Best Kept Secret: A Novel

In the middle of February, when I first arrived at Promises Treatment Center—fresh from the psych ward and detox—I was surprised to find a three-story, nondescript steel gray Colonial-style house in an area of Bellevue where many homes have been converted into businesses. Promises’ aged cedar siding was cracked in a few spots and the landscaping consisted of a yellow-lined parking lot and several groupings of slightly bent rhododendron bushes. The building wasn’t broken down, but its weathered appearance did little to foster a sense of confidence in the establishment’s healing capabilities. I voiced as much to Jess, who drove me there.

“It looks fine,” she said. “And it’s the only one your insurance completely covers.” Her voice was uncharacteristically thin. It practically wavered. She was tired. Exhausted of me, I supposed, of the situation. She was the one who called all the available treatment facilities while I was on suicide watch on the psych ward. She was the one who agreed with Dr. Fisher that I should spend twenty-eight days as an in-patient at Promises. She further committed me to another six months of continuing care, during which time I would attend a weekly group session, as well as an individual meeting with a counselor twice a month. Jess picked up my mail and fielded furious calls from Martin. She relayed the details of what was going on with me to my mother. I still hoped I might wake up any moment from this nightmare. That none of this was real. Maybe I was playing a part—the alcohol-numbed woman stumbling her way into treatment. I could be a goddamn Lifetime movie of the week.

“Where’s the Zen garden?” I asked. “I imagined sitting in a Zen garden while I pondered the recesses of my fucked-up soul.” Sarcasm became a tic for me when I got nervous—worse than an eye twitch and just as impossible to control.

Jess sighed. “You can ponder your fucked-up soul among the rhododendrons.”

“I don’t know,” I mused. “I was hoping for a little pizzazz. A welcome wagon of a massage therapist and personal dietician, at least.”

“Let’s go,” Jess said. I went, unable to put off the inevitable.

I soon learned that Promises’ understated front was for discretion’s sake; rare is the woman who wants to be walking into an establishment which boldly proclaimed FORMERLY DRUNK WOMEN ENTER HERE! in neon lights. It was designed so she could be going in to see a dentist or get a massage. No one would be the wiser.

But now, two months later on the Monday morning after I’d dropped off Charlie with Martin, I arrived for my continuing care group session with Andi and three other formerly drunk women already a little irritated, so the vision of Promises’ decidedly dowdy exterior serves only to irk me further. It is a drizzly, cold day—Lake Washington a perfect gray reflection of the angry, cloud-laden sky. Traffic had been a bitch over the 520 bridge; wet roads render a large portion of Seattleites into inattentive idiots behind the wheel. You’d think the opposite would be true. You’d think they’d be used to it, seasoned veterans made into stronger, better drivers in the rain. You’d think this, yes. But you’d be wrong.

“Hey,” I say to Promises’ daytime receptionist, Lily, as I walk in through the front door.

Lily looks up from her flat-screen computer. Her station is a delicate, scrolled maple desk in the entryway to what I assume was originally a living room, but now serves as a waiting area. It’s painted a peaceful sage green and filled with three overstuffed couches and muted lighting. Tinkling piano music plays softly in the background and a tabletop river stone fountain sits over in the corner of the room. I imagine the space saying, “Hello, welcome! Please, sit comfortably while you prepare to visit your drug- and/or alcohol-addled loved one. . . .”

Lily is a young slip of a girl, twenty-one if she is a day, with a mass of blond poodle curls and watery, pale blue eyes. “Hi, Cadence,” she says, blinking rapidly. She is polite, well-trained.

“Anyone else here yet?”

She nods, her curls bouncing like a clown’s wig. “Serena’s here, and Madeline. A new gal, too. She’s meeting with Andi before group starts.”

“Thanks.” I step down a long, narrow hallway, past the poster-covered walls. “Let Go and Let God” one proclaims; “One Day at a Time” says another. I grimace a bit, still, at these phrases. They seem trite, as though a mess as complicated as my life could possibly be rebuilt through tiny, ineffectual sentence structures. To my left is the large, sunny yellow kitchen and dining area; to my right, behind the waiting area, the four small offices shared by the staff. At the end of the hall is a stairway leading to the third floor, where the twenty or so in-patient residents stay, grouped together in five rooms sleeping four each, complete with knotty pine bunk beds and two large community bathrooms.

I head downstairs to the group rooms and enter quietly.

