Come Back (11 page)

My mind’s a chaotic, overcrowded station with a thousand trains going every direction, some of them going very dark places, some on tracks bloody from running over people I don’t like. All I need is the Almighty Omnipotent One setting up surveillance cameras. Isn’t there some kind of off button, an ecumenical lead shield?

Aha, my 3 a.m. wide-awake brain says, that’s it, that’s why all this happened! Four decades of wicked thoughts. But, I know people who are a lot worse than me, I’m related to some of them, and they’ve never had this kind of trouble—why me?

Claire, Claire, comes a little voice, don’t you see? Can’t you stop your fizzy brain for one second and see? Mia is safe, she’s been found. You’ve been blessed beyond imagining. Ingrate.

I get one phone call. A woman answers breathlessly, “Hello?”

A woman who is not my mom.

“Um, is Claire Fontaine there?”

“No, she’s in Utah, can I ask who’s—

“She’s WHAT?”

“Mia?”

“Sara?”

“I can’t believe you’d do this again, Mia! You should be glad your mom and Paul are already in Provo, you have no idea who you were with!”

What is she, ex-CIA? The woman is fucking everywhere! Melanie and
Brian were always paranoid about seeing cop cars. I was on the lookout for a rental car with my mother in it!

We have to be at juvenile hall in an hour and Paul needs his morning caffeine fix. We walk into a café full of the happiest people we’ve ever seen. There are children everywhere and all the parents are tall, young, and beautiful, with pale, luminous complexions. I want to ask what their skin care regimen is when I notice a CTR ring on our waitress.

Are you kids here all in some youth group, I ask her politely. Oh, no, it’s a Mormon thing. Paul and I have no idea what about being Mormon makes everyone so happy but he wishes it came in a cup with cream and sugar. Because there’s no coffee here and his head’s pounding.

“Juvie” is a big, modern building outside of town. Paul and I pass through pat-down to see a red-eyed bitch in a brown jumpsuit that I wish like hell wasn’t my daughter. She’s so foul that Paul finally yanks me out of the chair and pulls me out the door.

“You’re not going to talk to your mother that way, you little brat.”

He’s so disgusted and angry he leaves to find coffee somewhere. Nevada’s not far.

I meet with Mia’s probation officer, a sympathetic middle-aged woman who informs me that, “Scales mean intent to distribute in the state of Utah, which is a felony.”

For a second, I almost burst out laughing at the complete, total weirdness of Mia/Pimp/Prostitute/Handcuffs/Probation Officer/
Felony.
At the tragic absurdity that’s become my life.

Luckily, Mia has no prior record. The judge releases her to my custody on the condition she go straight to Morava. But she has to graduate or I can ask him to reinstitute charges and hold her till she’s twenty-one.

I’m happy because I finally have some authority to help Mia but upset because it took a judge in another state to give me any. Jack has shown up to deal with Hollie. He tells me he had a feeling the judge would release Mia to us. How did you know—oh, wait, you’re Mormon, aren’t you? I bet that judge is Mormon, too, isn’t he? Jack smiles, amused.

The whole state’s jumping with Mormons anxious to help us and I ask God to bless each and every one of them.

From the time we get back, I know running isn’t an option. My mom and Monty are by my side every second. When I go to the bathroom, she’s in the stall with me.

It’s hard to keep from crying. They moved my bed out to the middle of the main room. My mother’s made them handcuff one of my wrists to the bed frame and sleep in my bra and underwear. There are wooden beams across the ceiling and a leopard is perched on the beam directly above my bed. He’s crouched, with his fangs bared, and you can tell from his look that he knows he’s cornered. I know exactly how he feels.

I sit beside Mia to say good night. She’s drained, sad. Maybe she’s just as tired of it all as I am, maybe inside she really wants help but is embarrassed to say so. She asks softly, Mommy, what if I become the fastest bunny ever? It’s a paraphrase from one of her favorite bedtime books,
The Runaway Bunny
. I smile back and paraphrase the Mother Bunny’s response: Then I will become the biggest fucking brick wall you have ever seen, my little bunny. Have a carrot.

