1
Everybody knows you've got to hit rock bottom before you start getting better. Sara heard it more times than she could count.
Her father: "One of these days, Sara, you're gonna hit rock bottom, and you're gonna realize what a pampered life you've had."
At AA meetings: "Rock bottom is opening your eyes to your stripped apartment and realizing your one-night stand stole everything you had." Or: "Rock bottom is dreaming about cereal and realizing you're chewing on your own vomit." AA meetings had so many answers as to what rock bottom was.
In the months that followed her latest glimpse of Michael Scofield, after she accidentally flirted with his brother at a bar, Sara actively looked for rock bottom. Not so much because she thought if she found it, she could start getting better – but what the hell? Maybe she did. Maybe her life was such a mess that it was just easier to look for ways to get further down that pit instead of contemplating the massive task of climbing her way up.
Anyway, she looked.
She looked for it in double doses of cocaine when a guy offered her some in the bathroom of a bar. She looked for it in a stranger's bed who produced handcuffs, who asked, Do you trust me? When she'd met him half an hour ago down the street, and she didn't even trust him to moan the right name after they started fucking. If he's a psychopath and cuts me in pieces, I hit rock bottom. She was too drunk to wonder exactly how she could get up from something like that, and as he pounded into her, she pictured herself as chopped up limbs trying to crawl their way back to coherence.
After months of efforts, "rock bottom" didn't show its face, and Sara started wondering whether that was because she was already there. Maybe she was like those crazy people, asking where the playground was when they stood right in the middle of it.
She pictured herself, at an AA meeting: "Rock bottom is not knowing that you've hit rock bottom until you realize you're as down as you'll go."
Then, something happened to Sara. Not quite an epiphany. It stretched on for days, a lucidity in the atmosphere, the taste of ash in everything she drank. Until one day, she woke up, brushed her teeth, swallowed a couple mouthfuls of vodka, got in her car and drove herself to rehab.
"I would like to sign in, please," she said.
The people at the reception were all strangers. Though Sara's father had dragged her to AA meetings when she was younger, he couldn't have dragged her to rehab unless she was far beyond needing it.
"Name?"
"Sara Tancredi."
"This is your first time?"
Sara opened her mouth. She was going to answer Yes, when she realized how long it was since she'd done anything for the first time. Drugs, drinks. Nothing tasted fresh anymore.
Until rehab.
Instead of answering, Sara started to laugh. She knew then that this was rock bottom. When her comfort zone was an escalation of drunken horrors, and rehab was her first 'first' in ages.
"Uh – miss?"
"Yeah," Sara said, "sorry."
They pointed her to the waiting room and Sara kept thinking, Now is the moment I screw this up and leave, but she never did. Instead, she filled the form they had given her at the reception and waited, humming Like A Virgin.
2
"You should get a girl, Mike," Lincoln said.
Michael looked away from the road a moment to meet his eyes, to make sure he was serious. Lincoln had crashed at his apartment yesterday night, after losing his keys and drunk-calling him at two in the morning.
"I mean it," Lincoln said.
"I can see that."
"You're thirty years old. You have a good job that pays well."
"So, I should start working on completing the picture, is that it? Find a girl. Next step, have a few children. You think that's what I want?"
Lincoln shrugged. "Heck, what do I know?"
"Yeah." Michael said. "What do you know."
They were silent for a while. Michael tried to look like he was focused on his GPS, though he knew the road to Lincoln's place by heart. Turn left, then go straight until the round-about on West Avenue. Just ten more minutes, and he'd be alone in his car, ready to get to work and rejoice Lincoln hadn't seized the window to talk about 'the girl from the bar'.
But Lincoln was always one who enjoyed defying expectations. "It's not because of that hot chick you disappeared with a couple of months ago?"
"Lincoln, we said –"
"You said you didn't want to talk about it."
"And exactly what about that don't you understand?"
"Nothing, nothing. But I know you, Mike. I'm a mess and a lousy excuse for a brother, but I know you, all the same."
Michael sighed. "Don't talk about yourself like that."
"I saw how worked up you were that night, when we got home."
"You were so drunk, you asked me if I wanted to watch Scooby-Doo on television like when I was five."
"I did? I fucking hate Scooby-Doo."
"So, maybe you were trying to be nice."
"Ah, I see what you're doing here. Trying to change the subject."
"Linc –"
"I just want to say this once, so it's off my chest, then we don't have to talk about it again, ever."
That sounded like a fair deal. Michael nodded, eyes still on the road, hoping this would be brief.
"Look, if what's holding you back is that you think she and I… you know, did anything before you got to the bar –"
"Linc."
