Beautiful Boy (40 page)

We are given a piece of paper divided, for our family, into three wedges. Nic, Vicki, and I sit on the floor around the paper in a triangle. A triangle.

As instructed, I start drawing. I choose chalk. I just start pushing the chalk around on the paper.

The heater is turned up too high. There is not enough air.

Vicki, using watercolors, paints a pretty scene like a beach or whatever it is. I am still raging. She is drawing a sunset. Bright and light blue and swirls. She is drawing a pretty picture, as if we were here together at family art day at Nic's preschool with a blue sky and a green grassy field. But then I look over at Nic's third of the paper. Using ink, he draws a heart. Not a valentine heart, not Cupid's heart, but a heart with muscle and tissue and ventricles connecting to an aorta, a pumping heart inside a body. His body. Attached to the aorta, a face, and then more faces at different angles with expressions of fury and desolation and horror and faces in pain. I draw with my chalk. I have made some kind of thick line coming up from the bottom of the paper, some river coming up, but then it splits open and flows into the two top corners of the page. I push so hard that the chalk disintegrates into powder.

What's the point, it's a waste of time. Now Vicki has—here it comes, dark watery black is on her brush now and the pretty light blue sky is gone, covered with the watery swashes of black and sweeping, pouring brushstrokes. Nic begins writing hard, a word,
I,
two words,
am,
three words,
sorry,
writes them again, writes them again, writes them again, writes them again. He cannot, it seems, stop writing them. It is bullshit, a cheap attempt at—it is
not bullshit, he is trying with excruciating desperation, which I can feel coming from him, to say something, to get out something that he cannot get out.

It's easy to forget that no matter how hard it is for us, it is harder for him.

My drawing—now there are drops, tears, from the two branches of the tributary and six circles above it. Then I know—I have drawn the opening up of my brain and all that is in there—tears pain blood rage terror. The broken suitcase with the circles, its contents—me, former me—spilling out.

His mother has drawn a small red smear in the center and there is a drip from it—blood there, too.

Nic is writing
I am sorry,
and I want to cry. No, I think, don't let him in again. No don't let him in again. No don't let him in again.

We take turns, family by family, describing what's on the pages and what it felt like working next to one another. Vicki's red isn't blood, it's a red balloon that she wants to hold on to, to take her away from the black storm. Nic looks at her and says how remarkable it is that she is here. I look up at her and here she is. I look at Nic. Here is Nic with his parents. I feel sadness, overwhelming sadness, that she has gone through so much, and mostly sadness that Nic has gone through so much, and then me, us, and I am mortified to feel sadness, mortified to feel ... Oh, Nic, I am sorry, too, so so sorry.

Nic says that the work he's doing here isn't about finding excuses for his debauchery or his craziness and it isn't about blaming anyone. It is about healing. His therapists have told him that he has to work through whatever it is that causes him to harm himself, to put himself in danger, to turn from those friends who love him, to lash out at his parents and others who love him, to lash out at himself, mostly at himself, to try to destroy himself. He is an addict, but why? Besides the luck of the gene-pool draw, what is it? They want him to face it all so he can heal and move forward.

People in the other family groups talk about their pictures, what they evoke, what working on them was like. Then we comment on one another's. One girl, Nic's friend, says how different the images are in our family's pictures and how intense each one is, but she
says that Nic's heart leads into ventricles and my stream of chalk looks like a broken artery.

Somehow I am crying. Nic's hand is on my shoulder.

When we emerge before sunset, an imperious moon hovers over the mountain. I look at it and understand that I have not held out hope for this new program, not because I don't hope that it works and not because it cannot work, but because I am terrified to my core to hope again.

I go to a bookstore and buy Zadie Smith's novel
White Teeth.
I want to escape for tonight, and I want to hide in someone else's story. Back in my motel room, the first thing I open to is the epigraph from
Where Angels Fear to Tread
by E. M. Forster. I read it and read it again. "Every little trifle, for some reason, does seem incalculably important and when you say of a thing that 'nothing hangs on it' it sounds like blasphemy. There's never any knowing—how am I to put it—which of our actions, which of our idlenesses won't have things hanging on it for ever." I am almost shaking. I think, How innocent we are of our mistakes and how responsible we are for them.

