Drunk Mom (23 page)

The lack of things to do and the co-ed setup affects even the cool-headed alcoholic Tina, who starts flirting, aggressively, with Kevin, one of the night counsellors.

Like me, she hadn’t brought any makeup with her, so she makes a long list for the delivery services to get lipliners and eyeliners from the local pharmacy. I order packs of gum, which I chew all the time, ruining my broken teeth even more.

During our last week, Tina paints her face every evening before Kevin comes down to the women’s lounge to remind us of the ten o’clock curfew.

She lies stretched out on the couch, staring at him and asking him to reveal to us whether he used to be an addict. She asks for gossip about other counsellors.

Her face is no longer swollen from booze and her eyes are bright and blue in the forest of thick mascara that actually suits her.

She lisps a little when she talks. She never lisps to us but she lisps to him.

She says he’s so cute.

Kevin is polite and laughs politely. He says nothing back to the cute comment. He says very little at all. His arms are tattooed just like the former inmates’—raw ink with thick, sometimes shaky lines.

Tina tells Kevin that she loves him and he wishes us a good night and reminds us that we’ve only a few minutes left before bedtime.

We watch him one afternoon twist and hold the arms of one of the heavily tattooed guys behind his back. The guy has been caught giving Tylenol 4s to his roommate, Dad Pants, who’s never done drugs before. Both get kicked out. I never knew that Tylenol even went above 3.

A
lex, the teenage anorexic escort, gets kicked out three days before rehab is over.

We’re not supposed to go to each other’s rooms but I go into hers when I find out about it.

She’s packing. Just throwing her things into a large suitcase and crying. Boxes of diuretic tea and Sweet’N Low, which I’m not sure how she managed to smuggle in. They could be full of drugs, those sachets, packets and packets of powdered shit in them.

They’ve found cigarettes on her, she says, and now she has to go back to the fucking detox and this one, it’s the worst place on ear-r-r-rth, she bawls.

It’s just detox, I say.

On the night table beside her bed there’s a picture of a man in a coffin.

What the hell?

She says it’s her dad. Dead dad. She says he used to smack her but he was her idol and she started shooting up and eating pills when he died.

And this detox is fucking hell, she says, that’s all you need to know. The men there are fucking insane.

I imagine her tiny frame getting gang raped there or worse. I’m not sure what’s worse.

To distract myself and her, I think about asking her about her dad dying and her shooting up, but then I snap out of it—what am I trying to do anyway, fix her?

I take crumpled clothes out of her suitcase and fold them and put them back into the suitcase as she paces the room alternating between crying and cursing.

I find out later that during this time, upstairs in the cafeteria, her biggest fan, the older Neapolitan, Marco, is pulling paintings off the walls and throwing chairs around. Downstairs, my counsellor says that outbursts like that are a normal part of recovery.

Later, after they’re both gone, everyone is saying that they will most likely use together.

Alex being kicked out starts a strange three-day chaos, with the sexual frenzy upstairs, in the common room, at an all-time high now, with people suddenly smelling of tobacco and no longer trying to hide it.

I hide in my room most of the time.

My roommate has exposed her boobs to at least three men that I know of, but she always goes back to her Neapolitan junkie, Donicio, and we
all watch her make him salads and fetch him coffee during meals just like Charlotte, the elementary-school teacher whom she called the Wife. Charlotte isn’t here anymore to see it. Charlotte hasn’t made it to the end either, on account of her man back home asking her to marry her over the phone before week three.

The closer to the end, the more I retreat inside myself.

But this time it’s different.

Maybe it’s because it’s just me and no Frankie and no booze, it seems as if I finally have the room to notice myself.

In our final session, my counsellor says it’s a good feeling, the one I have, of noticing myself, but she pretty much says this about anything—good or bad. She has time to see me all the time, now that Alex is gone.

The person I notice, me, is a person in progress, the counsellor explains before I leave her office.

I’m not sure what she means by that. I admit to myself that I’m unfinished in some areas, just like everybody else. And in other areas I seem to be dead, like the part of me that died when I moved here from another country.

I no longer feel that I’ve come from anywhere. I’m just here. I’m still hanging on to illusions, such as my relationship with my boyfriend. The important thing is that I’m not completely irreversible. Sober, I feel that I can be fixed in some places, such as with my relationship. I even get a sliver of hope, right near the end of my stay, and this is more hope than I’ve had for months. The feeling of being underwater is still present—the almost palatable sensation that I’m not completely tuned in, that I’m missing something, like the one breath needed to break through and be present—but I’m more at ease with it, or perhaps I’m closer to the surface than I thought I was.

On our final evening as a group we are asked to write six things that we can’t live without. We’re told to cross two things out, then another two, then one more. The one thing that’s left, this particular counsellor explains, is the thing that we have left in life worth fighting for.

I’d written Frankie’s name six times.

B
y the end of our stay we’ve explored every possible topic to do with addiction—origins of addiction, sobriety maintenance, relapse—and for the last forty-eight hours there’s a feeling of freedom, much like the last day of school when you feel like tearing through hallways and high-fiving even your most tight-assed teachers. Ours is a small class—there were more than twenty of us when we started; now we’re down to eleven. Just like in high school, we get punished for smoking, and many people were kicked out for that.

