The girl stopped.
Ryan was sipping his coffee.
“I’m sorry,” she said then. “I started talking-I forgot to say I’m Denise, and I’m an alcoholic.”
Ryan lit another cigarette and leaned forward with his elbows on the table, watching her. It couldn’t be the same girl. But now the voice was familiar.
“I have the feeling everything I say you’ve heard before,” Denise said, “but I guess that’s part of it too. We can empathize, put ourselves in each other’s places.”
The nose was the same. Her face was different, it seemed narrower, smaller. Her blond hair was much shorter. It fell in a nice curve close to one eye, and she’d brush it away with the tips of her fingers.
“I reached the point finally, I guess I did think about killing myself, but even then I put off thinking how I would do it, whether to go off the bridge or turn the gas on or what. I’d think about it tomorrow, after I finished the half gallon of wine.”
The empty Gallo bottles on the kitchen floor. The girl lying on the daybed with her hair in her face. Hair and lint on the dark turtleneck. Ryan remembered it. The greasy blue jeans and pale white unprotected feet. Moving her foot and not knowing someone was there watching it move. The girl at the table would be about the same age, twenty-eight. She wore a navy-blue sweater with the collar of a print blouse showing. She looked fresh, clean.
“It was a feeling that I wanted to get out of myself. Do you know what I mean? Every once in a while I’d see myself, what I’d become, and I’d say, ‘What am I doing here? This isn’t me.’ I couldn’t stop thinking. Do you know what I mean? Going around in circles, afraid of not particular things but everything.”
The voice on the phone had said to him, “I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be inside me, but I can’t get out.”
“I had some help. Right at the end, when I didn’t know what to do. I remember someone tried to help me.”
She was looking this way, but her gaze might be directed past him, or at the table leader a couple of chairs over. Ryan wasn’t sure.
“But I guess my pride screwed things up. I had to do it myself, so I ran away. Which is a pretty good trick, running away from yourself. Then I got the idea I was going to go home, the little girl wanting her mommy. But I didn’t do that either, thank God, which was probably a good thing. If I’d gotten the lectures and all the shoulds and shouldn’ts, and Mother taking my screwing-up as a personal affront, trying to hurt her-I didn’t need somebody like that, who wouldn’t even begin to understand the problem. My mother’s idea of drinking-well, never mind.”
Good, Ryan thought. It would’ve been a bad move.
“Somehow I got to a meeting. It was at Holy Trinity in Detroit, you know, in Corktown, and there was a real mixture of people there. I remember a black woman who kept referring to her higher power as God Honey. That was my first meeting. I’d find a meeting every night somewhere, and finally I came out here.” Denise paused. “I got a job, I start Monday. I’m living in Rochester in a very nice place and-the amazing thing, it seems like such a long time ago, and yet it’s only been three or four weeks. I’m still a little fuzzy about periods of time.”
Three and a half weeks, Ryan thought. Twenty-five days.
“I just hope it lasts, the good feeling.” She paused again and looked at the table leader. “Thank you.”
After the meeting they stood in lingering groups talking. Most of them seemed to know one another. Ryan got a half cup of coffee and waited. She was standing with the man from their table named Paul and the woman who used to wake up in motel rooms. Paul finally left them. They glanced over this way, then came toward him, both of them smiling. She was a good-looking girl, neat and trim, Ryan’s idea of the perfect size. The other one, he couldn’t imagine her waking up in a motel room with anyone.
“It’s Jack, isn’t it?”
“Right. Denise and…”
“This is Irene. I was just telling her-you said this was your first time, but I know I’ve seen you somewhere. Do you ever go to the Teamsters’ Hall on Sunday?”
“No, I’ve heard about it, but I’ve never been there.”
“It’s a good meeting. Eleven o’clock Sunday morning.”
“I’ll have to go sometime. Yeah, I’ve been in the program three and a half years, but this is my first time here. Usually I used to go to Beaumont.”
He was letting it get away. He wanted to ask her a question to be absolutely sure, but Irene stood there smiling at him. It had to be the same girl, now with trusting eyes, a pleasant expression, looking at him and sensing something but not remembering. He wouldn’t have recognized her on the street.
“It was a good meeting, wasn’t it?” She seemed eager to keep going.
“Yeah, I enjoyed it. I guess I always do. Everybody’s straight, it’s the one place people tell you honestly what they think.”
“No More Bullshit,” Denise said. “I love that. I think I’ll paint it on my wall.”
“The guy I mentioned has it,” Ryan said, “is with an advertising agency. I don’t know if it helps him or not. Maybe.”
Denise smiled again. “Are you in that business?”
“No, I’m a process server.”
She nodded and seemed to be thinking about something.
“You know what that is?”
“I’ve been served, evicted, and repossessed. I know exactly what it is. Not lately, though.”
“Not in the past three or four weeks anyway, huh?”
It went past her or she didn’t hear him. She was looking at the people beginning to leave.
“I told Paul and some of the others I’d meet them for a bite,” Denise said. “Would you like to join us?”
“Fine. I’ve got a car.”
“I came with Irene. Why don’t you follow us over, unless you know where it is.”
“Where are we going?”
“I’m sorry, I thought all AAs went to Uncle Ben’s after meetings. It’s the pancake house on Huron.”
“Maybe he sick,” Tunafish said.
“Got sick all of a sudden,” Virgil said. “Park his car and walk in the hospital, say he’s sick.”
“Then he visiting somebody.”
“That’s where we’re at,” Virgil said. “Who? Bobby’s woman? Maybe so. She was in bad shape.”
“Ask him,” Tunafish said. “You know the man.”
“The man ain’t talking much. He don’t call me back. But all of a sudden he got this interest in Pontiac, going to the bars, going home, come back out here. He know something he ain’t telling.”
They sat in Virgil’s white Grand Prix in the visitors’ parking lot, Saint Joseph Mercy Hospital. If Virgil were to pop on his headlights, the beam would show part of Ryan’s light-blue Pontiac Catalina. Tunafish was cold. He held himself tightly with his hands in the pockets of his leather coat. He didn’t know what he was doing here, keeping Virgil company. Virgil was smoking a joint, the new quiet Virgil. He had smoked hash all the time and was never this quiet before. He spoke so slow Tunafish wasn’t sure he’d ever finish what he started to say, the joint putting spaces between his words. Virgil kept his window open a few inches. That’s why Tunafish was cold, feeling the damp night air.
He wished he knew what he was doing here. He didn’t like to ask, but he didn’t like the way it had been going lately, Virgil calling him, getting him pulled into some shit going on about Bobby Lear and Bobby’s wife. People asking about her, looking for her. He didn’t like not knowing who this man Ryan was. The man seemed familiar, like he’d seen him someplace, and he kept thinking of the man as a cop, even though Virgil told him he wasn’t. Tunafish wanted to know things, but he didn’t want to know too much, in case anybody was to sit him down and ask him questions. He got a little excited and sat up straighter when he saw Ryan come out and get in his car.