Chapter Seven
Cassidy
“It’s been a week since he attended a group. I’m surprised he hasn’t just up and left. He’s not doing anything but sleeping in his room,” Kaitlin said as I put Erik’s breakfast tray back on the cart.
“What happened? I mean, I thought he was making an effort.”
“Not sure, but the last few days I haven’t seen him at all. I tried telling him he was never going to get a room with a door on it if he didn’t go to groups, but he didn’t seem to care.”
“Is he doing anything?” I asked as concern for Erik pushed through in my voice.
“He’s been meeting with Jarrod. That’s something, I guess.”
“Well, I’m here today. So, I’ll get him to go to group,” I said confidently.
Surely, everyone else must just really suck at motivating people. Erik and I had talked a few times and certainly he wasn’t the easiest of patients, but he wasn’t the worst, either. He had come for a hike and even went to group with Melanie the last time I had worked. I was positive I would be able to motivate him and get him back into his treatment.
“I’ll take that bet,” Kaitlin joked.
“It wasn’t exactly a bet. I’m just saying I have a way with people and I can get him to go to group.”
“So, what you’re saying is that everyone else who has worked this week isn’t nearly as good as you. And now that you’re here, you will be able to magically motivate the man into getting up out of bed and stopping his self-pity party to attend group sessions?”
She seemed pretty annoyed at my insinuation that I could motivate patients better than others. I didn’t mean for it to sound like I was putting Kaitlin or anyone else down, but I did feel like I had a way with patients. Maybe it was because I had also gone through treatment, or perhaps it was because I was honest with them. But for whatever reason, patients listened to me more often than not.
“I’ll go wake him up again. I didn’t know he had been sleeping in all morning or I would have been tougher on him.”
“So, what’s the bet?” Kaitlin said with a grin.
“What do you want it to be?”
“If he refuses to go to group, you’ll come out to the jazz club with me this weekend. If you can get him up, I’ll go out with you to the jazz club.” She laughed.
“That seems like a lose-lose situation for me.”
“No, it’s a win-win situation. In both options, I win.”
Kaitlin laughed loudly and everyone in the dining area turned to look at her. It didn’t faze her, though, as she continued to laugh.
“How about you give me a hundred dollars if I get him out of his room and to group?” I asked.
“Well, then you have to give me a hundred dollars if he doesn’t go to group.”
“Deal,” I said with a victorious smile. “You better get your money ready.”
Kaitlin didn’t seem very scared at all as I walked toward Erik’s room. I had been there once already that morning when I had tried to get him up for breakfast. But when he said he wasn’t hungry, I didn’t argue and instead just returned to the nurses’ station.
Anytime I had been away from work for a few days, I had to get reoriented to the patients and what was going on. I didn’t want to push Erik if he was still having panic attacks like he had had the last time I was there. But if he wasn’t having panic attacks and he was just hiding out in his room hoping that treatment would magically fix him, then he had another thing coming to him.
I might not have looked like I was all that tough, but I could be if I wanted to. I had been through treatment; these patients couldn’t pull anything over on me. I knew what it was like to be depressed. I knew what it was like to not want to get out of bed or even what it was like to feel like treatment was useless. The thing about it was, I also knew that if you just stuck it out, treatment really did work.
Treatment took a lot of hard work. I knew that firsthand and it really annoyed me when people thought they could just sleep through a couple months at a treatment facilities and they would be all better when it was done. Sure, they would be over their physical withdrawals, but addiction was about so much more than physical addiction to a substance. The mental process of addiction was where the true treatment came in.
“Let’s go; it’s time to get up,” I said as I marched into Erik’s room.
“I’m sleeping.”
He turned toward the wall in an effort to ignore me. But I wasn’t going to lose a bet because he wanted to be lazy. Sometimes, I had to act more like a drill sergeant than their friend and that was just fine by me. Whatever I needed to do to make Erik get moving, I was going to do it.
“Let’s go,” I said as I reached for his comforter.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.” He laughed and flipped onto his back.
“You aren’t me,” I responded and pulled his blanket off. “I’ll pull this blanket off and you won’t be comfortable and then maybe you’ll get up and go to your groups. Now let’s…” I stopped dead in my tracks as the comforter left his bed.
“Told you so.” He laughed as his raging hard-on pressed his boxer shorts up into the air.
“Oh, come on! Let’s go; I don’t care what you’ve got going on under there. You’ve been here more than a week. You know the rules. You’re a big boy. Get up.”
I expected him to make some sort of comment about his penis in relation to the big boy comment I had just said. So, I was surprised when he simply grabbed the comforter, pulled it back up over him, and rolled toward the wall again.
“I’m sleeping,” he said.
“So, you are seriously fine with spending thousands of dollars a day for a treatment facility just so you can sleep? Wow, you must have a pretty privileged life to waste that much money on sleeping.”
