by Matt Burgess
“So how you been?” he said into the silence.
“Fine. The usual.”
“And work? Everything’s good over there?”
“Sure,” she said.
She tried turning on the radio, willing to listen to even those yapping hyenas, but Brother’s mechanical tinkering had apparently activated its antitheft microchip, an intended deterrent to petty boosters like Henry Vega. If only. To override the chip, she needed to enter her secret security code, which she of course did not know.
“Mom tells me you went to bed kinda early last night,” he said. He looked over at her. “She told me a lot of the time, though, you’ll hit up the bars before coming home. Like an after-work thing? A stress reducer? How many nights a week you think that is?”
“You’re kidding, right?” She tried laughing. “Is there a point to this brand-new curiosity of yours?” she asked. “Because it’s sorta coming out of nowhere for me.”
He fluttered his lips to show her she was exhausting him. Without checking blind spots or even signaling, he turned onto the Van Wyck, which would take them on a straight shot to Willets Point. A ten-minute drive. Maybe fifteen, the way he was soft-footing the gas. For perhaps the first time in his driving life, he did not rush over into the express lane but stayed put on the right-hand side of the expressway, barely above the speed limit.
“It’s a poison,” he told her. “Alcohol, I mean. Everyone knows that, of course, that it’s a poison. But what happens is once you start drinking enough of it, you become poisonous. I definitely was. When I was drinking? I was toxic, poisoning Mom—”
“You were beating the shit out of Mom.”
“Yup,” he said. “Poisoning her. Poisoning you girls. Bouncing off walls, couldn’t even walk straight. And maybe I’m the last person in the world you want to talk to about all this, I get that, but you gotta reach out to someone because it only gets harder. I’m telling you, Janny. It’s an awful thing, an awful thing, having to run away from everyone you love just so you don’t end up poisoning them to death.”
Her martyr father. All the sacrifices he’d made on the uphill road to his Great Neck mansion. Questions she could’ve asked him: Did he miss birthdays sixteen through twenty-four because he thought he might poison her? With his presence? His voice on the other line, his signature in a card? Did he think he would’ve poisoned her if he’d shown up to her high school commencement ceremony like Georgia Hawley’s father, who’d clapped enthusiastically in the back row, eventually reuniting with Georgia’s mom, eventually having a reconciliation baby Georgia couldn’t even visit in the hospital because the nurses assumed she was too old to be a sibling? Would Brother have poisoned anyone if he’d sat unseen in cavernous Madison Square Garden for Janice’s Academy graduation? Or maybe he had. She could’ve asked him that, too: Were you there? All this time? A benevolent ghost raising the tiny hairs along the back of my neck? “You don’t have to worry about me,” she told him.
“I can’t help it,” he said. “It’s my job.”
“I appreciate what you’re doing here. With this whole—what would you even call it? Like an intervention? But I’m fine. Really. I’m okay.”
“Really?” he said.
“Really.”
He reached across the console to put his hand on her knee. She let him. On the other side of the window, construction barrels dotted the shoulder for miles. Drivers drifted out of her side-view mirror to pass Brother on the left. The speedometer sputtered into the early forties. When the car itself began to curve toward an off-ramp, miles away from the Willets Point exit, she realized he’d stayed in the slowpoke lane not to extend their time together, or at least not only to extend their time together, but so he could merge more easily onto Queens Boulevard. He headed west, in the opposite direction from where he worked.
She squeezed the hand on her knee. “What are you doing?”
“Calling bullshit,” he said. “You’re fine? Don’t worry? Jesus Christ, pumpkin. Who do you think taught you how to lie?”
Always prepared, probably having looked it up ahead of time, he drove her to the only AA meeting in Queens with a Wednesday meeting at that particular hour: the Woodside Catholic Charities Diocese, located in a block-long brick building around the corner from Roosevelt Avenue. An older obese white man with tennis balls on the bottom of his walker went shuffling up the steps to the main entrance, followed by a young black guy carrying a blue duffel bag and wearing a Huxtable sweater. MENTAL HEALTH CLINIC said a sign out in front. Her father backed the car into a metered spot. With a practiced flourish he slipped her NYPD parking plaque from behind the sun visor and flung it onto the dash. He had to be kidding, although of course she knew he wasn’t. He probably hadn’t paid for parking all week. The smile he turned toward her was falsely apologetic, entirely infuriating.
