Tim Murphy - Christodora

So Boaz kind of shrugged in that slightly inchoate, menschy way of his that she rather loved. “Yeah, I know,” he said. “So where’s the foster son?”

Drew laughed. “He’s coming. He’s down at Intelligentsia sketching a little, I think.”

“He’s gonna have ninety days clean soon, right?”

“On Tuesday!” Drew said brightly. “Forty-five days at Gooden and the rest with us.”

“That’s amazing you guys took that on,” Boaz said.

Drew lowered her eyes. “It’s my amends to his mother. I mean, I made my amends to her many years ago. It’s my living amends.”

“Where are his parents? New York?”

Drew nodded. “They’re old New York friends of mine. They’re artists. They are such New Yorkers. Both born and raised.”

Boaz nodded slowly. “Maybe it was tough for him growing up with two artist parents, being one himself.”

“They’re working artists but they’re not wildly successful.” She paused. Was that mean to say? No, she decided, it was just true. “Actually, they fostered him when they were just — they were really young. Like twenty-six, twenty-seven. Just a few years after I left New York, actually.”

“Seriously?”

Drew nodded. How stunned she’d been back in 1998 when Milly told her over the phone that, only three years after she and Jared had gotten back together, they were taking in this kid! “It’s kind of a crazy story,” she told Boaz. “He’d been in, basically, a boys’ orphanage for a few years after his mother died. Of AIDS. And my friend’s mother had standby guardianship of him and was keeping an eye on him, trying to find him a home.”

“Holy shit.” Boaz rubbed his jaw. “Holy shit.”

“I know,” Drew said. “And they formally adopted him a year later.”

The meeting was being called to order and they took metal folding chairs alongside each other in one of the back rows near the door. Drew coaxed Lewy to lie under the empty chair to her right, putting a paper bib around his neck to catch his drool, and placed her bag on the chair to save it for Mateo.

“The shit people go through, right?” Boaz muttered.

She nodded and gave his hand a squeeze. The meeting started. The speaker was Julia, an insecure trust-fund kid from Seattle who fumblingly dabbled in filmmaking. Drew had heard her story twice in the past few months, and it irritated her when she realized she’d have to sit through it again, but she said a quick prayer that her Higher Power would help her hear something new and valuable this time, at least so the next twenty minutes weren’t a total bust.

“I’m really, really nervous and unfocused right now,” Julia began.

Really? Drew thought. After speaking twice already in two months? Then she admonished herself. She was not being openhearted. And she realized, as she twisted her head back every time a latecomer came in behind her, it was because she was irritable and distracted that Mateo was not there yet. Seven minutes into the meeting. Thirteen minutes. The end of Julia’s qualification, the round of applause, the passing of the basket for dollar donations to pay rent on the meeting room, the beginning of the individual hand-raising and identifying with Julia’s story before going into one’s own spiritual and practical challenges of the day.

“What’s up with Mateo?” Boaz finally leaned over and asked her.

She looked sidelong at him darkly, folded her arms over her chest. “I dunno,” she muttered.

Toward the end of the meeting, when he still hadn’t arrived, Drew raised her hand and was called on. “I’m Drew, a grateful recovering alcoholic and cocaine addict,” she said for what felt like the fifteen thousandth time.

“Hi, Drew,” came the affectionate chorus.

“Thank you for your qualification, Julia. I’ve heard you a few times the past few months and every time I hear something new and feel like I know you a little bit better.”

Julia smiled a genuine shy smile of gratitude, which made Drew happy she’d said what she just said.

“But I have to admit,” Drew continued, “I was distracted all through this meeting because a newcomer, which a lot of you know — Mateo, who is sort of my godson from New York — was supposed to meet me here at this meeting and he never showed up, and I know damn well at this stage of his recovery, just a few weeks out of rehab, he has nowhere else he’s supposed to be other than this meeting.”

A round of knowing “mmphs” went through the room.

“So I’m nervous,” Drew went on. “I’m thinking the worst, and maybe I’ll be embarrassed when he walks in the door right now and hears me talking about him, and he was late because he ran into some AA-ers there and got caught up in a conversation and he doesn’t know the right way yet of saying he has somewhere to be in twenty minutes. But as far as I’m concerned, when I was in early sobriety, the meeting always came first.”

Another round of “mmphs.”

“It still comes first,” Drew pitched higher, buoyed by the support, “because you know what? If I don’t put it first, I’ll lose everything else. I’ll lose my amazing husband, I’ll lose the writing career I love, I’ll lose my house in the hills, I’ll lose my dog.” Often she enumerated in meetings these things she’d lose; it was a comfort to her because it was her way of vocalizing vigilance, but also of subtly signaling to the newcomers how good they could have it if they stayed sober for nearly twenty years like she had.

“So, I’m sorry, I’m nervous,” she continued. “But I have to tell myself that if, God forbid, he’s relapsed, it’s not my fault. I have to tell myself that even when, God forbid, I call his mother in New York and tell her I don’t know where he is. Because I’d taken him in for a few weeks after rehab and given him this shot, thinking it might help him to live for a while with two sober people while he figures out how to live his first year in sobriety — because it’s going to take time for him, because this kid blew up his chances at a great art school”—she glanced warily back toward the door to make sure Mateo didn’t walk in amid her exegesis—“and drove his parents to the brink and lashed out at them hard. That’s where this disease can take you. A brilliant kid with brilliant parents and all the shots in the world. I’ve seen this kid’s work, and it is fucking brilliant. I mean, I wanted to introduce this kid to Deitch if he kept sober.”

People were shaking their heads in accordance and dismay. “If he’s disappeared, it’s not my fault,” she said, now actually a bit alarmed at the bite in her voice. “Because nobody can get you sober. You have to want it.” God, she sounded like the hard-ass old program cranks that she always complained about! Boaz put his arm around her.

“Anyway, thanks for letting me pipe up, and I’m grateful to be here and grateful to be sober today, because it doesn’t matter that I have almost twenty years sober. This is what I have. This is what matters. Today.”

“Thanks, Drew,” the room chorused. She sighed and sank back down in her seat. Others were called on, but she couldn’t hear what they were saying; she found that she was stewing in fury. Surreptitiously she pulled out her iPhone and texted her sponsor: “Mateo didn’t show up to meeting, I’m freaking out.” Three minutes later, her sponsor texted back: “Relax, don’t jump to conclusions.” That’s what she needed to hear.

After the meeting, Boaz asked if she wanted a ride home and she accepted.

“Can we swing by Intelligentsia?” she asked.

He glanced at her sidelong. “Sure,” he said.

Mateo wasn’t sitting outside the huge hipster café and he wasn’t sitting inside. She told herself not to, then she did: she asked the manager if Mateo had been in, but the manager, a pretty blond girl with a tiny diamond stud in her nose, had seen no sign of him. She felt a sick, cold pang in her stomach and walked out to Boaz’s Prius.