Come Back (31 page)

“Yeah,” Mia chimes in spiritedly, “after a year at Santa Monica, I’m thinking of transferring to Chico State!”

Bam! It’s a fist to my chest. We can see her smiling, excited to be part of the discussion—and that she has no idea that it’s a school that’s the butt of jokes. God bless these girls, because they pretend to be excited with her. Tears well in Paul’s eyes, and it’s one of those moments when you just die for your child.

How much she’s lost is all I can think. All the excitement these girls share, over first dates, senior trip, bright futures, and what to wear to prom. Most of the kids Mia’s with at Spring Creek just hope to stay away from drugs, jail, or abusive boyfriends. I’m afraid Mia isn’t going to fit in either group.

Here I am again, picturing her future based on my fear that she’ll be an outsider. Mia will either find other creative, energetic young people like herself at the college or she won’t. The big question for me is this: can I be with her wherever she’s at? Can I be a conscious and loving presence even when I don’t support her choices? Can I let go of fear and anger and hold in my mind an image of Mia as strong and healthy even when she doesn’t hold that for herself? This is the mother Mia will need when she comes home.

One aspect of our relationship has never needed to change, however,
and never will. Every night after Paul kisses her goodnight, I still sit beside her and sing lullabies. She still holds my hand and falls asleep smiling.

We’ve noticed that Mia is more conscious of her femininity. She takes longer to dress and doesn’t hide in big clothing. She puts on a bit of mascara and comes out of the bathroom with a new shade of lipstick every day. When I ask what color it is, she replies mysteriously, “It’s a blend.” I think she likes having something all to herself, something that I can’t know.

I find all of this so endearing that when we leave to go to dinner, Mia carefully balancing herself in my heels, in a new dress and blended lipstick, I get that big sigh feeling. Paul smiles and squeezes my hand as we follow her to the car.

She knows it, too, how she’s blooming. As she walks a little ahead of us through Century City, she looks at her reflection in a store window and turns back to us, smiling from ear to ear and raising her shoulders up to say, can you believe it, it’s really me!

The morning before Mia leaves is the actual day of her birthday. Paul and I are taking her to the beach. We have a tradition of coming to the beach on birthdays to write our wishes in the sand and watch the ocean carry them out to the universe. I can still see her scrawly six-year-old printing our first year here:

When we return home the phone rings.

“There’s been a verdict in your case this morning, Claire,” my attorney says. “I’m conferencing in the judge to read the final judgment to you.”

Fourteen years after the fact, on her seventeenth birthday, the court finally held Nick accountable for what he did to Mia. And for more than a dollar a month. The same week of our trial, a precedent was set in another trial where a man with a nice retirement account claimed he was too poor to pay what he was ordered. Giving the family of Ron Goldman access to O.J. Simpson’s retirement nest egg.

Our judge cleaned out Nick’s pension.

This note falls from the pages of one of Mia’s books, telling us what to give to her friends after she ran away. As if she was never coming back. Two years ago, I went through the things in Mia’s room so I could feel something of her in my arms after she’d left home. Today, I am going through them because she is coming back. Setting everything out for her to put into new bookshelves and furniture. And to hold something of herself in her own arms, to remember.

It seems severed, her childhood. Another Mia and me in another lifetime. I used to think of it as the magical time
Before
. But, what has till now been the painful time
After
is becoming a new kind of before. I’m rushing about, getting my home ready with the same excitement I did when I was pregnant with her.

Sometimes, we have to give birth to our children twice.

I walk down the path I could now follow in my sleep. Mike’s little cabin is half-buried in the snow. It was always hard for me to accept that I was just another client. It sounds childish, but I always told myself that I was his favorite patient. Maybe all the kids do.

I walk up his cabin steps, smiling at the girls because they’re on silence. I can see them eyeing my makeup and earrings with envy. I peer in Mike’s window. He’s on a call but he motions for me to come in as he reassures a parent whose child just dropped from Level 5 for cheeking his meds. I grab a handful of Tootsie Rolls and sit down.

“No, this doesn’t mean Justin’s going to come home and fall back into drugs, it just means he has more work to do with himself than we anticipated. And that’s okay.”

Mike’s always in the middle of a crisis. He finally hangs up, picks up his now cold cup of coffee and exhales.

“Long day?” I ask.

“Long year!”

I’m suddenly aware of the fine lines around his eyes, the tension in his forehead. Maybe he’s always looked this way, maybe because it’s our last session I’m allowing myself to see this, that however much he loves his work, it takes a toll.

“Do you ever get sick of hearing about people’s problems?”

He looks down a minute, thinking. “No,” he responds. “There are times I want earplugs when people don’t want to deal, just whine and blame. But those moments when I really connect with a kid, when I witness a breakthrough, honest to God, I wake up every morning excited to come here because of them.”

