Take Care

Laura Zapico

Micah called my name as I climbed the steps to the Oasis and he ran to catch up, sweating, his checked flannel shirt billowing behind him. I recognized him from my last rehab, the one with the low-rent organic meals and nonstop mindful meditation. We’d barely spoken there, but I’d felt his eyes on me in the dining hall and during Tai Chi, and I remembered how it thrilled me when I felt like a lonesome tumbleweed pinned against a rusted fence, blown and battered, miles from home.

Wait, he said now, huffing in the dusty desert air, falling in step beside me. Let’s go in together.

Inside the meeting hall, a woman with a leathery face introduced herself as Alma and took a twenty-nine-year chip.

I’ve lived three lives, she said, her voice vibrating over the noise of a box fan blowing hot air. She recalled how, at her rock bottom, she’d hidden out in an hourly motel, peeking through the curtains, cradling an empty bindle like a stillborn baby. Micah took a six-month chip and shared. He’d been a gloomy kid, and by the time he turned fourteen he was desperate for relief. He joined a band, but then his bandmates started smoking heroin, and pretty soon they were shooting it. He couldn’t think of any reason not to until it was too late. But things were better now. He was living with his dad, working at a guitar shop in Old Town, saving up to buy a car. He was finally feeling some serenity, and he owed it all to the program. I’d just celebrated nine months clean and I was feeling downright spiritual.

The next night, Micah grinned from the end of the bar while a drunk man with hair like a wire terrier’s sang John Denver songs on a guitar he claimed to have found by the side of the road. I had no idea how Micah knew where I worked, but I found it bold and old-fashioned to appear at someone’s place of business without being invited. I’d been working at the Prickly Pear since leaving rehab, wearing a push-up bra and fake eyelashes, struggling to seem alluring. My sponsor had gently asked if I thought it was a wise idea to tend bar, but I said I didn’t know how to make money any other legal way and she didn’t press the issue. Restocking paper towels in the ladies’ room, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and my cheeks were plump and rosy. I thought I might actually be starting to look pretty again. Towards the end of my last run, I’d let myself get raggedy and sold my services for way below market value. I thought my fillings were picking up radio signals, and one night I pulled out two of my molars with pliers.

Back home, I lay in bed, trying to feel something, and I pictured myself with Micah. I imagined unbuttoning his shirt and nesting under his arm. I thought about how it would feel if he loved me. My sponsor had told me to wait until I’d been clean a year to get into a relationship and I was trying to listen to advice. I was supposed to be taking things slowly now, attracting nicer men. The guy I was with before had pointed a gun in my face on three occasions and I promised myself I’d never go back to that kind of nonsense.

I pulled an astrology book from the shelf and studied my compatibility with Micah. Aries man is chivalrous, it said, and Cancer is his Cinderella. I skipped ahead to the sex part and it seemed promising. I realized I hadn’t even looked at his body and I couldn’t remember how tall he was. I had noticed another guy at the Oasis, a swarthy biker with rotten teeth and a milky eye. I felt sure he was a Scorpio, because I could feel his electricity across the room, and when he looked at me, my skin got hot and I had to turn away.

On Saturday night, the band Micah had been kicked out of was playing at a winery built to look like a castle, and he asked if I wanted to go. It was way past town, in wine country, and I dangled my arm out the car window into the dusty air on the ride. The grapevines went on for miles on either side of the road, rows and rows of gnarled bundles budding with ripe fruit. The moon was out, glistening over Mt. San Jacinto like a fat white opal, and it looked so lovely and earnest I had to choke back tears.

Micah was wearing a shirt with the arms cut off, and we sat on the patio drinking iced tea. Mosquitoes landed on my shoulders and he brushed them away. Behind him, a dust devil whipped through the parking lot, its dark funnel licking the blacktop, scattering debris and dirt. The band played as if wading through sludge. Micah seemed enraptured, his hands clasped in a posture of prayer. My skin was getting drier by the minute. I started thinking about how I could get some lotion. Looking across the table, I tried to feel tender, but Micah’s face was so flushed and puffy I couldn’t muster the feeling.

