Thorns of Truth (19 page)

Christ, what he wouldn’t give to see that look on her face again.

There was only one thing he wouldn’t do: settle for less than either of them deserved.

Quite simply, he wanted all. Or nothing.

Chapter 6

“S
ORRY … SO SORRY
… Don’t be mad….”

Mandy was muttering to herself as Eric helped her from the cab. Her head was down, her coppery hair obscuring most of her face. The corner on which they stood was just east of Battery Park City, where she lived. As far as Mandy was concerned, though, it might as well have been miles away.

Looking around him, Eric was struck by a sense of having narrowly averted a possible disaster. The street was pretty much deserted this far west. If Mandy had gone home alone, anything could have happened.…

A buried memory flickered through his consciousness, disjointed images of nights like this—stumbling from pillar to lamppost, negotiating each curb as if it were a precipice, fighting to maintain his balance on pavement that rocked like a suspension bridge. How he’d managed each time to get where he was headed, to
survive,
had to be some kind of miracle in itself.

His AA sponsor had put it best. Carl Jagger, a burly black trucker from Tennessee—with whom Eric had had only one thing in common, but whom he’d grown to love like an uncle—had listened intently as Eric haltingly told his tale about the car wreck that had taken his co-anchor Ginny’s life, but which had spared his own. Then, bowing his huge head, whose tightly coiled hair had always made Eric think of a buffalo’s, Carl had replied almost reverently, “Man, you got some powerful mojo workin’ on you.”

Mojo. Miracle. Call it what you like. It was out there, if not exactly available ready-made in your size. You had to fashion your own, Eric had learned. From whatever scraps you were left with, and whatever tools you were given.

This lady here, he thought, hooking an arm about Mandy’s waist as she wilted against him, could use some of that mojo herself.

As he steered her along the walk that led to her building, Eric felt connected to Mandy in a way that went deeper than with most people he’d only just met. A connection that had nothing to do with knowing Mandy … and everything to do with what they shared. They were alcoholics. Recovering or otherwise, one thing never changed: once a drunk, always a drunk. And God help him, Eric thought, if he ever forgot it.

“My keys … I can’t find them.…” Mandy had stopped, and was fumbling in her purse, its contents spilling onto the pavement—lipstick tube, compact, fountain pen, eyeglass case, a small canister of Mace.

They stood under the granite awning that shielded the entrance to the sleek black-glass tower in which Mandy lived—one in a complex of residential high-rises, all of which looked eerily alike to Eric. Mercury-vapor lamps illuminated the walk on either side, as well as the strip of grass edged in boxwood that passed as landscaping.

He stooped, retrieving her leather-tabbed key ring from under a scraggly bush. “Here,” he said. “You hold on to these while I get the rest.” He dropped it into her outstretched palm, and gently folded her fingers around it.

Mandy just stood there, gazing at him stupidly, her head nodding like a sleepy child’s. As he guided her through the revolving door and into the elevator, she leaned heavily against him.
Probably slipped in a few before the party,
he guessed. Oh yeah, he knew
that
terrain.

Letting them into her apartment on the twenty-second floor, Eric wasn’t surprised to see an empty wine bottle on the pass-through counter of the kitchen that opened onto the small, austere living room. He didn’t have to look inside the refrigerator to know it was well stocked. Not with much in the way of groceries, he imagined, but he’d bet cash money there was vodka in the freezer, and several bottles of wine chilling on the fridge’s bottom rack.

Something burned in his gut, a not-so-old wound that hadn’t quite healed.

He turned to find Mandy sagging onto the sofa, and grabbed her before she became dead weight. She muttered in protest, wriggling in his grasp, and pushing at him with fists made of rubber. Eric didn’t resist, only tightened his hold about her. When he spoke, there was no judgment in his voice, no hint of blame. How many times had he walked this particular walk? How many helping hands had he pushed away?

“Come on, let’s get you to bed.”

With one arm looped about her, supporting her, he walked her down the hallway to her bedroom. Thumbing the light switch, he found only more of the same sterile hotel decor. Queen-sized bed covered in a paisley quilted spread, maple headboard with matching maple dresser and nightstands. Nice, expensive, but with about as much personality as a department store’s model room. Nothing that bore even the slightest trace of its occupant.

