Outside, the darkness of Seattle swallowed her, and once again she was invisible.

Reaching into her pocket, Cloud found the wadded-up sixty dollars she'd taken from Truc.

He'd be waking up soon, growling like a bear, stretching his arms, calling for her to bring him coffee.

She pushed the thought away and kept walking. Limping. It was dawn now. Breaks of pale gray light fell falteringly between the buildings on either side of her. When rain began to fall, spittingly, then angrily, she climbed up onto the stoop of a vacant-looking building and sat down, pulling her feet in close to her body.

Her headache was getting worse. So was the shaking in her hands. But the bars weren't open yet and neither were the liquor stores.

Across the street, dawn lit the sky behind a row of old brick buildings. Sagging sheets hung in broken windows. Beside her, a scrawny-looking cat prowled between stinking, overfull garbage cans. Rain studded bits of paper and trash to the sidewalk.

How many times in her life had she slept in a place just like this? And this was a better choice than others she'd made. Men like Truc. In the dark, they were all the same, the men she'd chosen in her life, and those who had been chosen for her. Fists and booze and anger.

She dug through her gritty pocket for the money she'd taken from Truc's wallet. Maybe, if she let it go, just dropped it into the rain, it would be an untangling of some kind, a do-over.

But what she pulled out was a business card with a dog-eared edge.

Dr. Karen Moody [funny name for a shrink]

Occidental Rehab

Written across the bottom was: When you're ready to make a change.

Cloud had heard these words a thousand times in her life from doctors and social workers. Even from her daughter. People pretended all the time that they could help, that they wanted to.

Cloud had never trusted them, not even back when she was Dorothy and young enough to believe in the kindness of strangers. She had thrown away dozens of cards and flyers and pamphlets like this over the years.

But now, this time, as she sat on the garbage-stinking stoop, with rain nipping at her heels, the word-change-filled her with longing. She glimpsed the pit of her own loneliness, saw how deep it ran, how dark it was.

Occidental.

The street was less than a block away. Was it a sign?

There had been a time when she lived her life believing in signs. The est and Unitarian years. She'd thrown herself into one belief system after another. The jumps into faith had always been followed by depression, moods so dark and low she could only belly-crawl her way out. Each time she had failed, and each failure had taken something from her.

The one god she'd never turned to was herself. Rehab. Sobriety. One day at a time. These words and phrases had always terrified her. What if she really tried to be better-saner-and she failed at that? Would there be enough of her left to save?

And yet here she was. Sixty-some years old, the girlfriend of a mean drunk, a punching bag, essentially homeless, unemployed, a drunk and a pothead. A mother and not a mother.

There already wasn't enough of her to save. This was the rock bottom she'd feared all of her life. She was beaten and down. The only way she could stand was if someone helped her up.

She was so tired of this life ... exhausted.

It was that, the exhaustion, that did it.

She grabbed hold of the wobbly handrail and hauled herself to a shaking, unsteady stand. Gritting her teeth, she limped out into the rain and kept going.

The rehab center was housed in a small, flat-roofed brick building that dated back to Seattle's gritty pioneer beginning. The blackened concrete viaduct thundered with traffic nearby. She took a deep breath and reached for the door handle.

It was locked.

She sat down on the concrete stoop, this time unprotected by an overhang. Rain hammered her, drenched her. Her headache continued, and so did the pain in her neck and her ankle, and the shaking grew worse, but she didn't move. She sat there, coiled up like a sword fern, shivering and cold and shaking, until a sound roused her. She looked up and saw Dr. Moody standing in front of the steps, beneath a blossoming umbrella.

"I'll fail," Cloud said dully, shivering hard.

Dr. Moody came up the steps and reached out. "Come on, Dorothy. Let's go inside where it's dry."

"I guess dry is the point."

Dr. Moody laughed. "A sense of humor. That's good. You'll need it."

Cloud Hart went into rehab, and forty-five days later Dorothy Hart emerged. Now she stood in her small room and packed up her few belongings: a loosely-held-together macaroni necklace and a creased, slightly blurry photograph with the date October 1962 stamped on its scalloped white edge.

They had seemed like nothing when she walked into this building, these two small personal items. Trinkets, she would have said, but now she understood their value. They were her treasures; somehow, through all her years of alcoholism and addiction, she'd held on to them. Dr. Moody claimed that it was the Real Dorothy who'd kept them, the slivered, thin, healthy part of her who had somehow been strong enough to survive it all.

Dorothy didn't know about that. Honestly, she tried never to think about the girl she'd once been, and her life in that tract house in Rancho Flamingo. Sobriety didn't make it easier to look back. The opposite was true, in fact. Now she lived her life in moments, in breaths drawn and released, in drinks not sipped and bowls of pot not smoked. Every dry second was a triumph.

It had begun like all of her Hail Mary passes at normalcy-with a feeling of relief. Nothing was more comforting in the beginning than relinquishing control. She'd shuffled through the center and followed the rules. She'd had no mouthwash or other alcohols or drugs to give up, no bags to be searched. She'd let Dr. Moody lead her to a small room with barred windows that overlooked the gray concrete curl of the viaduct.

When the shaking started, and then the headaches intensified, she glimpsed the truth of the decision she'd made for the first time, and she'd gone crazy. There was no other word for it, although she hated the word. Her craziness had been epic-throwing chairs, pounding her head on the wall until she bled, screaming to be let go.

She'd ended up in a detox ward for seventy-two of the longest hours of her life. She remembered it in images that crawled over one another, pulled each other out of shape until nothing made sense. She remembered the smell of her own sweat, and the feel of bile rising in her throat. She'd cursed and writhed and puked and cried. She'd begged to be let out, to be given just one drink.

And then, miraculously, she'd fallen asleep and wakened in another world, washed ashore. Disorientated, still shaking, weak as a newborn puppy.

Dry.

It was hard to describe how vulnerable she'd felt, how fragile and delicate. She sat in the group therapy sessions like a ghost day after day, listening to her neighbors start their whining speeches with, Hi, I'm Barb and I'm an alcoholic. Hi, Barb!

It was like some horrible Kumbaya camp moment, and she'd zoned out, biting her nails until they bled, tapping her foot, thinking about how soon she could get drunk and that she didn't belong here-these guys had had overdoses and killed people in cars and been fired from jobs. They were Big-Time drunks; she was just a loser who drank too much.

She remembered when it had changed for her. It had been in morning group, about three weeks after her detox. She'd been staring down at her ragged, bleeding thumbnail, listening-barely-to fat girl Gilda complain about the time she'd been raped at a fraternity party, crying hard, spewing snot, and Dr. Moody had looked right at Cloud.

"How does that make you feel, Cloud?"

She started to laugh at the idea that the story meant anything at all to her, and then a memory floated up, bobbing to the black surface of her thoughts like a dead body.

It's dark. He's smoking. The red tip is terrible-looking. I smell smoke. Why won't you be good? You make me look bad. I'm not bad.

I know you're not.

"Cloud?"

"I used to be Dorothy" was how she'd answered, even though it made no sense.