Disclaimer: I don't own anything WAT-related, not even a red push pin!
Each of us angels
Summary: Can Danny Taylor ever admit that he needs someone? Danny-centric.
"We are each of us angels with only one wing, and we can only fly by embracing one another." - Titus Lucretius Carus
So sorry it took me several days to update. I hate it when reality rudely interrupts my fantasy:)
On the plus side, I can see the end of this story, and it shouldn't take me long to bring this to conclusion.
Thank you, as usual, to all the generous people who reviewed it. I am thrilled to have heard from all of you!
The large tableau over the central waiting area listed a 1:34 New Jersey Transit, Northeast Corridor, to Trenton as being on time. Danny scanned the crowds frantically. The lady at the information desk told him that the platform for each scheduled train is announced some 10 minutes before the actual departure. Which meant that Danny had about 8 minutes before the announcement to try his luck in the hub of the waiting public occupying the middle of the large hall. After the track would be announced, he decided to just rush there with all the crowds. He was fairly certain of his facts. This particular train was the only 1:34 from Penn Station to go toward or have a connection to Philadelphia.
There was no reason why they should have been here, though. They could have very well chosen to wait it out in any of the dozens of coffee shops, sandwich places, book sellers, or news kiosks dotting the perimeter of the Hall. In fact, it would have made much more sense to listen to the announcements anywhere but in the middle of the waiting area. But there simply wasn't any time for Danny to go and peek into all and every business at the Station.
Danny scanned the crowd in his customary, professional way, picking out shapes and faces that could have been familiar. Afternoon traffic at the Penn Station was not a place to find anyone easily. Hundreds upon hundreds made their mad rush to different New Jersey Transit and Amtrack destinations. Colorful students, determined weekend shoppers, harassed business people, and simply leisurely travelers - they all seemed to have converged here today. Penn Station, on any given day, is a barely-managed chaos of restless humanity.
Danny, perversely, enjoyed train stations. Unlike airports that filled him with dread of an unnatural act of flying, train stations spelled excitement, hope, and discovery. The feeling stemmed from an earlier, happier childhood, when the world was perceived by a very small Danny as stable and full of possibilities. In those days - when father would emerge from his binge drinking, Danny now realized - the Alvarez family would take occasional trips from Hialeah, to Miami, to some destinations, names and locations of which Danny has since forgotten. But the becoming feel and smell of a train station stayed in his mind as a precursor to things that were fun.
Today, though, he didn't relish the station. He hadn't allowed himself to dwell on what he would say when he found her. He couldn't be rational about this. Rational would have meant going home and waiting for her to come back on Monday. Rational would have meant two days of thinking, mulling over every word said, every expression displayed, every feeling unleashed. It meant preparing a beautiful and deeply-reasoned speech that would convince her absolutely to give them a chance. A speech so compelling that it would counteract whatever damage Audrey's mother and Audrey's cornered mind would do to them over the weekend. Yes, that would have been rational. Rational would have meant allowing for the possibility of losing her for good.
And Danny could not do that. He thought with amazement of his last weekend. He couldn't, in all honesty, remember what he did then. There was a gym visit, and, Danny vaguely recalled, some movie on TV. But all of it seemed thousands of years ago, and he simply didn't know if he was capable of living through a weekends such as this ever again.
Five days. He has known her for five days. The idea boggled his mind. And yet, here he was, traversing the crowds, because the alternative was simply unacceptable.
The announcement startled him out of his frantic pacing. Platform 7a. A large portion of the crowd stirred like a suddenly awakened animal: first slowly, unsurely, and then springing into action with speed and power. Danny followed, still looking, still searching. The fact that he didn't find Mrs. Mills or Audrey so far did not discourage him in the least. He was absolutely sure that he will.
One escalator flight down, and Danny followed the flow along the platform, ever watchful: noting faces, hair, clothes. The train was filling up steadily, and still, there was no sign of them. Danny took a deep breath and entered the nearest car.
He made his way past rapidly taken seats, negotiating people stashing their luggage in the overhead storage. He was walking fast, but the train was a weekender - at least 8 cars, and Danny was running out of time.
He heard the warnings, and he felt the train stir, but it didn't bother him. He resolved to buy a ticket from the conductor and continue his search. He would talk to Audrey on the train, and they would come back together from Newark or Elizabeth. Or even Princeton, should it take that long to convince her. But convince her he would. There simply wasn't a question.
The conductor caught up with him in the fifth car, and Danny bought a ticket. One way, since he didn't know from where he'd be returning, and since he hoped - no, resolved - to buy two tickets for the return journey.
He felt strangely elated, gearing up for a fight. Adrenaline carried him through the train at an almost illegal speed.
Danny entered the last car, covered the distance to the very end, and stopped.
She wasn't there. Neither Audrey nor Mrs. Mills were on the train. Danny slid into a nearest seat. He felt suddenly wiped, deflated, all that adrenaline bringing him down with a crash.
