She dug through her gritty pocket for the money she’d taken from Truc’s wallet. Maybe,
if she let it go, just dropped it into the rain, it would be an untangling of some
kind, a do-over.
But what she pulled out was a business card with a dog-eared edge.
Dr. Karen Moody
[funny name for a shrink]
Occidental Rehab
Written across the bottom was:
When you’re ready to make a change
.
Cloud had heard these words a thousand times in her life from doctors and social workers.
Even from her daughter. People pretended all the time that they could help, that they
wanted to.
Cloud had never trusted them, not even back when she was Dorothy and young enough
to believe in the kindness of strangers. She had thrown away dozens of cards and flyers
and pamphlets like this over the years.
But now, this time, as she sat on the garbage-stinking stoop, with rain nipping at
her heels, the word—
change
—filled her with longing. She glimpsed the pit of her own loneliness, saw how deep
it ran, how dark it was.
Occidental
.
The street was less than a block away. Was it a sign?
There had been a time when she lived her life believing in signs. The
est
and Unitarian years. She’d thrown herself into one belief system after another. The
jumps into faith had always been followed by depression, moods so dark and low she
could only belly-crawl her way out. Each time she had failed, and each failure had
taken something from her.
The one god she’d never turned to was herself. Rehab. Sobriety. One day at a time.
These words and phrases had always terrified her. What if she really
tried
to be better—saner—and she failed at that? Would there be enough of her left to save?
And yet here she was. Sixty-some years old, the girlfriend of a mean drunk, a punching
bag, essentially homeless, unemployed, a drunk and a pothead. A mother and not a mother.
There already wasn’t enough of her to save. This was the rock bottom she’d feared
all of her life. She was beaten and down. The only way she could stand was if someone
helped her up.
She was so tired of this life … exhausted.
It was that, the exhaustion, that did it.
She grabbed hold of the wobbly handrail and hauled herself to a shaking, unsteady
stand. Gritting her teeth, she limped out into the rain and kept going.
The rehab center was housed in a small, flat-roofed brick building that dated back
to Seattle’s gritty pioneer beginning. The blackened concrete viaduct thundered with
traffic nearby. She took a deep breath and reached for the door handle.
It was locked.
She sat down on the concrete stoop, this time unprotected by an overhang. Rain hammered
her, drenched her. Her headache continued, and so did the pain in her neck and her
ankle, and the shaking grew worse, but she didn’t move. She sat there, coiled up like
a sword fern, shivering and cold and shaking, until a sound roused her. She looked
up and saw Dr. Moody standing in front of the steps, beneath a blossoming umbrella.
“I’ll fail,” Cloud said dully, shivering hard.
Dr. Moody came up the steps and reached out. “Come on, Dorothy. Let’s go inside where
it’s dry.”
“I guess dry is the point.”
Dr. Moody laughed. “A sense of humor. That’s good. You’ll need it.”
* * *
Cloud Hart went into rehab, and forty-five days later Dorothy Hart emerged. Now she
stood in her small room and packed up her few belongings: a loosely-held-together
macaroni necklace and a creased, slightly blurry photograph with the date
October 1962
stamped on its scalloped white edge.
They had seemed like nothing when she walked into this building, these two small personal
items. Trinkets, she would have said, but now she understood their value. They were
her treasures; somehow, through all her years of alcoholism and addiction, she’d held
on to them. Dr. Moody claimed that it was the Real Dorothy who’d kept them, the slivered,
thin, healthy part of her who had somehow been strong enough to survive it all.
Dorothy didn’t know about that. Honestly, she tried never to think about the girl
she’d once been, and her life in that tract house in Rancho Flamingo. Sobriety didn’t
make it easier to look back. The opposite was true, in fact. Now she lived her life
in moments, in breaths drawn and released, in drinks not sipped and bowls of pot not
smoked. Every dry second was a triumph.
It had begun like all of her Hail Mary passes at normalcy—with a feeling of relief.
