Born Again Read online

  “One final blowout,” I announced as our shots arrived.

  “If you say so,” Brit laughed, and in unison we threw back our shots. Three each.

  When she wasn’t looking, however, I tossed two blue pills in my mouth, swallowed them down with vodka and lemonade. If this was to be my final night here, I would go out in style.

  I dragged her onto the dance floor when the drink and drugs hit me. Every song that came on, whether I liked it or not, whether I knew it or not, got the same level of energy. When I grew thirsty, I ignored the urge to drink in favor of boogying. That was all that mattered.

  I must have looked like a mad woman, jumping and flailing around as though having a seizure, because Brit, queen of crazy dancing, was laughing at me!

  “Those shots really did a number on you,” she said.

  I was about to let her in on my little secret about the magic blue pills, and even offer her one if she wanted, when I saw a familiar face in the crowd of dancers.

  Our eyes seemed to meet in slow motion. She didn’t stop dancing, didn’t remove her arms from around the neck of her dance partner, but her smile dropped.

  The room began to spin around me. My head pounded, as though an imp was beating a drum inside it. Everyone and everything became a blur. I felt the sweat clinging to my pores. The last thing I remember was stumbling into someone and collapsing to the floor.

  It took my eyes a moment to adjust to the light of the room. Disoriented, my throat dry, I didn’t move immediately, just lay there in the bed, taking in my surroundings. A hospital room.

  A nurse entered, smiled when she saw that I was awake. She checked the water in my drip.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “I—I don’t know.” It felt like I had a ball of fur stuck in my throat when I spoke.

  “Do you know what happened to you?”

  I sat up slowly. “I fainted, I think.”

  “Do you know why?” She retrieved my chart from the bottom of the bed. Looked at it. “An MDMA overdose...”

  I looked away in shame.

  “Your friend’s outside. Should I send her in?”

  I nodded humbly. When the nurse left I braced myself for Brit’s scolding. However, it wasn’t Brit that entered, but Naomi. And then I remembered: she’d been there at the club, just before I passed out.

  She approached my bed, face a picture of loathing. That was the only way to describe it. And because it hurt to see her look at me like that, I burst into tears.

  “I promised myself I’d go easy on you, but I don’t think I can,” she started, her voice cracked, shaky. “You can cry all you like, it won’t make a difference.”

  I wiped my face with the back of my hand, said nothing.

  “After everything you went through with your parents, your brother. After everything I went through...” She shook her head, rolled her eyes skywards, but only to prevent her own tears from falling. Had I read her initial expression incorrectly? This didn’t look so much like loathing anymore.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, my voice tiny.

  “Why? Why would you do something like this?”

  I had no real answer for her. My road to self-destruction was only paved with questions.

  “I’m not addicted, I’m just...” Lost. Not an addict, just broken and lost.

  She stepped closer so that she was right beside the bed. “You need help,” she said, her voice and stare firm, though her eyes were still watery.

  I nodded.

  “We might not be together, but that doesn’t mean I don’t care. And I’m not about to go through this again.” She was talking about her ex, the junkie. She probably saw me as no different from that careless monster who’d taken her son from her.

  “I don’t wanna be that person.”

  “Then get better.” It was an order more than a request.

  As she turned to leave I grabbed her hand. I didn’t say anything, she didn’t say anything, nor did she pull away. My eyes said everything my mouth couldn’t.

  I didn’t know how long we were frozen like that. Then I heard, “Dakota?”

  Colin appeared at the door. Naomi let go hurriedly.

  He gave her a quizzical look. “Naomi? What are you—”

  “I was there when she passed out,” she said quickly. “I wanted to make sure she was okay.”

  “That was really nice of you.” He obviously hadn’t registered the hand-holding, and likely wouldn’t have understood even if he had.

  She shot me one final look before leaving. My gaze lingered on the door, ignoring Colin as he sat on my bed, took my hand in his.

  “Brit called. What happened?”

  “I need help,” I said.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Sometimes it was just good to talk to someone. Someone who didn’t know you, didn’t care about you, and therefore wouldn’t judge you or worry about you. For that reason alone, the steep price tag of a shrink was worth it.

  However, Doctor Roger Fenberg didn’t come with a steep price tag, nor was he worth the price that I’d paid for him: nothing! He was a man who’d taken online courses in distance learning institutes no one had ever heard of. In a bid to qualify for a genuine certificate to start practicing therapy for real, he’d set up his practice in a small office at the back of an Italian restaurant, and opened his doors, gratis, to poor schmucks who couldn’t afford the real deal. All of which he’d disclosed to me on our first session. “Pasta and Pizza, with a side helping of therapy,” it said on his business card. I looked around for the hidden cameras, thinking this was a joke. I found none.

  He’d, of course, come recommended by none other than Dove, who’d met him in one of his AA meetings. Apparently that was where he scouted for possible victims/clients.

  “He keeps it real, sis,” Dove had said, when I berated him for introducing me to the clown. “Those other ones, they just take your money and let you talk to yourself for an hour. You could do that in your bedroom.”

  So I’d kept an open mind, given him a chance.

