Beautiful Boy (29 page)

"Acoustic toothbrush?"

"A regular one. Not the electric."

Daisy takes her brushing seriously now that her braces are off.
There's a retainer to contend with, though. "I can't stop fiddling with it with my tongue," she says.

"Try not to," I say.

"It's too tempting."

The kids race through the house, collecting homework and cleats, stuffing them into their backpacks. Karen takes on Daisy's tangled braids, and then heads out to drive them to school. When they're gone, I am left to fall apart. Again.

How do I know that something is wrong? It's not only that he hasn't called me back. Is it a parent's intuition? Were there warning signs that slowly seeped up into my consciousness? Were there clues in what he said that I detected on a subliminal level? Or was it the laconic pauses between his words?

Where is he? I will not accept the most likely answer: that he has relapsed.

He has been doing well. It's not perfect, but he has a coterie of supportive friends and a good job. He is biking and writing. He attends AA meetings, including some at Herbert House, where he sees Jace and his friends. With Randy, possibly his closest friend ever, he is devotedly working the twelve steps of self-evaluation, atonement, and what he has described as "new character building." Overall, he seems enthusiastic about his life. I know that sometimes he is lonely, but who isn't? Sometimes he is down, but who isn't? Sometimes he feels overwhelmed, but who doesn't?

And yet he must have relapsed. What else could explain his disappearance? Am I being paranoid? I have reason to be hypervigilant, alert for any sign that something could be wrong, but I must allow him to move on and have a life. Maybe he has a new girlfriend. Maybe he's just down and needs some time without being in touch; there have been times when I needed to withdraw from my parents.

I call Vicki, who reassures me that she saw him a day or two ago and he was fine.

Still, I ask her to go to Nic's apartment to check.

When she calls back in an hour, she says that his roommate hasn't seen him, his bed hasn't been slept in. We call Promises and a coworker says that he has not shown up in two days. We call his
friends, who have not heard from him. Yesterday one had a date to meet Nic for lunch and a bike ride, but he never arrived. I call the police to see if there has been an accident. Once again. I call hospital emergency rooms. His mother drives to the Santa Monica police station and files a missing person report.

He is:

Male.

Caucasian.

Twenty-one.

His baby-blond hair settled into a coppery brown. He has teardrop-shaped green-brown eyes and sun-bronzed olive skin. He has an easy smile. He is just over six feet tall, thin with the muscular upper arms and chest of a swimmer and the strong thighs and calves of a cyclist. When not in bike shorts and shirt, these days he normally wears an outfit of T-shirt, jeans, Converse. He has a strawberry birthmark on his right shoulder.

I try to keep it together—to appear all right—in front of Jasper and Daisy.

Karen and I don't want to tell them about Nic until we know more. We don't want to worry them more. They are only seven and nine years old. What will we say? "Your brother has vanished. Again. He may have relapsed. Again. We don't know."

But we will have to say something soon. We can't for much longer conceal the anguish and hysteria that is, again, taking over our home. It takes a prodigious effort to go through the motions of ordinary days with my constricting stomach, racing heart, and the inescapable, high-definition
CSI
video clips playing inside my skull: the grimmest, most sordid scenes of the worst things that happen to children on the streets at night.

I continually try Nic's cell phone but each time reach his deadpan voicemail: "Hey, it's Nic. Leave a message." I repeatedly check with his mother for news, but there is none. On a whim, I call the 800 customer-assistance number for our shared cell phone company to ask if there have been any recent calls to or from Nic's phone, but an operator says that she can't access the information. However, she explains that she can tell me if his cell phone is currently connected to the network. "It's against regulations," she says.
"But I'm the mother of a teenager." After some clicking on a keyboard, she reports, "Yes, the phone is on. It's accessing a tower in Sacramento."

Sacramento?

I call his mother and his friends. No one knows why he would be in Sacramento. No one knows of any friends there.

Two hours later, the operator calls back. "I checked again," she says. "The phone is on still. It's now in Reno."

Reno?

A police detective tells me that Reno is a meth capital, which could explain it, though it seems farfetched because he wouldn't have to go to Reno to score the drug.

