Last Last Chance

by Fiona Maazel

  She slams the door, which appears to lock from her side only.

  I call Eric and get his voice mail. I say: Everything’s going just fine. Then I draw the curtains. Under guise of creating an atmosphere of recovery, this view—desert, desert, mountain, desert—simply deters escape. I’d be parched and sunstroked within ten minutes out there.

  On closer inspection, my bed, a single, turns out to be an air mattress on a box frame. I wonder if this is because bedsprings make for a nice weapon. Then I remember we’re not in jail, so what the hell? The duvet cover is burlap. The walls are self-adhering strips of floral laminate. Shelf liner, perhaps. No way is this place for the rich and famous. Aggie was duped. I can see how it happened, like maybe Susan is the house shill who’s got the desert pitch down. She’s certainly not your average recovery bear. She’s too suave. Maybe she used to be one of those tony escort girls whose death by stretch mark brought her here. Maybe she has actorly ambitions to restore a star and land the part. Probably, though, she’s just a decent woman with a shitty job.

  Thus far, we’ve yet to be frisked. Our bags are untouched and my supply is safe. But I hardly feel calm. I’m sure they’ve got people who ransack the rooms while we’re in group. And I’m sure someone is going to feel me up shortly. This means stashing and carrying are risky. Used to be I could peg the staffer of loose morals in about a day or so, but now—and maybe age is to blame—I’m too lazy. Can’t be bothered to make deals or even to investigate an alternative. Mother, on the other hand, has all the energy in the world. She has crawled out her window and is stabbing the earth with a rock. She could have walked around to the back of the building, but I think the window egress gives her a sense of transgression, which might be the only excitement we get for days.

  I procure a rock of my own and kneel by her side. There is a chain-gang feel to our labors that gets demolished when she drops her compact of blow into the hole. From rehabs past, I have thongs designed for the purpose of drug trafficking. The one I got on now has a ribbon sewn along the ass in which to store pills like a string of beads. It’s not even uncomfortable, kinda nice in fact. But never mind. All but thongs go in the hole. Unfortunately, Mother is not having it. She says, “Get your own hole,” and begins to remove my stuff. She does this with the umbrage of siblings who divide their room in half.

  I watch her for a minute, then start a hole of my own.

  There is no way I can stay here for a month. I will go crazy, I know it.

  The binder says we eat at eight in the morning, dine at six, and spend the interim in group after group, with a break for lunch. We have two hours until the buggy comes. There is little else to do but read the literature or nap. I can hear Mother in the other room cursing because her cell phone has no signal. Click goes the lock, and in she comes, beelining for my phone, which I have already buried because personal amenities like phones and iPods are forbidden, unbeknownst to Mother, who’s actually gone her entire life without aid of a rehab facility, God bless her.

  She rifles through my shoulder bag in such a way as to conceal her efforts, like part of the fun here, this greedy forage through my belongings, is doing it in secret.

  “Who do you have to call, anyway?”

  “No one. I just like to have it around.”

  “Use the phone in your room.”

  She looks at me like I am thick, thick. “There are no phones.”

  I quiz the room and see she’s right. “Oh, jeez. Well, my phone’s in the hole. And I’m not getting it.”

  “Where’s your hole?”

  “Oh, so now you wanna share holes. Tough shit.”

  “I’ve got codeine in the other room.” She says this like it’s tempting.

  “Child’s play.”

  “Lortab?”

  I am thinking of Quinty’s scrip, which I filled yesterday. OxyNorm, quick-release capsules. A hundred twenty for a month. It’s not enough, but it will help. I just might get through Bluebonnet alive.

  “I cannot be bribed,” I say. “Ginger chew?”

  There’s a knock at the door. It is Robert. He looks effete in those cowboy boots and CHiPs sunglasses. I didn’t think it was possible to look effete in cowboy boots unless that’s all you’re wearing. He seems about twenty-two and none too pleased to be here.

  “I’m Robert. We met before.”

  “I’m a drug addict, not a retard,” I say. “Ginger chew?”

  He’s got a clipboard of his own and appears to be scanning it for permission to accept the chew.

  We’re standing in a circle. I got my hands in my back pockets, and am rocking on my heels. My years in rehab outnumber his, ten to one. I suppose he needs a little help.

