Everything inside her wanted to say No, thanks to the sandwich, but her belly knew that breakfast was a long time ago. “Thanks,” she said, and after Nola left, she ate the bologna and threw the sandwich bread to a brown rez dog that was always hanging around. The pudding, she wolfed down. The sugar rush helped for about fifteen minutes but turned into a king-size headache.
Cottonwoods’ menu is carb-heavy, which is why her street clothes are so tight. The tank top that once hung on her now shows back fat. Her skinny jeans cut painfully at the crotch. She ties her sweatshirt around her hips so she can leave the top button of her jeans undone. When a person stops drinking and dropping Oxy like Pez, what’s left? Sex and carbohydrates. The Cottonwoods program made everyone sign a paper promising you wouldn’t have sex with the therapists, your fellow inmates, or the adorable chef no matter how often he winked and gave you extra fries. It’s simple math: Subtract drugs, booze, and sex. What’s left? Cookies. Peanut butter right off the spoon. Mashed potatoes. Her world did a complete 180. She could be thrown out on the street for an orgasm, but not for scarfing down a twelve-ounce bag of chocolate chips she stole from the kitchen.
Now it’s one p.m. The temperature is 86, 88, 90. The sun is blinding. All those formerly pretty rocks look like needles stabbing the sky. Rocky should have been here by now. He’d promised he’d pick her up before noon. Did she get the day wrong? Did he have a car accident? Is he in a different time zone? The plan was for them to drive to his mother’s trailer park in Albuquerque, where she’d pick up Gracie, then to the body shop in Santa Fe to pick up the Mercedes her mother had given her years ago, which had endured moves from Denver to Santa Fe without any problems. Her twin mechanics—Lobo and Lalo—had been kind enough to store the car until she got out. She would drive Gracie to Santa Fe to Mama’s vacation home on Canyon Road. You can stay there on a temporary basis, but don’t you dare mess up my pied-à-terre, she’d text-messaged Skye. Pied-à-terre, Skye thinks, seriously? From there on, the plan is admittedly vague, but how hard can it be to find employment with tourist season just around the corner? Who knows, maybe her community service hours will lead to a decent job.
In the Cottonwoods program, they have a saying: You’re only as sick as your secrets. Hers is: Rocky had agreed to return Gracie to her, and in return she would pay him five hundred dollars a month to forget about what the judge said, which was that in his opinion, Skye shouldn’t even be allowed to have a pet goldfish. Five hundred dollars a month seems easier than finishing her community service, hiring a lawyer, and scheduling a hearing with Judge Assmuncher. Waiting for the court to pronounce her worthy enough to share custody could take months.
Rocky said he could sure use the five hundred, and while he enjoyed the idea of being a father, it was the day-to-day thing he couldn’t quite hack. He wanted to be quit of Skye as much as she did him. He promised the divorce would be a cinch. Sign papers, shake hands, get back her mother’s car, and Adios, señora, hola, muchacha.
“Hey,” she asks the UPS driver who shows up with packages at two thirty. The temperature has climbed to 92. “If you’re headed south, can I hitch a ride with you?”
“Wish I could, hon,” he says, grinning behind his sunglasses. “Against company rules.” He rushes in to deliver the package, his muscular calves a thing of hirsute beauty, and then he’s gone, a cartoonish trail of dust around his tires. The world goes quiet except for the mechanical waterfall on the other side of the portal and the hum of the air conditioner’s motor. It’s Africa hot now. Her armpits are damp and her headache traveled from her temples to her jaw before taking up residence in her eye sockets. Skye is all teeth and bad mood. Leaving a place you hate shouldn’t be this difficult. She thinks about walking down to the highway and sticking her thumb out, but after nine months of watching 48 Hours on TV, she is convinced the world is full of perverts and sociopaths. And given her luck, most of them are driving through the Four Corners today.
Luck, and her lack of it, makes her think about casinos. Just north of Santa Fe are the Camel Rock, Pojoaque, and Buffalo Thunder casinos, open all night. She could get a job at one of them. She’s good at math and card tricks, and lying comes naturally. The atmosphere of booze is a worry, but she’ll do what she has to for Gracie.
