Cheri’s head was numb. That bone weariness was still with her, although the crawlies seemed to have gone. What had happened to the Monopoly Man, though? Where was the man in the expensive suit who had wrapped her in his wonderful overcoat and called her his daughter?
“Where am I?”
“This is New Beginnings Rehabilitation Center. We’re in Brooklyn.”
“How’d I get here?”
Kelly held her hands up and out to her sides. “Sorry. I just don’t know. Your form lists you as self-admitted. Are you going to give it a try?”
Cheri looked around the office, sighed, and shook her head. “Can you tell me where I’m supposed to go now?”
Kelly told her. Fourth floor for final room assignment, then screening, orientation, physicals, lectures, group therapy, and always the promise of a new life if she could risk letting go of the old one. AA meetings, NA meetings, talks in the lounge with other patients, one-on-ones with counselors, physicians, and psychiatrists. Writing, reading, more writing and more reading.
Nearing the end of her stay three weeks later, Cheri had an interview at a halfway house where, after rehab, she’d live, look for a job, go to meetings, attend aftercare sessions, and become whatever it was she had the desire, the talent, and the determination to become.
What to become? So many possible beginnings. There were some paths that were closed because of her record. Tough to get bonded as an au pair when you’ve done time for possession and solicitation. Many were open, though. She saw the men and women around her working at the rehabilitation center, throwing out those slender lifelines, on a good month pulling thirty percent out of the nightmare. She didn’t know if she could develop the strength for that kind of work. So easy to hitch your wagon to a falling star.
On her last night in New Beginnings, after packing, she was with a few other patients watching the news on the television in her wing’s lounge when she saw a couple of familiar faces. One face was so familiar that everyone on Earth who had ever come within fifty feet of a television set or newspaper knew it: Kimberli Fallon, beautiful bad girl heiress to her father’s shipping fortune, pop star, actress, divorcée, and in trouble once again. Another drunk driving bust, but this time she’d been holding flake and had beaned a New Jersey State Trooper with her cell phone. Unless her attorney could pull yet another legal rabbit out of his pricey fedora, Kimberli would be spending at least part of the near future behind bars.
A tiny bit of Cheri delighted in this spoiled rich kid finally getting some reality dirt under her well-manicured fingernails. Then Betty, one of Cheri’s groupmates, said, “Maybe this time she’ll get some help.”
“Help?” said Bob scornfully. “She can afford to buy her own chain of drug rehabs.”
Betty nodded. “Which means she can also afford to keep help so far away it can never get to her.”
Cheri felt guilty about her tiny moment of glee at Kimberli Fallon’s predicament. If the beautiful heiress was an addict and had the money to keep help away long enough, she was in bigger trouble than almost anyone in New Beginnings. She might have been spoiled, but that wasn’t what was going to kill her. Kimberli was taxi dancing with addiction and could afford to buy up all the tickets.
And how the news pundits seemed to delight in the rich girl maybe having to be locked up and do without makeup for a couple of weeks. The jokes: drunk Kimberli, fried Kimberli, party-’til-you-drop Kimberli. What fun. They didn’t realize what they were laughing about, though: the victim of a fatal disease, unless she could get the help she could pay to avoid.
Cheri got up to get a cup of tea in the floor kitchen when she heard the voice-over mention Kimberli’s father, Jack Fallon. Cheri paused and glanced back at the screen. Jack Fallon’s father had lost everything in twenty-nine and never got ahead another cent. Then his son Jack was born in nineteen-thirty. Twenty years later he signed on as a merchant seaman and half a century later he was a billionaire. Jack Fallon had died of a stroke two years earlier, leaving his fortune to his only child, Kimberli. His picture came up and Cheri grabbed the back of a chair as she felt her knees sag.
Big white mustache, pinstripes, that smile, those fierce blue eyes—in her mind’s eye she could still see him sitting on that loveseat in Bryant Park in October. Jack Fallon: He was the Monopoly Man. He had wrapped her in his overcoat two years after he had died.
She slowly shook her head at her own thoughts. “I got to talk with someone.”
There was a floor counselor, a young woman named Shana, and they talked in Cheri’s room. Cheri told Shana about that night, the beating she took, the crawlies, the Monopoly Man, her waking up in rehab with no knowledge of how she had gotten there, and that the Monopoly Man was a dead ringer for Jack Fallon, except that it couldn’t be because Jack Fallon had been dead for two years.
Explanations explain everything. Jack Fallon and his daughter Kimberli had been in the news for the past ten years, ever since the girl had turned fifteen and had been first taken into custody for vandalizing the yacht club to which her father belonged. No charges, of course, but plenty of copy and airplay. In her confused drugged state and in her desperate reach for help, Cheri simply became confused by a little salvation fantasy. She had met an imaginary Crusader Rabbit on her way to get help.
It was all in Cheri’s head.
Maybe, thought Cheri as Shana left her room. Maybe.
After Cheri graduated from the halfway house and was beginning her college education in preparation to become a treatment counselor, on a return visit to New Beginnings she met someone. She was passing through the main patient lounge on the fourth floor on her way to meet with her old group counselor when she heard a familiar voice call out, “Yo, Cheri? Is that you?”
She turned and saw Rackshack getting up from a couch where he’d been talking to half a dozen very clean looking persons. He was still tall, dark, and wearing a Mets cap. She nodded dumbly, not knowing for certain if she should shake hands, embrace him, or run like hell. He walked over to her and stopped, his mouth wide with smiles, and looked down at her. “Girl, you clean. How long?”
“Eight—” Her throat was very dry. “Eighteen months. How are you doing, Rack?”
“Good,” he said as he nodded. “Real good. You doin’ all those meetings, workin’ those steps?”
“That’s my medicine. Are you visiting someone here?”
He laughed. “No, girl. I earn my way into this hotel.”
She raised an eyebrow. “I thought Rackshack never did drugs. Drugging was for losers.”
“Got that right.” He smiled sheepishly as he rubbed the back of his neck. “Fooled you as well as me. Got a minute?”
“Sure.” She nodded and they sat in a couch away from the other patients. They made a special kind of small talk: she apologized for stealing all that cocaine and running out on him. He expressed relief at the information because he didn’t remember Cheri ever moving in with him, stealing the drugs, or moving out. All this time he thought he had used it all himself and had become immune to overdoses, a theory that had blown up in his face about three weeks ago.
“I was dead. Out in Bryant Park under my old tree. I saw angels, swear to God, and they was laughing at me. So sick I wished I’d never been born. Then this old dude he picks me up off the ground like I was a little child. He sits me down in this seat. I don’t know what I said, what he said, or anything, unnerstand?”
Cheri nodded.
“I remember the rattles so bad I thought my eyeballs were poppin’ out my head. This old dude, real expensive threads, he puts his overcoat on me.” Rack snapped his fingers. “Just like that I stop shakin’. Never been so warm or at peace in my whole life. Got to be at least a foot taller than that old dude, but I near got lost in his overcoat. Can’t figure that. Anyway, sat me down, covered up my feet. I think I fell asleep.” He looked around and held out his hands. “Woke up in this place. You ever see a picture—”