Come Back (8 page)

My memory is visual, my feelings are recorded in images. This exact moment, when being Mia’s mommy ended, will be remembered as an iron gray sky, as Mia’s averted eyes, as Paul’s fingers gripped on the arms of a stainless steel chair.

This is what is recorded when the cord is cut and the blissful bubble that was always my life with Mia lifts up without me in it for the first time. And with it goes my anger. My fury melts and recasts itself into
something that feels much worse. Resignation, defeat,
acknowledgment
. That we will never again be to each other what we were.

Thank God they’re gone. I feel like shit. They look so miserable and confused. That’s why I never wanted them to see this side of me, why I kept it hidden. And they wouldn’t have if they hadn’t tried to find me! That’s why I get so mad, they fucked everything up and now I end up feeling guilty!

Two days ago I was so happy. Rain took us to the beach, across from the tide pools, to this huge drum circle. Joints and bottles were passed around and the beats being pumped out were so strong the sand seemed to shake. It was all so primal. It was a castaway circle filled with shouting Rastas, angry punks, hippie girls in flowing skirts twirling about like dancing fireflies. It was so alive.

It was awesome, one minute I didn’t know a soul and the next I had a group of friends and a place to crash. That’s what I love about the streets, how unpredictable it is, how chaotic and raw.

And now they want me to go back? Back to Hopkins’ manicured world? Back to hiding under a straight-A face, to walking around smiling and hollow? I’d rather slice my hand open to remind myself I’m flesh and blood and not plastic.

I leave there feeling motherness drain out of me with each step. I’m skin in the shape of a woman but nothing inside feels solid, wet, living.

It materializes suddenly, as if I turned a corner and there it was in my path. Something I laughed off long ago, then let slither along in our shadow for a dozen years, just out of memory’s reach, but licking at my heels. Now, here it lies, coiled and patient, waiting all this time for my certain arrival.

Ella’s warning. Ten years ago, she had told me so. On a balcony outside her office in Chicago, just before we moved to L.A. Mia was galloping around the courtyard below us like a giddy pony, stopping to whinny and throw her head back. It was two years since she’d last seen Nick.

Ella told us Mia was doing well and didn’t need therapy anymore.

However.

When Mia becomes an adolescent, she added, and becomes sexually
aware, issues will come up for her about Nick and the abuse. She’ll have problems. Have her see someone who deals with early incest trauma.

I only half listened to her. Adolescence? That’s years away, she’ll have had so much time to heal and be happy. Adolescence is a lifetime away!

I call the hospital in the morning and request a psychiatrist specializing in Mia’s issues. The day of our appointment, Paul and I return to the ward with cautious hope. If, as Ella said, this behavior is so predictable, perhaps a treatment for it is, too, by someone with appropriate training.

The tall, blond doctor is waiting in the hall for us. I don’t know what I must have been in a former life to have earned this karma—a warthog, Caligula—but she extends her hand with a kind smile and says,

“Hello, I’m Dr. P.”

Oh. My. God. Paul and I stand there with our mouths hanging open. She stares at us, waiting. We can’t even stammer a reply.

“Is something wrong?” she asks patiently.

“Yes!” I finally manage. “Are you related to Nick P from Philadelphia?”

Twelve years later and thousands of miles away, the
one
psychiatrist in the entire state of California that I
happen
to get is Nick’s cousin.

History isn’t repeating itself, it’s stuttering.

“Mia is a very troubled girl.”

Dr. Kravitz is one of the doctors in charge at the hospital. He saw us right away when he’d heard what happened. He’s also seen Mia.

“Of course, this all stems from the sexual abuse. It’s a very durable trauma, very significant in terms of Mia’s self-perception, especially when it occurs at such a young age. The self-loathing and disgust she’s expressed is typical. No matter what a parent does or doesn’t do, by fifteen the problem manifests itself. Kids don’t connect it, they don’t see the effects played out in their behavior. Like the cutting, for example. She has no idea why she did it, only that it made her feel better.”

Why would she? Trained professionals twice her age didn’t.

