Praise for A Clean Heart
“Set in 1991 in the early days of chemical dependency treatment, John Rosengren’s A Clean Heart follows the daily routine of Carter, a young counselor at a teen treatment facility. The book, which switches back and forth from Carter’s troubled childhood to present day, provides a wealth of details and insight into the daily life and struggles of both staff and residents at a typical treatment center of the time. [This is] a novel that will strike a chord with readers wrestling with substance abuse, the Catholic faith, or family trauma.”
—Alison McGhee, author of Shadow Baby and Never Coming Back
“With echoes of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Rosengren writes with great empathy for the misfits and outsiders of Six West (whose halls are stalked by the unforgettable Sister X). A Clean Heart grapples with life’s most difficult puzzles: how we navigate the tangled bonds of family and how we save ourselves, ultimately, by becoming vulnerable. A redemptive and affecting novel.”
—Will McGrath, author of Everything Lost Is Found Again
“A Clean Heart picks at the knot of addiction and recovery insistently and with a wholesomeness intriguingly at odds with its subject. I enjoyed this book.”
—Thomas Beller, author of The Sleep-Over Artist
“In his powerful new book, A Clean Heart, John Rosengren reminds us that the journey of body and soul is best taken with another, or others, that somehow tie their healing to our own. Set in a rehab center for teens, each level of recovery—or descent—is housed in a character. Whether client or employee, they are recognizable, flawed, [and] at times hilarious and lovable in their struggles. This is a book of lessons and offered insights, but never at the expense of a well-told and gripping story.”
—Kevin Kling, author of The Dog Says How and Holiday Inn
“In A Clean Heart, John Rosengren has created a wonderfully empathetic protagonist in Carter and a wonderfully complicated situation. After seven years in A.A., Carter finds himself being tested both by a new patient at the rehabilitation unit where he works and by his boss, the charismatic Sister Xavier. The result is a gripping and suspenseful novel about the dangerous art of helping.”
—Margot Livesey, author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy
“Rosengren’s A Clean Heart thrums with vibrant characters yearning to do the right thing, often at great personal costs to themselves. Witty and totally absorbing, here is a novel about helping those snared by drugs and alcohol see that they, too, are worthy of love. Along the way, the characters learn that painful memories and secrets are a type of drug in their own right—that the past is just as mind-altering and addictive as anything found in a syringe or shot glass. Both heartbreaking and heart-lifting, this is a narrative about coming clean that will haunt the imagination long after the last page has been read. Spellbinding, mesmerizing, and deeply human, this is fiction about the toxins and tonics that beat in all of our hearts.”
—Patrick Hicks, author of The Commandant of Lubizec and Library of the Mind
A
Clean
Heart
A
Clean
Heart
a novel
John Rosengren
Coral Gables
Copyright © 2020 by John Rosengren
Published by Mango Publishing Group, a division of Mango Media Inc.
Cover Design, Layout & Design: Morgane Leoni
Author Photo: © Scott Streble
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A Clean Heart: A Novel
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication number: 2020933492
ISBN: (print) 978-1-64250-192-6, (ebook) 978-1-64250-193-3
BISAC category code FIC043000, FICTION / Coming of Age
Printed in the United States of America
To Pat Meyer, Jerry Stelli, Ralph Bruce, Rich Scanlon,
Pat Bixler, and Audrey at Parkview West.
Thanks for showing me the way.
Something we were withholding made us weak
until we found out that it was ourselves
we were withholding from our land of living
and forthwith found salvation in surrender.
–Robert Frost
Contents
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
About the Author
Oscar sauntered down the hall, hips stiff, shoulders swaggering, hands cuffed behind his back. Contempt crusted his face. He looked neither left nor right at the calligraphy slogans framed on the walls: “First Things First,” “Live and Let Live,” “Easy Does It.” His eyes bored straight ahead, cleared his path. The other kids watched from their bedroom doorways in quiet awe, reverence almost. They shrank back when he passed. Even with his hands cuffed and a cop at his elbow, Oscar sauntered down the hallway with savage independence. His eyes fixed on the counselor waiting for him: Fuck