Jorge sat silently for a minute, and Dana worried that she had pushed him too far. Then he said, “Maybe you’re right. But isn’t it important that it was out of character for me, instead of being something typical for me?”
“Of course it is. But even if you were acting out of character, you have to take responsibility for your actions.”
A look of fear crossed his face. “You mean I have to tell my manager what I did?”
“I’m not talking about legal responsibility,” Dana reassured him. “I don’t care whether your manager ever finds out. What I mean by taking responsibility is admitting to yourself what you did, and taking it into consideration when deciding what you do in the future.”
He sighed. “Why can’t I just forget that this ever happened?”
“If I genuinely thought you’d be happier forgetting that it ever happened, I’d be fine with that. But the fact that you’ve spent so much energy on this indicates that it’s bothering you.”
Jorge looked down, and nodded. “You’re right. It has been.” He looked back up at her. “So what should I do now?”
“How would you feel about talking to Sharon about what happened?”
He paused for a long time. “I suppose…if I also tell her about how my paraselves didn’t do the same things, then maybe she’d know that it wasn’t something fundamental about me. Then she wouldn’t get the wrong idea.”
Dana allowed herself a tiny smile; he’d achieved a breakthrough.
A new town, a new apartment; Nat hadn’t found a new job yet, but it was early yet. It had been easy to find an NA meeting to attend, though. Originally she had wanted to go to the prism support group one last time and tell them everything, but the more she thought about it, the more she was sure that doing so would have been purely for her own benefit, not anyone else’s. Lyle was in a good place now; he wouldn’t appreciate learning that she’d had ulterior motives the whole time they’d known each other. Same for the rest of the group. Better for them to keep thinking that the Nat they knew was the real Nat.
Which was why she was now at an NA meeting. It was bigger than the prism support group—prisms would never be able to match drugs in terms of appeal—and it was the usual mix: people you’d never suspect were addicts and people who completely looked the part. She had no idea whether this group was hard core about working the steps or submitting to a higher power. She wasn’t even sure she wanted to attend meetings regularly; she was just going to play it by ear.
The first person to speak was a man who described waking up from an overdose to realize that his thirteen-year-old daughter had had to give him an injection of Narcan. It wasn’t easy to listen to, but Nat found something vaguely comforting about being back in a group of people whose experiences she could relate to. A woman spoke next, and then another man; neither recounted anything particularly harrowing, which was a relief. Nat didn’t want to speak immediately after anyone with a horror story.
The group leader was a soft-spoken man with a salt-and-pepper beard. “I see some new faces here tonight. Would you like to say something to the group?”
Nat raised her hand, introduced herself. “I haven’t been to one of these in a few years. I’ve been able to stay clean without them. But some things happened to me recently…it’s not that I felt I needed a meeting to keep me from relapsing, but I’ve been thinking about stuff, and guess I wanted a place to talk.”
Nat was silent for a while—it had been a long time since she’d done anything like this—but the group leader could tell she had more to say and he waited patiently. Eventually she continued, “There are people I’ve hurt that I’ll probably never be able to make amends to. They’ll never give me the chance, and I can’t blame them. But I suppose, at some level, that made me think that if I wasn’t able to do right by them, the ones I’d hurt the most, then it didn’t really matter whether I was nice to other people or not. So I stayed clean, but I would still lie, I would still cheat. Nothing terrible, nothing that hurt anyone the way I did when I was using. I just looked out for myself, and I never really thought much about it.
“But recently I had this…this opportunity to do something actually nice for another person. It wasn’t anyone I had wronged, just someone who was hurting. It would have been easy for me to behave the way I always have. But I imagined what a better person might do, and I did that instead.
“I feel good about what I did, but it’s not like I deserve a medal or anything. Because there are other people for whom being generous comes easily, without a struggle. And it’s easy for them because in the past they made a lot of little decisions to be generous. It was hard for me because I’ve made a lot of little decisions to be selfish in the past. So I’m the reason it’s hard for me to be generous. That’s something I need to fix. Or that I want to fix. I’m not sure if this is the right group for that, but this is the first place I thought of.”
“Thank you,” said the group leader. “You are absolutely welcome to attend these meetings.”
The other new person, a young man who looked like he’d just graduated from high school, introduced himself and started talking. Nat turned to him to listen.
There was a package waiting for her when Dana got home. Once she was in her apartment, she opened it and found a personal tablet inside; no retail packaging, just an adhesive note stuck to the screen: “For Dana.” She checked the wrapping, but there was no name or address for the sender.
Dana turned the tablet on; the only icons on the screen were half a dozen video files, each labeled with her name followed by a sequence of numbers. She tapped the first one to watch it, and the screen filled with a low-resolution image of her face. But it wasn’t her, it was a parallel version of her, talking about her past.
“Ms. Archer came into our room and found us counting the pills. She asked us what was going on, and for a second I froze. Then I said they were mine, that Vinessa hadn’t known anything about them. She was suspicious, because I’d never been in trouble before, but I convinced her. Eventually I got suspended from school, but it didn’t turn into as big a deal as it could have; they put me on probation, so if I stayed out of trouble, it wouldn’t go on my permanent record. I knew it would have been much worse for Vinessa because of the way the teachers felt about her.
“But Vinessa started avoiding me, and when I finally asked her why, she told me she felt guilty every time she saw me. I told her she didn’t have to feel guilty and that I wanted to hang out with her, but she said I was just making it worse. I got angry at her; she got angry at me. She started spending time with these other girls who were constantly getting into trouble, and everything went downhill from there. She was caught dealing on school grounds, she was expelled, and she was in and out of jail all the time after that.
“And I keep thinking, if I hadn’t said the pills were mine, everything would be different. If I had let Vinessa take her share of the blame, there wouldn’t have been that wedge to drive us apart. We would have been in it together, she wouldn’t have started hanging out with those troubled girls, and her life would have gone in a completely different direction.”
What the hell? Fingers trembling, she tapped on the second video.
Another Dana: “One of the teachers came into our room just as we were counting the pills. I confessed everything immediately; I told her that Vinessa and I had stolen them from our parents so we could have a party. Eventually the school suspended us and put us on probation; I think they wanted to do something worse to Vinessa, but they had to punish us both equally.