“Yeah, but there’s got to be days when you want to kill us, and you don’t have anyone to go and bitch at.”

“I talk to my cows. When I’ve had a long day or I’m feeling blue, I just blow through the house, grab some feed, and spill my guts.”

“I guess you couldn’t get better listeners.”

“No, you can’t—and they moo in all the right places. One night a while back I needed to blow off some steam, personal difficulties, a bunch of stuff. It was ice cold out, but the stars were just beautiful. I sat up on the bale feeder watching the stars and suddenly about eight of my cows came up. Just stood there with me. But then my bull—and this is a two-thousand-pound, big-ass bull—comes up to me and bends his big old head down before me. I scratched behind his ears, looked around at what I had. Made me remember all over again that I am one lucky son of a gun.”

He smiles at me. “So, how ya’ feeling, kid?”

“Good, actually. I’m nervous, but more about little things, like learning how to drive, making friends. It might sound cocky or unrealistic, but I’m not that worried about drugs. I don’t have the desire. I’m a different person now, I guess.”

“Or you’re back to being the same, depending on how you look at it. To tell the truth, I’m not too worried either. I think your biggest struggles will be with your mom, the whole control thing, and with your own mind. You’ve always
been your own worst enemy. And your own best friend. Just make sure you stick with the latter.”

It’s silent for a minute. He could give me all sorts of last-minute advice, I could list every fear. Instead I jump up and hug him as hard as I can.

“I love ya, kiddo.”

“I love you too, Mike.”

I turn and walk out quickly. I know he understands.

“How can you be so selfish?” Brooke demands, appalled and confused.

We came to say good-bye to Sonia, who dropped three days after seminar for passing notes to a boy and biting a staff member when confronted. She’s been in the Hobbit ever since, alternately screaming, crying, and sleeping. With Discovery, the pendulum swung too far in one direction and now she’s swinging back as hard as she can.

She talks about missing heroin, how one night of stripping pays for a week’s supply. She taunts the male staff, flirting with them one minute and saying fuck off you disgusting pig the next. Brooke’s been trying to instill some last-minute sense in her before going home.

“Me? Selfish?” Sonia smiles coyly.

Brooke is fighting tears, and I have the urge to shake into Sonia the knowledge that she’ll only end up killing herself, either quickly in an overdose or more slowly, probably AIDS.

“I’ll meet you at the bonfire, Mia,” Brooke says, turning and quickly leaving.

I sigh. I understand Brooke’s reaction, Sonia’s going back to her old lifestyle is selfish, a fuck you to her parents and friends. But, it’s more than that.

The first time I ran away I knew it would hurt my parents, but I truly thought they’d get over it. I convinced myself that their being sad for six months (or whatever the standard time is for getting over your child) was worth my happiness and that once they stopped missing me, they’d be happy I found a life that made me happy. Ridiculous, I know.

But, in trying to better understand my mom and build a relationship, I’m beginning to understand the ability of love to both create
and
destroy. I’d never been in love, never had a child, I’d never loved unselfishly. So I couldn’t fathom how someone’s love for me could also be their undoing, make life unbearable. I wasn’t capable then of understanding the pain I caused, just as Sonia isn’t now.

Nor did I grasp the capacity of love’s
absence
to destroy, that my lack of
love for myself made my own life unbearable. You take someone whose life experiences have taught them they’re worthless, string them out on drugs, and you have one miserable person. How could I have given what I didn’t have? It’s hard to value another life when you view your own as dispensable, hard to understand how you can have so great an effect on someone else when you don’t think you matter.

I want to tell Sonia this, but she’s in no frame of mind to hear it.

“Sonia, I was on Level 1 when Roxanne said good-bye to me. I’d been in the program only a month less than her, but she was going home. I know you hate me for finally getting out of here and leaving you behind. But I also know you want to hug me good-bye.

“There’s a lot I want to say to you but you’ve either heard it already or aren’t yet ready to. I guess I just want you to remember. I’ll never forget how peaceful you looked after that one process and wherever you go after this, I want you to remember that there are people who’ve seen you happy. That you know how to create that for yourself whenever you choose to. And that I love you.”

Sonia stares at me in silence. I lean in to hug her, but she stiffens and turns away.

I walk out of the Hobbit and get about twenty feet away when I hear a pounding. It’s Sonia, one hand pressed against the window, the other clenched in a fist pounding it. Tears stream down her face and she stares at me like a caged animal. One that doesn’t realize it holds its own key.

“The girl is trouble, she’s garbage.” Malka frowns as she scissors off chunks of my hair. My hairdresser has a daughter who’s begun hanging out with a troubled girl. She doesn’t know about what happened with Mia.

“Her mom’s gone, her dad drinks. I know she does drugs, she dresses like a slut.”

