in with her last night blows down the stairs again, but this time it blows her down into the room with it.
Sam doesn't look away this time, doesn't pretend to be looking at anything other than her. She looks at him, and a half-smile bends across her face. She's happy he's there. There are tears in her eyes, and, though it's possible that the tears are only a reaction to the dying wintery gusts of March outside, he believes he can see her repressing a cry.
She walks over toward Sam, stops at the coffee table, and places her court ordered card in the basket. She walks behind Sam, turns at the row of empty chairs beside him, takes the seat next to him, and brings all those rose water memories with her as she sits.
They sat there quietly through almost the entire meeting. She was fidgeting in her purse this time too, but now she was rummaging for tissues. And who wasn't? Tom's life reads like some movie of the week on cable.
His three-year-old son was killed in a car accident. His then-wife was driving at the time and survived the accident with nothing but minor cuts and bruises. Though not her fault, and everyone did everything they could to reassure her that she was faultless, she torpored down into a deep, deep depression. And instead of being her rock, Tom drank. He drank a lot. He couldn't escape the fact that, though it was unfair, he somehow found himself blaming her for the loss of their son, the loss of the life that they were supposed to live. It became impossible for him to face her without an underlying anger, and it was impossible for him to face reality without anguish and rage. And this new, darker world was so ever-present that he drank himself as far out of the darkness as he could, every hour of every day. He had lost everything that he thought his life was, everything he thought his life was supposed to be. So, he drank to lose all consciousness. He drank to forget the pain, to numb everything around him.
He became so successful at this that, one morning, waking up from a long bender, he found his wife dead in a bath full of cold, red water. She'd been there all night. And he just stood there, standing over her dead body, weeping, ready for his next drink.
And he did drink.
It was years before he would stop.
Tom drank away the remainder of his thirties, most of his forties, and has very little memory of those years. And the memories he does have are all the ones he wished he could forget. Worse yet, he lost, somewhere along the way, the memories of his son and his wife, his first family. Even photographs were lost.
When he looks up at the group and says, tears thick in his eyes, "I can't remember my sweet son's face. I just can't find it anywhere," you can almost hear the tears fall across the room. Even Sam, at this point, couldn't bravely hold back the tears anymore.
"Drink stole nearly twenty years of my life. Gone. I have only faint glimpses of those days now. And it probably had a great deal to do with the death of my wife, my girl, my Mary. How could I not have seen? I didn't want to see. Drink helped me not to see.
"It wasn't until I met my current wife that I began to find meaning in life again. She saved me, really. And this group. If I hadn't finally found AA, I'd be dead today. I would've died years ago. I know it. My doctor said that I had maybe a year if I were to continue down the road I was on."
"I've been married to Ann now for nine years. Married to AA for almost ten. And these are the things that keep me present, sober, and alive. So, thanks. Honestly. And I'd just like to say that, no matter how bad it gets, we can get through it together. It's the only way. We'll all get there, God willing. One day at a time," Tom says and walks back to his seat.
Russell leads the teary-eyed group in the Lord's Prayer and the Serenity Prayer and reminds everyone of the anonymity tradition of AA, which is particularly important to emphasize after someone has shared something so personal. But Sam could tell that the prayers made Jessi uncomfortable. The God stuff often makes newcomers uncomfortable. It's probably the number one excuse drunks give for not attending meetings. To a degree, it still makes Sam uncomfortable, too. But he's grown more accepting of it—in an abstract way—which is how most non-believers get through the program.
"You alright?" Sam asks Jessi.
"Yeah, I'm fine, but someone should get that Tom guy a drink," she says through swollen eyes, wiping them with her fingers—having used every inch of her ragged tissue. "I'm kidding, of course."
"Of course."
"He should loosen up a bit, though. God, what a downer."
"Yeah, that's about as rough as it gets."
"Really? Not everyone in here has a trail of dead behind them?"
"No. Tom has everyone beat in terms of body count. Most of us just have the one," he says, half-smiling at her. "His bottom seems to have been about as sad and low as anyone's here."
"So, he wins then?"
"He's the champ."
