Forever Right Now

“Dareen.”

She held her arms to me and I picked her up; held her close for a moment, breathing in her sweet, baby powder smell. Her arms went around my neck, squeezing tears from my eyes in her little hug.

It felt like goodbye.

Back in the living room, Sawyer stood with his arms crossed, his gaze cast down and his expression hard again.

“Look who’s awake,” I said weakly.

“Daddy,” Olivia said, her voice still cloudy with sleep.

Sawyer looked up at Olivia and me, his face a blank mask. And then he strode forward and took the baby out of my arms.

My skin went cold all over; I felt where Olivia’s warmth had been, and a goose bumps raised on my skin. Sawyer took his child a few steps away and turned his back on me.

“Okay,” I said, my voice barely a whisper. A thousand more words rose up behind that one: how I’d been clean for almost two years, the progress I’d made, how proud Max was...

Max. He was gone. That pain hit me in the chest to join that of Sawyer’s silent rejection. Tears drowned every other word I had, and I grabbed my bag off the kitchen chair.

“Okay,” I managed again. “Okay.”

It was all I could say and yet nothing was okay. Not one thing.

I went to the door and opened it. Sawyer stood in profile to me, his gaze over Olivia’s head, full of thoughts but none for me. His silence was worse than a thousand condemning words.

“Goodbye.”

My voice broke and Sawyer’s head whipped toward me, his hard features morphing into pain and regret, and his mouth opened as if he might finally have something more to say, but I shut the door between us.

Outside in the hallway, I leaned my forehead against the cool wood. Rain smattered the small window in the hallway, and lightning lit up the night sky. I pushed off the door, and headed out instead of up. Out into the cold wind and rain that had doused the su

mmer heat. It tore through my clothing. I was drenched immediately and shivered hard enough to rattle my teeth.

There’s a bar two blocks down. Someone there will know someone. Know where I can score. Whiskey sour and a pill, and who gives a shit what Sawyer thinks of me.

“Max,” I whispered, like a cry for help. The wind tore the word and drowned it in rain. I looked up and down the street to see if I could still catch him, but there was no Max. No help, save what I gave myself.

The bar was two blocks away.

The Y with tonight’s NA meeting was six.

Backward or forward.

I stood on the empty street, and the rain came down.

I pulled my phone from my purse with shaking fingers and shielded it from the downpour. My finger hit the Uber app and I waited. I’d had no words in Sawyer’s apartment but they were coming back to me now. So many of them, filling me up, filling that emptiness that lived within me that I’d tried to fill with drugs. Filling me with the truth, that I was not the sum of my criminal record; I was not words on paper, black and white.

I was everywhere in between.

At the Y, there was an NA meeting already in progress. It wasn’t my group, but it didn’t matter. It was my community.

A woman stood at the podium, but she fell silent when she saw me come in. The rest of the group turned in their seats to follow her jaw-dropped stare, to me, dripping rainwater and shivering.

I strode to the front of the group and the woman wordlessly gave up the podium. I met the gazes of those assembled. My lips trembled with cold. All the words I’d wanted to tell Sawyer but couldn’t were boiling up now, and I wished, more than anything, that Max was here one final time, to hear them. Because if he could have, he’d be getting on that plane knowing he had done his job. And that he didn’t have to worry about me. Not anymore.

I faced the assembled group, my hands clutched the side of the podium.

“Hi,” I said. “My name is Darlene and I’m an addict.”