Beautiful Boy (25 page)

The headmaster says:

"Will this year's first graders please stand."

They do. And then he says:

"Will next year's second graders please step up."

Now it's Daisy's grade's turn.

"Will this year's kindergarten class please stand."

Daisy, in a soft blue dress with smocking—the dress was Nancy's when she was a little girl—rises along with her classmates.

"Will next year's first-grade class please step up."

There is thunderous applause and foot stomping. This is the school's tradition. Daisy and the other kindergarteners, when they step up to first grade, are greeted by a deafening roar. It's a poignant
moment when the bottom tier is empty except for the kindergarten teachers, who are alone, anticipating a fresh group of five-year-olds who will arrive in the fall.

Inside me there is a searing void. The contradiction between the innocence of the children up there and my absent son is almost too much to contain inside one brain at one time.

After the step-up ceremony come speeches and the commencement of the eighth graders, who will begin high school in the fall. I am not the only parent with tears, but I cannot help thinking that mine are unique. I watch Jasper and Daisy dressed up—Jasper in the white oxford with its itchy collar, Daisy in her grandmother's dress, white socks, and Mary Janes—standing with their classmates, immaculate, nervous, and excited, and I remember Nic shining, too, standing tall, his life ahead of him. Where can he be?

Outside, the sky is streaked with smears of blue, but the sign that the storm has passed—and that summer is coming—does not lift my mood. I am in the kitchen boiling water for tea. The phone rings. My anxious reaction is recognizable. Who else would call this early in the morning? It must be Nic. And yet as I reach for the telephone, I tell myself, "No, it's not Nic," so as to ward off the bitter disappointment when it isn't.

It isn't.

"It's Sylvia Robertson," a woman says, her voice chirpy. "I'm Jonathan's mother. I'm the team mom for the Angry Tuna."

Jasper's swim team mom asks if we can work at the snack bar at next weekend's meet.

"Of course. We'd be happy to."

I begin to hang up.

"Go Angry Tuna," she says gaily.

"Go Angry Tuna."

The kitchen is still.

Along with china and teacups and glassware, a photograph dominates the open shelves over the sink. In the snapshot, we are on a boat on a lake somewhere. My father, wearing sunglasses and a fisherman's hat, waves and smiles. Daisy, on Karen's lap, is a baby. Her face is hidden underneath a wide-brimmed sun hat. The boys are in the foreground, smiling at the camera. Jasper, who just got a
haircut so that his brown bangs rim his eager face, and Nic, with a short buzz and gleaming braces. My boys. The picture has a stamp on the back, 10 12 '96, which puts Nic at fourteen.

Where is he?

Meanwhile, over the hill, at Karen's parents' canyonside home, Don has just emerged from his lair and he settles into his regular sunny corner of the living room. Wearing old boat shoes and a threadbare T-shirt and shorts, he sits in a rattan chair reading about Admiral Lord Nelson. Nancy is busy down the winding pathway in her garden when it dawns on her that the wash is probably done. Her pruning shears tucked into a leather holster on a belt, she trudges up to the house.

Removing her gardening gloves, Nancy enters through the lower door into the downstairs and goes into the packed basement with its distinctive smell of mold and laundry soap. Past the washing machine and the clothes dryer, there is a sewing room and a small bedroom, her son's when he was a teenager. There are bows mounted on the wall that were gifts from friends—members of the Blackfoot Indian tribe—to her parents. The room is now a spare where the grandchildren sleep when they spend the night.

Before she can transfer the load of clean sheets and pillowcases to the dryer, she has to unload the tumble of clean clothes. She piles them, for later folding, on the bed.

And gasps. There's a body under a pile of woolen blankets. Gathering herself, she looks closer, sees that it's Nic, a vibrating skeleton, sleeping, undisturbed by her cry.

"Nic," she exclaims. "What are..."

Haunted, with black eyes, fully dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, Nic looks at her. He sits up.

"What? Nan..."

Both of them are stunned.

"What are you doing?"

"Nancy," he begins. "I..."

"Are you all right?"

He gets up, grabs his bag, stammers, apologizes.

"Nic, no," Nancy says. "It's all right. It's just that you scared me to death."

"I'm ... I'm sorry."

"Nic, are you on drugs?"

