by Gia Riley
One by one, we file through the line, and I follow the crowd toward the dining room, keeping my head down until I’m seated by a window. The view of the dumpsters isn’t very appealing, but at least I’ll have something to look at besides the boring beige walls in my room.
I eat as quickly as I can, desperate to spend some more time with my journal before my session with Ms. Lucia.
But, when I get back to my room, I open the door and slide across the floor on a brochure. Stuck to the bottom of my shoe, I peel it off the sole and take a look.
Yesterday’s session with Ms. Lucia pushed me too far. I thought maybe it’d all blow over by this morning, but here I am, looking at a brochure about hypnosis—a form of therapy I never officially agreed to do.
I assume she’s the one who slipped it under the door on the way to her office, but if she is trying to convince me, then she’s not doing herself any favors. The more I read, the less interested I become.
Even the testimonials are confusing. Words like meditation and conscious awakening get tossed around like I’m supposed to understand what they mean. They just seem like fancy words for asleep and unconscious. And that’s terrifying.
I’ve never meditated, nor do I have the desire to. I don’t really believe in all that yin and yang, Zen stuff. When I want to relax, I have a drink, which seems a lot easier and less expensive.
There’s a short biography on the back about the doctor. His credentials are impressive, I’m sure. But let’s face it; how many hypnotherapists are walking around this town? I don’t imagine many if this entire facility only has one on staff.
These days, you can earn fancy degrees on the internet, and for all I know, that’s exactly what he did. Not that it matters. Something tells me that if Ms. Lucia thinks this is the next step in my treatment, I’m doing it regardless of how I feel about the doctor or the process.
But what if being hypnotized makes the dreams more intense?
Or worse, what if they stop?
twelve
MEADOW
Today, Ms. Lucia is more focused than ever. She’s determined to get me to talk about all the subjects I usually shy away from, including my relationship with Cash. I think she’s doing it to prove a point—that I can either sit here and suffer through grueling sessions or make serious progress her way … with the hypnotherapist.
I’ve tried to answer her questions the best I can, but every time we get to the same point of the story—the day I woke up in the hospital with Cash—I shut down. My pulse spikes, the room blurs, and without alcohol to push reality away, I disappear into the safest part of my brain, the place where bad things don’t happen to good people.
“Please, Meadow,” Ms. Lucia begs, “try to talk through the blank spaces.”
Those blank spaces aren’t what she thinks they are. I haven’t forgotten the truth—that my memories have been zapped from my body. The truth crushes me from the moment I open my eyes until I close them. When I was still drinking, the pain even invaded my sleep, disturbing me there.
Those were the nights I’d drink the most. Because, if I couldn’t escape into sleep, then I’d drink until I blacked out.
Since Ms. Lucia took away my crutch, there’s not much I can do to avoid those chilling moments when I was pulled toward heaven. But I don’t want to sit around here and dwell on the fact that I almost died. I’m lucky to be alive; I understand that. And, if I want to stay sane, then I need to stop dwelling on death.
“You’re trying to do a job,” I tell her. “But, if you were in my shoes, you’d just want to be left alone, too. You’d do whatever it took to find a little bit of happiness instead of being haunted by what happened to you.”
She shakes her head, naturally disagreeing. But, if any of these therapists were as human as they wanted us to believe they were, they wouldn’t sit in front of us, scribbling our confessions down like they were working on our biography.
I say three words, and she jots down ten.
When I stop talking, the pen slows, and the tip’s lifted from the paper. Ms. Lucia stares, waiting for me to speak. I never do. Not unless further prompted. If it were up to me, I’d never open my mouth at all. But, regardless of what I want or how I feel, she eventually starts writing until I decide to give her more information.
“I won’t force you,” she reminds me. “It’s always your choice.”
That’s not something I believe either. If speaking were voluntary and I were here of my own free will, then I wouldn’t have been stuffed into the back of the police car.
Look where that’s gotten me. I’m actually considering some bogus therapy to stay on my therapist’s good side. Because the fear of being stuck here forever is more than I can handle.
Stay calm, Meadow. Don’t give her anything extra to write about.
I give Ms. Lucia my best effort, and we go round and round until the hour is up. By then, I’ve had enough of the scribbling, and I want to grab her pen and snap it in half. My deeply personal thoughts don’t need to be cataloged or saved.
Whatever those social workers need to know, they already have. And, even if I get better—a word I use loosely these days—I’d never reference Ms. Lucia’s binder for reminders of how these days felt, like being set on fire and deprived of oxygen.
So far, Ms. Lucia’s judgments span at least thirty pages, and each time we have a session, the binder grows.
I once asked her why she took so many notes. Was I that fascinating or just that messed up?
Her response was mechanical, an excuse she probably recited every time a patient asked her that same question.
Maybe that’s the problem with therapy and why it’s never worked for me. I’m the only one being real. She’s doing a job, and I’m trying to live what’s left of a broken life. If she ever spent a day in my shoes, she’d know how impossible I was to fix.
