“I can’t believe she hasn’t called yet, she promised,” I whisper to Paul in the middle of the second night. There’s no need to preface it with, “Are you awake?”
“You actually believed her?” he says.
“She doesn’t want to feel guilty. She thinks calling us lets her off the hook.”
Till now, “waiting for the phone to ring in the night” was just a cliché. Now, we’re torn between dying for it to ring and be Mia, and hoping it doesn’t because it might be the police or the morgue.
I’m on a bus in the middle of nowhere, high off my ass. This tweaker saw me popping Coricidin the first day and we’ve been sitting in the back getting high ever since. There’s shit else to do on a bus for three days.
There’s a group of nuns singing praise to Jesus on my left, a cluster of screaming babies up front, and pacing the aisle is some sketchy guy muttering to himself in Spanish. Thank God I’m high because I couldn’t handle all this straight.
My anger at Mia for doing this to herself has pulled me out of the fog of parental guilt. A depressed, drug-addled fifteen-year-old has manipulated and intimidated all of the adults around her into collaborating in her self-destruction.
I juggle writing and feigning good cheer for the producer with researching a way to help Mia nearly every hour of the day. I have the phone company put a trace on our line and alert Vivian that she’s headed for Indiana. I call police officers, probation officers, and state social workers to find a rehab program for her. Until Mia breaks the law, they can’t help.
Insurance will pay for a month of inpatient rehab, but it won’t be much different than the psych ward. I try calling the local high school guidance counselor, who recommends we go for family therapy. Right.
Dr. Kravitz suggests a therapeutic boarding school in the mountains nearby. Five grand a month, a lot of traditional therapy, and she can’t be forced to stay. Not good.
Someone suggests joining BILY, Because I Love You, a support group for parents of runaways and missing kids. Oh, no, Paul groans, I couldn’t take it. I agree. Our misery doesn’t want the company of theirs.
I’ve learned to say she has a drug addiction stemming from depression rather than sexual abuse. Drugs are cool and half of LA is on antidepressants. Fallout from incest? You can hear them squirm through the phone. How easy it would be if it were only drugs. Drugs you can withdraw from. How do you withdraw from memories—a lobotomy?
“Mia!”
I step off the bus in Indiana and there’s Brian, smiling. I race over and I’m so happy to be off that bus I kiss him. He explains the living situation to me on the ride home. He’s obviously tweaked, talking and driving like a maniac.
“See, I technically live with my cousin and his girlfriend, who fucking hates me. So most nights, I just sleep in my van. So, I was thinking we could just live in my van and then for showers and shit we’ll wait until she leaves and sneak you in. In about a month I’m gonna rent a trailer.”
“That’s cool. Oh, shoot, hold up. I gotta call my mom.”
“Yes, we’ll take the charges! Where are you, are you okay?”
“I don’t know, Kansas,” Mia says. “I just want you to know I’m okay. I gotta go.”
She’s not in Kansas, the caller ID box says she’s in an area near Larkin. I call the Larkin police. Vivian says to tell them she hung out with the Wilkinsons.
The police tell us they’ll watch for her, then tell us two things: not to search on our own because we’d stick out too much and Larkin County has one of the worst heroin problems in the nation. So much for the wholesome countryside. There’s the 4H and the other H.
I ask them what they’d do if it were their kid. The general consensus: slap the living daylights out of them, lock ’em in the barn, home school them, and let ’em out at eighteen. At this point, it’s the best suggestion we’ve heard.
The girlfriend’s gone so I get my first shower since I left home a week ago. I’ve been coughing a lot lately and the steam feels good in my chest. When I get out, Brian’s standing there staring.
“Hello,” I say, surprised. I feel both pleased and squirmy. We’ve had sex once before but I was high and kept most of my clothes on. When he finally hands me the towel I take it and run upstairs to dry off and change.
We cut a few lines and head over to a party at his friend Warren’s place. It’s loud and rowdy, an older version of the Wilkinson house. Warren’s fun and kind of fatherly, but with an edge. He’s telling stories about his latest escapade, a fight he and some friends got into.
