Chapter 11: Beating it's never easy
June flew by and before I knew it August was there, and I swear when I blinked it was September. It had been three months since I had heard from Carter and well I had talked to Doug back in June, but I had a feeling that he was just busy with the girls and work. Family man now didn't leave much time for friends when they were little and well not only did they have one but two that were little.
And I did get some pictures of the girls from him around the middle of August. He and Carol had taken them down for pictures. It was hard to believe that they would soon be a year old. The year had just seemed to have gotten away from me soon it would be another year.
I had just got a coke and was settling down into my favorite chair to work on a journal article that I had started reading the night before but had fallen asleep while making a very weak attempt to get it read when the phone rang.
"Hello."
"Hey Anna."
"Hey John, I was just thinking about you."
"What's up?"
"Not much right now, just working on getting some of this reading done, it tends to pile up after you don't touch it for a few weeks." I say letting out a soft laugh, "how are you doing?"
"I'm okay." He says but I can tell that there's something different in the tone of his voice.
"Just okay, that doesn't sound too promising. What's wrong?"
"Oh nothing is wrong right now." He says to me.
"Really?" I say back to him, "there's got to be something honestly you don't sound that great right now."
"Oh."
"Hey you know that you can talk to me about anything right?" I say trying to be a good friend, "I'm home alone right now too." Not that Max would ever sit there and listen in on a phone conversation but if it was something that he didn't want anyone else to know about I wanted him to know that it would be okay to talk right now.
"Yeah I know." He says, there's this flatness to his voice that I can't make heads or tails of over the phone, but I knew that if I had been standing right there that I would have been able to easily read the look on his face.
I'm not sure what to say to him, the tone of his voice is throwing me off. I needed to say something cause I didn't want silence that might scare him, "works been crazy here."
"Has it, must be the warm weather. Did you get new students?"
"Yeah we got some new ones, so far they aren't too bad but then they are still pretty fresh and new." I say back to him.
"There's new ones at County too. I don't know them that well." I hear him say to me. "uh I just got back from Atlanta."
"Atlanta, you finally took a vacation." I say, "that's good, did you have a good time."
There's quietness now as I wait for him to answer me. "I wasn't there on vacation."
I'm trying to think if there had been any conferences in Atlanta but I was drawing a blank to what had all been going on in the medical community. "Oh." I say simply back to him waiting for him to go on, there had to have been a reason that he had been there.
John slowly started to finally tell me everything that had happened since we had talked last, how bad things got, how he almost lost everything that he had been working for. Slowly but surely he told me about his addiction and how they finally were able to get him to go down to Atlanta for rehab. He then started to tell me how he had been going to AA meetings and about Abby being his sponsor. He also told me about all the restrictions that Kerry had put on him.
I tried to reassure him that they were just being careful cause they cared about him as a friend. That she wasn't doing it as some form of punishment and that coming back and jumping into everything as if he had never left, wouldn't be good for him. I felt bad that he had to go through all of it but I also knew that it was a good thing that he had such good friends as Mark and Kerry to keep him safe.
We must have sat on the phone for a good four hours, talking about the steps that he would have to take as part of AA and that it was just the start of what would be a long road for him but that I knew that he had the strength to get through all of it. He still had Mark and Kerry and Abby now to keep an eye on him, to help him when temptation called knocking on his door, the temptation would never go away but he needed to know that there were people that he could rely on and though I was several hours away that I was still someone that he could call if he ever needed me.