  “History?” I say. “Do you need to take a history?”

  “Ah right. Yes. Thank you. Please, sit down.” He swipes his fingers through his hair to preserve a side part that’s so fixed in the declension of his head, the swipe can only be a tic.

  Mother and I poise on the edge of the mattress. It wheezes. Robert takes the wicker chair in the corner. We get through the preliminaries, no problem. Comes time for the details, forget it.

  “How would you characterize the extent of your drug use? Mild? Moderate? Excessive?”

  Mother says, “I dabble.”

  I say, “I dabble even less.”

  She turns to me, aghast. “What are you talking about? You are a zombie. You stagger around the apartment like the undead. You sleep twenty of every twenty-four hours. You slur!”

  I look at Robert. My gaze is steady and, I think, reassuring. “I dabble,” I say.

  “Your booking agent said you’re here for downers. Is that correct?”

  Mother laughs. “Her booking agent?”

  I laugh, too. The more I think of Agneth, the more incredible she seems. Posing as my booking agent. Posing to impress a rehab that is itself posing as a celebrity sanctum.

  “That’s what I got here,” he says, tapping the clipboard with his pen. Followed by the swipe. So the swipe is nerves. I see. If we ever get to playing poker, I got him nailed.

  I shake my head with the thought. Robert looks from me to Izzy and back. I am beginning to feel sorry for him. This might be his second day on the job. Given the condition of his hands—soft and manicured—I’m thinking ranch intern just wasn’t his beat. Oilman, neither.

  “How would you quantify dabble?” he asks Mother.

  I step in. “Good question. It’s like when they say a pinch of salt in a recipe for Cornish Christmas puddin’—who knows what that means?”

  Robert continues to stare at Mother.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “Ask her.”

  “Why thank you. Robert, my mother has a hard-core crack addiction. I’d say she binges at least once a week, will substitute most any drug if need be, and can blow through your salary’s worth of coke in an hour.”

  He checks off several boxes, says, “Okay, good,” and flips to the next page. Swipe.

  Mother empties two sugar packets in her mouth. Then she opens them along the seams and licks the inside. At home, decorum rules, but here in the desert—

  Robert says to me, “And about how much Valium do you take a day?”

  “I don’t know. Am I supposed to know? I just keep taking them until they work.”

  “Are they blue, yellow, or white?”

  “Blue.”

  “And are you taking anything else regularly?”

  “What’s regularly?”

  “At least once a day.”

  “Oh, of course. OxyContin, Vicodin, Celebrex, Lortab,” which I say for Mother’s benefit, “Talwin, though it sucks, Demerol, and, uh, Dexatrim.”

  Mother says, “Dexatrim! That stuff’s bad for you.”

  Robert says, “You take all that every day?”

  I blush. This is a kind of pride. “I mix and match.”

  “Do you have a history of eating disorders?”

  “No. I’m not fat so long as I take my Dexatrim.”


  He nods, writes it down. He’s already got three pages of notes. I feel like the notes are bad, like we made a bad impression, and now it’s on file.

  “Want some iced tea?” I ask. “I can make it in the bathroom, brought my own mix and everything.”

  He says private foodstuffs are not allowed and would I please hand them over.

  I make like he’s kidding, which might get him embarrassed enough about the rules to forget this one. Instead he takes a plastic grocery bag from his pocket and holds it open. In go my Country Time tubs of peach iced tea mix, a snack bag of Cheetos, and several packages of Wasa crispbread.

  “And the chews?” he says.

  Mother gasps derisively. “Not the chews!”

  I shake my head and say, “You know, Robert, you do not exactly redound to my well-being.”

  He makes a note of something, then excuses himself, says we will reconvene after dinner.

  “Reconvene? With you? How enchanting,” Mother says.

  But Robert is done. We are well afield of whatever he’s been told to expect, and now I have regrets. I say I’m sorry, and that we’re not so bad. He jams his thumbs in the demipockets of his jeans and says, “No big whup. Liza Minnelli, Judy what’s her face—I heard of family situations like this.”

  Judy what’s her face? Good God. I slam the door behind him.

