First Steps
Part Six
By Gary Schneeberger
TheSchnays@cs.com

Disclaimer: Not mine. Theirs. Don't want to be sued. Thanks.

Fifty-five minutes ago - hell, five minutes ago - it would have been all he needed to hear to head for the door. Now, though, it was all he needed to hear to head in the opposite direction.

Yeah, it was weird. Chris knowing his name without him ever mentioning it. But so what? It was hardly the weirdest thing that had happened in the past week. Getting caught with a needle in his wrist by Abby, the intervention, punching Benton in the mouth, Benton getting on the plane. How weird was all that? Maybe somebody - one of the other patients from the center - told Chris his name. Maybe the counselor who drove the bus over told Rick, just in case any of them acted up at his meeting, and Rick told him. Maybe he guessed. Hell, maybe God told him.

Carter didn’t care. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that he had the chance, while that perfect warmth was still percolating inside him, to make a run for the goal line. To score some peace. Some freedom. Some forgiveness. If he couldn’t cry it all out, or puke it all out, at least he could try to talk it all out.

What did he have to lose but the hurt? The regret? The guilt? Screw saving face. The face he’d been walking around with wasn’t worth saving, anyway.

Standing was a struggle. His body still ached from the withdrawal, and sitting for nearly an hour had duped all those sore muscles into thinking they’d been given the night off. His feet felt like lead, like lead that had begun to melt and was soldering itself to the tiled floor. He focused on unsticking them -- left, right, left, right, left, right -- watching each tentative lift and fall as intently as he studied the intricacies of a patient taking his first post-op steps.

One tile, two tiles, three tiles, four tiles, five tiles ...

He turned up the center aisle. He could feel the heads in the room turning in his direction.

... six tiles, seven tiles, eight tiles, nine tiles ...

The 3-by-5 card felt like a 20-pound barbell in his hands.

... ten tiles, eleven tiles, twelve tiles ...

The helmets were back. The shoulder pads. Barely visible on the horizon, but bearing down.

... thirteen tiles, fourteen tiles ...

Maybe this isn’t such a good idea.

“Nice to meet you, John.”

It was Rick, standing on the fifteenth tile, the one just left of the podium. Chris was behind him, looking like he wasn’t going anywhere, like one of those Good Samaritans who hang around the E.R. for condition reports on the people they’ve rescued from a fire or a car accident. Anxious and proud at the same time.

They took a few steps back, to give him a clear path to the podium, and Carter shuffled sufficiently through the solder to take his place behind it. He set the 3-by-5 card gingerly on the glass, face up, and rested his hands on the wooden slats at either side - as much to rest his aching arms as to steady his aching everything else.

He looked up, into the rows of faces that had only been rows of backs until now. They were mostly average faces, wearing mostly above-average smiles.

“I’m John,” he said into the microphone, consciously connecting to the warmth that still pulsed through him, hiding behind it, hiding inside it. Drawing on it like fuel to make his mind form the thought, his lips form the words.

“And I’m an addict.”

He eyes caught Kara, one of the other patients from the center. A pediatrician from Wisconsin. She looked shocked, and why not? She hadn’t seen him do anything but sleep in group all weekend, and now he was saying this?

The other faces, though, were still smiling. It really was going to be OK.

“My card is guilt: A painful feeling of self-reproach ... ”

Lucy’s face was back inside his head.

“ ... resulting from a belief that someone has ...”

His father’s voice was there, too.

... done something wrong or immoral.”

He shuffled his feet to free them from the solder, taking a half-step back just to make sure. Where was he supposed to start?

“I ... um ... I guess I’ve felt guilty since I was a kid, but I never really ... um ... thought much about it, you know? We had money. My dad ... ah ... we had a lot, and whenever I’d see people who didn’t, I ... I’d feel kind of bad about it.”

It wasn’t coming out like he wanted it to.

“It was like life was ... ah ... too easy for us, you know? Too easy for me. I guess that’s why I went to medical school. Why I became a doctor. To help people. Not by ... you know ... by giving them money but actually ... um ... actually getting in there and serving them.”

Did that sound as stupid to everybody else as it did to him? Their faces, smiles slipping into sympathy, seemed to say it didn’t.

“My dad, he ... ah ... he wanted me to stay in the family business ... And we had this ... this ..."

The helmets were right on top of him, just like that, and the faces inside were sneering.

“ ... this fight. I ... um ... I hurt him. I hurt him very badly.”

Apparently his eyes weren’t too tired to tear, after all.

“Every time I’ve seen him since then, I’ve wanted to ... apologize. To tell him that .. I didn’t mean it. I was just a ... a stupid kid. To tell him that I ... ah ... loved him, and that I wished he ... um ... that he loved me, too.”

His tears were flowing freely now, dropping to the 3-by-5 card in intermittent, rhythmless raps. He shut his eyes to wipe them, noticing just before they closed that some of the faces in front of him were wiping theirs, too.

He checked the time. 9:02.

“I’m ... ah ... I’m sorry,” he said, looking over his shoulder at Rick, struggling to lift his arm high enough so he could see him pointing at his watch.

“Don’t you worry about it,” Rick said, his voice softer, more soothing than it had been all night. “She’s understood my being late a lot over the last 25 years, for reasons a lot less important than this.”

Carter turned back to the rows of faces. This was harder than kicking the Fentanyl.

“I guess what I’m trying to say is ... is that I’ve felt guilty about things like this for as far back as I can remember. But there was always ... ah ... always a way to get away from it, you know? If I didn’t want to face it, didn’t want to feel it, I could always just ... always just avoid the situations that made me feel that way.”