This is about healing, not blaming. Is it possible to get beyond blaming? At one point Vicki says that she used to carry around so much anger toward me that it was as if she had on a backpack filled with bricks. "It's such a relief not to be carrying them around anymore," she says. After some of her comments in our next group session, I tell her, "Maybe there are still a few bricks in there." She acknowledges, "Yes, maybe there are." But we are now united in one of the most primal of human behaviors, trying to save our child. The therapist says that the weekend is not about blaming, but about moving beyond lingering resentment. A father here says, "Resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die."

In the morning, I again drive up to the treatment center. There's Nic in a New York Art Academy T-shirt, bell-bottom jeans with frayed cuffs, and a multicolored coat. He wears a knit cap low over his eyes. We drink coffee.

The families have a collective group therapy session. It's an appallingly vulnerable position—group therapy with an audience. But I admit that it's a relief to say what's on my mind. When Nic speaks, I feel a range of emotions—anxiety, fear, exasperation, anger, sorrow, remorse—and there are bursts of pride and dangerous flashes of memory of what we have had, and of love. I want to open up and hear Nic and believe him, but I am unwilling to tear down the fragile dam that I have constructed to protect myself. I am afraid I'll be drowned.

Parents are suckers. I am a sucker to contemplate opening to the idea of healing. And yet ... Suddenly I recall when I prayed for Nic. I never planned to pray. I just looked back and realized I had been praying. What did I pray for? I never said Stop taking drugs. I never said Stay away from meth. I said, Please God heal Nic. I prayed, Please God heal Nic. Please God heal every ravaged person in this room, the dear ravaged people on this planet, these dear, wounded people. I look around at them. They are brave. They are here. However they got here, they are here. They are here and so there is a chance.

At the final session of the last day, we are instructed to think about the future. The future. It's fraught with danger. We map it out. Literally. Our leaders give each family large sheets of paper with a shape drawn in the bottom left-hand corner representing one piece of land—where we are—and a shape in the top right corner representing our destination. Between them are small circles, stepping-stones.

The instructions. Indicate where you are today. And where you want to go. Indicate the steps—concrete steps—you can take to get there. Think about the next few months, not the rest of your lives. Where do you want to go, and what steps will you take to get there. "And oh," the therapist says, "the rest of the area of the paper is a swamp. To get across it from where you are now to where you want to go, using the steppingstones, you must avoid the perils in the swamp. Indicate the pitfalls lurking there, waiting for you."

Nic, using a thick red marker, has no trouble identifying the perils. There are so many—all the old mistakes, habits, the temptations of drugs. He draws a hypodermic needle. There is so much red that it is almost impossible to find room to write on the small circles, the steppingstones. The stones look so small, so unsteady, in comparison. But on them, Nic writes our family's plan and his plan. How we will go slow, taking small steps forward. How we will support, not impede one another. Nic's steppingstones include AA and other conscientious work that will, he hopes, repair his relationships. He mentions Karen and looks up at me. "I really love Karen," he says. "We are friends—I miss her." With Jasper and Daisy. "I know it will take a long time," he says. There's a lot to write. When the map is complete, it is clear that his mother's and my tasks are not inconsiderable—to step back, be supportive, but let Nic's recovery be his recovery as we work on creating healthy, as Nic describes them, loving and supportive, but independent, relationships. But most of the hardest work falls on Nic's shoulders, because the perils are waiting for him, enticing him to fail. The perils in slashing red marks are pernicious and ubiquitous and sinister. It is a swamp, and it will take a miracle for Nic to navigate it. Just as I think that, I look over at Nic's mother and I look at Nic. We three are here together, and I think, This is a miracle. Is it too much to hope for others?

