Walking on Broken Glass

by Christa Allan

  “That's part of the seduction of alcohol. Or drugs, food, sex. Anything you use to feel numb. Your disease convinces you it took care of the pain while you were drinking, drugging, eating, having sex. But none of it dies a natural death. It's just suspended, like in cryogenics. So you stop drinking and things start thawing. You start feeling.”

  “Am I supposed to spend the rest of my life feeling every little thing that happens? How do people live like that?” Hysteria hijacked my voice.

  “Addiction tricks us into thinking we can pick and choose what we feel. We can’t. Real life means feeling. Life's supposed to have an edge. If it didn’t, how would you know if you were falling off?”

  I hung my snotty-nosed, runny-eyed head over the back of the chair. “I hate all this. I want recess. Is there ever recess? I knew I missed first grade.”

  “Let's get back to the feeling. When Carl lied to his parents about why you’re here, now that felt like something, didn’t it?”

  “Betrayal. That's what it felt like. He sold me out for his parents.”

  “Is that the first time he's ever done that? Sold you out?”

  “Well, yes. I guess. I mean it's never been an issue before. Carl's whole family operates in a universe I’ve never been a part of—socially or financially. Since we’ve been married there have been times I’ve been ticked because of their demands … go here, be there, dress like this … but I knew Carl wanted to make them happy. So if I had to go to an afternoon tea with blue-haired ladies, no biggie. Sometimes the vacations drove me crazy. Ski lodge, lake house. Under their roof 24/7. Carl's mom obsessing about lettuce. But they’re his parents. He's all they have.”

  “Was your parents’ relationship like yours?”

  I snorted. “Not quite. My dad did whatever he could to keep my mom happy. At least it seemed that way to me growing up. They made sure I did what I was supposed to do and kept the whining to a minimum. If I complained, my father would give me the ‘if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all’ speech. The one about being grateful for what you have. Oh, and there was also ‘God doesn’t like ugly.’ That one covered my sassy self.”

  “So, they must have been proud of the woman you became.”

  “I guess. Most of my life I just did what they wanted me to do. I’d get wild ideas about stuff—like wanting to be a cheerleader or learning how to play the piano—and we’d have these family meetings. Cheerleader was definitely out. They made me realize I had no chance. They gave in on the piano lessons. But I didn’t always practice, and eventually I quit. Unfortunately, they’d remind me about that fiasco when I had some other bright idea.” I stopped to blow my nose again.

  “When I said I wanted to attend college, they freaked out. Asking me over and over if I was sure I wanted to do that and reassuring me I could change my mind.”

  We talked about my father, my relationship with him then and now. I wanted Ron to see my father as I did. “He’d help our neighbors build decks or donate money to every kid who came around selling junk for school. If I was out late, even in college and still living with them, I called home. He didn’t want me to drive in the city at night because it wasn’t safe. He still tries to protect me. He’ll send me an airline ticket so I won’t drive the six hours to his house alone.

  “My dad's close to Carl. He likes that they can talk football, play golf, and fish. He told me Carl was a ‘man's man.’ But he’d joke around with Carl about how he’d take him out if he ever hurt me.”

  Ron unfolded his arms and picked up his legal pad. “I know this has been a tough session. We have a lot left to uncover, but I think I understand now why you married Carl.”

  I stood to stretch the numbness in my backside for using it so long. “Oh, I thought it was simple. I married him because I loved him.”

  “And you loved him because he reminded you of your father.”

  32

  I left Ron's office with one thought: get to my room, lie on my bed, and prevent myself from thinking for as long as possible. I stared at the ceiling, afraid to close my eyes because movies I couldn’t stop played in my head. With my eyes open, I could count the holes in the ceiling tiles. If I focused on mindless activity, I could put my brain on a continuous loop, like when the computer's hourglass stays and stays and stays.

  But none of it worked for me. My brain wanted to hit “control-alt-delete.” End the task. Start over. Maybe I could control the information. Let a few pieces out at a time. Process and move on. Process and move on. Next. Next. Next.

  If I married Carl because he reminded me of my father, then who did I remind Carl of? That piece of information definitely had to go back and wait its turn. I mentally smashed it into the steel “waiting” bin in my brain.

  Maybe I could sleep. At this point, sleep was as close as I was going to get to numbness. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a strategy with much long-term usefulness like those “tools” Ron talked about. Voluntary narcolepsy was not going to help if I planned a vertical life.

  Knock. Knock-knock-knock.

  Something new to count.

  Knock-knock-knock.

  Was there a voice attached to this hand? Oh, maybe it thinks I’m asleep.

  The doorknob turned. Slowly and squeakily. Like the one in horror movies. Maybe they’re all the same doorknob. Like Carl was my father.

  “Leah?” My name sounded like a question. My eyes were still closed, but I recognized Cathryn's voice. “Are you sleeping?”

