by Jason Allen
The biker and the young woman stubbed out their cigarettes in a five-gallon bucket filled with sand, and everyone aside from Gina began moving toward the door. She couldn’t take the first step yet. Although she felt a degree of gratitude for their kindness, her driver’s seat tugged at her like a high-powered magnet. If she went inside with them and committed to this, wouldn’t she have to keep coming to church basements like this one—and bare her soul or listen to sob stories or whatever these people did—for the rest of her life? That’s how it worked, wasn’t it? Her neck tensed as though it had been clapped in irons. She couldn’t do it. She should think of an excuse to turn around and hurry to her car and leave, maybe say something about her kids, or rattle off an abbreviated story about how she forgot something at home that needed to be taken care of before work. But the thought of lying made her even more anxious. These smiling people, especially Maryanne, seemed to have some deep insight into Gina’s story after knowing her for only thirty seconds, and they would all know her excuse was exactly that—bullshit—and for some reason she already cared about what they thought of her.
“Well,” Maryanne said, “looks like it’s about that time.” She placed her hand on Gina’s back as a gentle directive after the rest of the group filed in ahead of them. They stepped through the doorway and down a set of echoing stairs, through another doorway and into a starkly decorated room with beige cinder block walls and rows of metal folding chairs.
An elderly man with an old fedora sitting cockeyed on his head noodled around on the keys of a very old upright piano in the corner. Roughly twenty other people stood or sat, scattered about the basement, many of them a decade or so older than Gina, but also some closer to her age, as well as a few with baby faces, and one or two who looked so old it may not have been a stretch to say they’d been alive during prohibition. A group of four stood by a large coffee urn with disposable cups in hand while most others began choosing their chairs, and a bald man with a red-and-gray beard sat behind a battered old desk talking to a few men and women in the front row. Gina scanned the two boards hanging on the wall just above the bald man’s head, each with sentences spelled out in Old English font, the lines numbered one through twelve. She noticed the word God came up from time to time, and again had a moment of panic when excuses to flee rushed through her mind like white water.
Then Maryanne tapped her shoulder and handed her a small piece of paper. “That’s my number,” she said. “You don’t have a sponsor yet, do you?”
“No,” Gina said, nearly swallowing her gum. “Honestly, I’m not sure I’m looking for one.”
Maryanne smiled. “Trust me, you want one. Think of me as your temporary sponsor for now. I don’t usually do this, but something about you makes me want to offer this time.”
“Really?” Gina’s posture softened, her thoughts suddenly freed from the critical filter. Although she hadn’t vocally accepted, the absence of a refusal seemed to suffice for each of them. The bearded man in the front of the room knocked twice on the surface of the desk and everybody not already seated found a chair, the metal legs creaking and scuffing against the cement floor as they settled in. Gina had seen a few movies and TV shows with people in AA meetings, but couldn’t believe she was actually sitting in one herself. The idea of introducing herself as an alcoholic in a room full of strangers set her heart beating way too fast. She glanced at Maryanne, thinking she had a maternal air about her and yet also some obvious experience in the trenches. A mama bear, equal parts caregiver and badass. Now that Gina had a moment for it to set in that Maryanne had offered to be her sponsor, even though she had no clear understanding of what that meant, she felt as if she’d just won the lottery.
Maybe I can do this, she thought. Maybe being sober won’t be so bad.
The man at the desk handed out three laminated sheets and asked a few people to read, and then the chairperson spoke about how he’d felt like an outsider as a kid, went into his drinking as a teen, and at some point skipped ahead to his troubled first marriage. Although Gina intended to listen, she drifted back and forth from the room to her own recent memories, finally subsumed by the aftermath of her awful make-out session with Ray yesterday afternoon, and the hazy space that followed, when she’d regained consciousness in the ambulance.
The last thing she’d heard before the slam of the ambulance doors had been the voice of her best friend, Cindy, calling Gina’s youngest son by name and telling him he could ride with her. Thank God for Cindy, but Dylan had seen her like this—his mother, a drugged and drunken disaster. Broken glass and a puddle of wine on the living room floor, blood and vomit on the comforter and God knows where else. The ambulance siren cut through her thoughts. Fingers pried an eyelid wide and a bright light blinded her. Something cold pressed against her chest. Machines beeped and rippled. The whole vehicle shuffled and rocked while the driver gunned the engine and weaved through traffic. Gina strained to say, “Please,” but her tongue fought against the back of her throat and refused to finish the sentence. Her hands clenched but still no sound escaped. A paramedic with a deep voice said she shouldn’t try to speak.
And later that night, after having her stomach pumped, she’d spent what felt like hours speaking to two different doctors for the psych evaluation, her frustration growing the longer she pleaded for them to believe that she hadn’t intended to go so far overboard with the pills and wine, until finally she convinced them she hadn’t attempted suicide, and the nurses allowed her to see Dylan and Cindy. Her youngest son entered the room and stood beside her hospital bed picking at his thumbnail, his hair hanging past his chin when he leaned down.
“You okay, Ma?”
Gina nodded and met his eyes with hers. “You shouldn’t have to worry about me.”