Sometimes, you can’t repair what’s broken. You just have to toss away the idea of perfection and work with what’s left.
“Do you agree, Meadow?” she questions.
I wasn’t listening to the question, so I recite a quick, “Yes,” and watch her record my response. It doesn’t even bother me that it might be the wrong answer.
What bugs me is a question I’ve wanted to ask her for a long time. So, I finally reverse the roles and lay one on her. “What if I’m not messed up and this is how I’m supposed to be?”
I have her attention.
She shoots back with a question of her own. “If you were meant to be this way, why did you rely on alcohol to get you through the day?”
The question surprises me a little bit even though she’s asked me the same thing before. I guess I expected her to see me differently by now.
But, if she still sees the same Meadow that arrived a month ago, then I’m not sure she’ll ever notice how much I’ve changed.
Flipping the autopilot switch, I spit out the same monotone answer I’ve given her before, “Because it’s easier to drink than to feel. If I can’t forget, I’d rather stay numb and drunk.”
“What specifically don’t you want to feel?” she questions.
The list of things I’m running from is long. It’d take me less time to tell her what I’m not avoiding.
What happened to me doesn’t need to be hashed out again and again. You can only repeat a story so many times before you lose it, and I’m dangerously close.
I lived it.
I’m told I even survived.
Isn’t that enough?
I don’t have it in me to convince her why I need the alcohol. All I know is that I’m not the same without it. My body and my mind don’t connect the way they do when I’m drunk. Life doesn’t make sense when I can see it clearly. One look at my private journal, and she’d see that for herself. I mean, I’m having dreams about people I don’t know. A man who might not be my husband.
“I won’t drink,” I tell her. “That’s all that matters.”
She shakes her head in disbelief.
“How can I trust you to do that, Meadow? You’re afraid to go outside. You exist inside a house, trapped by your behaviors. You only go out on very rare occasions. When you do, you need to be heavily intoxicated. And need I remind you that, if your husband hadn’t noticed you’d snuck out when you did, you could have died. Being hit by a car or freezing to death is no way to die.”
“I didn’t want to die,” I whisper. “And I only snuck out because I was coming here the next day. I needed a little time to myself.”
Dying didn’t cross my mind at all that night. I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t considered it in the past. But, each time I thought about ending it, I couldn’t do it. My grandma’s face would appear in front of me, and the look of disappointment was too much to handle. She hadn’t raised me to give up or quit on myself. She’d raised a fighter.
Ms. Lucia rests her elbows on her knees. Her posture is as invasive as her next question. “What do you call what you did to your husband that night?” she asks.
“First of all,” I start, hating the way she makes me sound like a criminal, “I didn’t intentionally do anything to him. I didn’t want him to get hurt.”
But that is probably a lie. The way I set him up by hiding his shoes, barricading him inside the bedroom so that he couldn’t come after me, and then forcing him to jump out a window was as reckless as I’d ever been.
What sane woman does that to the man who loves her?
Maybe I am crazy.
“Meadow,” she warns, “you’re not grasping the reality of the situation. You’re making excuses for your actions, ones that you can make your mind believe were logical.”
I take the deepest breath I can, and my shoulders still slump in defeat. Now, Ms. Lucia thinks I’m delusional.
Maybe that’s all the dreams are. They’re not signs that my memory is coming back. I’m fucking crazy.
“I locked Cash in the bedroom, and I knew what I was doing was wrong.”
There.
I said what she wanted to hear.
Though, at the time, I don’t know that I thought my actions were wrong. I was doing what I needed to do to get what I wanted. And I wanted to run through the corn and feel the tickle against my skin.
“I was selfish. I am a selfish person.” Speaking the truth only makes the pain worse.
I stripped a grown man of his dignity by forcing him to chase after his wife in his pajamas. He was bruised, inside and out, because of me.
I’m not just selfish. I’m a vile human being.
“Thank you,” she says like I’ve finally taken a step in the right direction.
I’m sure that should make me feel proud, but I’m not. I feel lower than I have in a long time. And that low, bottom-of-the-barrel feeling is why therapy causes more harm than good.
“Can I leave?”
“Will you do the therapy I’ve suggested?”
If it means we don’t have to do this again, hashing out the same stories over and over again, then yes. “I’ll do it.”
Leaving is all I care about. Staying in her office another second would suffocate me.
I’ve turned into a yes girl. Because of all the times I was told what to do.
How many times have I heard no before? Hundreds? Thousands? It’s the only word Cash ever said to me. I resent that one syllable as much as I resent my attitude toward him.
And I know that nothing will change with me and him as long as I’m the one with the problem. As long as I am a problem.
Ms. Lucia should be satisfied. I gave her the answer she wanted. Yet she’s still looking at me like she has a lot more to say.
My palms dampen, and no matter how many times I wipe my clammy skin on the denim covering my thighs, it doesn’t help.
She notices my discomfort, but whatever mission she’s on today, she isn’t going to stop until she gets it all out. It’s my job to sit and listen, to absorb the verbal assault and let it motivate me. But, today, I’m not feeling very motivated. I just hurt. Really fucking bad.