I fly home. I feel as if someone has sawed through my chest and made a series of cuts from my clavicle to each shoulder blade, then back at the center, cut southward through the middle of my chest and stomach to just above my groin, and then more horizontal cuts from the tip of one pelvic bone to the other. Then, with plastic-gloved hands, he reached into the flaps of flesh and pulled them back on one side and then the other, tearing the sinews and muscle and skin so that I am here with my guts exposed.

The feeling does not abate. I am home again and Karen is off with Daisy at the orthodontist, which leaves me alone with Jasper, who is playing guitar—what he terms the "pluckage" for a song he is recording on Garage Band. He adds drums, other percussion, and synthesizer. Next he records his voice, improvising funny lyrics. For the chorus, he repeats the word
doughnuts
as if it is the dénouement in the libretto of an opera. When the raucous composition is complete, he burns it onto a CD.

It's time to ferry him to lacrosse. Driving, we listen to his music and then to the White Stripes. When we get to the field, he leaps out of the car, throws on his uniform, and runs to his friends.

I stand on the sidelines. The boys in their gladiator gear breathe vapor like dragons because of the chill. They race after the small white ball, scooping it up into the mesh pockets at the end of their sticks, hurling it forward to one another on the field.

My cell phone is in my pocket, but it is off, a state formerly unthinkable. As the family therapist noted, the phone connected me to Nic, and each shrill ring provided a jolt to my heart like a defibrillator. Apparently it jolted each of our hearts. Every call fed my growing obsession with the promise of reassurance that Nic was all right or confirmation that he was not. My addiction to his addiction has not served Nic or me or anyone around me. Nic's addiction became far more compelling than the rest of my life. How could a child's life-or-death struggle not? Now I am in my own program to recover from my addiction to his. The deep work occurs in therapy, but I take practical steps, too. Like turning off my cell phone.

After practice, Jasper and I go to a sporting goods store. He has grown out of his cleats and needs new ones. To help pay for them, he uses a gift card left over from Christmas. Standing by the cashier, when he retrieves the card from his wallet, a piece of paper falls to the floor.

"What's that?" I ask Jasper, as he bends over to pick it up.

"The letter Nic wrote me."

He quickly folds it back up and puts it into his wallet.

Now the children are asleep. Karen and I are in bed reading. Brutus is running in his sleep. I put down my book and lie here, trying to comprehend exactly what it is that I'm feeling. Parents of addicts learn to temper our hope even as we never completely lose hope. However, we are terrified of optimism, fearful that it will be punished. It is safer to shut down. But I am open again, and as a consequence I feel the pain and joy of the past and worry about and hope for the future. I know what it is I feel. Everything.

Oh, what'll you do now, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, what'll you do now, my darling young one?

—B
OB
D
YLAN
, "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall"

Ha Jin writes: "Some great men and women are fortified and redeemed through their suffering, and they even seek sadness instead of happiness, just as van Gogh asserted, 'Sorrow is better than joy,' and Balzac declared, 'Suffering is one's teacher.' But these dicta are suitable only for extraordinary souls, for the select few. For ordinary people like us, too much suffering can only make us meaner, crazier, pettier, and more wretched."

I am no great man, but I do not feel meaner, crazier, pettier, or more wretched. There were periods when I did, but now I feel fine, at least much of the time.

Nic completed three months at Santa Fe, and his counselors recommended that he next go to a program in northern Arizona where he would continue his work in recovery, plus get a job and volunteer. He said no. He told me: "I know this will worry you, but I have to get on with my life." He tried to reassure me. "It will be all right."

At first I said, "No, you can't," but then I remembered: It's your life.

Nic caught a bus east. He went to see a friend he met at the program. We didn't speak for a while, but then we began talking again.
Now we check in with each other fairly regularly. He met someone new. She's an art student. They got a place together. Nic is working at a café, serving decaf (he says) when a customer asks for it. And he's writing again. He's back writing his book. Now he has more to say about how hard it is to stay sober.

We talk about our writing. We talk about our lives and the news and books we read, music and movies
(Little Miss Sunshine!).