"What? I just wanted to make sure you knew we didn't. Not even a kiss. I think. I was really drunk."
"Thank you for putting it out there. Now, can we let it go?"
Michael shook his head. It was so much like his brother to think he was the reason behind everything Michael did.
"So," Lincoln said, "now you can go after her, right?"
"It's more complicated than that."
Lincoln scratched his chin. "She did give me 'complicated' vibes."
"Look, I'd really sooner forget you ever looked at her like someone you wanted to take home."
"Take home? What am I, a choirboy? Why take someone home when you've got a bathroom in the bar?"
"Are you trying to make me toss you out of the car?"
Lincoln laughed. His laughter had always been dangerously contagious, but Michael resisted.
"I'm just trying to talk," Lincoln said. "I mean, clearly she matters, and until I bumped into her in a bar a couple months ago, I didn't know she existed."
"So, you feel cheated?" Michael didn't have the will to hate Lincoln for making this about him. "I'm allowed to keep some things to myself, aren't I?"
"Where did you meet her?"
Michael sighed. "Which time?"
"What?"
"Nothing. Never mind."
Michael kept rolling. In five minutes, he would drop off Lincoln, and he could get on with the rest of his day, go to work, and try to forget what Lincoln's tactless questions had dug up, like the smell of sweet summer days breaking free from the earth.
"You're going to see her again, though?" Lincoln said.
"I'm pretty sure I will."
"Why, d'you keep in touch?"
Michael smiled. He looked like Lincoln did when they were playing blackjack, and Lincoln inexplicably trusted the card he was about to pick would be a good one.
"Right," Lincoln said, a bit more serious.
"Right," Michael repeated. They drove in silence until they reached Lincoln's building.
3
It had been a long time since Sara had really cried. Come to think of it, maybe it dated back to her mother's funeral. As a child, she remembered feeling like the loneliest being on the planet, and hating herself for it. How abominably cliché. Poor little rich kid. Dead mom, indifferent dad. A huge house with everything money could buy but no love, nothing to anchor her to the ground. Her mother's death swept her off the surface of the earth so she was floating into space, off-center, no sun to revolve around. Everyone in the neighborhood sent their condolences. They sent pies, too, because apparently an orphaned girl and a widower couldn't want anything but pie to choke down the bile. "Comfort food," her friends said. She should watch out or she'd get fat, but Sara found no comfort, no taste, even, in the pies that piled up at their doorsteps.
This depressed her. Sara wasn't worried about getting fat, but she was afraid she would find no comfort again in this life.
If her father loved her, she thought, it would be different. But grief had dropped iron gates around the man who had always intimidated her, with his expensive suits and the newspaper always covering his face at the breakfast table.
As she grew older, she found no more comfort in a boyfriend's touch than she had found in her father or a mouthful of pie. She thought, That's it. There are no more palliatives for me to try.
And the first time her bloodstream tasted morphine, she felt so happy, so whole, she cried. No violent sobs that rocked her entire body, but peaceful tears of happiness.
It was only when Sara got clean that she remembered how she used to cry, remembered the drugs were first an anesthetic. How she stifled screams into her pillows at night, like a real pro, when it felt like she would die of this cold, loveless ocean that nothing could pierce through.
The drugs had.
They had pierced through everything that was wrong in Sara's life, and even what was right.
Lately, something new had pierced through them.
Something different from all the things she'd tried before.
"He's not even my type," Sara said in the middle of the night, when she woke up hysterical with sobs or laughter.
Of course, she knew she wasn't putting herself through the most painful thing she'd ever experienced because of the stranger she'd met in the elevator of her father's office, almost a year ago.
He had been the trigger, yes. But getting clean was one of those things you could only do for yourself. As Sara taught her body to live again without the numb bliss of the drugs, she thought she might as well have been teaching her lungs to live without oxygen. Everything was painful without morphine. Not in the sense that she craved it so much it hurt, but physical pain like she'd never dreamed possible. The sheets that brushed against her skin were sandpaper, the shower spray was acid, and under all that pain Sara felt like she was melting, her skin burning clean off her flesh. Who knew what would emerge under the smoldering remains of her shed self?
Not a new, clean, pain-free Sara. Instead, she began to recognize the lonely teenage girl she had been before all this. Her old fears in her chest. Her immense ocean of loneliness.
Yes. In the months she spent in rehab, Sara cried as she hadn't cried in a long, long time.
