by Tim Murphy
So all this had brought her to the latest book, and today she was banging out a sort of promo piece for it to run in Cosmopolitan. “The Secrets to Successful Couples: What I Learned.” This is what Kyla worked on for two hours, which, because she was an extremely efficient writer, she felt was far too long for such a puff piece. The gist of the piece was that successful couples communicated ruthlessly and constantly allowed each other, and the contours of the relationship, to change and grow.
Trying to live by her research, she’d even suggested to Christian that they devote Tuesday nights to having a “ruthlessly honest” conversation about their relationship. He’d sighingly agreed to that, and they’d even dutifully done as much for a few weeks—but Kyla had to admit privately that she was relieved upon realizing later that an entire month had passed and they’d both forgotten about the rather tiresome pact.
So that was that for the afternoon. She could finally leave the house and get some fresh air. She put Lewy on a leash—you could bring your dog to this meeting as long as the dog didn’t bark, pee, or poop inside, and Lewy had done the last only once, when Kyla was almost certain he had had a stomach bug, but, smartly, Kyla had some plastic bags in her purse so the cleanup wasn’t so bad.
She got to the meeting, in the back room of an old café on the corner of Sunset, a few minutes early and chatted with the regular crowd. There was Boaz, a former daily pothead and children’s TV producer whose wife was going through breast-cancer treatment; each time it seemed he was about to cry, he would sort of pull himself together, something Kyla thought was very sexy and reassuring in a very traditionally male way, even though she never would have said that, because you were certainly allowed, even encouraged, to come here and cry, rail, swear, curse out the room, whatever it took to keep you from taking your out-of-control feelings out into your life and, God forbid, picking up alcohol or drugs. There was Justin—the broad-chested, ginger-bearded gay TV-commercial actor who was trying to get a stage musical about Susan B. Anthony off the ground with his husband, Doar, with whom he was raising two foster kids from Compton. Justin had no problem crying in the meetings and did so frequently. Kyla loved Justin—they’d often go out for tacos together after meetings—but she always cringed just a little bit when he would raise his hand and say, in a sort of high, inquiring voice, “Justin, addict, alcoholic?” and then simply gulp for words and not say anything.
They all knew what was coming. Justin would softly, mournfully cry for up to sixty excruciating seconds—inevitably, whoever was sitting next to him would put an arm around him and stroke his back—before talking, and sometimes he wouldn’t say more than, “It’s just so hard, that’s all. It’s really hard today. But I’m grateful to be here. Thanks.”
Kyla sometimes wished he’d say more than that and give everyone something to work with. But then again, having gone to meetings for nearly twenty years now, she’d mostly learned to accept people on their own terms.
Well, probably except for Susannah. Beautiful, raven-haired Susannah reminded Kyla of Milly if Milly, rather than being too awkward to make a self-sealed temple of her beauty, had simply run with it and lived in a bubble of navel-gazing self-regard. Susannah would say things like, “I mean, honestly, I don’t think I’m built for this industry, I’m too raw, unfortunately I feel too much.” But that rawness hadn’t kept Susannah from being a super-successful writer of about every other original movie on Lifetime—she was writing the scripted TV-dreck equivalent of the real-life women’s stories that Kyla actually went and lived in a trailer park for a week to find. At least, Kyla’s sponsor pointed out to her, a fearless moral self-inventory had given Kyla the self-awareness to realize that some of her dislike for Susannah was competitive, and, in knowing that she was driven by selfish fear, she could pray to a (non-gendered, faceless, non-anthropomorphized) G-d of her understanding to remove that shortcoming from within her. And Kyla had several years ago stopped wearing the ankh pendant that had so disconcerted Milly upon spying it, but Kyla was still quite spiritual and spent her first twenty minutes upon waking in meditation, even though usually her focused inner mantra would stray off into to-do lists and various petty, nagging resentments, such as irritation at her gardener for leaving the sprinkler on in the middle of a summer drought.
Once at the meeting, Kyla made herself a cup of tea in a Styrofoam cup and chatted with Boaz, who’d spent the morning in bed watching DVR’d episodes of The View and Ellen with his wife after they got back from chemo at City of Hope.
“I mean”—he shrugged—“it was a blessing that I just wrapped a show and I have that kind of time to spend with her when she’s going through this.”
Kyla lightly put a hand on his arm. “Boaz,” she said, “you know you’d find a way to be with her even if you were in production.”
She’d mastered this gesture, the light touch on the arm, along with the remark that reminded people they were better than they thought they were. About three years into meetings, she’d realized what she had slowly, inadvertently become: the cool, good-looking, smartly self-knowing successful woman with a very good haircut who served as an example to smart, pretty young women who were coming into the meetings, with all their self-conscious hair-flicking, face-picking tics, because they’d messed up their lives just like Kyla had, probably because of some terrible father relationship or a mother who subtly had always told them that they had to be pretty and speak in a high, questioning voice and put their own needs behind those of others and never, never show anger. Kyla had sponsored dozens of girls like this. She even called them “my girls,” and, because she had a formidable Mediterranean-mother streak (something she’d come to realize and embrace about herself in sobriety, which had led to considerable experimentation in the kitchen with Greek cooking), these girls were almost a salve as she realized that she and Christian probably would not have kids. They were—they could admit, laughingly—“just too selfish and devoted to Lewy,” their bulldog, to take that on.
