Recoveries Read online

  * * *

  The AA meeting’s a blur, permeated with the smell of coffee combined with church-basement mildew that Vanessa always says should be packaged as AA Air Freshener. Hang one in your car and voila, instant meeting. The first speaker’s a dreary drunkalogue, listing every bar he ever went to. Vanessa, who’s heaped a paper plate with cookies and cake—sheet cake slathered with frosting, so sweet that you wonder how even she can eat the stuff—keeps her head bent over her food. The second speaker’s a sarcastic marketing exec who wears chunky silver jewelry and curses every other word. She gets the room roaring; you laugh so hard your face hurts. You whisper to Vanessa, “This is better than cable. I should come to meetings with you more often.”

  Vanessa scowls. You wonder if she’s heard a word the woman’s said. “This is fucking field research for you, isn’t it?”

  You took courses from the Electronic University Network, paid for with your programming and graphic-arts skills. You couldn’t go to a real college, because you’d have needed immunizations there, too, and the crooked doctor was in prison by then. You took every class you could afford in computer science and anthropology. You aced all of them, and Vanessa—who never went to college at all, who may have gotten through high school only because she was having a very suspect relationship with her math teacher—resents the hell out of it.

  But she’s right. This is field research.

  The advertising exec is telling a hilarious story about one of her blackouts. That’s one of the AA staples, like vomiting and DTs. All alkies worth their salt have blackouts, periods of amnesia from which they emerge to discover that they’ve done horrible things. Vanessa’s had a ton herself. Identify, don’t compare, people always say at meetings, and on this point, you know that Vanessa’s happy to comply. She hates blackouts. She hates not knowing what she’s done.

  * * *

  The morning after Vanessa’s fourteenth birthday, you wake up with a pounding headache and stabbing dread. You changed; you barely kept yourself from doing more. Vanessa will never talk to you again. She must hate you now.

  You stagger into the bathroom, where you empty the contents of your stomach. The foster parents have left for work. You’re alone. You think about running away, but you’ve done that so often that the idea exhausts you. You think about telling Vanessa that she was just seeing things, but that’s dishonest and would make you a terrible friend. You think about not going to school, but that’s delaying the inevitable. You have to have the conversation sometime.

  You spend so much time dithering that you almost miss the bus. You usually get to the bus stop long before Vanessa does, but today you race to hop on just as the bus is leaving. You grab a seat near the front, only to hear Vanessa calling you. “Hey! Hey, Kat, I saved a seat for you.”

  You hesitate, and she calls again, “Kat?” She’s crying. Vanessa hates crying. She hardly ever cries. In a flash you’re beside her, thinking that she must be terrified of you now, that she must be very brave to have called you over. You feel a surge of affection for her. Courage isn’t Vanessa’s strong suit.

  She sobs and hiccups, and you wonder if she’s still drunk. “Kat, what did I do? I did something awful, right? Last night? And that’s why you tried to ignore me?”

  You blink. You hand her a tissue. What she did last night isn’t the issue. You can’t look at her. “You got drunk, Vanessa,” and then, “You scared me.” You think that if she remembers what happened, maybe she’ll blame herself for scaring you, and as soon as you think this, you feel abject shame. Yes, she bullied you into drinking, but you’re the one who pulled the idiotic stunt of chugging the entire bottle.

  She sniffles. “Look, Kat, you have to tell me what happened. I don’t, I can’t, I don’t remember everything. I mean, I remember sitting in the car with the beer, drinking it. And I remember starting to walk into the woods. That’s all.”

  You draw in a long breath and look at Vanessa, finally. “Really? That’s all you remember?”

  It’s Vanessa’s turn to look away. “Yeah. That’s all. So what did I do?”

  “Nothing,” you say, dizzy with relief. “Nothing bad. You just got drunk. Are you okay? Are you sick? You don’t look so good.” But you’re the one who’s shaking. The idiotic stunt could have—should have—broken everything wide open, but it didn’t. You got away with it. You vow to yourself, then and there, that you’ll never do anything like that again.

