Caleb

For three days, I raged around the farm, alternately cleaning and destroying everything I came in contact with. I scrubbed the kitchen floor only to smash bottles of ketchup and mustard on it. I ate a whole box of cereal I found in the cabinet and didn’t remember buying, just to throw up when it turned my stomach. I was reaching for anything I could inflict on my body that wouldn’t leave space for thinking. I spent hours picking rocks out of the soil, until my shoulders and back ached so badly I could hardly move. Then I lay in a bath until the water cooled, too tired and disgusted to drag myself to bed.

On the fourth day I set out for a walk in the morning, needing something that felt like a plan, a destination, a goal. I walked for five hours, my feet torn up and my bad knee throbbing, then collapsed into a chair on the porch and smoked a whole pack of cigarettes, fingers itching for something, brain scratching at everything, mind simultaneously racing and bored.

The facts were these. At some point over the past few weeks, I had begun to live again without realizing it. I’d begun to think about the music again. I’d woken up and my first thought hadn’t always been either craving or fear. The sappy side of me wanted to say that Theo had kissed me back to life, like the prince in some fairy tale. But it wasn’t what he’d done, it was what being around him had made me feel.

Hope.

And wasn’t that just the fucking scariest craving of all.

I started to shake, light-headed, and then I started to pace. I couldn’t stay here. Couldn’t spend another second here, with Theo’s scent still clinging to the pillowcases that I hadn’t been able to bring myself to wash, though I’d manically cleaned everything else from top to bottom. Couldn’t spend the night wedged into the couch prison I’d made myself. Just fucking couldn’t do any of it.

I drove to Rhys’s without calling, without texting. Just knocked on his door in the middle of the night like a fucking mess. He answered with his old baseball bat in hand, and grinned sheepishly when he saw it was me. Then, at whatever he saw on my face, he opened his arms, and for the first time in a long time, he held me as I broke.

Theo had burrowed deeper than I’d realized, dug barbs into me. And when he’d ripped away—when I’d pushed him away—it had felt like they all tore loose at once. But with each passing day, I was finding new ones still lodged beneath my skin, treading on them and wincing, like a dog with a wounded paw. I couldn’t pluck them all out by myself. I didn’t even know how to find them.

Matt came out of the bedroom at some point, still half asleep, hair wild and slender frame wrapped in one of Rhys’s sweatshirts, and Rhys kissed him and sent him back to bed with a low-voiced explanation. I thought of Theo, the sleepy warmth of him in the dark, waking slowly like a night-blooming orchid, his sprawling limbs as tender and sinuous as purple-bruised petals. And I felt a barb I’d missed, lodged somewhere between my stomach and my heart, shake loose, leaving me empty and aching for the shape of him in my arms.

The next morning, I was mortified. Eyes shadowed and hair a mess, I could hardly even meet Rhys’s eyes. Matt stayed in their bedroom until I left, a kindness I didn’t think I deserved, but Matt had a talent for understanding what people needed, even when they didn’t know it themselves. Rhys peered down at me, the familiar bulk of him hovering just in front of me. I tried to apologize but he wouldn’t have it. He just looked at me until I met his eyes.

“You’re gonna be okay,” he said, and squeezed my shoulders. “With Theo or without him, you’re gonna be okay. But you gotta call Huey, and you gotta do it today. Promise me.”

I nodded. He was right. This was what I did. Things got bad, I didn’t want anyone to see me weak and broken, so I decided I’d wait until I was just a tiny bit stronger, and then I’d call. But in the space between shame and a public face lay the ocean of demons just waiting for the drop of blood that would set it churning. And I nicked myself with pride every time.

“I will. I’ll call him today. I promise.”

Rhys hugged me, and just for a second I could pretend things were the way they used to be, when we took on the world together and I fell asleep pressed to this man, fought with him, laughed with him, dreamed with him. I held on tight, testing the pain like a tongue poking at a sore tooth: did this still hurt? Was I still punishing myself? But the pain was centered elsewhere. These weren’t the arms I wanted to fall asleep in; this wasn’t the man I wanted to laugh with, dream with, hell, even fight with. Because he wasn’t Theo Decker.

“Rhys?”

His eyebrows were drawn together in concern, and I felt another surge of guilt for the worry I’d caused him, for barging in here without even calling. But I set my jaw and forced myself to get over it. I’d already apologized and there was nothing else I could do.

“I want to do the album.”