  Wasn’t that question on the universal list of dumb questions? I’m postponing the inevitable. At some point, I won’t be sleeping when she asks that question. It might as well be now. “Do you want me to be sleeping? I can be. I’d rather be.” I opened my eyes. Ceiling hole number 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9 …

  “No, I don’t want you to be sleeping right now. I want to talk to you before everyone comes back from group.”

  Oh, I’d forgotten. I’d traded one torture for another.

  “I really need you to sit up,” she said. “Look at me. This is important.”

  I massaged my temples. If I could just unknot my brain, I’d feel better. I pushed myself up to a semi-reclining position.

  “Okay, I’m sitting up. This better be good.” I scratched my bed-head hair.

  She sat on the bed somewhere between my waist and feet. I’m so short, it's a small vicinity, but she's there somewhere. She wiped her palms on her uniform pants. She had my attention now because she was acting very un-Cathryn-like.

  “First, I want you to know we all understand how much you’ve had to deal with, not just since you’ve been here, but in the past few days. And it's obvious to us how committed you are to your recovery and to staying here until you graduate.”

  “You’re scaring me. What happened and to whom?” The brain knot relocated to my throat.

  “Don’t be scared. Your family's fine.”

  “Then what?”

  “Usually one of the staff doctors handles medical issues with patients. But, since this is not a medical issue per se, I volunteered to talk to you.”

  I leaned forward, reached for Cathryn's hand, and squeezed. Gently. “If you don’t get this out soon, I might have to squeeze until your fingernails pop off.”

  “You’re pregnant.”

  A fifty-pound sack of surprise slammed into my reality.

  “I’m … say that again.”

  “Pregnant.”

  In some movies, women fainted when they were told this. I very much wished to be one of those women right now. “This can’t be. No. No. No. Oh, dear God. Why? Why now? How am I supposed to do this?” I mashed my pillow over my face. The pillow case smelled like lemons.

  Cathryn tugged the pillow toward her. “What can we do to help you right now? Do you want to talk to Carl? I can call him for you.”

  “No. No. Don’t tell Carl. It's early. It has to be. I can’t be that far along. My periods have been weird all my life, so I don’t usually panic when I’m late. But I know I just h
ad one not so long ago. I remember because I’d run out of tampons. Carl had to buy them for me. He bought six boxes so he’d not have to buy them again for a long time. When was that? Did I write it down? Maybe I circled the date in my planner.” I jumped out of bed. “Where's my purse? Here, here. I found it.” I overturned it on the bed. “Planner, planner. I know it's here. Checkbooks. Wait. Aha.” I pushed the lipsticks, pens, paper clips, coupons, and assorted purse trash aside and sat on the bed. “March, April, May, June. Maybe I missed it. May, April, March.” I counted months on my fingers. “It might be January or December. I’m not sure.”

  Cathryn watched me. Her head moved back and forth and up and down. She allowed my frenzy. “We can find out the due date. Are you sure you don’t want to tell Carl?”

  “He’ll want me to leave. He won’t let me finish. I have to stay. I have to. If I don’t finish, I might drink again. I can’t drink again. Ever. Ever. Ever.”

  She nodded. “Okay. No telling Carl. We want you to finish your program. And this baby wants you to finish too.”

  Alyssa. My sweet precious baby girl. Mommy is so, so sorry. Mommy didn’t know. She didn’t know. And now I do, and it's too late. I love you so much. I loved you so much. But I was too late. And you needed me. And I wasn’t there. Alyssa, Mommy will never ever ever forget there's nothing worse than too late.

  I smelled baby powder, felt the warm fuzzy softness of her round apple cheek pressed against mine, heard her cooing, and could not bear to take my eyes away from her when she nursed, and I would whisper, “I’m your mommy. And you are Alyssa. Jesus loved us so much he gave you to us. And Jesus loves Alyssa. I’m your mommy, and I will love you forever and ever.”

  And then I did what the ladies in the movie did.

  Fainted.

  33

  We decided, the hospital staff and I, not to tell anyone.

  I asked to attend AA smoke-free meetings. I told the group the smoking made me sick. I stayed back from some smokers meetings, and the smokers had to tap their feet through some of the clean air ones. Doug whined in group about my being too uppity, though he had a hard sell with that one around Trudie, who defended my right to breathe. The teens were, as Benny said, “a’ight with it” and told Doug not to “dis” me. Annie just shrugged, and Theresa liked that her pack of cigs lasted longer. One issue solved.

  I didn’t call Dr. Foret, even though he’d delivered Alyssa. Nothing about her death was his fault, but I couldn’t help that seeing him made me think of her. Trey recommended Dr. Bethany Nolan, a friend from his med school days. They arranged for her to come to Brookforest for my first appointment. Her first words to me were, “Well, now this is a fine mess you’ve gotten yourself in,” and then made me promise we’d never have to have another appointment at Brookforest. When she laughed, she shook her head, her braids swayed and remind me of Theresa. Oh, and she told me she didn’t mind that I was white. She estimated the due date somewhere between December 24 and January 3.

  Then there was the vomiting issue. Between using the cafeteria food and some “virus thing” as excuses, I managed to explain the morning sickness away. I also learned I was not the center of the rehab universe because apparently not as many people tracked my visits to the bathroom as I might have thought.