So Boaz kind of shrugged in that slightly inchoate, menschy way of his that she rather loved. “Yeah, I know,” he said. “So where’s the foster son?”
Kyla laughed. “He’s coming. He’s down at Intelligentsia sketching a little, I think.”
“He’s gonna have ninety days clean soon, right?”
“On Tuesday!” Kyla said brightly. “Forty-five days at Gooden and the rest with us.”
“That’s amazing you guys took that on,” Boaz said.
Kyla lowered her eyes. “It’s my amends to his mother. I mean, I made my amends to her many years ago. It’s my living amends.”
“Where are his parents? New York?”
Kyla nodded. “They’re old New York friends of mine. They’re artists. They are such New Yorkers. Both born and raised.”
Boaz nodded slowly. “Maybe it was tough for him growing up with two artist parents, being one himself.”
“They’re working artists but they’re not wildly successful.” She paused. Was that mean to say? No, she decided, it was just true. “Actually, they fostered him when they were just—they were really young. Like twenty-six, twenty-seven. Just a few years after I left New York, actually.”
“Seriously?”
Kyla nodded. How stunned she’d been back in 1998 when Milly told her over the phone that, only three years after she and Jared had gotten back together, they were taking in this kid! “It’s kind of a crazy story,” she told Boaz. “He’d been in, basically, a boys’ orphanage for a few years after his mother died. Of AIDS. And my friend’s mother had standby guardianship of him and was keeping an eye on him, trying to find him a home.”
“Holy shit.” Boaz rubbed his jaw. “Holy shit.”
“I know,” Kyla said. “And they formally adopted him a year later.”
The meeting was being called to order and they took metal folding chairs alongside each other in one of the back rows near the door. Kyla coaxed
Lewy to lie under the empty chair to her right, putting a paper bib around his neck to catch his drool, and placed her bag on the chair to save it for Mateo.
“The shit people go through, right?” Boaz muttered.
She nodded and gave his hand a squeeze. The meeting started. The speaker was Julia, an insecure trust-fund kid from Seattle who fumblingly dabbled in filmmaking. Kyla had heard her story twice in the past few months, and it irritated her when she realized she’d have to sit through it again, but she said a quick prayer that her Higher Power would help her hear something new and valuable this time, at least so the next twenty minutes weren’t a total bust.
“I’m really, really nervous and unfocused right now,” Julia began.
Really? Kyla thought. After speaking twice already in two months? Then she admonished herself. She was not being openhearted. And she realized, as she twisted her head back every time a latecomer came in behind her, it was because she was irritable and distracted that Mateo was not there yet. Seven minutes into the meeting. Thirteen minutes. The end of Julia’s qualification, the round of applause, the passing of the basket for dollar donations to pay rent on the meeting room, the beginning of the individual hand-raising and identifying with Julia’s story before going into one’s own spiritual and practical challenges of the day.
“What’s up with Mateo?” Boaz finally leaned over and asked her.
She looked sidelong at him darkly, folded her arms over her chest. “I dunno,” she muttered.
Toward the end of the meeting, when he still hadn’t arrived, Kyla raised her hand and was called on. “I’m Kyla, a grateful recovering alcoholic and cocaine addict,” she said for what felt like the fifteen thousandth time.
“Hi, Kyla,” came the affectionate chorus.
“Thank you for your qualification, Julia. I’ve heard you a few times the past few months and every time I hear something new and feel like I know you a little bit better.”
Julia smiled a genuine shy smile of gratitude, which made Kyla happy she’d said what she just said.
“But I have to admit,” Kyla continued, “I was distracted all through this meeting because a newcomer, which a lot of you know—Mateo, who is sort of my godson from New York—was supposed to meet me here at this meeting and he never showed up, and I know damn well at this stage of his recovery, just a few weeks out of rehab, he has nowhere else he’s supposed to be other than this meeting.”
A round of knowing “mmphs” went through the room.
“So I’m nervous,” Kyla went on. “I’m thinking the worst, and maybe I’ll be embarrassed when he walks in the door right now and hears me talking about him, and he was late because he ran into some AA-ers there and got caught up in a conversation and he doesn’t know the right way yet of saying he has somewhere to be in twenty minutes. But as far as I’m concerned, when I was in early sobriety, the meeting always came first.”
Another round of “mmphs.”
“It still comes first,” Kyla pitched higher, buoyed by the support, “because you know what? If I don’t put it first, I’ll lose everything else. I’ll lose my amazing husband, I’ll lose the writing career I love, I’ll lose my house in the hills, I’ll lose my dog.” Often she enumerated in meetings these things she’d lose; it was a comfort to her because it was her way of vocalizing vigilance, but also of subtly signaling to the newcomers how good they could have it if they stayed sober for nearly twenty years like she had.
