Chapter 63: Crystal Clear Again

Crystal emerged from inside the limousine, and our eyes locked on each other instantly. We each froze, standing and looking at the other. I felt another surge of emotions race through my body at seeing her again: forgiveness, anger, doubt, confidence, and that angst. I’m sure she could read every one of them. I could only guess that she felt all of them too, and probably much worse than I did.

I finally held my arms out to her. I wasn’t sure whether she wanted me or us or anything here in Nashville.

Crystal’s face suddenly scrunched up as she briefly bit her lower lip, she took a couple of irregular gasps for air, and then rushed into my arms as she started sobbing. Crystal’s tears instantly triggered my own identical reaction. The chauffeur stepped back away from us with a surprised look on his face as our sobs broke out; he went and busied himself with a suitcase from the trunk of his car, and the few items Crystal had left on the back seat – her purse and a magazine. He carefully stacked them next to the front door, walking around us in the process. The chauffeur bid us good evening, got in the car, and drove away.

The two of us held each other tightly as we cried. Occasionally, we’d pull apart to look at each other’s face, but that would only trigger another round of tears and sobs. I kissed her often around her face and hair. After several minutes of our tearful greeting, I laughed through my tears and croaked out, “If we keep doing this, we’ll never get inside all weekend and we’ll flood the front yard.” I guess the words were enough to break the ice. Crystal gave me a wan smile and struggled to get ahold of her emotions.

Crystal sat next to me on the front stairs, her body tight against mine as I put my arm around her in a robust hug of acceptance and forgiveness.

I said, “As you can probably tell from the other cars in the driveway and the turnaround, we have a lot of company inside. Ellen made them all go inside except for me – I’m your welcoming committee at this point. If it’s too much, I can wave them away, and we can just sit here or in the back yard until they’re gone – well, except for Ellen, Claire, Nadia, and maybe PJ – they live here.”

Crystal shook her head against me in the negative. “No, I want to see everybody. I’m not proud of what I did – and you may not know the half of it, but I have to face the music; that’s what my doctor said I had to do – my psychiatrist. The longer I postpone this ... even the deep discussions you and I need to have ... the more my depression will last. I hate to sound like I’m using you all to get over a problem I started, but I’m guessing all your heads haven’t exactly been in a happy state since I left either.”

“We haven’t,” I volunteered. “We all wish you’d stayed. We could have worked it out.”

Crystal pulled away and looked me in the eye, “No. You don’t know how far down the rabbit hole I’d fallen. When I left, I realized I couldn’t even look at myself in the mirror I felt such self-loathing.”

Crystal reached into the pocket of her jacket and passed a business card to me that read, ‘Nashville Limousine, available 24/7,’ and there were a couple of 800 numbers. She said, “I want you to hold that and listen to me. Maybe you want to hold off the others for a half hour or more, but I have to talk to you first – and maybe you only if you think what I have to tell you is so bad that I should leave ... and I will go if you say the word. I’ll understand. Maybe you don’t want to hear – I guess I should give you that option. Just call the limo service and they’ll come back and pick me up right away.”

I stood and said, “I want to hear everything you want to share. Let me tell the others it’ll be a while. Do you want to go to the back patio of just sit out here?”

“Let’s sit right here, please. Just so long as I can sit next to you – close to you like this.”

I went inside to the living room where the others were sitting. I explained that we were about to start a major conversation and needed some alone time for maybe an hour, and then we’d come inside. Everybody understood given the circumstances.

Ellen gave me a tearful look and whispered to me as I turned and walked past her to go back outside; she hugged me and sobbed into my shoulder, “Don’t lose her, Jim. Please don’t lose her.”

I nodded my understanding but steeled myself at what I was about to hear. I couldn’t imagine what else she could tell me that we didn’t already know or speculate about with some certainty. Maybe all she would tell us would be about frequency or intensity of how things had been, but maybe there was more.

I went back to the front steps and sat beside Crystal. This time I didn’t put my arm around her; I sensed that she didn’t want that at this instant. I looked expectantly at her, hoping she didn’t have something so bad that I’d reject her – a point I couldn’t even fathom.

