Recovery
Bleep, bleep, bleep. Bridget's phone alarm rang. She yawned, rolled over and turned it off. With a stretch, she got up and checked the time. She had overslept but if she hurried she knew she'd be there in plenty of time. The nap set her up with enough energy to make it but somehow she felt worse – horribly sad and lonely inside. She made herself get up. It was just all those hormones. It would pass she kept telling herself. She would feel better soon.
She knew she looked a mess but she couldn't care. She just put her Steinberg's cap over the disaster that was her hair and didn't even bother to change out of her work T-shirt.
By now she was vaguely hungry but she just waved to Sophie, grabbed a couple of crackers and walked on out. She could eat later.
Sophie was curious where Bridget was going that was so important she was eating crackers for dinner so she stepped outside to see. Her question was soon answered. Even though it was New York, it was a small neighborhood. Everyone knew everything about everybody on that block and so Sophie knew exactly what was going on.
Bridget didn't even have to leave the block to get to her destination. The Sister Marion Agnes House, just a few buildings down on 4th Street. She had gotten the address from the Greater New York Region of Narcotics Anonymous help line. It was a closed meeting and a Women's meeting and it couldn't be more convenient to the Deli. She hoped to make this her home group.
Sister Marion Agnes House was an old, tall red brick building. She found the metal stairs that led to Nazereth Housing and rang the bell and when the door opened she found the meeting room.
The meeting was held in a room that looked like it was used for many things including a nursery. Despite the toys scattered around and the cartoon characters on the walls, somehow the made it like every other NA meeting room with strong coffee and uncomfortable metal chairs. Cardboard signs with the twelve steps and twelve traditions of NA hung from the white board at the front. Smaller signs like "Easy does it" and "One day at a time" hung between the bunny rabbits and ducks. Bridget as she filled her cup with water. Caffeine wasn't good for babies.
As Bridget sipped her Styrofoam cup of water, one sign on the wall struck her. "To thine own self be true." The saying was from Hamlet. She remembered that from High School Lit class. Polonius was giving advice to his son. He told his son, above all else to thine own self be true. Don't lie to yourself.
It was a common enough sign at NA meanings but it still left Bridget depressed. She knew how often she had lied to herself over the years and how her lying to herself and others over the last seven months had cost her.
A fat Hispanic woman was passing around printed sheets in plastic sleeves. Bridget knew what she was doing. NA had no exact form and certainly it had no organization but it did seem to have a similar tradition be it Montana or Brooklyn. The woman saw Bridget and turned, looking at her as if she was somehow out of place. "Hi, I'm Garabina. Would you be willing to read?"
"Of course," taking one of the sheets. "I'm Bridget."
"You work at Steinberg's?"
"I just started this week."
It wasn't a big meeting room. There were three round tables, each with eight chairs around them. She found a seat at a table, really just like any other seat but this one was empty. She waved awkwardly to the other women around the table. They were a mixed group, every different age and race. One was a transsexual man who looked like a linebacker in drag. She called herself "Wanda June."
When 7:00 came, Garabina went to the chair at the front and began reading. "Good evening. My name is Garabina and I am an addict. Welcome to the 7:00 Lucky Ladies meeting of Narcotics Anonymous. We meet here every Thursday night at 7:00. Please help me open this meeting with a silent prayer for the addict who is not yet in recovery and then with the Serenity Prayer."
Bridget had truly grown to love those simple words. "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I can not change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference." So many things she wanted so badly were outside of her control. As she said the prayer dozens of times a day as she thought of Andrew and Juliet, she knew it was ultimately up to them and God.
As Bridget's mind went into a thousand directions Garabina of course continued on with chairing the meeting. "NA is a nonprofit fellowship or society of men and women for whom drugs had become a major problem. We are recovering addicts who meet regularly to help each other stay clean. This is a program of complete abstinence from all drugs. There is only one requirement for membership, the desire to stop using. We suggest that you keep an open mind and give yourself a break. Our program is a set of principles written so simply that we can follow them in our daily lives. The most important thing about them is that they work.
We are not interested in what or how much you used or who your connections were, what you have done in the past, how much or how little you have, but only in what you want to do about your problem and how we can help. The newcomer is the most important person at any meeting, because we can only keep what we have by giving it away. We have learned from our group experience that those who keep coming to our meetings regularly stay clean. It is traditional to read from the White booklet of Narcotics Anonymous and I have asked Wanda June to do this."
