Questing for a Dream, page 27
“I’m sorry… I’m just not hungry.”
“Damn meth-heads,” the woman muttered under her foul-smelling breath. She returned Nadie’s tray to the rolling cart outside the door and retrieved a clipboard with a form on it. “Fill that out,” she ordered, slapping the clipboard down over Nadie’s knuckles.
“Ow!” Nadie jerked back and the clipboard went clattering to the floor.
“Pick it up.”
Nadie gritted her teeth and picked it up. She looked over the long checklist of questions.
“Do I have to answer all of these?”
“Every single one. Don’t miss any or they’ll come down on me.”
Nadie frowned and started working through the questions. It took a good half hour to fill it all out, all while the aide grumbled and breathed and muttered about how slow Nadie was and what a pain she was.
“You Indians are always so slow,” she complained. “You can hardly even read, can you?”
“I’m grade ten,” Nadie protested. “And I was the best reader in my class!”
The woman grunted and waited impatiently for the form. When Nadie handed it back, she glanced over it, then scribbled her name at the bottom.
“Tomorrow, you eat!”
“I will,” Nadie agreed.
Even if it meant she threw up afterward, it would be more pleasant than having to deal with the dragon-breath woman and her form again.
Sleep did not come easily in the strange quarters, in spite of the exhausting day. Nadie was hyped up and anxious and couldn’t find a way to settle down for sleep. There was obviously not going to be a night-cap at rehab.
There were unfamiliar noises. The ventilation system creaked and groaned like something alive. Even after her heavy metal door was closed, Nadie could still hear someone shouting and the muffled PA system. There were nurses and guards walking by the door, causing shadows to fall over the narrow observation window.
In the morning, she was not hungry but forced down more than half of her slimy porridge and toast. The girl who collected her breakfast tray was younger. She smiled pleasantly and picked up the leftovers without complaint. Nadie breathed a sigh of relief.
The day’s work started with a group session. A counselor other than Jeremy led the discussion, introducing Nadie to the group and rattling off their names to her. She only caught his, which was Bryson.
“Today we are going to discuss feelings,” Bryson said earnestly, looking around at them.
“There’s a shocker,” muttered one of the other inmates, which made Nadie laugh. Quietly, though, so no one would hear. The young man who had said it looked at Nadie, as if he could sense Nadie’s laughter. He smiled at her conspiratorially.
“We take drugs to mask our pain,” Byron said. “To suppress our feelings. To silence our fears. If we want to be able to overcome our addictions, we need to first deal with the feelings that we have been trying so desperately to hide from. Who would like to start?”
Everyone, including Nadie, was wearing the same blue scrubs as the girl that had sat in the director’s waiting room with Nadie the day before. But they had all managed to make their own individual statements, small as they were. A different number of buttons done up. Collar up or down. Sleeves rolled up. Tucked or untucked.
There was a blond girl with very red lips sitting across from Nadie, and she took up the invitation to talk about the feelings she was trying to drown with alcohol. The victim of an aggravated sexual assault, she launched into a minute-by-minute explicit description of what had happened to her. Bryson tried several times to quietly interrupt and redirect her, without success. Nadie’s face was getting hotter and hotter as she attempted to tune the words out. Finally, Bryson put his foot down.
“Tessa, stop!”
She stopped mid-word and looked at him.
“Tessa, you are still not discussing your feelings. You are telling what happened to you physically, but you are still not addressing how you feel about what happened to you. That’s what I want to hear.”
She looked at him for a long time, mouth open. She made several false starts and big tears started to roll down her cheeks. “I can’t!” she wailed.
“What is it you’re feeling right now? Sadness? Anger? Helplessness?”
She just shook her head and sobbed. Nadie looked across the circle at the traumatized woman. She looked so far away and alone. Nadie didn’t want to walk across the circle. There was no empty chair near Tessa.
But she couldn’t take it. She couldn’t listen to Tessa cry like that and not feel compassion for her. Nadie got up and, dragging her chair all the way around the outside of the circle to the opposite side, she pushed it in beside Tessa’s chair. The others shuffled their chairs around to even out the spacing. Nadie sat down and put her arm around Tessa. Tessa cried harder. Nadie pulled her close and rubbed her back, much like Nicole had rubbed Nadie’s the evening before she had left to go back to the city. Tessa put her face against Nadie’s shoulder and gradually her sobs started to slow down.
“Who else would like to share?” Bryson asked quietly.
No one volunteered.
“Clark?” the counselor prompted.
“I feel… isolated… alone…”
“Okay; good. Where do you think those feelings come from?”
“I don’t have anybody.” The boy named Clark looked at Nadie, cuddling Tessa close. “Nobody who cares about me.”
“What about your mother? She cared enough to sign you into the program.”
“That’s not because she cares. That’s just ’cause she wanted my sorry butt out of her house.”
There were giggles around the circle. Bryson gave a small, tolerant smile.
“Tonya?”
Nadie looked around the circle before she realized all eyes were directed at her and remembered she was supposed to be Tonya.
“Ummm… yeah?”
