He seemed to roll his eyes and scowl. “Thanks,” he said again, before turning and walking away, leaving Milly standing in the terminal, bereft, wanting to reach out, pull him back, put him back together, turn back the clock, fix everything.
That had all been seven months ago. In the coming weeks, her heart swelled when she received reports from Drew that Mateo seemed to be thriving at Gooden, embracing the process, the group therapy, even the self-examination workbooks. She worried slightly when Drew said that Mateo had taken her and Christian up on their offer to come stay with them and continue going to outpatient sessions and AA meetings in L.A. What if Mateo failed them like he’d failed her and Jared? But, based on calls and texts from Drew, that’s not how it seemed to play out.
“He’s finding himself,” Drew had texted her after Mateo had been with them for nearly a month. He even had a part-time job at a coffee shop.
“Can I finally exhale?!??!” Milly had texted back alongside a smiley emoji. And she thought: He’ll show you, Jared!
Then she got a distressed voice mail from Drew and learned that the story had changed.
Drew picked her up at the airport. They hadn’t seen each other in over a year, since well before Drew had drawn Mateo out to California. Milly stepped into Drew’s Prius and the two hugged wordlessly for a good long time.
“You look really good,” she told Drew, half-consciously inspecting Drew’s peasant blouse, her armful of pearly bangles, her big, slouchy leather bag. She always thought Drew looked good when she saw her, and the next thing she thought of was Drew walking at an effortful clip around that reservoir near her house with her dog, which Drew did religiously every morning before she went to her meeting.
“So do you, Millipede,” Drew said in the kind of supportive tone where she may as well have just appended in spite of everything.
As Drew drove, they made small, inconsequential chatter about work until they got to Drew’s house in Silver Lake. Drew brought out lunch — a huge salad of greens, roasted squash, farro, and pomegranate seeds in a big bright yellow enamel bowl — and Christian joined them in the sunroom.
“My dear Millicent,” Christian said, hugging and kissing Milly. “Haven’t we all been through it with that kid?”
Milly was relieved that Christian had finally thrown it on the table. “I don’t think Jared even wanted me to come out here — well, to see Mateo, I mean,” she said. “I don’t mean seeing you two. How do I even thank you for dealing with the arrest and all that? I barely left the house for four days after you told me.”
“We think he may finally be licked,” said Christian. “In a good way. Like, the addiction has finally kicked his ass enough for him to know he’s powerless over it.”
Even hearing kicked his ass in reference to her son was a bit too much for Milly, who found herself tensing.
“He’s horrified — no, I think he’s terrified — by what happened,” added Drew.
Milly nodded slowly. The news of what had happened had sent Milly into utter bewilderment, then fury at her mother’s old colleague Hector, whom she’d come to see as the absolute worst person who had ever wandered into her family history, especially when she learned that he and Mateo had been getting high together all along in New York, just blocks from the Christodora.
And apparently there had been two other people, including a young woman who’d died of either overdose or cardiac arrest, or both. Milly had barely been able to believe the whole horrific story when she’d heard it. But after Drew told her about Mateo’s taking off with the credit cards and his massive second relapse with a girl dying and then his ending up in jail, Milly began thinking maybe Jared was right: that Mateo was beyond hope.
Milly finally picked her fork back up and ate a few bites. “What’s up with Hector Villanueva, anyway?” she asked, grimacing as she said his name.
“He’s in jail here still as far as I know,” said Drew. “Some AA folks are checking in on him. Nobody put up his bail. And nor should they. It probably makes sense that he just sit there and start getting sober until they mandate him into a rehab program, which I’m sure they will. His charges weren’t that major.”
“He can stay in jail for the rest of his life, for all I care,” Milly snapped. “He’s bad news.”
Drew and Christian glanced at each other. Then Christian shrugged. “He’s an addict,” he said. “Just like Mateo. They both need help.”
Milly said nothing. She felt guilty that she couldn’t see the situation as dispassionately as Drew and Christian. But she also didn’t like hearing her son called an addict, even if it was true.
So instead, she finally said what had been nagging at her the whole flight to L.A.: “Jared wouldn’t come with me. He said if I wanted to come, it was my choice, but he was in a work cycle and he couldn’t afford to break it off.”
Drew and Christian once again gave each other that minute, what-should-we-say? glance. Drew reached over and put a hand on Milly’s arm.
“Sweetie,” she said, “I’m just glad you came out here to see us. And I know you want to see Mateo because you love him, and I know not seeing him is eating away at you. But you also have to know there is nothing—nothing—you can do at this point to make Mateo stop if he doesn’t want to stop.”
“And also that it’s not your fault,” Christian broke in.
“That’s right,” Drew said. “If there was damage there that led to this, it happened before you adopted him. All you and Jared ever gave him was love and safety. And frankly,” Drew added, her voice rising a bit, “at a certain point, with addiction, you have to stop mulling over what caused it and just decide what you’re going to do going forward.”
“That’s right,” Christian said firmly.
Milly nodded obligatorily. She felt a bit cowed into silence, hearing this from the source, as it were. Then they all just sat there for several seconds, saying nothing, picking at their food.
“Milly?” Drew finally said gently. “Can I ask you something?”
Milly nodded.
“Have you been able to paint the past year or two with all this?”
“Oh, yes,” Milly said. “I mean, I go to my studio. I have a few things cooking.”
On the surface, this was true. There were two or three half-finished canvases in her studio right now. But she didn’t particularly like them. They were sort of ugly and dark and gunkily painted and she didn’t really know where they were coming from. But in the hours here or there, usually on weekends, when she went into her quiet Chinatown studio and listened to Beck or Radiohead or Moby through speakers hooked up to her iPod while she worked, she would feel like she was attaching to something that felt blank and wide and open.
Then, after she’d painted for a few hours, after a mild sense of panic and doom started to overtake her as the night deepened, she would sneak a cigarette out of the pack that she kept in a file cabinet and swing open the industrial window that faced the Manhattan Bridge. She would sit in the window and smoke, flicking the ashes down five stories, getting dizzy in a half-awful, half-pleasant way because she so seldom smoked, looking out at the city and thinking about flying, as she’d once done often in her dreams. This was a longtime favorite thought of hers; the ease and lightness with which she could get around the city if she could fly absolutely exhilarated her. What if she could walk out the door of the Christodora every morning, turn on her jet pack, waft upward until she was hovering just over the rooftops of the East Village, and then fly — arms outstretched, feet sailing behind her, a bit like swimming — at a northwest diagonal across Manhattan, gracefully slaloming through the skyscrapers of midtown, to Columbus Circle, where her school was? And better: What if, at night, unable to sleep and oppressed by Jared’s snoring, his smell, his spasms where he would kick her, she could put on sweatpants and a sweatshirt against the wind, take off from her own window, and tour the city at night? Just for a half hour or so, when she couldn’t sleep? The thought thrilled her.