Forsaken (28 page)

“I didn’t mean for it to come out that way.”

“I know exactly what you meant.” I lowered my head. “I’m sorry I let you down.”

“This has nothing to do with me.”

“Please don’t say that.” I raised my head. “I need for it to have something to do with you.”

He paused. “Okay, then it does. I want to help you.”

I started to cry, then grabbed my hair in my hands and clenched my eyes and my teeth.

He looked at me wide-eyed.

“Just once,” I said, “I’d like to have a conversation without bursting into tears like a twelve-year-old!”

He let out a breath and smiled again. “You had me worried there for a minute. Where do you keep your tissues?”

“In the bathroom next to the sink.”

He was on his feet before it occurred to me that the bathroom was the last place I wanted him to go. Too late. He came back into the room carrying the box of tissues. He handed it to me and sat on the couch.

I pulled out a tissue and wiped my eyes. “I don’t want to be this way, you know.”

“What is ‘this way’?”

By that time my nose was running. I had no choice but to cap off a memorable conversation by blowing it. There is no good place in a social setting to put a used tissue. I wadded it into a ball and closed my hand over it. Before I could speak, though, I began to cry even harder. I pulled more tissues out of the box.

Finally I got control of myself. “The truth is that I wish, for just one day of my life, I could be good enough. That’s all I want—just to be good enough.”

This is where, in my fantasies, he would have walked over, put his arms around me, and held me close. But he didn’t. Instead, he leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped in front of him. “Good enough for what?”

I gave up on the tissues and wiped my face with my sleeve. “I don’t know. Good enough to live. Just to be around decent people.”

His voice softened. “Taylor, think about who you’re talking to here. I’m a preacher who has committed adultery and denied Jesus in front of tens of millions of people. And you think
you’re
not good enough?
Nobody
is good enough. If we had to be good enough, none of us would have a chance.”

I used my fingers to wipe the spots beneath my eyes where I knew mascara must be pooling like mud puddles. “You may have made mistakes in your life, but you’ve done a lot of good for people. I’ve never done anything worthwhile for anybody. I’m a drunk and a . . . a . . .” I thought of the guy in the bar. I didn’t have to say it. Simon knew what I was.

Simon got up, walked over to my chair, and knelt in front of me. He put his hand on my knee, but not in the romantic way I imagined in my fantasies. He just rested it there. It was like my father’s touch. “You’ve done an awful lot of good for us—for Kacey and me. You are so
much better than you think you are. I wish I knew how to make you see that.”

There was nothing else to do. I just sat there and sobbed.

After a few moments he stood up. His voice became matter-of-fact. “Let me get you some help, Taylor. Then you’ll see how good you can be.”

I just nodded.

“I’ll make a call. Someone will talk to you tomorrow.”

I nodded again.

“Are you okay? Can I get you anything before I go?”

I shook my head.

“I’ll call you in the morning.” He turned to leave.

I looked up. “Simon?”

“Yes?”

“Please don’t tell Kacey.”

He smiled. “She thinks you walk on water. She thinks I do too. I guess we’ve both got her fooled. Let’s leave it that way.” He turned and walked out the door.

THE NEXT DAY BRANDON called. He didn’t give his last name. That was part of the deal with the version of the twelve-step recovery program that Simon’s ministry offered. Everyone was first-name only. Brandon told me that at one time he’d been Simon’s accountant. Then his drinking led him to bungle the annual audit so badly that Simon had no choice but to fire him. Soon thereafter, Brandon’s wife walked out on him, leaving him at “the bottom,” a concept central to the twelve-step theory of recovery. The idea is that until a person experiences complete humiliation, he won’t have the willingness to give himself up to God—and the program makes it clear that God is the only answer to addiction.

I attended the weekly meetings even though I wasn’t sure I was buying the “give yourself up to God” approach. After all, they were a church—what were they supposed to say? Frankly, my recent experience with praying for Simon had fallen short of anything that was likely to light a spiritual fire under me. The twelve-step program did provide impressive success-rate statistics, though. And while I might not buy their whole spiel, I did know one thing: I didn’t want to continue in the direction my life was going.

I didn’t fit the twelve-step mold as perfectly as I should have. For example, I couldn’t say that I’d ever hit some sort of wallow-in-your-own-excrement rock-bottom, not in the sense that I understood the group to mean it. I’d fallen to more of an isolated rocky ledge from where I could peek over into a dark pit. I constantly had the feeling that some invisible force, like a magnet, was pulling me toward the edge, trying to suck me into the pit. To me, that pit was rock bottom, and I had never quite reached it.

At my third weekly meeting I made the mistake of describing this visualization to the group. All of them except Brandon concluded that the idea of the ledge and the pit posed a significant obstacle to my recovery, that it indicated I hadn’t fully admitted the depth of my problem. Brandon pushed his heavy glasses up on his nose. “Come on, folks. She’s not really on a ledge, and she’s not really in a pit. She’s in the basement of a church. It’s a metaphor.” The tone of his voice contained the unspoken addendum,
you morons!
He gave me a closed-lipped
smile, which I later learned was his mechanism for hiding his crooked front teeth.

After the meeting I caught Brandon in the church parking lot. “Thank you for sticking up for me.”

He hitched his pants up under the overhang of his belly. “They didn’t mean anything. They just got caught up in your metaphor and couldn’t get out. After all, the last thing you want in a church basement is to get caught in a girl’s metaphors.”

I laughed. “Good point. I’ll be sure to keep them covered from now on.”

