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“It’s never been easy to talk to anyone about why I did it, but I think you might understand the pressures of being an athlete as much as I do. By the time I was seven, the rink had become my second home. At first, I loved it. People would stand on the sidelines and watch me practice, and I felt like I was on top of the world. I was nine when I entered my first big competition. I’d been a superstar at my local rink, practiced twenty hours of skating and ten hours of dancing every week.” She paused, and her eyes went out of focus, like she was visualizing what came next. “I remember walking into that first competition and thinking I was the best and going to win.” She shook her head. “I didn’t even make the podium. It was devastating, a real eye opener. That night I struggled to sleep, feeling like all my hopes and dreams of someday making it to the Olympics were a joke. I’d watched my mom get pissed off or upset about things for years. Her way of dealing was to have a few drinks. So the next night, when I was still feeling awful, I waited until she was passed out and snuck a few sips from her bottle. It allowed me to forget that I’d lost the competition long enough to sleep. At first, I only drank when I lost. But eventually I used it to console myself after a bad practice, a guy blowing me off, or…” She shrugged. “Anything really.”
“Jesus, Evie. I had no damn clue. I thought this was something new, that you were struggling because you didn’t make the Olympic team.”
“Well, I was, but it’s not new.”
“Does your mother know?”
She shrugged. “If she does, she’s never said anything. But my father knows. He could pick out a drunk a mile away after living with my mother for a dozen years. He tried to help years ago, but I would never admit the truth. It’s why I cut off our relationship. I didn’t want to deal with it.”
“He didn’t stop talking to you when he got remarried and started a new family like you said?”
Evie looked down. “No.”
Eleanor interrupted. “How does Evie sharing this revelation make you feel, Fox?”
I shook my head, still in shock. “I don’t know. Stupid for not seeing it. Sad that she’s been going through it alone for so long. Anger—toward her mother for not seeing that her nine-year-old was drinking.” I looked up and met Evie’s eyes. “Scared that it’s much worse than I thought, and you might not be able to stay sober…”
Tears streamed down Evie’s face. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I’m such a mess.”
Over the next hour, Evie did a lot of talking. Some of it really hurt, like when she admitted that she’d gone from feeling inadequate in skating to feeling like she wasn’t enough for me. It wasn’t true, but as she spoke about her lack of self-confidence, I realized she’d often sought reassurance from me, and I’d brushed it off as dumb. I didn’t get that she truly had low self-confidence and felt like a failure and needed more from me. And I felt like a failure myself for not being able to see that the woman I lived with—the woman I was planning to marry—was an alcoholic.
When we finally came to a lull in Evie’s confessions, Eleanor jumped in.
“I think this was a lot for one day—both for Evie to say and for you, Fox, to hear. I’m sure you need some time to absorb everything.”
I nodded. “Yeah, definitely.”
“Do you have questions for Evie? Or for me before we wrap things up for today?”
“Is she getting everything she needs here? It seems dumb to say it now, but I thought she was just coming in for alcohol addiction. It sounds like she has a lot of other stuff she needs to work through.”
Eleanor smiled. “She has a whole team. I’m a psychologist, so I talk to Evie the most, but she also has an addiction counselor, a primary-care physician, and a psychiatrist on her team. Of course, there are various nurses and support staff, too. Everyone has a different role, but we work together.”
“What’s the difference between what a psychiatrist and a psychologist do?”
“That’s a good question. People often confuse the roles, but the psychiatrist mainly treats by prescribing medications and a psychologist treats with behavioral and talk therapy.”
I felt my brows pull tight. I looked to Evie. “So you’re taking medication?”
She nodded. “Dr. Cudahy diagnosed me with clinical depression. She’s prescribed antidepressants.”
“So you come in for one addiction and the answer is to give you pills?”
Eleanor interrupted. “I understand how that can seem counterproductive. But often the reason people drink is because they’re trying to self-medicate to calm an underlying mental-health issue that has gone untreated. One of our goals here is to get to the root cause of the drinking and treat that so the patient doesn’t have to self-medicate in an abusive form.”
That sounded like trading one vice for another to me. Or worse, the treatment for the underlying mental health issue failed, and the patient was now addicted totwovices. But I didn’t know much about this shit. So I nodded. “Alright. I guess you know what you’re doing.”
CHAPTER 26
The Elephant in the Room
Josie
“Hey, sweetheart. What’s shaking?”
I tucked my cell between my shoulder and my ear and leaned forward for one last brushstroke. “Hi, Opal. Not much. Just painting the inside of the kitchen cabinets. Nothing too exciting.”
“Well, good. Then there’s no reason you can’t join us. I’m meeting some of the girls for dinner tonight. Elsie Wren is in town. She moved down to Florida to be near her daughter, but she comes up once or twice a year, and we try to get together. She lived a few houses down from your dad growing up. They were pretty good friends. Thought you might like to meet her.”
