Walking on Broken Glass (18 page)

He cleared his throat, the noise like a closed mouth cough, and looked, not so much at me, but in the vicinity of my head. “Your dad called. He wanted to visit, so he's flying in on Wednesday. I’m not sure how long he’ll stay in town.”

I straightened and pulled threads from the sofa's cording with my fingernails. My inner child (Cathryn joked with me yesterday that I held mine hostage) bounced on both feet and clapped her hands deliriously, using my stomach as a trampoline.
It's going to be okay. It's all going to be okay.

Carl grinned.
Had I spoken that out loud?
I shivered because what I saw in Carl's eyes was an approaching reprimand for that excited little girl who’d just made her appearance.

“Oh, I almost forgot. He's coming for family group,” he said. He sat back and looked at me.

The clapping stopped. So, this was the new game. Words were the weapons. Information used as stealth destruction.

I scratched the top of my hand. Carl wanted this news to hurt me. Why? Because I had hurt him. This was still about him.

Journal 8

I was the blind date Carl met for dinner. Generally, Carl refused offers of blind dates. A year later he told me that he thought if a woman needed a blind date, then maybe her date needed to be blind. Besides, it wasn’t as if he needed dates. But Nick and his wife, Brea, wouldn’t stop nudging him about meeting one of Brea's teacher friends.

The first few times they asked, he always found a reason to refuse. Dates arranged by married couples were much more suspect than those arranged by single friends. He was suspicious of the hidden agenda—like the date interviewing for a spouse in the house. Brea reassured him I wasn’t searching for happily ever after. So, Carl relented and made dinner reservations at Marsala's. Italian food would compensate for any dating disaster.

If I didn’t have to see Brea every school day for the next four months, I would have refused this setup. And if she and Nick hadn’t already spotted me at the entrance and waved me over to the table, I would have bolted out the leaded glass doors I had just walked through.

“I’m not ready,” I had told Brea when she first suggested this date.

“This is a training wheels date. Nobody expects you to take off on your own yet,” she said.

Fifteen minutes past reservation time. No Carl. Thirty minutes. No Carl. Nick had Carl's cell phone number on speed dial and left dozens of messages on voice mail. A bottle of wine and almost an hour later, Carl arrived.

Brea pointed him out to me. He stood at the bar, shaking hands with the badly toupeed man who had seated them. Carl's relaxed

confidence annoyed and intrigued me as he smiled in our direction and maintained an unhurried conversation with the wildly gesturing gentleman. The Gundlach Bundschu merlot had long since soothed the tenseness that accompanied me to the restaurant. Carl and the man I’d come to know as Emil, the owner, ended their talk. Carl walked to their table—a man with the easy stride of someone comfortable in his own body.

“Leah,” he said my name as if we’d been childhood friends. “I hope you’ll give me a second chance at a first impression.” His grin poured itself out and warmed my bare shoulders.

His ash grey sweater seemed dyed to match his eyes. He sat and looked only at me, as if Nick and Brea had disappeared.

“I would have been here on time but I was in the ER with my mother,” Carl said. He turned to the waiter at his elbow and ordered a dry martini and another bottle of merlot.

Carl held up his hands to quiet the obligatory stirrings of the sympathy choir.

“She fell getting off the sailboat at the Yacht Club. She needs to be careful.” He paused and thanked the waiter for the bottle of wine and the drink he’d just delivered. “I don’t think we can get a handicapped boat slip.” He smiled to let us know laughter would be an appropriate response.

Carl reached for the wine and said to me, “May I refill your glass?”

A sense of humor. Polite. And he cares about his mother. Perhaps he's worth a second chance.

T
he elevator doors closed.

Finally.

Carl and Molly had been transported to the universe beyond the locked doors, beyond the winding entrance, to the life I had plucked myself from, but from which my disappearance seemed only a speed bump. I’d expected more drama. Carl didn’t look like a gaunt victim of emotional terrorism, pleading for my return. Molly's carbonated enthusiasm fizzed as though her energy compensated for Carl's indifference.

After Carl zapped me with the news of my dad arriving for family group night, Molly looked back and forth at us, like a Wimbledon spectator. She watched guilt and anger and disappointment volley between us.

I exited the elevator, clutching the gifts Molly had produced from the bowels of her purse to distract Carl and me from each other.

“Whatcha got there, girlie?” Theresa yawned her way into the rec room. Her zebra-striped slippers were on the wrong feet, but they navigated her to the sofa.

“Unfortunately, not candy.” I handed her the two boxes. I paced.

“A book with nuthin’ in it? What's up with that?” She opened the leather journal, lifted it to her face, and breathed in. “This smells rich.” She closed it and gently massaged the embossed paisley designs on the cover with her pulpy little fingers. “Soft. What's in this other box?”

She handed me the journal.

“Your
friend
gave you a
Bible
?” Theresa eyed it like she was exercising some telekinetic power. She looked at me, the unspoken “Why?” captured in her eyes.

