Broken: A Billionaire Love Story (4 page)

God. He hoped not.

Focusing, his head between his arms as he sat, he tried to recall.

Okay. Today he woke up, still in a stupor. Lots of something running through his system—probably medication to help with the detoxing process his body was going through. Benzos, maybe. This sort of felt like a benzo high. Rawls was there in the dorm room, smiling and knowing—seen it all before. He'd been around the block so many times that he'd started to make a moat from his trail.

But how had Shane gotten in the small dormitory bed?

Uncle Arthur.

Shane latched onto the notion because it made sense—Arthur always was there to bail him out before when he got into too much trouble—and now that Shane entertained the train of thought, he began to recall his face. Arthur’s face and voice in odd, disjointed snippets. His hands on Shane’s body here and there. Pulling him through wetness, darkness.

Shane remembered...a hospital. Being strapped to an IV. Terrified, scraggly voices calling out in the night, asking for nurses. Lots of beeping. Endless beeping. Okay. The memory of those beeps now was so present that Shane was a bit terrified he had forgotten them at all. He felt like they had been droning for days. Maybe they had been?

He couldn't know.

Before that...before that...there had been a bar? There had probably been a lot of bars. There was...violence? Had he hurt someone? Someone certainly seemed to have hurt him. That, or he had been in a car crash.

But, no.

No. He knew he hadn’t been driving anywhere. That was the one mistake he would never, ever make again, no matter how drunk or high he became.

A voice on the overhead speaker announced that physical activity was over. Shane stood up and looked for Rawls. He found him walking out of the gym, a thin line of sweat on his shirt.

“We got some time to shower,” he said. “I’ll meet you over there, after.”

He pointed to the Rec Room—where a number of folks had already started reorganizing chairs for smaller meetings. But, as Shane drifted inside, looking for a place to stand out of the way and remain unnoticed, an orderly cornered him.

“Hey there,” said the man. He was middle-aged, olive-colored skin, with a narrow black widow’s peak. “My name’s Hector. You remember me?”

Shane shook his head. “Should I?”

“I carried you around one or two times the past few days,” said Hector. “Don’t worry about it. Listen, Dr. Strauss wants to talk to you, all right?”

“I thought I had...this.” Shane waved his hand at the meetings. “Whatever this is.”

“Oh, you’ll get to that. But Dr. Strauss wants a little one-on-one time first, okay? Pretty routine.”

Everything was routine here, Shane was finding out. Hector led him through the facility and soon Shane was sitting in the office of Dr. Strauss. He was a short man with close-cut blond hair, and he had a thick German accent that made it hard for Shane to make out everything he said.

Very quickly, Dr. Strauss revealed that Shane seemed to be recovering well from the sort of coma he was in.

“What do you mean,” Shane asked. “I was in ‘sort’ of a coma?”

The doctor shrugged. “I’m not sure. I wasn’t your attending. We have a medical facility in the adjacent facility. You understand, yes? Not so many surprises here. People respond to drugs wrong, or they sneak some in, or the delirium tremens, the DTs, they kick in too hard...it’s a good thing we have this extra facility. They moved you over here last night. Do you remember that?”

“No.”

“Well. Some of the medicine that is used to treat the DTs can have a stuporific effect. Particularly, of course, when a patient is in dire straits.”

“So that put me in a coma?”

“Some combination of the DTs and the medicine, yes. You’ll likely have some slow control back over your facilities as you go forward. But for all intents and purposes, you’ve been sober now for about ten days.”

Shane didn’t know how to respond to that. Ten days? He couldn’t even fathom the last time he had spent such a long time without a drink. How did you go ten days—more than a week—without a drink? Insanity.

In a sick way, it made sense he had been in something of a coma the whole time. That was the only way he could imagine not having alcohol in his system.

“If you have any questions about your treatment or its methods, I want you to feel free to ask me. You will be taking some medication while you’re here—just to make sure that you have no adverse effects from your withdrawals. But most of our treatment is therapy-based, both in groups and one-on-one.”