We should do this every night, he said, reaching for my hand.

Do what? I said.

Be together.

He tucked a square of paper into my palm and told me to save it for later. I forgot about it until I got home, and in bed, I unfolded it. It was a love note, one like I hadn’t seen in forever, the edges decorated with red felt pen. My forearms prickled. I refolded the paper and stuffed it between the mattress and box spring.

Micah called the next night to tell me he’d been fired. The till was short and his manager accused him of stealing. But it was a misunderstanding, he said. Now that he was clean, he would never steal. He hoped I believed him. He couldn’t let himself go down that road again, he said. Last time he started shooting dope, most of his veins collapsed and he ended up with a needle in his neck, in his forehead, between his toes.

Let me come get you, I said. We’ll go to a meeting.

I’d learned during rehab that it’s hard to be miserable when you’re doing something kind for someone else, and that when you start being kind to others, it’s easier to be kind to yourself. I was trying to be kind to myself now. Doing yoga in the morning, paying attention to the breath, the practice. Dialing down the rumination, the shame. I felt like it might actually be working.

I drove us to the Oasis and we sat side by side at the picnic table out front. Micah pulled a notepad from his pocket and we played tic-tac-toe, though it was getting dark and I could barely see the page. Our elbows were touching, and then our knees, and then he rested his head on my shoulder and his hair fell across my chest. Heat radiated through his pant leg and it made my leg damp. He asked for my wrist and wrapped a brass ball chain around it. That’s going to itch, I said. He didn’t hear me and snapped the last ball on the chain into the clasp. In the moonlight, his hair was the color of faded bricks and his eyes looked glassy. When he got up to go to the bathroom, old lady Alma headed straight for the table. By the time she made it over, she was panting.

Honey, she said, catching her breath. You know he’s high, don’t you?

I looked up in time to see Micah shuffle inside the hall, his plaid shirt disappearing through the doorway like a puff of desert dust.

Is he? I said, watching the door swing shut. He definitely was. Alma shrugged and turned to walk away.

You can’t worry about him, she said over her shoulder. You have to look out for yourself.

I thought about getting a bag. About how soon I could get it. About which connect I could call to whom I wasn’t already indebted, about whether there might be any bridge left unburned. About how low I might still be able to go and make it back to rehab in one piece. What I missed about it there was being sheltered from the world, from how hard it is sometimes to tolerate another day. And the therapists who were so eager to wipe the slate clean on everything you did for drugs or money or to forget how empty and desperate you felt and had felt since you could remember. Depravity forgiven, forgotten.

I took Micah home and he hesitated getting out of the car. He looked around, rummaged through his pockets. He said he wanted to give me something, but it seemed he didn’t have anything in mind. Finally, he pulled out a blue bandana and looped it around my neck. His eyes were rimmed red and it looked like he was going to cry. I thought for a moment he might kiss me, but in the end, he didn’t try.

Take care, I said, and he smiled. I watched as he climbed the steps to the apartment and turned to wave goodbye.

I knew the rehab wouldn’t take me back. My last day there, I got into an argument with a new therapist during group, and on my way out of the building I slammed the glass door so hard the pane disintegrated into a waterfall of tempered chunks that littered the sidewalk like soda fountain ice. The thing she had said that set me off seemed trivial now. She said I needed to stop focusing on everyone else’s problems and take a good, hard look at myself.

Back home, I peeled off my shirt and pants and lay down in bed. My wrist was itching, and I unhooked the ball chain and released it onto the windowsill above my head. I pulled Micah’s note from under the mattress and read it, quickly first and then slowly again and again, and then I tore it into pieces and threw the scraps on the floor.

It was still warm out, and a breeze was just beginning to push the curtains apart. I’d learned during rehab how to meditate by guiding myself back in time and recalling a fond memory, and I closed my eyes to try. I thought about how when I was a kid and it was hot at night, I’d flip my pillow back and forth to get to the coolest side. It reminded me of eating crisp green apples. I turned the pillow over now and thought of biting into an apple, of tasting its tart meat, of the juice trickling from the corners of my mouth, of savoring its sweet relief.