Thirty

Fiction by ​​Amy Stuber

Day 4. Everything is designed to murder them and take them to some afterlife where they really don’t want to be but where everyone else is sure they need to go. The hollowing out, the sad stories of strangers on stackable chairs. The wide faces of the therapists who tug at their battened-down parts until they start making up abusive parents to give them the easy rationale therapists seem to need. The fucking little chips that are nothing but angry plastic to rattle in their pockets on days when they breathe like breathing could actually break them. When they sit in a room full of the people who are their people, all of them wanting nothing more than to get serious about disappearing their brains because brains hurt so much more than just bodies.
 
 
Day 9. Helen sits cross-legged behind the couch in the dayroom and leans back against it with a man (cocaine, pills) Helen (alcohol, heroin) met a few days ago but who is now pretty much her best friend. They down an entire family-sized bag of potato chips in five minutes, and then he puts his hand up her shirt, but discreetly, which is fine with her because: what else? Even with crafts and group and second group and one-on-one and yoga and meditation and optional chapel and optional group trail walk and meals and snacks like they are all toddlers, there is still so much time.
 
Outside the window, an actual blimp skates across clouds with a sign telling everyone to buy insurance because a reptile thinks it’s a good and useful thing, which, yes, it is. Helen is 25. She is still on her mother’s insurance. She’s on her third rehab. Her last job was working at an indoor miniature golf course where she often pocketed the sweaty tens of divorced dads instead of putting them in the register.
 
“What do you want next?” Helen’s therapist asked. In response, Helen whistled a Joni Mitchell song her mom used to play, even though in real life she considers whistling a serious offense. Her therapist stared at her pencil, which was one of those thick and expensive mechanical ones. “You know I can’t help you if you won’t help yourself,” she said, which of course everyone in rehab has heard a hundred times. “Yep,” Helen said and then, of course, it was fifty minutes. 
 
 
Day 11. For some reason, they weigh everyone and do vitals every morning like it’s an actual hospital. They are in a room with a metal scale and blood pressure cuff and thermometer while outside the room’s big window, three men sit on the flat roof taking what’s probably their first smoke break of the day before returning to spreading some kind of hot tar in patches.
 
“I’m getting fat,” Misti yells when she takes her turn on the scale. “Fucking irreversibly fat. Fat grandma coming through,” she says, as she swats Helen aside and moves toward the nurse’s station where she’ll get a tiny paper cup that in another setting would be used for ketchup but here will have whatever mix of acceptable mood-improving pharmaceuticals her doctor has decided on. 
 
Helen declined the anti-anxiety meds they recommended, as she always does, and the doctor said, “Your choice,” and she said, “I fucking know it’s my choice,” and then she said, “I’m sorry,” to which the doctor said, “You don’t have to be sorry,” to which Helen said, “I want to be sorry,” to which the doctor said, “It’s your choice to be sorry,” to which Helen said, “I fucking know,” and then “I’m sorry,” and then a bird flew into the window and they both startled but only Helen started laughing out of sheer awkwardness.
 
 
Day 16. Everyone in the dayroom is watching Fox and Friends ironically and playing a pretend drinking game where each time the blonde woman tells a lie, which is constantly, they raise pretend glasses.
 
Ora, the staffer sitting on a chair in the room with a clipboard in her lap but mainly knitting a tiny yellow sock, rolls her eyes and says, “Y’all don’t even want to get better,” and she’s mainly right. Helen and her rehab bestie have been planning their relapses on bright post-its they pass to each other in halls or in meetings.
 
Fox and Friends goes away, and a used car lot ad comes on with James Brown music in the background while a man dressed inexplicably as a giant fish screams about deals. Ray turns it up as loud as it goes and starts dancing because he’s Ray and he’s always dancing. And then suddenly Bill, Bar Bill everyone calls him, the man who howled through detox maybe more than the rest of them, whose grown daughter brings him a jumbo bag of starlight mints at visiting, Bill stands in one spot and shakes it in a way Helen didn’t think he was capable of shaking. Misti the grandmother who spent a year burning macerated oxy on foil in a bunch of rural bedrooms is also up. And then they’re all up and they are just limbs jutting out and around and into each other for the 30 remaining seconds of James Brown.
 
When the blonde woman comes back on the screen, everyone sits and breathes hard and for that minute, they are all right there and maybe even a little bit okay and maybe even a little bit happy, except of course for Renee who is crying, but then Renee is always crying.
 
 
Day 20. Helen has never been good at meditation, which, the instructor tells her, means she needs it even more. She tries for the blankness, to count backwards and feel all the parts of her body relaxing in order from head to toes. But the more she tries, the more she obsessively notices all the sighs and grunts and twitches and tics of all the other addicts lying on dirty foam mats just a few inches beyond her fingertips. Her rehab bestie has started wearing a post-it every day front and center on his shirt, and it says, “there’s no reason, it’s just how my fucking brain works,” and she doesn’t have the heart to tell him it’s a comma splice. But there is the post-it, rising and falling on his chest, and Helen thinks he’s fallen completely asleep, which is not the point of meditation at all.
 
