by Erica Boyce
When she left the ICU, she took her necklace back out of her collar and started zipping the pendant back and forth along its chain. The sound filled her head, metal on metal, until she made it back to Martha’s desk. Martha was explaining to a stressed-looking couple where they could validate their parking. They turned to each other and started to discuss which of them could possibly find the time to stop by the parking ticket window on their way back to the car. “Can’t you just do it here?” the man said. “She’s eight months pregnant.”
“Afraid not,” Martha said, lowering her eyes in remorse or boredom. She tapped her bright-red fingernails against the desk until the couple turned away.
“You’re back!” Martha said when they were gone. “That was fast.”
“Her family showed up, so they didn’t need me anymore. Those two were delightful, weren’t they?”
“Oh, them?” Martha flapped her hand dismissively. “We get their type through here at least three times a day. They’re the least of our troubles.” She launched into a discussion on the latest hospital dramas, departmental meetings missed, new policies ignored, feuds between doctors and nurses whose names Rebecca no longer recognized. Rebecca gasped and murmured in the appropriate places, said the types of gossipy things Addie might say.
Eventually, another man appeared behind Rebecca, fiddling with his parking ticket, and cleared his throat delicately. She said goodbye to Martha and let him take her place. Martha’s face fell back into its usual pinched annoyance.
She was nearly to the door, already tallying up the groceries she’d have to buy for dinner, when she stopped. She planted one hand on the wall and the other on her belly. She sat down on one of the benches meant for those waiting for taxis.
She knew why she’d recognized Ms. Bray.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
May 10, 1999
Annie opened her eyes to an industrial-looking ceiling, the kind with the tiles that have holes all over them. She could tell from the beeping, sucking machinery around her that she was in a hospital. She pushed herself up on her elbows, heart beating hard as she searched the room for evidence that this was St. Augustine’s, not Devil’s Purse, before she remembered her parents were gone. There was no one left to embarrass.
An envelope stood on the table next to her bed, propped up against a glass vase of sad red roses. Her name was written on the front. It was Eve’s handwriting. She reached for it, wincing. The paper was smooth under her fingers. Inside was a thick cream note card rimmed with an embossed silver border, an elaborately scripted E at the top. Annie raised her eyebrows. Eve’s family in Connecticut must be richer than she’d realized.
Annie read the note, skimming over phrases like “concerned for our safety” and “best for all of us” and “care deeply.” The gist of it was that they wouldn’t let her move back in unless she went to rehab. They’d give her a month before they started looking for another roommate, provided she still paid rent in the meantime.
Annie pushed her head back into the pillow and sighed. It was like they were searching for drama. Yes, she’d gone a little overboard that one night, but she’d seen much worse at the parties they frequented.
There had been a knife, though, hadn’t there? She grimaced as she remembered the blade swishing through the air. She was not a violent person. She couldn’t even watch action movies. She realized with a sinking feeling that she was beginning not to recognize herself. She pushed the thought away. She’d just gotten carried away, that was all.
The fact remained that their rent was cheap, and she wasn’t sure she’d be able to find anything else in the area that she could afford on a minimum wage. Regardless of what she was or was not becoming and what she did or did not want to admit, she’d have to go through the motions until her roommates were satisfied.
The ER doctor recommended the regional youth rehab facility and said he thought they’d take her insurance. The taxi charged her an exorbitant amount to drop her off at the address the doctor gave her. She squinted at the meter and did quick calculations in her head to avoid looking at the bleak prison of a building. “It is what it is, babe,” the taxi driver told her, and she wasn’t sure if he meant the price or rehab in general. He looked down her shirt when she leaned forward with the cash.
At intake, she handed the woman behind the desk the new insurance card her mother had sent her in a slim envelope after her parents had moved. There had been a note with it: “You’re still our dependent, so you shouldn’t have to pay your own medical expenses.” Scribbled underneath it in another ink color was, “We love you always.”
The receptionist told her her parents’ insurance would cover two weeks’ worth of treatment. It didn’t seem very long. She could get through fourteen nights in this place. She’d be fine.
All the other patients in the facility looked so young. Some of them dressed all in black and leaned against the outer walls of the building for cigarette breaks, leaving butts ringed with dark red lipstick in the ashtray bins. They were so bony, the bricks must’ve left bruises on their shoulder blades when they stepped away. Other kids were just sad, sitting hunched in the cafeteria in oversized clothes and scooping soup into their mouths without looking up. A few were loud teenagers, shouting down the halls at each other. Annie slept with her back to the room she shared with five other patients and her face toward the dull gray cement wall. She did not want to be popular here.
Every day was the same. Cereal in the cafeteria, individual therapy, art therapy, sloppy joes, spaghetti and meatballs. And groups. Session after session in group after group. When it was her turn to talk, she talked about her parents and how cold they were, how distant. When she was bored, she’d make up stories. Innocent stuff: they’d made her give away her puppy when she couldn’t take care of it; she could only have sweets once a month. The other kids were half-asleep by then anyway. She picked at her chin when the session leaders talked about God.