“Cutting serves many functions,” he continues. “It’s the embodiment of distrust of the body. It relieves tension. It’s a way of achieving mastery; it says I will control the harm inflicted on me. It had nothing to do with communication problems with you.”

This should feel like a victory, but it doesn’t.

“Coupled with her enmeshment with you,” he says, “she got a double whammy.”

“Her what?”

Okay, let’s rewind, go back to the chapter in the
How to Mother an Abused Child
manual I never got to read when all this started. Here’s the drill:

• Child is abused, perpetrator threatens to hurt mother. Child feels protective of mother.
  
• Struggle to escape perp reinforces feelings of mutual protection. It’s Mom and I against the world.
  
• Something necessary at the time later creates “enmeshment.” Child doesn’t see her actions as separate from mother. Even during normal adolescent individuation. But—
  
• Normal individuation doesn’t happen in abuse survivors. They don’t feel normal, so they—
  
• Act out in unhealthy or self-destructive ways, which creates—
  
• Fear and pain for mother, which creates—
  
• Guilt for child who still feels responsible for mother’s emotional health.
  
• Child seeks release from the guilt and from not feeling normal, which leads to—
  
• Escape to the world of other not normal people, where mother can’t see her child self-destruct, which leads to—
  

“The bad news.”

“That was the
good
news?” I ask.

“Understanding all of this isn’t going to help, very little will,” the doctor says. “She’ll go back to the streets, the drugs. It’s the only thing that offers her relief from her own misery, the only way she sees to protect you.”

Mother horse can’t save her pony anymore. She’s charging off into the unending night that you buy in little plastic bags. She’s leaving because she loves me too much to hurt me? Then, I wish she hated me, that she wanted to destroy me instead of herself. That she would do to me whatever it takes to scratch the itch of the sullied child.

Staying at Sara’s lasts two weeks. When my sister Vivian asks if Mia wants to stay with her for a while, Mia jumps at the offer. Maybe it’ll be a good thing, I think. Vivian lives in Larkin, Indiana, a tiny town in the countryside, certainly a more wholesome environment than LA. Mia will have her little cousins, the public school there will be less pressure than Hopkins. It’ll also give Paul and me time to recover.

Mia’s back in her bedroom tonight, but only to pack her things for Indiana. I don’t recognize anything she’s packing, she must have gotten these
things in the last two weeks. Grungy druggie clothes, combat boots, shapeless knitted beanies. Different clothes for a different girl living a different life. One without me.

She doesn’t seem to mind my presence, though I can tell she’s glad we’re not talking. But she’s leaving tomorrow morning and I have a nauseating suspicion I won’t speak to her again for a long time.

“Mia, I know you were unhappy inside for a long time, but right before you ran away, things seemed better, you seemed genuinely happy before you left.”

She looks up from her packing. “I
was
really happy, Mom. I knew I was leaving.”

It’s funny. I used to be terrified of hurting my mom, it was my worst fear. Then it came true. That night she saw me cutting changed everything. It was one of those moments that define your life in a new way. Her look of pure horror and disgust, it was like she ripped me open and laid bare a gremlin. That was when I knew I had to go, that her house was too bright. I had already been hanging out and partying with street kids on the Promenade enough to know I made sense in their world, that I fit. Once I made the decision to go, I had found a thread to hang on to, to follow to salvation. Of course, I seemed happy, the last days of something are always the sweetest.

She goes back to packing, turning her face from me. My throat constricts. The stupid thing is, I get what she’s saying, I know how she feels. It was how I felt when I thought about suicide, that promise of release. Only I was seeking escape
from
the darkness, I wanted the light at the end of the tunnel. She seeks escape in the opposite direction. Either way promises oblivion.

Our most intimate conversations have always been while I was sitting on her bed like I am now, usually at bedtime. I remember how terrified she always was of monsters in the dark, of bad guys under the bed or in the closet. I remember all the ways I tried to banish her fears—telling the monster he had the wrong address and sending him off with directions and a cookie, turning on the lights to show her the empty closet, magic wanding them poof! into dead mosquitoes, see there he is smushed on the screen. Nothing helped. One time she
began to cry and told me not to bother, pointing to her head and saying sadly, “You can’t make them go away, Mudder, because they’re in my head.”