The weather is fantastic. It’s crazy-warm, summer-like. I make my only jeans into shorts; my roommate lends me a tank top.

We’re allowed to stay outside for as long as we want, and all eleven of us spread all over the benches around the basketball court.

I watch families pushing old men and women in wheelchairs through the parking lot toward the seniors’ unit.

Even though we’re about to leave, people keep talking about being
able to switch buildings, what it would be like to wake up facing the lake instead of a parking lot or a fence.

One of the counsellors says that the building is a palliative-care unit. Someone makes a joke that so is ours, although it may take us longer to buy it, you just never know.

My roommate says that Donicio probably won’t have to wait long at all, and he calls her a dumb whore and walks back into the building. She runs after him screaming his name in a shrill voice.

Sebastian, the guy who follows me around, takes off his shirt and flexes his biceps for me. Am I sexy? he says.

Very, very sexy, I say.

I can’t wait to leave.

And then it’s here.

We’re leaving the next day. Now it’s only ten of us left. Someone lost it the night before, went out and used. The day before graduation and he went out and used. It’s the guy who supposedly liked me, Sebastian. I can’t help but wonder if I was being too much of a bitch to him. But no, I know better than to give myself so much credit—nobody can make anybody use. Using is a personal decision.

When someone brings up the subject in our regular morning meeting after the tobacco propaganda, one of the counsellors says that leaving right before it’s time to leave is totally normal. But he won’t say a lot more than that since the counsellors are not allowed to discuss other clients. A late onset of relapse is a normal part of recovery, the counsellor assures everyone.

Almost everything seems to be a normal part of recovery. Relapse, slip, overconfidence, compliance, happiness, unhappiness, hunger, loneliness, friendships, too much of something or not enough of something
or just the right amount of everything—every single thing can be a normal part of recovery.

The next day, we leave as early as possible. It’s dark outside, the day hasn’t even started. Donicio is wearing a suit and nice shoes. The Priest is dressed in his usual black. Both of them light up as soon as they exit the building; they’re standing and smoking, right in front of it. I find their urgent smoking defiant. But maybe I’m reading too much into it. Maybe they just wanted to smoke.

Sade is waiting with me in the lobby, in her pink PJs, a tiny, flimsy robe wrapped around her tightly. She’s leaving later; one of her sugar daddies is picking her up. The same one who dropped her off. She looks worried, as if she had to stay another week instead of just a few hours more. She pokes her head outside, says something to Donicio, who says something back to her and she yells, Jerk!, and laughs, delighted.

Tina is talking to Kevin, still trying to exchange numbers with him, but all she gets is an email address. In a few hours she’ll see her Scottish boyfriend, Douglas, and she won’t have to think about Kevin, but I understand where she’s coming from—anything at this point. Only hours separate us from re-entering our regular lives, but we’ve been thinking of leaving for the past three weeks so often that it seems that this waiting will never end. The last half-hour seems to stretch into infinity.

Finally, magically, the cab that will take us to the bus station in town is here. Sade screams and throws her arms around Tina, then me, then she runs out and kisses Donicio right on the mouth. She gives the Priest a big hug and almost kisses him on the mouth too but Kevin calls her name, like a teacher, and she rolls her eyes and goes back inside, shivering in her nightclothes.

That’s my last image of New Hope: Sade with her too big doll-like
head, full of bouncing curls, her arms crossed, vibrating, and her hands rubbing together for warmth.

On the bus, Donicio takes his jacket off. He’s got a nice dress shirt underneath, clearly ironed. He must’ve had it hanging in the closet, ready for this final day, the whole time.

Donicio is already walking the streets in his clean, crisp shirt, running into his friends, doing his thing. This is what, I imagine, goes on inside him; the body on the bus is just delivering him there. He’s not as talkative as usual; even his laughter seems restrained when the Priest tells us jokes.

Donicio exchanges phone numbers with Tina, says he’ll give her a call for sure, once he’s in the city. I can’t imagine what they’re going to do together. Go shopping?

The Priest passes us scraps of paper with his first name and an email address written on it. He doesn’t have a phone, doesn’t have an address yet. He’s staying with Donicio for a week and then who knows. That’s another thing about Donicio: he’s invited the Priest to stay with him. I like Donicio quiet, and generous like that, different than he was inside. I know it will seem too out of character, maybe even like a capitulation, if I suggest exchanging numbers with him. I want to. But I don’t and he doesn’t ask and I feel a little hurt by that.

The men get off in St. Catharines. I’ve never been to St. Catharines before. In the darkness, the bus terminal seems more grey and more depressing than anything I’ve seen so far this morning.

Donicio says maybe he’ll see me in meetings.

Maybe. But I doubt it.

You’re funny, bella. Ciao.

Then it’s just Tina and me and the rest of our trip. We don’t talk to each other. I look out the window and it’s the same blur of parking lots, warehouses, fences as it was on the way here.

Then I’m home. Standing right in front of my house.

I don’t knock right away. Not yet. I stand on my tippytoes and look inside.