Beautiful Boy (34 page)

And then we come to this:

All in all, the temptation to take another gulp of Felix Felicis was becoming stronger by the day, for surely this was a case for, as Hermione put it, "tweaking the circumstances"?

Finally Harry takes the drug.

"What does it feel like?" whispered Hermione.

Harry did not answer for a moment. Then, slowly but surely, an exhilarating sense of infinite opportunity stole through him; he felt as though he could have done anything, anything at all...

He got to his feet, smiling, brimming with confidence.

"Excellent," he said. "Really excellent. Right..."

The kids are asleep.

Karen and I walk up the narrow staircase to the drafty third-floor corner bedroom that looks out over trees that creak like rocking chairs. I check my answering machine in Inverness. I hear Nic's voice. It's brittle, breaking up.

He is crying.

No. Why.

"Please call me," he says.

I check the time. He called about three hours ago. Nic answers on the second ring.

His voice is slurry, sticking to itself, his tongue in the way.

"I want to tell you what's been going on," he says. "I want to tell you the truth. Three days ago we were at a party. Z. did a line. She asked me to do some with her. And I did. If she was going to go out, I was not going to let her go alone."

Z. is the girl who broke his heart after their short time together. Before he relapsed last time. He's with her again, moved from his new apartment into hers.

"Nic. No."

"We've been high since then. Speed balls and meth." Speed balls are a combination of heroin and cocaine.

"Now I took a sleeping pill to come down. I know I fucked up. I'm going to stop."

I tell Nic the only thing I know to say, and what I know he isn't ready to hear.

"You know who to call. Get help. Before it's too late. You and Z. both need help. You can't be together until you are well and sober."

He hangs up.

No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No.

What was it this time? Approaching two years. The researchers said that it can take two years for a user's brain to fully recover. Nic has never made it two years since all this started.

An eruption of the same old worry—all that could happen to him—but then I become overwhelmed by fatigue and fall asleep, my worry settling into a newly carved-out nook in my remodeled brain. Maybe this reflects something else that shifted in the hospital—the character if not the volume of the worry. Lying in the neuro ICU, I came to another startling realization when it dawned on me that Nic—and not only him, but Jasper and Daisy, too—would survive my death. It's not that they would be unaffected, but they would survive it. Possibly because there's a time in their lives when children are dependent on their parents, we tend to forget that they can and will survive without us. I did. By now, though, through Nic's addiction, I have learned that I am all but irrelevant to Nic's survival. It took my near death, however, to comprehend that his fate—and Jasper's and Daisy's—is separate from mine. I can try to protect my children, to help and guide them, and I can love them, but I cannot save them. Nic, Jasper, and Daisy will live, and someday they will die, with or without me.

In the morning, I contemplate whether to tell the kids about Nic. In Daisy's letter to her teacher, she wrote, "My brother was a smoky guy." I suppose that is her way of summing up the drugs. And she said: "Everything is A okay now." I want everything to stay A-okay for her for at least a little while.

I had so much wanted to end my book with Nic's letter to Jasper. It served too perfectly as a neat bow on the package, a happy ending. I wanted it to be the happy ending of our family's story about meth. I wanted to move on from it. I wanted this now to be the post-Nic's-addiction phase of our lives. But no. It is still so easy to forget that addiction is not curable. It is a lifelong disease that
can go into remission, that is manageable if the one who is stricken does the hard, hard work, but it is incurable.

Nic's latest relapse is an undeniable measure of the relentlessness of this disease. It's not a new revelation, but a different iteration. Everything was going well for him. He had a girlfriend, so we cannot blame his loneliness. We cannot blame work that bores him, because he seems to enjoy his job and adore his coworkers. He considers them his good friends. He has a book deal and a shot at a job as an assistant editor at a magazine. His movie reviews have led to a few interviews and a review for
Wired
magazine. Perhaps most significant, he has a close group of friends who seem dear to one another.

All of this is irrelevant now.