“Meadow, if things don’t change, how long do you think your body will hold up?”
I have no idea how long a person in my condition can survive. My guess is longer than I’d ever want to.
While I’m thinking of the right response, she digs into her bag. Ms. Lucia loves to slide eye-opening reading material across the table during our sessions. A couple of times, she even made me watch former patients talk about their struggles with sobriety. Only after I watched those DVDs and felt a connection with some of those people did she bother to tell me that they had all died.
“Why haven’t you ever filmed me?” I ask her.
A defeated sigh slips through her lips, and she leans against the back of her chair. The progress she thought she’d been making zips around the room like a deflated balloon, eventually falling limp against the floor.
“If I walk in here with a camera, Meadow, you should be afraid.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I question.
“It means I’ve failed.”
She could mean she failed the treatment center or maybe even the program itself. But something tells me that she isn’t talking about either of those things.
She’s referring to me, to my life.
I’m not sure what to do with that, but I don’t want Ms. Lucia to film me. At least, I don’t think I want that.
I’ve come close to death from the drinking; Cash has said as much. But, if I were on film, Cash wouldn’t be the only one who knew. The whole world could see that I failed, too. And I don’t want to be stuck inside someone else’s head the way those former patients are stuck in mine.
If I don’t find a healthier way to deal with my pain, I’ll be six feet under with the rest of the rehab failures.
“Do you think you can get back to a place like this, Meadow?” she asks next.
“What kind of place?”
She holds up a picture from the wedding. “A place of happiness.”
For a second, I panic that she has all of my favorite photo albums in her possession. If they’re here, I know I’ll get stuck in the same repetitive pattern, begging to spend my nights staring at the images.
But Cash wouldn’t do that. He’d never bring them here, so I feel strong enough to look at this one picture that she is showing me, concentrating on the woman in the white dress.
It has only been a few years since it was taken, yet seeing the photo sober is a completely different experience than when I was wasted.
I look like a different person than I do now. My hair was so shiny, and the sun reflected off the loose curls that covered my shoulders. Whoever I was looking at across the room made me happy. Not just happy, content. I stared them in the eye like I deserved to be in their presence. I don’t remember the last time I looked anyone in the eye, other than Ms. Lucia.
I want to be able to remember her, but even if I did, I’m not sure we have anything in common anymore.
I’ll never be that Meadow again. No amount of therapy could take me back.
Instead of telling Ms. Lucia all of my doubts, I just say, “I’d like to.”
I won’t let my mind go there yet. If I do, I’d need a drink, and I can’t have one.
“What about Cash?” she asks.
“What about him?” I say as I stare at the floor.
Haven’t we already come to the conclusion that I hurt him and made him do terrible things to save me?
“Cash might be the only one who can lift the fog. He went through it, too, Meadow. You need to at least acknowledge that.”
Ms. Lucia isn’t wrong. Everything she says is the truth.
I should tell her about the conversation we had in my room yesterday and that I let him climb into bed with me. I made a conscious effort to let him in, and I think she’d be proud of me. But I can’t get the words out. I’m not used to baring my soul without a drink or two in me.
Whether she knows what I did or not, I will continue. I’ll try whatever Ms. Lu
cia proposes and do my best to be who Cash needs me to be.
I might have been drunk most days, but I am not stupid. He hates the lunatic in the rocking chair, the one who found comfort in an old, rusty bathtub on the other side of the cornfield. He wants Meadow back, and it is my job to be that person.
I just hope I can do it without the alcohol. That is going to be my biggest struggle. Because I want a drink right now.
thirteen
CASH
It’s barely been twenty-four hours since I’ve seen Meadow, and here I am, sitting on Teddi’s couch for the second day in a row because I don’t know what to do with myself when I’m home.
I thought I was starting to adjust to the changes, but seeing Meadow’s empty chair hit me extra hard today. I want her home, and I miss the sound of her rocking back and forth all night long even though she was wasted. At least I knew where she was and that she was okay.
Maybe it was too soon, but I thought that, if Meadow was fixing herself, I should put the house back together, too. When she comes home, I don’t want her to see the damage she caused when she ripped the pictures off the wall or when she cut apart the carpet. I want her to have a welcoming home, void of all her mistakes.
Each night after work, I tackle a new project. With the carpet replaced, new furniture, and freshly painted walls, the depressing side effects of alcoholism are gone. Every trace of pain has been removed, and that should make me happy, but the truth is, unless my wife comes home a changed woman, she could destroy it all over again.
What if she sees the changes and thinks her memory is playing tricks on her again?
Those feelings could send her spiraling right back to the bottle.
“What is it, Cash?” Teddi asks, reading me so well, like always.
I should be thanking Teddi, not sitting here, second-guessing her efforts. She’s spent hours of her free time helping me pick out couches and sorting through a hundred paint swatches for the perfect color. The last thing I want to do is appear ungrateful.