“I took a bat to this one jackass, damn near killed him. And then his friend came out to get his back and I turned around and knifed the fucker!”
His eyes gleam with pride. I’m glad when he stops talking and goes back to drinking and manning the grill. He brings me a burger.
“As long as you’re here you’re family. I know Brian since he was a little shrivel dick. Hey, and just ’cause this jackass lives in his vehicle, you’re a lady and if you ever want a real bed you come on over here.”
I smile and thank him, trying to reconcile the image of this hospitable guy with someone who amuses himself by splitting people’s heads open with baseball bats.
I’ve been afraid to call Mia’s friend, Melanie, in case she alerts her, but we have nothing else to go on. I make girl talk, earn her confidence. She says she hasn’t seen Mia. I drop casually that coke now and then wasn’t so bad, but Mia’s looking awful now.
“She’s probably speed balling more,” she says, as if I know what it is. “That can make you look pretty bad.”
She promises to call if she hears from Mia. I research speedballing. Injecting a mixture of cocaine and heroin is one of the most common causes of death by overdose. The heart loses rhythm and fails. River Phoenix and John Belushi died speedballing.
Paul and I have been on two phone lines and two computers looking for help. We’ve googled “teen,” “juvenile,” “drugs,” “delinquent,” but all we get are porno sites—naked teens behind bars, naked teens in bondage, naked teen drug orgies. We’ve tried “Rehab,” “treatment,” “family”—nothing, nothing, nothing. I’m ready to don overalls, hunt her down, and lock her in the first barn I can buy.
When the phone rings.
“She do what?!” our French friend Yvette cries out. “Sanks à God you call to me! I know a mozer wiz a girl who do bad tings, so she lock ’er up in some place zat fix ’er! She a big model now, zat girl! I going to call to ’er right now!”
I have a new alarm clock: the slamming of my head against the van floor when Brian races over the railroad tracks on the way to work. I tap on the glass for him to pull over so I can come up front. I lift up the hatch and hop down but my legs give way and little white dots appear everywhere. I sit on the ground, taking deep breaths. In a minute, color and sound drain back like a slow wave. Still shaky, I hold onto the car for support until I feel the front door handle.
“It’s extreme and expensive. You can’t just go visit either, she has to earn it,” Yvette’s friend tells me. “But it worked for us. We have a very close relationship now.”
Her daughter was at a behavior modification school in Utah for a year, a state that allows you to force your child into treatment. We naïvely assumed the laws were the same everywhere.
We’ve never heard of this kind of school but they’ve been in the news, on 48 Hours, Dateline, and we get copies of the shows. Their portrayal is hardly encouraging. They sound scary, like they brainwash the kids. Though if they were like Mia, maybe they needed their brains washed.
We get referral names from the schools and talk to many families from an array of them, most of whom are happy, with some minor criticisms. But we’re troubled by the conflicting portrayals. Do we believe the parents, whom the schools themselves chose for referrals, or the news?
On the one hand, the media’s supposed to report with no bias. On the other hand, Woody Allen marries his daughter and the press still adores him. And just as schools pick their referral parents, reporters pick the kids they talk to. Kids with good stories would hardly sell. And Yvette’s friend was not referred by a school.
We try Maddy, from the alternative school. Yes, she says, I’ve had parents send students there as a last resort, and they do seem to change the kids, but I worry at what cost. She says they come back with this cultish vocabulary and they seem just a little too polite. “I hate to tame these kids, Claire.” Though I’m sure it wasn’t her intention, she’s just given the schools a recommendation—a little too polite? And psychotherapy’s got plenty of its own slang—projection, overdetermined, fixation.
We find schools in Utah, Montana, and Oregon, all far from civilization, with “trails to success” amid towering pines and cinnamon-hued boulders. We study brochures, scrutinize websites, and call parents till we’re dizzy. Some schools sound too warm and fuzzy. I don’t want the counselors to be her “friend,” I want her to feel like she’s hit a wall. And I want that wall as escape-proof and as far from anyone she knows as possible.