Despite my knowledge that addiction does not respond to logic, I have held on to a vestige of an idea that the trappings of a life—girlfriend, job, money, solid friendships, a desire to do right by those you love—can make it OK, but they don't.

Please God heal Nic.

When I was in the hospital, many people told me they prayed for me, and I am enormously grateful to them. I never prayed. Perhaps I cannot pray because I never have, I do not know how, and I cannot conceive of a god to pray to. But as John Lennon said: "God is a concept by which we measure our pain." Here I am with Nic using again and I know that there is nothing I can do and I cannot believe that we are here again and that the next telephone call could be the one I have feared for the past half-dozen years, and I am praying.

Please God heal Nic. Please God heal Nic. Please God heal Nic.

It's my plea to whatever higher power there is, the one they—they in the endless rehabs, the endless meetings—the one they promise is out there listening. I repeat it inside my head sometimes even without knowing I am saying it: Please God heal Nic.

I pray even as the news in the papers makes my prayer seem insignificant in scale and wholly selfish. There is a devastating hurricane and flooding and suicide bombers and crashes and tsunamis and terrorism and cancer and war—endless and brutal war—disease and famine and earthquakes and everywhere there is addic
tion, and today the heavens must be overwhelmed with the noise of all the prayers.

Here is one more.

Please God heal Nic. Please God heal Nic.

The descent is quick. Nic shows up high at work and loses his job. His phone is disconnected because he does not pay his bill. He deserts every real friend. Saddest, he has deserted his best friend and sponsor, Randy.

In one message he says that he and his girlfriend have sold their clothes to pay for food. I don't know how they have paid their rent. I don't know how they will pay next month's rent, but soon, unless they have a benefactor or are dealing drugs, they will be homeless.

Today Vicki cannot stop herself, and she drives from the west side of town to his apartment in Hollywood. She wants to see for herself. She wants to see if he is alive.

I pretend that I am not waiting by the phone to hear from her.

She parks her car and apprehensively walks into the apartment building. She pulls open the screen and knocks on the door. There is no answer. The window shades are down. She knocks again. No answer. She knocks again. The door opens a crack. Then wider. The place is filthy—squalor. There is a pool of brown water on the floor. Trash everywhere. Nic, blocking the flood of daylight with his hands, shakily steps into view. Behind him, his girlfriend does, too. It is a scene familiar to me, but new to his mother. Vicki has never seen Nic like this: gaunt, white, nearly yellow, trembling limbs, sunken black circles around vacant eyes.

Z.'s legs are bleeding. When she notices that her legs are uncovered and that Vicki is staring, Z. stammers, "A light bulb broke on the floor. We were cleaning it up."

Nic tells his familiar lies: "We had to go through this. We're done now. We're getting sober."

He asks his mother to leave and to not come back.

Vicki calls and tells me. She sounds like I have felt on many occasions before. She sounds furious and wretched and horrified, emotion so overwhelming that she cannot yet cry.

***

A week goes by.

It is Sunday and I am driving Daisy to the city to meet a friend and her mother at Washington Square. We meet up with them and walk through the park, from where we watch the Columbus Day Parade. A float is filled with a dozen girls dressed as Queen Isabella. Nic is here. He is six years old. Queen Isabellas float by. This is our neighborhood. Nic is one of the children running toward the climbing structure, climbing up to the tip top, watching the parade from that crow's nest, waving at the queens.

I drive Daisy and her giggly friend across town to a birthday party being held at a ceramics studio. The girls, strapped into the backseat, play a game inspired by the picture book
Fortunately
by Remy Charlip.

The book reads:

Fortunately Ned was invited to a surprise party.
Unfortunately it was a thousand miles away.
Fortunately a friend loaned Ned an airplane.
Unfortunately the motor exploded.
Fortunately there was a parachute on the plane.
Unfortunately there was a hole in the parachute.

"Fortunately she had a very delicious sandwich," says Daisy's friend in the girls' game.

And Daisy's turn:

"Unfortunately she dropped it on the dirty street and along came a slobbery dog, who ate it up."

