“I will call you when I can, and I’m going to write you a letter as soon as we say goodbye. Listen to Grandma and Daddy, and eat your growing foods, and make your bed in the morning, and floss your teeth.”
“I have to go now. Sam & Cat is on!” There was a thump, the muffled sound of voices, and then my mom was on the line.
“How . . . how are you doing?”
“As well as I can, I guess.”
“Don’t worry about anything. Everything here is going well.”
“Really?” I’d braced myself for a litany of complaints, bracketed by When will you be home? and laced with plenty of implied How could yous, but my mother sounded . . . cheerful? Could that be?
“You just take care of yourself. Everything’s under control. We’ve got . . .” There was a brief pause. “Let’s see, gymnastics today, is that right?”
“TUMBLING!” Ellie shouted in the background.
“And then Sadie’s birthday party on Saturday, and Chloe’s birthday party on Sunday . . .”
“I have presents for them in the downstairs closet.”
“Yes. We found them, and we made cards. You just take care of yourself . . .” Almost imperceptibly, I heard her voice thicken. “We’ll see you when we can.”
“Thanks, Mom. Thanks for everything.” I hung up the phone and sat there, teary-eyed and sneezing, as the recovery coach tapped my shoulder and, on the other side of the desk, a guy with tears tattooed on his cheeks shouted for Seroquel.
“You know, there’s a seven-day blackout,” said Miss Timex. “You won’t be talking to anybody again until that’s over.”
I didn’t answer. I’d already decided that the khaki brigade wasn’t worth wasting my breath on. Nicholas would be my go-to guy.
“You need to join your group,” she told me as I walked past the desk.
“Nicholas said I could lie down if I wanted.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Are you not feeling well?”
“I feel awful,” I said, and followed her as, sighing heavily, she walked me down the hall and unlocked the room where I’d woken up that morning.
I hung the handful of items that needed hangers in the gouged and battered freestanding wardrobe. Then I pulled a sheet of paper from the notebook I’d been issued and wrote Ellie a note. What do you call a grasshopper with a broken leg? Unhoppy! I love you and miss you and will see you soon. I drew a heart, a dozen X’s and O’s, then wrote MOM.
After I’d emptied my duffel bag, I went through my purse. My plan had been to curl up with a novel and try to make the time go by, but my e-reader, like my wallet and phone, was gone. I marched back out to the desk.
“Nothing but recovery-related reading,” said Wanda, my People magazine–loving friend. She looked left and right before mouthing the word Sorry.
“Is there a library?”
“You can buy approved reading materials in the gift shop. But it’s only open on Monday, Tuesday, and Friday mornings, and I think maybe Sunday afternoons.”
That figured. I remembered a New York Times story about rehabs from a few years ago. Most of them were private businesses, some were run by families, and all of them were for-profit . . . and the profits they turned were jaw-dropping. It wasn’t enough that they were milking patients and insurance companies for upwards of a thousand dollars a day so we could eat crappy cafeteria food, sleep in rooms that made Harry Potter’s under-the-staircase setup look like a Four Seasons suite, and be lectured about our selfishness by old men in polyester. We also had to pay what were undoubtedly inflated prices for recovery-related literature.
“You can read The Big Book,” she said, and handed me a copy of a squat paperback with a dark-blue cover. No words, no title on the cover, just the embossed AA logo.
I carried it back to my room, lay on the bed, and began reading, starting at the beginning, then flipping randomly. The Big Book was first published in 1939, and it didn’t take me long to realize that it was in desperate need of an update. The prose was windy, the sentences convoluted, the slang hopelessly dated (I snickered at a reference to “whoopee parties,” whatever those were). Worse, the working assumption, in spite of a footnote stating otherwise, seemed to be that all boozers were men. There was a blog post in that, for sure; maybe a whole series of them. If the Twelve Steps were the order of the day, and they were still geared toward middle-class, middle-aged white guys, how were women (not to mention non-white people, or g*y people) expected to get better?
I kept reading. From what I could tell, in order to get sober the AA way, you had to have some kind of spiritual awakening . . . or, as the gassy prose of “The Doctor’s Opinion” put it, “one feels that something more than human power is needed to produce the essential psychic change.” So you got sober by finding God. And if you weren’t a believer? I flipped to the chapter called “We Agnostics,” and found that AA preached that if you didn’t believe, you were lying to yourself, “for deep down in every man, woman, and child is the fundamental idea of God. It may be obscured by calamity, by pomp, by worship of other things, but in some form or other it is always there.”