23
I’ve been to my fair share of NA meetings. For the most part, they’re all the same—they follow a very specific formula, even if who’s there and the content of what they have to say changes. I know Wyatt said I don’t have to start over, but I feel like it chisels away at a piece of my heart every time someone gets out of their chair to receive a chip. Especially the black ones for two or more years. That’s what I had, before I fucked everything up.
“How are you feeling?” Wyatt asks me after, once we’ve settled into our seats at the diner next door. The waitress was quick about bringing coffee; I cup my hands around the warm mug and tip my face toward the steam.
“I don’t know,” I say honestly. “Disappointed in myself. Annoyed. I keep wishing I could rewind and make a different choice, but that’s obviously impossible. So I guess I’m just stuck here with the consequences of my own stupid decisions.”
“It’s going to feel that way for a while,” Wyatt admits. “When I had my first relapse, I hated myself for weeks. Ended up spiraling, started using again for a few months before I was able to get myself checked in to another detox.”
I glance up from my coffee, meeting Wyatt’s gaze across the table. “I didn’t know you relapsed.”
“Oh yeah. Three times. Everybody does.” He shrugs one shoulder. “Or a lot of people, anyway. If you managed to stay clean after your first go-round in rehab, you’re a unicorn.”
“I did. I mean…I had a great support system. I had Shannon—she’s my sponsor, or she was, anyway. She was basically my best friend back in LA. And I had gotten involved in the art scene right around that time too, so I had those friends. Had to ditch a few of them because they were still using, and the rest I kind of…”
That was one of the hardest parts about getting clean. My first connections to art people had been through other users. People who could, it seemed, just do a little casual coke on the weekend and be perfectly fine afterward. I mean, maybe not. I didn’t know their lives; maybe they were just as broken as I had been. But I always felt like I was different. There was a section of my brain hell-bent on killing me, and the rest of my brain was more than happy to let it try.
Of course, now I’m thinking about how I still haven’t texted Shannon since the slipup. I don’t even know if I can. How can I admit to her what happened? After everything she has done to help me get—and stay—clean? It feels like a slap in the face.
And now that I think about it, I haven’t texted her at all, period, about anything, in like…weeks.
It’s a classic Ely move. My brain loves sabotaging friendships. Every time I get a good one, my shadow self is right there to be, like, lol, bitch, you thought.
“You have support here too,” Wyatt says. His voice is soft, gentle, as if he thinks I need convincing. “You have Michal, and your roommates. You have…well. You have me.”
All at once it’s like he can’t meet my gaze. He stares down at his napkin, shredding the corner of it between his fingers.
“Do I have you?” I ask.
He tears a long strip off the napkin. Then, at last, he looks up. “Yes,” he says. “You do. For whatever that’s worth.”
Something warm tightens in the pit of my stomach. He means he’s here to support my sobriety, obviously. But some part of me refuses to read it that way. Because he’s still watching me, his eyes big and doe-like, and I keep mentally circling last night, how he took me home, the way he was this morning—like I meant something to him. Like I was worth protecting.
The moment lasts just a beat too long. I have to tear my gaze away under the guise of taking another sip of coffee and examining the menu. I’m almost relieved when the waitress shows up again to take our order. I ask for eggs Florentine, even though I don’t like hollandaise sauce. I can’t fucking think straight around this man. It’s a problem, and my taste buds are about to pay for it.
“I should have seen this coming,” I say once the server has gone—dragging the subject back to safe(r) ground. “I had a few mistakes leading up to it. A glass of champagne, a few sips of tequila, that kind of thing. I just kept telling myself it was okay.”
Wyatt shakes his head. “People think it gets easier the longer you’ve been clean. And it does, obviously, but…there are different challenges. Like you start to forget how bad it used to be. You start lying to yourself, thinking how things might be different this time.”
Pretty much. And I wish I’d been right. I feel like I’ve been fighting my whole life just to be normal—the kind of person who can handle herself. Handle shit going wrong. Instead I’m intense, like Chaya told me during the worst of our fights. I feel things too much. I don’t know how to tone it down, or shut it off, or whatever it is other people do to keep their minds sailing along on an even keel.
“I volunteer at a place in Midtown every Tuesday,” Wyatt says abruptly. “It’s a harm reduction organization. They have a needle exchange, counselors, you name it. It helps me remember why I’m staying clean. And it lets me give back. You should come sometime.”
“Yeah. Yeah, sure. I’ll try to make it next week.”
Wyatt reaches over and finds my hand, curling his fingers tight around my palm. And suddenly that heat is back, flushing beneath my skin. “Listen. You got this. Okay? Don’t let yourself get stuck here. You can choose to keep fighting. And I’m not gonna let you give up. All right?”
I don’t know why, but right now, this feels like the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me. I press the heel of my free hand against my eyes, trying to scrub away the tears threatening to slip free. Wyatt rubs his thumb against my knuckle and squeezes my palm.
“Do you want to talk about it?” he asks softly. “What happened?”
“I told you,” I mumble. “I slipped. It just…spun out of control.”
“It’s usually more than just that. It might not be obvious what, but something made you feel like this was a solution. You wouldn’t have made it four years clean if it was as simple as giving in to temptation.”