But not anymore, he thought. Not anymore, Hard or not, he had to get it out.

“But then ... then ... on Valentine’s Day, I got stabbed. At the hospital. A patient ... a patient we did a spinal tap on. I went in to check on him, and ... and ... he stabbed me in the back. And when I hit the floor, I ... um ... I couldn’t move, you know? But I could see under ... under the bed ... and ... um ... she was there ... you know ... bleeding ... looking at me ... scared ... so scared ... and ... I ..."

He was sobbing now -- deep, heaving sobs, the kind he sobbed the whole way to the airport with Benton. He leaned into the podium, hoping it was strong enough to hold him, hoping he was strong enough to hold out.

He looked up, wanting to apologize for the scene he was causing, to apologize for keeping them all after 9. A woman in the front row was looking at him the way his Mom looked at him that day in the hospital in February, the way every mother looked at every child he’d ever treated.

He felt his composure slowly return as he stared into her eyes. Felt that perfect warmth flare inside him. Felt the helmets and the shoulder pads of that sneering fear take a few steps back.

“Her name was Lucy,” he said, straightening himself again before the microphone. “She was a med student, my med student. She was a ... she would have been a great doctor.”

He was talking directly into the woman’s eyes now.

“I thought the patient was fine, you know? I left Lucy to follow up ... figured she could handle it. But I should have known. The way he reacted to the spinal tap ... He was screaming, yelling ... It’s painful but not that ... not that painful.”

The woman’s eyes were on his, too. Reaching out to him, to comfort him.

“I should have known,” he repeated. “But I didn’t. He had a history ... mental illness ... She went to check on him ... and he stabbed her. And then I went to check on him ... and he stabbed me ... And I wanted to help her ... She was begging me to help her and ..."

The words were coming faster than he could get them out, stacking up behind his lips like a summertime line at Disneyland’s most popular ride.

“ ... and I couldn’t. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t reach out to her. Couldn’t stop the bleeding. Couldn’t even scream for help.”

The woman in the front row was still with him.

“And *God*,” he said - the word bursting out of him like a primal scream from those hidden, hurting places he’d been trying to cover up ever since - “I can’t tell you how guilty that made me feel.”

He thought he’d heard a collective gasp, but the words were still coming too quickly for him to stop and make sure.

“This time, though, I couldn’t get away from the feeling. Not physically, I mean. From the moment I knew I had to go back to work there, from the first day of my recovery, from the moment I realized I wouldn’t even be well enough to go to her funeral - I knew I wasn’t going to be able to face it. And that’s when I started using.

“It was morphine, prescribed stuff, at first. For the physical pain. But the prescribed dosage wasn’t enough, not enough to take care of the physical pain and the other hurt. Not enough to dull the guilt, too. So I took more. Doubled the doses, tripled them. And when that ran out, when I couldn’t get anymore without making everybody suspicious, I started stealing the narcotics left over from the patients we were treating.”

The woman in the front row was crying now. The perfect warmth inside him was boiling now. The helmets and shoulder pads were gone now.

He could see the end zone.

“But even that wasn’t enough. Even that would only keep me from seeing her face in my head for a couple of hours. So I tried anything else. Everything else. Lifted weights. Pulled double, triple shifts. Constantly kept moving. Because when I slowed down I saw it again. Saw her face. Felt it again. That hopeless, horrible feeling of not being able to help her. Of not being able to make it right. The same way I felt with my dad. The same way I felt with all those kids who didn’t have any money.”

He was running out of breath. He felt lightheaded, woozy. He tried to slow down, tried to will his thoughts into patience, but they’d been kept down so long they were fighting to get out.

“It was obvious to everyone something was wrong. I could feel it by the way they looked at me. I was trying too hard. Trying to hard to be a good doctor. Trying too hard to be a *recovered* patient. I thought about telling them, thought about asking for help, a hundred different times. But every time the moment seemed right, every time I’d almost worked up the courage, the fear hit. It strangled me.”

He was suddenly thankful his feet were soldered to the floor, because it felt like his knees were giving out.

“On Thursday, they confronted me. Another med student saw me in the exam room, shooting Fentanyl into my wrist. So they all got together, staged this intervention, and told me I had to come here or get fired. I was so pissed. I just grabbed my stuff and walked out. But this other doctor, the doctor who trained me -- I was his med student -- he wouldn’t let me go. He stopped me outside, we got in a fight -- and I broke down. Cried in his arms like a baby. And he even got on the plane with me, came to Atlanta to drop me off.”

He felt like he needed to sit down. But he couldn’t. He could taste the touchdown.

“But since I’ve been here, since I checked into the rehab center, I’ve still been trying to run from it. Still been trying to run from the guilt. Still been trying to blame all this on a bunch of stupid, insensitive bastards who don’t understand that the only problem I have is that some crazy son of a bitch stuck a six-inch butcher knife in my back a couple of times and killed my friend.”

The room was spinning. The woman in the front row was a blur. But so was the flow of his thoughts. Almost there.

“And it wasn’t until I was sitting out there, about 10 minutes ago, when Chris was talking about forgiveness, that I realized it.”

Just a few more yards to go.

“It wasn’t the guy who stabbed me who put me here ...”

Paydirt.

“ ... it was me.”

It felt different this time, Carter thought in those last seconds of consciousness before he hit the floor.

No pain.

No pain at all.

To be continued....