Beautiful Boy (39 page)

"I think it happens when the phone rings," I say.

"The phone?"

The kids are staring.

"The phone, when it rings, brings on the same state of panic. I am always worried that there is news of another crisis. Or it's Nic, and I don't know if he will be sane or high. Or it won't be him, and I'll be disappointed. My body tenses up. Oftentimes during meals or when we're hanging around in the evening, I let the phone ring until the answering service picks it up, because I don't want to deal with whatever might be coming. I think that everyone feels tension. Jasper always asks why I don't answer the phone. I think it makes him nervous."

Jasper is nodding.

The doctor says, "And so it's not only something rare and random that comes into your house, like the stack of newspapers. The phone must ring all the time. You must all be in a fairly constant state of worry and tension. That mustn't feel very good." He turns to the kids. "Does that sound accurate?"

They both nod vigorously.

It seems to be a profound acknowledgment. To me, the doctor says, "Maybe you can shut off the ringer for periods of time. You can always call people back." He then says: "And now that Nic is in rehab, maybe it would be useful to you and to Nic to establish a time—whenever, once a week or more—when you will speak on the phone. Then you will know. Establishing borders like that can help you both. You both will be freed from a continual state of anx
iety that he should or has or hasn't called you. It may help all of you. Your family will know when it's time for you and Nic to talk, and then they can be assured he's all right, but it won't feel like a constant threat."

I respond, "That's a good idea," but then I admit, "My heart is pounding. The idea of shutting down communication is terrifying."

"You're not shutting it down, you're making it safer for everyone."

We leave the session, descend the flight of concrete stairs from the nondescript building, and the children seem to have been unbound. Their cheeks are flushed and their eyes sparkle.

"What did you think?" Karen asks them.

Daisy says, "It was—"

Jasper finishes. "Amazing."

"It was," Daisy says.

I begin to monitor my telephone use, shutting off the ringer in the evenings and on weekends. I make a plan to speak to Nic once a week. Small things. They seem enormous.

It has been three weeks since Nic has been back in rehab. He sounds unwell. As he explains, the initial weeks of his treatment have been devoted to stabilizing him. The week-long detox in the valley wasn't enough to clear his body of all the drugs. Even now, after three weeks, he remains in acute mental and physical pain. He has had intermittent convulsions. Once he was rushed to a local hospital. His body writhes, he is desolate, and he can't sleep. The pain goes on and on—proof, as if I need more, of the deathly grip of the drugs on his body.

Nic calls on Sunday. He sounds cold and angry, blaming me for where he is. He asks for a plane ticket home. "This was a mistake," he says. "It's a disaster. It's a waste."

"You have to give it time."

"Will you or won't you send a plane ticket?"

"I won't."

He hangs up on me.

He calls back the next day to say that he is feeling a little bet
ter. He slept soundly last night for the first time since he arrived from LA. He is sorry for yesterday. "I still cannot believe that I relapsed," he says. "I can't believe I did what I did." He tells me he feels guiltier about it than he can say.

"I'm afraid to say anything at all because I don't know what will happen. I don't want to open you and Karen and the kids up and then disappoint you again."

He tells me a little about the treatment program's approach, different from the other rehabs. "In my first group, a counselor asked me why I'm here. He asked, 'What's your problem?'

"I said, 'I'm a drug addict and alcoholic.'

"He shook his head. 'No,' he said, 'that's how you've been treating your problem. What is your
problem?
Why are you here?' "

Fine, I think, but I am past being hopeful. I don't know if he is too far gone, if there is too much damage from the drugs. Even if not, I am unable to allow myself hope.

Another week. Another. Christmas. New Year's.

Another week. A month. Nic is safe in rehab, but I remain skeptical.

It is Thursday. I pick Jasper up from after-school World Beat Band practice, where I sit in and listen from the upper corner of the theater while they play. Jasper plays congas for "Oye Como Va." An eighth-grade boy wails on guitar like Carlos Santana.

I drive him home and say goodbye to him, Daisy, and Karen. They are going to their cousin's eleventh birthday party. I throw my suitcase in the car and drive in heavy rush-hour traffic to the Oakland airport, where I check in and eat a quick dinner.

