“You told me pain is good,” said Rachel. “You told me that pain is growth.”
“I also told you that it was okay to make Debbie Harry your higher power. Just go to sleep,” said Athena. “Tomorrow is a whole new day.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” muttered Rachel.
Athena had been astounded at how quickly Rachel moved through the steps; she had never sponsored someone so determined to get right with God, even though Rachel really only believed in Debbie Harry. There were twelve steps, and Rachel clawed desperately through each one; she wrote letters of amends to her mother and Red Mabel, to her father and several of her classmates from high school. All but one of the letters had been returned.
Rachel threw the phone against a pile of clothes, all Quinn--inappropriate, especially her vintage Halston palazzo pants. She loved those pants, but feared that magpies or marmots would be attracted to the sparkle, drop down from the sky or emerge from the forest to gnaw at her legs.
She navigated the sinkhole in the middle of the living room. The carpet was softly cratered where the floor had given in. The list of repairs was enormous, daunting: the house seemed to be surrendering to gravity, with the left end sinking faster than the right. A tube of lipstick rolled when she placed it on the kitchen counter. Rachel felt seasick when she walked from one end of the house to the other.
Rachel made do with washcloth baths, as the tiny bathroom contained a bathtub that had fallen through the subflooring. It rested three feet down from the rest of the linoleum, in the dirt and gravel underneath the trailer. Rachel had thrown the rest of her city clothes into this pit, along with the strange clothes she had found in her father’s closet. Her father owned a collection of polyester-blend suit jackets and matching pants, a pile of neckties. This was strange to her—in her few encounters with her father, it seemed that he only accessorized with sap from pine trees. She lowered herself to the toilet to pee, and it was cold and drafty in the bathroom, torturous to touch her buttocks to the icy toilet seat. At least the toilet worked. Her father had not completely descended into the depths of madness. He had just fallen into squalor, and sometimes through the floor.
The bedroom was where Rachel had spent most of her time since returning home, crying and making to-do lists. Her bed was the only thing she had brought with her, the only piece of furniture she had any kinship with.
Rachel had bought the bed after being sober for two months. It was a gift she had given herself. The last two years of her drinking, Rachel had become a bed wetter. She was a beer drunk, always had been, and it was unsurprising that she wet the bed, because during the last year of her drinking, she was consuming sixteen cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon per night.
Eventually, she bought a stack of blue tarps to sleep on. She wasn’t a complete degenerate—every morning, she would remove the tarp and put it in the bathtub, turn on the shower to rinse away the urine, and drape it over the couch in her living room to dry. She threw the used tarp in the Dumpster every Sunday night, before the garbagemen came, replaced it with a new one. Rachel could still recall the crackle of waking up in the morning, the sound of her naked body on the tarp, the suction and the stickiness as she pulled herself free. It was this crackle that got her sober, made her realize that this was not normal behavior, that most people didn’t piss the bed every night. Her moment of clarity about the tarps came on a Monday morning, and she called the AA number, her hands shaking so badly she had to redial several times. She had not realized that her entire back and buttocks had become slightly stained, bluish, until Athena pointed it out on a day trip to the natural hot springs, two weeks into her sobriety.
Rachel deserved this bed. She had earned this bed, and now she owned fitted sheets and a duvet. She clung to this bed like she clung to her sobriety—it was a white-knuckled sort of ownership. Now, overwhelmed, Rachel turned on the bedroom light and threw herself onto the bed. There would never be enough paper for her new to-do list. The town was a creature unto itself, wild and woolly. The people who lived there were unpredictable and could never be crossed off, conquered. Rachel could not organize and proceed methodically—she had learned in sobriety that people, places, and things were impossible to control. The world never did what you wanted. She buried her face in the pillow and recited every prayer she had learned over the past year, silently and desperately. The Fourth-Step Prayer, the Seventh-Step Prayer, the Serenity Prayer. She asked for strength to continue, and for a new bathtub. Then she felt bad for asking for things, so she tried to name all the things she was grateful for, and it was a short list, so she repeated it over and over until she finally fell asleep.
* * *