“—call Mateo later?”
Milly came to from her reverie. “Hmm?”
Drew was speaking. “We’ll call Mateo later and see about a visit on Sunday?”
Milly nodded and went back to her salad.
The next day, after she and Drew had passed the morning in a vigorous walk around the reservoir, which made Milly feel about as good as she’d felt in a long time, Drew came into the sunroom, where Milly was reading Drew’s copy of Tina Fey’s book Bossypants, and sat down beside her. She sighed and put a hand on Milly’s knee.
“What is it?” Milly asked warily.
“I talked to Mateo. I don’t know if he’s ready for a visit this Sunday.”
“But you said you’ve already visited him twice,” Milly said, then, “Oh.” She winced. “You mean he’s not ready to see me.”
Drew sighed again. “He seemed fine with it when I mentioned you were coming two weeks ago.”
Milly put down the book and crossed her arms. She could feel the Melancholy Demon bearing down.
“Listen,” said Drew. “I told him you were here and I asked him to think about it and talk to me again tomorrow. He probably just needs a night to adjust to the idea.” Drew paused. “He’s humiliated, Millipede. You put him on a plane, sent him out here to an expensive rehab, and he blew it, and now he’s in a halfway house with a bunch of ex-cons.”
“Wait,” Milly interrupted, startled. “There’s a bunch of ex-cons in this house?”
“It’s a very good program,” Drew said. “It’s a nonprofit. I know many people who’ve done it. It was also the only place for him to go because nobody was paying for him to go somewhere fancy a third time around.”
This much was true; when Jared had heard Mateo was in jail, he’d instantly said that Mateo would never receive a dollar of support from them again.
Drew stood up. “Just give it a little time, okay, Mills?”
She went back to her office down the hall, but when Milly picked up her book again, she couldn’t concentrate. After a few minutes, she padded down the hall and tapped on Drew’s office door. Drew turned around in her chair.
“Can I ask you something?” Milly began.
“Ask.”
“Do you even remember this drug time in your life anymore? When you first tried to stop, from that night you came to my place and then, I guess, the following year in rehab and all that?”
Drew smiled. “I remember it vividly.”
“What do you remember about it?”
“It was like—” Drew searched for the words. “It was like being born again.”
A memory flashed through Milly’s mind: Drew wearing that ankh pendant! Which, as it turned out, she had abandoned a year or two down the line, much to Milly’s private relief.
“I don’t mean that in a Jesus-y evangelical way,” Drew said. “But it was like — every day those first few months were so hard. But everything was so vivid. Colors, interactions I had with people, emotions, thoughts, things I noticed on the street. Daily epiphanies. Everything was so raw. I wouldn’t want to go through it again. But I think that was the best year of my life.”
Milly mulled over this a long time. “Do you think maybe Mateo’s finally having that now?” she finally asked.
“I hope so. But maybe you should try to have a year like that, too.”
Sixteen. West Adams (2012)
Mateo is on his hands and knees, cleaning the second-floor bathroom. This is his job every morning after breakfast, at least for this week’s work cycle in the house. By far, it’s the gnarliest job here. With cooking duties, there’s the social element, goofing with the other guys in the house, putting a bit of creativity into the chopping of vegetables, listening to cheesy Top 40-hip-hop on Power 106 on the old boom box in the kitchen. Vacuuming and dusting, there’s still an element of remove from the gnarly factor; at least you’re standing up, Mateo figures. But when you’re on your knees because you’ve got to spray and wipe down the floor where two dozen guys have planted their feet while they took a dump over the past twenty-four hours, then have to wipe down the shower where they’ve probably jerked off, savoring that brief moment of privacy in a house where privacy is hard to come by, there’s no getting around the fact that all your choices have led you here, to where you’re living under court mandate in a house with a bunch of other court-mandated dudes, who were actually lucky that alcohol or drugs were part of their records, because it gave them this option of choosing a halfway house over more jail time.
And the funny thing is Mateo doesn’t even really mind. While he’s working, guys in the house are singing that schmaltzy half-rap, half-ballad “Lotus Flower Bomb,” by that guy Wale, and he finds himself lifting up his head and joining in, cracking himself up as he cleans. And when he’s done, he stands up in the doorway of the bathroom and takes a moment to admire his work before he puts away the spray cleaner and the paper-towel roll in the cleaning closet before he heads back to his room, which he shares with three other guys, to grab a towel and hit the shower himself. He has seven minutes to report downstairs. On today’s morning docket: acupuncture, a bunch of tiny needles in his ear to reduce anxiety and cravings, at some nonprofit clinic nearby.
Every morning he wakes up in that room, where three other guys are snoring and mumbling in their sleep, and he looks around and his first thought is How the fuck did I get here? Then, every morning, whether he likes it or not, it all comes rushing back to him: that moment when five EMTs came rushing at him down the hall as he stared dumbly at them, naked, paralyzed from what turned out to be the combined effects of heroin, crystal meth, ketamine, and MDMA. There he was, looking up at the squad in a narcotic haze. Instantly, two of them threw one of those silvery thermal blankets around him, pulled him onto a stretcher, and started taking his vitals. A cacophony all around. The other EMTs blew open the door to the apartment, where he could vaguely remember hearing the music and assorted moans and exclamations of the porn video.
The EMTs coalescing in the apartment around her. Carrie. (A woman at the nonprofit yoga-like clinic they go to taught him how to do a breathing exercise, after he confided to the woman that every time he thought of Carrie — and it was usually several times a day, starting with shortly after he woke — he wanted to hurt, or kill, himself. He clings to that breathing exercise now like a madman.)
Anyway, Mateo remembers that much. He doesn’t remember much more. Well, he vaguely remembers lying on a bed that was only half concealed by a curtain on a ceiling runner, shouting things, and people holding him down. And that’s about the last thing he remembers until he came to in a hospital room. Then there was a period in a detox unit he can vaguely recall, shuffling awake a few times a day to go eat some bad food with a bunch of freaks, sitting there in a half-coma with a social worker talking to him about his options, then, at night, a makeshift AA meeting with some outside people brought in, mumbling out his dank thoughts.
It had all led to an inpatient rehab center for a month, some place that accepted Medi-Cal, which apparently they had put him on. He barely remembered anything from that month. He didn’t remember much until he was discharged and a minivan drove him here, to this not-so-pristinely maintained fourteen-room Craftsman home, called Triumph House, in a run-down, poverty-stricken neighborhood full of beautiful old houses called West Adams.