The parking lot was empty when Benno arrived, and the front door of the church locked. He got back in his car, where he experience a series of painful dry heaves that left him bleary eyed and dizzy, then got out and paced up and down the path that meandered from the church’s entrance and through a rock garden to the back of the building.

At about twenty to four, a car pulled up beside Benno’s, and a man climbed out. He smiled warmly as he approached Benno. At the same moment, Benno’s phone vibrated. He glanced at it. Nick was calling. Benno thumb hesitated over the phone’s glass.

“Afternoon,” the man said. “You a friend of Bill’s?”

Benno returned the phone to his pocket. “I’m sorry?”

“Bill.” The man gestured to the church. “You here for the meeting?”

“Oh. Well…”

“I’m Mark.” The man extended a hand, which Benno shook, distinctly aware that his own palm was clammy. “Come on in, you can help me set up.”

“No I’m not… I’m actually looking for someone.”

Mark frowned.

“A woman. I think she might come here. To this meeting.”

“Ah.” Mark stepped around Benno and continued up the path. “Don’t know her.”

“I haven’t even—”

“It’s called Alcoholics Anonymous for a reason, my friend.”

Benno followed him. “She’s in her twenties. Dark hair, bangs. She has face tattoos of Egyptian hieroglyphs.”

Mark stopped and turned, his brow furrowed sharply. “My God, I forgot all about her. It’s been two years…” His eyes swam up toward the gray sky. “You’re talking about Rosie.”

Benno’s heart bled into the sea of his stomach.

The man grimaced and smacked his forehead. “Goddammit,” he said. “That just slipped right out of me.”

“Do you know where I can find her?”

“That I do not.” The man fished a keychain from his pocket and started on the church’s door. “And even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you. I’ve already violated the poor girl’s anonymity.”

Benno swallowed bile. “Please,” he said. “Please, I need to find her.”

“Why?”

Benno considered his options. “She’s my daughter,” he decided. “I think she’s in trouble.”

Mark straighten up and turned around. “What kind of trouble?”

“I don’t know.” Benno’s toes flexed inside his shoes. “She disappeared. No one knows where she is. I’ve been looking for her for… For a while. This is the best lead I have.”

“Are the police involved?”

Benno nodded, then shook his head. “They’re not being helpful.”

Mark chewed this over. “This is pretty counterintuitive for me,” he said. “Giving up a member of the fellowship. But if she’s in danger… There is someone you can talk to. Her old sponsor. Don’t know if they’re still in touch, but she might know something that could be helpful to you.”

“Thank you,” Benno said. Behind him, a car rolled into the lot. “How can I find her?”

Mark looked over Benno’s shoulder and nodded. “Speak of the devil.”

Benno turned. A silver BMW had parked nearby, its exterior so clean it reflected the church in a near perfect facsimile. Its engine cut off, and its door opened, and a tall woman emerged. Her long hair was so gray it appeared nearly blue in the afternoon light. She wore a gray pantsuit and gray dress shoes and a pair of large, mirror sunglasses. Her lips were dark, and when she flicked the nub of her cigarette onto the pavement, its butt was smeared with dark green lipstick.

“Hey, Edie,” Mark waved. “This guy’s looking for an old sponsee of yours. Little Rosie. Says he’s her father.”

The woman, Edie, stood, unmoving and inscrutable at her car for long enough that Benno started toward her. As he neared, his nostrils filled with an aroma of lilacs and sandalwood that stirred another bout of unsettling deja vu—the second of the day.

Benno stopped a few feet away.

Edie’s glasses reflected a miniature version of him, which compounded his sudden sense of being quite small before this woman who was easily a foot taller than him.

“I’m hoping you can help me,” Benno said. “I’m looking for—”

“You must be Benno,” Edie said, her voice smokey and lilting at once. “I was wondering when you’d show up.” She removed her sunglasses, revealing a pair of bright brown eyes that flashed briefly over Benno’s shoulder to confirm that Mark was out of earshot. “I knew your mother well.”

#

She made him stay for the meeting before she would speak to him further.

Benno had never attended an AA meeting. He had no reason to. And even if he did, it was impossible to pay attention with the anticipation of his impending conversation with Edie about his mother.

His mother…

None of this made sense. Benno wasn’t stupid. He was sick, he was tired, he was dizzied and frazzled and perturbed by the chemo and the cancer. But he was lucid. He knew what he saw and what he heard. It didn’t make sense, but there was no other explanation.

