Florian's Gate (42 page)

“Philadelphia was the wrong place to take a kid with a drug problem. I guess we should have figured that out before, but Mom, Dad, and I never really complained about where the company was going to send us next. We knew without ever talking about it that this was just one of the prices we had to pay. And no matter how bad it was, we knew that it wasn't ever going to be for too long. But Philly was bad. Really bad. The only good thing I remember about Philadelphia was that as the problems with Chuckie got worse, my parents and I kept growing closer and closer together.

“Chuckie started selling drugs in Philly—or at least he got
caught
the first time there. I don't know if he'd already started in Phoenix or not. Philadelphia was something from another world, though, with guys out of your worst nightmare hanging around the school fence, dripping with gold jewelry and selling everything. I mean everything. And Chuckie was into it all.”

“It must have been awful for you,” Katya said, her voice carrying a shared pain.

“You can't imagine. We'd get called down to the police station in the middle of the night, and I'd go down with Dad because Mom was having hysterics and I didn't want him to have to go alone. When my baby brother would come out, sometimes he was still drugged up. Sometimes he'd been sick all over himself, or had somebody else in the tank get sick on him. It seemed like we were in court almost every week.

“Finally the judge gave Dad an ultimatum. Either Chuckie went into a state-run rehabilitation program for under-age drug offenders, or he was going to reform school. I know it sounds strange, but that's really the first time that any of us admitted that the problem was out of control. Things like that happened to other people, not us. But this time it was
us, and it wasn't just out of our control, it was out of our hands. Dad signed the papers and Chuckie went to a hospital for drugged-out teenage criminals.

“It just gets worse and worse,” Katya murmured.

“That's the way it is with an addict. Alcoholic, druggie—they're all addicted, and the problems are the same. You wouldn't believe the letters we got from him in the beginning—how they were beating him and treating him horribly. Those letters just tore my mother up. The people we spoke to on the phone didn't help any; they all had the same deadpan delivery that made them sound like they'd do anything for a buck. Most of them were recovered addicts, and they knew all about the tricks the kids used to try and get out, or try and stay high.

“When we picked him up six weeks later, they warned us that Chuckie displayed all the symptoms of a recividist.”

“Denial,” Katya said.

“Right. They say that the biggest step to help a recovering addict is for the addict to admit that he or she has a problem. Chuckie never admitted once in all this time that he was taking
anything
. Not drinking, smoking, snorting, anything. Not even after we started finding his stash and pipes and empty bottles and roaches all over the house. Never. It was all a big conspiracy. And the people at the center were right. As soon as Chuckie got out, he started up again. Nothing at all had changed, except once he was back he stopped trying to hide it at all.”

Jeffrey's mind went back to the uncounted days and nights—the sounds of his dad yelling and his mom crying and Chuckie cursing. At last his parents stopped trying to confront Chuckie at all, and the boy would come home late at night in a drug-induced stupor, crash around the house, and finally fall into bed, unchallenged.

In January there was yet another visit to the court, after his brother—still too young to have a license—tried to drive the family car through a concrete bridge support. The dust
settled just in time for one more move, the last his parents would ever make. By then they were involved in Al-Anon support groups and classes on co-dependency, learning how to deal with their son's addiction, struggling to keep their marriage and their home intact.

There was none of the usual joking and half-worried excitement about this move. There was no time for that, no place, no energy. The three of them went through the accustomed motions with grim determination. Chuckie came and went like a wraith, occasionally sobering up long enough to realize that their world no longer revolved around him.

The day after they arrived in Jacksonville, Florida, they laid down the law to Charles—all three of them, together. They formed a united front and gave him the ultimatum in no uncertain terms. He was moving out.

Charles was told that an apartment had been rented for him near the university. A bedroom was going to be made up for him in their new house, but he could stay there only if he allowed himself to be tested for drugs and alcohol every day for two months. The only way he would be welcome in their home was if he was sober.

Charles whined and begged and pleaded and cried and finally stomped his feet and screamed curses and punched a hole in the dining room wall. He spent only one night in their home; he came in around dawn, falling down drunk. Jeffrey and his father poured him into the new family car, drove him over to his new furnished studio, and dumped him fully clothed on the bed. They pinned a note to his shirt—since he was too drunk or stoned to understand what anyone was telling him—saying that if he was kicked out of this apartment, for any reason whatsoever, he was on his own. Charles missed seeing his father and his brother drive back home, both of them dry-eyed and grim-faced, neither having any more tears to shed.

“I left God behind in Philadelphia,” Jeffrey went on. “I can still remember the exact moment. I was packing up Mom's
porcelain figurines—she would buy herself one new figurine each time we moved. She loved them, she really did. She'd spend hours taking them out of this display case we had in the living room and dusting them off and just looking at them. It was her concession for having to move, and it gave her something nice to look forward to. She'd spend days and days going around all the shops in the new town, coming home with little pictures she'd take with her Polaroid. And the higher up the ladder Dad went, the nicer the figurines became. It was the one thing she always made us pack ourselves, and we always drove to our new home with them stowed somewhere safe in our car.

“So there I was, packing up the figurines, and I had this mental image of deciding it was time to stick God back somewhere in a box too—one that I never intended to open again. Nothing I'd heard in Sunday school or church ever got me prepared for what we were going through, and nobody was able to help me. The Bible sure didn't.”

Katya did not contradict him as he expected. Instead she asked, “What happened to Charles?”

Jeffrey took a deep breath and steeled himself. “Charles wasn't exactly what you'd call pleased to all of a sudden lose his family. Only I doubt that he thought of us as family by then—more like a haven and a source of money and somebody to beat on emotionally.”

Katya nodded.

