Sometimes, if I want to drink again, a flutter starts inside my chest, as if a small bird is beating upward toward my throat. This wish for a drink is rarely conscious, but my breathing gets shallow and fast, and strange thoughts enter my head, as if the wires of my identity are loosening. I don’t drink when this happens, or at least I haven’t for many years. Instead I go to AA meetings, where my interior chaos gets eased by friendliness and order and the sturdiness of hope. I had already checked through the meeting list for the Gallup vicinity, so I knew there was a 5:30 group called “Attitude Adjustment” every day at a clubhouse on Persimmon Street.
I told Ruby I had to be somewhere important, and within an hour I was away from Royce’s life and its ghastly consequences and back onto familiar ground. The famous Twelve Steps were unfurled on the wall, the slogans scattered around on placards: THINK THINK THINK, EASY DOES IT, and K.I.S.S., which I’d been told many times meant, especially for me, Keep It Simple, Stupid. My breathing began to loosen up.
The meeting had just started. Someone was reading out loud “How It Works,” the first two pages of chapter five of the Big Book, Alcoholics Anonymous, the section my first sponsor made me memorize early in my sobriety. I could barely listen, but I caught this phrase: “Those who do not recover are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves …”
It wasn’t simply the shock of locating Ruby again or the possibility, increasing with every second, that her young children were now dead, it wasn’t the fact that I was a lesbian who without any forethought had leapt straight into bed with a man for the first time in decades. No, it was the specter of my brother, my brother, my brother.
In AA, I had found a solution for my anger and self-destructiveness, and I thought I had let go of Royce and the hatreds he promoted, just as I had let go of our molested sister and our loopy mother and our dead father and God knows how many ex-lovers. “We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it” is one of the AA promises, and “We will comprehend the word serenity, and we will know peace.” For many years that had seemed true, but from the moment I recognized Ruby on television, the door to the past had blown back open. The racism my brother and I had been taught—how deep did that training go? Was it still lodged in my unconscious? Could it be genetic? How can we know what we have inherited?
Why one person recovers in AA and another does not has remained mysterious to me, but when I first joined, I just did whatever was suggested. I didn’t have a better idea then, and I still don’t. From the first meeting, I loved the extremism of the program. You don’t drink alcohol at all? Or do any drugs? Not cocaine or LSD or nitrous oxide or even a little marijuana here and there? Occasionally I wondered if AA was my own version of Royce’s radicalism, but, regardless of any ironic analysis, AA saved my life. So, while swells of fury and grief rose inside me, I sat quietly in the Gallup meeting, listening carefully to other people’s words, taking comfort, as always, in the steadiness of the meeting, the even-handed respect. “We come from Yale, we come from jail,” Bill Wilson, the cofounder of AA wrote.
A man named Jack, just released from a treatment center, said he was attending his first meeting without medical supervision. “Welcome!” we said in unison. “Keep coming back!” A woman named Clara announced that she would be getting her son back from foster care next week. She had a year and a half clean, and she was weeping with gratitude. A Native woman caught my glance and told me with her eyes that she too was long-term sober. A man with a Celtic tattoo on his cheek was chairing, and I hoped he wouldn’t call on me, but right after I’d gotten a second cup of the bitter black coffee and settled into my folding chair, he did.
“I’m Ellen, alcoholic and drug addict, visiting. Wires seem to be hanging out of my head tonight. I just need to listen.”
Later, when I looked back, the young reporter who had followed me inside was no longer in sight. I waited a few more minutes to make sure she wasn’t in the bathroom or lurking around, and then I raised my hand. When he called on me, I said, “Still Ellen, still alcoholic. Sorry to speak twice, but there was someone here earlier I couldn’t share safely in front of. I’m Ruby Redstone’s aunt, if you know who she is. In any case, I’m in Gallup because someone in my family has big trouble, and I seem to have ended up in the middle of it. I’m beginning to understand that I was always in the middle of it. I’m pretty shaky, so I could use some phone numbers after the meeting. Thanks for listening.”
Next the chairperson called on a man with pocked, ruddy skin and black hair that was pulled back in a ponytail. He wore Levi’s and cowboy boots and a denim shirt with the sleeves torn off. His arms displayed tattoos of Mickey Mouse, the Road Runner, and Bugs Bunny. “I’m Melvin,” he said. “Alcoholic and addict. Sometimes I have trouble staying out of the past because of Vietnam. Whenever that happens, I just go look at the mountains for a while. I tell the mountains what I’m grateful for, or what I would be grateful for if I were in my right mind.”
The chorus of individual stories continued to sound around me, and after a while I managed, momentarily, to forgive my brother for shooting Rommel in front of his young daughter. I wasn’t there, I don’t know his reasons, and judgment doesn’t belong to me. And I might never know what happened the night he beat Santane (I’d learned about this from the private detective I’d hired, who had located the hospital record) or why he changed so appallingly. “Walk your own path,” my AA sponsor kept telling me. “Look down at your feet. This is where you are. You are not in the past or the future. You are right here, and you only have one job: don’t take a drink or a drug today, no matter what. Go to bed tonight feeling like you’re a tiny part of what is good in the world. Let go of everyone else’s journey. Live and let live. Keep it simple, stupid.” So I asked God or the mountains or whatever it was to take care of the children and the kidnappers and even of Royce, whether any of them were alive or not. After I left the meeting I had several phone numbers stuck in my shirt pocket, including that of the old woman whose eyes had fastened on mine.