“One day at a time, my sweet brown ass!” I hear Serena exclaim as I step through the door. She snorts. “More like one breath!” She is a short, pretty black woman with an intricate configuration of dark, shoulder-length braids hanging in shiny, thin ropes about her face, swinging around like jungle vines. She appears slightly coltish beneath her cinnamon skin, all joints and smooth muscles, with a complexion marred by nothing but disappointment in how her life has worked out so far. She manages a small downtown cafe that provides the kind of insurance that covers her trips to treatment. This one will stick, she is convinced. It has to. She looks up, sees me, dark eyes bright, and gives me a huge, white-toothed smile. “Hey, girl!”

“Hey.” I smile, move to sit in the chair over by the window, facing the door. I drop my purse to the floor, release a deep sigh. I glance at Madeline. “Hey.”

“Hi.” Madeline smiles at me, a small movement, barely an upturned lip. She is a whisper of a person, the pretty, platinum blond, stay-at-home wife of a high-powered defense attorney. Her haircut probably cost more than my entire outfit. Her parents were both raging socialite booze hounds, so part of me wonders if by being here, she is simply keeping up a family tradition, her drunkenness an act born out of sheer boredom—rehab as recreation. She came to Promises about three weeks after I did, and joined the aftercare group just last week. Her fragility makes me feel awkward, like one wrong move, one swift step in the wrong direction, would crush her.

Serena screws up her lips, pushing them toward her nose. “What’s wrong with you?”

I shrug. “Nothing. Traffic, I guess. Bunch of morons out there.”

“No shit.” She pauses. “Hey, now. Wait. I’m one of those morons!” She cackles at her own joke, then jumps up, stepping over to stand in front of me. She holds out her arms, bending the tips of her fingers back at herself, beckoning. “Get up.”

I look at her warily.

She throws her head to her shoulder and lets loose an exaggerated sigh. “Get up.” As the resident recovery veteran, Serena has taken it upon herself to guide me through the appropriate behaviors. You come to a group session, you let people hug you. They do this at AA meetings, too. Being hugged by strangers is one of the things I have had to force myself to learn to tolerate, like a child forced to swallow broccoli. I stand and let Serena embrace me, knowing that, much like with my sister, it’s useless to argue with her. She’d likely kick my ass if I don’t acquiesce. She pats my back hard with open palms, squeezes me tight. “There. That better?”

I sit back down. “Yes.” I smile again, realizing this is a little bit true. Her hug was fierce—there is no denying the loving intent behind it.

Serena moves to stand in front of Madeline, who looks up at her like a mouse trapped by a cat. “How about you, lady? You need another?”

Madeline blinks, gives her head a quick shake. “No, thank you. I’m still a little bruised from the first one.”

Serena’s head snaps back with her laughter. “Damn, girl. You’d never know you’ve got a mouth on you from the way you look.” She plops back down in her seat.

Madeline leans forward a bit, adjusting her crisp, white linen blouse over her jeans. “How do I look, exactly?”

“Like if I shoved coal up your ass, you’d turn around and squeeze out diamonds.” She laughs again at the look of horror on Madeline’s face. “What? You need to relax, girl, I’m serious. You’re gonna be back poppin’ those happy pills and sucking down classy white wine spritzers like Kool-Aid before you know it if you don’t start laughin’ at your damn self. “

“And you’ve done so well, this being your fourth time here,” Madeline says beneath her breath, but loud enough for Serena to hear.

To her credit, Serena hoots at this statement. “There’s that mouth, again. You are definitely one of us.”

Andi chooses this moment to swish into the room. She is wearing one of her trademark broomstick skirts, this one a slightly metallic, coppery brown, paired with a chunky, black cowl-neck sweater. She is a heavy woman and her fleshy exterior somehow looks inviting, like something soft and wonderful you’d want to curl up with beneath a blanket. She smells of lavender and her dark hair is pulled into a simple ponytail at the base of her neck, showing off dangling dreamcatcher earrings against her warm brown skin. “Hello, ladies,” she says, moving to the side in order to lead another woman in the room after her. “I’d like you to meet Kristin. She’ll be joining our group.”

Kristin gives a small wave. She is tall, five ten or so, and her body belongs on a runway, not in the basement of a treatment center. Her pale face is all angles, framed by wispy brown strands of hair falling from what I imagine was meant to be a French twist. She might be pretty, but it’s difficult to tell; her eyes are puffy and red-rimmed, as though she recently cried her makeup away. She stands with one arm across her belly, clutching her opposite elbow with a bony hand.

We all greet her and watch as she scans for a place to sit. She settles in a chair farthest from me, closest to the door, as though she is contemplating making a run for it. Andi drops into her seat next to me.

“How is everyone?” she asks. “How was your weekend?”