He says nothing.

"You can stay anytime you want. It's all right. Just tell me. Don't sneak. You almost gave me a heart attack."

He leaves the room and heads up the stairs. She follows him.

"Have you eaten? Can I make you something?"

"No, thanks. Maybe a banana. If it's all right."

"Nic ... What can I do to help?"

There are tears in her eyes. She blinks. "Just tell me what I can do."

Nic mumbles something incoherent, an apology, and takes a banana from the basket in the kitchen. He says thank you and mutters I'm sorry and then walks briskly out the front door and up the driveway.

"Nic!"

She hurries after him, calls to him, but he doesn't stop.

By the time Nancy reaches the street, he's gone.

Nancy calls to tell me what happened. By now Don is hovering nearby, listening to the news. Nancy has every right to be furious, but she apologizes to
me.
"I'm sorry," she says. "I didn't know what to do."

I assure her that there was nothing to do.

"I'm sorry he scared you," I say. "I'm sorry you had to see him like that."

Nancy isn't listening. "I tried to get him to stay," she says. "He looked..." She stops herself and becomes choked up. "It makes me so damn mad!"

On a crisp afternoon a few days after the step-up ceremony, I'm at a park where Daisy's grade is having an end-of-the-school-year party. A friend—a teacher and Daisy's friend's father—is leading the children in a game of his invention inspired by J. K. Rowling. His version of quidditch involves four balls of varying sizes substituting for the bludgers and quaffles and a Frisbee for the golden snitch.

I am present, but I am absent. Parents can only be as happy as
their unhappiest child, according to an old saw. I'm afraid it's true.

Out of breath, Daisy runs up to me. "We need you on our team," she says. "Come on." She grabs my hand and pulls me into the game.

There is no news for another week, and then Nic calls his godfather, who invites him over to his house near Twin Peaks. Aghast at Nic's appearance—"he looks like he could blow away in a strong wind"—he cooks him a pot roast, which Nic devours. He begs Nic to get help.

"I'll be fine, I've stopped using," Nic lies. "I just need to be on my own for a while."

After Nic leaves, my friend calls. He tells me about the visit and then grows quiet. "At least I got him to eat something," he says.

There's no news for a fortnight, nothing but a perpetual state of anxiety.

Again I check jails to see if he has been arrested. Again I call hospital emergency rooms. Then Karen's brother sees him, or thinks he sees him, on Haight Street, huddling on a street corner, shifty, jittery, and suspicious-looking.

1 am beside myself—uncomprehending, terrified. Nothing in my life has prepared me for the incapacitating worry when I don't know where he is. I imagine Nic on the streets of San Francisco, like a wild animal, wounded and desperate. Like some off-the-deep-end anesthesiologist presiding over his own brain surgery, Nic trying to manage the flow of drugs in order to achieve a high, which rapidly and necessarily becomes less about euphoria and more about avoiding the hell of withdrawal.

In the drawer of the old desk in his room, I find a scribbled journal entry in a marbled composition notebook that lists a typical day's menu.

1½ grams speed
an eighth ounce of mushrooms
2 klonopin
3 codeine
2 valium
2 hits of e

Back in my office, I try to write, but I'm catatonic. Karen comes in and sees me, sitting and staring, and she sighs. She is holding a small slip of paper.

"Look," she says, handing me a canceled check. It's made out to Nic. The shaky signature is an obvious forgery.

I say, "He wouldn't..." but even as I say it, I know I'm wrong. Karen dearly loves Nic, and she is stunned and wounded and fuming.

"Poor Nic," I say. "He wouldn't do this if he was in his right mind."

"Poor Nic?"

She angrily turns to leave the room. I call after her, "But this is not Nic."

She looks at me and shakes her head. She doesn't want to hear it. I can't make excuses for him much longer.

I spend several more nights in anguish and dread.

Then, one night, the kids asleep, Karen having read to them from the
Arabian Nights,
she has the newspaper in bed and I am writing in my office when I hear something.

The front door?

With a racing heart, I go to investigate and collide with Nic in the hallway.

He grunts hardly a "hey," then rushes past me, aiming for his bedroom, though he stops briefly when I demand, "Nic? Where have you been?"

