Last Night I Sang to the Monster (19 page)

Hannah and Jodie broke out laughing.

Hannah shook her head. “God, I miss drinking. Miss it like hell.”

“Me too,” Jodie said. “Sometimes, I just wanna scream.”

“Me too,” I said. I don’t know why I said that. Not that it wasn’t true. I did want to fucking scream.

Hannah studied my face. “I have a son your age.” Her voice got real
soft and that really tore me up because she could be so tough. She patted me on the cheek. “I know, no touch. No touch.” She laughed. “Bourbon. Wasn’t that your drink?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I hope you never touch it again.” Then she burst out crying. “Or you’ll wind up worse than us.” She took a deep breath. “This place is making me sad. God, we’re all so sad.”

“That’s not true,” Rafael said. “We’re just sorting things out, that’s all.”

“You’re a sweet man.” Jodie was wearing a crooked smile.

“Am I?”

Rafael smiled. And right then he looked old and beat-up and I knew he was going through something and I wanted to ask him about that. He had to make it. Somebody had to make it. Rafael seemed like maybe he would be the one. Sharkey, he’d given up.
Rafael had to make it. Please, God, please.
I was praying to a God I didn’t get along with.

I could tell it was going to be different in group. I don’t know what it was, but the anxiety thing was visiting me again and it was really making itself at home. I had the urge to go away. Numb out. Disassociate. I seriously wanted to do that. But I was trying to make myself stay focused.

Sharkey was gone and I kept staring at his chair. He always liked to sit on the same chair. The new guy, Amit, was doing his paperwork so Adam said he wouldn’t be in group. Sheila and Maggie were out sick and Kelley, no one knew where she was. Sometimes, she just isolated, didn’t want to go near anyone, see anyone, talk to anyone. I knew what that was like.

So it was just me and Rafael and Lizzie and Adam.

Adam handed the Check-in card to Rafael. Rafael took it. Today he didn’t smile. He always smiled—even when he was feeling bad. But not today. “I’m Rafael. I’m an alcoholic.” And we all said, “Hi Rafael.” He paused for a moment, then looked at the card, then set it down. “I’ve been keeping a secret,” he said.

Adam didn’t say anything. He just waited.

“I killed my son.”

Adam got this very serious look on his face. I could see a look of surprise—then it was gone. “When you say you killed your son—what do you mean, Rafael?” His question was soft, not like an interrogation.

Rafael had his eyes pasted to the floor. “He was seven—” He stopped and hit his chest softly. He kept hitting it.

“Breathe,” Adam said. “Just breathe.”

Rafael took a few deep breaths. In and out. Inhale. Exhale. It was like I was breathing with him.

“Rafael, it’s okay. Take your time. You can do this.”

“I can’t.”

“You can. Rafael,
you can
.”

Rafael nodded, then shut his eyes. He spoke just above a whisper. “I was driving. I wasn’t paying attention. I was thinking about the screenplay I was working on. I had my son in the car and I didn’t keep my eyes on the road. And then, all of a sudden, something hit the car and I went skidding out of control and then—I don’t know. Everything was spinning and—Joaquin screamed, he screamed—and the next thing I remember is that I woke up in a hospital room. And I kept asking for Joaquin.
Joaquin? Joaquin? Where’s Joaquin?
I knew by the look on my wife’s face that he was—.” He stopped. It was like he just couldn’t say the word
dead.
He just couldn’t.

“My wife, she didn’t even have to say the words. I killed him. He was seven years old and I killed him.” He kept whispering
Joaquin
between his sobs. And he kept hitting himself in the chest and he was more like a wounded animal than a man. And I hated it, seeing him like that and I was torn up to hell and I just couldn’t take it.
Joaquin, Joaquin, Joaquin.
I don’t know, it was like he’d let go and there was nothing but his pain and he was living in that pain now. All of him, his heart and his mind and his body and he fell on his knees and he kept hitting himself and I looked at Adam and my eyes were telling Adam to make it all stop and I don’t know, I just grabbed hold of Lizzie’s hand and I could see that tears were rolling down her cheeks and I wanted it all just to stop.