Wanda June stood and read. She had a deep, baritone voice, almost like a foghorn. She made Andrew sound like a soprano. It would have been funny if the words hadn't been ones that she had learned the hard way were ones she absolutely had to follow. They were from a section of the little white book of NA called how it works. Bridget had read it over and over and heard it read perhaps a hundred times. Some days she felt good when she heard it, like the day she got her one year chip. Some days like today she felt miserably inadequate. Her mind glazed over as Wanda June read the first two sections of How it Works but other parts seared her brain like an accusation. "3. We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him."
Bridget's lips trembled. There was one thing she hadn't even put into her fourth step "searching and fearless moral inventory." Ha, she knew how shallow it really had been. She had ignored it – it wasn't illegal and it wasn't an important or a part of her life then. Yet now she knew it was growing like an ugly cancer on her future of living clean."
"5. We admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs."
There it confronted her again. She knew what she had to do. It wouldn't be easy but she had to.
"8. We made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. We made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others."
How could she ever make amends to Andrew? How could she begin after half a year of almost compulsive lying come to him and everyone she actually cared about and even some she didn't.
"12. Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to addicts, and to practice these principles in all our affairs."
She vaguely heard Garabina say "I have also asked Bridget to read Just for Today" but it took the black woman in the lime green dress next to her elbowing her to get her to stir from her depressed feelings of inadequacy.
It had always been Bridget's favorite reading. "Just for today, my thoughts will be on my recovery, living and enjoying life without the use of drugs.
Just for today, I will have faith in someone in NA who believes in me and wants to help me in my recovery.
Just for today, I will have a program. I will try to follow it to the best of my ability.
Just for today, through NA, I will try to get a better perspective on my life.
Just for today, I will be unafraid. My thoughts will be on my new associations, people who are not using and who have found a new way of life. So long as I follow that way, I have nothing to fear."
Garabina asked if there were any visitors from out of town. Bridget didn't stand. This was home now. Then she asked if anyone needed a chip. She asked for 24 hours, 30 days, 60 days, 90 days or six months of clean time. Then with a grin she asked if there were any NA anniversaries.
The woman next to her in lime green stood and said with a raspy voice "My name is Lateesha and I am an addict and I have four years clean today." The audience clapped enthusiastically as Garabina hugged Lateesha and gave her a four year chip from a Tupperware container.
They passed the collection baskets. Bridget looked at the basket sadly. When she was Mrs. Martin she had always put in a twenty of Andrew's money. She put in a hundred when she received her one year chip. Today she had nothing to give.
"My name is Lateesha and I am an addict. I'm supposed to tell you of how it was before, how I got here and what it's like now. So, I was born in Crack City in Washington Heights. I didn't want to be a junkie. I saw them all around me. My mother, she was a junkie. I didn't want to be like her. She said my daddy was a no good junkie. I don't know. I never met him."
Bridget had noticed that NA meetings were like a family reunion. You met people who you'd never seen before in your life but they think and talk and feel like you. The details were different from Bridget's childhood in Woodlawn in the Bronx but the story was the same. The feeling of deep fear and loneliness Lateesha described, of being in a room full of people and being the only one there was just the same. She spoke of that same feeling of awkwardness, of hating home, hating being around her own addicted family that Bridget had. She spoke of how that drink made her feel like everyone else. She could talk to people and wasn't afraid of everything.
As Lateesha talked of how it all began to go wrong for her, Bridget's mind began to drift back to those first nights where she drank herself to sleep after their mother died and how she found life only seeming normal when she had a couple.
Lateesha had handed her chip to someone as she went up to speak. It had been lovingly passed around the room. It finally was Bridget's turn. Bridget felt it. It was solid bronze and was warm and alive. It had strength and purpose. She knew how she had been clinging onto her chip for dear life lately. Even though hers had the same words on it she read it, front and back. "Self, God, Society, Service" with a roman IV for four on the front and "My gratitude speaks when I care and when I share with others the NA way."
Lateesha spoke of how she had turned to the dope when the drink wasn't enough, just a little weed at parties, just again and then how she had chasing the dragon. When smoking the heroin was too much of a waste she found herself snorting it and then finally shooting it, just a little skin popping. Then all her dreams went dark. She joined those people she said she never would become. She shoplifted. She sold herself and finally turned to dealing to feed her habit. She tried on and off for years to kick it. She tried ibogaine. She was in and out of jail and clinics. She tried methadone. For Bridget, it was that awfulness after Sean died. At first Bridget did anything to get drunk enough to black out and then when the whiskey wasn't enough she moved on to the pills. It was truly a miracle she didn't die from all the things she had combined over the years.