It was a disguise, he knew. Mandy was hiding behind all this smooth banality as she would behind a mask—one that had fooled everyone, including Mandy herself. But that mask had begun to slip.…

Rose, he thought, would be good for her. Tough, uncompromising. Just the kick in the ass her stepdaughter needed …

Rose.
Was he merely fooling himself about her? If she knew even a fraction of the complicated feelings she’d stirred in him, would she be scared into bolting for high ground? Probably. Hell, it scared
him.

“So sorry … All my fault …” Mandy was seated on a corner of the bed like a Raggedy Ann doll about to topple over. She was crying, her jaw slack and her mouth drooping open. Tears sooty with mascara rolled down her cheeks.

Eric crouched down so they were at eye level.

“You have nothing to apologize for,” he told her. “Not to me.”

“Oh God … I’m such a mess.” She was holding the knuckles of a clenched fist to her mouth, her eyes like twin smudges of carbon on white paper. “I need a drink,” she said with sudden forcefulness.

She tried to stand up, but Eric seized her by the shoulders, holding her steady. “First, you need to sleep.”

She blinked at him, screwing her eyes up as if trying to bring him into focus. “Who are you? Do I know you?”

“Not yet. But you will, I hope.”
I’ll be the guy sitting next to you at your first AA meeting, if you make it that far.

Mandy nodded blankly, and closed her eyes. He felt the tension in her arms and shoulders abruptly ease. This time, gently, he eased her down onto the bed.

When Eric returned from the bathroom with a wet washcloth to wipe her face, she was out cold.

Fifteen minutes later, Eric stood alone on the windswept esplanade looking out over New York Harbor. Except for the scattered couples strolling along its curving pathways, Battery Park City—landfill he’d always thought of as phony real estate stuck onto the southernmost tip of Manhattan like some vast concrete prosthesis—was deserted this time of night. The hot-doggers on Rollerblades had all gone home, and the kid-friendly play area resembled an abandoned construction site. The only evidence that this phony city was inhabited was the row upon row of lighted windows in the cluster of residential towers behind him.

Eric leaned against the metal railing, gazing out at the skyline reflected on water the color of stale coffee. The Statue of Liberty, illuminated in the distance, her arm upthrust in victory—or was it merely in welcome?—reminding him for some reason of when he was a kid, when life had seemed much more clear-cut: a game that had come with a set of instructions. Win or lose, you always knew where you stood. And when you screwed up, you could always start over from scratch.

He smiled bitterly to himself. As he’d gotten older, he’d discovered that life was more of a test than a game—a test of endurance, the lesson of which was, for the most part, obscured. Each day like pushing a boulder up a hill that kept rolling back to flatten you.

Staying sober had become easier with time, yes. Otherwise, how would anyone manage it? But he hadn’t forgotten how tough it’d been in the beginning. How seemingly impossible to make it through even one day.

Mandy? She hadn’t even started the journey. Tomorrow, he knew, she’d dimly remember getting drunk at the party, and his taking her home. She might even feel humiliated enough to white-knuckle it for a day or two. But until she loosened her grip, and realized the impossibility of doing it alone, she didn’t stand a chance.

Eric knew the territory well. Christ, yes—and then some. He was the Kurtz of that particular heart of darkness. Ten years of roadside bars, lost weekends, late nights in unfamiliar locales … plus another five of the seriously hardcore lock-the-door, unplug-the-phone drinking you do when it’s become your only reason for living. Not until he’d woken up, at age thirty-nine, in the drunk tank of a Memphis jail, had he discovered just how far he’d wandered from any path he would have chosen for himself.

When they told him it was Ginny who’d been driving their rented car as it smashed through the guardrail, he supposed he should have felt relieved that it wasn’t
him.
But even in his hungover state, with a square of gauze over one badly swollen eye, Eric had known exactly whose fault it was. Ginny, as timid behind the wheel of a car as she was gutsy in front of a camera, had hated driving at night, especially in strange cities. If he’d kept his promise to her and stayed sober during their stint in Memphis, Ginny Gregson would be alive today.