“What feelings are you trying to deaden with drugs and alcohol?”
“I’m not an addict.”
“That’s not what we’re here to discuss. We’re here to discuss your behaviors. You drink. You do drugs. Why?”
Nadie shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t know why.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
There was a block of time scheduled for art therapy. Nadie looked around at the pencil crayons and paints without much interest. Drawing wasn’t exactly her thing. She wandered around the room.
“Whatever strikes your fancy,” said Poppy, the counselor in charge of the therapy. “If you’re not drawn to anything, don’t let that stop you. Just give something a try. You can give something else a go tomorrow. The important thing is to start.”
Looking in the shelves of bins at the far end of the room, Nadie’s heart quickened. She found a number of balls of yarn and string, some larger pieces of fabric, and some fabric scraps that would do for quilting or some kind of mosaic. She started pulling bins out for a better look.
“What did you find?” Poppy asked, darting in to help.
Nadie looked over the textiles. “I did weaving at school. I made a blanket.”
“Well, you won’t be able to do anything so big here, but you could make a cardboard loom and make some smaller pieces. Wall hangings or potholders. A baby doll blanket or rug, if you know a little girl who would like one.” Poppy looked at her expectantly. She was a blond with long, fluffy hair and loose, flowing clothing. She seemed like some sort of cross between a hippie and a fortune teller. Nadie supposed that was probably usual for artistic types.
“Or I could do crochet or knit,” Nadie said. “I never got the hang of knitting, but crocheting isn’t very hard.”
“Sure,” Poppy agreed. “Whatever strikes your fancy.”
“Or I could quilt or stitch a mosaic,” Nadie motioned to the brightly colored scraps of fabric.
“Yes. But we don’t have a sewing machine, you’d have to do it by hand.”
Nadie nodded. Poppy looked at her expectantly, but Nadie wasn’t ready to make a decision yet. Her heart hurt when she looked at the various yarns and strings; but at the same time, she longed to pick them up and settle into a meditative rhythm of weaving, creating something beautiful.
“I’m not sure yet,” Nadie said, trying to prod Poppy to give her some space.
Poppy got the message. “Okay, well give me a shout if you have any questions, I’ll be close by…”
She went back to helping the residents who had been in the program longer than Nadie and who already had projects they had started on. Or those who just picked up the nearest drawing implements at random and started scribbling.
Nadie looked carefully over the materials and picked out a few yarns that worked well together. She would try a cardboard loom, as Poppy had said. That was how they had started in school before Nadie decided to build a full-size loom to make a blanket. But she wouldn’t make a blanket and she wouldn’t make something for a little girl. As she picked out her colors, she avoided anything red.
Nadie had been warned that the rehab program would include career counseling, but she hadn’t anticipated anything so involved. First, there was testing. Hours and hours of testing over the first few days. Nadie dreamed of being able to go back to the youth shelter to do chores all day instead of the psychoeducational testing. Her brain felt wrung out every day. It seemed like the only time she could really find peace was when she was doing art therapy, mashed in between the testing, personal counseling, and group counseling, which stretched her emotions to the limit. She couldn’t imagine what it must be like for those who were going through withdrawals. When Nadie had experienced her post-meth crash at the shelter, there was no way she could have managed any of it. Even sober she could barely see straight at the end of each day.
Finally, she was done the endless hours of tests and she sat across the table from Jeremy as he paged through the thick report that summarized the results.
“You were still going to school before you came here?” he asked. “To Calgary, I mean?”
Nadie nodded. “Yeah.”
“So up until, say, a couple of months ago?”
Time moved in a blur for Nadie, and she wasn’t sure how many weeks or months it had been since she had last sat in a classroom with Running Deer and Mouse and the little children. “In the fall,” she said, to clarify.
He made a grimace and tapped the report with his pen. “What were you doing at school? What grade level?”
“We had correspondence packages. Me and Mouse. Running Deer didn’t feel comfortable teaching high school.”
“Running Deer. So you were going to school on the reservation?”
Nadie nodded. Jeremy let out his breath in a long whistle of air and leaned back his chair.
“Yeah. That makes sense,” he acknowledged.
“Why?” Nadie asked, looking at the thick report. “What does it say?”
He contemplated, looking through it again. “Your reading level is almost grade level appropriate,” he said. “You said you like to read?”
“I love to read,” Nadie said, nodding vigorously.
“But you probably didn’t have a lot of reading material available on the reservation.”
“No. But I borrowed books from the library in town whenever we went in. And the librarian didn’t charge me fines because she knew I couldn’t ever return them on time. I read just about everything in the library! Sometimes she special-ordered books from the city library just for me.”
“That’s probably why your reading level and comprehension are so much higher than the rest of your scores. How was your teacher with math?”
Nadie wrinkled her nose. “I didn’t like the math in the correspondence book. The math we did before high school was a lot more interesting.”
“Your grade level in math is about a four.”
Nadie frowned. “What does that mean? Grade four?”
“Yes. You are able to do grade four math.”
“But I’m in grade ten.”