Now, she’ll do anything to get rid of the monsters in her head, even if it kills her. God knows it’s killing me.

I don’t know what about animal dissection inspires this teacher but he’s practically two-stepping his instructions across the room. I glance around to see if anyone else finds this weird, but no one’s the least bit fazed. Of course not, Mia, you’re in fucking farmland, they all probably killed a chicken this morning to bring for lunch.

I do a quick inventory of my new class. I brought neither bible nor shotgun, so between the religious and the rednecks, the snot-nosed nerd in the back is increasingly appealing. I’m beginning to wonder what I’ve gotten myself into. Then I notice the arm-crossed, slouching girl in the back. She smiles at me, runs a ring-filled hand through short and spiky bleached blonde hair. She’s pretty, with heavy eyeliner, electric blue eyes.

When I pass her desk on the way out, she says hi.

“I’m Melanie. You’re that new chick from LA, right?”

At least I haven’t been mistaken for a local.

I’ve only been in Larkin about a month but I’m really happy, trailer parks, hunting, cornfields, and all. One kid here actually pulls up to school in a small tractor. A fucking tractor! Like I should talk. I show up in a yellow school bus.

Melanie and I hang out almost every day. I don’t know where she gets her drugs but her supply seems never ending. After school, I walk the now-familiar path to Melanie’s house and follow her singing to the bathroom, a cluttered crack of a room filled with hanging clothes and a sink dyed rainbow from years of spilled hair dye and makeup. Despite the dirt, I love the mess in her house, it feels homey, easy to squish into and disappear. Our house has hardwood floors, hard angles, and uncomfortable, yet attractive, furniture.

“Mel?”

Two surprised blue eyes peep out from the curtain. “Oh! Hi. Listen, Jeremy’s folks are gone for the weekend, he’s having a huge party. It’ll be awesome. Tell your aunt you’re staying at my house, my mom will cover.”

One thing I’m still getting used to is that no one here has parents—even if they have them. Lying for my friends certainly wasn’t part of my mother’s parenting. When I was little and didn’t get my way, I would fantasize that I had “real” parents somewhere that never said no. It suddenly feels like I’ve walked into the golden land of those imaginary parents.

I love it here. I finally feel free. I have some space from my mom, I have a cool group of friends. I have no history.

“I think she smokes pot with her new friends, but she does go to school,” my sister says to me optimistically.

If the worst thing she does is smoke pot in the cornfields, it’s an improvement. My, how my standards have changed. Hopkins is out the window, too, she’ll never go back. We look at public schools all the way into the Valley. They all look the same, the same dingy halls, same tired teachers, the same gang-banger boys and slutty girls I sent her to a private school to shield her from.

Mia steadfastly refuses to come to the phone when we call. We haven’t spoken to her once since she left. Six weeks later it still feels like a kick in the stomach.

“Are your teeth brushed?”

My little cousin Sophie nods her head vigorously.

“Okay, go pick out a bedtime story.”

Sophie loves when I read to her because I always do the voices. Cockney street urchins, evil wizards, I can be just about anyone. Of course, being high helps. I’ve learned to lower my voice halfway through the book, so that she’s asleep by the end of it.

“And the little princess lived happily ever after.”

I fold the book and watch her sleep. She’s so fragile but at the same time seems so much stronger than I am. I want to protect her, so bad things never happen to her, so she’s always clean and glowing. I touch hair lightly, afraid to disturb her, to rub off.

The doorbell rings. I run down before it wakes up Sophie. Melanie’s there with two guys I’ve never seen. She smiles and shakes a baggie of white powder
in front of her face. She probably fucked them for it. A month ago I would have gotten mad at her for doing that, but I don’t even care now. It keeps stuff coming my way.

“Oooh, Mia, you’re gonna LOVE this shit!” she giggles furiously. “This heay’s the pure, uncut co-cai-een-a.”

An hour of partying later, I’m throwing up the “uncut cocaieena.” My tongue’s bloody from biting it while it was numb and the acid from the vomit stings. Shaking, I push through the medicine cabinet and find the Nyquil bottles so I can fall asleep. Thank God Sophie gets so many colds.

