‘And I told you he’d blocked me on everything and I’d no address for him.’
‘So I told you to Golden Key it. It took six years but Luke is here, you’re talking to each other and you’re finally facing the truth. I’ve a question for you,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you mark your NA anniversary?’
‘Because the important thing is to stay clean today.’
‘Baloney. You used to love the cake, the medallion, all the fuss. After you relapsed you stopped. Because despite all the lies you were telling yourself, you knew that your original date twenty years ago no longer counted.’
‘No, I …’ Whenever I thought of my anniversary date, my head filled with a sort of fog. I hadn’t been consciously denying anything. It was more like I couldn’t think about it. But now I saw the truth and it was very painful. ‘My clean time was – is – so important to who I am. I was proud of getting clean and staying clean. Without it, I feel lost. The me I thought I was, isn’t.’
I’d seen other people come back into recovery after a relapse and I’d pitied them.
‘Mourn it,’ Nola said. ‘Do your best to make sure you don’t do it again. Then embrace your actual recovery date.’
I had a clear memory of the morning in New York, a couple of months after Luke had left, when I’d decided to stop taking the sleepers. I’d woken very early – and felt inexplicably calm.
It was more than eight months since Yara had died and the frenzied storm seemed to have finally blown itself out.
I wasn’t okay, not cured – nothing like that. My appalling loss was still sharply defined but the thrashing agony, the anguish I just couldn’t accept, had eased. My little girl was gone, I was changed forever, there would still be terrible times but, finally, I could acknowledge the facts, even submit to them, and my soul was quiet.
I opened the bedroom curtains. Beyond the window, the first glimmers of dawn were lighting the sky. My window was wet, it must have been pelting down earlier. As the sun continued to rise, a ray caught on a raindrop on the glass and broke into the seven different colours of the spectrum, becoming smudged stripes of transparent colour on the wooden floor, right in front of me.
Experimentally, I moved my fingers in the arc of colour, spellbound by the different shades on my skin.
Seeing signs wasn’t really my thing but the same weird calm I’d woken up with was insisting that this was a message from Yara, saying that she was always with me, but that it was time to start living again.
Another certainty settled – from that day forward, I’d be able to sleep. There would be no more need for tablets. I went around the apartment, gathered them all up and flushed them away.
‘How come I just decided to stop?’ I asked Nola. ‘All by myself?’
‘Are you stone mad, girl? Two months earlier, your husband had left you. Into the bargain, the likes of myself and Olga Mae were blue in the face begging you to have sense. The question I’d be asking myself is: What took me so long?’
When she put it like that … ‘So what do I do now?’
‘We’ll get busy soon enough, you and me. You need to do your steps all over again.’
Oh God. Having to do a deep-dive on my various dishonesties and fuck-ups was hard, painful work. It needed to be done, though.
‘… I need to apologize to Luke. I told everyone he was a terrible person but I was the one in the wrong.’
‘Lord save us, I’m blue in the face telling you that.’
‘I feel sick about my job, Nola. What kind of an addiction counsellor am I? I’ve been carrying around a huge big sack of my own denial. How could I have helped other addicts?’
‘But you know that you’ve helped. Unless you’ve been lying about the thank-you cards and Jo Malone candles? And all your promotions have only been a cock-and-a-bull story and you’re really working in a carwash, which would at least explain your’ – Nola waved a hand at my jumpsuit – ‘rig-out.’
The steady stream of cards from ex-patients was real. As was the fact that the high-ups in the Cloisters – Ted and the board – had, over the past five years, in several steps, promoted me from deputy counsellor all the way to head counsellor.
‘Maybe …’ I chanced, ‘because I was an addict in denial, I was actually better at my job?’
‘Arra, now …’ Nola wasn’t having that.
‘My past isn’t the past I thought it was.’ I was trying to articulate my exact fear. ‘This new knowledge, is that going to impact the present?’