"Fortunately he threw up the sandwich and it was as good as new."

More giggling.

"Unfortunately a little fuzzy hamster scurried in and grabbed it and took it with him and then he disappeared into a crack in the wall and was never seen from again."

My own version plays in my head.

Fortunately I have a son, my beautiful boy.

Unfortunately he is a drug addict.

Fortunately he is in recovery.

Unfortunately he relapses.

Fortunately he is in recovery again.

Unfortunately he relapses.

Fortunately he is in recovery again.

Unfortunately he relapses.

Fortunately he is not dead.

Another week.

Vicki, with whom I speak daily, says that she is numb. I am, too. It's not that I don't worry about Nic—I think about him all the time—but for the moment I am not incapacitated.

Is this where parents wind up?

I walk past more people on the streets, this time in San Rafael. I walk past them and step over them, people alone and abandoned, and, when I do, as always, I think, Where are their parents. But this time I wonder, Is this the answer? Am I becoming one of them—a parent who has accepted defeat? My agonizing has not helped Nic in the slightest.

I am not pretending that this isn't happening. I am doing all that I can do.

I wait.

A downward spiral.

It's a degenerative disease. I imagine the downward spiral.

No, I am not numb. I wish I were. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed.

I brace myself.

Randy continues to call Nic and leave messages on his dead cell phone. Randy was Nic's lifeline.

Using Z.'s phone, which is still working, Nic calls and leaves more messages. "I just want you to know we're safe. We're going to meetings. I'm getting sober."

He claims that the relapse was a one-shot, three-day mistake and he's fine. But the longer he talks, the more it becomes obvious that his voice is the voice of Nic on something.

I wait.

It's like watching from afar, perhaps through binoculars with imperfect lenses, the moments before a train wreck. All of us who love him commiserate. Karen and I. Vicki and I. Randy. We all know. And yet there's nothing we can do. I call Nic back. "Nic, don't forget how dangerous it is when you aren't attending meetings," I say. "Don't forget when you listen to the logic of your brain when it's under the influence."

In recovery, working with Randy, Nic was the one who explained the insidiousness to me: "A using addict cannot trust his own brain—it lies, says, 'You can have one drink, a joint, a single line, just one.' " It tells him, "I have moved beyond my sponsor." It says, "I don't require the obsessive and vigilant recovery program I needed when I was emerging from the relapse." It says, "I am happier and more complete than I have ever been." It says, "I am independent, alive." And so Nic said he couldn't trust his own brain and needed to rely on Randy, meetings, the program, and prayer—yes, prayer—to go forward.

Nic, you have come so far.

Let me quote
you:
"Everything I have will be gone if I don't stay with the program."

Two days later, on Wednesday, Nic calls up slurring and asks for rent money. No. He says that he knew I would say no. He saved it for the end of the conversation, after, "I love you so much. I'm safe. We really fucked up but we're going to be fine now. I just took a little something to help me come down from the meth and coke and smack and..."

Vicki says no, too.

Now it is Friday. Nothing on Saturday. Nothing on Sunday. Nothing until Monday when an email arrives.

"hey pop, we're in the desert. Z is doing a commercial, out by joshua tree ... my phone doesn't get any reception here and I just borrowed this computer for a second from some guy on the set ... sorry ... this came up really suddenly ... anyway, i'll call you when
i find a phone that works ... it's hot, hot here and boring ... z just doing wardrobe and i'm writing in the shade here ... don't fret ... i may have some exciting news too ... love ya ... nic"

Joshua Tree.

A respite. An oasis. Maybe Nic will stop on his own. Maybe he'll be OK.

Nothing for two more days, but Nic is in the desert, writing in the shade. There are drugs in the desert, too.

At night, Karen and I switch off reading to the kids. We are nearing the end of Harry Potter. Professor Dumbledore died. He is dead. More than one of the children we know cried for hours when they read this—Albus Dumbledore, Harry's protector with whom these children grew up, is dead. Evil is winning, and I feel weakened by the ceaseless battle.