The storm on his face broke, sun beaming down on me like a benediction.

“Yeah? You sure? Oh, shit, babe, that’s great! Fuck, sorry, habit.” He cast a quick guilty look toward the bedroom. We both knew it didn’t mean anything when he slipped and called me babe, like he had so long ago, but it set Matt’s nerves jangling, so he tried not to.

“I’m sure. I’ve already been writing some stuff. For me, mostly, but a little for you. I’m…I think it would be good to have a distraction.” The second the words were out of my mouth I cringed. “Fuck, that’s not—I don’t mean it like that. I want to work on this. With you. If you’ll still have me.”

“No worries, man, I know. Nothing wrong with something being awesome and also a distraction. Okay, then.” He flipped into business mode. “What about you show me a song in…two weeks? That work?”

“Great.”

I grabbed my keys and walked to the front door.

“Tell Matty I’m sorry?” Rhys nodded. “And…Rhys, I won’t let you down. I won’t.”

“I know you won’t,” he said, waving me off.

“No.” I caught his hand. “But I have. I have, and I won’t this time.”

I did call Huey, though a familiar streak of perversity made me wait until after midnight. I told myself it was because he’d certainly be at the bar, but I knew it was asshole brain skirting the edges of the promise I’d made Rhys, keeping it, but stepping just far enough over the line that it satisfied the urge to rebel.

He listened as I rambled about nonsense at first. Then, finally, I worked my way around to telling him that breaking up with Theo felt like trying to get clean all over again. Then I backpedaled, telling him it wasn’t exactly a breakup because I wasn’t even sure we’d really been together. And that I didn’t know what I had been thinking in the first place, getting together with someone who lived smack dab in the middle of everything I’d run away from, so maybe the whole thing had been about my addiction in the first place and not about Theo at all.

In the silence that followed me running out of steam, I could hear the buzz of the bar in the background, and I had the strange feeling of dislocation, because now it was me on the other end of the phone, when so often I had sat in the bar and watched as it was someone else, the particulars of what they said drowned out by toasts and laughter and conversation.

Huey’s voice was as steady as ever when he said, “It doesn’t matter, Whitman. Right now, it doesn’t matter what you were, or why. If you wait until you figure it out to deal with it, you’re gonna be right back on the floor where you started.”

And that, I reminded myself, was why I needed Huey. Because nothing I said could shock him, and he reacted to everything with the sangfroid of a man who’d heard it all before, and could strip the nastiest tangle of thorns down to dirt. He told me to stop being a fucking diva who thought he could do everything himself, and start coming to meetings again.

So I did. For the first few weeks, it felt like regression because I’d somehow convinced myself I was done with that part of things. Huey just snorted at me when I told him that, reminding me that he’d been clean for fifteen years and still went to meetings four days a week.

“Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday. I go to the gym, I go to meetings, I go to the grocery store. Those are the things I do. If I stop doing one of them, I stop doing the others. So I don’t stop,” he said. “Some things you take medication for a week and they go away. Some conditions you take medication for your whole life because that’s how you manage it. Only you can say which you’ve got and which you need.”

Now, after a month of meetings, working on songs for Rhys’s album, and—at a suggestion from Huey—running every morning, I felt…better. I still felt like I was walking a tightrope, but now it seemed like I could see the open air around me, see that if I stepped to the side, I’d fall off, where before I was stomping in the dark, fingers crossed that the rope would even be there.

It was around midnight on a Wednesday night, and rain was lashing the windows of Huey’s bar, turning the lights outside smeary and distant. Inside, the bar was dim and desolate, only a few devotees who’d come out for dollar well drink night despite the weather. I was perched on the last stool, next to where Huey leaned, one foot against the wall, arms crossed, looking like the bouncer he’d once been, in another life.

I’d come from having dinner with a woman I’d met at my meeting—a playwright I’d started talking to at the break. I’d never seen her at a meeting before, and the things she said had resonated. She talked about how for her, part of the struggle wasn’t just the cravings for drugs themselves. It was the craving for what it meant that she could give in to them. The freedom. The desire to act on her impulses, her wants, without feeling like she had to slap them down.

Huey nodded as I told him about our conversation. “The desire for oblivion starts with desire for oblivion,” he mused. I raised an eyebrow at him as I often did when he spoke in the kind of irritating Yoda-esque tautologies I associated with the support-group-speak.

