Sunday Again

TW: DEPICTIONS OF DRUGS, SUBSTANCE ABUSE, AND ADDICTION

I used to make omelets for my daughter every Sunday. She would get bored since her friends were all attending church. Her mom’s never been and it was easy for me to drop out of the habit of going once we married, so my daughter didn’t go either. It didn’t matter how many times I told Nadia she could play outside, she’d still end up with her eyes on her phone and waiting for a friend to text back.

“You know you have two consoles you could be playing on right now? If you really don’t want to go outside.” I remember reminding her one morning, leaned up against the back of our leather couch.

“I don’t know,” She said, as if that response made sense. She reclined back against the couch, blowing hairs away from her face. “I just wanna wait for Abby to answer. She’s gotta have an opinion on these pants I want.”

I pulled back from the couch, looking for something that could possibly keep a pre-teen entertained. My first thought was ‘nothing’, but eventually my eyes wandered to the space the living room shared with our kitchen. “Guess I’ll just make food then, and you can sulk on the couch.”

“Wait.” She took the bait, on her feet faster than any time I had ever called her name, her bottom lip out in an over-exaggerated display. “I want food too.”

Sundays became alive with the sound of sizzling pans and the smell of eggs. It was difficult for me to connect with Nadia in the way that I wanted—I wasn’t sure what girls would do with their dads, and I tried to suggest painting her nails when she was younger but she just never seemed into what I thought of for girls her age. She only had one friend, and she was attached to the phone at all times. On Sundays, though? I watched her laugh as I broke eggshells and rolled her eyes at any egg-related puns. My eggs may have been less than great, but Sunday omelets were our only constant.

“Nadia! Dang, can you even taste it?” Nadia was a teenager at that point, freshly fifteen. It was one of my last days in the house. I didn’t know it at the time, and so a smile plagued my face.

“That’s the point, cuz your cooking sucks,” she said through a mouthful of eggs, making her comment null.

“Ah you must be joking.” I was already laughing before I said it. “you always crack me up.”

The low groan from her was what almost brought me to tears. The ‘crack’ jokes were her least favorite. I made sure to make at least one every Sunday, up until the very last one we shared.

The problems that plagued me since I was a teenager never really left. I started smoking, everyone did when they were my age. It wasn’t enough for me after a while though, and soon my cigarettes were filled with more than just tobacco. Then that wasn’t enough, and I went to things I could eat, then things I could simply stick under my tongue.

I found Willow at one of my dealers. She was pretty enough, but what caught me was the hundred she handed over to get her purchase. I caught her as she was leaving, thought I was smooth asking if she’d share some of her haul for a kiss. We went off to get high in the woods, woke up in a creek five miles off from where we started. At the time, we thought it was true love.

Our addiction didn’t disappear when we got married, it only got worse. I’d be sitting on the couch, finally feeling my hands go still from shaking during the times I could actually think. Then came Willow with a light in her hand, showing me her latest score. It was our love language, the constant cycle of euphoria, then crash. To escape the crashes, we knew all we needed to do was light another one, but the crashes were piling up, and we found that in our late twenties, we could only smother so much with drugs. Then Willow asked if I wanted to have a kid, and I said yes without thinking.

Our child wasn’t an accident of flying too high one night, I just foolishly assumed a child would simply make us better. We settled on the name Nadia—hope. It wasn’t hope for a bright future for our child, it was the hope that she would make us better people by simply existing. When I held the crying bundle of living person in my arms at the hospital, all I could think about was my next smoke.

The cravings didn’t stop as Nadia got older. I missed her sixth birthday from taking a spill down our short stairs after indulging. Willow missed Christmas so Nadia wouldn’t have to see how her mom couldn’t stand. By the time Nadia was ten, one of us always left an empty seat during holidays, maybe even two. There were more missed celebrations in her first thirteen years of life than ‘I love yous’ exchanged between us. It wasn’t because I didn’t love Nadia, it was the opposite. I just didn’t feel worthy of stating that love. Omelets just felt easier to give.

There wasn’t a good explanation and no better way to say it, I got stupid. I drove one night after indulging at the back of a bar, and it didn’t even take ten minutes before red and blue lights flooded behind me. I failed the sobriety test with flying colors, and was whisked off in the back of a police cruiser. It was far from the first time, and it was easy to follow the routine.

“Hello?” Willow’s voice came through crackled on the phone.

“Hey.”

That was all it took before I heard her sigh on the other side. “We don’t got bail money anymore, Drew. Nadia’s fifteenth birthday was last week, if I spared any for you we’d miss rent.”

“Then miss rent. We can afford to skip a month.”

“Like hell we can!”

It was a screaming match for half an hour, up until the moment the boys in blue watching me decided they’d heard enough. Willow got in one final ‘good riddance’ before the phone was snatched up, and I was alone. Looking back on it, I wished I called Nadia instead to tell her goodbye.

The trial was quicker than any I’d been to before. One year. I would be away from my Nadia for one year. If only it had actually been one. I got out early by making a deal to go to rehab, something I had no interest in doing, but I mistakenly thought it beat being locked up.

Jail was hard, but rehab stripped me down and made me bare. They gave me my room on the first day with a list of items I had to keep orderly. It would’ve been quicker if they had just told me to keep the place clean. At the bottom was a guide on how to get a job—a requirement. I never shared a room with anyone but my wife before, and the man they placed me with was work; silent with a permanent scowl. The only thing that helped was my roommate who let his germaphobia possess him and turned him into a cleaning machine.

