My father and I drop her off at a treatment center later the same day. We walk through the yellow doors and say our good-byes as doctors take her vitals, ask her to open her mouth for a fat popsicle stick. This is the first time I check my mother into rehab, though it won’t be the last. The next time will be just after my father dies, and I’ll be wearing his monogramed shirt; I’ll sit in the seat he takes right now as he sandwiches my mother’s hand in both of his, saying, You’ve got this, baby.
When the doctors ask her to announce her drugs of choice, my mother lists them off, quietly. Embarrassed, I think. She rubs her arms like she’s freezing, rocking back and forth. It is a long list. I feel guilty being in this room. This part of her life is both mine and not mine.
My father doesn’t say much on the way home. I watch his steady hand on the wheel, the gold recovery bracelet he wears now—a new ruby on the triangle for each year he is clean. Three by now. I’m sorry I left you with this, he says. I didn’t know what to do.
It’s okay, I say.
I’m not solid yet, he says. Not well enough to see it. To be around it. He begins to cry, and shakes his head in a quick thrust, like a horse shooing off a fly. I can tell this hurts, and I know he’s been struggling. I know it by the way he picks up the phone when I call him sometimes. The drag of his voice when he says, I’m just tired, really, and his anger when I don’t believe him. I’m working so hard, but it’s so much fucking harder than you could ever know, he says, once he confesses to one drink, maybe two. And I hope you’ll never have to know it. He always hangs up on me.
In the car, I say, I think you’re solid, and I’m so proud of you.
Proud? Well—
It’s okay, I say.
I’ve got to head back to New York, he says, but I’ll be back for Christmas.
That night, after my father takes off, I call The Senior. I ask him to score the best drugs he can find. After I smoke and swallow everything he gives me, I leave his house and drive into a ditch off a road in Weston, Florida. I fall asleep like that, behind the wheel, in this U-shaped ditch, the rain patting my windshield. By morning, nobody has found me.
Where’s your mom? my half brothers want to know. They flew in to meet our father in Florida for the holidays.
With her family, in Texas, I say. She’s been gone two weeks.
We’re sitting on the gray couches in my Grandma Sitchie’s living room, smearing liver on crackers. Cousin Cindy is on the back patio, screaming into her phone, smoking. I would strangle her for a cigarette.
And she just dumped you on Christmas? the older one says.
Sucks, says the younger one.
I don’t like Texas, I say.
My father and brothers watch television all day long in Grandma’s living room. They exchange Hanukkah and Christmas gifts. A new phone with a twenty-four-hour sports radio, a wooden backscratcher—So you can stop using the spaghetti spoon, Pops. My father gives all three of us wads of cash.
I miss my mother. The hand-pressed paper over her presents, origami wrapped. The bows that shed glitter in a purple mist. She writes cards for every gift, writes cards for every person she’s ever met. Her writing, those loops and crosses—I love you to the moon and back—I miss her.
Here, says my older brother. My girlfriend gave me this to give to you. It’s a bag of Sour Patch Kids. Merry Christmas.
I drive to my mother’s treatment center. She’s made it through detox, and Christmas is my first allowed visiting day. A nurse leads me through a long hall to the backyard. The people inside stare at me. They must know I am my mother’s, I think. We look the same. There’s no mistaking it.
Outside, a fountain spits into the sky. The sun is beating down, and I’m sweating in my chair. I peel off my sweater. Pills of cashmere stick to my forearms like fly tape.
I hear her before I see her—Merry Christmas, baby—behind me. I stand up and turn around as she opens her arms. We hold each other so close her hair is in my mouth. I crumple into her. I miss you, I say. It’s all I can seem to say. The tears come down my face, and, for once, I let it happen.
My mother speaks to me slowly, measured. I can tell she’s medicated so she won’t fever again. We talk about other things: the weather, the news, other patients inside the center. Good, good people. You’d like them. Some of them are around your age. I tell her about Grandma Sitchie’s house, the liver, the Sour Patch Kids. Before I get to ask any more questions, our time is up.
Take care of yourself, baby, she says. She picks up a glass of water from a lawn table and sips it. She holds my hand a moment longer. You doing okay? She is earnest in her question.
Of course, I say. I sit up straighter. I smile.
Make your numbers tomorrow, she says. One of the biggest shopping days of the year.
That trout. I wrestled with the hook to free it; I was in a hurry. Easy, like this, said my mother, and she did it in one motion, a popping sound. The hook had pierced my finger, and I sucked the blood so hard my fingertip went white. I tossed the fish back into the mud of the pond, and the two of us watched it shoot off like a single strand of tinsel in the sun before it disappeared.
What I mean to say is, it lived.
PEOPLE LIKE THEM
I have a famous uncle in prison in northern Florida, a second uncle locked up in the middle of Texas, and a third who will join this club in a year or two. It doesn’t matter why.
Today, I’m visiting the Texas uncle, Uncle Kai, the one with the habits, the one without God, and my Auntie T says, Careful now, you won’t be let in with an underwire bra.
Why not? I ask.
Because a bra could be used as a weapon.
It’s all I have in my suitcase—this bra with the wire in it. I am thirteen and my padded, white, diaper of a bra has a wire running all the way through it. I’m too embarrassed to tell my family this, to show it to them, so I decide to visit prison for the first time braless.
I walk through security with my arms crossed over my chest. I walk like this all the way through a building that smells like microwavable burritos and bleach, until we’re directed outside, to an enormous barren yard, where my uncle sits, smoking a Newport, at a picnic table.
I don’t want him to hug me, because of my chest.
I say, Hello.
He tells me about the latest visitors. How a group of wives shat balloons full of black tar heroin into the toilets. How he was going to get his very own guitar string tattoos, or learn how to give them. How lately, people have been smuggling juices from the kitchen in order to make alcohol.
That sounds nice, I say. Complicated.
This is the last memory I have with my Uncle Kai. Here, he is still mellow, himself. Soon, he’ll be released, take up new chemical drugs, ride a stone horse monument in the middle of Parkland, and beat my mother up on the side of the road. Soon, he will threaten to take out his whole family with explosives and black magic. Us, I mean.
It’s not so bad here, he says.
The blank Texas sky reminds me of a green screen, like I could cut out his body and move him anywhere else, drop him into any other world.
We share a hamburger from a security-monitored vending machine. I break mine into little pieces. The meat is a grayish purple with pockmarks, and he chews like an animal given a treat. We look alike, my uncle and I. Gummy smiles, deep eyes, the ragged edge around our nails where neither one of us can ever stop picking.
At twenty-two years old, I begin teaching inmates in a county jail.
I prepare notebooks with no staples, no paper clips. Rubber golf pencils. I walk through the metal detectors with ease, wired bra and all, drop my belongings into little plastic crates and clear baggies and wait for an officer’s eyes to magnify behind them.