“So I’ll be seeing you more often?”

“No. You’ll be working with Olivia Martin.”

“She’s a therapist?”

“The term we use for her is counselor. Someone who has experience with cases such as yours, with so much abuse. She is very good.”

“So why am I talking to you?”

Shane was a little combative already. He would have been more so—he had always hated authority, even doctors—but his mind haze slowed his thoughts down, even the agitated ones.

Dr. Strauss shrugged. “You are to be here for thirty more days.  It is my belief that you have a right to know who is in charge. As I said, I don’t want you to be afraid to come to me if you have an issue. Particularly, your uncle insisted that I give you this access, but truth be told, it is available to everyone.”

“My Uncle.”

Arthur. Shane’s shady recollection was confirmed, then.

“Yes. He had a list of demands when it came to your recovery. One of them is that your identity remain a secret. You are on the logs here as Shane Richards. That is how everyone will know you. Your appearance has...changed, shall we say? Since the last time you were in the public eye. I don’t think anyone will recognize you.”

That made sense. Shane had lost weight, cut his hair, grown a beard. He certainly looked the worse for wear—and there were a few more tattoos, besides. As he had made it a habit to stay out of the public eye as much as possible even when he hadn’t been actively trying to disappear himself, it wasn’t too hard to accept that people didn’t recognize him. He liked it better that way.

Shane again found it hard to focus on much of what the doctor said. His brain was as the doctor mentioned—not in full control of its facilities. He was glad to know, at least, that it was because of medication running its course through his body and not any permanent brain damage or anything like that.

They left each other with a quick, sloppy handshake. Shane could barely manage holding his hand out in front of his body.

After that, as before, he sleepwalked through the day’s schedule, not participating in meetings or speaking up when relevant thoughts occurred to him. Part of him just felt worthless—without value to anyone.

If he spoke up, like most of the times when he did, probably he would just make people sorry that he had opened his mouth. Shane had that ability, and he resented it. There was nothing like telling someone off—the initial satisfaction of saying exactly what venom you meant in that moment and the slow crawl of guilt over your soul, both.

Then, another break for “free time,” which he had found out meant mostly looking through the sparse collection of magazines, trying to find a decent book in their small library, or watching whatever DVD had been chosen for the day.

Then dinner, another group meeting, then an hour of free time, and then lights out.

Any deviation was not tolerated—though all this meant was that he would be pestered by the counselors or orderlies or other patients until he finally did as they asked. He found this out when he tried to beg off from a meeting after dinner.

Shane wasn’t a fan of structure. As far as he was concerned, structure was there mostly to bring him down and make him suffer. Wasn’t that everything all the structures of life had done so far?

His family, take that. There was a structure. There was a structure engineered entirely to make a person feel small and worthless. And if everybody came from a family, then every structure somehow had its origins back in that same family structure—and so every structure everywhere was precipitated from this feeling of superiority over people like Shane, who wanted nothing to do with them.

Right?

That sounded right. He gave up on the thought, though, as he had many others. Ever since the fire, most thoughts, even the good ones, the ones with a bit of poetry to them, hadn't felt like anything worth keeping. He would just find some way to destroy them anyway.

Eventually, the day all wound down and it was time to go to bed. Shane welcomed the break. He didn’t think he had ever felt so tired and worn-out and worn-down. He felt like a stone in a river, everything passing over him and all of it trying to move right through him as well.

In the room already was Rawls, spread out across the other bed. He wore a short, tangled beard, the kind that looked so thin that any attempt to shave it seemed like it would cut his throat. Thick bags rested under his eyes, but they only made him seem friendlier.

Rawls said nothing as Shane prepared for bed, brushing his teeth and washing his face in the room’s small sink.

God, but he needed a drink.

The thought came to him suddenly, but there had never been a thought as clear as that in his head in all his life. Certainly, it was the clearest thought he had worked through all day. He needed it, and already his brain was to trying to calculate how to get it.

“Hey man,” he said to Rawls. “You been here long?”