A man with a glass eye was telling a story about a car accident—an accident he’d caused while intoxicated—that left a teenager bound to a wheelchair. When Benno was fifteen—soon after his mother disappeared—he’d walked in on his father in his study—its walls plastered with layers of scribbled diagrams, triangles upon triangles, a desperate effort to map meaning over a meaningless land—crying in the dark and standing on his hands in the room’s dark corner… No. That hadn’t happened. Where had that bizarre thought come from? Benno pressed his thumbs to his temples. He was lucid. He was just tired. He was just a little perturbed.

When the meeting ended, Benno waited just outside the church for Edie. He needed a drink—now after listening to all these alcoholics complain about their sobriety more than ever—but was afraid to seek out a bar or liquor store in case Edie was gone when he returned. He dug his fists into his pockets to control and conceal his shaking, and focused on taking slow breaths.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

When Edie finally emerged, it was nearly dark, and starting to rain.

“I’m driving,” she said, starting for her shiny BMW.

Benno shuffled after her, taking two steps for every one of hers. “Where are we going?”

“I need to eat.” Edie climbed inside her car and slammed the door.

The car’s headlights flared on, revealing the long raindrops cutting down. Benno’s phone vibrated in his pocket. Without removing it he thumbed at its edge until it stilled, then crossed through the headlights—briefly mistaken that in doing so would result in him getting wetter—and folded himself into the car.

#

Edie ate a cheeseburger with meticulous ferocity.

Benno tried not to stare at her, gazing instead at the diner’s window, through which the mostly empty parking lot and the neon signs of the fast-food joints and after-hours businesses melted together into bleary light in the rivulets of rain on the glass. A TV over the dessert counter played a compilation of NASCAR crashes, each one more fiery and spectacular than the last.

“You can get a drink,” Edie said eventually, wiping between her fingers with a greasy napkin and discarding the napkin onto her empty plate.

Benno looked at her with what he instantly deemed a conspicuously forced naivety.

“Believe it or not, I know the signs.” Edie waved down a waiter. “The shaking, the fidgeting, the bloodshot eyes. Plus you stink like booze.”

A waiter appeared. “What can I get you?”

Edie lifted an eyebrow at Benno.

Benno drummed his fingers on his thigh. “Jack Daniels. Double. Neat.”

The waiter went off to fetch it.

“So how’d you find me?” Edie asked.

Benno’s stomach pinched and throbbed. “I got lucky, I guess.”

Edie nodded slowly, as if this meant anything at all. “You look just like her.”

None of this makes sense.

“Where is she?” Benno asked.

“I don’t know.” Edie slid her plate away and sat back. “I haven’t seen her in two years.”

“You must know something.”

“She showed up here out of nowhere. First meeting she came to I could tell she was struggling. I used to struggle too, so I know it when I see it. I took her under my wing, gave her a place to stay. We went through the Big Book together. For a few weeks she hardly told me anything about herself. I speculated, privately. A young woman like that, pretty, showing up out of the blue. I figured maybe human trafficking. Abusive boyfriend. Cult victim. Didn’t matter. In the rooms, we’re all just alcoholics, and I wanted to help her. Now I’m no idiot, I knew she was still drinking. It’s a small town, you can’t keep a lot of secrets around here. And typically that would be enough for me to kick a sponsee to the curb. But with Rosie… There was something about her. I felt like she was clinging to a cliff. Like if she wasn’t working a program—even if it wasn’t in sobriety, even if it was more imperfect than usual—that she would lose her grip and fall to her death. So I broke my own rule and stuck with her. And over time she opened up to me. She told me where she’d been and how she ended up here. Of course I didn’t believe a word of it—no one would. At least at first. But then she showed me…” Edie turned to the glistening window. “Then one day she just disappeared. Left town as fast as she’d arrived. And that was it.”

The waiter returned with Benno’s whiskey.

“Tell me,” Benno said, the whiskey shivering in his hand. “Tell me everything.”

Edie’s brown eyes coruscated in the diner’s fluorescence. “Okay,” she said.

Benno’s peripheries conjured two distinct realms: a NASCAR track littered with smoldering debris, and the neon lights of the restaurants and stores widening and blooming beyond the rain-soaked window into a distant and curious garden.

#

Benno had a vivid dream:

A set of pared eyes looked up at him from the dark, their tumescent whites reflecting the guttering of a weak candle. The stench of unwashed skin and human waste was intolerable.

Recipient’s forlorn shadow haunted the unknowable floor.

A hand appeared in the fluttering ring of candlelight. Beige, fingernail-less. It held a small red bean. Not a bean. A heart. A mouse heart, which twitched and bled an endless stream into the small flame.

SOON… a Voice said, genderless, monotone.

Benno could not move anything except his eyes. His breathing was steady, but not by his own volition. Even his thoughts, it seemed, were conducted toward the round eyes and the bleeding heart.