"Do they pass out tokens for that?"
"No, no tokens. Though we do all chip in every year, on his anniversary, and present him with a velvet painting of a sad clown."
She laughs. And he can't remember a laugh ever ringing such a vibrant bell inside him.
The group has started to gather in their usual cliques. There's a lot of traffic moving around Tom, and it won't be long before they start to make their way to Jessi. For some newcomers, this attention can be off-putting, and he feels she should be warned about the onslaught of awkward introductions and pithy aphorisms she's about to experience.
"Have you ever been to a meeting before?"
"You mean, besides last night?"
"Let me rephrase that. Have you ever stayed for a whole meeting before?"
"All the time. How else would I get to enjoy the cookies," she says, eyeing the cookies that have just been set out on the table with the coffee.
"Well, be prepared. You're about to enter the AA motto machine."
"Right. I've got it. I'll take it one line at a time," she says, smiling. "Sorry, that was lame, even by my meager standards."
He goes to get up. He feels that he should thank Tom for his talk. Regardless of the jokes, Tom is a true AA success story. If he can stop drinking then anyone can. God knows, he has more reasons to drink than anyone Sam has ever known.
"Where're you going?" Jessi asks, and her eyes, her whole body is begging him to stay. "I'll stop telling bad jokes, I promise."
"I was going to say something to Tom. Thank him for telling his story."
"Oh," she says and suddenly she seems smaller somehow, more frightened to be here than before.
"I can stay if you—"
"What? No. Why?" she asks, clearly in her bravado mode again, a place she seems to return to often. It's clear to Sam that she's much more vulnerable than her playfulness suggests.
He moves away from her, clearly keeping her in the corner of his eye, watching her trying not to watch him.
"Hey, Tom, great talk tonight."
"Thanks, Sam."
"Very inspiring."
"It's real life. We all have a story to tell."
"Maybe so. We just don't tell it as well as you."
"I'd trade the story, of course, for a second chance," and then Sam can see that even polite conversation with Tom can go quickly downhill.
"Right, of course," Sam says, trying to get away.
"But the past is past. What's done is done. All I can do is move forward one day at a time."
"You're right about that," Sam says, dizzy from Tom's outpouring of clichés.
"Hey, I wanted to congratulate you on making it ninety days. Russell says you did ninety in ninety."
"I did."
"That's quite an accomplishment."
"Yeah, it gave me something to focus on, something to chase."
"Well, keep coming."
"I will," Sam says, seeing an opening to turn away from Tom.
Jessi's still sitting in the same chair watching him while Ellyn is talking to her. Ellyn is holding one of the group's copies of AA's Big Book. It is common practice for a group to have copies of the Big Book that they give out to newcomers. Ellyn
is usually in charge of this, and as with everything else she does, she takes it very seriously. Since the group pays for the books, she lets the newcomers know in no uncertain terms that she wants them to take the gesture of the gift to heart, to read it, and to keep coming back.
In the beginning, one of the constants a newcomer hears is 'keep coming back,' and it's true that after awhile those tropes sink in so deep that they do indeed become habits. There is magic in repetition.
Ellyn views herself as the maternal leader of the group. She is the oldest woman in the group, and the longest running female member. And, although the role of mother was self-appointed, it is a role that she has embraced. And, though the group is about two-to-one men, when there is a new girl, Ellyn is always quick to take her under her wing, which is what she appears to be trying to do with Jessi.
But Jessi is looking at Sam as if she would like to be rescued.
He walks over to them. "Quite a talk tonight," he says to Ellyn.
"Yeah, it gets me every time I hear it," she says with the straight face of a dead pan comic, and in her usual monotone. Sam wouldn't know whether to take her seriously or not if he didn't know her better. But it would be a mistake to question Ellyn's intentions. She is nothing if not sincere. Probably sometimes to a fault. She certainly has always seemed humorless to Sam, and for that reason alone, would seem to make a bad match as Jessi's sponsor. He can already tell Jessi wouldn't respond well to Ellyn's no-nonsense approach to AA.
"Anyway, Jessi, read the book, and call me if you have any questions or concerns. My number's on the inside