“I don’t have a privileged life,” he said.
“You know, when I went to treatment, it was in a disgusting state facility with rapists, meth addicts, and prostitutes. I didn’t have my own private room with a shower, and I certainly didn’t have nice nurses and techs who worried about me like you have.”
I felt myself getting angry, and as much as I knew it wasn’t professional, Erik was really starting to piss me off. Did he understand how good he had it? I would have died to have the opportunity to do treatment in a swanky place like Paradise Peak. Everyone was nice, even the people who weren’t as nice as I was were one hundred times nicer than what I had put up with at the state hospital.
“Go away,” Erik said without giving me the satisfaction of feeding into my angry spew.
“Fine, but I was going to lead group today. So, you’re going to miss out. But hey, just wallow in your own self-pity. I’m sure you will magically start to feel better sooner or later.”
I stormed out of the room and back to the nurses’ station. It killed me that he didn’t listen to me. It bugged me that he hadn’t participated in my little word fight with him. Something was different with Erik than when he had arrived. There had been a small glimpse of his boyish charm when I had pulled the covers off of him, but it quickly disappeared as he rolled back over.
“I told you he wouldn’t move,” Kaitlin said. “I think he needs to be kicked out of this place. There’s dozens of people waiting for a bed, and he’s just wasting it.”
To hear her speak poorly of Erik had my defenses on alert. I didn’t think he was a bad guy. I didn’t know what was going on with him, though, and it was obvious he wasn’t getting much out of his stay with us. But I would never condone kicking someone out unless they were putting others in danger. And even then, I would recommend sending them to the state hospital where they had quiet rooms and better security for dangerous patients. I just wasn’t the type of person who gave up on people.
“He’s going to group,” I said, not even believing my own words as they came out of my mouth.
I took a couple deep breaths and walked back to Erik’s door. I had to take a different approach. There had to be a way to earn his trust and get him out of his room and working on his recovery. Part of what I had said was true, there was no way he would ever get better if he just stayed lying in his bed the whole time he was with us.
“I’m sorry for yelling,” I said as I stood in the doorway. “Is there anything I can do for you? Is there something you need so you can feel better? What do you need to be successful?”
There was no answer.
I waited another moment before I started to talk again.
“Come to group this morning. I’m going to help Jarrod with some activities. It’s not going to be fun, at all. It’s going to make you uncomfortable. You’ll probably hate it here even more than you do now. But come anyways.”
“That’s the worst sales pitch I’ve ever heard,” Erik said as I heard him moving in his bed.
“So, is that a yes?”
“Hell, no. I’m not coming, but thanks for the effort.”
“Fine. Just fine. You want to rot away in this room all alone, then go ahead and do it. I don’t care!” I yelled as I left and went back to the nurses’ station again.
But I couldn’t stand to look at Kaitlin and the smug look on her face, so I went into the back room and hid for a moment. Why did this man drive me so crazy? Plenty of other patients had refused to go to group before and I had never raised my voice to a single one of them.
Brad constantly argued with me about his food and what was in it, yet I didn’t yell at him. Kimber could hardly walk half the time because she was so drugged up on psych meds and refused to let the doctor lower them, but I didn’t yell at her, either. In fact, I couldn’t remember the last time I had yelled at anyone in our facility. But there I was, yelling and berating Erik like it was going to help motivate him.
I knew better! I wasn’t a counselor and I wasn’t a nurse, but I had been a patient before and I knew that yelling at someone wasn’t going to motivate them. I knew that trying to make them feel bad about their decision was the worst thing I could have done. It put a divide between us and assured that Erik would stick his heels in deeper, just to avoid looking like I had forced him into doing something he didn’t want to do.
I knew all of those things, yet I had still yelled at a patient to try and get them to a group session. I felt like the worst mental health technician in the world. How was I ever going to be a nurse if I couldn’t even handle my own frustrations when all I had to do was get people to groups and feed them?
My stomach was in knots as I sat in the back room and tried to pull myself back together. It wasn’t like me to act like I had been and I really needed to knock it off. This place wasn’t about me or my feelings – it was about people getting better. I took a couple deep breaths and decided to still go and help Jarrod with group for the day.
Showing up late to a group session was worse than not going at all, at least as a patient it had been. So, as I walked into the group room, I kept my head down and went right to the empty seat in the back of the room by the supplies we were going to be using for the project that day.
No one even seemed to notice I had arrived, which was a relief. It was sometimes a hard transition for me from patient to staff member. I was probably the youngest person at Paradise Peak who had a history of addiction. Plus, my addiction and treatment weren’t all that long ago, so everything felt fresh for me still.
“Erik, it’s nice to have you with us again today. Why don’t you start by telling us what you hope to get out of this exercise?”