On the other hand, Helen’s new roommate Stephanie does everything right. Achieves a perfect Zen state in meditation. Talks in group. Doesn’t laugh during forced yoga. Doesn’t fuck anyone in the bathroom during break. Listens with eye contact and face nodding to everyone’s long and similar stories. Yay Stephanie. Stephanie wins rehab.
 
 
Day 22. Food is not the thing, but it is something, and they all walk with more speed and purpose to the dining room than to the art room or the exercise room or the group room or the day room. The room where they eat has the look of a converted office space with whiteboards on all the walls where staffers write affirmations that someone crosses out or revises when no one is looking: “Do the Work” becomes “Do da Twerk” and “I Can and I Will,” “I Drink and I Chill.”
 
The food tries but falls short. It all feels like the food of airports from the time of Helen’s childhood. There are turkey sandwiches on flattened croissants wrapped tight in plastic. There are machine-stamped cookies with their criss-crossing lines of fudge. Every few days, someone’s mother comes at visiting with a large amount of shareable gummy candy. The fact is, Helen’s own mother is a basically nice woman whose worst crime is having no boundaries. She’s 60, lives alone in Helen’s childhood house outside of Portland where she smokes weed most nights and texts Helen things like, “I should have done something more with my life,” and then “I hope you don’t think I’m a disappointment,” and then a few minutes later, “But don’t worry about me,” and a few minutes after that, “I’m fine.”
 
 
Day 29. On her last Friday, when her thirty days are almost up, her doctor sits without saying anything for the bulk of the fifty minutes and near the end passes Helen the stack of fluorescent post-its on which she’s written all her relapse plans. “What is it you’re trying to recreate, Helen? What are you seeking?” She’s wearing stockings, which Helen didn’t think anyone did anymore. There’s a clock on her side table with clock hands shaped like actual human hands ticking toward tomorrow when Helen will walk outside unsupervised, get into a Lyft and be driven to the house of an old boyfriend because her lease ran out and there’s nowhere else she can think of but back with her mother, which she can’t and won’t do.
 
The thing is: this is a loop. They fly through. Fly out. Fly back again, and everybody knows it, so it’s a game to pretend otherwise.  The brain was a creature of habit, Helen knew. It wanted what it had had before, and it wanted that more than anything until you spent a lot of time convincing it not to, and even then sometimes it wanted it still.
 
 
Day 30. Helen forgot there was a fountain just outside the hospital’s entrance, but then she remembered little about the day her mom dropped her off.
 
There are cast-iron lily pads resting on the fountain’s blue water, on top of one of which a child-sized iron frog sits with broad bronzey eyes that seem to cast aspersions. Her mother texted to see what time she should pick her up, but Helen didn’t text her back. This isn’t the time that will stick, Helen wants to tell her but can’t bring herself to.
 
She gets into her Lyft, and the driver, a very old man who seems like maybe he shouldn’t be driving anymore, is blasting Harry Nilsson’s version of “Everybody’s Talking,” which she can remember her dad playing at some point.
 
“Want me to turn it down?” he says,
 
“Nah, I like it,” Helen tells him and settles her backpack on her lap like it is a child. Her rehab friend was kicked out a few days ago (someone he knew brought him pills inside of a ball-point pen that somehow made it through inspection, and he’d taken a few and passed out on the floor of the dayroom).
 
Helen gives the Lyft driver the address of the old boyfriend she knows will let her crash for a while, and the driver eases the car forward and out of the parking lot. A woman with several children sits at the bus stop across from the hospital. Two of the kids wrestle in the grass. While Helen waits for the light to turn, one of the two stands up and punches the other one right in the jaw. The mother who is only a few feet from Helen’s face doesn’t move except to shake her head side to side while locking eyes with her, and then the car is going again.  The real mindfuck of childhood is how many people ask you all the time, “What are you going to be,” as if you dream a version of yourself and walk right into it, as if the future is swimming with NBA stars and doctors and not 7-11 night shift workers and people pulling fish onto boats or cleaning under the bathroom sink of a stranger.
 
Of course, after so much time indoors, the pines they drive past look greener and a little more alive than a few weeks ago, and here Helen is back outside and alone and really not at all different.
 
The car pulls up in front of the old boyfriend’s building. There’s a woman on the steps folding laundry, and she’s putting the clean and folded clothes in piles on the concrete at her feet like a grouping of acolytes. The old boyfriend knows she’s coming, and he puts his whole upper body out the open window on the third floor and for some reason gives Helen the peace sign. She gives him a nod and thinks of what all the hours leading up to sleep will entail and decides right then to lean into it, to really do it right until it’s 3 AM or maybe it’s noon or maybe time is a construct because of course it is and the angels she the atheist has never believed in are hanging in a tight circle above her head with a syringe and bringing her back to life. Repeat.

Amy Stuber

Amy Stuber's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Witness, The Common, Idaho Review, Wigleaf, American Short Fiction and elsewhere.She's an Assistant Flash Editor at Split Lip Magazine. She's on Twitter @amy_stuber_ and online at www.amystuber.com.