Christmas Eve, 1999

Thursday nights are always a little tense, but especially now, less than a week before Christmas. We are on edge; the clots of snow in the road, the family time, none of it helps. We meet in a classroom in the community center at 8pm. The rest of the building is dark, yawning shadows cast over our faces. It smells like paint and gym ball plastic.

Carol leads us. She has always led us. Even Don, whose wife died of liver failure nearly 30 years ago and who hasn’t missed a meeting since, speaks only of Carol. Her age is hard to place–she has long brown hair, though we suspect it is dyed, and she wears a thin silver wedding band. We don’t know Carol outside of group. It is one of our rules—no social contact—though we find it odd that we have never run into her in the grocery store or seen her walking down the sidewalk. We have a theory that she lives in another town, that she commutes here to protect her confidentiality. This has never been proven.

The biggest reason for extra tension this week is that we are joined by two new members. We are used to an influx of people after the holidays, family members with color running high in their cheeks as they describe transgressions that range from burning the ham to DUI arrests. We are not prepared for the new group members tonight, and it disrupts the flow of the meeting. We shift uncomfortably in our folding chairs, the metal legs creaking beneath us as Carol begins the meeting with a weary smile. She can sense our eagerness to discuss our own anxieties, our holiday-focused dread, but we have to follow the rules, one of which is that newcomers can take up as much time as they want on their first week in group. We are a little angry at Carol for letting them join, tonight of all nights.

We find out during introductions that they are sisters. There is a resemblance near the eyes, an owlish look of rapt attention. We find it odd that they don’t sit next to each other in the circle. They are both older, with gray hair delicate as spun sugar piled atop their fragile heads. They are here because of their other sister. At first we like how close they are–the bond of three sisters, two united in the support of the third. But their rage at her becomes hard to ignore. Carol tries to steer the conversation gently away, but the sisters pick like vultures.

“I don’t like her. I’m not sure I even love her anymore,” says one sister.

“Mmm,” Carol says. She is taking notes as always, inside a brown leather portfolio. “Does anyone want to add to that? Or can we relate to it?”

We shift in our chairs again, curl away from the question. Those of us with living loved ones fear speaking of them in this way so openly, superstitious that if we complain too much about the addicts in our lives  the Fates will cut them away.

“I don’t think I do either,” the other sister says. “She’s in rehab now. I don’t want her to come out.”

We think of our own experiences with rehab, the tries and fails, the rare triumphs. We have been there–we have spent four hours on the phone with the insurance company every day for a week, cared for our two under three by ourselves and saved the crying for after bedtime, sat across the table from a loved one and watched the life seep back into them over the course of 30 days.  We are reminded of the rare relief in knowing, however briefly, that they are safe.

We sit in silence. There are no personal attacks on other group members. No sharing of names outside of group. No blaming ourselves, or each other, for behavior outside our control. Carol has the rules in her portfolio, and if we want to add to them we can, so long as we all agree.

“That’s not a very nice way to talk about your sister.”

Our heads turn; we suck in lungfuls of recycled air. This rare outburst from Jamie, whose wife is not currently using but has recently had a slip, catches the whole room off guard.

“You don’t know her like we do,” the first sister says. The second nods in agreement. We can tell it is something they say a lot to people who have not met her. We think of ourselves at our angriest, the worst things we’ve said or felt about our own loved ones. Jamie’s eyes are cast down, his thick brows pressing into them as his hands constrict into fists, but he says nothing. The tension in the room is thick, almost humid. We find it difficult to breathe. Carol scribbles furiously.

“Let’s move on, shall we?” she finally says.

We are reflective tonight, but worried, our palms slick with sweat and heads thumping to the beats of our anxious hearts. We know there is a very good chance of relapse this time of year. If we gambled on it, we would be more likely to win than not–or at least some of us. Don does not have to worry anymore. It must be a twisted relief, we think.

“Oh, come on,” the second sister says. “You must all feel the same. Has no one here ever thought to themselves, I just don’t know if I can love this person anymore?”

We look down at our shoes. They are muddy, caked in melted snow and salt from the roads.