No, he cannot have relapsed. He just celebrated his seventeenth month off meth. Not only that. He works at a rehab center, helping addicts.

I try to work but can't. There is no news throughout the day. After school, Karen and I ferry Jasper and Daisy to swim practice at two different pools. After practice, a thrown-together dinner, homework, baths, and bedtime stories, the children are asleep.

I call the wireless operator again—she has given me her private cell phone number. She says that she will call in the morning from work, so I wait the interminable hours of another night. She calls and tells me that Nic's phone is still on, but now it's in Billings, Montana.

I wrack my brain for a plausible explanation. Has he been kidnapped? Is he dead in the trunk of the car of some psycho who is fleeing east across the country? I call the Billings police and the FBI.

It is raining outside. The children are still at school. Karen I and I sit on the concrete kitchen floor with Moondog. The vet is I here, also sitting on the floor. The dog's head rests on Karen's lap. She strokes his velvety ears.

Moondog's cancer has taken over—he can barely stand. He trembles and cries out from pain. It's time to put him out of his misery, but we are devastated. Karen shakes and weeps. The doctor has come here to do it at home. As the vet injects Moondog with something that puts him into a deep sleep, tears come from me, too. His breathing is labored. A second injection, and there are no more breaths. The vet sits with us awhile and then she leaves. Karen and I struggle to carry a blanket with Moondog's heavy body on it to a hole we dug under a redwood tree in the garden, where we bury him.

When Daisy and Jasper come home from school, they work with Karen in the rain making a shrine for Moondog. We cry for Moondog and for all of the sadness in our home. At their bedtime, we read to them from a picture book called
Dog Heaven
: "So sometimes an angel will walk a dog back to earth for a little visit and quietly, invisibly, the dog will sniff about his old backyard, will investigate the cat next door, will follow the child to school..."

Where is Nic? It is late morning on the fourth day since he disappeared. I continue to try his cell phone. Finally someone answers. A male voice. Not Nic.

"Ha-llo?"

"Nic? Is this Nic?"

"Nic's not here."

"Who is this?"

"Who is
this?
"

"Nic's father. Where is Nic?"

"He gave me his phone."

"He gave it to you? Where's Nic?"

"How the fuck should I know?"

"Where was he when he gave you the phone?"

"I don't even know him. He was at the bus station in LA. Downtown. He gave me his phone and I haven't seen him since then."

"He gave you his phone? Why would he give you his phone?"

Silence. He hangs up.

I call the cell phone operator and ask her to disconnect the telephone, telling her that it has apparently been stolen, thanking her for her help and her compassion.

Vicki and I are frantic. Once again. We make phone calls, hoping for some—any—news. Finally Vicki tries Z., and yes, Z. just heard from him. Nic called her—from San Francisco. Here we go again. She says that when he called her, he was high. Of course.

I want this to stop. I cannot bear it. I wish that I could expunge Nic from my brain. I yearn for a procedure like the one Charlie Kaufman invents in a movie he wrote,
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
A doctor provides a service for people who suffer from the pain caused by a traumatic relationship. He literally erases every trace of the person. I fantasize that I could have the procedure, have Nic wiped from my brain. Sometimes it feels as if nothing short of a lobotomy could help. Where is Nic? I cannot take this any longer. And yet every time I think I can't take any more, I do.

Utter despondency is followed by a frantic impulse to do something, anything. I know better, but I am desperate to find him. When she hears the plan, Karen shakes her head. "It won't help to find him if he doesn't want to be found," she says. She looks at me with concern and—what is it? Exasperation. Sorrow. "You'll just be disappointed."

I say, "I know," and I don't say anything more, even as my brain calculates: it won't help to find him if he doesn't want to be found, but he could die and then it will be too late. Waiting is ghastly. Karen, sensing my anguish, finally succumbs. "Go ahead," she says. "Look for him. It can't hurt." I can tell that she's trying hard not to judge me or Nic, but she is increasingly angry and frustrated by the relentlessness, and she resents the impact on Jasper and Daisy. On us. On me. She resents that she has lost me to worrying. "Go on," she says. "Maybe you'll feel better for trying."

