Come Back (9 page)

Melanie’s really into it now, whipping her hair around like a rock star and leaning over far enough for everyone to see down her shirt, sans bra.

“Hey, Mel!” Trevor yells, pumping his hips. “Show them what you show me!”

Melanie turns her back, then whips her shirt off, cascading giggles. How can she do that? I can’t take off my shirt in front of one guy, much less five. She’s running her hands over herself and shaking her hair and feeling so good and…

I come to and the room’s empty and dark. I’m so thirsty. I go to sit up but I’m pushed back down. I can’t…I can’t breathe. Gasping, I try to sit up again, but something’s pushing me down. There’s a weight on me and this pushing, on top of me, inside of me. In a haze, I see Derek’s face floating above my own, wincing. What…what’s his face doing there?

Sun streaks through the curtains. I pull the blanket up over my head and curl up in a ball. Shit! I feel last night’s activities coming up. I grab a bag from the floor and let it go. I’m sweaty and shaking, my teeth chatter.

“Mia?”

Melanie gets up and comes over to me, pulling my hair from my face and stroking it. Her hands are refreshing and cool.

“Come on, sweetie, let’s go eat, you’ll feel better.”

Nodding, I pull the cover off to get up and immediately throw it back on. I’m naked from the waist down.

“Did I fall asleep like that?”

Melanie grabs my jeans off the sofa. “Damn, Mia! You don’t remember anything, do you?”

Well, no shit. I pull on my jeans and suddenly Derek’s wincing face flashes. I stiffen and push his face out of my head.

Fuck it Mia, what happened, happened. Just forget about it.

When Melanie calls next I make up some excuse for not wanting to go to the Wilkinsons. I’m afraid to be around Derek, of him pretending nothing happened. Of me going along with it.

“Brian Starcher told me about a party tonight, he’ll pick us up at my house.”

I’ve seen Brian at school. He roams the hallways in his wife beater, muscles bulging, chains and cigarette dangling beneath multicolored spikes.

We go to some guy’s house and party until late. Brian and I drop acid under the stars and have one of those “deep” conversations. There’s a fair tomorrow, he says. By the time the acid wears off, it is tomorrow.

“Mia’s run again, Claire.”

The phone call we’ve been dreading. Paul knows before I say anything, by the way I drop into a chair with the phone. He slams his fist on the cabinet.

The police find her later that day outside a raunchy bar in another town. The officer tells me she was with ex-cons. Parolees at a biker bar. It’s Venice, country style. Vivian picks her up from the police station with her bags already packed. She can’t put her on a plane fast enough.

If I thought she looked bad at Vivian’s, she’s even worse now. Her eyes are always pinkish, her nose runs, her cheeks and eye sockets are sunken. She barely weighs a hundred pounds.

She’s coarse, rabbity, aggressive, secretive. Sometimes she cackles with hoarse laughter that’s so unnerving, I’m almost afraid of her, of this Indiana Mia. She’s picked up the accent and mannerisms of rural druggies so well, I think she needs an exorcism rather than therapy, which she refuses anyway. “No freakin’ way, I don’t need no therapist.”

Sometimes she’s so blue and quiet, it’s painful to see, painful that she refuses to open up to me. Other times, she’s beaming and fizzy, saying I’m so glad to be home! Of course, she’s high when she’s like this, so it poisons my joy. It’s obvious she’s completely addicted now. Her unspoken threat is that if we say anything about it, she’ll run again.

She’s become both stupid and cunning. What I’ve come to realize is that she doesn’t need to be any smarter. Just as a scholar thrives on how much she knows, a druggie thrives on how little. Their knowledge and energy constrict around finding their next high, their brilliance is measured by it. If you only need to be smart about one thing, any junkie can be a genius.

It’s frightening to have no parental authority, no power to help her. Still, we’re thankful that she’s not on the street. That she’s not a crime scene photo on a Venice police officer’s desk.

She agrees to finish tenth grade at an alternative school, “for fuckups,” she says, not bothered by the label. The director, Maddy, likes Mia, she likes them all, they’re creative, misunderstood, they march to a different drummer. They march to their dealers, I add. Then that’s their path, Maddy says, you must trust that your child will find her way.

What if that way leads to permanent addiction, to jail, to the funeral parlor? Or just to the shabby half-life of those who never fully rose up from the level they sunk to in their drug days? Like the men with graying ponytails who hand you your groceries. Or the women with cigarette laughs, funky toenails, and sagas to tell.

“I’m taking a bus back to Indiana.”

It’s early Sunday morning, her duffel’s already packed.

