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“I’m not sure,” I admitted. I was in a precarious situation since I was the one who looked into the records and couldn’t share what I’d learned. “But I think I can present it in a way that maybe she can admit what she’s done instead of us accusing her.”

  “That’s a good idea,” Tori said, sounding relieved. “When should we do it? I don’t think we should wait very long. Strike while the iron is hot and all that.”

  “Good point,” I said, moving to the calendar on the fridge for a quick view of the week ahead. I was taken aback to see all the NA meetings filled in on the calendar—I’d written them in more than a month ago, believing Keisha would still be here and healing. Seeing the times written there gave me an idea, something that would take our confrontation with Ilana to the next level. The idea gave me butterflies. “Do you think you could see if she’ll go to dinner with you Monday night? I kind of have a crazy idea, but I think it will make an impact.”

  “Impact is good,” Tori said quickly. “I’m all for impact. What’s the plan?”

  Chapter 35

  I stood outside the church Monday evening, tapping my toe while hoping I didn’t appear as anxious as I felt. I hadn’t seen Keisha since Friday, which was the longest I’d gone since I’d moved her into the hotel. I’d texted her a few times each day to check on her, and she usually responded that she was fine, but sometimes she didn’t answer me at all. I’d get anxious and sweaty—it was hard to focus on anything but the text she hadn’t sent. This morning I’d called her three times during my break. She finally answered and said she’d been asleep, she was fine, and could I take her to dinner tonight? I couldn’t because of this meeting Tori and I had planned for Ilana. I felt horrible not being there when Keisha needed me, and yet I knew I was obsessing. Ruby and John’s words were chipping away at my certainty that I was helping Keisha, but I still struggled to get past the “If she would just . . .”

  Everything had come together in regard to what Tori and I had planned for Ilana, but now that I was here I was beginning to question whether or not this was such a good idea. If I couldn’t help my own stepdaughter deal with her addiction, why did I think I could make a difference for a woman I barely knew?

  And yet, the plan was in motion. Tori was taking Ilana to dinner, then they were meeting me here. Why had I thought a public place like this would be better than somewhere private? What if Ilana freaked out and made a scene? I wasn’t good with scenes outside of work, where I dealt with them on a regular basis. I had that fabulous counter to keep me separate when those happened though. There would be no counter here.

  “Hey, there,” a voice said, forcing me to look up and focus. It was David, the guy Keisha had met at the first NA meeting she and I had gone to. “You’re Keisha’s mom, right? Is she here?” He looked past me and to the side, a hopeful look on his face.

  “She’s not here,” I said, then took a breath and decided to practice the truth. “She relapsed.”

  His face fell, and he shook his head. “Dang, I’m sorry to hear that.”

  I nodded, out of words now that I’d been all brave about telling him. But he hadn’t walked away, hadn’t run away from the truth like I had for so long. I’d suspected David had had a crush on her, and it made me sad to look at the kind of person she could have been with right now if she’d chosen a different path.

  “It’s such a hard road,” he said almost reverently. “But maybe next time it will stick.”

  “Maybe,” I said, surprising myself as tears filled my eyes. Sheesh, what was wrong with me? I wiped at my eyes and was about to offer an apology when he spoke.

  “This whole process is brutal—on everyone—but Keisha has to own her stuff, ya know? Don’t let her drag you into it.”

  I nodded, a bit undone by his sincere concern, and blinked quickly to get rid of the tears. How could I love her and be there for her without being dragged into it? If I’d felt a little more stable, I’d have asked him that.

  “So, if Keisha’s not with you, why did you come?”

  “Oh, I have a friend who’s . . . struggling. I’m meeting her here.”

  He gave me a compassionate smile. “Good for you to be here with her. I’ll save some seats for you guys, then. Two?”

  “Three,” I said. “Thank you.”

  He left me standing there, replaying his words before I looked up to see Tori and an anxious Ilana walking toward me. My stomach flipped. I’d already scoped out the building and found an alcove where we could talk before the meeting started.

