the steps,” asserted Athena. “I don’t understand why you keep coming back to steps eight and nine.” Rachel made a list of all persons she had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all. She made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others. Rachel no longer feared injuring herself, figured that she had it coming.
“I’m stuck,” said Rachel. “I’ve been able to forgive myself for everything else. I have to make things right.”
“That’s not how it works,” said Athena. “You know that. All you have to do is be willing, and if they can’t accept your amends, then forget every white-trash piece of shit in that town. Stop beating yourself up.”
“Okay,” said Rachel.
“I don’t think you need to atone for the rest of your life. Two weeks is plenty. Paint some benches, pick up some trash, buy some Girl Scout cookies, and get the fuck out of there. Go to meetings.”
“You told me pain is good,” said Rachel. “You told me that pain is growth.”
“I also told you that it was okay to make Debbie Harry your higher power. Just go to sleep,” said Athena. “Tomorrow is a whole new day.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” muttered Rachel.
Athena had been astounded at how quickly Rachel moved through the steps; she had never sponsored someone so determined to get right with God, even though Rachel really only believed in Debbie Harry. There were twelve steps, and Rachel clawed desperately through each one; she wrote letters of amends to her mother and Red Mabel, to her father and several of her classmates from high school. All but one of the letters had been returned.
Rachel threw the phone against a pile of clothes, all Quinn-inappropriate, especially her vintage Halston palazzo pants. She loved those pants, but feared that magpies or marmots would be attracted to the sparkle, drop down from the sky or emerge from the forest to gnaw at her legs.
She navigated the sinkhole in the middle of the living room. The carpet was softly cratered where the floor had given in. The list of repairs was enormous, daunting: the house seemed to be surrendering to gravity, with the left end sinking faster than the right. A tube of lipstick rolled when she placed it on the kitchen counter. Rachel felt seasick when she walked from one end of the house to the other.
Rachel made do with washcloth baths, as the tiny bathroom contained a bathtub that had fallen through the subflooring. It rested three feet down from the rest of the linoleum, in the dirt and gravel underneath the trailer. Rachel had thrown the rest of her city clothes into this pit, along with the strange clothes she had found in her father’s closet. Her father owned a collection of polyester-blend suit jackets and matching pants, a pile of neckties. This was strange to her—in her few encounters with her father, it seemed that he only accessorized with sap from pine trees. She lowered herself to the toilet to pee, and it was cold and drafty in the bathroom, torturous to touch her buttocks to the icy toilet seat. At least the toilet worked. Her father had not completely descended into the depths of madness. He had just fallen into squalor, and sometimes through the floor.
The bedroom was where Rachel had spent most of her time since returning home, crying and making to-do lists. Her bed was the only thing she had brought with her, the only piece of furniture she had any kinship with.
Rachel had bought the bed after being sober for two months. It was a gift she had given herself. The last two years of her drinking, Rachel had become a bed wetter. She was a beer drunk, always had been, and it was unsurprising that she wet the bed, because during the last year of her drinking, she was consuming sixteen cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon per night.
Eventually, she bought a stack of blue tarps to sleep on. She wasn’t a complete degenerate—every morning, she would remove the tarp and put it in the bathtub, turn on the shower to rinse away the urine, and drape it over the couch in her living room to dry. She threw the used tarp in the Dumpster every Sunday night, before the garbagemen came, replaced it with a new one. Rachel could still recall the crackle of waking up in the morning, the sound of her naked body on