“I didn’t want to sneak out again. I promise I’ll call every few weeks to let you know I’m okay. But, if you guys or Aunt Vivian do anything to find me, you’ll never hear from me again.”

You said you’d finish school, I say weakly. Paul, the easy parent, the one who was always a sucker for his little girl, has had it.

“You don’t have to worry, we’re not going to look for you this time!” he yells at her. “You want to go live with scum, go! You want to throw away your future, fine, go, leave now!”

This has broken him. There is a flash of hurt on her face; it’s the first emotion she’s shown since she got home. Still, she walks to the door with her duffel.

“Mia, wait!” I rush after her. “The bus station’s in a dangerous part of town! Your dad will take you. Paul, please!”

I can’t believe it, I’m volunteering to take her to a bus station to run
away. But she’ll escape no matter what we do. At least she’s offering to call. No one speaks on the ride downtown. The ticket line is full of migrant workers, drifters, a group of nuns. Mia stands outside my car door in the seedy parking lot, hoping I’ll come out to say good-bye.

“Please, Mommy, it’s not about you, it’s not, I just have to do this, I have to be on my own. Please, hug me good-bye.”

When she starts to walk away, I jump out and clutch her. We’re both crying for this good-bye, the way we cried when she arrived in the world.

“Promise you won’t look for me, I promise I’ll call from the road every day so you know I’m okay,” she says as she hugs me then pulls away.

“Please call us, Mia.” She’s already walking away from me. “Please call! I promise I won’t look for you!”

I am lying.

“I can’t believe she hasn’t called yet, she promised,” I whisper to Paul in the middle of the second night. There’s no need to preface it with, “Are you awake?”

“You actually believed her?” he says.

“She doesn’t want to feel guilty. She thinks calling us lets her off the hook.”

Till now, “waiting for the phone to ring in the night” was just a cliché. Now, we’re torn between dying for it to ring and be Mia, and hoping it doesn’t because it might be the police or the morgue.

I’m on a bus in the middle of nowhere, high off my ass. This tweaker saw me popping Coricidin the first day and we’ve been sitting in the back getting high ever since. There’s shit else to do on a bus for three days.

There’s a group of nuns singing praise to Jesus on my left, a cluster of screaming babies up front, and pacing the aisle is some sketchy guy muttering to himself in Spanish. Thank God I’m high because I couldn’t handle all this straight.

My anger at Mia for doing this to herself has pulled me out of the fog of parental guilt. A depressed, drug-addled fifteen-year-old has manipulated and intimidated all of the adults around her into collaborating in her self-destruction.

I juggle writing and feigning good cheer for the producer with researching a way to help Mia nearly every hour of the day. I have the phone company put a trace on our line and alert Vivian that she’s headed for Indiana. I call police officers, probation officers, and state social workers to find a rehab program for her. Until Mia breaks the law, they can’t help.

Insurance will pay for a month of inpatient rehab, but it won’t be much different than the psych ward. I try calling the local high school guidance counselor, who recommends we go for family therapy. Right.

Dr. Kravitz suggests a therapeutic boarding school in the mountains nearby. Five grand a month, a lot of traditional therapy, and she can’t be forced to stay. Not good.

Someone suggests joining BILY, Because I Love You, a support group for parents of runaways and missing kids. Oh, no, Paul groans, I couldn’t take it. I agree. Our misery doesn’t want the company of theirs.

I’ve learned to say she has a drug addiction stemming from depression rather than sexual abuse. Drugs are cool and half of LA is on antidepressants. Fallout from incest? You can hear them squirm through the phone. How easy it would be if it were only drugs. Drugs you can withdraw from. How do you withdraw from memories—a lobotomy?

“Mia!”

I step off the bus in Indiana and there’s Brian, smiling. I race over and I’m so happy to be off that bus I kiss him. He explains the living situation to me on the ride home. He’s obviously tweaked, talking and driving like a maniac.

“See, I technically live with my cousin and his girlfriend, who fucking hates me. So most nights, I just sleep in my van. So, I was thinking we could just live in my van and then for showers and shit we’ll wait until she leaves and sneak you in. In about a month I’m gonna rent a trailer.”

“That’s cool. Oh, shoot, hold up. I gotta call my mom.”

“Yes, we’ll take the charges! Where are you, are you okay?”

“I don’t know, Kansas,” Mia says. “I just want you to know I’m okay. I gotta go.”

She’s not in Kansas, the caller ID box says she’s in an area near Larkin. I call the Larkin police. Vivian says to tell them she hung out with the Wilkinsons.