  “I don’t understand,” Ilana said, coming to a stop after looking up at the church. Oops, it was a Christian church; would that be offensive to her?

  “Hi, Ilana,” I said, hoping I could do this and hating how unnatural my voice sounded in my attempt to cover my anxiety. “I found a place we could talk.”

  “Talk?” she repeated.

  I turned and opened the door without answering, and Tori walked behind Ilana, kind of pushing her inside. If she’d known us better, she might have resisted or challenged us, but she was just uncomfortable enough to not know what to do and therefore instinctively followed our lead.

  They followed me down a side hall and around the corner, where a bench and two chairs were set up outside a locked door. I stayed standing while Tori ushered Ilana to a seat. Behind Ilana was a large wooden cross on the wall. I stared at it for a few moments before sitting across from them. Ilana’s face showed that she was about to lose all her politeness.

  “Ilana,” I said, smiling slightly. “I’m sorry for the trick we played to get you here.” She stiffened, and I pulled harder on all my resolve and my bedside manner while also praying for help. If this went badly . . . “But we’re really worried about you.”

  That softened her a little, but confused her too, maybe even scared her. She pulled back and looked at Tori. “Worried about me? What are you talking about?”

  Tori explained about finding the pill in Ruby’s bathroom.

  “Percocet,” I added, drawing Ilana’s surprised look from Tori to myself. “From a prescription bottle in Ruby’s master bathroom.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ilana said. She was definitely scared, and angry. She tried to stand, but Tori put a hand on her shoulder and pushed her back down. I don’t know how hard she pushed, but it was hard enough to tell Ilana we meant business. She looked between the two of us and opened her mouth to speak, but I didn’t give her the chance.

  “There’s a meeting going on in the next room, and I’d like you to attend it with us. Then we’ll talk and we’ll take you home.”

  “I don’t have to stay,” Ilana said, looking between Tori and me. “I can call my husband to come get me right now—you can’t do this!”

  “You can call your husband, Ilana,” Tori said, a kind softness in her voice. “But we’re trying to do you a favor. We could just have easily gone to your husband about this, or your doctor, or the police.”

  Ilana stood up, said she didn’t have to stay, and turned toward the hall.

  “It’s illegal to possess someone else’s prescription,” I said. She stopped. “Either the paper script or the actual fulfilled product.” I hoped my discomfort wasn’t showing. I hadn’t told her we thought she’d done it, I hadn’t made an accusation, I’d just stated fact. She didn’t turn to face us, but I could see her breathing had increased, and I could see the way her hand tightened on her purse strap. If she were scared enough, this could work, and if this worked, I wouldn’t have to explain myself to the State Licensing Board. I stood and headed toward the meeting; Tory followed my lead, though she stopped behind Ilana, keeping her between us. I gave Ilana a look and then moved forward. She followed without us asking her to.

  True to his word, David had saved seats for us, him on the aisle and the three of us along the row next to him. Ilana sat between Tori and me; we shared a look as we sat. Tori was as nervous as I was, but together we were apparently a force to be reckoned with.

  A woman
I recognized as the leader of past meetings was talking about a spring picnic for the group, then talked about a party she’d attended for work and how she’d drunk iced tea instead of wine. Everyone cheered for her and she raised her hands over her head like a conquering hero. It was hard to see her as anything different. She’d been where Keisha was and dug out of it. How I wanted that for Keisha too. My chest got tight with longing.

  The woman turned the meeting over to anyone else who wanted to share. David was on his feet before she’d stepped off the platform.

  “Hi, my name is David, and I’m an addict,” he said when he reached the microphone.

  “Hi, David,” everyone in the audience said back—the reminder that everyone here understood where he’d come from. My chest got tighter as the tone of the meeting shifted.