  * * *

  At this meeting, as at every one you’ve ever been to, people talk about their blackouts with shame and terror: learning third-hand about humiliating scenes at parties, about insults shouted at soulmates and damage done to children who’ll be paying for a lifetime of therapy to get over it. Or not learning, never learning. Losing that time forever.

  Most of Vanessa’s own blackouts appear to have been sordid messes filled with shattered dishes and anonymous sexual encounters. You know she picked up chlamydia and herpes during those adventures, and she told you once, with a sigh, that she can’t say for sure there was nothing anal.

  But you also know she wants to forget most of the previous year, and you can tell, from how she’s staring at the clock, that she’d love to lose the three hours until her parole’s over. There’s a bar near the apartment. It’s open until two, which will leave plenty of time for disaster if she gets there at midnight.

  A group from the meeting always goes out for coffee afterwards. Minta pressures Vanessa to come tonight, and you tell them you’re happy to tag along. “More fieldwork,” you tease Vanessa, but you and Minta both know it’s more than that. After all of you leave the diner, handling Van will be up to you. Minta, who’s a fierce and confrontational sponsor, is also a firm believer in the First Step. Ultimately, she’s powerless over Vanessa.

  She’s told you that you are, too. She’s told you that you and Vanessa are badly codependent, that you need to get to meetings of your own. The meetings you really need, you can’t find.

  * * *

  A few weeks after the beer incident, your health teacher begins a substance abuse unit. This is one of the few classes you share with Vanessa, because most of yours are Honors and none of hers are. “We’re going to talk about drinking today,” the teacher says, and everybody snickers. School drug education is completely lame, a set of horror stories in which people who party always wind up dying with their heads in toilets.

  Vanessa, sitting across the room and trying to impress a football player, isn’t paying attention. You’re the only one who is. The teacher puts a list of alcoholism red flags up on the board. Family history. Craving. Drinking until you’re sick. Going to places where you know there will be booze. Blackouts.

  Blackouts. Despite the unspoken rule of ignoring each other in this building, you glance at Vanessa. She’s looking back at you, wide-eyed. Maybe she’s recognized herself in this list. Maybe she’ll avoid beer from now on.

  After class, Vanessa catches your eye again and ducks into a stairwell. You follow her. “Blackouts!” she says, and, “Alcoholism’s genetic! Kat, my parents? And the AAs? They were all just drunk! That’s why they have those memories of seeing weird shit and losing time. Aliens are their version of doing embarrassing things at parties! There aren’t any aliens at all!”

  She’s desperate for any connection to her parents; you know that. But even for Vanessa, this is nuts. You shake your head. “Um, Van, have you ever seen your parents drink? Or any of those people? You’re the one who drinks.” And has blackouts, although that’s so obvious you don’t want to point it out.

  “Of course I haven’t seen them drink, but that’s the point! That’s why they don’t! What I thought was my parents’ joke about AA wasn’t really a joke at all! The other AA is where they should be, but it’s too embarrassing, so instead they invented the story about aliens and started their own group to stargaze, instead of doing whatever drunks do at those meetings.”

  Vanessa clings to this theory for years, while you bury yourself in aca
demic tomes about folklore. You develop your own ideas. You believe that changeling stories, all those tales about goblins and faeries left in cradles, about human babies spirited away and returned only years later if at all, are the earlier versions of alien abduction stories. Lost time. Elf Hill. Exotic beings with overly large eyes and pointed ears. Being returned to the wrong place with your clothing on backwards. People have been telling stories like that as long as there have been people.

  You’re looking for your parents, too.

  Vanessa scoffs at your theory as much as you scoff at hers. “Do changeling stories have anal probes?” She asks you this one summer evening when you’re both seventeen, sitting on the log in the forest while you watch Vanessa down a sixpack. You haven’t repeated your own mistake, but you come out here with her to keep an eye on her.

  “No anal probes. Sex, though. Tam Lin was basically a sex slave to the Queene of Faerie.”

