The leader had run through the process where they give out these little key tags they called “chips” for anyone who had thirty, or sixty, or ninety days. Or six months, or nine months, or anybody who was celebrating an anniversary of a year or multiples of years.
Only nobody was. But they went through the list every time, calling off all those milestones to see if anybody wanted to raise their hand and take a chip.
I saw a few sets of eyes flicker over to the door, so of course I looked where they looked.
Zoe Dinsmore was just stepping into the room, closing the door behind her.
She either hadn’t seen me yet, or had seen me and her eyes had moved on. She was looking at Roy, and Roy was looking back at her.
And, now, this part was weird. At the time.
She nodded to him. And he nodded back.
I couldn’t have told you exactly what the nod meant, but it was an acknowledgment of something. Something they shared between them. Which was absolutely stunning to me, because I had no idea they’d ever shared anything between them. But I could see it was not the kind of nod you exchange with a stranger. It was a nod to some level of mutual history. It was an understanding. Some things don’t need explaining. Some things are just plain on their surface.
They broke off their gazes, and Zoe found herself a seat.
She sat across from us, and her eyes came up to mine. Just very briefly. She offered me one weak, sad little smile, then looked down at the table.
The leader, this guy named Jeff, spoke directly to her.
He said, “We just finished giving out chips, but I’ll ask again. Anybody here in their first thirty days of recovery?”
Zoe raised her hand, still staring down at the table.
“My name is Zoe, and I’m an addict,” she said.
And instead of the usual group response, which would have been “Hi, Zoe,” just about everybody in the room said, “Hi, Zoe. Welcome back.”
“I’m thinking there’s not a single person in this room who doesn’t know my story well enough to tell it themselves,” Zoe said when she was called on to share. “Am I right about that?”
Her eyes scanned the room. No one spoke. No faces seemed the least bit confused.
“Good,” she said. “Then I won’t waste your time with that, because you know it, and I hate like hell to talk about it anyway. I’ll just tell you this. If you’re thinking of going out again, don’t. Don’t even mess with it. Just consider that I did the research for you and it still stinks out there. And the addiction problem you used to have hasn’t gotten any better while you were recovering in these rooms. If anything, it’s gotten worse. It’s like you’re in here thinking you have all this insurance, but meanwhile your disease is out there doing push-ups on the porch. You think you can let it out of the box and then put it back in again when you’re ready because you did it the one time, so maybe you get overconfident and think you did that with your own superior will. So you let it out, and then you look at it, and you look at the box, and your disease is like a thousand times bigger than the box, and you can’t for the life of you figure out how you ever got it to fit in there in the first place.
“I almost didn’t make it back here,” she said, her eyes flickering somewhere close to mine. But no direct hit. “I almost took myself out instead. But I guess that wasn’t what my higher power had in mind for me. I guess the plan is for me to stay around and try to do some good.
“So all I want to say, and then I’ll pass it along . . . I just want to say it’s a hell of a lot easier to hold on to your seat in this room than it is to give it up and think you can get it back again. If we do get back to the rooms, the wear and tear on our bodies and souls is considerable. And then there are the ones who don’t make it. And I was almost one of them. So take my advice. There’s nothing for you out there.”
A pause. No one filled it. No one spoke while a person was sharing, and everybody waited to be sure they were really done. Until the sharer passed the torch, so to speak.
Zoe opened her mouth again. “I want to hear from . . .”
She pointed directly at my brother. I could see the alarm on his face.
“I forget your name, son.”
“Roy,” he said.
“I want to hear from Roy.”
A long silence. Like, really uncomfortably long. But no one filled it. It was Roy’s turn to share and that was that. He could say he chose to pass, or he could start talking. But the meeting was not going to go on until he decided.
“My name is Roy,” he said.
My body and brain tingled, waiting to see if he would say it.
“And I’m . . . well, I have no idea what I am. No, I do. That’s not really true. I think I know I’m an addict, but I just don’t want to say it out loud, because then it will be the truth about me and I can never unsay it. And it’ll never stop being true. But I guess I pretty much just said it anyway, didn’t I?”
He paused. Sighed.
“I just got back from overseas.” His eyes came up to where Joe was sitting at the far corner of the table. “Like that guy, only my story just about couldn’t be more different from his. No disrespect to him. Just the opposite. He’s the one who deserves