The police tell us they’ll watch for her, then tell us two things: not to search on our own because we’d stick out too much and Larkin County has one of the worst heroin problems in the nation. So much for the wholesome countryside. There’s the 4H and the other H.

I ask them what they’d do if it were their kid. The general consensus:
slap the living daylights out of them, lock ’em in the barn, home school them, and let ’em out at eighteen. At this point, it’s the best suggestion we’ve heard.

The girlfriend’s gone so I get my first shower since I left home a week ago. I’ve been coughing a lot lately and the steam feels good in my chest. When I get out, Brian’s standing there staring.

“Hello,” I say, surprised. I feel both pleased and squirmy. We’ve had sex once before but I was high and kept most of my clothes on. When he finally hands me the towel I take it and run upstairs to dry off and change.

We cut a few lines and head over to a party at his friend Warren’s place. It’s loud and rowdy, an older version of the Wilkinson house. Warren’s fun and kind of fatherly, but with an edge. He’s telling stories about his latest escapade, a fight he and some friends got into.

“I took a bat to this one jackass, damn near killed him. And then his friend came out to get his back and I turned around and knifed the fucker!”

His eyes gleam with pride. I’m glad when he stops talking and goes back to drinking and manning the grill. He brings me a burger.

“As long as you’re here you’re family. I know Brian since he was a little shrivel dick. Hey, and just ’cause this jackass lives in his vehicle, you’re a lady and if you ever want a real bed you come on over here.”

I smile and thank him, trying to reconcile the image of this hospitable guy with someone who amuses himself by splitting people’s heads open with baseball bats.

I’ve been afraid to call Mia’s friend, Melanie, in case she alerts her, but we have nothing else to go on. I make girl talk, earn her confidence. She says she hasn’t seen Mia. I drop casually that coke now and then wasn’t so bad, but Mia’s looking awful now.

“She’s probably speed balling more,” she says, as if I know what it is. “That can make you look pretty bad.”

She promises to call if she hears from Mia. I research speedballing. Injecting a mixture of cocaine and heroin is one of the most common causes of death by overdose. The heart loses rhythm and fails. River Phoenix and John Belushi died speedballing.

Paul and I have been on two phone lines and two computers looking for help. We’ve googled “teen,” “juvenile,” “drugs,” “delinquent,” but all we
get are porno sites—naked teens behind bars, naked teens in bondage, naked teen drug orgies. We’ve tried “Rehab,” “treatment,” “family”—nothing, nothing, nothing. I’m ready to don overalls, hunt her down, and lock her in the first barn I can buy.

When the phone rings.

“She do what?!” our French friend Yvette cries out. “Sanks à God you call to me! I know a mozer wiz a girl who do bad tings, so she lock ’er up in some place zat fix ’er! She a big model now, zat girl! I going to call to ’er right now!”

I have a new alarm clock: the slamming of my head against the van floor when Brian races over the railroad tracks on the way to work. I tap on the glass for him to pull over so I can come up front. I lift up the hatch and hop down but my legs give way and little white dots appear everywhere. I sit on the ground, taking deep breaths. In a minute, color and sound drain back like a slow wave. Still shaky, I hold onto the car for support until I feel the front door handle.

“It’s extreme and expensive. You can’t just go visit either, she has to earn it,” Yvette’s friend tells me. “But it worked for us. We have a very close relationship now.”

Her daughter was at a behavior modification school in Utah for a year, a state that allows you to force your child into treatment. We naïvely assumed the laws were the same everywhere.

We’ve never heard of this kind of school but they’ve been in the news, on
48 Hours
,
Dateline
, and we get copies of the shows. Their portrayal is hardly encouraging. They sound scary, like they brainwash the kids. Though if they were like Mia, maybe they needed their brains washed.

We get referral names from the schools and talk to many families from an array of them, most of whom are happy, with some minor criticisms. But we’re troubled by the conflicting portrayals. Do we believe the parents, whom the schools themselves chose for referrals, or the news?

On the one hand, the media’s supposed to report with no bias. On the other hand, Woody Allen marries his daughter and the press still adores him. And just as schools pick their referral parents, reporters pick the kids they talk to. Kids with good stories would hardly sell. And Yvette’s friend was not referred by a school.

We try Maddy, from the alternative school. Yes, she says, I’ve had parents send students there as a last resort, and they do seem to change the kids, but I worry at what cost. She says they come back with this cultish vocabulary and they seem just a little too polite. “I hate to tame these kids, Claire.” Though I’m sure it wasn’t her intention, she’s just given the schools a recommendation—
a little too polite
? And psychotherapy’s got plenty of its own slang—projection, overdetermined, fixation.

