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“Drew died this week. O. D. ” Her voice was quiet and shaky. Tears washed her eyes, slid slowly down her gaunt cheeks. “You said if I ever needed help . . . I mean . . . I couldn’t think of anybody else . . . at the station they told me you might be here. . . . ”
“It’s okay, Gina. . . . ”
“I don’t want to die, Mr. Delacroix. ”
Before this spring, Nick would have been afraid of this moment; he would have seen another tragedy in the making, another failure nipping at his heels. But now, he felt Annie beside him, as strong and warm as sunlight. He heard her voice whispering inside him: Would you give it all up, Nick . . . the caring . . . would you give it all up because at the end there is pain?
Maybe he would fail—probably he would fail—but he wouldn’t let that stop him now. It was in the trying that he could save himself, and possibly this one desperate girl beside him.
He took her hand. “You’ve come to the right place, Gina. It’s scary and hard to give up the crutches, but I’ll be here for you. I won’t give up on you if you won’t. ”
A smile broke across her face, making her look impossibly innocent and hopeful. “I’ll just get a Coke, and then I’ll sit with you. ”
“Okay. ” He watched her walk through the crowded room, and then he sat down.
“So, Nicholas,” said Joe. “What’s that all about?”
Nick turned to his mentor, smiling broadly. “I guess it’s just another cop trying to save another kid from ruin. ”
Joe grinned. “Welcome back, Nicholas. We missed you. ”
The words settled through Nick, sifting gently, finding a comfortable perch. “I missed me, too,” he said quietly. “I guess you can put me back on the schedule. Say, Monday morning?”
“Ah, Nicholas. I never took you off. ”
Smiling, Nick leaned back in his seat. In a moment, Gina sat in the chair beside him.
The meeting got under way. Nick listened to the stories, and with each one, each tale that was so like his own, he felt himself grow stronger. When at last the meeting was coming to a close, he motioned to the chairman. “I’d like to speak,” he said quietly.
There was a flutter of surprise around the room. Chairs squeaked as people turned in their seats to look at Nick.
“My name is Nick,” he said into the quiet. The next part stuck in his throat, so he tried again. “My name is Nick, and I’m an alcoholic. ”
“Hi, Nick,” they answered in unison, smiling proudly at him.
He saw the understanding in their eyes, in the way they nodded or looked at him or leaned forward. It’s okay, they said wordlessly, we know. “I think I was an alcoholic long before I took my first drink. But everything started getting out of control about a year ago, when my wife died. . . . ”
Word by tender word, he relived it all, picked through the rubble of his life and exposed all his vulnerabilities and failures and triumphs and heartbreaks. He gave everything inside him to the nodding, understanding faces in this cheap, smoke-filled room, knowing that they would hold his pain in careful hands and transform it into something else, a new awareness that would get him through the long, lonely nights without Annie. As he spoke, he felt the weight of the past year begin to lift. It wasn’t until he spoke of Izzy, sweet Izzy, and the memory of the day she’d said, I love you, Daddy, that he finally broke down.
Part Three
God gave us memories so that we might have roses in December. —JAMES M. BARRIE
Chapter 24
Heat rose in shimmering waves from the black ribbon of asphalt and melted into the brown, smog-filled air. Annie leaned deeper into the smelly velour upholstery of the taxicab and sighed, resting her hand on her stomach.
Already, she couldn’t stand being away from Nick and Izzy; it felt as if a vital part of her had been hacked off and left to wither in some other place.
This concrete-encrusted land didn’t hold her life anymore. It seemed to her to be an apocalyptic vision of the future in which green trees and blue skies and white clouds had been replaced by a million shades of man-made gray.
The cab veered off the Pacific Coast Highway and turned onto her road—funny, she still thought of it as her road. Beyond the Colony’s guarded gate, they drove past the carefully hidden beach houses, each cut from the same contemporary designer’s cloth; huge, multilayered homes built practically on top of each other, most with less than eight feet of ground between them. Each one a tiny kingdom that wanted to keep the rest of the world at bay.
They turned into her driveway, and the white angles of the house soared toward the blue sky. The yard was in full bloom, a riot of pink and red hibiscus and glossy green leaves. Its beauty was so . . . false. If they stopped watering, this contrived garden would shrivel and die.
The cab pulled up to the garage and stopped. The driver got out of the car and went to the trunk, popping it open.
Slowly, Annie got out. She stared down at the driveway, remembering how she had watched over the placement of the bricks, each and every one. That one’s not right, it’s crooked. Could you please do it again before the cement hardens?
