Rehab Run

by Barbra Leslie

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Barbra Leslie

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  About the Author

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS AND BARBRA LESLIE

  Cracked

  Rehab Run

  Print edition ISBN: 9781783297009

  Electronic edition ISBN: 9781783297016

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: November 2016

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2016 Barbra Leslie. All Rights Reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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  For my brother

  Aubrey Grant Leslie

  The Cool

  ONE

  It was just my luck that I was the one who happened to find the severed hand in the mailbox.

  On my very first day in rehab, they told me running would be therapeutic. An endorphin producer. A natural high, the perfect adjunct to individual counselling, twelve-step meetings, and basket weaving. Sorry: Occupational Therapy. Besides, it was this or yoga, and the yoga teacher they employed was so serene and reeking of self-fulfillment that I could feel my blood pressure rise to dangerous levels whenever I unfurled my borrowed yoga mat.

  So, running.

  I liked to count things as I ran. Cows in the farmer’s field outside the gates I ran next to – twelve today, and I even slowed down in case I could see more. Bury your cows, we used to say when we were kids. Travelling in the car, every time we’d pass a farm we’d scramble to count as many as we could, then if we passed a cemetery whoever was the first to say “bury your cows” won. I wasn’t sure why, but it always made me shiver. And what kind of sense did that make? Cows weren’t exactly ominous creatures, and they weren’t meat eaters either, unless you count what they fed all those poor cows in England to give them mad cow disease, making them eat the mushed-up products of their own sick, fallen brethren until their brains started to melt.

  So I counted cows. And fence posts. On one particularly bad day, the amount of money I had passed to a Croatian crack dealer, whose wares I sucked greedily into my lungs. Or the number of days since my twin sister Ginger had been brutally murdered. Or since I had watched the love of my life bleed to death in front of me.

  Or how many people I had killed in the white-hot sadness and rage that had followed.

  Dr. Singh told me that the counting could be used in a productive way. Count the number of days since you’ve used, she said. Count how many people love you. Count your blessings.

  I was trying. Some days it even worked.

  And I had to admit, there were worse places I could have wound up in rehab. Rural Nova Scotia, the Annapolis Valley. It was spring, the apple blossoms were everywhere, and you could smell the clean sea air from the Bay of Fundy. I barely missed the city streets under my feet. And here, I could try to be a different person. No one knew me here, or knew what I had done, or what I had seen. I could be identified as the girl who laces up her running shoes after morning meeting and takes off for an hour trotting around the property, madly counting things. Or if I ever got it together in Occupational Therapy, I could be the girl who made the famous all-back collage.

  I was almost smiling as I ran down the hill toward the front gates, where I planned to begin my ascent back up to the renovated Victorian house we called the dorms, and coffee and a shower. It was early morning, the birds were making their racket, and the air was sweet. I was clean. I could breathe. There are worse places to be, I told myself again. Count your blessings.

  I reached the wooden fence at the bottom of the hill that acted as our gate, and held on, breathing hard. My ankle was aching, but it wasn’t sharp pain, and it wasn’t bad. It was only my fifth morning running. I was like Rocky in the early scenes, before he runs up those steps in Philadelphia. I was in training, but I didn’t know what for yet. I thought for a good half second about getting back into fighting, but I thought about what Dr. Singh would say, and about the last times I had fought – for real, and to the death – and figured maybe running could be a goal in and of itself right now. Maybe a marathon, or even a triathlon? I would think about it.

  I circled the old mailbox at the bottom of the hill. It was just inside the gate, painted bright red like a lot of the mailboxes around here, but wasn’t used by the post office. Rose’s Place used it as a sort of community mailbox: Residents could deposit their outside mail in there to be posted and staff would pick it up, or more fancifully, people could leave notes for each other, or staff, or anonymous complaints. It was meant to be cute, and a way to get people outside for a little exercise. The trek back up the hill would give addicts a bit of cardio and fresh air, and the old mailbox was supposed to add to the rural charm of our environment. If a resident was so inclined, they could amble down there and see if someone had left them a note. People rarely did that; it was a bit too twee for most of us hardcore addict types.

  But despite myself, on that bright spring morning I found myself opening the red mailbox to see what was inside.

  I was already holding it before my brain fully registered what it was. For a couple of slow seconds as I was reaching in I thought it was a joke. A plastic freezer bag with red ribbons tied all around it – I thought maybe some kind local had stuck in some homemade baked goods for the poor addicts at Rose’s.

  Until I found myself holding it in both of my hands, registering the weight and meatiness of it. A hand. A man’s hand. It wasn’t a joke-shop plastic hand. It was real. The wedding ring was real. The nails had been chewed. A bad habit, biting your nails, I thought blankly as I put the hand carefully back into the mailbox and closed the door. So hard to get the cuticles to heal.

