Still Room for Hope

by Alisa Kaplan

  Not that it mattered to me then. When the conviction in my own trial came in, I barely registered the verdict. In fact, I was watching it on television, sitting on Neil’s bed, high as a kite. Nearly three years of my life had culminated in this moment, but I didn’t feel much of anything at all. It was over, and I didn’t even call my family.

  Early in the spring of 2005, I met another drug dealer, Russell. He’d been attacked by a pit bull when he was younger and enjoyed a big payout from the settlement every year. Big money meant one thing to me: lots of drugs. Drugs were the only thing I was interested in. Then Neil beat me up worse than he ever had before. I broke up with him and moved in with Russell right after his check came through.

  It was a frightening time, and not just because of the drugs. That summer, my parents’ neighbor Bonnie, who looked enough like me to be my sister, was ambushed and brutally attacked outside of her house. At this point, the harassment of me and my family was so well known that Bonnie actually had the presence of mind to scream, “I’m not Alisa!”—at which point her assailant ran away. Her face was battered beyond recognition; multiple reconstructive surgeries later, the damage was still evident. I was completely terrified by what had happened to her and sick with guilt about it. The only thing that allowed me to forget were the drugs.

  By June 2005, I was staying in a Motel 6, selling drugs, and attending the court-ordered rehab program I’d been sentenced to after I’d been arrested in the fall. I knew that failing a drug test would mean three and a half years of prison time, but I couldn’t stop using.

  Every Monday, we had a drug test. I’d used Sunday, and then drank two full gallons of water. (I’d even drunk hydrogen peroxide, because I had heard it could mask a positive result.) My urine was too diluted for a result, so my probation officer put me in a room for a few hours. When they tested me again, I tested clean.

  She knew I was dirty. I knew I was dirty. Leaving, I could hardly meet her gaze, but she wouldn’t let me off the hook. “Someone’s giving you a second chance,” she said, her eyes boring into me. I grabbed the discharge paper from her hands, ducked my head, and got out of there, on my way to getting high.

  I wasn’t ready. Still, her comment that day stayed with me, and a thought, however vague, penetrated my perpetual drug haze. The second trial had been successful. The second jury had believed me. We’d secured a conviction.

  Maybe the idea of a second chance wasn’t so crazy after all.

  Chapter Seven

  A Way Out

  That summer, everything came to a head.

  In March, Russell had gotten $32,000, part of his settlement from the dog bite case. By August, every cent of that money was gone. We’d spent it all—every last penny—

  on drugs.

  I hadn’t spoken to my mom in months, but my dad and I were still in contact all that summer. He was dedicated to keeping the lines of communication open. I think he hoped to show me that I was still loved and therefore still had a reason to live. I also think that staying in contact with me made my dad feel that he was still able to protect me in some way, though my condition was visibly deteriorating at a rapid rate. On the worst days, I think he was relieved simply to hear that I wasn’t dead.

  As he had been my whole life, my dad was my rock that summer. I wasn’t allowed anywhere near my parents’ house, but whenever I showed up at his shop, he would welcome me with love and open arms. He’d always find some little thing I could clean or file so I could make some money, though I’m sure he knew in his heart that I’d spend it on drugs as soon as I’d left him. Those afternoons with my dad were an oasis for me in the desert of my drug use. I’d talk to him for hours about the chaos and destruction of my life, and he’d listen and let me cry. He never judged me and he never got mad, and he never let me see how painful it must have been for him.

  In July, I sent him a letter. In it, I wrote: “I’m not going to wait for these drugs to kill me.” He recognized the letter for what it was: a suicide note.

  I often wished during those days that I was strong enough—brave enough—to kill myself. Isn’t that the worst thing? Every morning now, I am flooded with gratitude for so many things: my family and friends; my beautiful, sweet dog; the silly little bird that hops around my back lawn while I’m drinking my coffee after I’ve said my morning prayers. It’s so sad, but it’s true: That summer I hated myself for the fact that I couldn’t step up and end my own life.

