Nine
Mary struggled to keep her focus on the page in front of her. It was attractively full of text. But she was three hundred words short, and while that should have only meant another six or seven minutes, if she were working hard and working fast, it was coming out like pulling teeth.
Three hundred words might be three hundred hours, and she didn’t have that kind of time to finish her blog post for the day. Never mind three hundred hours, she didn’t have three hours. She barely had one, and the time on the clock continued to click down as her mind wandered and her heart pounded in her chest.
She was over her old life. She’d gotten past it. Finished it off. It was a whole lot of bad stuff that just wanted her life to stay bad. Wanted her to stay bad. And for a while, she had wanted to listen to it. Why should things ever get better?
Well, there was one good thing that came out of that part of her life. Peter needed her. She needed him. And instead of letting all the bad stuff drag her down, she let that little baby inside her drag her up.
She’d escaped, and she left all the bad stuff behind her. Her whole life was built around Pete, making sure that she was always there for him, and making sure that she could pull as many people out of the places that she’d been as she could. There wasn’t much else that she could ask for from herself or from God.
Up to this point, she’d done that. Her life was good and it was working out, on the whole, better than expected. She’d built a little life out of being able to talk to people about how to solve their problems. She’d written four or five books, which sold well enough to keep her and Pete fed. She ran a fairly successful web site targeting recovering addicts, which ensured that when number six came out, it would continue to sell well enough to keep her clothed.
All in all, everything worked out well enough that she didn’t have to worry. She was happy with her life. Happy with how things had gone in it.
Which was why the events of the last two days were making her head pound like she was coming down off a three-day coke binge and hadn’t really bothered eating anything in that time. She knew a panic attack when it was coming, and she was about to fall off the edge. She needed to call Cara. That was the first step, wasn’t it?
We admitted we were powerless over our addiction, that our lives had become unmanageable.
Maybe there was nothing that Cara could do for her. It had been years since they’d done more than email. Because Mary had her life under control, and Cara had her own problems. Everyone in NA did.
But it was starting to feel out of control, and she needed to talk to someone about it. Everyone in the group was worse-off than her. She was supposed to be strong by comparison to them. She was supposed to know what was going on. They looked to her for guidance.
She closed her eyes and looked at the post. It was long. But she had something more important to talk about today, and she knew better than to think that she was going to call Cara. She had her own problems, and Mary hadn’t called her sooner because she’d already learned how to cope.
Cara wasn’t going to tell her anything new. She just needed to get the thoughts out. The fears and everything. And she had a platform to talk to thousands of people who understood her in the same way that Cara did.
She let out a breath and deleted the whole thing. Her fingers started moving. It was easier this time, at least. The words smashed across the page. And she purged the fears that she was feeling. A thousand words flashed by. Twelve hundred and she was feeling alright. It was fast. Twenty minutes or so.
She re-read through it. It sounded good. Which was a surprise. She let a breath out. She needed to call Cara, but she was going to call Roman. She had to tell him that she needed to talk to him. If she could tell 2 million people, with an average of 500,000 reads in a day, then she could talk to him about it. If he was really who he said he was, then he could understand.
Mary let a breath out and leaned back into her chair. It was a solution. It might not be the right solution. But she had to do it.
She picked up the cell phone and turned off airplane mode. It buzzed frenetically in her hand as it suddenly realized that there were a thousand things she’d missed while she was gone. She ignored them.
Mary opened the phone app and started to type. R-O-M. The phone buzzed again. A message showed at the top of the screen. The beginning of the text showed in tiny text. But it was big enough that she could read what she needed to from it.
Don’t contact me again, it said. And next to it was a photo of an album she’d downloaded when she made the contact in the first place. The name next to it was Roman.