“Where’s Laura?” I ask, ignoring her question. “She’s usually the first one here.” I am anxious to see her after our conversation yesterday morning at my sister’s house. I didn’t call her later in the evening, as I intended. I simply forgot. It’s no wonder I don’t have many friends, I thought. I’d have to be a friend to have one.

“I’m not sure,” Andi says. “I haven’t heard anything.”

“I’m not sure if I’m supposed to tell you this,” I say, “but she wasn’t sick last week. Her mom lied to you. She relapsed.”

“Damn,” Serena says, slowly shaking her head back and forth.

Andi sits forward in her seat, looks at me intently. “How do you know this?”

“She called me yesterday when I was at my sister’s house,” I say. “She was upset. She said she felt like using again. She told me she relapsed and that’s really why she didn’t show up to group.”

Andi pauses, absorbing this information, then looks at me. “How was it for you, to hear she’d relapsed?”

I don’t respond. Andi stares at me, waiting for me to speak.

“I thought I didn’t have to share if I don’t want to,” I say. I’m not comfortable delving into emotional territory with others present. Andi’s asking me to talk about my feelings with the group is tantamount to her requesting I share my masturbatory techniques—there are some things better left unsaid.

“You don’t.” Though she manages to quickly rearrange her expression, a brief, disappointed shadow falls across her face. “Every alcoholic is different,” she goes on. “There doesn’t have to be some catastrophic event to ‘cause’ your drinking to get out of control or make you relapse. It’s rarely that simple. We want it to be, of course. We want something or someone to blame for making us pick up the drink that eventually takes us over the edge. There’s no cut-and-dried way we get here, nothing we can point to and say, ‘oh, that’s going to turn that person into an alcoholic.’ ”

“But your husband died,” Madeline says, whispering that last word like it was a secret Andi didn’t already know.

“You’re right. He did.” Even now, six years after the fact, the grief tightens the muscles in her face. “And for a while, I used that as an excuse. I felt terribly sorry for myself—oh poor me, the widowed alcoholic. My husband died of cancer. He was only forty years old. I deserve to drink. It’s my right.”

“Well, it was your right,” Serena says. “In a way.”

Andi looks at her. “How so?”

“You had the right to drink. You just didn’t know you were an alcoholic when you started doing it. You still have the right to drink, don’t you? I mean, you’re a grown woman. You could walk out of here right this minute and go on down to the Quickie Mart and pick yourself up a six-pack, couldn’t you.”

Andi smiles. “Vodka was my drink of choice, remember? I slipped it into a water bottle during one of my lectures? And then I had the bright idea to show my breasts to my students.”

We all laugh. This vision of a sloshed, boob-flashing Andi runs entirely contrary to the woman we know to hold a Ph.D. in psychology with research published in several well-respected journals. After she completed treatment at Promises, she decided to leave the tenure track at the University of Washington in favor of helping other women rebuild their messy, mangled lives.

Before Andi has the chance to continue, the door swings open and Laura saunters in. “Hey, ladies,” she says. “Sorry I’m late.”

I give her a quick wave, noting how pale she seems compared to just a couple of weeks ago when I last saw her. Her dark hair is stringy and thin around her face, chopped in a harsh, angled bob, coming to sharp points near her chin. Her low-hung jeans barely cling to the exaggerated knots of her hip bones. Heroin-not-so-chic.

“You guys talking about me?” she asks. Her voice is strained.

“Sort of. “ Andi smiles, beckoning with a wave of her hand. “Come on in.”

Laura walks across the room and drops into a seat next to me, reaching over to poke the top of my leg with a bony finger. “You were worried about me, weren’t you?” she says. “Go ahead, admit it.”

I bob my head and flash a smile at her. “I’m glad you came.”

She grins. “Me, too.” She looks around the room. “I take it Cadence gave you all the news of my unfortunate relapse?”

“Yes,” Andi says. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, honey,” Serena says. “You all right?”

“I’m fine,” Laura says, throwing one meager leg over the other. “It was a fucking bad decision, though. I guess I needed to test the theory of whether or not I actually have a problem with addiction.” She puts her gaze on Andi. “What do you think, Madame Therapist? Am I an addict?”

Andi’s mouth curves up gently. “That’s something you decide for yourself, Laura. Addiction is pretty much defined by continuing to indulge in any behavior when we don’t want to. Even though it hurts us. Does that apply to you?”

“Oh, hell yeah,” Laura says. “I’m sorry my mom told you I was sick.” She pauses. “Well, I was sick, just not in the way she probably made it sound.”

“It’s okay,” Andi says. “This time. But you know you can’t come back to group if it happens again.” She shifts toward the new woman, who has registered this entire exchange with watchful gray eyes. “What about you, Kristin? Would you like to tell the group a little about what brought you to us?”