  Russell didn’t beat me like Neil had, but he was emotionally and verbally abusive. And when the money ran out, our situation became dire.

  When Russell had first gotten the payout, we’d moved into a relatively nice apartment. The idea was that we’d have more money for drugs if we stopped jumping from one sordid motel room to the next. But whatever effort we might have put into making the apartment liveable at the beginning got messed up pretty quickly. Buddies came over to get high and didn’t leave. Then one of Russell’s friends lost his own apartment, so he moved in with us, along with his wife and three kids. By July, there were ten people living there, on and off.

  When the cash dried up, we stopped paying rent. The eviction notices started coming. One of the tweakers crashing with us took a Sharpie marker and graffitied filth all over the walls. We didn’t pay our bills, so our electricity got cut off. That meant no air conditioning, even as the temperature climbed past 100 degrees. Nor was there any hot water for showers. Unless one of us stole a candy bar from the gas station for the kids, there wasn’t a scrap of food in the house. Some nights I was so hungry I wanted to cry right along with them.

  One afternoon in August, I showed up at my dad’s shop to ask for gas money. We were so broke that I was running Russell’s truck on fumes.

  For the first time ever, my dad said no to me. He was done, he told me, with supporting a lifestyle that was going to kill me.

  We got into a huge fight. I was furious, in part because I truly had planned to use the money for gas. So I screamed horrible, hateful things at him and gunned the engine. As I was about to screech off, my dad ran up to the passenger side of the truck and tossed a balled-up twenty-dollar bill through the window into the cab.

  “Enjoy getting high on my hard-earned money,” he told me, his face crumpled with hurt. “But that’s it, do you hear me? That’s the last time.”

  I drove away, hysterical. I’d lost my mom, and now I was about to lose my dad, too. And I knew that if he was done with me, I’d have no reason to live at all.

  I went straight to a gas station and put the whole twenty into the gas tank. I got a receipt to prove it. I drove back to show it to my dad, but it wasn’t the reconciliation I’d hoped it would be. Instead, he met me in the parking lot, and handed me a padded envelope. Inside was a framed photograph.

  It was the last sober picture I’d taken with him, Thanksgiving of 2002. My aunt had taken it, and it was such a great shot that she printed and framed a copy for each of us. In the picture, I’m sitting on my dad’s lap, my arm slung around his neck. I glow with health and happiness and promise, every hair in place, my smile wide and easy, my lip gloss perfectly touched up. My dad looks relaxed and incredibly proud, and he’s wearing the very familiar teasing look on his face that means he’s about to make a bad joke, probably at my expense.

  You can tell, by looking at it, that these are two people who get each other.

  My dad had kept the photo on his desk at work for years. It was the picture he’d show clients when he was bragging about me. Now, he’d put it in a padded envelope because he didn’t want it anymore.

  “I don’t know where the girl in that picture is,” he said to me before he turned away. “And I don’t want to see that picture again until she’s back.”

  It was a dark, dark moment, in a summer that had been filled with them. I drove away slowly. The thought came to me, unbidden, almost exasperated: C’mon, Alisa. This isn’t the life you’re supposed to be living.

  The Holy Ghost was riding shotgun that day. Tha
t was the voice I heard, reminding me that I was loved and had a purpose on this earth.

  A few nights later, I found myself alone in our filthy, roach-infested apartment. Russell and I were completely out of drugs, and I was desperate, so I got down on all fours so I could comb through the carpet for crumbs to smoke.

  Suddenly, I started to weep as if my very heart was broken. It was like an out-of-body experience: I could see myself, as if from above, and what I saw shocked me. Where was the straight-A student I’d been, the Girl Scout, the captain of the color guard, the good girl with all her big dreams?