  “What d’you wanna talk about today, Damona?”

  It was our third session in two weeks; despite my better judgement I’d kept coming back. Not because of his expertise, but because, like I said, it felt good to let everything out.

  He hadn’t bothered to buy armchairs, so I was forced to sit in a wobbly computer chair.

  “Actually, it’s Dakota...”

  He frowned. “Are you sure?” He consulted some papers on his desk.

  “Yep, I’ve had this name for twenty-nine years, so...” Was this guy for real? He’d already seen me twice.

  He scrutinized the papers, then pushed them aside finally. “Just have to take your word for it. So, what are we talking about today? Have you got all the mom stuff off your chest yet, or is there still something we need to cover?”

  I steadied myself as best I could on the wobbly chair, while he scratched his beard. “Well, I’ve been thinking a lot about her, about both of my parents, lately, and trying to figure out how someone gets to a point where they want to harm their own children. And...”

  He leaned in. “And? What conclusion did you come to?”

  “I came to the conclusion that... that nothing got them to that point. They were violent brutes even before we were born, and we were an opportunity to act out that rage that had built up inside them. Human punching bags that couldn’t run, that continued to love them unconditionally, hoping they’d get better.”

  I’d stopped crying over all of it. Gotten that out of my system in the first session. Ignored the fact that he was cleaning the gunk out of his nails while I was blubbering. I’d wasted too many tears on bad people. I had no more to give them.

  “The drugs and alcohol alleviated some of the pain that their failures as human beings caused; we did the rest.”

  He nodded, crossed a leg. “Do you think they hated you?”

  I thought about it. The question, as with most of his questions, was weird. But they di
d make me think. I shook my head. “They hated each other, though. They saw their reflections in each other, and that reminded them how much they’d failed in life. Then they took it out on us. That’s what I think.”

  He grabbed a beaten up notepad, started scribbling something down. “Saw their reflections in each other... that’s a good one,” he mumbled to himself.

  I’d grown so accustomed to his quirks and unprofessionalism that this didn’t outrage me as much as it had the first time he’d done it. I wondered how many others he’d used my lines on.

  “You know how I know they had it in them the whole time? Because I think about my own children, the children I hope to have in the future, and I would sooner cut off both arms before I would even think about harming them. And I’d kill anyone who so much as looked at them the wrong way.”

  He gave a nervous laugh. “But you wouldn’t really kill someone, would you? ‘Cause, I mean, if there’s a threat of imminent danger—”

  “Oh my God, I don’t have any children! Of course it’s not a real threat.”

  We talked a little more about my parents, and then he nudged me into another direction. I was convinced my life was a source of entertainment for him, and that he got off on certain aspects of it.

  “Have you seen her recently?” There was something lecherous in his eyes and voice. I noticed that his cadence became more smoky and hushed whenever he asked me about my relationship with Naomi.

  I fiddled with my hands for a while, said nothing. I didn’t like talking about her, not to him, not in this place. To do so felt as though I was tarnishing the memory of our time together, making it seem like what we shared was something problematic that required analysis and deconstruction. I knew everything was connected, but I wanted to keep the memory of her, of us, in a good place.

  “No,” I said eventually. “Not since she came to see me in hospital three weeks ago.”

  He didn’t know her real name, nor that she was my boss — I honestly didn’t trust him with any of that information. So I’d given her a fake name — Regina. Don’t ask why I chose that one.

  “Do you think about her?”

  I nodded miserably. “All the time. I think about what she thinks of me, how crazy she must think I am. How much trouble I’ve caused her. Then I start wondering if my feelings for her were genuine, if I was merely addicted to the illicit nature of our relationship.”

  “Well I wouldn’t go so far as to say a lesbian relationship is illicit as such—”

  I rolled my eyes. “I’m not talking about that. It doesn’t matter.” I was talking about the employer/employee relationship — the woman in authority, with power over me, who’d loved me in a way no one else ever had.

  “Do you think maybe you sought her out because your mother never loved you, and you wanted to be loved by a woman?”

  I wanted to be loved period, and she was the first person to do it. She was the first person to truly want me. Her love had become an addiction. I’d often joked that being apart from her was like being without air. But was she just a crutch to keep me emotionally balanced? Was any of it real?

  “I don’t know,” I said after a while.

  “And how do you feel about her now?”

  I shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. That ship’s sailed. Too much has happened. Besides, I’m getting married next week.”

  Dove and I lay on his brand new double bed, plastic still on the mattress. His first real purchase, and the only new piece of furniture in his studio apartment.

  We lay head to toe, something we used to do as children. I’d sneak into his bedroom at night, when our parents were fighting, and he’d always let me sleep with him. It was cramped in his single bed, but that was my safe place. I wondered when I’d taken over the role of being his protector. Only once he’d discovered that I’d overdosed on ecstasy had he jumped back into big brother mode. He sent me to therapy (albeit with an absolute moron), and forced me to accompany him to his AA meetings. Even though I knew I didn’t have an addiction to drugs, didn’t feel the urge to take them the way he did, I’d gone along anyway.