My ears perked up as I heard his name and I couldn’t help but smile that he had actually showed up. Although, it didn’t feel as much like a victory as I thought it would.
Whatever he decided to do with himself after he left the facility was all his business, but while he was in our care, I really wanted to push him to make the most of it. There was no reason for a patient to spend thousands of dollars if they weren’t going to participate in the program. It was a waste.
“I’m going to make a collage of things my mother loved. Thinking of her makes me happy and sad, so I’m not sure what all I’ll put on there.”
“Great, I look forward to seeing it.”
“Kimber, what will your collage be about?”
“My boyfriend, Rob, and our relationship. My parents don’t like him. They think he’s just using me for my money. But I know our love is pure.”
“Why do your parents think he’s using you?” Jarrod asked.
“Because he’s unemployed and old. They don’t understand what I see in him. But I see love. He loves me. It wouldn’t matter if I was poor, I know he loves me.”
Even Kimber didn’t sound convinced by her own words. I know I wasn’t convinced the guy was a stand up, decent fella. He sounded like a douchebag to me. What kind of middle aged guy didn’t have a job and was still able to land a rich twenty-one-year-old woman? I imagined he must have been pretty easy on the eyes, at least.
“Okay, I look forward to seeing it,” Jarrod said.
I could see that Jarrod was visibly trying to hold back his own opinion on Kimber’s relationship. Jarrod was a damn good counselor. He didn’t tell people what to do, instead he guided them to finding their own solutions to the questions they had in their minds. Sometimes watching Jarrod work made me think that I wanted to be a counselor instead of a nurse, but Kaitlin always talked me out of that option because of the pay difference.
Nurses made close to thirty dollars per hour, while the therapists made much less. I certainly wasn’t interested in the job because of the salary alone, but both nurses and therapists were positions I wanted to explore.
“Let’s head back to the tables over there. You’ll find lots of magazines, scissors, and glue for you to make your collage with.”
I stood up as everyone made their way to the table. I expected that Erik would have sat as far away from me as possible, but instead he sat across from me as he started his project. He didn’t seem to be angry at me at all, which was very surprising to me considering how I had just acted toward him in his room.
“So, this is you helping teach the group?” he said with that grin I had seen before.
“Hey, it’s better than nothing. I’m helping with the fun part.”
“I’m not sure it is,” he joked and then went back to work.
I didn’t distract him, or anyone else. Instead, I went around the table and looked at the collages of their life. It was a fun little exercise and filled with meaning.
If I had made a collage, it would have certainly been my parents all over it. They were the greatest people on earth. I had been such an annoying teenager and then just pure trouble when I became an adult. I was grateful they had stuck it out with me and hadn’t given up home all together.
Sobriety was damn hard for me. I couldn’t imagine how hard it would be if I didn’t have my parents to help me. After I got out of treatment, I didn’t have a job, or money, and I could barely keep my body moving forward each day. My mom would make me breakfast and my dad would talk to me about my day. It was those little things that really helped me day in and day out.
I continued to look around at everyone’s projects. There were enlightening and showed so much about who each person was. It was very interesting to see who they chose to do their collages on and the pictures they assigned to their loved ones.
Kimber had pictures of men all over her collage, as well as expensive shoes and jewelry. It was clear that she valued material things and men a lot. I couldn’t help but think that would have been my collage back when I went through treatment.
As I walked around the table, I learned so much about each of the patients.
Stan had a beautiful display of everything music on his collage. He had drums, violins, singers, and concert venues. He had been a drummer for so many years; his happiness was tied to it. But his drumming career was over and he was left to try and make some sort of meaningful life and that had been when he started to struggle.
When I walked behind Erik, I took a look at his collage and felt like I was peeking into his soul. Colorful, vibrant pictures of mothers with their children were all over. He had playgrounds, pizza parlors, family dinners, and people laughing.
I couldn’t help but smile as I looked at his collage. It was clear that he had a mother who loved him, but it also seemed clear that she was no longer alive. I saw angels and clouds across the top of his page. I felt for him and the loss he must feel. I couldn’t imagine living without my mother; she was truly one of my best friends.
As we wrapped up the session, everyone took their collages with them back to their rooms. They also brought pictures and glue sticks, just in case they had anything else to add before the next day when they would share their collage with the group; no scissors were allowed back in the rooms, though.
“I just need to cut out a few more pictures,” Erik said as everyone was leaving. “I’d like to fill up this empty section, if you don’t mind. I know I won’t work on it later and I like to finish things once I start them.”
I felt like the last comment was totally aimed at me and the yelling fit I had had with him earlier. I still felt horrible for the way I had talked to him. Not just because he seemed like an okay guy, but really because he was a patient and it had been entirely unprofessional of me. The way I had talked to him was much more about me and my own issues than it was about him and his issues. I really didn’t know him well enough to know what his issues were.