Nothing was more comforting in the beginning than relinquishing control. She’d shuffled
through the center and followed the rules. She’d had no mouthwash or other alcohols
or drugs to give up, no bags to be searched. She’d let Dr. Moody lead her to a small
room with barred windows that overlooked the gray concrete curl of the viaduct.
When the shaking started, and then the headaches intensified, she glimpsed the truth
of the decision she’d made for the first time, and she’d gone crazy. There was no
other word for it, although she hated the word. Her craziness had been epic—throwing
chairs, pounding her head on the wall until she bled, screaming to be let go.
She’d ended up in a detox ward for seventy-two of the longest hours of her life. She
remembered it in images that crawled over one another, pulled each other out of shape
until nothing made sense. She remembered the smell of her own sweat, and the feel
of bile rising in her throat. She’d cursed and writhed and puked and cried. She’d
begged to be let out, to be given just one drink.
And then, miraculously, she’d fallen asleep and wakened in another world, washed ashore.
Disorientated, still shaking, weak as a newborn puppy.
Dry.
It was hard to describe how vulnerable she’d felt, how fragile and delicate. She sat
in the group therapy sessions like a ghost day after day, listening to her neighbors
start their whining speeches with,
Hi, I’m Barb and I’m an alcoholic. Hi, Barb!
It was like some horrible Kumbaya camp moment, and she’d zoned out, biting her nails
until they bled, tapping her foot, thinking about how soon she could get drunk and
that she didn’t belong here—these guys had had overdoses and killed people in cars
and been fired from jobs. They were Big-Time drunks; she was just a loser who drank
too much.
She remembered when it had changed for her. It had been in morning group, about three
weeks after her detox. She’d been staring down at her ragged, bleeding thumbnail,
listening—barely—to fat girl Gilda complain about the time she’d been raped at a fraternity
party, crying hard, spewing snot, and Dr. Moody had looked right at Cloud.
“How does that make you feel, Cloud?”
She started to laugh at the idea that the story meant anything at all to her, and
then a memory floated up, bobbing to the black surface of her thoughts like a dead
body.
It’s dark. He’s smoking. The red tip is terrible-looking. I smell smoke. Why won’t
you be good? You make me look bad. I’m not bad
.
I know you’re not
.
“Cloud?”
“I used to be Dorothy” was how she’d answered, even though it made no sense.
“You can be her again,” Dr. Moody had said.
“I want that,” she’d said, realizing right then how true it was, how long it had been
true, and how scared she was that it couldn’t be.
“I know it’s scary,” Dr. Moody said. The bobbleheads in group nodded, murmured their
agreement.
“I’m Dorothy,” she’d said slowly, “and I’m an addict…”
That had been the beginning, maybe the only real one ever. From then on, recovery
had been her addiction; honesty her drug of choice. She talked and talked and talked,
told anyone who would listen about her blackouts and her mistakes and the men she’d
been with—they were all the same, she saw now, a string of mean drunks with something
to prove. This pattern came as no surprise when she thought about it, which she did.
Endlessly. But even with her new sober-zealotry, she never named her daughter or talked
about her youth. Some pains ran too deep for sharing with strangers.
“Are you ready to leave us?”
She heard Dr. Moody’s kind voice and Dorothy turned.
Dr. Moody stood in the doorway. In her high-waisted, straight-legged jeans and ethnic-embroidered
tunic top, she looked like exactly who she was—a woman who gave all her time and energy
to helping others. Dorothy wished she had money to give to this woman who had saved
her.
“I think I’m ready, but I don’t feel like I am. What if—”
“One day at a time,” Dr. Moody said.
It should have screamed cliché, like the words of the Serenity Prayer. Both had once
made her roll her eyes. Now she knew that some things could be cliché and true at
the same time.
“One day at a time,” Dorothy said, nodding. She could do it that way, she hoped. Break
her life into bite-sized pieces.
Dr. Moody held out a small envelope. “This is for you.”
Dorothy took it, stared down at the picture of bright red cherry tomatoes on it. “Tomato
seeds.”
“For your organic garden.”