Eric Sandstrom, fair-haired boy of the top-rated
Morning Show
, on the other hand, had risen from the wreckage like a modern-day Lazarus. Even with network executives demanding he sober up “or else,” and friends no longer returning his calls, he’d literally gotten away with murder.

His only punishment was to go on living.

Drinking helped deaden the pain. Sandstrom’s Quart-a-Day Maintenance Plan, a friend had called it—Bill Stimson, who’d seen the humor in it as only a fellow drunk paying rent on a stool down at Duffy’s Tavern could.
No down payment necessary, easy installments, just sign on the dotted line, if you will, sir.

Bill died a few years ago, he’d heard. Liver failure.

These days Eric traveled the back roads of those memories only as often as he needed to in order to keep from reliving them. Blessedly, those months were largely a blur in his mind, marked by a few clear patches. Like the morning he’d woken with no feeling in his arm from the elbow down, and a voice deep in his fogged brain quite calmly pointing out that, if he didn’t quit drinking, his next gig would be the county morgue. He’d shut that voice up with a bender that had lasted three days before washing him ashore on a strange lawn, where he was found baying at the moon at half past who-the-fuck-cares-what-time-it-is in the morning—a stunt that earned him a bed in the detox ward at Santa Monica Hospital.

For Eric, the experience was defined by a single watershed moment: looking around him, at all those winos in wrinkled hospital gowns reeking of Thunderbird, and thinking,
Christ, what am I doing in this place? I’m nothing like these guys. I don’t belong here.

The voice in his head had spoken up again—louder this time, in order to be heard above the jackhammer threatening to pulverize his skull.
You’re wrong, my friend, this is EXACTLY where you belong. The only difference between you and these other guys is that they
know
what they are.

At the time, he’d seen it as just one more reason to go on slowly killing himself … but what it had been, in fact, was the wake-up call that had jarred him hard enough to accept the offer of a kindly older man named Phil, who’d visited him the next day and invited Eric to attend an AA meeting. It had been the beginning of a whole new life. The first day in a series of days, weeks, months, in which he would be guided by a single objective: staying sober by living the program, by adhering to the twelve steps laid out by Bill W.

Now, five years and a hundred million miles of hard road behind him, it seemed to Eric that he hadn’t come as far as he’d hoped to. There were still times when the collective memory of all those wasted years washed over him like sewage. When he felt less than whole—as if the ragged ends of his past and present lives didn’t quite meet.

At this particular moment, however, it was enough simply to be standing here on his own two feet, gazing with clear eyes at the monument to a city that punished its huddled masses as much as it forgave them.

He would do what he could for Mandy … but he wasn’t in the business of saving people. Only by continuing to save himself did he stand a chance of helping someone else.

Eric shivered in the cool breeze that rattled through the shrubs planted in neat columns alongside the esplanade. During his years of exile in Des Moines, and later in L.A., he’d dreamed of one day coming back to New York. There was a kind of majesty to this city that rubbed off on even its lowliest subjects. A hard beauty, as well as a gruff acceptance of its prodigal sons. Watching a tugboat churn its way upriver, he smiled to think how different this was from the triumphant return he’d imagined.

He’d pictured himself at this age with a wife, two kids, and a prime-time network slot—at a fat salary with the perks to match.

Instead, here he was, still single, about to head home to his comfortable—but far from fashionable—third-floor walk-up in Murray Hill. A few people still remembered him from the
Morning Show.
But with radio, he knew, unless your name was Howard Stern or Rush Limbaugh, you were nobody.

Yet Eric had no regrets. The radio gave him a freedom that would have been unthinkable—if not illegal—on television. He could explore at length issues that actually mattered. It was the hardest he’d ever worked, no contest—five days a week of three hours on-air, plus half a day’s prep—but also the most rewarding. At times, it was even fun.

He didn’t regret not having married, either. Women, Christ, there’d been
women.
One to whom he’d almost proposed. Susanne Whittaker had been his producer at the
Morning Show.
Smart, sexy, a solid ten … and he’d loved her, yeah. But in the end, he supposed, he hadn’t loved her enough. Susanne wasn’t the one he’d been searching for, the woman in his mind’s eye.