“All addicts are selfish,” Darnton repeated, and raised his caterpillar-thick eyebrows, daring us to disagree. When no one did, he opened the blue-covered paperback in his hand and began reading. I wondered idly whether he was starting where he’d left off with the last group; whether he just worked his way right through The Big Book, regardless of who was listening. “The first requirement is that we be convinced that any life run on self-will can hardly be a success.” I blinked. My hands hurt and were trembling. My head was still throbbing. I wanted to lie down, curled beneath a blanket, soothed and calmed by my pills.
“Why are you here?” Darnton asked Aubrey.
She shrugged. “ ’Cause my parents found my works.”
“Do you want to stop using?”
Another shrug. “I guess.”
“You guess,” Darnton repeated, his voice rich with sarcasm. Was mocking addicts really an effective way to get them to change? Before I could come to any conclusions, Darnton turned on Mary. “How about you?”
“I was drinking too much,” she whispered in a quavering voice. “I did terrible things.”
Darnton appeared just as interested in Mary’s self-flagellation as he did in Aubrey’s nonchalance. “And you?”
I forced myself to sit up straight. “I was taking painkillers.”
“And you were taking painkillers because . . ?” the thumb persisted.
“Because I was in pain,” I said. Duh. Never mind that the pain was spiritual instead of physical. The thumb did not need to know that. I turned my eyes toward the wall, where two posters were hanging. STEP ONE, I read. We admitted that we were powerless over alcohol and that our lives had become unmanageable, then tuned back into the jerky little man lecturing us about our “character defects,” hectoring us about what he kept calling “the brain disease of addiction,” a disease that, he claimed, was rooted in self-centeredness.
“If anything, I was using the pills because I was trying to do too much for other people,” I interrupted. “My father’s got Alzheimer’s, so I’ve been helping him and my mother. I take care of my daughter. And I write for a women’s website.”
Darnton’s eyebrows were practically at his hairline . . . or where his hairline must have been at some point. “Oh, a writer,” he said. He probably thought I was lying. Given my scratched hands, my pallor, my ratty hair and attire, my vague smell of puke—and, of course, the fact that I was in rehab—I couldn’t blame him.
“Yes, I’m a writer,” I said. “And my life was not unmanageable. Everyone else’s life was unmanageable.”
The thumb opened his book again and kept reading. “Selfishness—self-centeredness! That, we think, is the root of our trouble. Driven by a hundred forms of fear, self-delusion, self-seeking, and self-pity—”
“I volunteered,” I said, hearing my voice quiver. I swallowed hard. No way was I going to cry in front of this hectoring little jerk. “I ran my house. I took care of my daughter. I took care of my parents. I helped out at my daughter’s school . . .”
He lifted his eyebrows again. “Doing everything, were we?”
“So either I’m selfish or I’m a martyr?”
The man shrugged. “Your best thinking got you here. Think about that.” He returned to his reading. “The alcoholic is an extreme example of self-will run riot, though he usually doesn’t think so.” He paused to give me a significant look.
“I’m not a ‘he,’ ” I said. I’d been acquainted with The Big Book for only twenty minutes, but I could already tell that it needed a gender update.
“Above everything, we alcoholics must be rid of this selfishness. We must, or it kills us!” He set the book down and looked us over. Aubrey appeared to be asleep, and Mary was crying quietly into her hands.
“You think your life is fine,” he said to me. Better than yours, I thought unkindly, imagining the existence that went with his outfit—a vinyl-sided house in some unremarkable suburb, a ten-year-old shoebox of a car with spent shocks, waiting for his tax refund to arrive so he could pay down the interest on his credit card. A little man with a little mind and a handful of slogans he’d repeat, no matter who was in the room with him or what their problems were.
“I bet when you go home, and you’re looking at things with sober eyes, you’re going to think differently.” When I didn’t answer, he said, “Before I got sober, I’d been building shelves in my kitchen. I thought they were beautiful. I thought I really knew what I was doing. When I came home, I saw that those shelves were a disaster. They were crooked. The cabinet doors didn’t shut. I’d kicked a hole in the wall when I got frustrated.”