Kristin sits up, her long limbs rearranging themselves before she speaks. “Well, I’m an alcoholic. And an addict. This is my second time in treatment.”

“What brought you back?” Serena asks.

Kristin drops her chin to her chest, her fingers pull at a loose thread on her purse. “The court. I was caught driving drunk.”

“Blue-light special, huh?” Serena leans forward, elbows on her knees. “How many DUIs you got?”

“This is my first,” Kristin says quietly. “My lawyer is trying to plead it down to reckless driving. I went to treatment before, about five years ago, on my own.”

Serena looks confused. “And you got ordered here, for one DUI? What else you do?”

“Serena . . .” Andi warns.

“Don’t let her bug you, Kristin,” Laura says. “She’s only jealous because she’s had four of them.”

“One for each husband,” Serena says, brown eyes sparkling.

“No, it’s fine,” Kristin says. She meets Serena’s gaze, her chin trembling. “My kids were in the car. I ran into a stop sign in a blackout. I barely remember it. My neighbor reported me, Child Protective Services got involved, and now I’m court-ordered to attend treatment before they give them back to me.” Her voice shakes, tears begin to roll. She pushes the heels of her hands into her eyes in a vain effort to stop them.

“Who are they with?” I ask, unable to mask the emotion in my own voice.

Kristin sniffs, looks up at me. “What?”

“Your kids. Who are they staying with? Your husband?”

She shakes her head. “He left a few years ago.” After a heaving breath, she goes on. “They’re with my mom.”

“Do you get to see them?” I am clenching my hands together, I realize. My fingers have gone white. This is the first time I have heard another woman speak of drinking in front of her kids. None of the other women in my group have children. I am riveted; I want to know everything about her.

She nods. “Yes. But I’m just so ashamed. I can’t believe I let this happen. I’m smarter than this. I can’t believe I let myself get to this point.” She is crying again, swiping at the tears with the back of her right hand. Her shoulders quake as she sobs in silence. We are not allowed to give her a tissue—at Promises, it is taught that interrupting a person’s emotional processing in this way quashes its resolution. If she wants a tissue, she’ll have to reach for one herself. I found this a little hokey at first, until I cried the first time in group, and someone new handed me one; my emotions shut down, whatever dam that had broken suddenly rebuilt—the release of tears immediately ceased.

“Did you lose your license?” Serena asks.

Kristin shakes her head. “No, because it’s my first offense.” More tears well up as she speaks, and she is forced to stop talking.

Andi lets Kristin weep in silence for a moment. “We’re glad you’re here, too,” she says to our group’s newest member, then swings her gaze to me. “How was your weekend with Charlie?”

My eyes are still on Kristin, watching her feel her pain so easily, so out in the open for all to see. I am amazed by this, in awe of her ability to admit the gravity of what she has done to perfect strangers. It took me three weeks at Promises before I could say the words “I got drunk in front of my son” to anyone; they still feel like bits of sandpaper stuck in my throat whenever I’m forced to speak them.

I have to tear my eyes away to look at Andi, who I suspect is bringing my son up for Kristin’s sake. “We ended up at my sister’s place for the night,” I say. “I took him to get a haircut, alone, though. It went well, actually.” I don’t mention the episode in my sister’s living room, my angry reaction to my child’s behavior. I’ll save that for when I meet with Andi alone.

Andi moves on to Serena and Madeline’s weekend recounts. I listen, trying to stay focused on what the other women are saying, until it’s finally time to walk out the door.

In the parking lot, I’m relieved to find that the drizzling rain has stopped and the sun is fighting to come out, backlighting the clouds with a fuzzy pale glow. I’m about to climb in my car when a voice stops me. “Cadence?” I turn to see Kristin approaching me, a black trench coat flapping around her long legs.

I stop. “Did I forget something?”

She approaches, shakes her head. “No, no. I was just wondering . . .” She pauses, bites her bottom lip, and then goes on. “Did you drink in front of your son?” Her voice is hesitant, clipped.

I give her a swift nod, not trusting my voice to speak. She gives me a look so vacant of judgment, so filled with compassion, it lends me some small measure of relief. I feel something inside my chest pulling me toward her, a whispery thin, silver line of connection.

“Can I call you sometime? Maybe we could go to a meeting?” she asks.

“Sure,” I say. I swallow, grab one of my business cards, and hand it to her. I don’t know what I’m doing—I’m in uncharted territory—but maybe, just maybe, I’ll have an easier time of things if I choose not to handle it all alone.