Perhaps God really did want her to be alive. Perhaps he did have a purpose for her to be there. She looked down at her stomach. Maybe he really cares about the little bean. Bridget knew she should have been dead enough times in the last year. She stopped and counted. Bodaway Macawi the night Shaylene was murdered, then the first hitman Catherine sent, then almost being killed twice by the second one, then Catherine herself and then the final confrontation with Macawi. Six times when she should have been dead.
Lateesha had been in and out of NA for years but had continued to relapse. One story caught Bridget's attention because it was so true. "I relapsed again though I don't know if you could really say I relapsed considering I didn't really want to come back after I relapsed a week before. I called my sponsor that morning, basically begging her to tell me what's wrong with me and she said the most wise thing I've ever heard. She said 'Lateesha, we're a group of diseased kids. We try desperately to prove that we're normal. You want to be normal because you want to be able to have a normal relationship with someone. But you keep trying to drink and drug yourself normal. Don't you realize that normal people don't have to use to be normal?'"
Lateesha took a breath from an inhaler. Her voice had been getting raspier and raspier. Giving her story like this was obviously difficult for Lateesha. Then she was able to tell what her life was like now and finish. She had a one bedroom apartment here in Sister Mary Agnes House. She had a job at a market. It wasn't great but it paid for the bills. She had found her Higher Power. Right there in Sister Mary Agnes House, she had found her Higher Power. Best of all, she said she had a two year old boy who never had seen his mother use and never would. She gave the third step as her the topic. "Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him."
The other woman clapped and then gathered around and hugged Lateesha and thanked her. Bridget joined the line. "Your story is so much like mine. Only the little details were changed."
"That's just the way it always is" Lateesha answered.
After a quick trip to the bathroom, she met in group. She wanted to have some of the small chocolate cake was for Lateesha's anniversary but knew she could not hold it down. When it came her time to share, she told the truth. "My name is Bridget and I am an addict. I have been clean for a year now but I wasn't for a very long time. I spent fifteen years in a fog because I was always one substance, or two substances or three. I started with sips of my father's whiskey and beer. I ended up with whatever pills I could snort that would let me black out and temporarily let me leave my fears and self loathing behind. I hated life and wanted to die. I have struggled with the whole God thing. For years, God seemed to be this being who hated me, who cursed me with problems I didn't want and didn't deserve. I didn't pray. I didn't want to attract any more lightning bolts. When I walked into the doors of NA, well I got pushed in. You understand. Each of the steps was hard. I didn't want to admit to myself that I was an addict and that there was nothing I could do to control myself. I didn't want to let anyone or anything else have control over me." She shook her head. "Yet I knew inside that since I had made such a mess out of everything I did that it would take someone bigger and better than me to clean it up."
She paused, looking at her belly. "I have seen so many problems in the last year. Yet all the problems I had right before I started at NA have been resolved. Now I have new ones. My first sponsor told me that the everything will pass away, the good and the bad. Just give it time. Everything around you except your working the program and your relationship with your Higher Power is just today's entertainment. I have seen that in the last year. I have lost everything I thought I had. Money, friends, family. Yet I think I now have myself. And with that I'll pass."
After the meeting, she stopped Lateesha. "I need a sponsor and I feel you're it."
Lateesha shook her head. "Girl, can try but I am no good at the fancy learning. All I can do is tell you what the steps are and tell you when you're not being honest with them."
Bridget smiled. "That's exactly what I need."
They stopped and talked as the other women began to put away the signs and the tables. She got some very good advice from Lateesha about free clinics. Then fate or God put the spot light on what she had to do next. She could not deny it. A priest from the church that was connected to St. Mary Agnes House walked in, waved and began to rack the chairs and move the tables. She followed him, taking one of the chairs as he worked. He was small, about Moe's height, with a broad face and frame and brown skin. He looked so young, even younger than she was. She swallowed and said it. "Father, when can I please make confession?"
"How long has it been, my child?" He spoke with a thick Hispanic accent.
She thought about his question. "About six years, maybe eight." She scratched her head. "I'm not sure exactly."
He pulled out his phone and went through his calendar. "Tomorrow night, at 6:30 at the church. Can you be there?"