“Do you think your daughter is doing drugs?” I ask.

“No, that’s the thing, she thinks she’s gonna help this girl. It’s not her responsibility!”

“You’re right, it’s not. But the girl isn’t garbage. She’s hurting and scared.”

Malka stops cutting a moment, then starts again. I look at my reflection in the mirror and I see a very different woman than the last time I was here. Once your child becomes the “garbage” other parents are afraid
of, you never look at any teen, or yourself, the same again. All you see is the child they once were. And their miserable parents.

“She’s just lost, Malka. She’s lost and let’s hope that somehow she finds her way.”

I was once Malka. I blamed Talia for “corrupting” Mia, I hated the “garbage” at the Promenade fountain who sold Mia drugs. I couldn’t even bring myself to go there until a few months ago, on the last day of the Focus seminar. Lou gave us a challenge: we had to go out on our own and break bread with a stranger. I knew immediately where to go.

There were two smoking, jittery girls at the fountain who looked like they slept on the concrete beside it. They were rail thin, coarse-mouthed. One looked at me with suspicion, the other with delight.

“You mean, just for breakfast, no bibles or lectures?” She grinned and stood quickly, as if I might retract my offer of lunch. She was short, her oily, blonde hair clung to her head, and her clothes and skin had the ground-in grime of being on the street a long time.

She ate very little but she did drink two huge lattes. She poured nearly a cup of sugar into each and seemed glad I didn’t say anything. Only an addict eats sugar like that.

She couldn’t sit still, picking, scratching, wiping her nose. She avoided my eyes. It was as if she’d forgotten how to look at someone being kind to her. She talked about her boyfriend, about the place they were going to get where she could sleep a whole night through.

“I’ll sleep on the floor, as long there’s a door I can lock.”

“Is there a shelter you can sleep at where you feel safe?”

“Yeah, but they’ve got a lotta rules. I like my freedom.”

Her freedom to use. Shelters don’t allow drugs.

“When was the last time you slept at home?”

“Two years ago. It was worse than the street. I used to worry about my little sister, but she’s gone now, too. When I have my own place, I’m gonna find her.”

She smiled as if she really believed it. She has to. How else does a sixteen-year-old girl who lives like this survive? She stashed the leftovers in her pockets along with two handfuls of sugar packets. I gave her money I knew would go for drugs, but at least she wouldn’t have to beg for it, or worse.

I’ve gone back there several times, but I’ve never seen her again. I hope she found a place to sleep with a door she could lock.

Mia will be home in a few days and I sign onto the Link to share the news. I haven’t spent as much time on it as I used to. Tonight, I’m reading about the challenges of a kid’s coming home. Parents often post their home contracts, which I always print out to study for what might work when we create our own.

The last seminar is one parents and teens take together, creating a Value Frame and Home Contract that students take back to fine-tune during their final phase at the school. Issues that come up as the contract goes back and forth usually mirror what went on in the home before, and will when they come home. It has consequences, rewards, and levels linked to family, school, friends. It requires great commitment, because during Level 1, your kid is with you every minute they’re not in school. Which often means they go to work with you. Kids usually finish the contract in six months to a year.

The most important vocabulary word David teaches in this seminar is “bummer.” It’s the word parents learn to use when their teen starts manipulating and whining because you’re holding them to the contract, one
they
helped create.

“But Tiffany’s parents don’t care if she’s in by two!”

“Bummer.”

“Don’t you realize how much easier your own life would be if you let me drive myself to school? You guys are so program, it’s fucking ridiculous!”

“Bummer.”

“This is so unfair!”

“Bummer.”

A highlight of the seminar is the look on the kids’ faces when David tells them that turning eighteen is Independence Day…For Your
Parents.

Thus, the Exit Plan. It’s for kids eighteen and over who are out of alignment with the contract or the family’s values. For most it means they get a few hundred dollars, their bed, desk, and see you for Sunday dinner. It is a loving send-off—we love you but we don’t support your actions. For some kids, the real world gets them back on track. They have no idea that that little ringing thing in your home comes with something called a phone bill.

This final seminar is where you can really see the difference between parents who took the seminars and those who didn’t. You see the latter’s ineffective way of interacting with their kids and you see your old self. You also see the sadness and disappointment on their kids’ faces. They know they’re going home to deal with parents who are like Level 1 kids, who blame, control, and manipulate; who don’t see the countless subtle ways they don’t keep their word; parents who think getting honest feedback means being made wrong.

I saw a few of my fellow Focus attendees at our Parent/Child seminar. Two were ballerinas who were so tightly wound, one Focus staffer actually told them to unclench their buttocks. They’ve become different men, hugging their kids openly, crying without embarrassment when appropriate. Amazing what a pink tutu can do to a man. And it’s not until it’s pointed out to me that I realize I’m not wearing black.