Archive of Our Own ^beta

VANESSA BLOOM’S problem wasn’t that she was the baby daughter of an addict. It was the fact that, in the midst of her childhood, she suddenly found herself no longer shielded from an alcoholic’s mercurial temperament.

When asked to share her story in the various rehab support groups she has had to attend over the years, she cites the age of 12 as a turning point in her life. It was right at the time her older sister, Lauren, had to go to college. Unaware of the specifics of the admissions process, and unable to grasp the gravity of the possibility of her sister relocating, Vanessa thought that life would go on, as it was.

She soon would find that to be false when, after waking up one morning, her sister was gone without a trace. After that first domino in her line of thinking fell, the rest of the pieces that made up the illusion Lauren had carefully cultivated to protect her from the reality of having an addicted mother seemingly blew over at once, leaving her confused and, for the first time in her life, faced with the meaning of loneliness.

Her sister wouldn’t pick up her cellphone or otherwise give any other sign of life. There was no ring on the landline or a pop-up AIM message that would indicate she had a chance of salvation and not just survival. Vanessa was left to her own devices, desperate and alone, a visitor rather than a rightful occupant of her own home.

LOOKING BACK NOW on what she had become in the years between her sister leaving and the present, Vanessa would say that she was nothing more than a hopeless citizen in a city drawing in people filled with hope. But, worst of all was the feeling that she was a spare piece in an infinite puzzle that seemed to have just enough space for everyone else but her. It was hard to be a privileged addict and counting personal milestones only in the form of the numbers of liquor bottles emptied and pills ingested - often at once.

Where was her grit? Did she even possess the slightest of merit that wasn’t given to her via inheritance. Where were those enviable traits that made her father a talented breakthrough physician and her sister the Head of the Emergency Department of America’s oldest hospital? Staring at white bottoms and dodging malignant liver disease would hardly register as achievements anywhere other than on the long track record of a seasoned alcoholic, and most definitely not one in their late 20s. But what Vanessa failed to realize was that she was, indeed, a veteran in the addiction world herself. At first, it was a matter of getting hooked based on taste, but once alcohol’s memory-obliterating properties began to kick in, she felt lucky to have found the secret potion to oblivion.

THE CONNECTION made between The Drink and Lethe is primarily an olfactory memory and one of the few she can recall with no great effort. Soon after Lauren left, she had taken up her duties in cleaning their mother's vomit. She raised her eyes and looked at her, lying on the couch, half-delirious, half asleep, with a flute glass tipped over and pointing at the floor. That's when she finally realized that the fruity, alcoholic scent emanating from her breath had a source, and it was none other than the colorful drinks filling the glasses that seemed to be an extension of her arms. Not two years later, Vanessa would carefully, silently clean up after herself, too - and not for having finished her meals or tidying up her room, but in the aftermath of raiding the liquor cabinet or even drinking out of her mother's numerous colognes in desperation that bordered on withdrawal.

Her teenage years were marked with rampant alcohol abuse, and her growing body couldn't metabolize the poison as fast as it should. She did end up in the hospital more than once, and she was on the verge of doing so many times over, saved only by old wives tales and internet tricks that proved to be marginally successful. Her father had long passed, and all her mother was capable of doing was to sign the release forms and drown her sniffles as the doctors warned her, each time, of her daughter’s increasingly dire predicament. There are no memories of her graduation; her school dances were a great excuse to drink with no pretense, and she is unable to describe the specifics of her day-to-day life as a student.

WHILE SHE DID make it to college, she didn't last long. She was no Lauren, that's for sure. Her sister played hard but, above all, worked hard. On the contrary, Vanessa's GPA was abysmal, and her attendance was so poor that one would argue that there was no meaning in tracking it past the first couple of months of each semester. With tuition and board covered and an inexhaustible supply of money, she was now free to consume as much alcohol as she wanted, whenever and wherever she wanted. She would also experiment with a host of other legal and illegal drugs, gambling away her sanity and physical well-being daily and even hourly.

Whether in the company of bad seeds who tapped into her funds to satisfy their vices or other lost souls who struggled with absentee wealthy parents, she lost pieces of herself all around the city. Sleeping with strangers, waking up in places she didn’t recognize, being dragged to crummy walk-in clinics for IV drips and Narcan.

But, after a string of ODs that followed in close succession, things had reached critical mass.

So the rehab stints came.

One.

Two.

Three.

Four:

She decided she would give things a try, albeit meekly. Something was different this time; something rumbling inside her and asked to be tended to. She couldn’t find the words to describe her state of mind, but, when presented with the question to define herself as part of a Cognitive Behavioral Therapy exercise, she wrote, with a black sharpie, on the notepad laying on her lap:

The last sentence shocked her. She moved to cross it off, but she chose not to.

What the hell! But suddenly, she knew. It came to her like a revelation, with the letters jumping off the paper and hovering just below the tip of her nose, close enough so that she could both read them and fail to avoid them.

She wasn’t little. She stayed little by losing all those years between the age of 12 to now through the chemical interference of all the substances she would mercilessly bombard her body with.

That little girl is not a girl anymore, and she will no longer be lost.

STEP 9: MAKE AMENDS.

She was surprised how far she had climbed up the steps ladder, but she had a certain foreboding that things would not proceed as quickly from hereon. The list she had prepared was small, she thought, but very important. It contained some names that were precious to her, relationships so fragile and fragmented that she wondered if reaching out could mean cutting the final thread that would connect her with the people she had once slighted or wronged.

The first entry on the list was

and it took her some time to map out how and where she would find her and what she planned to say. She had no ill-will, and she felt like whatever had happened was now so far into the past that she couldn’t possibly say whether it was a story they told themselves to live whatever life they had to.

She would do it in New Amsterdam.

In Lauren’s comfort zone. Her ED.

She wouldn’t walk in as a patient but instead ask for her and tell someone that “an old friend” would like to see her.

That, someone, happened to be none other than Casey.

“That's weird - you actually look a lot like her….”

“Oh, people used to tell us that all the time.” Vanessa was bashful.

“She’s, uh, in the middle of a case right now, but I’ll let her know as soon as possible, alright? Make yourself comfortable in one of those fancy chairs we have in the hallway,” Casey said, with his offhanded sarcasm.

Vanessa waited, and the minutes turned to more than one hour. Her thermos was now empty and dangled from her hands only out of habit. She second-guessed herself, but only briefly, for the moment that the thought of leaving flashed in her mind, her beautiful, radiant sister with the white coat she fought so hard to get the rights to wearing was now standing before her, startled.

It took her a few seconds before she could utter:

“Nessie? ”

and, just like that, for the first time in many years, Vanessa felt that all was going to be right in the world.