“This is one of the twelve steps?” she asked him. “Drag your daughter to a meeting?”
“The twelfth,” he said. “Carry the message to other alcoholics.”
He came around to the other side of the car to open the door for her, but she wouldn’t get out. She looked past him, at the dilated black pupil of a security camera above the building entrance. The weirdest thing: her legs were shaking and she didn’t know why. She had a couple of hours before she needed to show up at work; an insurance risk, she had another couple of hours before she even could show up at work. Her father’s knees cracked as he squatted in front of her.
“I’m not going to force you to do this,” he said.
“You can’t.”
“That’s right.” He tilted his head toward the building. “It ain’t really how it works, anyway. The company line is if you don’t want to go, don’t go. But I think it would be good for you. Seriously, Janny, I don’t see what you got to lose.”
“I work around here,” she told him. “I probably got half the people in there locked up.”
“It’s not NA,” he said defensively. Still squatting, a heavy man on old haunches, he gripped the door to keep himself from dropping into her lap. “Well, actually,” he said, “we do get a few drug addicts every now and again. But that could work out perfect for you, right? With your cover, I mean. To boost your street cred?”
She explained that her street cred gets irrevocably shattered every time she makes a buy. Forget about her street cred. Her cover gets irrevocably shattered every time she makes a buy. She explained that when dealers get cuffed, they’re told they’re under arrest for selling to an undercover cop.
“But the guy can’t necessarily know that it was you, right?”
“They usually figure it out when the cops show up right after I leave.”
“But that’s so stupid! Why wouldn’t they wait?”
“It is what it is,” she said, the line popping out of her for the first time, and her eyes widened with embarrassment.
“Understood,” Brother said, not really understanding. He looked at his Movado’s numberless face. “You don’t gotta wait for me,” he told her. “I’ll just take a cab when it’s over. But if you change your mind, the meeting’s in room four, you can’t miss it.” With a hand on his back he stood up, groaning. “And feel free to keep that parking plaque,” he said. “I made plenty of copies.”
Having squatted for too long, he hobbled up the steps to the main entrance with less mobility than that morbidly obese white guy. She crawled over the console into the driver’s seat. Terraza Café, she knew from experience, didn’t open until four, but the nearby Ready Penny had started serving drinks hours ago. Not that she would’ve gone there or anything. It was just a thought, a cloud passing through. She punched possible PINs into the radio until the screen locked up on her. Vita right now was probably praying for Janice’s soul. Maybe even kneeling in a confessional booth on her behalf, but for what? A petite white girl with short blond hair climbed the steps into the building. Janice pulled her sweatshirt’s hoodie over her head. She tightened the drawstrings as much as she could, but when she looked
in the rearview she still saw too much of her face. Enough to get recognized. Her head slumped. Her stupid legs wouldn’t stop shaking. She rolled her eyes, reached into the backseat for the burka.
For once, movies and TV had gotten it pretty much right, probably because a depressingly high number of those screenwriters attended daily meetings. She’d expected gray walls, stark lighting, metal chairs arranged in a circle, a banquet table with coffee and cookies, and everyone to be staring at her as she came into the room. She got tan walls, stark lighting, metal chairs arranged in rows, a card table with percolating coffee but no cookies, and everyone staring at her as she came into the room. The burka was supposed to disguise her, not make a mockery of the meeting, but the young black Huxtable, who’d been reading aloud from a leather-bound book, stopped in the middle of a sentence, and the old obese white man looked as if he’d just caught a sudden whiff of shit. The only one smiling was her father. He was also the only other person in the room. She hadn’t expected him to recognize her so quickly, but maybe he hadn’t. Maybe he just appreciated the idea of an alcoholic devout Muslim trying to take it one day at a time. Before she could escape, he hurried over to pour her some coffee. Up at the front of the room, to an audience of three now, Young Huxtable resumed reading.