Why was he so damn certain she'd be there, he asked himself? Because she mentioned this particular train? For all he knew, they decided to stay in New York until evening. Do some shopping or sight-seeing. Or, more likely, they simply took an earlier train, having nothing more to say, and in no particular mood to dawdle after the events of last night and this morning.
Danny took out his cell phone and dialed. Audrey's cheerful voice informed him that she wasn't available. He remembered with a prickling pain how they giggled when she was setting up the message in his presence, two evenings ago. They tried each to remember what the funniest answering messages they ever heard were.
"How about this one: Hi, this is the refrigerator speaking. The answering machine is at the shop right now and cannot be contacted, but if you leave your name and a message, I will make sure someone will get back to you before everything freezes over!"
"That's nothing! I once got this while following a lead: Greetings. You've reached an S&M Hot Line. All our operators are currently tied up, but if you leave your name, your number, and your bondage preferences, we will get back to you with your punishment!"
She settled on a somewhat flippant: "Hi, I am either asleep, away, or screening. Therefore, you either woke me, have a bad timing, or you're someone I don't feel like speaking to right now. However, if you leave a message, there's a 50/50 chance I'll get back to you."
"Well, that's rude! And long," Danny noted that evening, but with an indulgent smile.
"I know, isn't it cool? I figure: in this day and age, who doesn't know what to do when they get the machine? And if they are unfortunate enough to get one, the least I can do is entertain them with something funny and/or rude!"
Listening to it now, Danny felt like laughing and crying at the same time. Not that he really expected her to be home. He just needed to hear her voice.
She wasn't picking up her cell, either. Danny suspected she turned it off, probably not in the mood to talk to him. What was it people said about letting someone down gently? This was letting him down with a resounding thud.
The train come to a stop. Newark. Danny felt as if he couldn't move. As if he was old all of a sudden. However, sitting there all the way to Trenton had even less of an appeal than getting up and moving. So, Danny stepped out of the car and onto the gray, smoggy platform.
He must have been crazy to ever have liked train stations. They were desolate places, smelly and stained, filled with irritated humanity and no hope at all.
XXXXX
He made it back to Manhattan without noticing the time or surroundings. An automatic pilot kicked in - a good thing, too, because Danny wasn't sure where he was going, or to what purpose. An occasional pang of some residual activity would motivate him to make another call. She wasn't picking up.
He didn't leave any messages. There wasn't a point. She was gone, and when she'd come back on Monday, it wouldn't matter. He would face her. He would try again. Even if the chances of prevailing on her then would be diminished.
He tried to recover some of his earlier fighting spirit. But the depression has settled in and was doing its slow, distractive work. Danny tried to tell himself that at this time last week he didn't even know Audrey, and he was perfectly fine.
It wasn't working. He felt cheated. Bereft. He was given a glimpse of something great. Something, apparently, he wasn't allowed to have. Then why was he shown it at all? One can't miss something one hasn't known. And it was absolutely no use telling himself that he'd be fine no matter what. Or that she'd be back on Monday and that it will be a clean slate. Or that, by that time, he'd emerge from this temporary insanity and will look on the entire thing from a philosophical standpoint.
Danny didn't realize where he was headed until he found himself pulling on the doorknob and entering the building. He came here sometimes. Not often, only when special reinforcements were needed, and, boy were they needed today!
This particular meeting was no different from the one Danny attended near his home, only dissimilarity being that this group met on Saturdays. Danny had set with them a handful of times during those weeks when it was impossible to attend his regular AA, or during the dark periods when he felt he needed this more than twice a week.
Those were not happy instances, even for an AA meeting, and Danny, not unnaturally, preferred the comfort of his own familiar group to the mostly sad associations of this place. But today he was desperate.
He found a seat in the back of the large room. The place wasn't even half-filled: a typical Saturday meeting, when most attenders feel they've been good all week and deserve to do fun things, rather than sit in a stuffy hall full of creaky chairs and ashen faces.
The meeting leader, a tall, slightly gaunt woman in a gray pullover, was standing at the podium equipped with a microphone. That little box often reminded Danny of a pulpit. In fact, when he came to his first ever meeting, the similarity to a church was so overwhelming, he almost left. He stayed only because he truly felt he had nowhere else to go. Not unlike the feeling he was experiencing now.
"We admitted we were powerless over our addiction - that our lives had become unmanageable. . . ."
That first time, this was the easiest part: as if anyone would be caught dead in a room like this - inhaling cigarette smoke and desperation - if they didn't feel they were powerless.
But now Danny thought about the so-called bottom every addict is supposed to reach before attempting recovery. It seemed to him that the pit of addiction was, in fact, a bottomless one: a person could keep falling into it their entire life. How often would one hit a rocky ground, mistaking it for the bottom, planting one's feet on it, and starting to climb back up, only to find out that this was just a cliff in a stone wall of the pit, and that one false step would propel one off of it and back on one's way down, lower.
". . . Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. . . ."
Danny had trouble with this one. His faith in the Power grater than oneself was severely damaged more than once in his life. And not just because of the blows he was dealt. It was hard to submit oneself to a power that seemed to be arbitrary at best. Or, at times, even malicious. Danny's faith was like a tide. It ebbed and flowed erratically. He began losing faith for the first time when he watched them pull his parents' broken bodies out of a totalled car. He lost more of it watching his brother's slow deterioration: needle in his arm and gaping emptiness in his eyes. Father Orlando seemed to have restored some of the faith, but it was in people, like the good Father and a few others, that Danny saw divinity. Not in some mysterious Power that could restore him to sanity, if only it would. . . .
". . . . Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God. . . ."
Turning his will over to something, anything, was a problem back then, because Danny didn't seem to have a will of his own. Everything he attempted in those days had turned out wrong, or hazardous, or damaging. And later he felt adrift for so long that he didn't mind surrendering. It felt strange, however, to promise to give up control, since most addicts had no control to relinquish in the first place. They wouldn't have been here otherwise.
" . . . Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. . . ."
Moral inventory. That one didn't take much work for Danny. He already condemned and sentenced himself for all the sins, real or imagined. It took a long while, though, to exonerate himself of at least some of them, because, as it turned out, moral inventory didn't necessarily mean one had to be found guilty of everything. Sometimes, giving oneself a break was harder than confessing and judging one's failings.
May be that was Audrey's problem. May be she judged herself too harshly, or not enough. Not for the first time this day Danny thought of her as an addict. As someone who had lost control and didn't even realize it.
". . . Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. . . ."
Well, that was something he, at any rate, could do. Danny was always a doer, and it felt like a relief to have something to act upon. Admitting wasn't the issue. Fixing things was.
" . . . Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character. . . . Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings. . . ."
If only it were that simple. To sit there and let a Higher Being do all the work. But it always seemed to Danny like something out of a province of voodoo. A ritualistic approach, if you will. After all, if recognizing your defects and humbly asking for their removal was the same as actually removing them, why was there a constant, daily struggle? A struggle that led people to these meetings in a first place.
". . . Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all. . . ."
A list of persons he had harmed. A list was easy, and the willingness to make amends was there. But the means, in some cases, presented a problem. One can always track down a former college girlfriend or two, who had to put up with a lot of drunken stupidity. And most of the people were generous enough to let it go. But how would one go about making amends to those persons no longer alive? Or how would one get rid of the feeling that the dead were harmed the most? Even if the feeling wasn't rational, or logical, or even altogether legitimate?
". . . Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others. . . ."
And that was the real question, wasn't it? Asking for forgiveness and making amends to those who would have none of it. Or those who didn't feel themselves injured. Or those who no longer cared. Where did one draw a line between the humble and the self-indulgent? And who was to be the judge of whether the amends would, in fact, injure them or others?
Danny stirred in his seat. He would go home, he decided. He would spend the rest of the day and tomorrow throwing everything he had into that conversation he was going to have with Audrey. Because they will have that conversation. Because she came into his life and changed it. Because she owed it to him, and he owed it to her. And, mostly, because he has learned to realize that things unsaid and actions not taken can be just as harmful - if not more so - than those that see the light of day. And because he, of all people, could tell her that making amends for the future, possible, hypothetical evil was a really backward way to go through life. Making sure that no one will get hurt, and nothing will be destroyed, and no hearts will break was not the way to live. He needed to make her understand that.
". . . Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it. . . ."
Promptly admitted it. He could do that. He was good at personal inventories now, and he knew that he was wrong. He was wrong to have let her leave his apartment, too angry and too devastated to fight it out. There was a moment, a fleeting second, an opportunity there, when she looked at him almost pleadingly, as if asking him to change her mind. He should have changed it. Right there and then. But not all was lost, and the promptness was still his. It occurred to Danny that, as an FBI agent, he could easily track down her address in Philadelphia. Not the most ethical thing to do, but sometimes the ends really did justify the means. Danny resolved then and there, that, if she wasn't back on Monday, that would be just what he would do.
". . . Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood God, praying only for knowledge of God's will for us and the power to carry that out. . . ."
He didn't know God's will, and he wasn't very concerned about it. He had to believe that the energy, that resurgence that he felt, that need to go after her, that mad dash through the Penn Station and beyond was, indeed, the will, if not of God as he understood God, then at least of something equally divine. Wasn't love a spiritual entity? When it's real, and strong, and moves one to do things one didn't know oneself capable of? Last weekend Danny would have laughed this off. Last weekend was history. He had the will and, he believed, the power to carry it out.
". . . Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other addicts, and to practice these principles in all our affairs. . . ."
Danny got up and made his exit as quietly as possible, so as not to disturb the meeting in progress. He had a message to carry.