  A
nd then, with blood pumping in my ears, I ran up the hill toward the office as though the devil himself was chasing me.

  They told me later that I ran into the office, picked up the phone from the desk and spoke to the 911 operator with a calm and steady voice, telling her what I had found and giving excellent and precise directions, while the staff looked on, stunned. Then, after hanging up, I fainted.

  Brutal violence and fainting. Story of my life.

  TWO

  I had been at Rose’s Place for fifteen days. Fifteen days straight without crack, or even a bump of coke. Nothing stronger than caffeine and e-cigarettes.

  I’d been recuperating with my brother Skipper and his wife Marie after what happened in Maine, after the face-off with the evil people who had killed my twin sister and my husband. And during which I was nearly killed by an arrow from a crossbow, had my lower leg shattered by a fall downstairs, and had taken a beating with a fire poker by a psycho bitch who had impersonated me and kidnapped my nephews. I wound up shooting a good portion of her head off and accidentally burning her in a fireplace, though, so in the end I got the better deal. At Skipper and Marie’s, what with January snow in rural Maine and me in a cast after a fun-time operation on my leg, I was pretty much housebound. But I did have a bit of a stash, which I snuck hits of here and there, in my closet or in the bathroom. Not much, and not even every day. But when the demons came to call, when I woke up sweating and teary after seeing my husband Jack die in my dreams or woke up thinking my nephews were gone, that I hadn’t found them – well, if anybody wanted to blame me for a little self-medication in the form of my old friend crack cocaine, they could go right ahead, and fuck them very much.

  I knew all along that I would do what my siblings wanted and take the spot at Rose’s Place that my brother Laurence had reserved for me. But, like any sensible addict about to start getting clean, I planned a going-away party with two guests: me and crack. I’d phoned D-Man, one of my old dealers, paid him everything I owed him, and stocked up for one last binge. That’s what addicts do: We think we have to get back to rock bottom before we climb out.

  But I knew this was it for me. I wouldn’t hurt the people who loved me any longer. It wasn’t an option. And I certainly wasn’t going to spend any more of Jack’s hard-earned money on it. But unlike when I was drug-free in the previous months, this time there were no glasses of wine to take the edge off. At Rose’s Place, we were allowed to be addicted to caffeine and nicotine. And as nearly all addicts smoke, everyone is given, as part of their welcome bag of goodies, an e-cigarette starter kit, with flavors ranging from Lemon Meringue Pie to Marlboro.

  It’s a brave new world.

  Rose had been the late wife of the owner-slash-benefactor of the place, Dickie Doyle. Her addiction to prescription pain meds after a riding accident had found the poor woman wandering the streets of Halifax in search of men who might need some company and have some drugs to spare. After she died an ignominious death by overdose in a rooming house in the South End, her husband Dickie founded Rose’s Place.

  Drugs make some of us take a funny turn. In my case, I did manage to avoid such measures; but then, I had a bit of disposable income when I got into the life. By the time I got out of it, I owed a small sum to a few unpleasant drug dealers, but in the aftermath of what followed, that was the least of my worries.

  * * *

  I sat in the office at Rose’s Place with Evan and Mary, two of the staffers, waiting for the police and an ambulance. The ambulance had been called for me, as my fainting spell had happened immediately after I got off the phone with emergency services. My head was pounding afterwards, as per usual. Mary was looking at the coffee maker as though she had never seen one before.

  “Do you want me to do that?” I said. “Sit down, Mary. You’ve had a shock.” Mary was prolifically tattooed, fifty-ish, and seemed to get her fashion sense from television shows about biker gangs. I never knew what her title was, but she ruled the roost at Rose’s Place through a haze of Marlboro smoke, with a voice like a profane Lauren Bacall and the heart of Mother Theresa.

  She was like my sober soul mate. Minus the Mother Theresa part, of course.

  She sat down abruptly, putting her head between her knees slowly and deliberately, breathing like she was in labor.

  “A hand?” she said. Or croaked. Her long red hair was muffling her voice.

  “A big hand,” I said. I remembered the weight of it, the fleshiness of it, and shivered.

  In the last six months I had seen far more than my fair share of blood, guts, and all things disgusting. And while I was prone to what neurologists call syncope – i.e. fainting – I was pretty sure that it had something to do with an adrenaline spike and my flawed brain’s inability to handle it. Before I go down, I feel a sensation almost like carbonation in my head, like bubbles in my brain, and everything goes black. But the hand had been so unexpected and so… human, in my hands.

  “Whose hand was it?” Mary said. She sat back up slowly and patted the desk in front of her. I pushed her cigarettes toward her, and she patted my hand.