Once again, like Glinda in her shimmering bubble, Yvette appears at our door, in her impossibly high heels and red lipstick, carrying a bottle of wine and glasses.
“You don’t believe eet, Claire, she come ’ere, ze model! She going to be shot in LA and she want talk to you! She be at my ’ouse tomorrow night, I going to make a nice dinner for you.” She pours three glasses of wine. “Come, my darleeng, we going to ’ave a leelabeet wine, because you look terreeble. I tell you, you going to find Mia by zis weekend, I know eet! Salut!”
From her French leeps to God’s ears.
The rain pummels down outside Warren’s living room. His son Devon’s playing his favorite video game, Street Fighter. As usual, he’s dirty and full of scabs from fighting in school.
“You’re lucky, when I was a kid, my mom didn’t let me play video games,” I say, coughing in between words. My chest is on fire.
“That sucks. Here, play with me!”
I grab a controller and try to dodge the kicks coming at my character, an Asian girl in lime green. When Devon finally kicks the shit out of me, he jumps up, yelling, “Haha, I killed that dirty gook!”
I can’t believe the little snot just said that! I’m about to ask him where he heard that when Warren reaches over and roughs up his hair.
“Way to go, Dev, that’s what you gotta do to gooks, and niggers, get rid of ’em. They’re a total waste of space that steal our women and tax dollars. Remember those dudes Daddy beat a couple weeks ago after I picked you up from school? Those were fag bastards, which are just as bad as kikes, gooks, and niggers.”
My mouth goes dry and my high vanishes instantly as I realize that my new friends are probably the skinheads Aunt Vivian used to talk about. My heart is pounding so hard, I’m scared he’ll actually hear it.
The twisted and misshapen body of the neighbor Warren beat to a bloody pulp last weekend flashes to mind. It was surreal to watch, a kamikaze blur of arms and legs until the man spewed red like a fountain. And that was just for asking Warren to turn down his music.
I am so stupid, so blind. And so Jewish. For some reason, a memory from childhood comes up. Of standing at the kitchen counter picking out unwanted raisins from my cereal. To make sure I would have a completely raisin-free breakfast, I invented a game where the raisins were Nazis and the cereal flakes were Jews. I’d sift through my cereal and pluck out the Nazis, who shouted and protested that they were really Jews. But I was not fooled by their lies and would throw all the raisins in my clenched palm into the trash and slam the lid shut. I solved the raisin question!
But now the tables have turned and I wonder if the raisins know there’s one little cereal flake hiding in their midst. And what they would do if they found out.
I can’t get Warren’s words out of my head. Fag bastards? I was practically raised by lesbians and “fag bastards.” And my first kiss was with a “gook.”
The rain hammering down on the van and my flood of thoughts is driving me crazy. I count out the last of my money, a whopping two dollars and sixty-seven cents.
I hop out and walk to town in the rain. By the time I get there, I’m soaked and muddy. I also can barely see. I feel so weak and light-headed, I sit down on the side of the road in the rain and put my head between my knees. A spiked ball has settled in the back of my throat. Please, God, please, don’t let me faint out here like a dog in the dirt.
I need to get out of here but I have no money and nowhere to go. I’m scared. Of Brian, of Warren, of the fact that I keep fainting and on some days can barely breathe. I light a cigarette and try to come up with a plan, but I keep drawing blanks. The van seems impossibly far away now, so I call Brian’s work and a half-hour later, he pulls up, grinning. He got a big bonus today and we waste no time getting started on an eight-ball of coke.
“Mia! Are you sick? You sound sick, honey.” Paul rushes over to listen. He points to the caller ID box—she’s in a different area code.
“I need money.” Her voice is thin and scratchy.
“We’re afraid you’ll use cash for drugs. Aunt Vivian will bring you food, anything you need!”
“I want cash, you fucking bitch!” she suddenly screams shrilly.