“I saved you a seat,” her father whispered.
They sat in the middle, surrounded by a dozen empty chairs. The petite blonde she’d seen enter the building earlier wasn’t an alcoholic apparently, or maybe she was and had just gotten lost in this enormous labyrinth. Maybe she was in the bathroom knocking back a shot of vodka and would walk flustered through that open door any moment now. Janice hoped so. She wanted another woman in the room, but really she would’ve taken just about anyone. The more people, the less likely she’d have to speak, the very idea of which terrified her for reasons she didn’t want to think about. Hello, my name is Janice and I’m an alcoholic? It seemed impossible. So far, though, as Young Huxtable continued to read aloud, the Woodside chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous seemed like—knock on wood—a nonparticipatory lecture, like church or high school civics, or even a bar late at night with a single blowhard holding forth while everyone else pretended to listen. Her unwashed breath cooked the inside of the headscarf. She leaned forward in her seat and tried to pay attention, for no other reason than to shut off her logorrheic brain. With his more frequent pausing and the way he now stammered through words, Young Huxtable appeared to have gone off book, but he still stared straight ahead at its pages as if afraid to make eye contact. Her father once again put a hand on her knee, this time to quell her jiggling legs. Huxtable was saying something about free will. About the culture’s misguided obsession with personal agency, headier stuff than she would’ve imagined. Protected by metal bars, a clock ticked loudly on the far wall. If meetings lasted an hour—and from TV, she thought they did—then there were only fifty-four minutes to go.
Two Latinos walked in side by side, as if they’d just been holding hands, the both of them dressed for a different season in fitted T-shirts and shorts. The same rigmarole all over again: Huxtable went momentarily quiet, the old obese man sneered, although perhaps he’d never stopped sneering, perhaps his face was just like that, and her father stood up to pour the guys some coffee. Brother Itwaru running for mayor wherever he went. The next latecomer, however, beat him to the pot. A Latina in nurse scrubs and with a long braid of ponytail snaked over her shoulder, she helped herself to a cup while Brother was still making his way down the row of chairs. He looked defeated, then annoyed when she took the pot around the room to top off everyone’s cups. Janice gave her a big smile, unseen behind the headscarf. Young Huxtable meanwhile had given way to the white guy, who told a rambling story about living under a car, the logistics of which Janice found hard to follow and even harder to believe. Another heavy white guy, although thinner than the first, came into the room reeking of alcohol. He took a front-row seat as if in penance. The nurse brought him a cup of coffee, but because he had his face in his hands she left it for him on the floor, where it seemed statistically inevitable that he’d kick it over. When the first white guy finished his monologue, the second white guy started his own. Out of the rotation, Janice thought. And thank God. Because this was Queens, where start times were considered approximations, more bodies filed in late: a stylish young Asian woman in designer sunglasses, looking lost, as if she’d come to the wrong room; a bespectacled, baldheaded, vaguely Indian-looking Latino whom Janice immediately recognized as K-Lo.
He sat in the last row, in a corner chair where he could see everyone at once. She doubted he was an alcoholic, recovering or otherwise. More likely he attended meetings—AA, NA, Gamblers Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymous, Sex Addicts Anonymous—all over the borough for the access to others’ secrets. He had one leg crossed over the other and his foot bobbing with excitement. When the nurse, who’d brewed a new pot, brought him a coffee he nodded his thanks but stashed the cup under his seat without taking a sip.
Her father was standing. The second white guy had finished sputtering, it seemed, and Brother wanted to get his own confession in before somebody else tried speaking out of turn. Like K-Lo, he seemed less nervous than eager. He gripped the seatback of the empty chair in front of him and introduced himself by name, as an alcoholic, the only one in the room to have done so, but everyone still knew the next line.
“Hi, Brother,” they all said, even Janice.
