Fearless (9 page)

Around two o’clock in the morning, Adam went into the bathroom with a knife. Sometime later, his friend checked on him, and when Adam didn’t answer, he kicked in the door and found Adam crouched on the floor covered in blood, continually stabbing at his neck with the knife.

Instinctively, the friend balled up his fist and punched Adam squarely in the face, disarmed him, and yelled down the hall, “Call an ambulance!”

The first police officer to respond found Adam bleeding profusely from his neck and arm. “Applied direct pressure to wounds until Lifemobile Personnel arrived,” he wrote in his report. “Ran subject for wants/warrants. Subject had an active felony warrant for his arrest and was placed in custody after his wounds were taken care of by St. Joseph’s ER staff.”

Adam being “processed” at the Garland County jail during his dark time.

Upon receiving the call that their son was in the hospital with self-inflicted stab wounds, as well as wanted by the law for forging checks and stealing property, Janice and Larry paid the ten thousand dollars in bail and restitution and requested that an officer drive Adam from the Garland County jail to a lockdown drug treatment center. Months before, they had looked into the center but could not persuade Adam to check himself in—and there wasn’t evidence that he should be committed against his will. Now that he was clearly a danger to himself and bound for jail if his parents hadn’t paid the restitution, he had no choice.

When the drugs left his system and the fog cleared, Adam found himself in a hospital with a staff whose recovery strategy included the twelve-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous. Adam began his first step toward sobriety by admitting he was powerless over the drug and that his life had become unmanageable.

“He couldn’t argue that one,” says Larry, who along with Janice kept their visits to a minimum, stopping in only a handful of times.

Adam began by answering questions in a mini-autobiography highlighting the significant events in his life. “This tends to put your life in perspective,” stated the instructions.

Sitting at the small desk in his room, Adam started with his childhood and preteen years. He noted that he had “always wanted to impress everyone and be the very best. Enjoyed showing off to my parents and brother in sports and cared for my sister very much.” He recounted his earliest attitude about alcoholism or chemical dependency by stating, “Only losers let it happen to them.”

While Adam was working through these questions, Manda visited him. “He was so sad,” she says, “and just lost.” She put her arms around her brother and hugged him. He started to cry. She hugged him harder when he told her that he hated himself. “Adam, you can get through this,” she said, offering him the same advice their mom had once given her, the shy and quiet sister in Adam’s shadow who wondered if people liked her or if she even liked herself. “First of all, you need to get over this,” she said, repeating Janice’s words. “You are a likable person, and you need to like yourself. Remember who you are.”

For months Manda had been praying for Adam. However, she never told him she
had been praying for him, because she knew it would have had little or no impact, but “it was what got me through and gave me hope,” she says. “I prayed for my mom and dad too, because they were carrying such a weight on their shoulders with Adam. It was eating them up inside.”

When her parents would tell her “Only Adam can help Adam,” she inwardly believed that what Adam was up against was too big for even him. Leaving the hospital that day, she thanked the Lord for getting Adam off the street and prayed that he would continue to watch over her brother.

Grandma Brown and Larry’s sister, Becky, had begun taking Adam and Manda to church on Sundays when they’d moved back to Hot Springs after those years living on the road, and as young teenagers both of them had accepted Jesus Christ as their Savior and been baptized. Manda had stayed on the path, but somewhere Adam had veered off.

The questions in the autobiography forced Adam to examine each stage of his life. Regarding his relationship with his parents and siblings before his drug additction, he answered “good” every time. Asked what major values his parents had passed on to him, he wrote, “Be the best you can be. You can be anything you want to be. Hard work will overcome anything.”

He perceived himself to be “very shy” with girls, but felt he had had lots of close guy and girl friends in high school. He felt he was a “good person” during the high school phase of his life, which was when he began to experiment with alcohol, “so I could feel at ease with myself,” he wrote. On the subject of his current life, he wrote that for the first time ever, he had let his parents down and taken advantage of them. As for Shawn, “I lost my relationship with my brother.”

“I can’t be depended on anymore,” he continued. “I was once a crazy, unique, hard-working person, but now I’m a miserable drug addict that hurts other people. I feel very alone, but I have many, many people that really care about me.”

Most of the twenty-two-year-old’s answers were a barrage of self-deprecation without an ounce of hope. Only the very last line in the workbook allowed a sliver of light to penetrate the dark storm of self-hatred: “But I will climb out of this hole and be somebody.”