Melanie’s free drug supply no longer baffles me. His name is Trevor Wilkinson. Most things don’t live up to their reputation. The Wilkinsons leave theirs in the dust. Local legends, Trevor and his brother are both dropouts and are usually in trouble with the law. The most anyone’s seen of them is a glimpse from their black Impala, a flash of face, a whiff of smoke, a blaring song.

Their house looks like a ghetto crackhouse airlifted and dropped in the middle of a cornfield. Blue paint is peeling and faded, a rusting pickup truck sits dying on the front lawn, and a mangled dog is chained to the front porch. It lunges for me when I walk by.

“Shut it, Samson,” someone behind me growls.

I turn and there’s a skinny, blond guy standing behind me. His hazel eyes look gentle despite the devil lock hanging between them and a badly scarred eyebrow. He looks twenty-six, twenty-seven.

“Who’s she?” he asks, blatantly checking me up and down.

“Mia,” I say. “You gonna keep staring or invite us in?”

“Feisty,” he says, flashing a grin. “I like that. I’m Derek.”

He reaches for the front door but it flies open on its own as a guy bursts through and hurls himself over the porch, retching.

We walk down a dingy hallway into a smoky room filled with people in various stages of oblivion. Condom wrappers litter the floor, along with empty plastic baggies, tin foil, and soda bottles.

Melanie struts in like Cleopatra, laughing as she pushes a potato-faced kid with a bull ring out of the way to clear a spot on the sofa. A small pile of heroin sits on the coffee table. Suddenly, Mel goes silent. I watch, intrigued by this new side of her, precise, focused, and serious.

Just as I lean in to do a line, the door slams open and a squatty woman with hair shooting out in all directions is silhouetted in the doorway.

“Hi honey, I’m Linda.”

“Mia,” I say, waiting for her to comment on the small mountain of dope.

“Nice meetin’ you, sweetie.” Her smile vanishes. “Derek, did you take my cigarettes?”

This place is nuts, awesome, but nuts. I lean back in and cut out two lines. The high hits me totally unexpectedly. It’s not that instant rush you get from coke, it sort of melts over you slowly until it feels normal to be weightless and floating, like life has always been slow and beautiful. My body comes and goes, tingly and prickly one minute, normal the next. I sit zoned out like that for hours before I realize I have to puke.

Derek gives me a ride home, Melanie being “occupied” with Trevor. I pass Linda curled up on the sofa, dazed and drooling.

“Is she sick?” I whisper.

“No,” Derek answers. “Not sick…just weak.”

I spend time in Mia’s room each day, exploring her old books and toys, her collection of handmade boxes, her photos. It soothes the ache in a part of me I wasn’t aware of yet, the way your sternum or spleen doesn’t exist until it hurts. I have a new organ now in the shape of my daughter’s absence. I’m learning the anatomy of new life.

Late one Saturday night, I find a pretty wallet that she never used. Or so I thought. I notice a seam has been opened to make a secret place. I dig inside and find a folded white 3 × 5 card. I unfold it to see, written in blood traced with a fingertip: ROTTEN.

“Hey, Mia, I’m gonna mix you up something special, ’kay? It’s better than straight H. Speedballs are seriously like communing with God.”

“Sure,” I mumble, half stoned, half drunk.

Derek comes over with a needle and a belt.

“Here, tighten this around your arm,” he says. “Make sure it’s really tight.”

The needle comes toward me, slow and weaving, like the circles my mom used to make with a spoon when I was little to get me to eat. It finally makes contact with the vein and plunges in.

It’s the most mind blowing pleasure, the rush of coke minus the agitation. And when the coke wears off it leaves just enough of an edge to enjoy the heroin, which is ten times more potent than snorting.

There’s nothing like personal calamity to find out just how small your town is. Somehow, everyone knows what’s happened to our family, friends, colleagues, school moms. I run into them everywhere, in library stacks, at the Writers Guild Theatre, at the Farmer’s Market herb stand. I’ve become a human car wreck that people can’t help rubbernecking.

They’re all kind, concerned, but sometimes I need to not be who I am. I’ve ducked out a restaurant kitchen, slipped through an employee lounge, hidden behind display racks. I’ve escaped through the produce doors at Whole Foods twice.