  “I don’t believe in UFOs,” Vanessa says. Neither do you. You don’t believe aliens are coming back; you want to find aliens who are already here, passing. You gaze into the darkness between the trees, listening to the tiny night rustlings, yearning for kin.

  Vanessa shakes her head. “Seriously, Kat? You don’t think that if there were green pointy-eared kids around, somebody would have noticed? Those stories are just how people explained kids who were born sick or disabled.”

  “They’d have to be able to blend in,” you say quietly.

  “Then how would you find them? Nah, it’s all nonsense. Everybody who went through that shit, with elves or grays or whatever, was just high. My parents must have been lushes in their youth and turned their blackouts into fairy tales; if you can’t remember, that means you were sucked up into a flying saucer and anal-probed. If they’d been born earlier, they would have been sucked into fairyland, and they’d be spending their time looking for crop circles and tromping around in the woods instead of gazing up at the sky. Either way, they won’t find anything.”

  She’s slurring by now, badly. Alcohol’s a disinhibitor. Drinking usually makes Vanessa smarter, or anyway more willing to say smart things, until she falls off the cliff of incoherence. You’d tell her that the mere existence of the stories is its own evidence, but she becomes abruptly and violently ill, and when you get her back to the house she falls asleep, and the next morning she doesn’t remember the conversation.

  * * *

  The after-meeting gang crowds into a diner booth and orders milkshakes and burgers and coffee. You buy Vanessa an ice cream sundae for her birthday, and she thanks you, but she barely touches it. She checks her watch every two seconds. People chat about their holiday plans, the nightmare of dealing with family, the stress of the first sober Christmas. You dig in your backpack for a legal pad and pretend to research a folklore paper. They’re all fascinated, flattered that you’re writing an ethnography of Twelve-Step culture. You tell them that you’re focusing on how they used drinking to fit in when they drank, and how they use the program to fit in now. You’re looking at definitions of belonging. What did that look like in childhood, and during the drinking years, and in sobriety?

  Since AAs love nothing better than to talk about themselves, you get more material than you could possibly use even if this weren’t just a ruse to keep Vanessa in the diner. You scribble furious faux-notes as Vanessa takes slow, deliberate bites of her sundae and fidgets with her watch. She only snaps to attention, frowning, when one of the AAs—a thin brunette who teaches yoga—says, “My parents left me when I was a kid, and after that I never felt like I fit in anywhere.” There’s a collective sigh. Everyone, including you, can identify with that one.

  * * *

  On Vanessa’s eighteenth birthday, you buy her dinner at a barbeque place in the city. She chows down on ribs; you, as usual, choke down a salad. You’re living in a tiny, decrepit loft, working at a graphic-design firm and taking online classes. Vanessa’s doing temp work and brooding about her latest boyfriend. You’re tired of listening to her obsess about him—he’s as much of a loser as all the others, and why can’t she see it?—so you try to distract her with stories about the jerks in your office and the tribal initiation rites you’re studying in your anthropology class. You have a complicated theory about how photocopying at work serves the same function as vision quests in certain Native American tribes, but Vanessa, who’s on her fourth beer, isn’t even pretending to follow this. After dinner, you take her to the Italian bakery across the street for dessert, and then you go home, claiming a work deadline instead of admitting that you can no longer stand to be around Van when she’s drunk. You know she plans to hook up with the boyfriend, a bouncer at an East Village club who only likes her when she’s drunk.

  She calls you the following afternoon, static crackling on the line from upstate, and tells you everything that’s happened. Over the years, she’ll retell the story obsessively, repeating it until it’s hardened into a translucent amulet, her identity in amber.

  After you left, she called Tom but got only his answering machine. “I’m coming over,” she told him, and on the way she bought a quart of gin because she intended to get well and truly hammered in the company of somebody who’d drink with her. But he’d already started drinking with somebody else; when he answered the door, Vanessa saw the half-naked blonde behind him, and she cursed him and ran out of there.