  “What a jerk,” I say. “I hate this place.”

  Mother gets on her bed, prostrate, with hands folded under her chin. I adopt the same position and in this way, we can see each other without having to leave our rooms.

  “Don’t be obnoxious. He seemed nice.”

  “That’s because he didn’t confiscate your drugs.”

  “Shhhh.”

  I roll over onto my back. There’s gum on the ceiling. And an eraser impaled on the crests of impasto paint. I am just thinking about what I can add to the collage when from outside comes the blare of a horn that won’t quit.

  I watch Mother toss a velour wrap around her shoulders. I’m still waiting for the day she takes flight in one of those things. Or we take flight, since I forgot to pack a sweater and now have to sport a wrap of my own. She offers me something black. So, black it is.

  “Come, dear,” she says. “It’s time for group.”

  Twenty-eight

  In the cafeteria, one of the counselors had his son over for the day. Kid was about one, not too keen on strangers. He was wearing red sweats and bomber jacket. His dad, Bruce, was more Lumberjack, in thermal shirt and beanie. He was prancing around the tables with the kid on his hip. It was our second day there. I’d made no overtures to the other inmates, who, it turned out, were women. A women’s rehab. Mother took it worse than me. She hates women. As a result, we were sitting alone, which was not allowed. The dad, Bruce, came over. Plunked his kid on the table. And the kid, he was adorable, so fat you couldn’t find his joints. Bruce, it turned out, didn’t give a shit about us and our isolation, he just wanted to hang out with his son. I did not take it well. The kid said, “Qwhy,” which had Bruce praising him to the moon. Never mind that I was actually crying or that Bruce was there to counsel me.

  I stared ahead, and had my thoughts. I want a child! I want a husband with low-rider jeans, a thermal, beanie, and half a day’s growth of beard! I want a baby!

  The bell rang. Bruce stood and said, “Hang in there, Lucy.” Then he waved his son’s hand and went, “Say bye-bye!”

  I waved back. But it was more like farewell. Farewell from the Achille Lauro. Farewell with love. Mother took my sleeve and said, “Snap out of it.”

  We went to group. We wore our capes.

  Inside, we were seven, but since two of the women were called Dee, it took some of the pressure off. I can never remember people’s names and I think it’s because I do not listen when they introduce themselves. I figure I’m not going to see this person again, only I do, inevitably I do, at which point I realize that I never know how to evaluate incoming information. It’s like how in school you were always wondering if this was going to be on the test. Your teacher could be telling you about segregation and the KKK, but if it wasn’t gonna be on the test, let ’em hang.

  Our group leader was Susan, which had me wondering about whether this place had any disposable income. Everyone seemed to have six jobs. I’m pretty sure I saw the cook doling out meds in the infirmary. Susan had traded her suit for gymwear, which meant she probably taught the four o’clock yoga class, as well. Her hair, however, was still secured in that barrette. So either the clip was a crutch or doubled as a shank for when the ladies got raw.

  We were in a library whose offerings were Julia Child, The Grapes of Wrath, and self-help workbooks that ranged from Buddhist to neocon. The carpet was tan sisal, the chairs industrial plastic. We sat in a circle. Did anyone have a topic they wanted to discuss? All hands up. A topic related to addiction? Hands down. Susan looked distressed. “Should I remind you that we are here to recover? I am authorized to suspend radio privileges, you know. We need to stay focused.”

  Radio? Izzy and I didn’t have a radio. I sensed a hierarchy and raised my hand. I gathered that here at Bluebonnet, news of the outside world trickled in slowly, if at all, but if some were getting it, all should get it.

  Susan said the radio was in the lounge adjoining the cafeteria, as described in the welcome packet in my room.

  I said, “Who decides what station?”

  She said, “Don’t be tedious.”

  We left it there. I was starting to like Susan a whole lot.

  Hand up. “Cecilia, yes.”

  We all turned to Cecilia. Could she possibly be as old as she looked? Who goes to rehab at eighty-five? She cleared her throat. Her head was so sunk into her chest, you forgot she even had a throat. “I think,” she said, “about what you said yesterday, I think superplague is more relevant than you made it out to be. We are here to recuperate hope, yes? To think our lives are worth living? Isn’t the threat of holocaust germane to these efforts? Isn’t it adolescent, even irresponsible, to pretend it’s not? We are, after all, in the line of fire.”