I know they all care, many of them deeply, and I’m grateful. It’s the pity in their eyes I can’t stand. How careful they are. It’s such a thin line between I’m sorry it’s you and I’m glad it’s not me.

We go to the Wilkinsons so often now it’s become routine. Time’s hard to distinguish there, nights blur with days, this week with last week with last month. It’s like a continuum, you know whenever you go back you’ll pick up right where you left off, snorting, smoking, shooting. It’s its own world, that house.

Derek’s become like a big brother. Sometimes he takes me on drives and shows me stuff, the best cliff jumping spots, places where deer gather, secret caves. We talk about things, his mom, my old dad. He lived on the streets for a year before coming back home. He’s been on heroin for six, but he says he’s trying to kick it. Kick it and leave this place for good.

I know what he means about this place now. Being young and doing this shit is one thing, but here half the parents do it, too. I know one guy whose forty-five-year-old aunt gives his friends head as long as they dope her up first.

“No,” Derek says, ignoring the ten I tap against his shoulder.

“What the hell’s your problem? You mix me speedballs all the time.”

“I know, but shooting straight is different. You think I haven’t noticed your legs?” he asks, sucking the liquid into a needle. I tug down my cutoffs. I’d forgotten about my scars.

“That don’t matter, I already seen them,” he mumbles, one end of a belt in his mouth. “You got enough to figure out without fucking yourself up even more. Don’t wanna end up like me now, do ya?”

I’d normally continue to argue, but something in his tone silences me. He jerks his head sideways, pulling the belt tight while pumping his fist. Tapping his bulging blue vein, he shoots up. His blood replaces the junk in the needle and I watch the bright red mix with the fluid, like jellyfish tentacles. For some reason it reminds me of a womb, something about the blood curling up into the fluid and swaying gently. It seems warm and cozy and I want to be in there, just for a moment.

I start to say so but his eyes are already closed, his back slumped against the wall and he curls on his side. I push his devil lock to the side to see his profile. He looks young all of a sudden, small. I saw him curled up like this last week, only then it was because he was sick from withdrawal, his sheets covered in his own filth. He didn’t even make it six days.

I’ve been in Indiana visiting Mia for three days and haven’t looked into her eyes once. She won’t look at me and barely speaks to me. I know nothing of her now, what she thinks, what she does, where she goes. My daughter’s made me irrelevant. I need new skills. I need all-seeing eyes, I need the ears of a dog, I need clairvoyance, armor. I need many things to be Mia’s mother now, love least of all. Now, love is a liability.

She doesn’t know who I am, either, and I think it angers her. She doesn’t recognize this woman who is scared, who doesn’t know how to make her pain go away.

We share the same guest bed, and some nights she scoots over and puts her arm around me. The night before I leave, she says good night, Mom, I love you. I cry till long after she’s asleep.

I gotta get the hell out of here. By the time Derek picks me up, it takes two fat lines before I even begin to calm down. I’d forgotten how bad it is between my mom and me now, either awkward silences or pointless lectures.

When we get there, I’m thankful for the chaos that is the Wilkinson house. For Samson’s barking, for Linda’s hollering, for everyone high as hell and getting drunk.

I go to the corner where Melanie’s at and blow some coke while matching shots with Derek and Trevor. I lean back and the room splatters into pieces. Furniture and people’s faces and bodies all swirl together to dance a dervish and I see my mom’s face floating in the middle of it all, with her sad, defeated look. I
hate that face, it’s a lie. She was never like that until I ran away. She was never weak or helpless, she’s usually a fucking banshee.

A familiar rage builds, my hands clench. I stumble to the bathroom and fumble around until I find a razor. It pours out of me in a torrent, every thought and feeling leaving a red gash on its way out. I cry red until I can breathe again.

“Whooohoooo!”

Melanie’s on the bed in her underwear and a T-shirt, rocking her hips in tempo with the music. Five guys are crowded around the bed, shouting and whooping. Every couple seconds she stumbles, then giggles and keeps dancing. I want to leave but I shot some shit and am too fucked up to move.