  “I’d like to talk a little bit tonight about the purpose addiction plays in our lives.” A muttering washed through the crowd, but I kept my eyes trained on him. He looked down at his hands grasping each side of the podium. He couldn’t be more than twenty-five years old, and although the geeky impression he’d made when I first met him was still apparent, standing at the podium gave him an air of authority and confidence that matured him in my eyes.

  After a few moments of thought-collecting, David lifted his eyes and looked over the crowd. “Life is hard,” he said with painful sincerity. “And each one of us encounters things in our own lives that we simply can’t handle. It’s not because we’re stupid, or weak, or less than someone else; it’s simply a fact that every person in the world deals with things that are too much. And when we encounter these things, we are offered a variety of ways to cope with them. Some people find that faith in a higher being can lift them just enough that they can keep moving forward. Some people have a special relationship with someone else that can carry them through. Some people find a bottle of one kind or another that takes the edge off enough for them to survive.

  “For me, I found a pipe. The stuff I put into the end of that pipe softened the edges of the hard things I couldn’t handle anymore. It was such a relief to get a break, ya know, to simply inhale deeply and feel as though I were suspended above the garbage instead of sinking into it. Maybe if that’s all the drugs did for me—just gave me a break—I’d have been okay, but drugs are a tricky support system, and in time, the tentacles of the monster I thought I had on a leash began wrapping around me until the people in my life had to move away in order to save themselves.”

  His gaze flickered to me so quickly I could almost talk myself out of his notice. But the image he’d created was so real, so reflective of Keisha’s monster too and the hold it had taken on the people who loved her. The hold it had on me.

  “Maybe if those people had never left me, I’d have never found myself alone with the beast, and maybe I’d have never been able to truly feel the fear I should have felt in the beginning. I don’t know if that’s how it would have happened, though, because I chose my path and I can’t go back and change it. But I can change how I handle stress now, and how I handle my obsessive compulsive disorder, and the abuse from my childhood, and the girl who broke my heart, and the college I didn’t get into, and the loss of a grandmother I loved so much who died when I was too young to process my emotions.” Another murmur washed through the crowd, and I felt tears come to my eyes. “I wanted to share today because last week I celebrated my twenty-four-month anniversary of being clean—two whole years.”

  The room broke out into applause, including Tori and me. Ilana was staring at David, but silent tears streamed down her face, taking away all my reasons not to give into my own emotion. David smiled under the attention, both shy and confident at the same time.

  “Two years ago, I woke up on the floor of a crack house next to a woman I think I’d met the night before but whose name I couldn’t remember. I couldn’t feel my legs, and I couldn’t take a full breath. I tried to call for help but couldn’t make the words. I could hear a baby crying somewhere, though I never saw one. A few moments later my body started convulsing. I was aware of every movement but could do nothing to stop it.

  “The woman took off, the baby stopped crying, and a few minutes later, after the shaking had gone away, two men picked me up, took me out of the house, and threw me into the backseat of a car. They dropped me off at a park—just left me there to die—but not before they took my wallet and the watch I’d stolen a few weeks earlier.

  “Some kids found me on their way to school, and I ended up in the ER again. My mom came to see me for the first time in months, and instead of hugging me and crying over me and begging for me to let her help me, like she’d done the other times, she stood at the foot of my bed and asked me, ‘Is this it, David? Is this the last time I see my boy alive? I think it would be easier to visit your grave than to see you like this over and over again. Maybe that’s what I should be praying for.’”

  The hush in the room was like a blanket, each of us wrapped tightly in the pain of those words. I glanced over my shoulder and saw many other people in tears. Every one of these people had parents, grandparents, maybe siblings and spouses and children. Friends, neighbors, church leaders, and—I glanced at Ilana, who looked completely overwhelmed—some of them had book club members, not sure what to do but doing the little bit they could in hopes that the monster David had described wouldn’t win. I reached for Ilana’s hand—something so out of character for me—but I needed to hold on to someone. When she let me take it, I wondered if she did too. I noticed Tori do the same thing with Ilana’s other hand.