Her individual counselor was a guy named Randy—no one even knew his last name, because he told them all to call him Randy—and he ran a few of the groups, too. He always stared at Annie for longer than she cared for.
On the eleventh day, during her individual session, Randy pushed his chair back from his desk and crossed his legs. “So, Annie,” he said. “I had an interesting call with your mother this morning.”
Annie stiffened. Her parents must’ve already known about the rehab from the insurance bills, but she preferred not to think about that.
“Are you sure there’s nothing more you want to talk about?” he said.
Annie shook her head.
Randy watched Annie’s face closely. Annie looked right back, grinding her teeth together. She could tell her mom had told him about the baby, but she knew he wouldn’t bring it up until she did. It was probably counselor protocol.
Her daughter’s memory did not belong within these walls. For once, she was glad she’d never named the baby. There was nothing to call her by, nothing to tell him.
Finally, he started back in on his lecture on preparing for the outside world. She remained silent for the rest of the session. She watched him squirm. After a while, he stopped talking, maybe thinking she’d fill the quiet out of sheer discomfort. She didn’t. They spent the remainder of that hour in their separate bubbles, him checking his files and her picking at her nails, the tick of the button on his mouse occasionally interrupting the silence.
When she checked out on her last day, she felt buoyant. She still didn’t quite know if she was cured or needed curing, but she was free, and the air was crisp and early-summer new. Neither of her roommates had offered to pick her up, but that was okay. She’d taken a cab to the clinic, and she would take one away from it.
Sophia was gone when she walked in, off running errands or something, but Eve was there. She leapt up from the couch to greet her. “You’re home!” she said. She embraced Annie tightly. “We�
��ve missed you.” She stood back, her hands still clamped around Annie’s biceps, and lowered her voice. “Listen, I know one of your steps is seeking forgiveness, but you don’t have to worry about us. That horrible night is all water under the bridge now.”
Annie smiled wanly. She mumbled a thank you and headed to her room to unpack the ill-fitting clothes Eve had dropped off for her at the clinic.
The theater manager let her come back only because he was shorthanded for the summer rush. Helen barely acknowledged her. Annie saw her glance at Sophia more than once on her first day back. When Annie asked her about her kids, Helen hesitated and said, “They’re fine,” before turning back to the popcorn machine. Sophia probably told her about the knife. By the end of her first week, Annie was exhausted and drooping, wondering always what her daughter would think of her.
The girls didn’t invite her out with them that Friday. They swanned past her door in miniskirts while she lay in bed with an aching head. She knew better than to ask to join them. No matter; it was a college town. There were bound to be other parties going on. She had to do something about the pain.
* * *
It took her four tries to get sober—really sober. Sophia found her passed out in front of their door one morning, her face mashed into a bag of cinnamon rolls she’d bought from the bakery downstairs. Annie was still picking icing out of her hair when they dropped her off at the clinic, trying not to think about the frat boy who kept asking her about her family the night before. After that, she moved in with a bunch of girls from the clinic, all in recovery.
When she relapsed a second time, the rum took up most of her wages. There were no more college parties to supply her in this new part of town. She hid the bottles under her bed—the girls had a strict substance-free policy. One night, she lay on the floor, one arm outstretched to retrieve the half-empty bottle. The walls of her apartment were so thin, it was a mystery how they supported the weight of the building. She heard a baby wailing in the unit next door, and as its cries ripped through her and she brushed the dirt off her cheek, she realized she didn’t like herself very much. She held the bottle in one hand and wondered if it would kill her.
No more. She tried to quit on her own that time, to see if she could, but the shakes and the vomiting quickly became too much. She checked herself back in that third time. The receptionist at the clinic told her without even a little bit of sadness that there were no beds available. She referred Annie to the adult facility nearby. At eighteen, she qualified for treatment there.
The adult clinic was somehow even bleaker. The patients were all worn down, strung out, given up. Nobody yelled in the hallways. Nobody bothered. A lot of them had kids they weren’t allowed to see, and in group, some of them talked about how the only thing getting them through was that they needed to get out and see their daughters again. She checked herself out after a week and needed a drink just to forget what she’d seen.
The fourth time, she went because she was just tired. Tired of herself and of the effort it now took to get a buzz. She went back to the youth clinic, since she still qualified as a teenager. She resolved to tell Randy everything this time, every little detail, but Randy wasn’t there anymore. Her kind-eyed new counselor said he’d transferred to a facility in North Carolina to be close to his family.
By rights, it shouldn’t have stuck that time. She had no friends, no family—her mother had written her a letter shortly after her first stint in rehab and said they would pay for treatments as long as she liked but asked her to please not contact them any longer. She had no job, either, and no energy. All things the group leaders said were crucial to a successful recovery.
“What would you like to do with your life, Annie?” her counselor asked her one morning. “How do you envision your future?”
Annie’s eyes darted around the room. “I want to survive” seemed like it might raise an alarm bell or two for this sweet woman. She said, “I want to be a drug counselor,” and both of them raised their eyebrows in surprise.