JUNE
30

Mia’s draped across me asleep on the flight to Vienna. I study her face like a specimen, a mutated species of daughter. I would give anything for a glimpse of my beautiful girl behind this ruined mask of leathery skin and sunken eyes. I inhale, eager even for a smell that’s familiar, but that’s gone, too. A user smells like drugs; her pores exude a wet copper stink.

Who is the girl in my arms I’m so desperately afraid of losing? This Mia who’s twitching from withdrawal while she sleeps could have grown up in the rural shacks with the rest of her Indiana pals, with their puke-stained, prison-visit, cow-tipping lives. I’m afraid Mia isn’t buried, but gone altogether.

I feel gone altogether myself. I hardly remember myself before all this began. They say our children raise us and it’s true; my circuitry’s been entirely rewired. Now, for example, when I see criminals on the news, I don’t think first of their poor victims, as I used to, I think of their mothers.

I also used to think that nothing, short of death, could be worse than my little girl molested, and that only angels worked miracles. Oh, what I have learned. Listen: a man takes a child in his hands and does things, rams their little life like a freight train.
He casts a spell
. But the devil’s miracles are both wondrous and sly, because he lies low, he bides his time. Far in her future, this child will defy physics, will
herself
become freight train, conductor, tracks, and target. She will lay her head on the tracks, keep one foot on the pedal and head straight for herself, laughing, calling it
freedom
. No mother can break that spell. Nothing but to lay my head down beside her, to be there when the end comes as I was there in the beginning and for every little sufferance in between.

After a few hours, Mia wakes up, takes my makeup bag, and heads for the bathroom. She returns made up like a whore. I glance through the makeup bag to be sure she hasn’t kept the tweezers.

“Afraid I kept the tweezers as a weapon?” she snorts, reading my mind. “I’m not stupid, I know they’re gonna confiscate sharps.”

“Sharps? Two days in the slammer and you’ve got the lingo down.”

She chuckles, yawns, and conks out again. Fury-laughter-sleep, in less than thirty seconds. “Mood highly labile.”

Still, one thing hasn’t changed, and it’s the only mercy granted me in this long night. She seeks me out in her sleep, finds her mommy’s lap. I should sleep, too, but I have so little time left with her. I stay up to let my eyes trace along her slender fingers, the tip of her nose, let my hands circle her tiny, bird wrists, feel her still-childish puff-breaths.

I’m memorizing her before I leave her.

The first thing I see coming off the plane are five soldiers with the biggest guns I’ve ever seen. Either Vienna gives everyone this warm a welcome or she’s hired them. She glances at me for a reaction, but I won’t give her the satisfaction. The whole United States is available and she picks the Czech Re-fucking-public.

She keeps looking around like she’s expecting the Messiah and holding my arm so tight I’m sure I’ll have permanent nail imprints to remember her by. When I feel her muscles relax I look up to see a tiny grinning lady with a live Ken doll beside her, dumb smile included. I stifle a laugh. My mom sent me all the way here to be disciplined by them?

I don’t know who I was expecting at the Vienna airport, but it wasn’t Peter and Zuza. Maybe people more official looking, certainly older. Not attractive young blonds in summer togs with soft Czech accents. And they’re the
heads
of the staff at Morava. If I was looking to avoid a typically therapeutic setting, so far so good.

Frankly, I don’t care if she never sees a therapist again. I don’t care if they use shamans and chants. I hope they bring in a Feng Shui master to rearrange her mental furniture, locate the seat of trauma, and reposition it to deflect the poison arrows Mia keeps aiming at herself.

What a group we must make, the two of them flanking the two of us, Mia looking like a scrawny, pubescent streetwalker, me gripping her hand
as if she were a toddler. I feel bad for her, to have this humiliation added to the anger that simmers beneath her tough surface. But, beneath the anger, where she’s pretending she can’t feel it, is fear.

Mia has never liked feeling weak or afraid. Her profile now, the erect head, the forward chin, is the same one I saw when she was eight, on a visit to a friend’s farm in North Carolina. She hoisted Mia onto an old horse to mosey around the corral, but before she could get the reins on, he bolted toward the woods an acre away.