  We turned our eyes back to the front when David continued. “I don’t know why that moment was different than all the other times she begged me to get well, bribed me to get well, prayed for me to get well, screamed at me to get well, but something about her apathy that day made me realize how far I had fallen.

  “I was in the hospital for three days, and even though I told her I was going to get clean and it was going to work this time, she wouldn’t let me come home. We’d done that so many times, and I brought too much chaos with me. Mom contacted our pastor, and he found an older man from our congregation who agreed to let me stay with him. I went to a doctor and got help for my OCD and my anxiety disorder. I started talking to my family again and, perhaps most importantly, I started going to NA meetings regularly—every day. I met people like me—not bad, evil people with no willpower and no soul—but good, decent people who’d chosen the wrong way to cope with their struggles.”

  Tears finally filled his eyes as he took a deep breath and looked across the group. “This weekend, my parents are throwing me a party. I’m not supposed to know about it, but I do.” Everyone laughed. “I’ll get to celebrate my freedom from addiction with the people who never stopped loving me, even when they couldn’t have me in their life. We’ll eat cake and ice cream and drink homemade root beer, and it might just be the very best party I’ve ever been to.” He took off his glasses and wiped at his eyes before putting his glasses back on again and sniffling slightly. “Thanks for letting me tell my story,” he said, smiling and looking a little embarrassed, and yet confident and excited too.

  David sat down, and I squeezed his arm and mouthed, “Thank you.” He nodded shyly and looked away. Other people talked, but their words blended together, whereas David’s had stood out. I knew he was telling his story for his own reasons, but I couldn’t help but think that it was for me, too, that I was supposed to be here this night out of all other nights so that I could see his journey. His story gave me a different kind of hope than I’d had before, and in a way it let me off the hook. His mother couldn’t fix him. It wasn’t that she didn’t work hard enough, or love enough, or hug, or kiss, or pay enough—she could not fix him. It wasn’t her job. It wasn’t my job either.

  I’d become so wrapped up in my personal realizations that I almost forgot about Ilana’s part until the meeting ended and everyone stood and began chatting and laughing with one another. David asked for a formal introduction to Ilan
a and Tori but then stepped out of our way when I finished, wishing us luck.

  Ilana stood up and looked at the exit, her expression full of fear. She was shaking.

  “Ilana,” I said, quietly. “You’re going to be okay.”

  She didn’t answer me, and I understood that she didn’t know what to believe anymore. Outside of the church, I explained as gently as I could that Ilana had a week to find help on her own, and then I would have no choice but to go through the professional channels of my position to enforce her accountability. It could have been a really awkward discussion and yet she was so humbled—or broken, I wasn’t sure which—that she just nodded. Tori had her arm around her as they headed back to Tori’s car.

  I watched until they disappeared, then headed for my own car and drove back to my own home, with my own family—minus one. I wasn’t sure who was helped the most with tonight’s meeting, Ilana or me, but I hoped both of us would always remember this night as a turning point.

  Chapter 36

  I worked a ten-hour shift in Fountain Valley with the business card for Detective Pierce in my pocket the whole time. I filled prescriptions, processed the staff schedule for the next two weeks, inventoried, counseled clients, and ordered stock, but in the back of my mind was the question: What am I going to do about Keisha? Between Ruby, John, Tori, Ilana, and David, I felt as though my mind had finally cleared. What I was doing was not okay. I had to change this path, but knowing what I had to do didn’t make it easier, just obvious.

  I could call the detective and tell him where Keisha was, but that felt like such a betrayal. The other option was to try to talk Keisha into turning herself in. I didn’t like that option either. The chances of Keisha agreeing to go to jail seemed thin, and yet it felt like the better reflection of our relationship. And I would get to see her one more time; it would give us the chance to do this together.

  After work, I drove to the hotel. As I pulled up in front of her room, I could see a Do Not Disturb sign on the door but didn’t think much of it. Once I reached the door, I raised a hand to knock just as I heard laughter from inside.