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Sprint for the door of the house and get there exactly thirty-four minutes late for our mandatory Friday night meeting. I half expect to see Billy waiting for me on the porch, but he's already gone. I notice that I'm disappointed, which is my first clue that the next time the phone rings and says DON'T ANSWER, I probably will anyway. But the thought is a fleeting one. I have bigger problems than Billy right now.

I gingerly shut the door behind me and shrink as small as I can as I slink into the room and sit down against the wall. Everybody looks at me for a second and then looks away. I feel the judgment shimmering in the room like heat waves rising off asphalt in summer. And from Susan it's more than heat waves, it's laser beams. Laser beams of condemnation. Objective laser beams, of course. Nonjudgmental laser beams.

Violet gives me a tight-lipped smile that's meant to be reassuring, but just looks anxious.

After group, Susan calls me into her office.

“Please sit down, Beth.”

I sit on the lumpy love seat that makes my knees stick up funny in front of me.

“I'm worried about you,” she goes on, an off-center deep wrinkle of concern etched between her eyebrows. The wrinkle always fascinates me. I can't stop staring. Why is it pushed off to the left that way?

“It is not about an isolated incident. I'm sure you're upset about the situation that occurred today with Jacob Hill. I want to let you know that we located him and he is being well cared for. But such an emotional investment is hazardous at this stage of your recovery, which is why it's against the rules.”

She pauses and I wait for her to go on, but she just looks at me so I assume it is my turn.

“I'm really sorry I was late. I had an ugly mishap with a chemical straightener.”

I look her straight in the eye with what I imagine is a neutral facial expression.

You have to be careful around Susan. She can try to bluff you into showing your hand. It drives her crazy that I won't emotionally flay myself for her and let her stick Post-its on my every memory. She takes it as an insult that I don't welcome her into my most intimate, wet heart spots.

“Beth, I'm forced to take disciplinary measures. I don't want to, but I think you need to be aware that there are consequences for your choices. I'm writing you up for your tardiness at the meeting today. I need to bring your attention to the fact that this is your third write-up. This is it. One more and we'll be forced to terminate your residency here.”

“I understand.”

“Beth, I urge you to look at yourself. Try to see this as an opportunity to change your habits, to change your choices, and to therefore change the outcome of your choices. You are so close to achieving what you have worked hard for.

Stop being your own worst enemy here. Let us help you help yourself.”

Trying to keep a hold on my running brain exhausts me. I don't have any fight left. I feel like I walked to the reservation and back. I have to press my hands down into the seat next to me just to prop myself up straight.

“You're right. I'll meditate on that.”

“You can go now.”

With my last scraps of energy, I shuffle down the hallway to my room. When I get there I find Violet and Buck sitting cross-legged next to each other on Violet's bed. They look up at me anxiously.

“Nice hair,” I say to Buck, who sports a freshly shaved head.

“I feel like a new man.”

I shut the door behind me. There are no locks on the doors here. There are no carpets on the hardwood floors. If you stand outside a door you can hear every word said inside. It can make you crazy. But if it doesn't, you get used to it.

Buck holds Violet's delicate, pale hand in her square, calloused one. This is a new development. Not terribly shocking, but new. I lie down on the bed facing away from them.

“We got rid of him for you.”

“He'll come back.”

“What's going on? What happened today, Bebes?”

“You found out more than I did. What did I think, I was going to catch Jake and have some big reunion scene? I'm so sorry cry cry. I love you cry cry. I'm having your baby cry cry. Like it's my fault. It's not. Like I can stop him from going crazy again. I can't. I know that. I read. I'm not stupid.”

I roll onto my back and gaze up at a hairy spider on the ceiling, wondering if it is poisonous. If the spider turns right, I tell myself, Jake will get out and everything will be okay and we'll be happy. The spider stays frozen there for a minute and then decidedly turns left and runs along the seam between the ceiling and the wall. It's childish anyway, how I'm still looking for signs. From who? Signs from who?

I look over at Vi's handmade Buddhist placard.
Help is not on the way.

Vi says, “Are you, like, using a metaphor I don't understand right now?”

“Nope. Not a metaphorical baby. A real baby. Help is not on the way.”

Buck startles me, leaping up from the bed and putting an arm up as if in victory.

“Yes!” she says and runs over to where I'm lying on my bed. She grabs my whole skull in her hands and plants a big kiss on my forehead. Then she leaps back across the room, topples Violet, and sticks her tongue in her ear, making her squeal.

Violet rights herself. “Stop it, Buck. It's not funny. What are you going to do, Bebes?” she asks, twirling a black snake of hair around her finger and blinking her wide brown eyes with lashes so long they look like zebra eyes.

Buck sits up and gets serious, with her legs wide apart and her elbows on her knees. “I'm not trying to be funny.

Help is right here. We're havin' a baby. If it's a boy, will you name it after me?

“Listen here,” she continues, laying on the Alabama accent, which waxes and wanes and is definitely waxing. “Me and Vi, we're meaning to tell you that I'm coming with you guys to San Francisco. My parole conditions are nearly complete. I've got less than a week. And if that nutter can pull it together, bring him, too, and if he can't, hell, I'll be your baby's daddy. We're gonna blow this town. We're gonna start over.”

“This has always been the plan, Bebes.”

“Start over,” I repeat. I look for the spider, but it's gone.

San Francisco. It was where we were supposed to go. I don't know how we wound up here. Aaron promised me San Francisco. Fog that rolls over the hills like cappuccino foam. Little pink and white and blue houses. Silver towers that sparkle in the sunlight like Oz.

“But I can't go now. What am I going to do about Jesus? I'm not leaving him.”

“Only Jesus can get Jesus out of that place,” says Buck. “It's not up to you.”