That night, she stared at the ceiling, kept awake by the rattling snore of the patient she shared a room with. Maybe it could work. She could be matter-of-fact like Helen, nurturing like Eve. She would never, ever force her patients to admit something they weren’t ready to face. She would be like the mother she hadn’t been able to be.
* * *
And so by some miracle, she was. She got her GED and went to night school for her bachelor’s in psychology while she worked days in a coffee shop around the corner. She studied for exams on public buses and on sticky tables in the window of the café on her breaks. She discovered she had an extraordinary capacity for reading when surrounded by noise. Whenever she needed a drink—which was often in the beginning and still once or twice a week a few years later—she studied instead, even when her head pounded and her hands shook and every part of her told her “you cannot.” She went to a couple of AA meetings, but all that talk of God and a higher power still made her fidget, remembering the hard, unforgiving pews of her childhood. Her higher power was studying so ferociously, she lost track of herself. Giving herself no breaks, ever. Was that healthier? She didn’t know. She went to her graduation despite not having anyone to invite, and when she walked across that rubberized stage, she glowed.
She went back to her own rehab clinic to apply for a job. She could have gone anywhere, to any state, and she shivered a little as she climbed the steps to its front door. But she wanted someone to recognize her and see how far she’d come. Of course, none of the caseworkers she remembered were still there—turnover rates were high. The field as a whole tended to chew through idealistic new college graduates, spitting them out into gentler careers. She thought she saw the receptionist glance twice at her face while she filed her orientation paperwork, though.
Working at the clinic was both far better and far worse than she’d imagined. Sometimes, she got letters—not emails but real, honest-to-God letters—from former clients who were now out, living cleaner lives. They wrote to her to thank her for her help. She kept those letters stacked in a drawer in her bedside table, and sometimes, late at night, she took them out and read them all, even the ones whose names she barely recognized, even the ones who she remembered as reticent and near silent during their sessions.
But then, working with teenagers was often a special kind of thankless, with their mood swings and their all-knowingness. But then, there were the deaths. So many. Over the years, the alcoholics and marijuana users were replaced with painkiller and heroin addicts. They were hooked on Oxy and Percs. They would finish their treatments and walk out the door, and the staff would watch them go. Even the receptionist could tell they weren’t ready. And what could Annie do? Insurance covered what insurance covered, and that was that. Sometimes they got calls from parents weeks later. They were distraught, angry, tragically grateful. Their kids were missing, relapsed, dead. The staff developed a sort of gallows humor about it to protect themselves. They called each other by their last names, like soldiers, and never admitted to each other when they’d gone home to cry or scream or drink. She was “Fitzpatrick,” which eventually got shortened to “Patty,” even after she married and became a Bray.
One day, Annie walked in her apartment door and found her husband, Terry, dumping several glugs of vodka into the tomato sauce bubbling on the stove. “I know, I know,” he said. “I’ll pour the rest down the toilet when I’m done. It’s just been one of those days.”
Annie made a mental note to eat her pasta dry that night. The alcohol would cook off, but the flavor would still be there.
“You got a letter, by the way,” he said, pointing over his shoulder with the sauce-dipped spoon. “Doesn’t look like it’s from a client or anything.”
Well, of course it didn’t. Client letters went to the office, not to their home address. Annie picked up the envelope from the counter and immediately dropped it. She wiped her hands on her legs, s
hook out their shake. Fear shot through her belly. Terry stirred away, but he was no doubt watching out of the corner of his eye. He’d specified what the letter was not because he was curious about what the letter was. There, in the upper left-hand corner, in staid, black font, was the name and address of the adoption agency.
She took the letter into their bedroom and checked twice to be sure the door had closed behind her. Terry knew about the adoption. One of the things she loved most about their marriage was that he’d never once mentioned having kids of their own. She couldn’t bear the thought. As far as she was concerned, she hadn’t earned another shot. No matter how understanding Terry was, though, she wasn’t ready to share whatever this letter had to say.
She sat on her knees on her braided rug and slipped her finger under the envelope’s seal. She felt seventeen all over again. Everything she had was slipping away.
Her daughter had just turned eighteen and had requested identifiable information about her birth parents. Would she be willing, the letter asked, to release that information?
Every year, in October, she googled stock photos of five-year-olds, twelve-year-olds, fifteen-year-olds, and tried to imagine those generic faces with her own features on them. She read articles about what to expect from your child’s development during that year. And then, that one night a year, she took a sleeping pill before bed and refused to think.
She’d known this day would probably come from the moment she chose a closed adoption against the agency’s disapproving advice. Birth parent reunions were a staple of daytime talk shows now, and she clicked the TV off whenever one appeared.
It wasn’t that she didn’t want to meet her daughter and see what she’d become. She ached for it. But she also couldn’t bear to think of the look in the girl’s eyes when she learned who her mother was: a recovering alcoholic who never even left the state. Better that the girl live in the dreamy life of possibility Annie picked out for her, where her birth mom could be an actress or an astronaut. Better that she keep the clean slate Annie had given her. Lord knows, Annie had cluttered her own slate up plenty. Better for everyone.