The clock ticks on and still no Rocky. Three thirty arrives, what Duncan calls “the arsenic hour,” when the recovering inmates get the itchies and the shakes, and the urge to use pops its ugly head up, screaming, Feed me!
She recites the Serenity Prayer to herself, determined not to lose her nine months of sobriety.
High desert sunlight is brutal, burning the blue right out of your eyes. It takes more than just the color with it. She’s seen the gaze of long-termers who will never leave Cottonwoods, like Nola. Everyone talks about his or her Higher Power every ding-dang minute. The first time Skye heard Duncan say “the Steps,” she pictured one of those staircases in an M. C. Escher print that lead nowhere. She doesn’t want to leave Cottonwoods only to end up bagging Snickers bars at the Farmington CVS or running credit cards through the scanner machine at the last gas station before the Indian tipi motel in Gallup. That path leads to welfare, strip joints, and homeless shelters where they make you leave the second the sun comes up.
She fixes in her mind the image of her blond-headed little girl, dragging a currycomb around with both hands. Skye’s watched her hug the legs of draft horses and brush out their feathers, the fluffy hair that grows from the horse’s hock like fleece on Ugg boots. Since the day she was born, Gracie has had no fear. Skye takes her baby picture out of her wallet and rubs her thumb over the wrinkled paper. Skye screamed her way through labor, but when Gracie was born all she did was look around the room as if she were thinking about ordering new wallpaper. Her newborn head reminded Skye of a peony, a bloom too heavy for its stem, yet right away she could tell Gracie was trying to lift hers up, to take the world right in and make it her own.
Skye doesn’t plan on repeating the experience anytime soon, but her mind goes there sometimes. How it felt to push Gracie out of her body—ripping pain one second and a rush not unlike OxyContin the next. Could she rewrite Gracie’s birth, she would have a better version—one with her mother there in the delivery room, and outside, doling out bubblegum cigars, Daddy. Rocky wouldn’t have to be there at all. Having done his part, Rocky would, as a praying mantis has the sense to do, die after mating.
It’s so hot that she surrenders and heads into the building for a bottle of water.
Nobody is sitting in reception. She guesses the phone that rings over and over is getting the answering machine. That’s too bad. Because once the urge to commit to rehab strikes, you have to go right that second. The first ring, you think, Yes, this is the way. The second ring, you think, Maybe all it takes is me saying no to what’s offered. By the third ring, you talk yourself into believing everyone drinks this way and you hang up.
The Cottonwoods lobby features a huge gray sectional couch, tall, indoor cacti with the needles clipped off, old Better Homes and Gardens magazines and New Yorker issues with the addresses snipped out. Against one wall a fake waterfall spills over rough slate into a semicircular pond filled with plastic plants and a few elderly goldfish. On the other wall is the R. C. Gorman print Navajo Chiles. In the picture, one of his trademark plus-size Navajo women sits on the ground next to a basket of spilled chiles. Because of the way the sun blasts through the floor-to-ceiling windows in the lobby, what should be red chiles are peach colored. Chiles lite. It’s the perfect shade for Cottonwoods, where in order to get and keep you sober, they suck the life out of everything and replace it with a paler version. And as with everyone at Cottonwoods, there is a story behind the painting you could have gone your whole life without knowing.
The good part: R. C. Gorman’s father was a Navajo-code talker who helped win the Second World War. R.C. grew up tending sheep in Canyon de Chelly, where he often got in trouble for painting on the rocks. He ran the first successful Nativ
e American–owned art gallery in the state of New Mexico. If you went into his gallery and he was there working, he’d sign your print.
The bad part: In 1997, the FBI began assembling a child molestation case against Gorman. Before anything could be proven, the statute of limitations ran out, and Gorman died, at age seventy-four. The cloud of suspicion will never lift. Every time Skye looks at the woman in the print, all she can think is, Take that damn thing down and replace it with a landscape. Gorman’s gone, and no one will ever know the truth, but it hurts her to wonder about any child going through that kind of abuse. It makes her think of Gracie, and how easily she would be able to kill anyone who touched her in the wrong way. And yet, she understands how it’s easy to malign famous people. That’s why “Tesuque,” the retired Hollywood director-benefactor who paid for her rehab, said his one condition was that she would never reveal his real name. “The last thing I need is something like this to bite me in the ass,” he said. “My exes will be at their attorneys’ offices in ten minutes, asking for more alimony.”