  “I didn’t ask it, Mary,” I said. “And it didn’t introduce itself.” I looked at Evan who was staring blankly at the coffee maker. Apparently severed hands made people in these parts forget how to operate simple appliances. He hadn’t said a word yet. He was only a kid, probably twenty-three years old, and looked like this was the worst thing that had ever happened to him. Which I hoped it was. He was doing night duty as a security guard at Rose’s, and I had come down in the middle of the night more than once in the last couple of weeks to find him studying. He was quiet and smart, and there was something about him made me want to protect him. I pushed him out of the way and grabbed a coffee filter, idly musing as I scooped coffee that finding a body part in a mailbox at rehab should sort of give one a pass to relapse. They’d have to give me a discount, right? Next visit free?

  We heard sirens coming from the main road. It was still early morning, and rush hour in these parts was non-existent, so the sound seemed louder and more alarming than it does in the city. Mary sat up and ran to the window, energized by the noise, and Evan said something about telling the staff and calling Dickie, the centre’s owner.

  “This is bad,” Mary said. “People are going to be leaving. People who shouldn’t be leaving.” She was right of course, but in my shock of taking a severed hand out of the mailbox, I had neglected to consider what it might mean for the facility itself.

  “Maybe not,” I said. “Some people might even stay longer than they would have. Addicts love drama.”

  Mary snorted and flicked the switch on the coffee maker. She scratched her flat belly and slapped it a couple of times. Mary was a former anorexic – or recovering anorexic, as they said around these parts – and it hadn’t taken more than a couple of days for me to notice that whenever she wasn’t being mindful of her surroundings she was prone to gently slapping or patting parts of her body that on most people tended to gather body fat. I really hoped this kind of stress didn’t start her cutting each mouthful thirty-two times, or whatever weird food rituals were particularly hers.

  “Poor Dickie,” Mary said. “Like he doesn’t have enough to deal with.” She looked out the window, over the oddly beautiful, marshy shore of the Bay of Fundy. I didn’t know what Dickie had to deal with, other than having a dead wife, but I figured it was none of my business. There was enough openness at the morning meetings, with people telling each other the kinds of details that don’t normally get aired in public. I hadn’t been able to Share yet. Partially because I hated the word in that context, so when the group leader said, “Danny, would you like to share with us at this meeting?” I would smile and shake my head and look at my lap like a junior high wallflower. I respect people for being able to open up to complete strangers, and I can see how it would be valuable. There were issues that made me start doing drugs in the first place, about Jack and the end of my marriage and not feeling alive anymore, and how crack m
ade me feel euphoric and actually normal. Until it didn’t. I was starting to talk to Dr. Singh about these things, but I wasn’t ready to let a bunch of strangers poke into my psyche.

  So whatever Dickie’s problems were, I figured that if he didn’t tell me himself, then I didn’t need to know. And as the only reason I was here at Rose’s Place, as opposed to some other pricey secluded facility catering to the sad and addicted, was that Dickie Doyle was a college friend of my brother Laurence. Laurence had gone to Bennington College and had one of those liberal arts educations that people like the Clearys normally didn’t get – we were the kids of a small-town dry cleaner and a housewife from rural Maine. But Laurence was a special case, a star in high school, and a musical prodigy. So a scholarship landed in his lap, and he went off to learn how to mix with people who didn’t shoot guns at cans in the gravel pit down the road. But Laurence never forgot us little folk – like the rest of us, he was both completely annoyed but also ridiculously besotted with his family. When we lost Mom and Dad after a drunk driver hit them head-on coming back from their yearly Florida trip, Laurence was the one who took it the hardest. He stopped playing piano, said he couldn’t bear it anymore; if he played Chopin one more time he would want to commit some grand self-destructive gesture. So he switched streams at school and when he moved to New York, he started working in television. He had come out as gay in high school, which in and of itself was a brave act where we grew up, but at six-five – he claimed six-six, but we had our doubts – and with the shoulders of a linebacker, people tended not to mess with Laurence. Especially with the fierce Cleary clan backing him up. Rumor in town had it that we all carried guns everywhere we went. And then of course in high school I got arrested for breaking the nose of a girl who broke my little brother Darren’s heart.

  When Laurence moved to New York he dated a series of inappropriately older men, none of whom the rest of us met. “Oh, Danny, you really don’t want to spend an evening with Edward,” Laurence would say, after I’d spent an hour getting ready to meet them at some restaurant or other when I was visiting. Jack and I would go down sometimes for fun and stay at funky hotels because it was one of Jack’s hobbies, hotels. “He’s so old, and his hearing aid is on the fritz again. It will really slow down the conversation at dinner. Another time.” Of course that other time never came, and then Laurence would have moved on to the next old man.