I board a packed Southwest flight. When I arrive in Albuquerque, I walk past the gates through the airport. I have a vivid image, Nic's arrival here eight or so weeks ago, after his mother watched the plane take off in LA. I see the terminal through his eyes: Southwest art, Indian rugs, the
ENTERING O'KEEFFE COUNTRY
sign. In my mind he glances up at Thunderbird Curio and Hacienda New Mexican cuisine. I think, Nic would have been disdainful of being here in this themed terminal if he were in shape to be disdainful of anything.

Outside, I imagine the driver from the Life Healing Center waiting for Nic with a sign that says
NIC SHEFF,
but there would have been little doubt who Nic was, the young man off the LA flight, wearing in his colorless face and dull eyes and listless body his months-long binge and the week of torturous detox from a dozen drugs.

I rent a car. It is supposed to be a nonsmoking car but it smells like cigarettes. Driving on a wide highway, I turn on the radio, and the first thing I hear is the opening riff of "Gimme Shelter."

I drive for an hour and find my motel and check in. I try to sleep. I would be more at ease if I were here for a convention of dental students practicing their first root canals on me.

Swimming might calm me down. I leave the room and drive around until I find a mall where I buy a bathing suit. Then I return to the motel and find the pool closed, yellow tape surrounding it as if it were a crime scene.

In my room I pick up the
The New Yorker
and read the fiction and Hertzberg and Anthony Lane. I wonder if there are copies of
The New Yorker
at Nic's rehab? Finally I fall asleep for a while, wake up at eight, and get ready.

I have not seen Nic since June, right after the ICU. I hardly remember his visit, only the ensuing barrage. The slurred voice, telephone calls, lies, terror, his mother's visit to his apartment, the email from—ostensibly from Joshua Tree, but, as I learned, from Oakland.

Why am I here? A weekend cannot undo these years of hell, and a weekend cannot turn Nic's life around. Nothing I've done made a difference. Why am I here?

The therapists in his program counseled him to ask his mother and me to come. If we're trying this one last time, trying one last time to give him another chance, I will do what they tell me. I know that nothing will help, probably nothing will help, but I will do my part. Frankly, and to be completely honest—don't tell anyone, don't tell him—I am also here to see him. I have been afraid, but a cautious and well-guarded place inside me misses him like crazy, misses my son.

The morning blue sky is marred only by a smoke line from a jet.

I drive through the town, following the directions that arrived in the mail from the treatment center. I turn down a dirt road lined with sagebrush and scrawny pines. It's like a scene in an old western. The place looks as if it once was a ranch. There are bunk-houses and a chow hall and a ramshackle main house and outbuildings sided with split logs. A line of log cabins on a ridge that looks onto the high desert. The place is rustic and modest, unlike Count Ohlhoff's old Victorian mansion or the austere modern hospital in the wine country or the stately brownstone on Stuyvesant Square in Manhattan or Jace's LA Melrose Place.

I fill out forms in a small office and then wait outside for Nic. It is cold, but I have a thick coat.

There. Nic.

Deep breath.

Standing under a sagging awning on a low porch of a rundown cabin, Nic.

Nic in an army jacket and a purple paisley scarf.

Nic in a faded T-shirt and cords with tiny leather patches and black leather sneakers.

His gold and brown hair is curly and long. He pushes it out of his eyes.

Nic walks down the rickety steps toward me. His face: thin and angular. His eyes flash at me with—?

"Hey, Dad."

If I admit how good it is to see him, I may be accused of forgetting the fury and terror, but it
is
good to see him. I am scared to death.

He walks over. Reaches out his arms. I smell his smokiness and embrace him.

While we wait for Vicki, we make small talk. Then Nic looks shyly up at me and says, "Thanks for coming. I didn't know if you would."

I walk with him up to an outside smoking area under a wood roof with a few weathered chairs and a fire pit.

I'm afraid and I don't want to want to see him and I don't want to be happy to see him.