And so I am in the city again, driving along Mission Street, peering into the open doorways of shops and taquerias and bars. I examine every face, continually seeing Nic. Every other person looks like him. Next I park on Ashbury and slowly walk along Haight Street, zigzagging back and forth across the street, checking head shops and bookstores and a pizza place and café and Amoeba. I return to Golden Gate Park, making my way to the clearing where I met the meth-addicted girl from Ohio. Except for two women, whose toddlers play on a blanket, it is deserted.

Back home, I dial Randy. He listens patiently to the anguish in my voice and then assures me: "Nic won't stay out long. He's not having any fun." I hope he's right, but I am no less worried that he could overdose or otherwise cause irreparable damage.

Nic is gone a week. Then another. Interminable days and nights. I try to keep busy. I try to work. We make plans with friends—the same ones who were going to the beach with Karen and the kids when Nic was arrested. With bikes strapped onto racks that hang from the backs of our cars, on a pristine Saturday morning we meet them at the parking lot at Bear Valley. Between our two families, there are eight bikes, ranging from fancy fourteen-speeds to the littlest girl's tiny, rattling Schwinn.

Bear Valley is gold and verdant, and the sky, filtered through the trees, is a blue-white canopy. We pedal along a dirt trail to a meadow and from there down a rocky path toward Arch Rock. To reach it, we have to leave our bikes and hike the last mile.

The forest trail, which follows a stream, is edged with fir and Bishop pine and chinquapin and gnarled and twisting oaks. At the
end, we climb up to a sheer cliff with a startling lookout on the sea, where seals poke their heads up near a jagged rock that emerges like a glacier from the ocean.

Now we follow another path, this one lined with sticky monkey flower, myrtle, and iris. Rust-colored moss grows on granite boulders. Jasper says it's like being in
Lord of the Rings
on Frodo's quest. At the bottom, under Arch Rock, timing it so that we can run past a crashing wave after it has been sucked back into the ocean, we traverse a rocky point and climb down onto a fingernail of beach. The floor is polished quartz and spongy seaweed.

The path leads back to the trailhead. Jasper and I are the first to arrive. We mount our bikes and continue ahead. The plan is to meet up again at the meadow.

When we reach it, we lean our bikes against a tree and rest on a fallen log under an oak. Jasper points out into the meadow—"Look!" There's an astonishing swath of shocking pink flowers, exotics left over from a long-abandoned garden: pink ladies, pink like cotton candy.

We sit there quietly, listening to birdsong and wind in the leaves. Suddenly I am flooded with déjà vu. I have been here before. Sitting on this same log. But with Nic. More than a decade ago. My heart pumps and my eyes water. Nic climbed this tree. Climbing, he called to me: "Dad, look at me! I'm way up here!"

He absentmindedly sang: "All mimsy were the borogoves, and the mome raths outgrabe."

He climbed higher up and then began to shimmy out onto a thick branch that reached over the meadow. "Look at me, Dad! Look at me!"

"I see you."

"I'm up in the sky."

"Fantastic."

"I'm higher than the clouds."

He slid farther out along the gnarled limb. "Pulling weeds," he sang. "Picking stones. We are made of dreams and bones." A puff of wind shook the tree; its leaves trembled and branches swayed. "I want to come down," Nic said suddenly.

"It's OK, Nic. You're fine. Just take it slowly."

"I can't," he called. "I'm stuck."

"You can," I said. "You can do it."

"I can't get down." He began crying.

"Take your time," I said. "Find one foothold at a time. Go slowly."

"I can't."

"You can."

He wrapped his gangly legs and arms tighter around the branch.

"I'll fall."

"You won't."

"I will."

I stood directly underneath and yelled up to him, "You're fine. Take your time." I said it, but I was thinking, I'll catch you if you fall.

Sitting here with Jasper, remembering, a few tears slide from my eyes. Jasper immediately notices. "You're thinking about Nic," he says.

I nod. "I'm sorry. I was just reminded of him. I remember when he was your age we were here."

Jasper nods. "I think about him a lot, too." We sit together under the ancient tree saying nothing until Karen, Daisy, and our friends call out to us.

On a morning the following week, Karen notices that something is amiss in our house. Just a few things out of place. A hairbrush on the floor. Some books and magazines strewn on a couch. A sweater is missing.