Dorothy looked up. In the past weeks, this “plan” had come to her. She’d studied it,
imagined it, dreamed it. But could she do it? Could she really move back into her
parents’ old investment property on Firefly Lane and rip up the overgrown rhododendrons
and junipers and till the small plat of land and grow things?
She’d never successfully cared for anything in her life. She’d never succeeded, period.
Not at anything. Panic began its slow, popping bubbling up inside of her.
“I’ll come out on Friday,” Dr. Moody said. “I’ll bring my boys. We’ll help you start
clearing.”
“Really?”
“You can do this, Dorothy. You’re stronger than you think.”
No. I’m not
. But what choice did she have? She couldn’t go back again.
“Will you contact your daughter?”
Dorothy released a heavy sigh. A parade of memories sidled into the room. All the
times “Cloud” had abandoned Tully. She could change her name back to Dorothy, but
Cloud was still a part of her, and she had broken her daughter’s heart more times
than she could count. “Not yet.”
“When?”
“When I believe.”
“In what?”
Dorothy looked at her counselor and saw the sadness in her dark eyes. It was understandable.
Dr. Moody wanted to cure Dorothy; that was her goal. In pursuit of that cure, the
doctor had put Dorothy through detox, talked her through the worst of her withdrawal,
and convinced her to go on medication for mood swings. All of it had helped.
But it wasn’t a cure for the past. There was no pill that offered redemption. All
Dorothy could do was change and atone and hope that someday she would be strong enough
to face her daughter and apologize. “In me,” she said at last, and Dr. Moody nodded.
It was a good answer. Something they talked about in group all the time. Believing
in yourself was important—and hard for people who’d perfected the art of disappointing
their friends and family. Truthfully, Dorothy said the words and tried to sound sincere,
but she didn’t believe in the possibility of redemption. Not for her.
* * *
One day at a time, one breath at a time, one moment at a time. That was how Dorothy
learned to live this new life of hers. She didn’t lose her craving for drugs and alcohol
and the forgetfulness they offered, nor did she forget the bad things she’d done or
the hearts she’d broken. In fact, she made a point of remembering them. She became
evangelical about her change. She reveled in her pain, swam in the icy waters of clarity.
She started slowly, and did things in order. She wrote to her daughter’s business
manager and told him she was moving into her parents’ old rental house on Firefly
Lane. It had been vacant for years, so she saw no reason not to claim it. As soon
as she’d mailed the letter, she felt a slim thread of hope. Each day when she went
to the mailbox she thought:
She’ll answer
. But in January of 2006, the first year of her sober life, she heard a businesslike,
I’ll forward your monthly allowance to Seventeen Firefly Lane,
from the manager and not a word from her daughter.
Of course
.
Her days that first winter were a confusing mix of despair, discipline, and exhaustion.
She pushed herself harder than she’d ever pushed herself before. She rose at dawn
and worked in the big, flat field until nightfall, when she fell into bed so tired
she sometimes forgot to brush her teeth. She ate breakfast (a banana and an organic
muffin) and lunch (a turkey sandwich and an apple) in the field every day, sitting
cross-legged in the tilled black earth that smelled like fecund possibility. In the
evenings she rode her bike into town and attended meetings.
Hi, I’m Dorothy and I’m an addict. Hi, Dorothy!
As odd as it sounded, the roteness of it soothed and comforted her. The strangers
who stood around after the meeting, drinking bad coffee in Styrofoam cups and eating
stale store-bought cookies, became friends. She’d met Myron there, and through Myron,
Peggy, and through Peggy, Edgar and Owen and the organic farming community.
By June of 2006, she had cleared a quarter of an acre and rototilled a small patch
of earth. She bought rabbits and built them a hutch and learned to mix their droppings
with dying leaves and what little food leftovers she had into compost. She stopped
chewing on her fingernails and traded her obsession for marijuana and alcohol into
one for organic fruits and vegetables. She had sworn off much of the world, thinking
that a life without modern choices would suit her newfound self-discipline best.
She was kneeling in the dirt, tilling with a gardening trowel, when she heard someone
call out.
She put down her trowel and stood up, brushing the dirt off her oversized gloves.