We meet some of his friends. There's a girl with pierced ears
and inch-short bleached hair and a boy with no hair and a boy with curly black hair. A man who looks as if he spent his life in the sun comes over and shakes my hand. His skin is rough, brown wrinkled leather. He shakes my hand and tells me what a great son I have.

Nic smokes. We sit near the fire pit and he says that things are changing.

"I know you've heard it before, but this is different."

"The problem is that I have heard
that
before, too."

"I know."

We go inside to meet with his chief therapist and wait there for his mother, who soon joins us. Vicki's wearing a beige jacket, her hair long and straight. I glance over at her. It is difficult to look her in the eyes even after all these years. I feel guilty. I was a child—exactly twenty-two, a year younger than Nic is now—when we met. I can try to forgive myself, whether or not she forgives me, because I was a child, but some things you just live with because you cannot go backward. I have been nervous to see Nic, but I was also nervous about seeing Vicki. We may have become closer over these past few years, we have, but though we talk on the phone and console each other and support each other and debate interventions and worry about the lack of good insurance (she is working now to get him back on her policy), we have not been in the same room for more than a few minutes since our divorce twenty years ago. Come to think of it, last week was our wedding anniversary, or would have been. The last time we were together for more than five minutes was Nic's high school graduation, when Vicki and I sat next to each other and Jasper sat on my other side. Afterward, Jas whispered, "Vicki seems nice."

The therapist says that in her view Nic is doing well, is where he should be considering everything, asks us to notice how things compare and contrast with his previous times in rehab. She asks us all to think about what we would like to get out of this weekend. She wishes us luck.

Nic, Vicki, and I have lunch. There's a spread of food. Tamales, salad, fruit. Nic eats a bowl of cereal.

After lunch he leads us to another building, into a room with two wood-paneled walls and two white walls covered in patients'
artwork. The floor tiles are off-white, some of them buckling. It smells of coffee that has been sitting all morning on a burner.

A circle of chairs waits for us.

I look over at Vicki. She has been a journalist for more than twenty years, but when we met she was working in a dental office in San Francisco. The office was below the northern California headquarters of the newly founded
New West,
where I was an assistant editor, my first job after college. It was an office devoted to New Age dentistry designed for pleasure, not pain, an airy place with a vaulted ceiling supported by exposed rough-hewn wood beams. Italian lights dangled from crisscrossing wires; there was a jungle of hanging potted ferns. Music—Vivaldi, Windham Hill—was piped in through patients' headphones, nitrous oxide through their masks. Vicki wore a white smock over a Laura Ashley print dress. She had dawn-blue eyes and Breck-girl hair. She was a recent arrival from Memphis, where she had an uncle who was a dentist, which somehow qualified her for her job as a dental assistant. It took her four tries before she got my x-rays right, but I thought, Blast away, because, on nitrous with her levitating before my eyes, I was content. We married the following year. I was twenty-three—exactly Nic's age now. The check to the pastor of the pretty white church bounced. No one but two friends were there in Half Moon Bay. We have not seen those friends since. I was twenty-three, and three weeks ago I turned fifty. My hair is no longer gray, it is white. It's getting like my father's cotton-white hair.

The chairs are filled. I look around the circle. The patients and their parents and one's brother. Here we go again.

Two therapists lead us. One has dark hair, one is light blond, both wear scarves, and both have eyes that are kind and intense. They take turns speaking. They set forth ground rules and expectations.

I think, This is bullshit. I have been here and done this and it did no good whatsoever.

First there is a questionnaire to fill out. Each of us. I set to work. After a half-hour or so, we take turns reading our answers. One mother, responding to the question "What are your family's problems?" reads, "I didn't think we had any problems, but I guess if we
didn't we wouldn't be here. I thought we had a good family." She begins crying. Her daughter puts a hand on her mom's knee. "We do have a good family." Once again I'm back in a room with people like me, people hurt by addiction and uncomprehending—baffled and guilty and angry and overwhelmed and terrified.

Next is art therapy.

Art therapy!

I have been through too much to be sitting on the floor finger-painting with Nic and my ex-wife. I am raging inside. Why did I come? Why am I here?