“Molly thinks the Bible's the only self-help book anyone ever needs. She and Jesus have some kind of hotline going on.” I kicked off my white Crocs. Why do comfort and style have to be incompatible? My toenails and cracking heels screamed for a pedicure.

“It's kinda heavy.” Theresa bench pressed it with one arm. “And you sure are stuck with it.”

“Hmmm?” I’d been distracted flipping through the blank pages of the journal, wondering what pen I’d use to write in it.

I used to tell my students that writing was all about the pen. Like Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Everyone had to find a pen that was “just right.” Not too slow that it couldn’t keep pace with their thoughts and not too fast that it hurried thoughts and ink along, barely interacting with the paper. I’d show them one of my favorites, a stocky, lapis-colored, extra-fine point, marbled pen I’d ordered years ago from one of my favorite catalogs. Molly would always laugh and say she didn’t have any
friends
except me who’d throw away the new Victoria Secrets catalog and immerse themselves in the latest from Levenger's. Finding a pen that fit my hand and writing style versus finding lace panties the size of dental floss that fit what I needed to sit on to write—no contest.

“I said you gotta keep the Bible.” Theresa leaned over, her blouse pleading for mercy in the attempt, and shoved the Bible in my hands. “Look, she had your name put on it. See?”

Theresa pointed to
Leah Adair Thornton
inscribed on the burgundy leather cover. I opened it and found written on the first page:
“The grass withers and the flowers fade, but the word of our God stands forever” (Isaiah 40:8 NLT). Dearest Leah, this is God's journal. He’ll be reading yours. Now you’ll have some time to read His. I’m praying for you.—Molly

Really? God should’ve watched Alyssa instead of reading people's journals. After all, if He's God, didn’t He already know what I’d write on its blank pages?

Nobody knew about Alyssa, about nights I’d fall asleep on her bedroom floor clutching her soft baby powder-scented blankets, about how I’d slip my hand in my purse where I always carried her silver rattle so I could put my hands around something she had held.

Inside Edition
's hostess filled the television screen. A man trapped underwater in a cylinder had thirty-three hours to escape before his oxygen ran out. “We’ll let you know if he lives.” She smiled. I’m struck by the fact that Alyssa had the same number of days with us as he had hours to live.

“Good luck,” I told the screen.

W
hile I reboxed my new, unasked for, and likely never-to-be read Bible, I was deposed as Queen Suburbia in Rehab. The Princess of Designer Drugs, accompanied by our very own Jan, teetered out of the elevator in Jimmy Choo teal patent leather sling backs.

A Prada dress splashed with blooming flowers in shades no flower would be caught dead in defined almost every inch of her body. I’d bet a Botox treatment that the purse Jan hijacked was also Prada. I couldn’t wait to tell Carl's mother that her fashion training paid off and in the unlikeliest place.

The new client was a walking haute-couture advertisement, except for the blood-stained tissues she kept jamming into her surgically altered nose. Jan led her to the counter, steering her by the elbow as though she were an upright vacuum cleaner. Judging by the baseball-size roll of tissues she clutched, I’d say that nose of hers probably had sucked its share of white powder.

I looked around to make sure I wasn’t so insensitive as to say that aloud. Even with crumbs of dried blood on her face and wobbling on knees about as sturdy as Play-Doh, she looked stunning—one of those women who wake up with-

out morning mouth or helmet hair. Radiant. “Arm candy” my brother called them. This one would’ve sent most men into a diabetic coma.

Men like Carl.

And there it was—the putrid smell of insecurity.

She was everything I wasn’t. Not that I envied her drug of choice (how noble of me). But without a dedicated team of plastic surgeons, a rack to stretch my body, blonde hair and extensions, and transplants, I’d be renting this body for always. Trapped in the same room with women like her, I felt like a piece of furniture—a piece Carl's mother desperately wanted to reupholster.

In my pre-recovery days, I’d have leveled the playing field with gin or vodka or wine or beer by now. I might not ever look like her, but I could pour in the security, composure, and assertiveness.

Owning these thoughts made sobriety feel like a horror movie unfolding one frame at a time. Any faster risked exposing the monster inside, and that would be entirely too frightening.

“Hey, now
she's
a girlie,
for sure
.” Theresa said to her fingernails as she chiseled off the red polish, the chips drifting to the floor like bloody snowflakes.

Empty urine specimen bottles lined the counter, patiently waiting to be claimed by their owners due back soon from their weekend passes.

Matthew looked up from labeling the last one. Strange sort of Welcome Wagon gift all in a row. Not something I imagined Mrs. Cleaver in her shirtwaist dress and pearls handed off to the Beav as he walked through the door after a date.
Hi, sweetie,
so glad you’re home. Now, be a good boy and go pee for me. And wash your hands. I have brownies waiting.

In the alternate universe of rehab world, though, these babies had status. A rite of passage—like being assigned a parole officer meant being one step closer to civilian life.

“Play time's almost over.” Theresa yawned, still attacking her nail polish and bypassing the social grace of covering her stretchy mouth with her hands. “Wait till they see …” She stood up and sent a flurry of red acrylic snowflakes to the floor. “Oops.”