The first three months she was here, Skye waited every day for things to blow up, for the bill to go unpaid, for the news that she was eighty-sixed and owed a ton of money besides. Just because you can’t see the spark doesn’t mean the fuse isn’t burning. Tesuque didn’t write to ask how she was doing. He didn’t call to check on her. But he paid the bill, and after the vanilla Jack Daniel’s episode, she got sober.
Which was when the real work began. Making her list of amends, she realized how broken she must have appeared to Tesuque, how immature to the judge. But what especially hurt, what cut her to the marrow, was realizing that no matter how clever she thought she was, she couldn’t hide her drunkenness from a three-year-old. Gracie would pat her mouth and Skye would open it, thinking this was some kind of game, but it wasn’t. Her daughter had been checking for the smell of alcohol. The day she figured that out was the day she began in earnest to try to stay sober. “My soul is as dry as tinder in an old-growth forest,” she said in group, where of course everyone was chain-smoking cigarettes. But damn it all, it hurts to be sober! Every minute of every day here she’d felt jumpy, as if her nerves were growing back twice as sensitive. Duncan said that was normal. With her first paycheck she planned to purchase a decent pair of sunglasses. Hopefully Ray-Bans. Anything to soften the glare.
Outside again. On the portal of Cottonwoods, where things have cooled down at least 10 degrees. That’s the high desert for you. When night arrives, you better have a jacket. There is so much red dirt all around this part of New Mexico, it could be mistaken for a crime scene. Every day in rehab she went for the morning mountain hike and the dirt got everywhere. She’d blow her nose, out it came. The dust got into her pores. Left marks on her bedsheets. She loved monsoon season because it kept the red dirt pinned to the earth long enough to fill the dead-looking arroyos, making the riverbeds come to life. Water hurries everything into blossom.
Sun’s going down. No doubt about it, that beautiful New Mexico sunset is on its way. It occurs to her that today is April Fool’s Day and she sighs. She heads indoors.
Skye uses the reception phone to call Rocky’s cell again. “This message box is full,” is all she gets, which is more than she expected. Usually it’s no bars of connectivity. The coverage is spotty in the places he travels. If only she’d kept the card with Tesuque’s phone number, she could call him. But the day she left for rehab, she wasn’t big on organization—she was higher than the proverbial kite.
Checking to make sure no one’s watching, she picks up the phone and dials her mother’s cell. It goes straight to voice mail. “Mama,” she whispers, trying to keep the emotion out of her voice, “I’m supposed to be released today. I’m sober through and through. But Rocky never showed. Would there be any chance at all you could come for me? Or could you send someone? I’m sorry to ask for help. If there was another way . . .” Her voice trails off and she hangs up the phone.
Mama doesn’t call back, and Skye didn’t really expect her to.
It’s no use calling anyone else. Either they will see “Cottonwoods Rehab” on caller ID and not pick up, or like hers, their phones have been disconnected from not paying the bill.
She flops back on the lobby sectional, her nerves shot and her throat dry. Where is Rocky? The stack of color brochures falls to the floor. She picks them up, stacking them into piles. They’re like an advertisement for the most fun camp ever. Hikes, crafts, movie nights, choir groups who sing “Kumbaya” and stay friends for life.
Duncan said Cottonwoods was deliberately built on leased Navajo land because of its remoteness. The whole of the county was dry. Not much of it was developed. To buy Tampax, a person had to drive an hour to a CVS. The only place to eat is the Chat ’n Chew, which passes off canned chili as homemade. Across the empty prairie there is nothing but footprints and tire tracks and weeds. The same land as in old black-and-white spaghetti westerns, where the Indians galloped bravely into war on second-rate ponies, only to get picked off by soldiers with rifles.
Being stood up by your soon-to-be ex-husband, having your hard-earned sobriety come to nothing, and not so much as a Tylenol for the pain of it? This is as real as it gets, she supposes. Fresh tears burn her eyes. She hears the bell for dinner, and she’s so hungry that it hurts, but she cannot will her body to move.