Violet says, “I suppose you should at least go down there tomorrow and see what the damage is.”

I have no doubt the damage is significant. No one does damage with quite Jake's flair. When I first met him in detox the scar on his face was still an angry gash crisscrossed with stiff black stitches. I was sweating as the dispensary nurse slowly decreased my Dilaudid, but not slowly enough, because I gripped the phone between my two bandaged hands and called Billy Coyote from the pay phone and wept and begged him please please come visit. Please please smuggle me some pills, some anything.

Billy said, “Of course. Of course, Baby. Don't I always take care of you? It's me you come to. It's always me.”

He never showed. And that night my eyes just leaked tears, didn't stop for anything, and I woke crying in the pale predawn and wondered if I could somehow shred the sheets to hang myself. Wondered where I could hang myself from even if I got the sheets shredded. I wanted to gnaw my wrists open with my own teeth. If I could break apart a ballpoint pen in such a way that I could sever my jugular vein with the jagged plastic.

I went to the group room and there was Jake, awake and watching
Jesus Christ Superstar
.

Every spare moment, he watched
Jesus Christ Superstar
. I thought it was so funny how he was completely obsessed with that movie, with its groovy, multiracial, seventies cast dancing against a background of white sand, their hair blowing wild in the desert wind. Unable to sleep, covered in the cold sweat of a nasty detox, I stayed up all night with him that night, watching the bare-chested and bell-bottomed apostles look on as a wide-faced Mary Magdalene anointed a movie star Jesus.

Since he still claimed he was Jesus then, I asked him, “Doesn't it bug you to watch that? Isn't it like being a gangster and watching
The Godfather
or something? It must get on your nerves that they're getting it wrong.”

“No, no. They're getting it right. There's so much music and golden light. My hands hurt; they're throbbing and cold and hot.”

My hands. It was my hands that felt that way.

“Somewhere not so far is an ocean you can't hear yet,” he said. And then he held me as I wept and the sunrise shot the dingy room through with clean, rosy light.

A few days later, he wavered about being God, and in a week more he said he had just been crazy. Anyway, it was the worst morning of my life and I lived through it with Jake and a bunch of bell-bottom-clad hippies singing in the desert. As we stumbled through the next few weeks, he tried to teach me to play chess in between group therapy and grief counseling. By the time we each graduated to Serenity, I wouldn't allow that I loved him. It was far too soon for that. But I knew he'd saved me nonetheless.

So maybe I can't save him back, but I can't just leave him, either.

I go to the bathroom to give Buck and Violet a chance to say good night. I wash my face twice and mechanically brush my teeth. I open my toiletry bag, eye the amber bottles of my meds, and then zip it shut again without taking my evening dose. Because when you're going to have a baby you stop taking truckloads of psychotropic medications designed to balance your tilted brain chemicals. Pills are bad for babies. Pills are bad for babies, but then what happens to moms?

I
wake up and Violet is still sleeping, breathing softly with her covers pulled up nearly to her eyes. My breasts seem to be growing exponentially bigger by the day. I lie in bed and push my fingertips into the sides of them to test the soreness. Waves of ache shoot through me. I sit up slowly, expecting nausea, expecting something. But there's nothing. I'm waiting for symptoms, becoming hyperaware of every subtle itch and twitch and shift in my body.

I get out of bed with a renewed sense of purpose. At least Jake isn't at Camp Pendleton like he wanted to be. Though I do feel sad for him when I think of him striding into that office expecting his life to change, expecting a dramatic splash of transformation, and what he got instead was slapped into another hospital. He must have felt so betrayed.

I'm rolling the dice by missing another morning at school. I'll have to attend two nights next week to make up the hours for missing yesterday afternoon and this morning, which means twelve-hour days. Miss any more than this and they may penalize me by pushing my graduation back a month. I can't let that happen. I don't think I have another month in me at that place. I am only living through it right now because the finish line is so close.

Be a can-do guy. Eyes on the prize, Bebe. Eyes on the prize, sweetheart.

Like Rick used to say. And maybe Rick was a scumbag, but he managed to be successful selling hot tubs in Toledo. You can learn a thing or two from scumbags about getting what you want.

I get all brisk and directed. I take a shower, put on a somber sweater, and tie my hair back in a ponytail. I try to imagine that I'm someone a doctor might take seriously, someone to be trusted, someone who'll be allowed to visit the patient. I'm a can-do guy. Eyes on the prize.

I creep into the room Buck shares with Missy and wake her. She always sleeps with her boots by the side of the bed for an emergency or an earthquake or just out of habit in case she has to run. She reminds me of Jake this way, who takes it a step further and often doesn't take his boots off at all. The house around us starts to stir. Someone showers on the other side of the wall. I shake Buck and drag her silently back to my room and we both wake Violet for a conference.

“I need you to call the hospital and say you're Susan Schmidt. Tell them that his sister is coming over and that he should be permitted to see me.”

“There's some kind of number,” Violet says sleepily.

“What do you mean?”

“There's a number that she uses to identify herself. I've heard her call before. It's, like, her license number or something. It's on the pad by her computer. You need that.”

“And this is why you want a felon as your friend. Who's your daddy now? I'll get into that office and Vi will make the phone call. How long do you think it'll take you to get over there?”

“VA hospital is, like, in Westwood. Crosstown rush hour. I don't know. An hour? Six hours?”

Buck makes a salute. “Done. We got your back here, soldier.”

I pack my school uniform into the same bag Buck packed for me yesterday, then walk out of the house and down the three blocks to where my car is parked. I slide into the driver's seat and throw my bag on the floor of the passenger side because I don't want to smush Kitty Hawk Barbie, who is still in a seated position riding shotgun but has toppled so that one of her wings bends dangerously underneath her. I sit her up straight and point us west.