We watched helplessly as Mia ducked down tight into the horse’s mane as he disappeared into the trees. After several frantic minutes, a black speck appeared far down the opposite field. Mia, approaching at a gallop. The horse looked like he was going to trample us all, but Mia yanked up on his mane and stopped right in front of us. With her head erect and her chin stuck out, as if to say, “I meant to do that.”

When I was kissing her good night, I asked if she was scared. She pulled me close and whispered, “Ooooh, yes, Mommy, I was! And I knew he would run right to the trees so he could knock me off with the branches! So, I just ducked!” She shivered with excitement at the memory of it.

If the drugs have done one thing most of all, they have made her forget what she knew as a child—to duck. To recognize danger and protect herself.

After Peter locks Mia and Zuza into the back of the van, he says to me, “Only driver has door that can be opened from inside. We know that she is a runner, and very smart.”

Someone finally gets it. As he walks me to my rental car, Peter says, with genuine caring, that Mia will be happy and healthy again, that I will have my real daughter back.

It has been my fate to be comforted by young men in strange places this week.

The van doors shut with a thud that echoes in my bones. I feel clammy, nauseous. I try to memorize the names of towns we pass to orient myself for when I run, but the Czechs don’t fucking believe in vowels. The view out the window gives me no landmarks to help, it’s one vineyard or sunflower field after another.

The view begins to flicker and fade, I can’t tell if I’m watching a dream of this world or the real thing. I know the name of that big thing in the field out
there is a cow, but I have to keep staring at it to remind myself. Cow. Spots plus udders equals cow, Mia. Fuck, I need a fix.

I follow Peter’s speeding van past Brno, a blur of Byzantine, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, and Nouveau architecture. As we pass through the suburbs into a rural outlying area dense with summer foliage, I begin to feel a strange exhilaration. I feel buoyed and jittery with purpose. I’m speeding closer and closer to Mia’s salvation. A place that awaits us with a system! With levels, seminars, consequences! With groups with names like Purity, Innocence, Clarity! They’ll isolate, modify, confront, reveal, redirect! They’ll do whatever it was that I couldn’t do to help her.

We finally reach a lake ringed by low mountains and snake up into hills carpeted with sixty-foot fir trees so dense you can hardly see into them, Hansel and Gretel woods. Woods a girl could disappear into and never be found without a tracking dog.

Buried in them is a Soviet-era hotel, a faux chalet that’s now Morava Academy. The glass vestibule has two sets of bolted doors, a good sign. A man joins Peter before they open the van door. He’s wearing running shoes. I love it already.

And then Mia steps down from the van, dwarfed by the men, the building, the sky, her life. I’ve just been kicked in the heart. She looks so small and, for an instant, scared. I’m seized with panic and regret. She’ll be so far from anyone who loves her.

This is no relief, I don’t want this salvation, I’m choking on it. I want to go back, far back, I want to breathe her back into me, into my body again, the only place she was ever truly safe. Every mother knows this feeling. From the moment we let them go, we know they’re never safe again.

This place looks like a bad dream after seeing too many shagadelic seventies films. Orange-flecked sofas, corny-ass posters, a tripped-out carpet hung up as art, and a coffee table covered in wood-grain shelf paper. I hope she’s beginning to realize how lame this whole idea is.

No such luck. Zuza takes me to a room.

“This is where you will be sleeping.”

There’s nothing but two beds, a long empty shelf above each one and someone’s ratty teddy bear on one pillow. The walls are totally bare and hospital
white, the only homey things are nylon lace curtains. Zuza starts going through my backpack.

“Hey! Leave my shit alone.”

She looks at me calmly. “Attitude is not tolerated here. If you want to do well, you will change it quickly.”

If I was doing what I wanted, I wouldn’t be here in the first place, bitch. I hold my tongue; if I show I’m mad they’ll start watching me more closely.

She tells me I have to be deloused and puts on rubber gloves before touching me, even with my clothes still on. I know it’s procedure, but still my cheeks burn.

“I showered before I got on the plane, you know.”

“This is to be on the safe side.”

The safe side of what? Me?