“It’s all right.”
“No, it’s not.”
Laughter in the meeting room crept in, dissolving the memory of those first steps of her walk of shame down that immaculate hospital hall with her hand on Dylan’s shoulder and her best friend’s arm around her. She opened her eyes and focused on the gray chair backs and heads directly in front of her, only then realizing she’d had them closed. Maryanne listened intently to the woman sharing, with her head turned toward her and a wide smile. Gina did her best to listen but seemed to have missed a key portion of the story, the funny part, and eventually drifted once more, caught up in a flurry of looping thoughts about Ray, and the boys, and the weekend ahead at the Sheffield estate, all of it finally blending into a ball of noise fueled by worry. She heard fragments of a few more shares but somehow the rest of the hour whisked by, and suddenly the chairperson announced that the meeting had come to an end.
Unsure what had just happened or why sitting in a room with these people held a slight appeal, she promised herself she would come back tomorrow. If she were on her own, she might not bother with any of this weird self-help shit, but she was desperate to be a good mother more than ever before, more than she’d ever wanted anything for herself. And because of that, she would come back.
On their way out, about halfway up the stairs, Maryanne took her by the elbow. “So let’s just start off by you calling me at least once a day, and also anytime you feel triggered to drink.”
Gina agreed and thanked her, and when they stepped outside into the daylight, Maryanne gave her a firm hug, and after a few beats still didn’t let go. “All you have to do is get through today, and then we’ll start over tomorrow,” she said, releasing her grip. “Take care, hon. You can do this.”
Gina crossed the parking lot in a daze, closed her car door and buckled her seat belt, but waited to turn the key. She fell into a different sort of trance than she had in the basement, staring through her windshield in a dream state, analyzing the small crowd beside the church wall one by one. The biker handing a cigarette to a short man with a potbelly and a mustache; a woman in a business suit who’d shared something about dating in sobriety, leaning in
to hug the bald man who’d led the meeting... Who were these people?
Gina’s stomach turned. The peace she’d felt moments ago had already vanished and the marathon of work at the Sheffield estate awaited like a hangman’s noose. Memorial Day weekend, the billionaire family and their spoiled grown children and a troupe of entitled guests—for the twelfth consecutive summer Gina needed to suck it up and do what she had to do in order to hold on to a job that had whittled her down a bit more each year.
She turned the key and the CD in her stereo began playing the same Beatles song she’d been listening to when she arrived—“Yesterday.” She let the music swallow her, letting go as she let Paul McCartney do that thing with his voice and his words where pure warmth seeped into her bloodstream through her skin. She closed her eyes and let her hands rest at her sides. If only things could be that way...all her troubles, so far away...
All ten fingers curled around the wheel, all squeezing tightly. She opened her eyes as the song faded down to its end, thinking she might still have enough time for a twenty-or thirty-minute nap before having to head to the Sheffield estate, a nap she desperately needed now that she’d awoken to the fact that, after returning from the hospital, she really hadn’t slept at all last night.
Her car rolled slowly to the parking lot’s edge and she shut off the stereo. She paused there with her right-hand blinker flashing and her new sponsor centered in the rearview mirror. The sun had just finished rising. She had to get to work soon. If not for Leo Sheffield intervening on her behalf last summer, first when she showed up horribly hungover, and later when she broke Sheila’s precious fucking chalice, his wife would have fired her. She needed to show up this morning in good form.
Suddenly, a powerful vision of her sitting alone in a bar and ordering straight whiskey popped into her brain. It made no sense at all; she didn’t even like whiskey. Plus, it was seven in the morning, and she hadn’t even left the property where the AA meeting had taken place. But now that she’d thought about whiskey, she could taste it—that first sip.
And that’s when Gina knew she was truly fucked. No two ways about it, she needed a drink. Goddamn it, did she ever.
FOURTEEN
Angelique opened her eyes to threads of Easter egg colors bleeding away from the lava-red dome of the rising sun. She watched the birds spiraling and calling out in the soft orange light that bathed their feathers and blanketed the beach, hoping this sense of safety with Corey wouldn’t end once the sun rose higher above them and the day began for the rest of the world. His arms around her supplied some key element she’d been missing, something substantial and warm in the base of her stomach, along with a hum radiating along her spine. Something with weight as well, like an anchor. He kept her from floating away.
Even so, Mr. Sheffield’s face continued creeping in, poisoning her peace with worry—his bloodshot eyes and the spit flying from his mouth when he’d shouted. The lack of air when his entire body had pressed her down. She couldn’t fathom crossing paths with him ever again. How could she explain that to Tiffany?
With her mouth next to Corey’s ear, she whispered, “You awake?”
“Sort of,” he said, shifting his shoulder on the sand.
“How long now until you have to be back there?”
He held her tighter as he answered, “A couple hours or so,” his voice trailing off into a yawn.
Her eyelids sank for a moment, but then her throat tightened and she sat up straight, Mr. Sheffield’s crazed face returning in a close-up. “I can’t go there,” she said, her voice flittering. “Seriously, you have to help me figure this out. What am I going to do?”