I wipe another wave of tears off my face and meet his eyes across the table. I feel like I’m desperate for that life vest he’s offering: An excuse for why I’m such a shit show right now. Something sympathetic. A sob story that makes me more than just an addict who fell off the wagon.
It’d be so easy to blame it all on Dvora, but the truth is, I lost control before I made that phone call.
“I don’t really have an excuse,” I say. “I’m just a piece of shit.”
“Don’t say that. You’re not. You’re one of the strongest, stubbornest people I know.” Wyatt’s leaning in across the table, clutching my hand between both of his now, as if he could press his brow against mine and will me to believe him. “You don’t deserve what you are doing to yourself.”
The waitress chooses that moment to reappear with our food. I take the chance to discreetly scrub my face with my napkin; there’s nothing less attractive than dripping snot into one’s side of hash browns.
“I do, though,” I say once the server is safely out of earshot. “I’m not a very good person. I’ve…I’ve fucked up. A lot.”
One of Wyatt’s brows goes up. “And you think that isn’t everybody?”
“I killed someone.”
There’s a part of me that grimly relishes the way Wyatt’s expression falters. It’s not about trying to sound shocking—or okay, maybe it is, a little bit. But of course Wyatt never thought I’d ever actually hurt anyone. He thought when I said I did bad things, I meant stealing my mom’s credit card or cutting class or getting into stupid fights over drug money. And I let him think that. Because I couldn’t stand the idea of him knowing the truth. Because if he knew the truth, he wouldn’t want anything to do with me.
“What do you mean?” he says at last, carefully, as if using the wrong words might shatter me.
“My best friend, Chaya. I got her into drugs. I made her use with me. She fucking…she died. She overdosed. Because of me.”
“Ely…”
“It was my fault,” I press on. I’m crying again, but this time I don’t bother trying to wipe the tears away. I grab my fork and stab at my eggs Florentine, puncturing one of the poached eggs and splattering its yellow contents across my plate. “I bought some cheap Percocets. Turns out they weren’t Percs at all. They were laundry detergent laced with fucking fentanyl, and she…she…”
Wyatt passes me his napkin, and I take it with my shaking hand only to ball it up in the pit of my fist.
“If she’d never met me,” I whisper, “she’d still be alive right now.”
“You don’t know that. You can’t possibly know that. And even if it’s true, that doesn’t make it your fault. She made her own choices, just like you did.”
Did she? Did any of us really? Maybe if I’d let Chaya go after we had our biggest fights, things would have turned out differently. If I’d gotten clean, if I’d never had those pills in my room to begin with…
Did she really choose to use, or did I make our friendship dependent on it?
“Anyway, that was kind of it, for me. Chaya’s parents never forgave me. Everybody in the community knew what happened. So my dad told me it was probably best if I went away. He gave me a thousand bucks, which I spent on bus tickets to LA and a shitload of heroin.”
Wyatt hasn’t touched his waffles. They’re starting to go soggy under their lake of syrup, but he doesn’t even seem to notice. He places his hand on the middle of the table, palm up, and after a moment I reach over and let him lace our fingers together. That simple point of contact is grounding. My heart rate gets a little slower; my chest feels less like it’s caving in on itself.
“We’ve all done things we regret,” he says. “But you don’t have to let your past define your future. I know it’s a little trite, but when they say, ‘One day at a time,’ that means something. Every day you can make different choices. Every day is another step away from that person you used to be. Eventually you’ll look back and see how far you’ve really come. And those who love you will be there waiting for you, no matter what. There’s always a way back.”
I don’t know if I believe him—or if it takes ten years to get to that point—but I’m still glad he said it. I wrap those words up and keep them safe in the corner of my heart, where they might take root and maybe—one day—have a chance of becoming true.
■
In a perfect world, I wouldn’t live in a house that had alcohol in it at all. I’d have my own apartment, completely scrubbed clean of everything that might tempt me off the straight and narrow. I’d go to NA every night. I’d keep in touch with my sponsor. In a perfect, perfect world, I might have even checked myself into rehab after this last slip.
But this isn’t a perfect world, and I’m not a perfect person. So I go to NA the night after my slip, and when I get home I bake Ophelia and Diego a really nice quiche, and over what essentially amounts to egg pie, I tell them the truth. I tell them I’m an addict and an alcoholic, and I cannot be trusted, and that if they ever see me sneaking swigs of bourbon in the bathroom, they should probably knock me out with the bottle before I do anything worse.
Ophelia knows already, of course, but she does a good job faking otherwise, and Diego takes it surprisingly well. It turns out Diego’s brother has substance abuse issues too, and Diego is pretty empathetic for someone who had his college savings stolen to fund someone else’s drug habit. He pulls me into a hug, the kind of bone-crushing embrace that makes you feel like the other person is trying to smoosh their affection into your visceral organs.
Sometimes I realize that I am the luckiest person in the world.
Wyatt texts me every few hours over the next couple days, always the same thing: All good? And I text back, All good. It’s a small ritual but it feels important. Like if I can just keep texting back that “all good,” then it’ll be true. It’ll stay true.