  I found myself praying—or, more accurately, begging. “Please, God, help me. Help me, God. Please.” I said it over and over again, crawling around our destroyed apartment on my hands and knees. “I don’t know what to do, but I can’t do this anymore. This is not who I am, or what I’m supposed to be doing. Please, God, help. I can’t do it by myself. If I continue to control my own life, I’m going to die.”

  A couple of weeks later, on August 20, the police raided the apartment where Russell and I were staying and arrested him on an outstanding auto theft warrant. They got ready to take me in, too.

  The cop who was getting ready to arrest me looked at me with disgust. I was filthy, and living in squalor. My athletic body was practically wasted away, and my arms and legs and face were covered with open sores. By that point, I was no stranger to being treated like a pariah, but under his gaze, I felt sick with shame.

  I begged for his mercy. I wanted to get clean, I swore. Typical junkie crap, I could practically hear him thinking while he was rifling through my purse. But then he found the list of drug rehab centers I’d been calling since that night I’d begged God for help.

  He looked at me again. Thankfully, he could see that I was desperate for a way out of the life I’d been living, and he told me he’d give me a chance at one: the gift of a week. Over the course of the next seven days, he said, I could find a spot at a rehab or simply move along to another filthy drug house in a different town. But he promised he would come back to that house on August 27, and if I was there, he’d toss me in jail and throw away the key.

  He gave me a second chance: “One week, you hear me? Seven days.”

  It was all I needed.

  After they were gone, I took my meth bong, wrapped it in two black trash bags, and smashed the package with a hammer until I could no longer lift my arms to keep hitting it, pulverizing the glass into dust finer than grains of sand. Then, while Russell cooled his heels in jail, I went through detox by myself in the trashed apartment.

  But as the clock ticked down on my gift week, I started to panic. I had spent the week clean, burning up the phone lines to every rehab on my list. Wait lists averaged nine months, and I knew I’d never stay clean without inpatient treatment. I also knew that if I started using again, it would only be a matter of time before I ended up dead.

  But on the morning of August 27, exactly seven days after the cops had arrested Russell, my phone rang. Resigned to jail, with a week’s shaky sobriety under my belt, I answered. A ninety-day inpatient rehab center half an hour away had an opening. The cost would be covered by my parents’ insurance.

  The opportunity I’d been praying for had been granted. This was the second chance I’d asked God for, and when it came, I grabbed it with both hands. My journey toward healing had begun.

  No matter how bad my drug use got, every single day I would find a pay phone and place a collect call to my father, just to let him know that I was alive.

  “Hi, Daddy,” I’d say when he picked up.

  I can’t imagine now how either one of us tolerated those calls; the memory of them is so painful I can hardly bear it. For my dad’s part, he says that, as horrible as they were, they were better than the alternative, which was not hearing from me at all.

  The same thing that compelled me to make those phone calls helped me to stay clean in the first few days of rehab. I desperately wanted to stop using, but I had no idea how to do it, because I had no idea how to do it for me.

  In my own eyes, I wasn’t worth enough to stay clean for. I was a piece of garbage, a whore, a junkie. I’d made decisions—the months before I’d been raped, the night of the rape, and many, many nights afterward—that had led to my own life being ruined. I’d destroyed the lives of three guys, not to mention my own. My amazing parents had gone through untold amounts of financial hardship, stress, and straight-out harassment because of me. Their perfect, loving marriage had been badly strained. I had no friends. Those who hadn’t abandoned and betrayed me, like Beka, had walked away when they’d seen what a colossal mess I’d made of myself in the aftermath of the trials. Once a straight-A student, the kind of kid who’d freak out over a B+ or a typo, I’d barely graduated high school.

  I did have one thing going for me, though. Most of the people I met when I was using didn’t have the solid upbringing I’d had. As far away as it seemed, I had a memory of the time before—before the rape, before the intimidation, before the humiliation and trauma of the trial. I had been happy as a child, though it had been a long time since I’d felt that way.

