“There are two ways to be dead — the loss of life and the loss of the spirit.” MacKenzie Oak spoke as if he were beginning a lecture.
Dr. Jake Tunnel nodded, pushed back in his leather chair and occasionally made a motion with his pen, as though he were taking notes. He wasn’t. If he wrote down everything his patient said, he’d run out of paper.
“I’d much rather lose my life than my spirit,” MacKenzie continued. “I want to live out the rest of my life on this world and go to the next. I refuse to be the walking dead.”
Jake stopped himself from saying something about zombies; MacKenzie didn’t need encouragement. Jake knew his patient’s lecture was a strategy to avoid talking about the real reason he was sitting in a psychologist’s office. Big, burly MacKenzie Oak was an alcoholic and addicted to gambling — or at least to using video lottery terminals. The man had worked for Canadian Pacific Railways for forty-two years, and now he was wasting his life savings and gambling away his pension. His wife had confronted him about their dwindling bank account, and MacKenzie turned to his former employer for help. The cpr’s Employee Assistance Program referred him to Jake, who specialized in addictions. And an eap meant Jake didn’t have to worry about payment. He felt callous when he listened to a patient pour his or her heart out for fifty minutes, then had to ask, “How will you be paying for all this help?”
“You can teach your patients about being alive again,” MacKenzie Oak continued. “You can introduce them to a higher power of faith. You can help them find reasons to live — not just be alive.”
Jake casually checked the small clock he kept hidden from the patient couch: only ten minutes left in the session. Time to get to the real therapy. He hated cutting a patient off, but sometimes he had to be firm.
“Yes, but we’re here to talk about you, Mac. We need to get back to the reason you came to my office.”
MacKenzie instantly looked contrite.
“I know it’s difficult,” Jake said in a soft, nonthreatening manner. “Why don’t you give me an update on how you’ve managed with the gambling over the last week?”
MacKenzie hung his head. Jake waited patiently, and finally the bearded man began to talk. He had told Jake he was full of guilt, because his church taught him gambling was sinful. And he felt guilty about how he was treating his wife, to whom he was devoted. “I’ve betrayed her,” he told Jake.
“It’s been a rough week then,” Jake said gently.
MacKenzie nodded.
“How much?” Jake asked.
“Too much.”
Jake waited.
“Five hundred,” MacKenzie finally said.
“And the drinking?”
His patient looked up. “Nothing,” he said almost proudly. “I did like you taught me. I used one of the drastic measures. I was at the machine and ordered a beer without thinking. I was about to take a drink but I stopped myself and right then and there I dumped that beer on the floor.”
Jake laughed, “Right on the floor, eh?” MacKenzie finally smiled.
“Yep, the whole damn thing right there on the floor, and I told myself I’m not going down that slippery slope. I remember you saying it’s that damn first step and then the next steps are so easy. You just slip and slide your way right into an all-out relapse. Well I wasn’t gonna do that. No sir. And even though I got a stare or two, like I was crazy, I made like it was an accident, and the people around me sank right back into themselves.”
“I’m proud of you, Mac. You’ve taken some pretty big steps. I think it’s been almost a month since your last drink.”
MacKenzie nodded, but his face was sad. “But I still didn’t get away from the machine after the beer thing. I still wasted all that money.”
“Hey, you beat the booze — you can beat the machine. Just don’t knock yourself down — you know what that does.”
“Puts me back in the cycle.”
“Yep. The cycle of guilt and remorse that drives you right into the addictive behavior.”
“You’ve been real good to me, Dr. Tunnel. I just wanted to say —”
“No, no, Mac. It’s my job, and you’re doing all the work. I just wish all my patients were as thoughtful and motivated.”
“I know, but —”
“No buts,” Jake insisted. “You keep on working hard like you are, and we’ll put all this stuff behind us. Now get out of here. I’ll see you next week.”
As soon as MacKenzie Oak was gone, Jake stood and stretched his six-foot frame, working out the knotted muscles that came from focusing on someone else’s problems. Even now, at thirty-eight and after ten years of working with people, he still ached at the end of every session. He was happier than when he’d lived in New York — after he received his PhD from Columbia, he’d worked for two years at an addiction clinic on the Upper West Side, but he hated having to report to a supervisor, and the weekly team meetings wore him down. He preferred to work on his own; in private practice, he never had to explain himself to anyone. He knew he wasn’t much of a people person when it came to coworkers.
He’d moved to Halifax after he married Abby, a Canadian enjoying her dream vacation in New York. Abby. Jake spun his chair around so he could see the photograph on his desk of Abby and their family. Abby was five years younger than Jake, and bubbled over with enthusiasm about life. He thought fondly of the whirlwind romance, their city wedding, and the move to Nova Scotia. He’d opened his practice in a converted historic stone complex, one of Halifax’s oldest breweries, in a prime location on Lower Water Street. He loved the city, loved working right downtown, and he and Abby were enormously proud of their two children, seven-year-old Emily and five-year-old Wyatt.
He let loose a sigh as he leaned back in his leather chair. He always tried to leave half an hour between patients so he could relax, but recently he was finding it hard to concentrate. Recently, the only thing on his mind had been his son, Wyatt. The boy had been complaining of headaches and dizzy spells. Jake and Abby knew something was very wrong.