I do not own "Warrior." It belongs to director Gavin O'Connor. Nor do I own or advertise Alcoholics Anonymous. I do, however, own Jane. As someone who also started developing an addiction at an early age, I don't think Jane's a completely unreal or unrealistic character, nor a cliché. But if you disagree, let me know.

Chapter Three: Enter a Girl

Fast forward to two and a half months and things are progressing and improving in some ways. In others, they're the same as they've ever been.

Tommy wonders why his brother and father keep trying to patch things up. You've made your goddamn bed, he thinks as Paddy heads out to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and slowly but surely makes his way through the works of Charles Dickens, or thinks about his brother, who made his retirement speech a week after Sparta and has gone back to being Mr. Rogers. Lie in it. It's like they're sleepwalking or under some kind of delusion that they're still a family. Brendan has his new family, his wife and daughters; Paddy has church and twelve-step meetings that take place, from what he's heard, in the basements of churches. He had a kind of family in the Marines: a large group of foster brothers.

Part of him really would like to patch things up with Brendan, at least, and meet him halfway, but then again, they don't relate. Not really. They came from the same broken home, they have the same parents, but it ends there, as far as he's been able to tell.

Did you serve in the Marines?

No, I didn't serve in the Marines.

Then you're not my brother.

But he can't go back to the Marines. It would be a lie to say he's part of that family anymore. As far as he's concerned, he doesn't deserve to be a part of that family anymore. Right now he's in limbo; he's at the tail end of healing his shoulder; he's in the middle of getting back into shape, he's starting a normal, eight-to-ten hour-a-day job with people who seem to feel the need to kiss his ass, when on the first day he joined those same people were probably taking bets on how long it would take Mad Dog Grimes to knock him unconscious. He doesn't know who the hell he is outside of the military, outside of fighting, and the thought scares the shit out of him. All he can focus on is working, working out, going to PT sessions, easing his way into doing things that were impossible earlier: push-ups (on his knees at first, girly-style), weight-lifting (always fairly light weights), punching bags. He's lost quite a bit of strength and it's infuriating, especially when he's surrounded by people who months ago revered him as some kind of god. He hates watching everyone else spar and hates answering questions from people who recognize him from TV and all want to know what it felt like having his brother dislocate his shoulder, how it felt ripping the door off a tank, how it felt to knock out the same guy whose ass he kicked months earlier for a second time in the fastest knockout in Sparta's history, how it felt being a "War Hero" of all fucking things. So mostly he works in making sure everything's in stock. It feels like those first two weeks all over again, except with more physical freedom.

David is becoming the only person who's not the least bit intimidated by his now constantly-foul mood and tells him over and over not to push past the limits of whatever upper-body exercise he can do without risking injury.

"You're treading some dangerous waters, Tommy," David tells him. "You are pushing yourself to the absolute limit of what is safe. Just doing push-ups from the knees up is hard enough. Wait a little while to do them in plank position."

"On-the-knees push-ups are for old women."

"You fuck up your shoulder again and you'll be back to square one with that cast. That, I can guarantee."

Except in the desk-drawer in his old room he keeps a letter Brendan forwarded to him from El Paso.

Dear Tommy,

Don't be sorry. That you went through all that for us, for Manny, for me, for the kids, is the greatest thing anyone has ever done for us.

Thank you so much. I just hope that you're healing okay. And I hope you find your way.

-Pilar

F

Seventy-nine days sober, and with the help of his sponsor, Sid, Paddy is starting to feel better about focusing more on getting sober instead of trying to achieve the impossible and reconcile with Tommy. His son's a big boy now. If he needs help he'll ask for it, like he did many long months ago.

"Look, he's obviously conflicted with guilt of his own," Sid tells him over the phone when Paddy gets a craving that threatens to turn him inside out if he doesn't hop into the car, drive to the liquor store, and buy as many bottles of whiskey as his trunk will hold and does what he can't believe he never did before and calls someone. "You need to understand, he's spent more than half his life away from you and fighting in Iraq includes quite a bit of trauma all on its own. Trust me, as a veteran of the Gulf War, I can testify. Detach yourself."