He took his wallet out of his pocket, pulled out a business card, and handed it to me. It was white, and the only things on it were the name Brandon and a phone number. “That’s my cell. You can call me any time you need help. I don’t sleep much, so you don’t have to worry about calling late.”

“Did you have these printed just for these meetings?”

“Sure. I seem to be better at supporting other people than I am at supporting myself.”

I put the card in my purse.

He opened his car door. “You’re the first famous person to come to our meetings. I like to rub elbows, you know?” He gave me the closed-lip smile again.

“You know who I am?”

“Any person with a television and a brain knows who you are. That means the others aren’t likely to identify you, so you don’t have to worry.” His eyes brightened. It was obvious he enjoyed being the cleverest person in the room.

“They seem like nice people to me.”

“They’re very nice people. I’m just gigging them a little. It can be a bit of a housewives’ club.”

“I noticed you were the only guy there tonight. Is that the way it usually is?”

“About half the time. You met Jason last week. He travels a lot, so he doesn’t make all the meetings.”

I lowered my voice. “I really don’t want anyone to know I’m coming to these meetings. It could cause real problems for Simon.”

“Don’t worry, I know the rules. We must protect Simon at all costs.”

I squinted at him.

He shrugged and stuffed his hands in his pockets. Before I could ask what he meant, he nodded toward my purse. “Be sure to use that number on my card if you need me.” He got into the car.

“I will. Hey, who do you call when you need support?”

“My mother.” He waved. “See you next time. I’m late for a Dread tournament. In my spare time, I’m a gamer.”

Over the next couple of months I came to understand why Brandon hadn’t answered my question seriously. He was always there for me, and I understood from others in the group that they also relied on him. Not a single person could recall, though, a time when he’d ever called one of them for support.

Eventually Brandon became my recovery partner. That meant that he was essentially my twelve-step
mentor. Probably the smartest person I’d ever met, he leaned more than I did toward the classic addictive personality profile. He ate too much, drank too much coffee, and spent an alarming portion of his non-working hours playing video games. To top things off he was an accomplished and unapologetic computer hacker. Each of those compulsions seemed worthy of its own intervention, but he was content to prioritize his treatment and focus on licking his alcohol problem.

During my first couple of months in the program, I called him quite a few times, usually after midnight. Whenever I got the urge for bourbon, I’d ring him up and he’d talk me into having a diet soda instead. We discussed all sorts of things, but one call sticks out in my mind. I was lying in bed with my head propped on a pillow and had been talking to him for twenty minutes or so. The conversation had somehow turned to Simon. I asked Brandon why he’d never gone back to work for Simon after he got help with his drinking.

“I did go back, about six months ago.”

“What were you doing for him?”

“Keeping the books, just like before.”

“What happened?”

“I quit.”

“When?”

“Just after Kacey was kidnapped.”

I sat up and switched the phone to my other ear. “Why?”

“He was paying me too much.”

“Would you please be serious?”

“Boy, your sense of humor really goes in the ditch after 2:30 in the morning.”

I looked at the clock. It was 2:45. “Why did you quit?”

There was silence on the other end of the line.

“Brandon?”

“It was nothing. Little stuff, that’s all. Listen, are you going to be all right tonight?”

“Yeah, I’m fine now.”

“I’m going to get some sleep then. You call me back if you need me, okay?”

“Okay. Thanks for talking. You’re a life saver.”

After I hung up, I took a sip of my soda. Was it my imagination, or had he rushed off the phone to avoid telling me why he quit? I closed my eyes and rehashed the last part of the conversation. Before long my leg jerked and startled me awake.

I was no longer sitting up. My head was on the pillow and the covers were under my chin. I opened one eye and looked at the clock: 3:45. Without opening my other eye, I reached over and flicked off the lamp.

THE BEST THING ABOUT Simon’s discovery of my drinking problem was that I got to spend time with him and Kacey again. At first he checked on me every day, in person or by phone. He also added an additional session at the gun range for Kacey every week. Within a week or so, he gave me an open invitation to drop by for dinner whenever I wanted.

Since I’d never been a daily drinker, their constant presence was more important to my treatment than the twelve-step program. As long as I had somebody who cared about me, I didn’t feel the need to drink. I was beginning to understand that loneliness had always been my real problem. The equation was simple: family
equals no loneliness equals no drinking. It worked like a charm.

During that time Simon and I often sat in the family room and talked. Kacey had enrolled in summer school to make up the credits she lost during the spring semester, so most evenings she was either at the library or studying in her room. Typically, Simon would put the Rangers game on the television and pick up a book to read. When something of note happened in the game, he would look up and check the replay.

It was not unusual for me to sit with him until the game was over. I never really asked if I could, we just sort of fell into the habit. I quickly got hooked on baseball. Often I would be the one to shake him from his reading by yelling, “Get to it, get to it—yeah!” or some other admonition to one Ranger or another.

By this time I no longer had romantic fantasies about Simon pulling me into his arms. On several occasions I tried to re-conjure them in my mind, but they just weren’t there anymore. The daydreams stopped cold after he told me about his son. I was happy, though, with our relationship—not just with Simon, but with Kacey too. It was comfortable. It was family.

It soon became clear that Simon’s theme for the summer was martyrdom. He bought a dozen or so books on the topic and raised the issue from time to time as we sat in front of the television. One evening in mid-July we ordered pizza for dinner. When we finished eating, Kacey grabbed her backpack and headed for the library. Simon sat in his favorite chair, reading a book entitled
Heroes of the Christian Faith.
I sat on the couch with Sadie curled up next to me. I thumbed through a celebrity magazine with one eye on the Rangers game.