Little by little, the pain decreased, and Sara felt like she had awakened from a very long dream. Details about the place she was in came into focus. The other patients became people she could talk to, not silent witnesses to her screaming agony. She started making conversation with them and with the staff, because it tamed those dark waters she swam in for a little while. Soon, she tasted things again. The food was bad, and it brought no more comfort than it used to, but it was real. She rediscovered the joys of unmedicated life as she had discovered the bliss of morphine. How fast her brain could work without drugs in her system. How clear and simple the sight of a sunset, a fresh gust of wind on her face.
In the two months that Sara stayed at the rehab center, she was a newborn child who finally learned to quiet the raw sobs of babyhood and watched the world from a distance, before she could become part of it again.
Her father didn't visit but wrote her a letter, when he learned where she was. It was concise and disillusioned. He applauded the decision – she could only picture a limp applause at the end of a passable show – but wished she had warned him beforehand so he could take care of all the details, meaning money. His lack of enthusiasm was fair, she supposed. When you've been a mess for so long, people start to forget you've ever been anything else and that you could change, even if you wanted to.
When it was time to check herself out, one of the patients Sara had befriended gave an apologetic squeeze on her shoulder. "You know, it's okay if you don't make it the first time. I mean you shouldn't be too hard on yourself. Plenty of us relapse, come back here, and try again. That's just life."
"Right," Sara said. Part of her felt absolutely sure the warning wouldn't apply to her. But she didn't want to hurt the girl's feelings, so she said, "Thanks."
Sara walked out of the center, hands in her pockets. She hadn't brought anything with her. Part of her had thought rehab was like death, a black hole she would disappear in. It would have been absurd to bring a book to keep her company. Since she didn't need to carry any luggage, she didn't take a cab back to town but walked, instead, for as long as she could bear it.
Chicago was different from how it had been in the haze of addiction. It smelled of wintery coolness, roasted chestnuts, a whiff of warm bread when she walked past a baker's shop.
When her feet were sore, her cheeks glowing red from the cold, Sara stepped into a coffee shop and bought a huge cup she didn't drink until she had warmed her hands around it.
Sara wasn't a child anymore, but she was learning.
Life is little things.
Life is all the time, one second at a time.
4
Nights were no longer the nightmare they had been before rehab. No more haze when she woke up, wondering whose bed she was in. No more sleepless nights wondering just how deeper the hole could get. Sara didn't sleep much more than she used to, but she was more quiet, less afraid. To battle the midnight-blackness of loneliness, you must learn to be at ease with yourself.
She wasn't always alone. Apparently, the neighbor's cat had missed her while she was in rehab. He may well be the only one who had. Sara gave him some milk – unskimmed, which she bought especially for him – and sometimes, he slept curled against her stomach under the covers. Sliding her fingers through his doughy fur made Sara feel calm. Now that she'd put some distance between herself and addiction, the extremes she used to go to seemed even greater. She'd dodged a bullet, as some would say.
For some reason, the image made her think about Michael Scofield.
Because he dodged a bullet, she thought, with me.
Sara had been like a bullet, unstoppable in her deadly track, hurting everything she touched. But that was a little unfair, because meeting Michael had been like that for her, too –
BANG.
Distracting Sara from her love affair with death and destruction.
Maybe she should feel regret, looking back on it. But there was none. Only a quiet sense of waiting. Like in a book, when you wait for all the threads to come together. Never mind that things seem a mess, that no solution seems forthcoming. The wires will cross. They just will.
Sara had no means of contacting Michael. Long ago, he had given her his phone number, but Sara's phone had been lost or broken. She couldn't remember which. When you party hard, phones get lost all the time. Sara couldn't remember how many had cracked against the pavement, slipping from her hand, or fallen into a pool of water, floating like dead fish while the party dragged her onward.
It was true that Michael had driven Sara to his place, and she should have been able to find it again. But though there were things about this night Sara would never forget, Michael's home address wasn't one of them. The feel of Michael's body inside her, the kisses that melted like sugar against her tongue – that was clear enough. How the pleasure had been ever more intense because she could feel it fading, even as it was happening, filling her eyes with water.
But the place where Michael had driven her? The turns he'd taken on the road, even what his building looked like? Well. Drugs weren't exactly known to stimulate memory. It was more than that, though. Like everything about where Michael lived had faded into a black hole. Like she'd deliberately taught herself to forget it, shoving it down the drain of oblivion, knowing that if she didn't, eventually –
I'd come back to him.
Yet Sara didn't feel regret. She felt at peace, stroking the fur of her neighbor's cat, focusing on the breath that went in and out of her body.
They had met so many times when she wasn't ready, in the worst circumstances. Now that she was –
The wires will cross.
Their roads would surely meet.