"I have detached myself," Paddy protests.

"Patrick, you just called me at eleven at night wanting to relapse and the first person you mentioned was Tommy. No, you haven't."

E

After that day, Brendan makes a promise to himself.

He'll wait. He's not going to beg for his brother's company if it means any more meetings like that. He wrote the check, included it with the letter he didn't read, and he sent it off. In return he received two short letters, one for him and one to forward to Tommy, and one that he didn't read either. The one addressed to him was one line: Thank you for your charity. You must really love your brother.

In retrospect he thinks it was stupid to believe things could heal that quickly, with someone who casts blame on everyone, including himself. Or did he ever really think that?

You must really love your brother. He does. He still dreams about that fight, hears the breaking and wakes up in a cold sweat. But right now that's not enough. Right now it's better just to leave him alone. He has his job back and teaching high school physics full-time while raising two young girls is all he can handle right now.

A

Paddy's never been to the meeting on Jefferson Street and winces when he opens the door and sees everyone already sitting down. The clock on the back wall kindly informs him that he's five minutes late.

Heads turn his way and he sees a few embarrassed, empathetic little smiles and a couple of empty seats. He takes the one closest to the door.

The leader is a man who bears a vague resemblance to George Carlin—the mellow, pot-smoking, "Seven Words You Can't Say on Television"-era Carlin, and with the same benign presence. "Today we have someone speaking. Jane," he nods to a young woman sitting beside him, "who will start off the discussion. Jane, you have the floor for ten minutes."

The woman, the girl, really, smiles at the man as she nurses a Styrofoam cup of tea in her almost trembling hands. She couldn't be a day over twenty-five and could be as young as twenty, barely or not even old enough to drink legally. She has these big, wide-set dark eyes that, as she peers nervously around the group, make her look just a little like a wounded bird or a lost puppy, one who bites her lip. She's just a girl. But then again, she's not. Because she is here. And there is something in her presence that strikes him as ageless. He's seen her at a few meetings here and there, where until nearly three months ago he was often one of the more vocal people. He can't remember her speaking at any of them. It's good to know she has a voice.

She clears her throat and her voice starts off high—out of anxiety, he's sure—when she says, "Okay. Hello. My name is Jane—"

"Hi, Jane," the others in the room say in unison.
She smiles a little. "I apologize in advance. I'm not a good public speaker at all, but I'll try my best. I'm an alcoholic and drug user. Today I have been clean and sober for one year."

There's applause and a few whistles from throughout the circle. A year is a big deal.

"I recently turned twenty-one," Jane continues, "and it struck me as kind of funny that everyone else, you know, marks their twenty-first birthday by celebrating buying liquor, going to bars, painting the town red and whatnot, and I ended up going to three different meetings on my birthday. Then again, I started really early. I was fourteen. Call it a natural talent." There's tentative laughter. It doesn't seem to bother her in the slightest. In fact, she runs with it, saying, "Hey, there are prodigies in sports, math, art. I was a child drinking prodigy." There's a little more laughter.

She then takes a sip of tea and sets the cup down. "And, um, I've thought about each step and what it meant for me in this year, and one year isn't a long time in the grand scheme of things, but so far it's the first step that I think about the most. Actually admitting that I'm an alcoholic. I think part of being an addict is learning to look the other way in one's own life, because the truth is just standing right there, so hard not to see, but it's too terrible to acknowledge. When I was drinking, I found a way to question things that had such obvious answers. Things like, 'Is it bad that it's a school morning and I'm so hung-over that I just threw up in the shower?'" She winces. "Nice image, I know. Things like," she swallows hard. She voice seems to close up, but she forces the next words out with such shame, and quiet though everyone can hear exactly what it is, "asking myself, 'Is it…" the next word comes out in nearly a whisper, "rape… if I was too drunk to say no?'"

Paddy sees it. He sees the pain, the moments a person will try so hard to push to the back of his mind, only to have to force it out into the open. He closes his eyes for a moment. The things he wishes he could forget. But he has to remember. The things that make him want to drink are the ones that if he wants to stay sober must admit them.

