Now that I’m clean, I have a million regrets—and trading away my iPhone is the least of them. But sometimes I’ll remember the experiment and I’ll start to wonder. I’ve tried to find the doctor online but obviously I don’t even remember her name. One morning I took the bus to the university medical center and tried to find the auditorium, but the campus is all different now; there are a bunch of new buildings and everything’s scrambled. I’ve tried googling phrases like “gaze detection” and “gaze perception” but every result says these aren’t real phenomena—there’s no evidence that anyone has “eyes in the back of their head.”
And I guess I’ve resigned myself to the fact that the experiment didn’t actually happen, that it’s one of the many false memories I acquired while abusing oxycodone, heroin, and other drugs. My sponsor, Russell, says false memories are common among addicts. He says an addict’s brain will “remember” happy fantasies so we can avoid dwelling on real memories—all the shameful things we did to get high, all the shitty ways we hurt good people who loved us.
“Just listen to the details of your story,” Russell points out. “You arrive on the campus of a prestigious Ivy League university. You’re strung out on kickers and no one cares. You enter a room full of handsome young doctors. Then they stare at your body for fifteen minutes and erupt in a standing ovation! I mean, come on, Quinn! You don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to figure this out!”
And he’s right, obviously. One of the hardest things about recovery is coming to terms with the fact that you can’t trust your brain anymore. In fact, you need to understand that your brain has become your own worst enemy. It will steer you toward bad choices, override logic and common sense, and warp your most cherished memories into impossible fantasies.
But here are some absolute truths:
My name is Mallory Quinn and I am twenty-one years old.
I’ve been in recovery for eighteen months, and I can honestly say I have no desire to use alcohol or drugs.
I have worked the Twelve Steps and I have surrendered my life to my lord and savior Jesus Christ. You won’t see me on street corners handing out Bibles, but I do pray every day that He will help me stay sober, and so far it’s working.
I live in northeast Philadelphia at Safe Harbor, a city-sponsored home for women in advanced stages of recovery. We call it a “three-quarters house” instead of a halfway house because we’ve all proven our sobriety and earned a lot of personal freedoms. We buy our own groceries, cook our own meals, and don’t have a lot of annoying rules.
Mondays through Fridays, I’m a teacher’s aide at Aunt Becky’s Childcare Academy, a mouse-infested rowhome with sixty young scholars ages two to five. I spend a good part of my life changing diapers, dishing out Goldfish crackers, and playing Sesame Street DVDs. After work I’ll go for a run and then attend a meeting, or I’ll just stay in Safe Harbor with my housemates and we’ll all watch Hallmark Channel movies like Sailing into Love or Forever in My Heart. Laugh if you want, but I guarantee you will never turn on a Hallmark Channel movie and see a prostitute snorting lines of white powder. Because I don’t need those images taking up space in my brain.
Russell agreed to sponsor me because I used to be a distance runner and he has a long history of training sprinters. Russell was an assistant coach on Team USA at the 1988 Summer Olympics. Later he led teams at Arkansas and Stanford to NCAA track and field championships. And later still he drove over his next-door neighbor while blitzed on methamphetamine. Russell served five years for involuntary manslaughter and later became an ordained minister. Now he sponsors five or six addicts at a time, most of them washed-up athletes like myself.
Russell inspired me to start training again (he calls it “running to recovery”) and every week he drafts customized workouts for me, alternating long runs and wind sprints along the Schuylkill River with weights and conditioning at the YMCA. Russell is sixty-eight years old with an artificial hip but he still benches two hundred pounds and on weekends he’ll show up to train alongside me, offering pointers and cheering me on. He’s forever reminding me that women runners don’t peak until age thirty-five, that my best years are way ahead of me.
He also encourages me to plan for my future—to make a fresh start in a new environment, far away from old friends and old habits. Which is why he’s arranged a job interview for me with Ted and Caroline Maxwell—friends of his sister who have recently moved to Spring Brook, New Jersey. They’re looking for a nanny to watch their five-year-old son, Teddy.
“They just moved back from Barcelona. The dad works in computers. Or business? Something that pays good, I forget the details. Anyhow, they moved here so Teddy—the kid, not the dad—can start school in the fall. Kindergarten. So they want you to stay through September. But if things work out? Who knows? Maybe they keep you around.”
Russell insists on driving me to the interview. He’s one of these guys who’s always dressed for the gym, even when he’s not working out. Today he’s wearing a black Adidas tracksuit with white racing stripes. We’re in his SUV, driving over the Ben Franklin Bridge in the left lane, passing traffic, and I’m clutching the oh-shit handle and staring at my lap, trying not to freak out. I’m not very good in cars. I travel everywhere by bus and subway, and this is my first time leaving Philadelphia in nearly a year. We’re traveling only ten miles into the suburbs but it feels like I’m blasting off to Mars.
“What’s wrong?” Russell asks.
“Nothing.”
“You’re tense, Quinn. Relax.”
But how can I relax when there’s this enormous BoltBus passing us on the right? It’s like the Titanic on wheels, so close I could reach out my window and touch it. I wait until the bus passes and I can talk without shouting.
“What about the mom?”
“Caroline Maxwell. She’s a doctor at the VA hospital. Where my sister Jeannie works. That’s how I got her name.”
“How much does she know about me?”
He shrugs. “She knows you’ve been clean for eighteen months. She knows you have my highest professional recommendation.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“Don’t worry. I told her your whole story and she’s excited to meet you.” I must look skeptical because Russell keeps pushing: “This woman works with addicts for a living. And her patients are military veterans, I’m talking Navy SEALs, real f’d-up Afghan war trauma. Don’t take this the wrong way, Quinn, but compared to them your history ain’t that scary.”
Some asshole in a Jeep throws a plastic bag out his window and there’s no room to swerve so we hit the bag at sixty miles an hour and there’s a loud POP! of breaking glass. It sounds like a bomb exploding. Russell just reaches for the AC and pushes it two clicks cooler. I stare down at my lap until I hear the engine slowing down, until I feel the gentle curve of the exit ramp.
Spring Brook is one of these small South Jersey hamlets that have been around since the American Revolution. It’s full of old Colonial-and Victorian-style houses with U.S. flags hanging from the front porches. The streets are paved smooth and the sidewalks are immaculate. There’s not a speck of trash anywhere.
We stop at a traffic light and Russell lowers our windows.
“You hear that?” he asks.
“I don’t hear anything.”