Crystal put her face in her hands and when she looked up her face was again streaked with tears. She started in a halting voice that I could barely hear; “I was already in a bad way before that last night when you brought me back here drunk, with a DUI, ... and drugged up – that night just topped off something that had started months earlier.”

We knew that she’d been deep into drugs before she left. We’d found her stash of pot, ecstasy, and cocaine after she’d left, and I extrapolated that her behavior on that Friday night hadn’t been untypical of past months. I hated it, but I’d come to accept it.

Crystal said in a worried tone, “I got into drugs about six months before I left. Someone told me where to score some pot, and God only know why I wanted to try it again, but I did. I’d only tried it a couple of times before when I’d been in high school, and thought it would be fun to give it a couple more shots. I went to a bar that looked like a hangout for people who would have some grass, found a contact, and bought some stuff. Fortunately, none of the guys recognized me – I’d dressed down, even changing into grubby clothes in the car before I went in the bar; I was just some chick that wanted to score some weed. I guess they trusted me because they didn’t hassle me or anything – just cash, and here you go. For weeks that followed, when you and the others were gone, I’d light up outside and enjoy the buzz – a couple of times a week, and then every day, and then, well, too often. I went down into the woods if you were around. I liked the buzz – too much. I even took some to Europe as you know.”

I nodded to encourage her to go on, as well as to signal to her that I’d figured most of this out for myself.

Crystal continued, “When we got back from Europe, I went back for more. There was a larger group of people there; some guys and a couple of women. My ‘source’ sold me a bag and asked me whether I wanted to try some ecstasy. I hesitated, but the girl I was sitting next to leaned over and whispered to me how great the sex was after popping an ecstasy. She even volunteered her boyfriend and her to turn me on if I was interested. At that instant I wasn’t, but I took a pill and sat around with the group for a while having a beer.”

My stomach ached because I could guess where Crystal’s story was headed.

Crystal’s eyes started tearing again, and she snuffled. “The boyfriend, a guy named Vern and the girl – Debbie, started to touch me a lot. Anyway, as the glow from the ecstasy warmed me up, I got really horny, and I started to return the favors. Next I knew, we went into a backroom at the bar they seemed to know about and had sex; another guy joined us, too. They had old mattresses on the floor. I couldn’t get enough of anybody; I couldn’t give enough either.” Crystal couldn’t look at me as she talked; she sort of talked to the ground about five feet in front of her.

I shook my head.

“After we wore the guys out, I found out when they hung out at that bar a lot, and said I’d try to hook up with them occasionally. ‘Occasionally’ for a month or two later became twice a week, maybe more, plus sometimes even over a lunch hour. I started to want ecstasy every time it looked as though I’d be having sex – with them, with you, with anybody. I kept telling myself that I didn’t have a habit, but I did.”

Crystal sobbed loudly. “After that, the ecstasy became snorting cocaine for an even larger buzz – and sometimes taking both at once.” She looked at me through eyes fogged by tears. “The sex got more and more intensive, and started to involve a few more of my new ‘friends.’ We got wild – more guys, more cocks. There were more girls involved too.”

“I was well into all this by the time we held Nadia’s graduation party – the night she got engaged. I’d taken an ecstasy and did cocaine that night as you know, and that was when I got you and three others to fuck the daylights out of me. That had already happened before with some of the guys in this other crowd, and I loved it. I craved it. I didn’t understand it, but ... I just had to have wild sex ... gang bangs ... group ... anything that gave me lots of orgasms that I could savor under the influence of the drugs.”

I hated to hear her admission, but Ellen, Claire, and I had deduced that something like this must have happened. I whispered, “Go on.”

Crystal tried to read my face for a few seconds, but I had my poker face on ... except for the tears running down my cheeks.