"I felt more and more powerless. Against the people who waited until I was well past drunk to do things to me, against the depression, the cycle of drinking and getting sick, trying to make myself feel better with weed and doing it all over again, all through high school. I find it amazing that I was able to graduate high school, even though I was held back a year. I knew the drinking was a real issue. I knew that I was screwed up somehow—there was no way even I could have denied that. But I didn't know what else to do other than try and show up for school often enough to pass each grade and get wasted enough to forget that I had a problem.

"The first time I got help was when I was nineteen." Jane clears her throat. "After I tried to take my life. With pills. It was the summer I graduated high school and had no idea what to do with my life. All my friends…if they were friends…were going to college. I had nothing, nothing, to look forward to. No one who would care if I left the face of the earth. You know, that's one thing that was really hard to grasp when I first started getting sober. Realizing and admitting not just that I am an alcoholic, but that I'm also a worthwhile person who deserves to be alive and happy. It seemed impossible that I could be both.

"Anyway, I was found in just enough time that I got rushed to the hospital, and from there I was sent to a psychiatric ward for several months. It was there that I met people who talked to me about alcoholism. I thought I was way too young for that. For the name, I mean. My habits fit the description but I wasn't even old enough to drink. Not legally, anyway, so the word 'alcoholic' just, um, seemed wrong. But at the same time I knew it was somehow right. An alcoholic doesn't call it quits just because she's getting nauseous or feeling a loss of control or coordination. An alcoholic doesn't just drink to take the edge off, or to be social, or just to enjoy a drink. An alcoholic drinks to try to find an escape. A break from reality. At least I did. And I started to realize this more and more because while in that psychiatric ward, I couldn't drink. It was hell. I had my first taste of having to deal with my emotions and speaking in groups instead of drinking back all the anger I felt. And there was a lot of anger. And depression, but that wasn't new. I got diagnosed with that as well.

"I was released just after my twentieth birthday. And first thing I did, after getting a diagnostic telling me I was an alcoholic, was get drunk. I crashed with a couple of people from high school and wouldn't you know it I wound up in the hospital again to have my stomach pumped. Again. It was binge-drinking after several months of not being allowed to drink, and I got a mild case of alcohol poisoning." She scoffs a little. "Like alcohol poisoning could actually be mild.

"My mother sent me to a rehab center in Pittsburgh—I'd lived in D.C. all my life, and living hundreds of miles away seemed like a good idea for us all. It's the greatest thing she's ever done for me. I was terrified at first, waiting for people to tell me things like, 'Oh, you have no self-control.' Or: 'You have an alcohol demon and need to be exorcised.'" People laugh but she goes on. "Instead people told me, 'What you have isn't your fault. Your brain happens to be wired differently. There's something in your brain chemistry that reacts to alcohol, and self-control has nothing to do with it. It's not a punishment or a demon.'" She gives kind of a laugh. "What a relief that was. No judgment of any kind. Just a bunch of other people who struggled constantly with the urge to drink or to use, people who hated themselves, who didn't know what their place was, people trying to survive. I'd been in circle discussions at that psychiatric ward, but this was different. We came from separate backgrounds but we all shared that one thing: we were all addicts.

"I stayed in Pittsburgh after being released. It just seemed like the logical thing to do if I wanted to be sober and start a new chapter in my life. It was my equivalent of going away to college, I guess. I'm glad I did. It's at meetings in Pittsburgh where I found my sponsor, Dionne," she nods to a middle-aged, heavy-set Black woman sitting near her and smiles. The woman smiles back. "And she's helped me through the darkest times, been there for me. Everyone I've shared with, been to meetings with, has, does, and will continue to play a vital part in my sobriety. We help each other get sober, and it goes around to help us. Sharing that pain, sharing the things we don't really want to share because we're programmed to believe that drinking is a best-kept-secret, is what helps us stay dry." She looks over at the man beside her and the clock. "And thank you, everyone today, for letting me share."

"Thanks for sharing."