“It would certainly be easier,” the first sister says. They cross their arms in tandem, perhaps sensing they have gone a bit too far.

We shake our heads. We are so silent we can hear the janitor moving down the dark hall, the jingle of his keys, the low whisper of his no-scuff shoes. We normally avoid him–he has a smell of liquor on his breath that nauseates us, reminds us of home.

Carol uses the lull to explain an activity. Many of us have done it before. She passes around a deck of cards, asks all of us to choose one. Those with red cards must find those with black cards and vice versa. We end up standing in clumps around the room, worrying the corners of our queens and sevens while Carol stalks the perimeter to make sure we’ve matched up correctly. The sisters have the same color card and cannot be together. Carol works with one and we have no choice but to absorb the other–April is the unlucky sacrifice.

“Now,” Carol says, her loud voice bouncing off the linoleum as she urges us into silence. “If you have a black card, share with your partner a memory you have from the past surrounding this time of year. It can be anything, positive or negative, and it doesn’t have to involve your loved ones–it can just be about you. If you have a red card, share an ambition or prediction you have for the last couple weeks of this year. When you’ve both done this, switch!”

We begin quiet and get loud. Carol likes to split us up sometimes, make us work with people we normally wouldn’t. We get nervous, at first, sharing from the past. But we realize that this is the easy part–everyone can remember. It is the predictions that are hard. We know Jamie is afraid to name, but feels the inevitability of a potential relapse for his wife. Nella is worried about her father, a retired firefighter with PTSD living on his own, and Sam is fretting about what her twin toddlers will remember about having Daddy gone away at rehab on Christmas. We bemoan champagne and eggnog and buttered rum, the impossibility of concealing stress from extended family. We overhear the sisters give noncommittal and acidic responses to the questions, always coming back to Kathy, Kathy, Kathy.

Things seem to be calming down until the last few minutes of final circle. This is our chance to share what we talked about in our activity, and what we need to cope ahead for this week. Mostly we talk about what is expected of us–our spouses, our siblings, our parents, what would happen if… Sometimes Carol makes us do “worst case scenario” if we’re getting too nebulous, but not tonight. This week is only about survival. One of the sisters takes her turn.

“A memory that comes up for us this time of year is 1999. Kathy was anxious, Y2K and all, and her boyfriend had just left her. She went out drinking. Then she went out driving.” She pauses, takes a shallow breath. We can hear the radiator click on, the tremble in her voice. “She hit a family and badly injured them. Two parents, two kids. Christmas Eve.”

She begins to cry, presses her large red nose into a balled-up napkin. Carol has clicked her pen off and is just listening now, a cautious, pitying look on her face. The second sister has to take over.

“Our dad–he knew the cops that were the first on the scene. He was a sheriff’s deputy. No one ever pressed charges, but of course we all knew,” she says. Her owl eyes are bigger now, round behind her spectacles and glittering with tears. “Twenty years ago now and she still won’t stop. Sometimes we wish she had just died that night and saved us all the trouble.”

“If she was dead…” The first sister trails off, her voice quavering. She doesn’t finish the sentence, but we can still hear it–things would be better, at least it would all be over, we could finally move on.

None of us speak for a long time. We think of Don, who is lonely but free. How he can smile, even laugh, while the rest of us sit paralyzed with a pressing fear on our backs all the time. The janitor has begun to whistle in the next room; we stare down at the knots of our worried hands. Eventually we grow tired of the cramped silence and Nella, who is sitting next to the first sister, takes her turn.

It is snowing softly as we leave the community center, some of us linking arms to keep from slipping. We watch as the petals of snow fall under the glow of streetlights. The sisters walk slightly ahead of us, not touching, backs straight as cornstalks. We wonder about them, about Kathy. As we duck into our frozen cars and coax them to life, we watch the sisters loiter around a small black Jetta. Their expressions are obscured by scarves and coats, and all we can see as we watch them through our defrosting windshields are their gray heads bent together in conversation like a pair of sleeping swans. It is hard not to imagine the third sister standing off to the side somewhere, half in shadow. We drive home in silence, minds too turbulent to bother with the radio. We hope, though we surely know better by now, that we will have a happy holiday.