“And can you do grade ten math? Do you understand it?”
“Yes… a little bit… some of it…” Nadie trailed off. She and Mouse both struggled to understand anything in their packets for math. Running Deer was hopeless at explaining it. Mouse had given up and just copied the answers directly out of the back of the text. Nadie tried to do it without looking at the answers but rarely succeeded. She stared down at the table in the interview room.
“It’s not your fault if you weren’t taught,” Jeremy reassured. “But before you’re able to finish school, you’re going to have to get some help in most areas. You have a lot of remedial work to do.”
“I’m not going to school anymore. I’m done with that.”
“You’re old enough to drop out if you want to… but I wouldn’t recommend it. A high-school diploma and the general knowledge that you would get go a long way to being able to get a good job. You don’t want to just be a bum getting by panhandling or picking bottles, or with a minimum wage job that doesn’t give you enough to live on.”
“But if I went back to school, I’d be in grade four? With little kids?”
“No, you’d have to get some resource help. Get your skills upgraded.”
Nadie had no idea what that meant. “But my reading is good. It’s just my math…?”
“Your reading level is adequate. You might want to look at reading some of the classics, a little Shakespeare and Dickens, some harder material. It’s a bit different than reading pulp novels. And the rest…”
“What else?”
“Science. Social studies. You’re all over the place. You don’t have a solid foundation.”
“White man’s subjects,” Nadie pointed out. “Studying what’s in a test-tube instead of outside your own door. And his history, not our stories.”
Jeremy’s nod conceded this. “But if you want to get along in the white man’s world, get a diploma and a job, you need to know it. Have some understanding of it.”
Nadie shook her head in frustration.
Jeremy straightened the papers. “For a good job, you need to be educated. I couldn’t do this job without a university degree. And to get that, I needed to get a high school diploma and to do well on entrance exams. I did have to study a lot of stuff that wasn’t relevant to social work. The next thing we’re going to do is some vocational testing, see what careers would be a natural fit for you. Do you have ideas about what you want to do with your life? What you’d like to go into?”
Nadie shook her head. The future wasn’t just unknown for her, it was a deep, dark, foreboding hole of nothingness. She couldn’t see herself doing anything.
She thought about the kids she knew who had committed suicide. At least for them it was over. They didn’t have to make any more decisions. They didn’t have to choose a career or make something of themselves or choose between the white world and the Nehiyaw world. If she believed the Elders, they had moved on in their journey and were happy. If she didn’t believe there was any more to their journey, then their pain had at least ended.
It seemed like the only real solution to the pain and uncertainty.
When Nadie got out of her latest session with Jeremy, feeling tired, confused and bleak, she found Tessa waiting for her out in the hallway. Tessa gave her a smile of greeting and clamped onto her arm. Ever since that day in group, when Nadie had been the only one who tried to comfort her, Tessa had been attached to Nadie. Sometimes physically.
“Uh—hi,” Nadie said. She had hoped for some time and space of her own to think. Or more likely, to take a nap and not have to sleep. Without any chemicals to help take her away from her troubles, there were few ways to escape during those blocks when she was not scheduled to be in some other therapy.
“Don’t you just hate all the talk therapy?” Tessa demanded. “I don’t know how it’s supposed to help. Honestly, most of the counselors don’t have a clue what it’s like for us. Not many of them are like your Jeremy and have actually been addicted themselves.”
Nadie glanced toward the closed door to make sure Jeremy wasn’t coming out. “Jeremy was an addict?” she murmured. “I didn’t know that. When?”
“You should ask him his story. He’d tell you. I don’t know any details, just that he was an alcoholic before he became a counselor.”
“I didn’t know.”
“And it’s good they matched you with him,” Tessa pointed out. “Because he’s Indian too, so he can understand all of the cultural stuff. You know, how you grew up and your religion and everything.”
Nadie shifted uncomfortably. She and Jeremy hadn’t, in fact, discussed any of the ‘cultural stuff’ they might share. Since he hadn’t said anything about growing up on a reservation, she assumed he had just been raised in the city, like everyone else. They really didn’t have any more in common than dark skin and a few physical features.
“But there’s no one here who can understand what I’ve been through,” Tessa sighed.
Nadie glanced aside at her. “What?”
“You know,” Tessa dropped her voice dramatically. “The rape.”
“Oh. But that’s pretty common, isn’t it?”
“With addicts, you mean? I wasn’t an addict when it happened.”
“No, I just meant…” Nadie shrugged. “I thought it was something that happened… to a lot of girls.”
Tessa frowned, a crease forming between her eyebrows. “No… more than it should, but… I don’t think anyone else here…”
“People just don’t talk about it,” Nadie explained. “But everybody… well, most of the girls I know on the reservation… It’s just something that happens. Especially when people get drunk. But other times too. Little girls.” Nadie’s voice cracked. She swallowed and gave a little shrug.
“That’s not right,” Tessa said.
“No. But… it happens.”
“So you know what it’s like.” It was a statement, but with a little lift at the end of the sentence, like it was a question too.