It’s like a gunshot—she’s never, never cursed at me.
“If you won’t send me any fucking cash,” she yells, “then give me his number! I want my fucking old father’s phone number, bitch!”
“I—I don’t know it.” I’m stunned. “You’re going to ask him for money?”
“I want to tell him what an asshole he is for ruining our lives! I want him to die!” she shrieks and hangs up.
Paul takes the phone out of my hand and looks at me anxiously.
“We’re losing her, Paul.”
“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I hated it there for a long time. You go through some serious emotional shit and the other girls won’t let you fake your way through. You can’t lie to a liar.”
“Zat model” has met us at Yvette’s for dinner. I recognize her from magazines. She’s candid, poised, kind. She’s spending the little time off she has on this shoot with two miserable parents she doesn’t know.
She tells us the first three levels in the school are more internal, about getting you to recognize how you got there. Levels four, five, and six are more about how you interact with the world, with peers and family.
“You become a mentor to newer girls and there’s a lot more contact with parents.”
“What prompted you to start changing?”
“After a while, you see that the kids who’ve moved up to higher levels in the school really are happier. You just get sick of your own bullshit, you know? I still use a lot of what I learned, it really does change you for the better, long term. I do occasionally have a drink but I haven’t used drugs since, which is saying a lot in my profession.”
Of all the schools, the parents from her school or their sister facilities are the most ardent in their support of “the program,” as they call it, which surprises me given it’s the strictest of the lot and the one the media slams the most. One woman returns my call after midnight. I knew you’d be awake, she says, I’ve been there. She’s right, I’m wide awake, studying a map of Larkin.
Parents are honest about what they don’t like—the food’s lousy, communication isn’t always good, academics are mediocre. They’re also blunt in saying that Paul and I will be doing some behavior modifying of our own; the program involves the entire family.
The last woman I talk to, Trish, feels most like me in terms of personality and philosophy. She’s a banker who also teaches yoga, with a happy marriage and a daughter much like Mia at their newest facility.
“I think it’s actually the extremity of the program and location that works. They have to be stripped of everything familiar and comfortable, so their only comfort becomes internal. I especially like that the program includes visualizations and affirmations along with the strict rules. The balance is quite remarkable; it changes the way they think. The director, Glenn, is amazing. The girls adore her.”
“You’re sending her where?!” everyone says.
Morava Academy. In Brno, Czech Republic, near the Slovak border. The other side of the world. Locked doors and windows. A tracking dog trained by the German military. Only twenty students, a student-to-staff ratio of 2:1. Peer group daily, personal growth seminars regularly. The teachers speak English, many have PhDs. Students earn the right to take trips to Prague, Vienna, and Budapest. My mother’s from Hungary, she and I can visit together and show Mia her heritage.
It couldn’t get any better. All we have to do is find her. She hasn’t called in a week.
“For heaven’s sake, tell the police and your sister to stop looking for her. If anyone notices, she’ll take off. I’m a former police officer, I’ll coordinate with them when I get there. Try to get me a name, that’s best in rural areas.”
Jack Tyson is an escort. I had no idea there was an entire profession devoted to finding and snatching seriously wayward teens. When he finds her, if he does, he’ll take her to a holding facility in Utah where she’ll get a medical and psychological evaluation before being escorted to the Czech Republic.
Melanie hasn’t called but I try her again, telling her that Mia is sick and we want to send money and medicine. She says she’s sorry but doesn’t sound like it and doesn’t offer more. I think her tone’s changed because she hears the desperation in my voice. She knows my small talk is begging and she’s enjoying it.
I hear her light a cigarette. I hear her inhale.
“Well, you know,” she says languidly, “I do remember her saying something about camping with some guy.”
I can picture her narrowing her eyes as she blows the smoke out in her own sweet time. Then she sighs the words out slowly, “I think…it was…Brian…Briiiian Starcher.”
She always knew. And she never would have called to tell me. I had to go to her, do a dance, wheedle. There’s a learning curve to this that could cost Mia her life.