  “Do you remember that time we found the mouse with the broken leg in the back yard?” I said, the memory suddenly returning to me.

  He laughed. “Yeah, and we thought we could heal him by wrapping a popsicle stick around his leg with a rubber band—”

  “But the next morning we woke up and the stick was on the floor, and he was gone.”

  We chuckled.

  “You know, now that I look back on it, I think it was a rat, not a mouse,” I said.

  “Hmm, I think you’re right. His tail was pretty fucking long.”

  That set us off again.

  “I wonder what happened to him,” I said, once the laughter died away.

  “Dad probably found him and killed him.”

  Our forays into our past always took a dark turn. A reminder that there wasn’t much, beyond the brief and infrequent moments of joy we were able to extract, that deserved to be remembered. We were under no illusions about our childhood; we would sooner have skipped it altogether.

  I sat up then, which made him sit up.

  “Do you ever wonder what happened to Dad?”

  He considered this for a moment. Then said, his eyes pained, “Every time I do, I remember how he was with us, and I don’t have to wonder anymore. A sorry piece of shit like that, there’s only one way he ends up.”

  Just like our mom, probably.

  Something else came to mind. “Do you think Mom and Dad ever loved each other?”

  He nodded after a beat. “Why else would they have been so destructive to each other? I think they were obsessed with each other.”

  After my initial conclusion that they hated each other, I’d come around to his way of thinking.

  I sat there in silence. He must have read my face, seen what was in my heart, because he said quickly, “But that doesn’t mean all love stories end up like theirs. And it definitely doesn’t mean people should marry people they don’t love...”

  Through my peripheral vision, I could see him watching me.

  After a long beat of silence, he added, “Are you sure you wanna do this, sis?”

  I knew exactly what he was talking about. I nodded. “He’s a great guy, who’ll make a great husband, and an even better father.”

  “But you don’t love him, you love the idea of him.”

  “I want my children to have everything — a protector, a provider. A man who goes to work on time, comes home when he says he’s coming, knows his alcohol limits, hates drugs, and respects his wife. I want stability.”

  Dove hugged me as soon as the tears began to fall. “I know, sis. And I just want you to be happy.”

  Vlad, aka Chips, was giving me a strange look, stranger than usual, even for a bird. It was as if he could look right through me and see my dishonesty. From my fake smiles, to my fake enthusiasm for my pending nuptials only a couple of days away.

  Sunday dinner with Colin’s parents was over, and we’d all retired to the living room. His mother’s creepy, unfaltering smile had been there since we’d arrived, and still hadn’t budged.

  “There’s a lovely woman in my book club who does hair,” she said, upon bringing up her favorite subject — the wedding. “Smells a bit like pee, due to the incontinence, but after a while you get used to the smell. I can give you her number, if you’re interested?”

  I offered her a polite smile. “No, that’s okay, my best friend is doing it.” And I’d rather not have someone pissing themselves while they’re styling my hair for my wedding, thanks.

  I glanced at Vlad, hoping he’d stopped staring at me, but those beady little eyes continued to watch me. I was convinced he’d expose me, blurt out, in his Russian brogue, that I was a liar and a cheat who didn’t really love their son.

  “It’s all so exciting, isn’t it, dear?” This she directed at Colin, who, for the first time since we’d been coming here together, didn’t look agitated.
But he did seem distant. In fact, he’d seemed distant with me for a couple of weeks, like there was something on his mind.

  “Uh-huh.” Then he turned to me. “We’re both looking forward to it very much, aren’t we?”

  I nodded quickly, looked away from him, turned to Vlad again, to see if he’d picked up on another one of my lies. Yeah, he was on to me for sure.

  “I still think you should’ve gone bigger. The bigger the better, I say,” his dad chimed in. “You only get married once, unless you’re Henry from the bowls club. On to his fourth wife. They’re getting younger as well. The fifth will be a fetus, at the rate he’s going!”

  I laughed nervously.

  Colin looked at me again. “Well our religion doesn’t look favorably on divorce. That and a whole bunch of other things...”

  I shot him a quizzical look. What was his problem?

  “Oh, right, you mean sex before marriage,” his mother, oblivious, said with a chuckle. “Silly rule. If I’d married any of the men I’d been with prior to sleeping with them, I would have been very disappointed.”

  The laugh that burst from my mouth couldn’t be contained. I don’t know what was so funny about what she’d said, but it felt good to laugh.

  His parents joined in, but Colin didn’t. Any talk of sex always made him bristle.

  I stopped when I realized how serious he looked. I put a hand on his forearm. “Hey?” I said in a gentle voice.

  “It’s fine.” Then he did something he never had before, he moved his arm away.

  “So I suppose that, come wedding night, you two will start working on those grandkids we’ve been dying for?” His mom winked at me. I felt so uncomfortable.

  The tension in the car as he drove me home was so thick I could have reached out and touched it. He said nothing to me, and wouldn’t turn on the radio to alleviate some of the awkwardness.

  Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. “There’s something bothering you, I know it.”

  “I’m tired, that’s all.”

  “You know Christians aren’t supposed to lie,” I said in a teasing, jokey manner.