Chapter Ten #3
During my scheduled visit with Maisie, Emily is true to her word.
She doesn’t leave the house, but she doesn’t hover over us either.
Maisie is subdued but seems okay. I make her half of a grilled cheese for lunch, her favorite, and cut up some carrot sticks.
Get her to grin a little when I balance one of the sticks above my top lip and say it’s my orange mustache.
After lunch, we cuddle up on the sofa and watch TV: Peppa Pig, Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood .
When it’s nap time, I tell her to pick out a story.
She chooses not one but two: her own favorite, The Very Hungry Caterpillar , and her brother’s, Where’s Spot?
The door to the twins’ room is still closed, so at nap time I figure the crib is still off-limits.
I put Maisie in the middle of Emily’s and my bed, kiss her, and tell her I love her.
As I’m leaving the room, she says, “Niko?” I turn back and face her, at a loss for words.
There’s no way to explain death to a little girl who’s two.
Instead, I hurry into the living room, grab that framed picture of the two of them, then go back and show her.
“Niko,” she says. She touches his face behind the glass and smiles. That’s when I lose it.
That thing my mother said about grief? How it’s like a wave that clobbers you so that you go under and can’t catch your breath?
That’s how it felt when Maisie touched her brother’s photograph.
Emily and I had agreed that my daily visits would end when Maisie went down for her afternoon nap.
I need to compose myself before Emily sees me crying.
That woman at the AA meeting had had her parental rights taken away.
If I want to stay in my daughter’s life, I need these visits to go smoothly.
I grab my jacket, go outside, and sit on the porch step to wait for Mom to pick me up.
Emily opens the door. “It’s raining,” she says. “Why don’t you wait inside?”
“No, I’m okay,” I tell her. “Thanks, though.” It’s weird how polite and careful we’re being with each other. I’m relieved when she goes back inside.
When I see the McNallys’ garage door open and Shawn’s car backing out, I brace myself.
What am I supposed to say to him now that my confession and arrest have been in the paper and on TV?
What’s he going to say to me ? What happens, though, is that neither of us speaks.
He backs into the street, shifts, and drives off, pretending he didn’t see me.
Part of me feels shame, another part feels relief.
For the rest of that afternoon and into the evening, I keep hearing Maisie’s question.
“Niko?” Where is Niko? Where did Niko go?
My mother showed me where she kept her weed if I want any, but I don’t need to get mellow.
I need to get hammered. But Mom’s gotten rid of her alcohol; I’ve already checked.
By eight o’clock, I’m craving a drink so bad that I start getting the sweats.
And not just a drink. A number of them, one after another, enough to make me too drunk to feel the pain that my life has become and the pain I’ve caused everyone else.
Mom went to bed early—to read, she said, but her workday starts at four in the morning so she’s probably asleep already.
I crack open her door and sure enough, her breathing is rhythmic and she doesn’t stir.
I fight the urge for another half hour or so, then give up, pull on my jacket, and grab my wallet and phone.
There’s a liquor store in that strip mall on Sachem Turnpike.
If I hustle, I can make it there before closing time.
Outside, I break into a jog, each step bringing me closer to relief.
I walked away without a scratch, but the accident brain-damaged Kayla.… Anyways, that was the day when the miracle happened.… You can always drink tomorrow if you need to. Just don’t drink today.
I stop. Stand there shaking and baking until I reach into my back pocket and feel that napkin he gave me. With a shaky finger, I punch in the digits. Listen to it ring once, twice, three times, four. I’m about to hang up when there’s a click.
“Hello?”
“Dale? It’s Corby… guy from the meeting today? You said I could call?”
Ten minutes later, his truck pulls up in front of the Cumberland Farms where I told him I’d be waiting.
When he asks me whether I’ve been drinking, I’m able to say no.
He asks whether I’m telling him the truth and I say yes.
I don’t take offense; drunks know what good liars other drunks can be. But I’m not bullshitting him.
Over coffee and pie at the Pilot truck stop off Exit 93, he fills me in on his story.
“My sister Gina was in the middle of a divorce and she and Kayla had moved in with me. Gina worked long hours, so I was pitching in—helping Kayla with her homework, giving her rides, stuff like that. My sister knew I wasn’t the best babysitter—no secret I was a boozer—but at that point, her options were limited.
I was on disability from work, so I was around and I had promised her I wouldn’t let Kayla get in the car if I’d been drinking.
“Gina was supposed to get back in time to take her to gymnastics that day, but something came up at work. Attendance at practice was mandatory for some show. At first, I thought I’d call the kid a cab, but then I decided I was feeling no pain but not really drunk.
I could get her there and maybe get one of the mothers to drop her off when practice was over.
That was fourteen years ago, but to this day, I remember starting the car and watching her run across the lawn toward me in the polka-dot leotard I bought her for her birthday.
She had a pretty limited life, thanks to me.
In and out of hospitals and Easter Seals.
Her walking and talking were compromised and she had all kinds of learning problems. Died from an aneurysm when she was thirteen.
She’d be twenty-two now if she had lived.
“The thing is, you never get over it—that hard a loss and the fact that you caused it. There’s always going to be sadness and shame around it.
You just have to figure out how to live with yourself without drinking over it.
At least that was what I had to do.” When I ask him about his sister, he says she moved out to Colorado.
Got married again, didn’t have any more kids.
“She still won’t have anything to do with me.
When I got to my ninth step, Gina was the first person on my list that I had to make amends to, but she told me she wasn’t having it.
Said I could take my amends and shove it.
I was pretty bummed out about that, but my sponsor said her not accepting it didn’t matter.
I couldn’t control what her reaction was going to be.
What mattered was that I had offered her my amends. ”
Dale and I talk for about an hour. Then he drives me back to my mother’s. As he pulls into the trailer park, he says, “Oh, one more thing. Today, at the end of the meeting, I noticed you weren’t saying the Lord’s Prayer.”
“Yeah, I’m not really big on the higher-power thing,” I say.
“I hear you. I love AA, but I tune out a lot of the God stuff. The closest I get to believing in a higher power is when I look out at the ocean while I’m surf casting.
See something that’s much bigger than I am.
Something that’s been here a lot longer than me and is going to be here long after I’m gone.
What I’m saying is, you don’t need to turn into a Holy Roller in order to get saved.
Just keep coming to meetings and don’t drink.
My first sponsor was a religious man—a deacon in his church.
He used to say to me, ‘Dale, you don’t have to believe as long as you believe that I believe.
’?” He stops talking and lets that sink in. Finally, he says, “So. You all right?”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
He nods. “And you’re not going to drink tonight. Right? We got a deal?”
I take a deep breath. “Deal,” I say.