Crystal said, “Normally, I didn’t drink that much when we were doing the pills and sex, but that Friday night I did many foolish things. For one, prior to that night I’d always insisted the guys wore condoms, but that night I got shitfaced – very unusual; the guys were feeding me liquor faster than I could drink it. When the buzz from the drugs took hold, plus the booze, I told the guys I wanted to be covered in their cum inside and out. I wasn’t thinking, and neither were the other girls who were in the same state I was. We started early, so everyone was drunk and fucked out by ten that night. For some stupid reason, I just pulled my clothes on over me – over my dripping body, I staggered out to my car and no one stopped me, and I started to drive home. I didn’t get very far before I got pulled over. You know what happened after that: I got stopped for DUI, passed out, and my sordid night exposed as you and the others got me ready for bed. I’d never even thought about what would happen when I got home. Maybe I got saved in some small way because of what happened that night.”

Crystal paused and looked at me with a look of hope. She sobbed, “When I came out of that drunken and drugged fog the next morning, I realized I’d sunk really low – lower than I’d ever been in my life, and so low that I hated myself. I’d let about twenty guys fuck me – maybe more – as I did every other act I could imagine with the guys and girls in the group. I finally felt deeply ashamed about what I’d done. I realized I’d been defiling a trust you put in me – you, Ellen, Claire, and all the others.”

Tears were rolling down Crystal’s cheeks as she continued, “I couldn’t stay. I had to get far away from the drugs, and the sex, and that bar, and you and the people I’d so violated. I had to figure out why I even ‘started’ to do what I did. I’d been telling myself it was ‘fun’ and ‘temporary,’ but I realized something else was going on in my head – somethings I didn’t understand and somethings that were ... slowly killing me, and I don’t mean the drugs although they could have done that, too. I knew there was something deeper, and I had to figure out what it was. I knew you wanted me to stay, but I couldn’t do that with you or the others – not even with my parents. I had to do it on my own.”

I whispered, “Did you? Did you figure it out?”

Crystal dropped her face into her hands and said in a muffled voice, “Yes, I think so, but you may not like it.”

“Try me.”

Crystal paused and then spoke slowly and deliberately, “Before I tell you, I want you to understand what happened and how I found the answer I think is right for me.”

I nodded for her to continue.

She said, “When I realized I’d hit bottom; I remembered Jill Danes telling me about this rehab facility in Tucson. I couldn’t even remember the name, but I started heading to Tucson to go there. I did recall that she said they handled all sorts of ‘tough’ cases with discretion. I figured I was a tough case, and that turned out to be more than true. Eventually, on my way there, I telephoned Jill and got the name and phone number of the place. I pleaded with her not to tell you, and made her promise; I didn’t explain why I needed the place. I called the place, and when I got to Arizona, they met me at the airport, I checked myself in, ... and then I started to cry again. I cried so hard throughout the night, so much that the facility put a full-time nurse trained in critical care psychology and suicide prevention to watch with me. They thought I might be suicidal, and those thoughts weren’t far from my mind. How could I escape what I’d done to the people I loved the most in the whole world? That nurse told me that if I did myself in, I’d hurt all of you more than I already had, and that would be a bad thing. She turned that part of me around.”

“The next day I went through an evaluation. It was a bad day because all I could do was cry hysterically. They got enough out of me to immediately start me with a good psychiatrist – Dr. Linda Cowan. I spent almost full-time with her the first week, telling everything over and over again as she led me through all the terrible things I’d done and all the bad feelings I had about myself, even in areas I couldn’t initially put into words. I cried incessantly; I didn’t know a body could hold so many tears or feel so badly. Gradually, as each day passed, I calmed down and got a little more rational, and our sessions became a little shorter – finally, only an hour or two every day, but seven days a week.”

“Dr. Cowan would give me homework to do, and then we’d start each session with a discussion on what I’d done from the day before. I had to read books and articles – things that covered trust, faith, loyalty, duty, obligation, relationships, and reliance, and other things like self-confidence, self-reliance, self-love, and narcissism. I had to study about drugs and STDs too, and what they did too your body. Next, she got me to think about what I trusted and had faith in. We talked about spirituality, and the union of mind, body, and spirit, and what my God concept was. I would cry because I remembered so many discussions you and I had about some of these topics. Oh, God, Jim, I cried so hard and so often I didn’t know I’d survive. Some nights I was sure I’d never see the dawn from the pain I felt.”

I reached over and took Crystal’s hand in mine. I hurt just thinking of her hurting. Crystal smiled weakly at me in response, but continued to hold my hand tightly.