  My father had told me that treatment in a serious inpatient program was the only way I’d get my mother back into my life. Though I’d put them through hell, I still loved my family deeply, and I knew how much they loved me. If I could get and stay clean, they’d let me back into the fold. The thought of being part of our family again was what kept me clean in those very early days. I may not have been worth anything in my own eyes, but I could get clean for them.

  One of the very first things I did in rehab was set up the two framed copies of that picture of me and my dad on my dresser. It was nothing short of a miracle that I’d been able to hang on to both of them, but I had.

  “How come you have two copies of the same picture?” everyone who came into my room wanted to know.

  “When I leave here clean, I’ll be able to give one of them back to its rightful owner,” I’d say.

  That picture meant something to me, too. Every morning, I would look at it, unable to reconcile the shiny, happy girl on my dad’s lap with the lank-haired, hollow-eyed reflection that looked back at me from the mirror. That girl—that laughing, engaged perfectionist, a quip on her lips and every hair in place—where had she gone? Was she still in there, somewhere? How had I gotten from there to here? And was it even possible to get back?

  You can get clean for someone else, as I’d gotten clean for my family. But you can’t stay clean for someone else. You have to stay clean for yourself.

  Helping with yard work was part of rehab. It didn’t take me a lot of time watering the lawn to notice that the busted-looking house across the street from the rehab center had a lot of shady-looking visitors coming and going. A drug house! My heart sang. I headed back to my room, already cooking up a plan to sneak out, get some drugs, and bring them back in.

  But as soon as I’d phrased it that way in my head, my plan went haywire. Why on earth would I bring drugs back to rehab? If I wanted to get high, why not just leave? I could remember all too well the time spent on those waiting lists, the frustration of not being able to get help when I thought I wanted it. Why wouldn’t I at least give up the bed, leaving it available for someone who was in good faith trying to get clean?

  Unbeknownst to me, my counselor, Tina, a former addict herself, had been watching me from the window while I was out in the yard. I wasn’t the first resident to clock that drug house across the street, and Tina didn’t need to be told what was going on. She showed up in my room about ten minutes after I came in and found me curled up in a ball in the empty bathtub, completely wracked with sobs.

  But instead of rubbing my back and offering comfort, she asked me the same question I’d been asking myself: “If you want to score, why stay?”

  She didn’t mince words, though I was pretty near hysterical by that point.

  “Nobody’s keeping you here,” she told me flatly, talking over the sound o
f my tears. “You’re not on lockdown. You want to go across the street? Then go across the street. But if you go, understand this: You do that, you’re never coming back.” Then she turned on her heel and left the room.

  I stayed in that empty bathtub for a long while. When I finally got out of there, I knew two things. The first was that I didn’t want to die. The second was that I knew I would if I left. So I stayed in rehab.

  That day was a turning point. For the first time in a long time, I had consciously chosen to live.

  One of the pieces of advice that good therapists give trauma victims is to do things that will help them connect to the person they were before the trauma occurred. Before the rape and my drug abuse, I had been an athlete: a dancer and a runner. I had taken a lot of pride in how flexible and strong my body was. I had loved being fit enough to effortlessly knock out a seven- to ten-mile run before school. Obviously, my physical fitness had diminished significantly during the period where I was using drugs heavily. Not only had I horribly abused my body, but I’d become completely disconnected from it.

  After that day in the bathtub, I started waking up a little early so I could spend an hour in the makeshift gym they’d set up in the rehab’s basement. There were only a couple of machines, a dated treadmill, and some free weights, but that was more than I needed, and I began to work out.

  I went, even on the mornings when I didn’t feel like it. The routine kept me grounded. I started seeing muscles again in my calves and upper arms, which had wasted away to practically nothing. The planes of my thighs took on definition instead of hanging there. I did hundreds of crunches, allowing myself to get lost in the sweat and sensation. At night in bed, I could run my hand over my belly and feel the warmth that comes from muscles that have been vigorously used.