“The fifth time I hit rock bottom, I woke up to the police banging on the front door of my house. Bang, bang, bang, like how they do. I roll over in bed, okay? To tell my wife to go downstairs and sort it out, but she’s not there. The police, they want to know what happened last night. I say, ‘What do you mean, what happened?’ And I’m very scared, right? I’ve got my two daughters watching TV in the room. And the police are telling us my wife’s at the hospital. With everything above the shoulders okay but her body they tell me is done. Like beat to hell. I go, ‘When? How’d this happen?’ Turns out I’m how it happened. And I believe them, right? I don’t remember but I believe it. If Savita says so. If that’s what she says … The cops are having to take me to jail now, but I’m asking about the kids, what happens to the kids, six and eight years old? The cops, they’re trying to help me out. They go, ‘Do the girls have grandparents they can stay at for a while? Any family friends, neighbors you can trust?’ I say we got none of that. Both sides of our family’s back at home and it’s not like I’m the best-liked guy in the neighborhood these days. So it’s off to lockup for me, Child Protective Services for the girls. When my wife finds out, she goes buck wild. Runs out of the hospital. She’s the one that bails me out of jail even, but I still can’t go home, so I check into a motel. The Kew Motor Inn? Not too far from here? I’ve got a nice little view of an alleyway outside my window and there’s a liquor store across the street where if you want anything, you gotta talk to the guy through bulletproof glass. I’m living in the motel room less than two hours when I tie the bedsheets to the headboard and jump out the window. I don’t want to hang myself in the shower, scare the maid half to death, but I figure they can cut me down in the alleyway—no one’s got to see anything too gruesome. But I’m too heavy. From all the drinking, I guess. Go figure. The headboard snaps, comes flying out the window with me. Now the cops are waking up my wife. ‘What happened last night? Your husband’s in the hospital with a concussion and two broken legs.’ That’s the rock-bottom number-five story. I made a promise to myself and my family that I’d never touch another drink after that. After lucky rock-bottom number thirteen, I move out of the house for good. I was working the program by then and I’d write my daughters these long ten-page letters I find out never really got into their hands. Because their mother, I guess. She tore them up maybe and I don’t blame her, I really don’t. It’s a good thing she did that, I think. I was a poison, you know? I was a poison that had to be flushed out of everybody’s system. But what I wanna know now: am I still poisonous? If I tell my younge
st about those letters, am I doing it to be selfish? More for me than for her? Not like she’s gonna jump into my arms over a couple letters, believe me. She’s not like that. She’s got … she’s got a hard bark on her. But see, I want to tell her, I want to be a part of her life somehow. I just worry that because I want those things, I should do the opposite. For her sake. As God is my witness, I’m not sure I know how not to hurt people, you know? So what am I supposed to do? I don’t know. I really don’t. I haven’t had a drink in eight years, including today. And with that, I think I’ll pass. Thanks very much for listening.”
Except for the drunken white guy, with his own problems to noodle over, and her father, who was easing himself back into his chair, everyone in the room turned to look at her, as if they knew, as if they’d somehow ID’d her as the youngest daughter. But no, come on, don’t be so paranoid: it was her turn, that’s all. They were only waiting for her story.
“Do I have to speak?”
“What’d she say?” asked the obese white man. “I can’t hear what she’s saying.”
“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to,” the nurse said, a preposterous lie. “It’s entirely up to you.”
“Then I think I’ll pass.”
“Great!” the nurse said as she stood up. “So there’s this guy at work driving me crazy …”
When the meeting finally did end, everyone circled—even the drunken white guy—to hold hands and recite the “Our Father.” She had her own father on one hand, squeezing tight; K-Lo on the other, his palms grossly sweaty. Like her, he had abstained when his turn to speak had come around, probably one of the few times in his life he’d passed on an opportunity to run his mouth. And forgive us our trespasses, they said. About her father’s speech, she wondered only if Judith knew about the letters, and if so for how long. Janice couldn’t really give it any more consideration than that, because she at last had a plan coalescing and needed to concentrate. Afraid K-Lo might recognize her eyes, she stared at the floor.