“Anyway, we'd get calls from the landlord or the police to ask if we knew that Charles had been here and done this or that. My parents absolutely refused to get involved. Every once in a while Charles would call and scream over the phone about abandonment and heartlessness, but they really stuck to their guns. Al-Anon had taught them how to detach from Charles' problems. After about nine months or so, just as I was getting ready to go off to college, I started seeing smiles around the house again, hearing laughter. You can't imagine
how nice it is to hear laughter until you've lived in a house without it for a year or so.”

“I can imagine it,” Katya said softly.

He looked at her. “Yeah, maybe you can.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Ever since I've gotten here, I've been coming to grips with what lies behind that silent strength of yours.”

This time it was different. This time the defense mechanism did not automatically freeze him out. There was no indifference, no denial, no drawing away. She simply said, “Finish your story.”

“Okay. So Chuckie, I mean Charles, began going to greater and greater extremes. He got kicked out of his apartment, but by then he had a girl who took him in. Charles was growing up into this really good-looking kid. And there was something else about him, something other than his looks that drew the girls like a magnet.”

“Certain women are attracted by guys with those kinds of problems,” Katya said. “They usually have a tough external shell, and this type of girl wants to work her way inside. It's almost a motherly sort of reaction.”

“You've met guys like this yourself.”

“Every girl has. She can be attracted by the toughness, and maybe pride herself on her ability to understand this man that the rest of the world can't. Women in such situations put up with an enormous amount of abuse—physical or emotional—infidelity, unreliability, whatever. And still she works very hard to keep pleasing this man. She's never confident of her hold on him, except for this idea that she alone understands the soft, inner, hidden man.”

“That's beautiful,” Jeffrey said.

“It's tragic,” Katya corrected.

“No, I mean the way you expressed it. Your insight.”

She did not deny it. “Sometimes I feel as though I can see things and understand things that the rest of the world just keeps on trying to shut out. Maybe it's part of the gift of
learning compassion, coming to understand more through trying to care more.”

He turned and looked away.

“Did I say something wrong?”

“No,” he sighed. “It just really hit home.”

She waited a moment, and when he did not go on, she said, “Finish your story. Please.”

“About two months after I started classes,” Jeffrey continued, his voice a monotone, “I got a call from Mom. All the time she'd spent and the work she'd done to rebuild her life had been destroyed. She was crying so hard she couldn't talk, and finally had to give the phone over to Dad. He sounded worse than she did, really hollow. At two o'clock in the morning, Charles had gotten drunk at some party and climbed a tree. And he'd slipped out and fallen on his back and broken his spine.”

“Oh, Jeffrey.”

“He was paralyzed from the waist down,” he went on, rushing now, pushing it out. “I listened to Dad tell me, and I wasn't thinking about Charles or Chuckie or whoever he was. I was thinking about my folks. And me. If they weren't strong enough to do the obvious, I was. I just cut him out. Right there. Cut him out completely. I didn't have a brother anymore. My folks were just too weak to do it. So I was going to do it for them. I told my dad I wasn't coming to the hospital, not then, not ever. And I didn't want them to mention his name around me ever again. As far as I was concerned, my brother was gone. Dead. Out of my life forever.”

“What did your parents say?”

“That's a funny thing. Dad didn't object, and Mom never mentioned it. Not ever.”

“And you never saw your brother again?”

“Once. I went to see him once more.”

It was after his grandmother asked him, just before his departure for England. His brother was back in the hospital
for surgery. All those years of sitting in a wheelchair had given him bedsores, and they'd become infected.

That was the worst part of going to see him, having to do it in the hospital. It was almost as though his grandmother's request had rolled back time, pushed him back nine years to the hospital visit he'd refused to make.

Charles was parked in a special air-bed, an incredible contraption with a pump built into its base. It pushed air continually up through a load of silicon sand into a bottom sheet of fine-mesh nylon; it let the air out in a continual cool blast that ballooned the sheet's slackness up and around Charles's limp body.

The years had softened Charles's features, but not as much as Jeffrey had expected. There was a slight blurring to the strong lines, but part of this was caused by the Demerol that Charles had control over. He had an electric pump connected to his IV, and every fifteen seconds or so Charles would push the button and give himself a dose. Jeffrey couldn't help but grin when he finally figured out why Charles kept such a grip on the button; at first Jeffrey thought it was for calling the slowest nurse in history. Charles would wait until a bleep announced that his next dose was up and charged. Knowing Charles, he'd have told the doctors he was in terminal pain. Giving that guy control over his own drug supply was the silliest thing Jeffrey had ever heard of.

That set the tone for their meeting, at least on Jeffrey's side. Charles acted as though he had seen his brother the day before—sort of bored and casual and not really concerned one way or the other. Jeffrey was standing there, trying to come up with something to say, when he caught sight of himself in the mirror across from Charles's bed.

His button-down Oxford shirt was crumpled from a day of running around, his top button undone and his tie at half-mast. His shoulders were hunched up as though he were getting ready to charge the line, and there were worry-frowns creasing his forehead.

Then his mother had appeared in the door, all bright and brown from her daily tennis and solid in her happiness. That amazed Jeffrey more than anything, how both his mom and his dad had somehow recovered from all the stuff life had thrown at them, and kept hold of both their happiness and their love for each other.

His brother took his cue like a consummate actor and folded inside the bed's balloon-sheets like he'd been hit with a sudden attack of real live pain. Jeffrey stepped back, watched his mother straighten her shoulders and take a breath and do the bravest thing he'd ever seen her do, which was meet her son with a smile. It was a forced smile, and the brightness had a brittle, lacquered quality to it. But it was still a smile, and the determination that she showed in not allowing Charles to drag her down into the pit again left Jeffrey speechless.