  And then there was Carl. The family session after Carl-gate and my surprise news worked out for several reasons because: 1) my father wasn’t there; 2) Carl arrived five minutes before and left five minutes after the session; and 3) Trudie, Adam, and Adam's daughter shared therapy spotlight with Theresa and her long-absent husband.

  We started that night by saying the Serenity Prayer. Then, instead of just opening the floor for “check ups from the neck ups,” Trey said he was conducting an informal survey. “I want everyone to participate. Be honest. I promise, you’ll find out how much more we’re all alike than we are different.” He asked how many of us knew alcoholism was already in our families, not counting the person in the room they were visiting. Almost every hand shot up in the air. One by one, we just said the relationship of the alcoholic—fathers, mothers, aunts, uncles, siblings—and realized we were all parts of short or long family chains of drinkers.

  “Remember these two words: genetic predisposition. We may not have control over the genes that are passed to us or that we pass on. But here's what you can control—the example you’re going to be for your family.”

  When he asked how many of the people we just mentioned were in recovery, only two hands raised. “See the connection here? If you don’t stop the chain right now, who will? That's why these groups are vital for families. So, good for you—for all of you—for making the decision to be here tonight.”

  And then it was “start your dysfunctional engines” time.

  The couple with Trudie and her husband at the last family session was her sister and her husband. This week, Haley, Adam's Mean Girls-wannabe thirteen-year-old daughter decided to participate. When she didn’t talk, Haley was a terrific kid. Mostly, she accused Trudie of marrying her father because he was rich enough to afford the drugs she needed.

  “He's spending our money on this place. There's no guarantee this is going to work, right? How is that a good investment? And I have to consider my options for college.” She alternately whined and sassed. Adam, literally and figuratively stuck between his wife and his daughter, kept asking what he could do to make everything better. On some level, I felt sorry for him because he was faced with a problem that couldn’t be solved by throwing money at it. By the end of the night, though, I think he would have been happy to throw money at Haley—huge sacks of it.

  Jules, Theresa's husband, sported wavy black hair, combed back, but not an oil slick. His eyes occupied most of his angular face. Before group started, he stroked Theresa's new hair and whispered something in her ear that made her giggle and then slap him on the arm. The kind of slap that invited him to repeat whatever he whispered. Theresa shared the “new creation” epiphany (she pronounced it epeep-a-nee) with the group. Then Jules told the group about “old creation” Theresa.

  Carl and I didn’t participate. We feigned politeness and rapt attention as the Tower of Babel resurrected in the room.

  Trey earned his money that night.

  I had one more weekend pass before I was scheduled to “graduate.” So, in the “inmate” group later that week, Dr. Sanders asked me about my weekend plans.

  “I really don’t want to go home overnight, so I haven’t made any plans,” I said. Doug grunted something, and Annie looked up from biting the skin off her left thumb to ask why. The chick hardly ever opened her mouth, but today she had to ask the one question I didn’t want to answer.

  I looked at Dr. Sanders with my practiced blank-face stare and waited for him to rescue me with some therapy mumbo-jumbo, but he only tapped his pen against his notebook and stared back at me. The boys played air guitars. Trudie had introduced them to Queen and “Bohemian Rhapsody” a few days ago, and they became rabid fans.

  “Do I have to have a reason?” I bit the inside of my mouth. I needed to make an appointment with my dentist. If I couldn’t get happy gas, he wasn’t going to touch the inside of my mouth with anything silver that made whirring sounds.

  “Do you not have a reason or do you have one you don’t want to talk about?” Dr. Sanders shifted to face me.

  “That's a trick question. If I do go, I haven’t made plans because I haven’t discussed it with Carl.”

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you, ever since you shared with the group how Carl managed the money in your house, including giving you an allowance, because he said you can’t balance a checkbook. He takes off work to drive you downtown because you get lost easily—”

  “Wait,” I sputtered. “You wrote all this down?”

  “Yes, that's why I have a pen (he held it up) and a notebook (which he also held up) at every session. To write down what people share. He also—”

  “Enough. What's your point?” I couldn’t believe he�
��d mock me in front of everyone. I didn’t have to look around the circle to know everyone else was looking back and forth between him and me, waiting for the strike.

  He leaned back in his chair. “My point is that you’re the epitome of a pampered little woman at home. I just don’t understand how someone with your almost perfect life is here.” He waved around the circle. “You’re Miss Patty-Peace-at-any-Price, aren’t you? Isn’t that what you call yourself?”

  What was with this man? Had anybody checked his urine samples lately? I looked around and could tell by the downcast eyes that no one was jumping in on this. I was on my own.

  “Why are you being so mean to me? Carl cares where I go and how I get there. So what? That doesn’t make him a bad person. I like and appreciate that he manages the money. He's good at it, and I don’t have to putz with it. He works hard, and he takes care of me.” I folded my arms across my chest in my best “how dare you dis me” posture.