He acts put upon, snarling, "What's your problem?"

"I asked you a question. Where have you been?"

He responds with all the incredulous indignation he can muster, then peers over his shoulder at me, mumbles "Nowhere," and continues into his room.

"Nic!" I follow him, entering the smoky red cavern, where Nic is opening and slamming dresser drawers. His eyes scan the bookshelves in the closet. He has on a T-shirt, red, faded, and ripped-up jeans. His red Purcells are untied. No socks. His movements are frantic. He's obviously searching for something—I assume money, drugs.

"What are you doing?"

He glares at me.

"Don't worry," he says. "I've been sober for five days."

I grab his bag, which he has set on the bed, unzip it, and rummage through the pockets of his jeans, unrolling his socks, shaking out blankets, and unscrewing a flashlight. (It is filled with batteries.) While I do this, Nic leans on the doorjamb, blankly watching, his arms folded across his chest. Finally, with a barely perceptible acrid smirk, he says, "You can stop, OK." He gathers up a pile of clothes, stuffs them back into the canvas bag. "I'm leaving."

I ask him to sit down and talk.

"If it's about rehab, there's nothing to say."

"Nic—"

"Nothing to say."

"You have to try again. Nic. Look at me."

He doesn't.

"You're throwing everything away."

"It's mine to throw away."

"Don't throw it away."

"There's nothing to throw away."

"Nic!"

He pushes past me and without looking up says, "I'm sorry." He rushes down the hall.

When he passes Karen, he says, "Hey, Mama," and she stares at him, uncomprehending.

Karen stands with me, still holding the newspaper. We're both looking out the window as he disappears down the deserted street.

Short of tackling him, what can I do?

Though I want to hold on to him, and though I dread the haunting vacancy and debilitating worry when he's gone, I don't do a thing.

I am awake at four
A.M.,
along with other parents of drug-addicted children, children who are—we don't know where.

It is another interminable big-moon night. Suddenly I think, It's Nic's birthday. Today my son turns twenty.

I fight off stabbing urges to second-guess myself. There must
have been something I could have tried. I should never have let him leave. I should try to find him.

By now we have been told a hundred times that drug addiction is a progressive disease. I still don't quite get it until the next morning when the phone rings. It's Julia, Nic's girlfriend, whom I met last winter in Boston. Now, with Nic gone, their China plans by the wayside, she is calling from her family's home in Virginia, her voice breaking up. She has been crying. "Nic stole hypodermic needles from my mom's house when we visited here last month," she tells me.

"Needles?"

"They were for her cancer medication. He also stole morphine." She sobs.

"I don't know what to say."

"I don't either."

After a pause, she says: "I can tell you one thing. Don't help him. Don't give him any money. He'll try everything to get you to help him. Then his mom. If you help him, it will only kill him faster. It's one of the few lessons we learned from my sister's addiction."

"I had no idea. I'm an idiot. I thought he was doing better. I thought he got through the year at school sober."

"You wanted to believe him just like me."

She is about to hang up the phone.

"From our family's experience with my sister, the best advice I can give you is to take care of yourself."

"You take care of yourself, too."

Even after everything we have been through, I am stunned. Nic is injecting drugs—shooting them into his arms, arms that not that long ago threw baseballs and built Lego castles, arms that wrapped around my neck when I carried his sleepy body in from the car at night.

We have promised to take the little kids to the Monterey Bay Aquarium the next day. The disparity between our two worlds continues to stun and overwhelm. Sometimes it seems as if it is impossible that both worlds coexist.

There is no point in sitting at home waiting for the telephone that doesn't ring.

We strive to carry on with our lives.

We drive to Monterey, stopping on the way in Santa Cruz, where we hike down a cliff, following a series of jagged footholds, to a cave just above the foaming and churning Pacific. The lower rocks are slippery with seawater. The kids swim nearby at Cowles Beach. My children—all three of them—seem as comfortable in the ocean as on land. They are like dolphins.

At the aquarium, we watch a film of a languid bay and hundreds of feeding cormorants. The birds seem to be playing and splashing in the surf. Then, out of nowhere, the water erupts with evil gray, a mouthful of teeth, a great white shark, and a cormorant is swallowed whole. The shark's tail whips around like a snapping rope and disappears.