As if he’d just snapped out of a much calmer dream than her snapshot nightmares, he propped himself on an elbow and faced her, the sunrise light enhancing his cheekbones and jawline and setting an orange spark in each eye. “I just had an idea.”
“Okay, what?”
He sat up straighter. “You don’t want to stay there, and I don’t really want you to go back, either. But you’d need money if you didn’t, right?”
“Yeah, so?”
“Well, Leo Sheffield has plenty.”
“What are you saying—ask him for some?”
“No, more like tell him an amount to give you—so you’ll stay quiet.”
“You’re saying I should blackmail him?”
He looked at her without blinking. A long pause crept by.
“Yeah,” he finally said, “but let’s not call it that.”
Angelique plunged her fingers into the chilled sand and stared out at the cords of white water rolling in to the shore. After all those conversations that she’d prompted last summer and the summer before, it had always been obvious that Corey was a good guy, a puppy dog with muscles, and she loved the way he looked at her, especially since they arrived here at the beach, as though he’d never imagined a girl could be so beautiful. Add to that, he’d saved her from harm, and may have in fact saved her life. Trust had never come easily, but when it came down to who she trusted to help her through the next phase of this insane situation, at this point the list of names began and ended with Corey. And yet his suggestion struck her as crazy. Tell the father of my oldest friend to give me a bag of money, or else threaten that I’ll go to the cops?
“I’m not sure I can,” she said. “I just can’t imagine saying the words.”
He didn’t push, instead he sat beside her and held her close, both of them facing the water. A few minutes passed, and the longer she stared out at the sunrise over the ocean and contemplated his loose plan, the less scary and more plausible it became. Maybe she could do it. She hadn’t been an angel all her life, not by any means, so who knows, blackmail might come easier than she’d first imagined. She watched the waves breaking on the shore, thinking about her less-than-proudest moments over the years, like the first time she stuck something under her coat and walked out of a high-end clothing store without paying, back when she was twelve, and then how she’d shoplifted dozens more times throughout her early teens. And much worse, that period a bit later when she and Tiff teamed up and enacted a bullying campaign against Jane Nelson, after Jane “stole” the guy Tiff had been crushing on, Jane finally defeated when her mom checked her into a rehab for eating disorders. And just a month ago, when she called Brad and said she took a pregnancy test and it came back positive, then didn’t return his calls or texts, and instead let him stew on the prospect of being a nineteen-year-old dad for a couple days, just to get some payback after he’d cheated on her. Even though Brad had acted like a creep and deserved some stress in his cushy Upper East Side life, this had been a new low. Brad may have deserved it, but Jane hadn’t. Remorse couldn’t erase the damage done, no matter how much Angelique wished it could have.
No, she hadn’t been a saint, far from it. But she’d never threatened to take someone away from his family by sending him to prison, something she knew a bit about thanks to her convict father. Yeah, Tiff’s dad had done a horrible thing when he chased her down, and maybe another really horrible thing if Corey had been wrong about him not killing the guy in the pool, but what exactly should she say to get the money?
Don’t overthink it, she thought. Leo Sheffield must have been on the verge of cracking by then, probably way more scared than she and Corey. He’d do what she asked, because she could end him with a phone call or a short statement in person at the nearest precinct. He’d pay, and as long as she convinced him she would keep his secrets safe, he’d be glad enough to do it.
Corey’s arm around her shoulders and his calm energy allowed her to play the tape all the way to the end. At least he had an idea. And what other option did she have? If she decided against returning to the Sheffield house, she realized she had no plan B for the day whatsoever, not even a seed of an idea aside from running off without a destination, penniless and without even a spare change of clothes—without even a pair of shoes
. She couldn’t take off without money, obviously, and Tiffany couldn’t help because she never saved any of the money that Leo put on her debit card. She had no doubt that Corey would have given her whatever money he could scrape together, but it seemed safe to assume he was dead broke, just like her.
“Okay,” she finally said. “If I do this, though, how much should I ask for? Or I guess I should say, how much do I tell him he has to give me?”
“Not sure,” Corey said, shivering as the wind picked up. “How much do you guess he could come up with in cash over the weekend?”
She bit her bottom lip and ran through a series of figures before answering. “Ten, maybe twenty thousand?”
“More than that,” he said, hunched forward with his arms tight against his ribs, clenching his jaw when a gust blew his T-shirt halfway up his back. “The guy’s worth over a billion. I’m betting he has a lot more than ten or twenty grand already in the house. And I bet if you scare him bad enough it won’t take him long to come up with a lot more.”
“Okay, yeah, that’s all fine and good, but it’s a holiday weekend, so how’s he going to get huge stacks of cash when all the banks are closed?”
“To start, he has a wall safe in the master bedroom. I’d say there’s a good chance he has at least a hundred grand in there, maybe more, maybe way more. Really, what the hell else would he have a safe in his summerhouse for? If you tell him a number, whatever he says, he can at least give you what’s in there first. Why wouldn’t he? Anything less than a million is like pocket change to a guy like him, anyway.”