Fighting shivers, sweats, and the severe shaking of physical drug withdrawal, Adam worked his way through the First Step of Alcoholics Anonymous. He sat in group sessions, met daily with a counselor, and made it his goal to return to college. Fourteen days later, Janice and Larry paid the six-thousand-dollar bill and were told by doctors that Adam was ready to go as long as he continued the twelve-step program.

“Really?” said Janice incredulously. “You think he’s okay to go out into the world this soon? Can he go back to college?”

“We’ve provided him with the tools,” said one of the program’s counselors, and Adam agreed, saying, “I’m ready to get back on track.”

Skepticism overshadowed Janice and Larry’s hope: expensive as the hospital had been, two weeks didn’t seem long enough.

O
N THE FIRST DAY OF
M
ARCH
1996, Janice and Larry returned home from searching for Adam after hearing from the University of Central Arkansas that he had not attended classes for weeks.

Nobody they knew had seen or heard from Adam. Larry was distraught and Janice was at her wit’s end. She kept telling herself that she’d felt this way before, that even though she would worry herself sick Adam was dead somewhere in a ditch, he always showed up. But they couldn’t—and Adam couldn’t—keep going on like this, so Janice and Larry sat down at their kitchen table to figure out a course of action.

As Janice brainstormed aloud how they would save their son, Larry had an epiphany. Reaching across the table, he took his wife’s hand. “We’ve tried everything we can do,” he said. “We can’t fix Adam. God is going to have to fix Adam. We’ve got to go to church.”

Janice hadn’t been raised to know God. She didn’t even
think
about God. With Larry’s words, however, a light bulb switched on. “You’re right,” she replied.

Larry slapped both his knees and said, “We’ll go this weekend.”

The next Sunday morning Larry found the Bible his mother had given them as a wedding gift, wiped some thirty years’ worth of dust off the spine, and brought it with them to Second Baptist Church in Hot Springs—the church Manda attended when she was home from college.

A woman about Janice’s age greeted the Browns by the front door. “Good morning! Welcome,” she said. “My name is Helen Webb. Come on in and let me show you around.”

Larry, who hadn’t gone to church since Vietnam, was a bit rusty on his knowledge of Scripture, and Janice had never read the Bible, but after that first sermon, both
of them felt lifted up. The peace Larry experienced returned him to occasional times in his youth when he had leaned on God.

They went home with an invitation to come back soon.

The associate pastor, Mike Smith, knocked on the Browns’ front door three days later to thank them for being guests of the church. Over a cup of coffee, Janice and Larry shared Adam’s story. “We are failing our baby,” Janice said as she shook her head and wiped at tears.

For more than an hour, Pastor Smith listened while they explained their family past and their spiritual past. As a child Larry had gone to church three times a week but stopped once he entered the military. Janice had attended church only for weddings, funerals, and a Christmas Mass or two and said she knew nothing about religion. “I don’t know how to pray,” she said, “so I’ve just been talking to God nonstop in my head since church on Sunday, asking him to look after Adam.”

“You’re doing fine,” said Pastor Smith. “Just open up your heart to Jesus. He knows exactly what you’re up against; your struggles are not uncommon. And he has a plan.”

Pastor Smith understood intimately what Adam was up against with addiction and cocaine, but he left the Browns’ home without sharing his personal history. Back at the church he called Helen Webb, who was in charge of the prayer chain. “Helen, we need to pray for a couple,” he told her. “Their son was arrested, he’s battling drugs, and they desperately need our prayers.”

The following Sunday Janice and Larry attended separate Bible studies before the worship service. In the women’s class, “most of them were mature Christians,” says Janice, “and they started talking about ‘I read this scripture, and it revealed to me that I need to do this today.’ It was totally foreign to me, but what I saw was that they were living their lives through the Bible and laughing and having fun—and I didn’t think Christians
could
have fun.”

She became intrigued with the Bible, who Jesus was, and why all these people were so enamored of him. When she shared a little about Adam, one of the women
told her to “give some of that weight you’re carrying to Jesus. You can’t do it all by yourself. Just like your son can’t do it all by himself.”

So she did. Right then and there, Janice prayed silently, and she could not deny the peace she felt. Larry experienced the same liberating freedom from his own debilitating guilt and failure as a father. “God is in charge,” Larry said to Janice afterward. “That’s what going to church reminded me of today.”