SOON…

And from the darkness behind the eyes, a Thud…

Thd-thud…

Thd-thud…

Like a door being beaten in.

Thd-thud… Thd-thud… Thd-thud…

Then light roared in, and Benno was on his back looking up at Kay. A steady beep kept rhythm overhead. A vinyl curtain cordoned his bed from the rest of the room.

“Hey,” Kay said, her dark hair cordoning half her face, her strong hand clasping Benno’s.

“Hey,” Benno said, his voice dry and small. “Hey…”

Kay pushed her hair behind her ear. It wasn’t Kay. And her hand wasn’t strong. It was Brooke, and her hand floated in Benno’s like meek water.

Kay’s dead, Benno reminded himself, then, No. Not dead. We’re just divorced.

Brooke looked down at him oddly, as one might an inscrutable abstract artwork.

“What’s going on?” Benno asked, his senses returning, suddenly distinctly aware of the stiff hospital sheets tangled around his feet and the IV inserted in his forearm, the crowd of vital sign monitors standing guard, the catheter lodged too deep inside him.

“Hold on.” Brooke got up and disappeared around the curtain.

Benno massaged his jaw, which ached. In fact, his whole face ached, and his head throbbed, and his neck was tight, and his chest and shoulders were cramping. Had something happened? Why was he here? A surgery, maybe. Or another endoscopy… He didn’t remember coming in. He tried to recall the last thing he did remember… Headlights bearing down on the car. Kay’s fingernails. Nick’s high-pitched scream. Untangling from himself… No. No. That was years ago. Nick was only eight when that happened—the Close Call. Now he was fifteen. The same age Benno had been when his…

Benno sat up with a bolt of remembrance. In doing so, the IV in his forearm wrenched at his skin and the rack attached to the other end of the line toppled against one of the vital sign monitors, clacking and crashing. At the same moment—as if they were the same phenomena—the curtain drew back, and a doctor appeared, followed by Brooke.

“What are you doing?” the doctor demanded. He was young, about Brooke’s age.

Benno tried to swing his legs off the bed, but they were tangled in the sheets. “I have to go,” he said, finding himself winded.

“No.” The doctor squared up as if Benno was going to rise and charge, then, deciding he wasn’t—or couldn’t—he approached and placed a hand on Benno’s shoulder. That subtle weight—merely a touch—was too much for Benno to withstand, and he collapsed onto his back.

“Just take it easy.” The doctor set about untangling the IV line. “You’re not well.”

“How did I get here?” Benno asked, looking at Brooke. “Where’s Edie?”

Brooke’s face soured. “Who’s Edie?”

“Your blood pressure is very low,” the doctor said, eyeing a monitor.

Benno tried again to sit up, but this time his shoulders and neck seized up and prevented his back from even leaving the sheets. At the same moment, he began to become aware of the pain in his stomach—a different pain than the one he’d lived with for the last year. This one was deep and churning, like gears gnashing against each other, and as he exhaled his mouth and nostrils filled with the stench of iron.

“I just need to grab a nurse.” The doctor hurried away, leaving the curtain fluttering.

Benno scrunched his eyes shut as a tide of bile rushed up to meet the bloody taste in his sinuses. When it passed, and he opened his eyes, he found Brooke standing over him.

“Do you want to be here?” she asked.

Benno shook his head as if he understood the question.

“You haven’t answered your phone in days.You missed a chemo treatment. You missed an ultrasound you promised you would be at—she’s healthy, by the way, if you care. You also missed both your days with Nick. He called me, looking for you. I didn’t know what to tell him. He’s struggling, Benno. Not just because of you but it’s a big part of it, and when you do shit like this it makes it so much worse for him. His mother called me too. That was a… an awkward conversation. And then I get a call from a hospital upstate.” She gestured around at the room. “They find you passed out in a diner bathroom. Passed out drunk. With stage three stomach cancer. I mean I knew you were drinking, but not like that. And I know… I know you’re scared. But I thought you wanted to fight. I thought you wanted to get better. Now I’m not so sure.”

Benno looked up into the light on the ceiling.

“So if you don’t want to be here, if you’re ready to go, just tell me now. Because if I’m gonna be doing this alone, I need to get started on that.”

Benno looked deep into the light.

He’s struggling. Not just because of you…

“I don’t want to die,” Benno said.

Brooke nodded slowly. “So what’s going on?”

Not just because of you…

“My mother…” Benno’s voice came from a part of his chest that hurt worse than the other parts. “She’s alive.”

Brooke’s guarded anger dissolved into incredulity. “What?”

Two pairs of sneakers squeaked on the linoleum, and the curtain rustled.

“She’s alive. And I’m going to find her.”