Annika makes a low, high-pitched keening noise, an almost feral growl of raw pain. “You’resorry?Idid that, Gram. Ididthat. Thank fuckinggodI don’t remember. Thank god.” She covers her face with both hands, rocking back and forth. “I swore, right then, no more. Never again.”
“It’s over now, my love.” Gram kisses her crown again, clinging tightly. “All done. It’s all done, my love.”
“They’d stolen my fucking clothes. As souvenirs, I guess, I don’t know. I begged for an old T-shirt and some shorts of Alvin’s just so I could leave that fucking hellhole. I walked…so many miles. Bare feet. Starving. Everything hurt. My soul hurt. My body was…” She trails off, shaking her head. “I went to a homeless shelter at a church. They let me take a shower and gave me clothes. They fed me. They gave me a bed and I just laid there, detoxing. I don’t remember much after that, other than agony. Mental, emotional, physical, everything…it was just pure unadulterated hell. I wanted to die. I thought I was going to die. And more than once, I lay there and welcomed it, begged God to just let me die, rather than live with knowing what I’d become.”
I slide my hand, palm down, across the table toward her. She peeks through her fingers, looks at my hand, at me, and then extends her hand to me. I wrap her small, delicate hand in mine. “Get it all out, mama.”
“If I ever felt like I wanted a hit, whenever the cravings hit, which was oh, every other minute, for days on end, all night and all day—I’d think about waking up in that vile, roach-infested hellhole, covered in semen, used by who knows how many men, just so I could get high. I’d think about that. Remind myself of it. I’d tell myself I’dwhoredmyself out formeth. And that knowledge? It was horrible enough that it helped me beat the cravings.” She moves her hand in mine, tangling our fingers together. “Alvin found me in that shelter. Showed me he had a gun hidden in his waistband, and reminded me that he could find me, he’d always find me, that I owed him. What I’d done in that hellhole hadn’t paid any of my debt, it just hadn’t added to it. He reminded me I owed him twenty-five thousand dollars and told me I either had to pay him or work for him. Or he’d take what I owed him however he felt like taking it. And we both knew what that meant.”
Gram takes her seat, her eyes lingering on Annika’s and my joined hands. “You owe someonetwenty-fivethousanddollars, Annika?” Her voice is quiet, but alarmed.
Annika looks to me. I look to Gram. “I took care of that for her.”
Gram’s eyes cut from Annika to me. “Do I want to know what that means?”
I smile, hoping it doesn’t look too frightening. “Probably not. Let’s just say I…convinced him…to relinquish his claim.”
Gram’s kind green eyes contain a surprising note of hardness. “It seems like a big brute like you would be rather convincing.”
I let some of my innate primal fury shine through. “You might say it’s what I do best.”
She nods at me, then takes a tentative sip of tea. “Well then, I’m glad my Nikki found you, Chance.”
“I am too.” Her lower lip trembles, just slightly, just for a moment.
“We have some very important things in common,” I say, holding Annika’s eyes. “In helping her, I discovered I was helping myself.”
Gram’s eyes settle on me, then. “You were an addict, too, then.” It’s a statement.
I nod. “I am. Recovered, and clean, but…once an addict, always an addict. The only question is if you’re still a user or if you’re clean.”
She nods. “My Zeke, he had problems with the drink. It nearly drove me away from him before he gave it up.”
Annika sets her tea down with a shocked thud, liquid sloshing over. “Gram—what? I had no idea!”
Gram tilts her head to one side, with a shrug of a shoulder. “He kept it to himself, and I respected that wish. It was no one’s business but his and mine. It was well before you were ever born, anyway, my dear. In fact, I doubt even your mother remembers him having been a drinker. He went through AA when your mother was…ohhh, four or five? By the time you and your sister came along, he’d been sober for thirty years.” She smiles at Annika. “My point in sharing this is that I do understand the power of addiction. He couldn’t do it for me. He could only do it for himself. The motivation and the strength to find sobriety, no matter the substance, must come from within. No one can make you do it or make you want to. And this is something I understand. Even thirty, forty years later, Zeke confided in me that being around someone who was drunk made him uncomfortable. Because a part of him still craved it, even all that time later.”
Annika looks at her grandmother for a long, long time. “So that’s how you knew you had to…” she trails off, swallows hard. “Let me go.”
Gram nods. “That’s how I knew, my love. Because I’d been there with your grandfather. He would come home at all hours, barely able to keep himself upright, having driven our vehicle in that state. He was never violent with me, but he…” She inhales a soft, short breath, lets it out with a shudder and a shuttering of her eyes before continuing. “The things he would say. I knew it wasn’t him—it was the drink. But the heart doesn’t know that even if the mind does.” She’s quiet a moment. “I…I told him that I’d always love him, always, no matter what. But he was going to have to choose between alcohol and his family. Because I just couldn’t keep allowing that awful spirit the alcohol put into him in our house.”
“What was it that made him get sober?” Annika asked.
Gram doesn’t answer for a while. “He’s passed now, so I suppose it’s all right to tell you.” Another moment or two of thoughtful silence. “He didn’t come home one night. He went drinking after work, and he just never came home. I waited up all night. I called the police, the hospitals, but there was no sign of him. So when morning came, I packed up your mother and your aunt and your uncle and I went to my parents’ house in Arizona. He had our only vehicle, so I had to take all three of our children, who were all under seven years old at that point, by myself, on a bus from Los Angeles to Flagstaff.” She sighs. “He showed up more than a month later, hat in hand, begging me to come home.”
“What happened? Where had he been?”
Gram shrugs. “Oh, he’d pulled his usual stunt, got drunk after work and tried to drive home. But he got lost, drove off the road into a ditch or something, and woke up some time past midday, alone and hungover in a wrecked car. By the time he got the car towed out of the ditch, got it running, and got home, the kids and I were long gone. And he knew where I’d gone. I’d told him, if he didn’t get sober I’d take the kids to my parents' house. So he knew that’s where we were.”
“Why’d it take him a month to go find you?” Annika asks.
“Because he knew I wouldn’t even look at him if he hadn’t sorted himself out. So he checked himself into a treatment center. He went through a thirty-day program, and then he came to get us.”
Annika sips tea. “And you went home with him?”
Gram holds her mug in both hands. “Yes, I did. I was scared. I was worried it was…not faked, but…I suppose I was worried it wouldn’t last. But it did.” She smiles down at her mug, but it’s a slow, sad smile. “He says when he came home to an empty house, all of our clothing packed up, everyone gone, it just…shook him to his core. He knew, in that moment, he was done. He’d never touch alcohol again. And he didn’t. Not till his dying day.”
“My god, Gram, I had no idea.” Annika lets go of my hand and rests hers on Gram’s hand. “Not even the slightest clue.”