“Cassidy, stay with him and put everything back in the cabinet when he’s done, please,” Jarrod said.
“Sure.”
As everyone left the room, the comfort level between Erik and I seemed to go with them. Being left alone with him wasn’t anything I had planned. I sat there quietly as he cut pictures and casually looked up at me. I thought about apologizing to him for the way I had talked before, but that didn’t seem necessary. He clearly wasn’t angry with me, so I decided to just drop it and move forward.
Sometimes he smiled; sometimes he just looked at me and went back to work. I didn’t want to talk first. I really didn’t have anything to say. I had acted like a total jerk to him earlier, and if I managed to say a single word, it should have been to apologize to him.
“I’m sorry,” Erik said as he put the scissors down and reached across the table and touched my hand.
My whole body froze as I looked at him. Why was his hand touching mine? Why was he apologizing? He hadn’t done anything wrong; it had been me who screamed like some sort of crazy person. It took me a moment to figure out what was going on. I had been thinking about apologizing to him for so long that I thought maybe I had imagined him saying something to me. But there he was with his hand on mine, and as he looked at me, I realized he definitely had just apologized to me.
“Okay,” I managed to mutter. “But what are you apologizing for?”
His hand on my skin was sending a nervous feeling throughout my body. I felt warm and shaky as I looked at him. Is he flirting with me, or just being nice? I couldn’t tell. Do I want him to flirt with me?
No. What am I even thinking? This guy was a patient. He was off limits. He was also a bit of an ass. He was going through withdrawal really badly and was literally reaching out for help though, so I couldn’t exactly just leave him hanging.
“Seriously, I’m sorry for being such a jerk. I had planned to leave after the first week and then decided to stay. But then I was going to leave again. I just couldn’t make up my mind. You were right. Thanks.”
His voice was calm and even as he spoke to me. I searched his eyes for some sign that he was being sarcastic. How was I right? I couldn’t even remember what I had said to him. The only thing I remembered was yelling at the poor guy and making him feel bad enough that he had climbed out of bed and come to group.
“What was I right about?” I managed to say with a bit of a grin.
It wasn’t often that anyone told me I was right about something. Typically, I was the one making mistakes and not following the rules, both at work and at home.
“About me not getting better if I didn’t get out of bed. Well, I’m not sure what better is for me yet. But lying around in bed isn’t me. That’s not who I am, and I needed some tough love to show me that.”
“Love?” I said with a raised eyebrow as I held back a laugh.
“Oh, you know what I mean.” He laughed and gave me a tap on my hand as he pulled his hand back toward his side of the table. “I needed someone to be straight with me and that was exactly what you did. I appreciate it, and I wanted you to know.”
I missed the warmth of his touch instantly and longed to feel his skin on mine again. There was one thing for sure: Erik’s touch had instantly made me feel comfortable with him. There was no longer awkwardness between us, and instead I felt like I was sitting across the table from a very close friend.
Weirdly enough, I didn’t know much about Erik at all. All I knew so far was that he didn’t have family that he thought cared about him and his mother appeared to have died. My initial impression of him was that he was some sort of rich brat who had been given the family money, but I was starting to rethink that version of who he was.
“Did your mom pass away?” I asked in an effort to get to know him a little more.
“Yeah, it was a long time ago, when I was a teenager, but I still miss her like it happened yesterday.”
“It must be hard not to have family there for you. I live with my mom and dad, and they are my rocks. I couldn’t imagine life without them.”
“Let’s change the subject,” Erik said without continuing down the path I was trying to take him.
“I don’t want to sound like a jerk, really I don’t. But why come to treatment if you don’t want to get better?”
“I don’t really have a drug or drinking problem. I’m just here so my business partner can get a deal closed for a new project we are working on.”
“It sounds like you must have had a problem if they wanted you to come here, though, right?”
“Nah; you know those California types.”
I had to laugh. No, I didn’t know those California types at all. I didn’t know them except for the addicts and alcoholics that had come through our doors. So, if I compared Erik to those California types, he sounded exactly like all the others who had been through the treatment center. I probably shouldn’t have compared him to others, but the way he was talking was very familiar to patients who just weren’t ready for treatment.
“I’ll hold my opinion on this whole conversation for right now. Are you done with your project?”
He placed his scissors back in the bin and I gathered everything up and opened the locked cabinet to put them away. We had just made up from my previous yelling at the poor guy; I wasn’t about to tell him that everyone seemed to think they didn’t have a problem with drugs or alcohol when they showed up.
“You are one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen,” Erik said as he stood behind me near the cabinet.
My breath caught in my chest as I realized his body was closer than I had expected. Normally, I would have pushed him away. Normally, I wouldn’t have let a patient get as close as he was. But there was something different about Erik. There was something different about how I was around him. I didn’t feel like I had control at all when he was around.