  And wound up on the street, on her birthday, with nothing to show for it but a bottle of gin and the aftertaste of cannoli, and it was dark and raining and she thought about finding a bar, but she was out of money and too tired for the buy-me-a-drink-for-sex hustle.

  There was nowhere to go but home, so she did: dug out the return bus ticket she hadn’t planned to use until the next morning and headed ten blocks up, to the huge glass and steel bus station with its kiosks and filthy restrooms and bays full of humming behemoth vehicles, and got on one of them for the two-hour ride upstate. Her parents and the other AAs would be stargazing, even in the rain, but she was pretty sure they’d have left her a card and some cash, the standard birthday gift. She’d go up to her room. She’d listen to music and drink gin. Tomorrow she’d wake up with an awful hangover, but she’d have the birthday money. She’d figure something out. She’d find a new guy.

  She went home. Nobody was there. They were undoubtedly stargazing at somebody else’s house. A card and a thick envelope sat on the kitchen counter—sometimes her parents gave her, like, a few hundred dollar bills—but she didn’t even touch them. She went upstairs and drank until she passed out.

  The next morning, her parents still weren’t home, which was weird. Wearing her old plaid robe, Vanessa made herself coffee and, yawning, opened the card, a photo of some galaxy or other. Inside she saw her mother’s handwriting. “Goodbye sweet girl you are of age now and we are going home. Love.” They’d both signed it.

  Goodbye? Vanessa squinted at it, blinked, and then reached for the fat envelope. The bills weren’t singles; they were hundreds. Her parents, she’d later learn, had left her the entire contents of their bank account.

  She made phone calls. She interrogated the other AAs. Where were her parents? When were they coming back? She was met with gasps of awe. They’d finally done it! They’d finally ascended! They’d been talking about it, saying they thought it was close! “Oh honey,” said one woman, “they aren’t coming back. They’ve been picked up. They’ve been recovered. You should be excited for them.”

  At which point, hysterical and ranting, she called you. “This can’t be happening!” You were glad that she was upstate, that she wasn’t in the same room, because you were nearly as upset as she was, and you couldn’t tell her why.

  “You’re right,” you said, your throat tight. “It can’t be happening. It’s nuts. You just have to look for them, Van.”

  A few months later, the cops gave up. Vanessa hired private investigators, who also gave up. Her parents had never been smart enough to pull off a WITSEC-level disappearance.

  Van
essa already felt abandoned by her parents, and when it was clear that they weren’t coming back, she set about filling the black hole of her life with booze. You, meanwhile, were going through your own agony, which you couldn’t share with Vanessa. You couldn’t share it with anyone at all.

  The aliens had picked up Vanessa’s parents and left you here, again. Alone.

  * * *

  The coffee-shop group finally disbands. It’s 11:00. Minta suggests a late movie, but Vanessa pleads headache and says she just wants to go home. “Don’t worry,” you tell Minta. “I’m not going to let her do anything dumb.”

  You mean it.

  Until that horrible night ten years ago, you hung out with Vanessa not just because she was the only other kid in your neighborhood, but because she, or rather her parents, might have helped you find your people. You have no idea why, aside from sheer habit, you’ve put up with her since then. If you ever went to a therapist—which you’ll never do—that would be your presenting issue.

  You and Vanessa take the subway downtown. The closer you get to your stop, the twitchier she gets.

  “Van,” you say, over the rumble of the number 1 train, “You’re not going to do anything dumb. Right? You’re not going to throw away this entire year?”

  She turns and glares at you. “This year? This year of feeling shitty and just wanting to drink and block everything out? This year of feeling like I don’t fit in anywhere, like you and Minta are watching everything I do and just waiting for me to screw up?”

  She goes on like this for another minute or so. She’s on such a roll that you wonder if she’s already managed to sneak a drink. But you don’t smell it, and you can always smell it.

  You wait for her to wind down, and then you say, “Van. Come on. You want to block everything out? You hate blackouts. You know you do.”

  “Yeah, well. Now I want them. The less I have to remember, the less it hurts.”