“For this stay? Nah.” He shook his head. “But, I been in and out of here a few times, like I said.”

“Really?”

Shane still had trouble believing that. Didn't you go to rehab to end a problem?

“Sure. Recovery doesn’t take easy with me, you know. The folks here, the doctors and all, they don’t seem to get it, but they keep welcoming me back. Olivia, she’s worried about me already, I can tell.”

“Who’s Olivia?”

“That pretty thing who was staring at you earlier today in the big group.”

He recalled her dimly. It seemed so distant, now.

“Someone was staring at me?”

The old timer smiled. “You must be dumber than a bag of rocks if you didn’t see it. She was sorely smitten with you. I wish I could have had her looking like that at me.”

They laid down for bed. After a day like that, Shane couldn’t imagine going through twenty-nine more. It seemed like a nightmare.

“Listen, man, does anybody ever get out of this place?”

“Out?” Rawls laughed. “Come on, man. You just got here.”

“I got a girl I want to go see.”

That was a lie, of course. But it was one that came easy. Most lies did, to Shane.

“Sure, I bet you do,” laughed Rawls. “I bet she’s not too far from a bar or a liquor store, neither.”

“What’s it to you?”

“Nothing. It’s just usually when I get slapped into rehab, I try to at least give it the full thirty days before sliding out there again. Ain’t you tired of getting in trouble, just for a little bit?”

In truth, Shane was. But not enough to want to stop drinking.

“You know how to get out of here or not?”

“Well.” Rawls slapped his hands together. “You can’t be here too long and not figure it out for yourself. I think they do it on purpose, like, to test our resolve. But the orderlies change shifts every night at ten. The fellas going out have some kind of meeting with the fellas coming in. There’s no one guarding the door, then. But I’m telling you, you’d just be hurting yourself if you went.”

The number one thing Shane had on his mind was that he needed to get out of this place so he could go and grab a drink.

He was going to get out of here.

And that was his way out.

Chapter 5:

Monday evening, after work, Olivia arrived at St. Margaret’s Hospice to visit her mother. This was her custom.

The front desk let her right in—Olivia was practically staff herself, visiting there over three dozen times in the past two months. She would have liked to have made it every night, but her work schedule simply didn’t allow it, and Olivia had to eat and sleep and pay rent, like anybody else.

Her brothers—both of them living in other cities—hadn’t shown up hardly at all. A few times in the beginning, then once early the week before when their mother started to deteriorate again. Olivia really thought that would have been the end, that time last week with all that coughing.

She thought she was going to be in the room and watch her mother die—all those violent hacks, those loud whoops, blood spittle flying all over the white of her blanket and gown. At the end of that night, Olivia felt like she had aged twenty years, just watch death throttle at her mother like that.

But death didn’t win that night. Harriet pulled through. She kept pulling through—so much that Olivia had continued to gently and positively suggest moving her back to a hospital.

But it was like talking to a brick wall—her mother had accepted her own death, and was ready for the pain to end. No medicines to numb her mind, she demanded, and no resuscitations. The end would come, and that would be that.

Olivia wasn't that close with her brothers—they were much older than her, Theo by eight years and Claude by ten—but she did love them. She understood they didn't have the money to fly in every time her mother was sick. But still, she could have used their support as their mother's condition got worse and worse.

Once upon a time Olivia’s mother had been a great political activist. From feminism to unions to civil rights, she had worked for every cause she could find across the tri-state area. Her role, usually, was organizing—imagining up campaigns as ways to get people involved and
keep
people involved. That last part was always the hardest, her mother said.

“Everybody wants things to change. Not everybody knows how to make people believe they can create that change just with a little persistence.”

As a way of protesting the local stage company’s stance of hiring minorities, Harriet Martin had organized the city’s first “fart-in.” For a whole afternoon, she fed a crowd full of angry protesters beans. When the evening came ‘round, she handed out tickets to the gas-imbued crowd for a showing of Shakespeare’s Macbeth—and then after about the third-way mark, the magic began.