Huey fixed me with an incisive stare. “First comes the desire not to exert control. Then comes a mode of losing it. You don’t want to have to control yourself. You want to have the freedom to act as you wish. Then you fulfill that desire. You’re as addicted to the sense of freedom as to the thing that brings it. I’m just restating what your friend said, Whitman. Don’t give me that look like you’re smelling shit.”

“I think that’s what freaked me out so much with Theo. There was all the fame stuff. Like, how dangerous it seemed it would be, getting sucked into that lifestyle, the scrutiny. But mostly it’s…how much I wanted him—the way I wanted him. It felt too close to that craving, you know? Felt too close for comfort.”

Someone raised a glass from down the bar, and Huey held up a finger to me and went to provide a refill. As he was doing so, a few customers walked in, shaking off the rain, and he served them.

The irony of my sponsor owning a bar was not lost on me. But, as Huey often said, “Hey, I ain’t got a problem with booze, so what’s the harm?” The first time he’d said it, I’d suggested that the harm might be the fact that he had to watch people struggle with their own addictions all the time—that some people might argue he enabled them just by existing. That’s when I realized his sense of humor was so dry it threatened to blow away in the breeze. It was also when I learned that Huey didn’t trust in his own sobriety unless he constantly proved to himself that it could weather any storm. I wasn’t there yet myself, but I admired the hell out of his attitude.

As always, Huey just picked up where we’d left off.

“You know all this shit about codependency and replacing one addiction with another. Only you know if you were having healthy patterns with Theo. Maybe you were, maybe you weren’t. And maybe you needed to clear everything out, including him. Reintroduce shit back in one at a time, like one of those allergy tests. See what’s poison and what’s nourishing.”

I nodded. That was how it felt. Like over the past month I’d scrutinized every detail of my life, held each one up to the light and asked myself if it harmed me or helped me.

“At a certain point, though, Whitman, you gotta trust.”

“It’s not that I don’t trust him, it’s—”

“No. Not trust Theo. Trust yourself. You gotta be able to say, okay, I want this person and that’s okay. Or, I want this person and I shouldn’t have them. I ever tell you about Maxine?”

Huey liked to illustrate his points with stories from people he’d sponsored or known in the program over the years, and he always referred to them by fake names. I asked him once how he chose the names but he just gave me a look.

“I don’t think so.”

“Okay, so Maxine. Coke and booze. Plus she had issues with food. She ditched the coke and the booze, right? Went to meetings, did the whole bit. Took her a while, but she did it. After she’d been clean for about five years, you know what she told me? She said that she didn’t talk about it much at meetings because people didn’t take it serious, but the hardest thing for her to get under control—harder than coke and booze? Her eating disorder.”

“What? Why?”

He nodded. “You can draw a clean line with coke and booze. Say never again, and stay away from them, period. Food? You gotta eat that shit three times a day every day for the rest of your life, and you gotta make choices about it every time. Imagine if you had to use, and you had to use just a certain amount every day and not go off the rails, but not quit it? Imagine looking that needle in the face, breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”

“Fuck me.” Just the thought was making my heart race.

“Yeah. Well, that’s people, Whitman. You can’t cut everyone out of your life. You’ve still gotta interact, and so you have to get to the point where you can look at relationships and not be so scared they’re gonna kill you. That’s your Theo, right—is he a healthy choice or an unhealthy choice? That’s all you can ask.”

I dropped my forehead down to the bar top.

“Fuuuuuck.”

“Christ, kid, get your fucking face off there, it’s not that clean.”

Huey grabbed a bar mop and wiped at the wood between us.

“What if—” I shook my head.

“What’s that?”

“Nothing.”

Huey snapped the towel at me and glared.

“Talk.”

The bar top was polished and shiny and it reminded me of the night I took Theo to The Firefly Club. I traced the whorls in the wood and watched the ghost of my face reflected in the sheen.

“I don’t— He probably doesn’t want me anymore, anyway,” I muttered. “I’m no fuckin’ prize, man.”

Huey’s expression was fierce, but he wasn’t a bullshitter. “Maybe he doesn’t. Maybe he does. You won’t know if you don’t try.” I slumped in the stool. “And, Whitman.”

“Huh.”

“If you’re looking for a prize, you ain’t lookin’ for love. Love isn’t a reward. It’s not something you deserve or don’t deserve.”

“Oh, yeah, so what is it then?”

Huey’s face was set, but his eyes were distant.

“Fuck if I know,” he said. “But I sure as hell know what it isn’t.”