We find schools in Utah, Montana, and Oregon, all far from civilization, with “trails to success” amid towering pines and cinnamon-hued boulders. We study brochures, scrutinize websites, and call parents till we’re dizzy. Some schools sound too warm and fuzzy. I don’t want the counselors to be her “friend,” I want her to feel like she’s hit a wall. And I want that wall as escape-proof and as far from anyone she knows as possible.

Once again, like Glinda in her shimmering bubble, Yvette appears at our door, in her impossibly high heels and red lipstick, carrying a bottle of wine and glasses.

“You don’t believe eet, Claire, she come ’ere, ze model! She going to be shot in LA and she want talk to you! She be at my ’ouse tomorrow night, I going to make a nice dinner for you.” She pours three glasses of wine. “Come, my darleeng, we going to ’ave a leelabeet wine, because you look terreeble. I tell you, you going to find Mia by zis weekend, I know eet! Salut!”

From her French leeps to God’s ears.

The rain pummels down outside Warren’s living room. His son Devon’s playing his favorite video game, Street Fighter. As usual, he’s dirty and full of scabs from fighting in school.

“You’re lucky, when I was a kid, my mom didn’t let me play video games,” I say, coughing in between words. My chest is on fire.

“That sucks. Here, play with me!”

I grab a controller and try to dodge the kicks coming at my character, an Asian girl in lime green. When Devon finally kicks the shit out of me, he jumps up, yelling, “Haha, I killed that dirty gook!”

I can’t believe the little snot just said that! I’m about to ask him where he heard that when Warren reaches over and roughs up his hair.

“Way to go, Dev, that’s what you gotta do to gooks, and niggers, get rid of
’em. They’re a total waste of space that steal our women and tax dollars. Remember those dudes Daddy beat a couple weeks ago after I picked you up from school? Those were fag bastards, which are just as bad as kikes, gooks, and niggers.”

My mouth goes dry and my high vanishes instantly as I realize that my new friends are probably the skinheads Aunt Vivian used to talk about. My heart is pounding so hard, I’m scared he’ll actually hear it.

The twisted and misshapen body of the neighbor Warren beat to a bloody pulp last weekend flashes to mind. It was surreal to watch, a kamikaze blur of arms and legs until the man spewed red like a fountain. And that was just for asking Warren to turn down his music.

I am so stupid, so blind. And so Jewish. For some reason, a memory from childhood comes up. Of standing at the kitchen counter picking out unwanted raisins from my cereal. To make sure I would have a completely raisin-free breakfast, I invented a game where the raisins were Nazis and the cereal flakes were Jews. I’d sift through my cereal and pluck out the Nazis, who shouted and protested that they were really Jews. But I was not fooled by their lies and would throw all the raisins in my clenched palm into the trash and slam the lid shut. I solved the raisin question!

But now the tables have turned and I wonder if the raisins know there’s one little cereal flake hiding in their midst. And what they would do if they found out.

I can’t get Warren’s words out of my head. Fag bastards? I was practically raised by lesbians and “fag bastards.” And my first kiss was with a “gook.”

The rain hammering down on the van and my flood of thoughts is driving me crazy. I count out the last of my money, a whopping two dollars and sixty-seven cents.

I hop out and walk to town in the rain. By the time I get there, I’m soaked and muddy. I also can barely see. I feel so weak and light-headed, I sit down on the side of the road in the rain and put my head between my knees. A spiked ball has settled in the back of my throat. Please, God, please, don’t let me faint out here like a dog in the dirt.

I need to get out of here but I have no money and nowhere to go. I’m scared. Of Brian, of Warren, of the fact that I keep fainting and on some days can barely breathe. I light a cigarette and try to come up with a plan, but I keep drawing blanks. The van seems impossibly far away now, so I call Brian’s work and a half-hour later, he pulls up, grinning. He got a big bonus today and we waste no time getting started on an eight-ball of coke.

“Mia! Are you sick? You sound sick, honey.” Paul rushes over to listen. He points to the caller ID box—she’s in a different area code.

“I need money.” Her voice is thin and scratchy.

“We’re afraid you’ll use cash for drugs. Aunt Vivian will bring you food, anything you need!”

“I want cash, you fucking bitch!” she suddenly screams shrilly.

It’s like a gunshot—she’s never,
never
cursed at me.

“If you won’t send me any fucking cash,” she yells, “then give me his number! I want my fucking old father’s phone number, bitch!”

“I—I don’t know it.” I’m stunned. “You’re going to ask him for money?”

“I want to tell him what an asshole he is for ruining our lives! I want him to die!” she shrieks and hangs up.