One of the boxes on their list said we couldn’t cook unsupervised. Easy to follow from the lack of a kitchen in our room. Instead there was a public kitchen, shared between all the men in the facility. It would have been completely crowded if many of the men didn’t seem completely clueless about how to operate most of the appliances or make themselves anything that wasn’t a sandwich or bowls of cereal. But despite my shoddy cooking skills, some guys were willing to pay for something cooked up. It was an easy way to make money on the side that didn’t involve the risk of being thrown back in jail.

The rules wouldn’t have been a problem if my calls with anyone that I didn’t work with didn’t have to be monitored. I had to have approval, then a guy stood behind me while I made the call. The only thing that kept me dropping from rehab that first month was the thought of seeing Nadia again, and the idea that I couldn’t speak freely with her—or that she couldn’t speak freely with me—kept my contacts closed. It was the first week of my job that I attempted to break that rule. The Subway I worked closing shifts at was within walking distance from the center, and it was easy to convince my exhausted coworker to let me close by myself.

I locked myself away in the employee’s lounge, a place I would hardly even consider a closet. My fingers were frantic against my phone screen, finding Willow’s number. There was no ring. I tried again, then again. I didn’t think to try Nadia’s until the fifth attempt, but it rang out. It did the same the next three attempts.

I didn’t see a reason to go back to the rehab center, not really. Every step ached, a flash of Nadia’s face that took up more than my peripherals. She hadn’t blocked my number like Willow did; it was worse, she wanted to simply ignore my existence.

There was a plan forming almost unconsciously as I stopped walking and stared down one of the dark streets I stood in front of. I could sign myself out of rehab—but no, they wouldn’t just let me walk free. But how easy it would be to turn away from the center and keep walking, to take the money from my job and the extra from cooking and find anything to smother the crushing weight of being sober.

I told myself, maybe another night. Maybe I would have the courage another night, when I wasn’t so tired. So I kept walking, the only thing holding me back from the worst decision of my life, second only to when I first held a cigarette, was the thought of my bed.

After I was escorted back to my room, sleep didn’t come for hours. I had once again placed all my hope in Nadia fixing me. Without hearing her voice, without knowing she was waiting for me, all my motivation drained from me like flowing blood.

Waking up, I couldn’t even recall falling asleep. I was buried under covers that somehow found their way over me in the night, making me sweat my weight. I wanted to stay buried under them forever, even as I heard the scrambling of feet outside my door. The men usually rushed to get to a church built into the rehab, and my suspicion was confirmed when I pried my eyes open enough to spot my roommate’s empty bed, covers tucked in. That cemented the idea of wasting away for as long as I could get away with. That was until I saw my phone light up with a text from my boss. I was ready to ignore the text, knowing it was most likely to be someone calling out. That’s when I saw the notification underneath.

A text from Nadia.

I scrambled upright, only realizing I was holding my breath once the message opened. It wasn’t exactly a text, instead an audio message almost a minute long, sent at 2:49 last night. I found my adrenaline from originally seeing the notification drain. She could have said anything, never mind something she needed to get out aloud at nearly three in the morning. There was only one way to know what she wanted to say, though.

“Hi dad,” I heard the noise of a bed creaking through the phone, acting as the acoustics to a voice that seemed so distant from me. “I’m sorry I didn’t answer earlier. Or— last night, I guess. I was really angry, seeing your name.”

I wanted to crawl back into the covers, refusing to reemerge. That didn’t stop her voice. “I thought about it a lot tonight. It’s just quiet at home now, I guess. Mom talked about you, right after you…yeah. She told me that you were a good man doing bad things, like she wasn’t also doing the same stuff. I’ve known since I was like—what? Seven? What do you think weed smells like, cupcakes?”

I let a laugh slip through my trembling lips. It felt morbid, but not so much when I heard a sad laugh through the phone.

“Anyways, like I said I was mad. I think I’ve been mad, since the moment you left. It’s why I’ve got a pixie cut now, and why I told Abby I don’t care what her parents thought about anything and kissed her right on the mouth. That mad. Actually pretend I didn’t say that last part. I forgot you were my dad for a minute. I just— what I’m trying to say is—“

There was a distinct groan from the other side, frustration wrapped in exhaustion. I thought the message would end there, but in the last few seconds her voice came through, barely audible.

“I miss your eggs.”

There was a distinct click of the message ending.

Then I played the message again. And again. There was something in my chest, a mix of everything being lifted from me all at once, but at the same time, the weight of every expectation I’ve ever felt. It pushed me out of bed, and I didn’t find it a hassle to tuck in the comforter though I usually despised the task. What helped me walk out of my room that morning wasn’t Nadia’s message fixing me. Her voice didn’t mend together a warped mind of someone she did not owe anything to. It reminded me that there was something waiting for me when I was out—something waiting for me to be better.

Nadia didn’t get a response right away. I gave myself time to pull myself together. I’d look for paper, get everything written down somewhere and give her back a voice message like hers. But at the moment, I made my way to the kitchen a floor down from me. I took money from the guys I would usually make breakfast, but warned them they couldn’t make requests today. Instead I went up to the fridge and got as many as I was allowed. When I came back, I wasn’t going to return with the gift of the same uninspired omelets every morning.

I cooked knowing I would fix myself so Nadia could have what she always deserved; perfect omelets.