Death Will Help You Leave Him (29 page)

“You’ll have to talk about Laura eventually.”

“Not now!”

It came out more of a bellow than I’d intended as I jerked my head away from her touch. New York subway riders are notorious for ignoring any kind of drama. But two people turned their heads to see if we’d provide any entertainment and three shifted slightly farther from us.

For once, Barbara shut up. I didn’t feel like telling her, even in private, that I knew damn well that Feingold was Laura’s gynecologist. He’d done abortions since before
Roe v. Wade
, which was okay by me. But he didn’t ask a lot of questions. He had believed Laura’s mother when she brought her fourteen-year-old daughter in, saying the pregnancy they needed to terminate was the result of a schoolyard rape. Like hell it was. Laura’s stepfather had started coming to her room when she was eight. Unlike Netta, Laura had never been able to conceive after the abortion. She hadn’t spent most of her time since then trying to stay high or die for no reason.

I didn’t let Barbara take me to my first Al-Anon meeting. I told her I was going, so she could kvell, as she would say, like a proud mother whose little boy takes the bus alone. But I had to do this by myself.

Once the thing with Luz unraveled, I could let it go. But if my life was one big show, Laura still held the spotlight. Barbara refrained from scolding me about it. She didn’t even remind me more than once or twice a day that codependency is a disease.

“You’re entitled to grief,” she said.

Jimmy, troubled by something an AA meeting couldn’t fix, offered me his company, his virtual ear 24/7, and all the simple wisdom of the program. I
knew
“this too shall pass.” I even found it comforting, staggering evidence of how much I’d changed. But Laura still upstaged every other act and character. Even mine. Even me.

If I’d chosen differently that day, would Laura be alive? Would Luz have died? Would anything be better? Would I feel any less responsible? My head had sensible answers to all those questions. My heart just hurt.

I wondered if Laura would ever have succeeded in leaving Mac. She couldn’t leave him. I couldn’t leave her. I kept thinking I had, but it took death to cut the cord for good. That made me no different from her at all.

My sponsor advised me to go back to the First Step. Oddly, Step One is the same in Al-Anon as in AA: “Admitted we were powerless over alcohol and our lives had become unmanageable.”

I told him I didn’t even feel like drinking.

“You will,” he said. “If not now, during some other crisis, or maybe some time when everything is ticking along nicely. For now, think of alcohol as a metaphor. We’re powerless over
everything
— except our ability to choose the next right action.”

So I chose to attend this meeting. The church basement was no different from the church basements of AA. I even saw a few familiar faces. The same Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, only a word or two different here and there, hung from the wall behind the speaker. I liked what someone read about taking what I liked and leaving the rest. I could do that.

When they opened the floor to shares, I raised my hand. I still had trouble doing that in AA. I didn’t plan it this time. For a moment, I became God’s marionette. And that was all it took. The speaker called on me.

“Hi, I’m Bruce, I’m an alc—” I bit back the rest. “Sorry. Damn! ‘I’m Bruce and I’m sorry.’ I guess I do qualify for this program.”

That got an encouraging ripple of laughter.

“Yeah, I’m in the other program,” I admitted. “That’s not why I’m here, though. I’m here because someone I loved is dead.”

As if the D word flipped a switch, the quality of the silence changed. No one fidgeted. Nobody’s chair creaked. No one rustled any papers. Even the knitters in the front row stopped clicking their needles and waited motionless for me to go on.

“She’s not my only qualifier, though she did do drugs and alcohol,” I said. “But she’s the one I never could let go of.”

“You’re in the right place,” someone in the back row murmured.

“We got a divorce. It didn’t make any difference. I got sober. That didn’t work either. I didn’t even love her any more. Not that way, whatever way that is. I still couldn’t stop hanging on.”

Now I saw the nodding heads that meant the listeners could identify. A couple of people said softly, “Keep coming back.”

“The other day she killed herself,” I said, through a lump in my throat that felt the size of a fist. “I couldn’t save her. And now I’m here.”

I fought back tears. They all sat quietly and waited for me to cry or not. Whichever I wanted. Whatever came.
Acceptance is the answer.
Not only theirs, but mine.

The End

For Brian, always.

Any writer who sets a work of fiction in New York City today takes liberties with its geography and sociology, whether deliberately or because the city changes faster than a book gets published. Novelists make stuff up. We call it literary license or simply what we do.

We’ll give you your money back if you find as many as five errors. (That’s five verified errors—punctuation or spelling that leaves no room for judgment calls or alternatives.) If you find more than five, we’ll give you a dollar for every one you catch up to twenty. More than that and we reproof and remake the book. Email
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Try
Death Will Get You Sober
, another great book by Elizabeth Zelvin.

http://amzn.to/10JNYbR

Next: Death Will Extend Your Vacation.

The Bruce Kohler Series
(in order of publication):

Death Will Get You Sober

Death Will Help You Leave Him

Death Will Extend Your Vacation

Death Will Save Your Life

We hope you enjoyed
Death Will Help You Leave Him
and wonder if you’d consider reviewing it on Goodreads, Amazon (
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), or wherever you purchased it? The author would be most grateful. And if you’d like to see other forthcoming mysteries, let us keep you up-to-date. Sign up for our mailing list at
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ELIZABETH ZELVIN is a New York City psychotherapist whose mystery series about recovering alcoholic Bruce Kohler and his friends includes
Death Will Get You Sober
,
Death Will Help You Leave Him
, and
Death Will Extend Your Vacation.
Liz’s short stories have appeared in
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
and various anthologies and e-zines. Three of her stories have been nominated for the Agatha Award and one for the Derringer Award for Best Short Story. Liz is also a singer-songwriter whose recent CD is titled
Outrageous Older Woman
. Liz blogs on Poe’s Deadly Daughters and SleuthSayers and can be found on Facebook. Her author website is
www.elizabethzelvin.com
and her music website is
www.lizzelvin.com
.