The landscape goes purple. Gone from view are the sharp-edged rocks and the dry, spiky cacti. Soon coyotes will start howling to one another. Skye’s pretty sure she can live without alcohol, but life without OxyContin will take some getting used to. “How,” she’d asked Duncan, “will I make it when my heart is breaking twenty-four hours a day?”
“You’ll gut it out,” he’d said. “Down below the breastbone, the sternum, lies the xiphoid process, an actual joint. Yours hurting means you’re healing.” Duncan had told her to “picture your heart glowing, getting stronger.”
“You mean, like heartburn?” Skye had asked. Both times in detox, her heart had felt singed, bitter to have to let go of those nice, predictable drugs. Rapid heartbeat, nausea, the headache from hell. Seizures she doesn’t remember, but Duncan said he took video of it, in case she wants to see herself pee uncontrollably or vomit or any of the ugly stuff.
She never wants to go through detox again.
Here they come. The fellow inmates skulk by on their way to dinner. A few of them smirk as though they’d expected Rocky wouldn’t show. For a moment, Skye thinks when Rocky arrives she’ll leap into the air and wrap her legs around his waist just to show the nonbelievers that she still has what it takes to snare a man on looks alone. And the next moment, she imagines a funnel in her mouth, pouring down a bottle of whiskey. Or licking Oxy dots off a strip of paper like that candy Gracie begs for.
Lord, it hurts to be sober.
She skips dinner.
Rocky swears he’ll kick drugs, yet come rodeo season, all bets are off. If only he could get rid of that addiction thing—that thing he encouraged in her—he might be a decent dad. Between them, they’ve done one thing right in their lives, and that thing is Gracie, who is probably having Fritos and Kool-Aid for dinner with Grandma Rita in the ghetto section of Albuquerque. Skye hates thinking about her daughter in a trailer with a swamp cooler and a foldout sofa bed. Would it kill her mother to help? She’s too busy with the plastic surgeon, taking trips to some South Sea island Skye pictures as a single palm tree surrounded by sand.
Where is Rocky?
Seven o’clock turns to eight. The snack time bells signal an hour left until lights out. Skye finally admits she has to bag it and heads down the hall with the rest of the inmates. After shooting off her mouth about busting free of this place, she has to spend another night, because they don’t let you go unless you have a ride.
“We had vegan Swedish meatballs for dinner,” says Nola. “I ate three.”
“I heard they use horsemeat in those,” Skye tells her just to be mean.
Nola heads to the bathroom,
and Skye can hear the water running while Nola empties her stomach. These ridiculous misfits think just because they’ve been through the worst together in rehab, somehow that bonds them soul to soul. Skye would like to tell Nola, tell all of them, that they need a major reality check: “When we leave there’ll be nothing to talk about. Each of us will run as fast as we can to get back to our old lives and try to convince ourselves that we’ll stay sober and function. When we fall off the wagon, because the stats say we will, imagine how hard it will be to come back here, to have to admit you failed to everyone. You might as well jump off a cliff.”
I’ll be different, she tells herself. This time is the last time.
Restless, she walks down the hall to get as far away from Nola as she can. Should she watch TV? No, it’s too depressing, and the way she’s feeling right now, she couldn’t sit still for it. Judge Assmuncher will receive the notification that she’s completed the Cottonwoods program. Next comes the mandatory community service or there will be jail time. Everybody and his brother racks up multiple DWIs and nothing happens, but she could go to prison. Skye recalls a time she stopped drinking on her own, a year ago, when she was about to sign a lease on a one-bedroom apartment and put Gracie in preschool. Then Rocky blazed through town, tracked her down, and in a couple of months she’d lost her security deposit, her job, and her white-knuckled sobriety.
Outside, the coyotes are wailing. They have families, friends, and talk every night, like a cell phone plan with unlimited minutes.
Duncan, who walks the halls at lights out, stops where she’s sitting, using the wall to hold herself up. “Skye,” he says, “why don’t you find a bed and call your ride tomorrow?”
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