“Mm-hmm.”
“I’m gonna hit the studio then shoot hoops with Asa. But walk up and down the river after? Burgers and beer?”
“Mmm,” she said, wondering if she sounded as flat as she felt when she was saying it.
Therapy was where she’d come up with her best understanding of the cold rage she felt toward Jared a great deal of the time. It was, she determined, because of Mateo. Because they’d always had a split on Mateo. Jared had basically agreed to adopt Mateo in the first place because Milly had wanted to. And Jared had actually turned out to be a very good father, and back in what they could consider the “good years,” Jared and the boy developed what appeared to be something approaching companionability, taking their bikes on Metro-North upstate to Beacon to visit the Dia museum and ride along the Hudson, sometimes with Asa and his two daughters, that sort of thing.
But it was in the recent, truly hellish years — especially, curiously, after Mateo turned eighteen — that Jared detached. Not to say Jared wasn’t dismayed when they learned of Mateo’s latest relapse or hospitalization, but it consumed Milly in a way it didn’t with Jared. In fact, stunningly to Milly, in the very years when Mateo was really declining, Jared went deeper into his own art than he had in years — more time in the studio, more time with art people, then his first solo show in years, in a small but well-regarded Williamsburg gallery.
That first rehab in Connecticut hadn’t stuck for Mateo. He stayed three weeks there, complaisantly enough, but when he returned home, in time to hop onto the new semester at Pratt, he seemed to be doing nothing to preserve his clean status. Prompted by Drew, Milly asked him if he was going to meetings for Narcotics Anonymous, to which he replied, “The counselors at Silver Hill said that’s not the only way to stay clean.”
“How are you going to stay clean, then?” Milly had asked him.
“Focus on my work,” he’d said.
Then, walking home in the neighborhood one evening, she came across him having beers and smoking cigarettes outside Sidewalk Café with Fenimore and Keiko, who urged her to join them, but she demurred. When Mateo returned home, drunk enough to stumble a bit en route to his room, she called out, “I thought you were supposed to be clean and sober.”
“Dude, I didn’t have a drinking problem,” he called back, mimicking her cadence, before slamming the door behind him and blasting hip-hop.
Did they know when he picked up heroin again? Milly figured it was sometime in late September a year prior, 2011, when his comings and goings became more erratic. More than once in those weeks, Milly woke in the middle of the night to the sound of the front door unlocking and Mateo’s uncertain steps in the dark to the bathroom, then his room.
One of those nights, right after four A.M., she woke to the sound of a giant crash in the kitchen. Jared, typically, kept snoring.
“Wake up,” she said, shaking his shoulder. “Someone’s in the kitchen.”
Jared lifted his head, his eyes sticky with sleep. “Are you sure?”
“I just heard a giant crash.”
They went into the kitchen, Milly in a long T-shirt over her underpants and Jared in his boxers, and snapped on the light to find Mateo on his knees in jeans and a camouflage hoodie, picking quarters out of a huge mound of loose change they kept in a blue ceramic vase, which had shattered everywhere.
“What are you doing?” Milly cried.
Mateo looked up. “I didn’t think I’d wake you,” he said.
Jared bent down, grabbed Mateo’s arm. “I can’t see your pupils, Mateo,” he said. “Jesus Christ. Not even home six weeks.” He roughly lifted Mateo by the arm into a standing position, then reached for the pockets of Mateo’s jeans. “Come on, buddy, you gotta give us the house keys and go. I can’t go through this again.”
Milly felt a lump in her throat. “Wait!” she said, grabbing Mateo by the other arm. “Mateo, just be honest with us, did you use again?”
“Milly, look at him!” Jared cried. “He’s high as a kite.”
“I didn’t use,” Mateo said, his words a slurry. “I wanted change for a juice.”
“But you don’t look right,” Milly said. “Have you been up working all night?”
“Milly, give it a rest,” Jared said, dragging Mateo by the arm through the dim living room toward Mateo’s bedroom. “Grab some clothes and give us the keys and get out of here. Enough is enough.”
Mateo shuffled forward alongside Jared. But suddenly he broke away from him and picked up Jared’s three-foot weathered steel sculpture, of a kind of wolf creature with jagged edges all around, and threw it through the glass top of the coffee table. Mateo then stepped back from the wreckage and stood there, shaking wildly. “Don’t you fucking touch me!” he screamed at Jared, his eyes now wide open. “You fucking fraud mediocre rich piece of shit.”
Jared stepped back now toward Milly, fury and fear warring in his eyes. “Milly, call the cops on the kitchen phone,” he said, steeling his voice. “Mateo, drop your keys on the floor and get out.”
“I didn’t work out so great for you guys, did I?” Mateo sneered, still shaking.
“Mateo,” Milly pleaded, “just sit down and try to breathe and let me call an ambulance, okay?”
But Jared took the phone out of her hand. “We are calling the police, Milly. This ends tonight. Get out, Mateo.”
Mateo pulled his keys out of his hoodie pocket and flung them at Jared, hitting his knee. He stormed out of the apartment, his back pocket heavy with change he’d collected, and slammed the door behind him.
Milly just stood in the kitchen, her hands over her mouth, trembling, Jared breathing hard beside her. Neither of them said anything for nearly a minute. Then Jared turned to her and said, “This is over, Milly. He’s eighteen. We are done.”
“Jared—” Milly began.
“Done!” shouted Jared, raising a hand to stop Milly from saying more. He turned into the living room, carefully extracted his intact sculpture from the glass wreckage and set it on an end table, and retreated to the bedroom, closing the door behind him. Milly sat at the kitchen table and stared into space.
Drew had stepped in the next day in response to Milly’s despairing phone call. “There is such an excellent, affordable rehab here in Pasadena called Gooden that’s just for men and that does really intensive, deep work,” she’d told Milly.
“But he’s already been to rehab,” Milly said.
“But maybe a reset outside of New York and all that context will be really good for him. I know so many guys who’ve gone there and say it turned things around for them. Believe me, Millipede, he’s not the first to go to rehab more than once.”
“I’m not sure he’ll go again.”
So it was Drew, in fact, who reached out to Mateo—“one addict to another,” as she put it to both Milly and Mateo — and got him to agree to come out, on a ticket that Milly surreptitiously paid for. But it was Milly who pulled some of Mateo’s things together, including new toiletries and underwear and his iPod and some of his cherished Frank Miller graphic novels, and then, unbeknownst to Jared, met Mateo at the airport to see him off. To her colossal relief, he actually showed up — his handsome face blotchy and sallow, that same camouflage hoodie smeared with faint stains, his eyes unable to meet hers for more than a moment. His whole presentation wrapped itself around her heart and twisted it.
“I tried to think of everything you might need out there,” she said, handing him the bag.
“Thanks.”
Please make it work this time, she wanted to say. But she knew she wasn’t allowed to say that.
“I’m rooting for you, honey,” she said instead.