She shakes her head, and her eyes drift toward the detective who gave her the hair tie, whose name I discovered is Regina Jones, but everyone calls her Reg.
Reg smiles. “I’m happy to ride with you.”
Imani then turns to me. “But can you be there when I talk to the cops?”
“Absolutely.”
“Good. I don’t trust them.”
Reg and I exchange a look. Something tells me she knows exactly what Imani is talking about.
“Imani, we can keep it to just me and Dr. Barlowe if you’d like,” Reg assures her.
Charlie’s voice comes in through the comms. “I’m going to look into the police officers’ union and see if there’s anything problematic.”
“And my mom is going to be hysterical,” Imani says, running her hands over her borrowed clothes, rolling her eyes as though that’s the worst part of all this.
“I’ll be there for your mom too,” I promise. “If you’d like, I can intercept your parents before they talk to you to see if we can create a calm reunion.”
“Good luck with that,” she says, shaking her head. “They went into my computer last month and found my DMs to my girlfriend. Pretty sure they are just over it at this point.”
“All I saw were parents who desperately miss their daughter and love her very much. I promise they are just happy you’re alive.”
For the first time since we found her, she sheds a tear. “Okay. That’s good.”
I hold out my hand, and she examines it before slipping her small hand into mine for a brief moment.
“You’re okay,” she says.
“You’re okay too, kid. Once you’ve recovered for a while, we’ll invite you to come out and hang with our horses. I think you’ll like them.”
“Every girl loves her ponies,” she cracks, then lies back and closes her eyes as the EMTs push her stretcher into the ambulance.
She’s got a long road ahead of her, but I have faith.
7
NACHO
Justin and I walk out of our Saturday morning AA meeting, a little emotional. One of our friends had a relapse, and we didn’t even know it.
When he came in and asked for the twenty-four-hour chip, it was a real gut punch.
I’ve come to learn that falling down is often part of getting up, and it was a reminder to not take my own sobriety for granted. We found out after the meeting that he’d been arrested for a DWI and was feeling horrible about it.
Justin and I stayed a little later, and Justin walked through some of the legal issues with him, letting him talk through his guilt about doing something so dangerous and irresponsible.
“I could’ve killed somebody,” he says, tears streaming down his face.
“I’ve been in the same situation,” Justin says. “You and I got real lucky. Real fucking lucky. We know the deal—when we’re struggling with ourselves, we can’t make it dangerous for everyone else. But it’s hard to maintain sobriety while beating yourself up. You can’t hate yourself sober.”
“What if I can’t help but hate myself?”
“Go back to the basics, learn the lesson. Use it to propel you forward.”
We sit with him while he cries, then walk him out to his car, where his wife’s waiting. They switch places, and she goes in for her Al-Anon meeting. It’s tough, like seeing a vision of the future and how my alcoholism can impact somebody I love. Like a lot of folks in AA, I struggle with the idea that I’m even worthy of a relationship to begin with, and days like this one make me question even more.
More shit to plow through, but I’ll save that for a different day.
