“Don’t miss that. Those meetings are so important to your sobriety.”
“I’ll be there. And I’ll go to the meetings.”
“If you don’t like it, try a different meeting. Don’t give up.”
He grins. “I won’t, coach.”
“I know of a really good one in the city every morning, if you can make it.”
“Do you ever go scope them out, so you know which ones to recommend?”
I shrug. “Some people really like smaller meetings where they can talk more, and others like big ones where they can feel anonymous. I’ve never been to an AA meeting, but I go to Al-Anon.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a support group for people whose lives have been affected by addiction.”
He nods. “And you go because of your work here?”
I’m silent for a beat. “No, I go because my father is an alcoholic.”
His expression turns serious. “Really?”
“Yes.”
“Wow. I had no idea. Is he still around?”
I shrug. “Somewhere. I don’t keep in touch with him.”
“Graysen…damn, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. His lifetime of bad choices is on him.”
“Yeah, but…it had to affect you. Is that why you went into this line of work?”
“It is.” I clear my throat and put on my glasses, reading over my notes. “But we’re here to talk about you.”
“Okay. But another time…I want to talk about you some more.”
“I shared something about my parents with you…maybe you can do the same now?”
Alexei rubs a hand over the dark stubble on his face. “Yeah, I see what you did there. Okay…I’ll share what I remember, but it’s not much.”
“Okay.”
“I was happy before we came to the states. I didn’t even realize things were bad until we got here and there was so much food. Food all the time, in the refrigerator, in the pantry, an endless supply. Everyone in the Carr household had their own bed—even me and Anton. We were used to sharing with our parents, buried under blankets and still freezing. And there was never enough to eat.”
“How did it feel to make that change?”
His expression darkens. “At first, good. But then…God, I felt so guilty. When I was warm in bed, I’d think about my family back in Russia, freezing and hungry.”
“Those are heavy feelings for a five-year-old boy.”
“Yeah. And I resented Martin and Laura because they had so much and my family had so little. Martin Carr was our youth hockey coach, but he always treated us like his own children.” He sighs heavily. “Anton, he was able to compartmentalize it better. He said our parents had fewer people to feed and take care of once we were gone, and he just embraced American life.”
“Did your feelings change as you got older?”
“I don’t know if they changed, but I thought about it less. My parents sent us letters for the first few months, and the Carrs hired a translator to read them to us and to write letters back about how we were doing. But within a year of us coming to the US, our letters started getting returned because my parents had moved.”
“And they didn’t send a forwarding address?”
He shakes his head. “In their situation, they may have been holing up with friends or other family. Things there were…really hard. Or maybe I just told myself that because it felt better than thinking they just didn’t care.”
He’s a grown man, but all I see is a hurt little boy. I want so badly to get up and go hug him. To tell him he deserved better.
“Did you ever get back in touch with them?”
He shakes his head. “I hired a private investigator to find them when I signed my first NHL contract. He spent two months following every lead he could find. My mother had died eight years before and he couldn’t find my father or any of our other siblings.”
“Oh, Alexei.”
“I didn’t know them, you know? Barely even remembered them. But it was a punch to the fucking gut to think my own mother had died on a day that I was just going to school and playing hockey, completely unaware.”
“Is there a gravesite you can visit?”
“No, she was cremated.”
I just look at him, feeling that personal-professional conflict tugging at me again. The therapist in me is glad he’s finally vocalizing his pain. I’m not sure he realized he was still carrying around that hurt, it was buried so deep inside him. But as a woman who has feelings for him, I want to hug him…and more. A lot more.
I focus on the professional side, because this is a big moment in Alexei’s treatment. “Do you and your brother ever talk about them?”
“Not much. There’s not much to say.”
“Thank you for sharing that with me.”
He looks at me, his expression weary. “Do you think my drinking is related to my parents somehow?”
“I think it’s probably part of it, but not the only part.”
“I just don’t make that connection, I guess. I’ve never thought about them before getting wasted.”