“So, I’m sorry, I’m nervous,” she continued. “But I have to tell myself that if, God forbid, he’s relapsed, it’s not my fault. I have to tell myself that even when, God forbid, I call his mother in New York and tell her I don’t know where he is. Because I’d taken him in for a few weeks after rehab and given him this shot, thinking it might help him to live for a while with two sober people while he figures out how to live his first year in sobriety—because it’s going to take time for him, because this kid blew up his chances at a great art school”—she glanced warily back toward the door to make sure Mateo didn’t walk in amid her exegesis—“and drove his parents to the brink and lashed out at them hard. That’s where this disease can take you. A brilliant kid with brilliant parents and all the shots in the world. I’ve seen this kid’s work, and it is fucking brilliant. I mean, I wanted to introduce this kid to Deitch if he kept sober.”
People were shaking their heads in accordance and dismay. “If he’s disappeared, it’s not my fault,” she said, now actually a bit alarmed at the bite in her voice. “Because nobody can get you sober. You have to want it.” God, she sounded like the hard-ass old program cranks that she always complained about! Boaz put his arm around her.
“Anyway, thanks for letting me pipe up, and I’m grateful to be here and grateful to be sober today, because it doesn’t matter that I have almost twenty years sober. This is what I have. This is what matters. Today.”
“Thanks, Kyla,” the room chorused. She sighed and sank back down in her seat. Others were called on, but she couldn’t hear what they were saying; she found that she was stewing in fury. Surreptitiously she pulled out her iPhone and texted her sponsor: “Mateo didn’t show up to meeting, I’m freaking out.” Three minutes later, her sponsor texted back: “Relax, don’t jump to conclusions.” That’s what she needed to hear.
After the meeting, Boaz asked if she wanted a ride home and she accepted.
“Can we swing by Intelligentsia?” she asked.
He glanced at her sidelong. “Sure,” he said.
Mateo wasn’t sitting outside the huge hipster café and he wasn’t sitting inside. She told herself not to, then she did: she asked the manager if Mateo had been in, but the manager, a pretty blond girl with a tiny diamond stud in her nose, had seen no sign of him. She felt a sick, cold pang in her stomach and walked out to Boaz’s Prius.
“He never was here, the girl said,” she announced, getting in.
“Oh, shit,” Boaz said. He drove her home.
“Will you wait here one second?” she asked him when he pulled into the driveway. “I want to check something.”
“Sure,” he said. Kyla hurried into the house and found exactly what she’d feared she’d find. Her wallet, which stupidly she’d left in her purse on the kitchen table, since she was just walking to a meeting, was shorn of cash and credit cards. And in the room where Mateo had been staying, all his stuff was gone. She charged back out of the house toward Boaz.
“Well, that’s just as I feared,” she said. “My cash and credit cards are gone and so is his stuff.”
“You’re kidding,” Boaz said.
“I’m not.” She started crying. “We were fools! He could’ve stayed in the halfway house and we could’ve just met at meetings. But no, I wanted to help my friend.” She pushed back her hair. “Well, the joke’s on us, I guess.”
“You want me to come inside?”
“No, sweetie, get back to Becca. I’ll go inside and cancel my cards and call Christian. And, oh God, then I have to call his mother.”
She and Boaz hugged good-bye. Then she went inside. Her eyes were throbbing and she wanted a glass of white wine. It amazed her that she could still have that instinct in times of freaking out, even after nearly twenty years. She poured herself a glass of water instead and called the bank, gazing around the house while she waited for the service rep to come on to see if Mateo had left a note. He hadn’t.
The rep finally came on. Yes, said the rep, a withdrawal at a Silver Lake ATM had been made at 1:37 P.M. for $400, the maximum, and another at a nearby ATM at 1:47 P.M., also for the $400 max. That was it so far. Kyla froze the bank card and did the same to her credit cards, which, somewhat miraculously, hadn’t run up any charges yet. It occurred to her that, somewhere along the line, somehow, Mateo had gotten her ATM PIN number. How on earth? she wondered. No cokehead, no crackhead, she thought, was ever as conniving, as utterly zombielike and self-serving, as
a fucking junkie.
Then she caught herself and took a deep breath. When she and Christian took Mateo in, she reminded herself, they’d acknowledged to each other that this could happen. It had already happened to Milly and Jared in New York. So it had happened again, and it was pointless, she told herself, to be infuriated about it; it was simply beyond her control. But the most curious feeling, which she couldn’t shake, was that she was letting down Milly all over again, nearly twenty years later.
She called Christian and relayed the news.
“This is making me incredibly fucking sad to hear,” Christian said.
“You said he should spend the year in a halfway house after rehab and I was the one who pushed and said we should make him the offer,” she said. “And I have to come clean: after all these years, I did it out of guilt. I couldn’t believe Milly was going through a drug thing with somebody again—first her mom, then me, then her own son—and I did it out of guilt.”
“You didn’t do it out of guilt. You did it out of love,” Christian said. “You know that.”
Kyla slumped in the kitchen chair and felt more tears coming. “I wanted to pay her back.”
Christian laughed lightly, startling her. “Because you’re in love with her, darling,” he said agreeably. “I’ve always known there’s one other love in your life besides me, and it’s Milly. Saint Milly.”
“That’s a mean thing to say to me right now,” she complained through her tears.