I never knew that hurt in a man could sound like that. It was the
saddest song in the world. And I knew that Rafael was broken, that he had fallen and reached the very bottom of a dark hole and I wondered if he had it in him to climb back out.

And then I saw Adam reach for Rafael and pull him up from the floor. He stood him up and sat him back down on his chair. I don’t know how long Rafael cried. The whole world had gone quiet and there was nothing in the entire universe except for the sound of a man breaking in half. And finally, Rafael grew quiet and still. I could tell that he’d gone away and now he was trying to come back. He reached for the box of tissues that was always in the center of the circle. He took a deep breath, then looked at Adam. “I couldn’t tell you.”

He looked at the floor, then looked back up into Adam’s face. “I haven’t spoken his name since his funeral. Eleven years.”

He looked at me.

“He’d be eighteen.” He gave me a crooked smile.

And I wanted to say,
I’ll be your son if you want. I will be. I’ll be a good son.
But I didn’t say anything. I just tried to smile back at him.

“My life fell apart after he died. He was adopted. My wife, I don’t really think she wanted to go through with the whole adoption thing. But she went along. I guess she could see how much I wanted to have kids. I think she knew I loved him more than anything in the whole world. She felt left out. She
was
left out. When he died, she moved on. I think I hated her for moving on. She hated me back for
not
moving on. She grieved too. But she couldn’t live in all that sadness. Me, I just drank. After a year, she left me. But I’d left her long before that. I don’t forgive myself.”

Rafael’s tears were like little rivers. And then Adam did something I’d never seen him do. He took Rafael’s hand and held it. Then he just looked at Rafael. Looked him right in the eyes. “I think you
can
forgive yourself. I think you know it’s time.”

Rafael looked down at the ground, but Adam didn’t let his hand go. “I used to sing to him when he was a baby. All the time. I stopped singing the day he died.”

There were tears falling from Adam’s face. That was the first time I saw Adam as a man, as a human being. Before that instant, I’d only seen
him as my therapist. He was only a guy whose job it was to help us. To help
me.
But he was more than that. Everyone in the world was more than anything I ever imagined. I felt small and stupid. We all sat there quietly, the four of us. And finally Adam let go of Rafael’s hand and nodded at me and Lizzie. “What’s coming up for you, Zach? Lizzie?”

“It was an accident,” Lizzie said.

Rafael nodded. He wanted to believe. But he didn’t. Not quite. Almost.

Adam looked at me, a question in his eyes.

“I want to remember,” I said. I didn’t even know I was going to say that. “I think the monster will go away if I remember. It’s like—.” I stopped and looked at Rafael. “It’s like you saying your son’s name again. It hurts. But it’s not stuck inside you anymore.”

Rafael gave me a smile. I swear it was the most beautiful smile in the world.

And then I heard myself say: “Don’t hate yourself anymore, Rafael. Please don’t hate yourself.”

After group, I sat on the steps outside Adam’s small office and waited for him. I wondered what he and Rafael were talking about. For some reason I remembered the conversation at breakfast. When Jodie had said
I have a son your age
Rafael had winced. Almost as if someone had punched him in the stomach. Now I knew why he had winced. Now I knew why he was so kind to me. Because I was his son’s age.

I thought maybe Rafael didn’t see me.

Maybe all he saw when he looked at me was his son.

That thought really tore me up all to hell. See, that was the thing about my mom and dad. I think that most of the time they didn’t see me. My mom and dad, they didn’t even see themselves. I hadn’t thought about them in a long time. I wondered why.

I heard Rafael’s voice as the door opened. “Your turn,” he said. He
was smiling and the sun was out and it wasn’t so cold outside. Not today. He sat down next to me. He didn’t say anything. “Are you okay?” he asked.