  I asked what did she mean. Last I heard, a few people had escaped California. Cecilia pawed deep in her satchel to produce an article she’d clipped from the newspaper about a local manufacturer of body bags and mortuary garments scrambling to fill a giant order from the governor’s office.

  I understood the point here, but got distracted by the idea of the mortuary garment. Vinyl hoods, booties, and gloves for when your parts sever ties with the rest of you. I expect these are useful in countries that favor machete death—the Congo, for instance—but is there really enough demand in the U.S. to warrant mass production? Of mortuary garments?

  “The order was confidential,” Cecilia said. “But now that the story leaked, the governor insists it’s just a routine precaution. What hooey. They ordered thousands of bags because they expect thousands will die.”

  Everyone looked at Cecilia like: Who made you God?

  Another hand up. “Gale, yes.”

  “I just want to point out, also, that our new guests, as you called them”—and here she looked at us—“Isabelle and Lucy? That they are pretty connected to the plague thing, I’ve seen them on TV, not that I give a rat’s ass because if I did, I’d be feeling way more alive than I do, but since you keep telling us to hide nothing and speak our minds, I thought I’d bring everyone else up to speed.”

  So much for anonymity. I watched a caterpillar traverse the sisal. I tried to keep my head down and not notice Mother’s arm, flung up high and waving.

  “Isifrid, okay, but then we will be moving on to a topic of my choice.”

  “Thank you, Susan.” She sounded like a reporter on scene. “If there is to be a holocaust, even if initiated by a man of singular evil, it is for the express purpose of hastening Ragnarook, the End, to which I have been looking forward my entire life and about which I will brook no criticism in these my last weeks or hours, the most solacing time for a person whose s
oul is promised return in the new world—redolent, glorious, happy.”

  Dees one and two conferred, lip to ear, until they had consensus, which seemed to be amusement, for they smiled at Mother and crossed legs, followed by one, who sang into the floor lyrics from an Eagles song in which there is much wooo-hooing for fear of the succubus who turns your skin red. Witchy woman. Ha.

  Penelope, who’d yet to say a word, opened her mouth wide, wider than any mouth should open, and laughed in raspy heaves, all while slapping her thigh and plugging her tracheotomy tube with a finger.

  Susan asked for quiet. She suggested we move on. And that we talk about the obsession to use. The whys of our drug addiction. We started with Gale, who looked midforties, pale and thin. Orange. Orange hair that came down in sheets, and whose tint intensified the pallor of her face, which was drawn into a tight frown so that all her features appeared to taper and aim for a spot somewhere just past her nose.

  She sat forward and braced her elbows on her knees, chin in hand. “Oh, I don’t know. I guess I started on crank because that’s what the other drivers did to stay awake. Trucking is a lonely job, especially for a woman, so at least I wanted to be making good money, which meant making good time and all that. Problem was, at some point I got really into my truck. I was cleaning it all the time. I dismantled the engine at least once a week. And the driving, the way it got the engine dirty, it started to make me crazy. So I’d take more crank to stay up even longer so I could clean the engine. Eventually, I spent more time cleaning than driving, and I lost my job and went into production for myself.”

  Here she held up her left hand, which I had not noticed before, but which was bandaged in gauze so that it looked like a giant Q-tip.

  “And that’s all she wrote, I guess.”

  Susan said, “Okay, Gale, but do you know why you continued to take methamphetamine after you stopped driving? Seems like you didn’t have to keep long hours anymore.”

  “Oh for God’s sakes,” I said. “Because she was addicted. Don’t you need a degree or something?”

  “Thank you, Lucy. We’ll get to you shortly.”

  Gale zipped up her sweatshirt and shoved the Q-tip in her pocket. “I don’t know,” she said. “I felt too depressed without it. A year before I got canned, when I got back from a run to Sonoma County, my husband was gone. No note, nothing. I’d only been away two weeks. I thought we were happy. Turns out he split with a hooker. Can you believe it? A hooker who wants out meets a man who’s ready to save anyone so long as she’s got pussy to spare.”