Mia’s led away from me quickly. The place is Spartan, Joan Crawford spotless, with handmade inspirational posters, very Phil McGraw, very Dale Carnegie. It is unnaturally quiet.

A man appears from a dim hallway. He’s extremely tall, handsome, fair, about thirty. I know immediately that he’s (a) American, (b) Mormon and (c) not the director, Glenn. Brendan is a codirector from another facility, in charge till Glenn returns from having back surgery.

“But, I need to talk to Glenn about Mia; there are some things she doesn’t know.”

“Mia’s behavior will tell us exactly where she’s at,” he says, unconcerned.

Like that’s supposed to be encouraging? I also wanted to meet the person I’m leaving my child with. I ask to see her husband, Steve, only to learn that he’s in Germany for two weeks, in special training with the famous sniff dog, who finished top of his class.

“You mean, the dog’s not here, either?” I blurt.

Who cares if it’s valedictorian as long as it can sniff out one fearless, foolish, fragrant girl? The honeymoon is definitely over. His whole demeanor says he’s used to scared, nervous parents, and he feels no need to explain or assure. This is either arrogance or confidence. He adds that Mia’s first two weeks will mainly be getting settled in, learning rules, getting her equilibrium. Equilibrium? It’s chaos Mia loves. I’m the one who needs equilibrium.

He must have figured as much because he gives me a security tour. All
doors are locked and guarded 24/7 (I notice staff with walkie-talkies posted all over), meds and drugs are locked and guarded, windows open only about five inches (I check most of them). There’s no interaction between boys and girls. The dog will have no contact with kids to keep their scent fresh. They think his name is Ify—they don’t know that’s just short for I’ll Find You.

The Czech staff is young and university educated; many speak English. Like Zuza and Peter, they are soft-spoken, polite, more formal in manner than Americans their age. Fine with me. The less like American culture it is here, the better.

The bedrooms are like college dorms between semesters. The lack of décor is deliberate; they want the kids to miss home. Throughout the tour, I ask endless questions. How often is peer group, how long till she earns a visit, how long does it take to move up levels, what if she doesn’t pass seminars, and on and on. Most of it answered by a version of “It’s up to her.”

“If everything’s up to her, then she’s never getting off Level 1,” I say as I follow him back through the lobby into the cafeteria, a large, airy room with beautiful views and Mozart playing.

“Trust me, she’ll get sick of Level 1 quickly. No shoes, no dessert, no privileges,” Brendan says as I look out the window to a rec area just below.

A group of teen boys with crew cuts sits in a circle on a blacktop with a staff member. One starts crying and two others put their arms around him; others kneel in front of him and touch his knee, his hand. It’s odd to see teenage boys acting like this.

A very tall chain-link fence holds back the lush, towering woods pressing in on them from all sides. The setting’s both gorgeous and oppressive. There is no view to the outside world at all.

I turn back from the window. “Mia doesn’t care about dessert or shoes. She ran ten miles through the desert in flip-flops. Her feet are still swollen.”

“Does she know you have such great faith in her?” he says, not without sarcasm, looking directly at me.

They weren’t kidding about confronting attitude. Okay, so I’m faithless and cynical by now, you would be too, buddy, I want to say.

“I’m sorry, I’m just worried. She can fake her way through anything.”

I’m obviously still not getting something because he laughs.

“Sure, because she’s had a lot of folks she could manipulate, like her parents and therapists. Who’s she going to fool here? The other girls were as bad as your daughter or worse. Kids here can’t hide out emotionally; they’ve got to take themselves on or they don’t get voted up. You’ll understand the process better when you’ve taken the seminars.”

“The process,” “voted up,” “take themselves on.” I see what Maddy meant about the vocabulary. He’s called away and I’m left standing alone in the lobby, feeling useless and anxious, like I’m onstage awaiting my cue in the play called
The Bad Mother
.

On impulse, I walk to a door and peek in. It’s a classroom full of girls working silently at their desks, fresh-faced, innocent looking. Oh, is Mia going to hate this place. One girl notices me, her eyes fly open and she gasps. The whole class notices me and they all start grinning and raising their hands excitedly. Uh-oh, I’ve done it now. The teacher introduces me, then says something I don’t catch.