“Yeah, I guess. What about you?”

“I’m good, Zach. I really am.” He took a deep breath, held it, then let it out. “God, sometimes I wish I still smoked.” He laughed. I think he was laughing at himself. He did that a lot, laugh at himself. I thought that was a good thing. You know, a healthy behavior. “Have you ever been in a summer storm in the desert, Zach?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“They just come up on you—the wind and the thunder and the lightning and the rain begins to pound. And you think that the world is going to end. It’s this overwhelming apocalyptic moment. And then, just like that, it’s over. And the world is calm again. And the air smells clean and new. And smelling it, you want to be alive again.”

“Yeah, it’s like that,” I said.

“That’s how I feel, Zach. Like the desert after a storm.”

Adam was on the phone and his door was open. He motioned me to sit down. When he hung up the phone, he nodded and asked, “How you doing, buddy?”

He liked the word
buddy.
I liked it too. “I’m kind of stunned out,” I said.

“You mean about group this morning?”

“Yeah. That was a big secret Rafael kept.”

“Yeah. You know, the secret thing, I know you guys think it’s just this little bullshit thing, but secrets are killing you guys. That’s why it’s on the list. You have to let them out. They really
are
killing you guys. They’re killing all of you.” Then he looked at me. “You have a lot of secrets you don’t talk about.”

“Guess I do.”

“When are you going to let them out?”

“I’m not as brave as Rafael.”

“I’m making up that you’re as brave as they come.”

I wanted to tell him that God didn’t write
brave
on my heart. “You’re giving me a lot of credit.”

“You don’t give yourself
enough
credit, Zach. You never have. You know, it was a beautiful thing, what you said to Rafael, that he shouldn’t hate himself. You should take your own advice.”

“Yeah, sure,” I said.

Adam shot me a snarky smile. I knew about those smiles of his. “You said you wanted to remember.”

“I do.”

“I’m going to ask you a question, Zach.”

“Sure.”

“Why haven’t you ever asked about how you came here? How long has it been—sixty days?”

“Fifty-three days.”

“Fifty-three days and you still haven’t talked about what got you here.”

I looked at him blankly.

“Your first day here you told me you didn’t know how you got here. And since then you’ve never asked. You’ve never asked who’s paying for your stay here. You’ve never asked why you have money in your account, the money you buy cigarettes with and buy your soap and shampoo and shaving cream and all those things.” He stopped, almost as if he wasn’t sure, but then he got this determined look on his face. “And you’ve never asked about your family.”

All of a sudden I felt numb and frozen. You know, I felt like one of those windshields I used to take a bat to. I couldn’t speak. I didn’t know what to say.

“Zach?”

Adam was looking at me, studying me. I looked back at him. I know I was holding a question in my eyes. He was holding a question too.

“Adam, I don’t want to know.”

“You don’t want to know or you’re afraid to know?”

“I told you I wasn’t brave.”

“You
are
brave, Zach. Didn’t I tell you once that you’ve already survived the worst? You’re here. You’re alive. You’ve survived all the bad things already.”

“I’m not alive,” I said.

“Yes, you are.”

“I don’t feel anything. I hate feeling. I’ve told you that.”

“But you
do
feel, Zach. When I didn’t go after Sharkey, you were furious with me. I’m making up that the reason you were so angry with me was because you love Sharkey. And you love Rafael. I saw the look on your face this morning when Rafael was talking about his son. You looked at me and I thought I saw this look. I’m making up that you wanted me to stop his pain. You wanted Rafael to be free of pain and you wanted me to do something. Am I right?”

“Yeah, something like that.”

“I can’t stop his pain, Zach. But you love him. You love Rafael. I can see that. That’s a beautiful thing. That’s feeling, Zach.”

“It hurts like hell, Adam.”

“Yes, it does, buddy.”

“I hate that.”

“But love doesn’t always have to hurt, Zach. Didn’t anybody ever tell you that love could feel good?”