Maybe no one meant for this to sound like a threat, like the consequence for not giving up names was a trip to the mental hospital whose commercials Doug and I had grown up watching on TV and frequently imitated (“I don’t need your help,” “I can quit anytime!,” “Don’t worry—I’ll cut down,” with the ominous echo, “down, down, down”). Maybe the intent really was to act “in loco parentis” and to prevent future damage.
Mr. Bell’s final offer came after a long hiatus in the interrogation, during which I studied the chaos of his office and concluded that he was definitely a dick, but was probably also overworked. He spelled it out in between heavy pauses and grinds of his jaw: the possibility to reenroll after a “break,” during which he would recommend that I get in-patient treatment for my “emotional problems,” if I gave names. It would not have to be an expulsion. He indicated that my parents had not yet been notified, and it seemed like he felt this was a bargaining chip that gave him leverage. I could tell he was angry. I could tell what he thought of me. What I couldn’t tell was what he would do if I continued trying to deal with this by myself. I told him I needed the night to think and he finally let me go.
Even though it was long past lights out, and evidently something she’d been advised against doing, my dorm mother, a woman I barely knew, let me use the hall pay phone to place one call. “Witch hazel,” she said. “Witch hazel for those eyes.” Years later when I heard she had died of cancer the sudden crush of sadness surprised me.
The connection to Saudi Arabia fuzzed, clicked, and fumbled, and when my dad picked up the phone I could tell he’d been sleeping. It was early morning there. “Dad, I’m getting kicked out of school for drugs.”
“Well.”
The silence that followed was so long that I wondered if he was still there. “Dad?” My ability to imagine other possibilities faltered here. Had my dad not said what he said next, I don’t know what I would have done.
“We still love you.” And then, “We’re coming to get you.”
—
My uncle Dan, a first mate in the merchant marine, arrived back in town from his latest stint on a ship just in time to get a call from my parents asking him to go and pick me up from St. Stephen’s while they scrambled to arrange emergency travel visas back to the United States. For all of the angst I’ve felt about the disappearing men in my life, Dan’s arrival in the wake of my boarding school disaster was nothing short of a miracle. He was the uncle I knew best, and his showing up at the front door off and on throughout my childhood, most often in the bleak stretches when my dad was away, always felt like some unexpected treat. And now here he was, only two miserable days after my encounter with Mr. Bell, helping me toss the contents of my dorm room into crumbling produce boxes I’d stolen from behind the school kitchen and then load them into the back of his pickup truck. He looked shocked at first, and allowed me to remain completely silent for the first half hour of our trip back up I-35 to the empty house in Georgetown, but then he cranked up the volume on R.E.M.’s “Shiny Happy People,” gave me a fully ironic grin, and asked if I wanted tacos before we hit up the storage unit for a few essentials.
A slow backtracking movement began after my expulsion from boarding school. After liberating my bed, the TV, some boxes of dishes and towels, and a futon mattress he set up for himself in the study, Dan took on the job of babysitting me long-term, which somehow ended up not feeling awkward for me at all. We ate lots of fast food and watched The Simpsons and My So-Called Life together every night. He let me talk, or not talk, as I chose, and kept reassuring me that I was not the biggest failure he knew, despite the fact that Miss Healy, perhaps anticipating her own shit storm in the wake of my expulsion, had taken a parting shot before I left school and suggested to me coldly that perhaps, if my parents managed to stay together through all of this, I might eventually be able to complete my GED. Each morning I would wake up and have a few seconds of peace before the reality of the empty house sifted down over me, and what it meant, what I’d done to end up there.