Rehabilitation

She had been sober for fifteen months. She was open about her life. Told us how she missed her kids. How she hadn't seen them since before her six months of drug rehabilitation. She feared they would forget her.



One day, her ex-husband called and handed the phone to her son. Then he handed the phone to her daughter.



A few months later, she told her ex-husband that she wanted to home school the kids. He laughed her idea away. They, she and her ex, got along well, she said, despite everything. This confused the kids and even confused her. They always wanted Mommy to sleep over. She never slept over, anymore, but she thought about it. She once told me that she was thinking of seducing her ex-husband. She knew how, she said. She was missing her family life. She carried this small desire to be a mother with her everywhere she went. Some days it came in thick like grass in the Irish countryside, but other days this feeling grew in patchy and yellow like our backyard in Brookline.



She never seduced him. He annoyed her about something and it reminded her why she had cheated on him in the first place.

She was a forty-year-old recovering drug and alcohol addict with an undiagnosed obsession with self. Thoughts about herself consumed her brain like cancer, growing secretly and silently into a thick tangled tumor.



Her mind was mangled, but her tight tanning bed body and wide mouth laugh distracted us all. She's so strong, we thought.



She was strong until she met a man who made her weak. She was living and working in a rehabilitation house in Boston. In exchange of free housing, she helped supervise those chosen to live in the house of recovering addicts. This man she met was another live-in assistant and another recovering addict. She spoke of the connection they had. They were like magnets when they saw one another, she said, and they had started secretly meeting in hotel rooms.



After they started meeting in hotel rooms, she started acting strangely and one day, she showed up to work looking weak and sleepy. She couldn't keep her eyes open. Then I heard her say, "I feel like I'm dying."

She had fallen off of her wagon to pebbly cement and now we were watching as her body rejected all she had injected into it's veins. For most of an hour, she walked around the restaurant with her eyes mostly closed. She was called down to the manager's office. When she came back upstairs, her face was red and wet from crying. I watched from the corners of whatever I was pretending to do. She stumbled for her bag. I struggled to swallow the lump in my throat. 

She came back a month or so later. She was not on the schedule but she could pick up shifts for people who needed coverage. She needed the money. She almost looked better, but she wasn't.

Soon after her return, she was lost again and soon after she started picking up shifts, she disappeared again. 

I've been told she was arrested up north with that boyfriend. They "chewed and screwed" as they called it (ate in a restaurant and ran out before paying). A waitress.