I find the Starcher’s number easily enough. Fortunately, Brian’s brother is young, polite, and intimidated by me. Unfortunately, he doesn’t know where he is. But he does know where he works. Jack’s on a plane within hours.
“He filled the door, Claire, literally. He could kidnap a gorilla.”
It’s late at night and Jack’s just left Vivian’s. She gave him and his partner, Beth, names and locations, local hangouts. They’ll start their search early tomorrow at the campground. It’s the first night I feel any kind of hope.
I’ve been wanting to go camping ever since we got here. I love being out at night like this, out in the wild. I look up at the stars. They make me feel alive. It’s a welcome change from that dead feeling that only drugs or raw physical sensation like cutting wakens. I feel connected. I don’t know what to, but I feel less alone. I didn’t grow up religious and I’ve always been somewhat envious of people who are. I felt dumb whenever I prayed, like I was talking to a wall. I could just picture God sitting up high looking at his answering machine and seeing six billion unheard messages and then deleting them all. But tonight’s different. I don’t feel alone, even if it is just the stars up there watching me.
I wake up today so weak I can barely move. Or breathe for that matter, my voice is almost totally gone and I’m wheezing like crazy. I have no appetite even though I haven’t eaten in days. I literally don’t even have the energy to pull myself up to the glass to signal to Brian as he starts the van. He’s helping a friend move some stuff into his shop, a friend he says can give me a part-time job to pay for food and smokes. What he doesn’t know is that it’s also going to buy me a ticket out of here. New York’s not far and it’s full of other street kids.
I lay my head down and pass out.
Jack and Beth cruise Larkin on the way to the campground. The van isn’t there, but a girl remembers seeing it. They hit the gas stations, the bars and pool halls, the convenience stores, cheap diners. He checks the parking lot of Brian’s job twice, but he must be off today.
The convenience store nearby is run by someone Jack feels he can trust. The man recognizes Mia, says she comes in for cigarettes. He promises not to alert her.
Jack returns to the campground but the van never shows up.
My coughing wakes me after it’s dark. I pull myself up to the window. We’re still at Brian’s friend’s; they’re probably all inside the shop partying. I just want to sleep. I’ll figure out what to do tomorrow.
Jack focuses his last day on Brian’s job and places near it. He pulls into the lot of the plant, drives up and down the aisles, then stops.
The van sits parked in the hot June sun. He gets out one aisle over and walks toward the front of the van. Beth pulls up behind it, blocking the path out the back. Jack walks along the front bumper. The front seat is empty. He turns down the side. No curtains on the back window—good. Jack moves silently down the side of the van, stops at the window and looks in.
There’s a dirty mattress and pillows. And no Mia. He looks around the lot, gets in his car, and tells Beth to drive to the convenience store. They’ll come back to the lot and wait for Brian to leave and follow him.
They pull slowly out of the lot, passing a grassy area that slopes down to a river. And in that river, just below his sightline, a sick, emaciated girl is cooling off.
On my back, in my underclothes, the cool water feels like heaven. I was so hot I dragged myself to the river behind the plant. I had to stop to rest twice. Now, submerged in water, I look up at the wavering sky from underwater and for a blissful moment forget where I am.
An hour later, Jack returns to the plant lot and cruises up the aisle. The van is gone. Gone! Brian must have gotten off early. They search everywhere else she could be until late into the night, with no luck. He leaves early tomorrow.
My God, he was so close! I’m so upset I can’t stop pacing. I have such a strong foreboding that she’s about to run to somewhere else or overdose or she’s sick.
I slap open the back door and stagger out into the night, barefoot and in pajamas, like a loosed asylum inmate with her robe flapping behind her. I burst into tears and stop in the street and beg—
“Dear God,
Please help me find Mia.
Sincerely,
Claire.”
A letter? My first prayer in my adult life comes out like a letter? Like it was to Santa Claus?
God must have checked his mail. An hour later the phone rings. It’s Mia. Can Aunt Vivian bring medicine and groceries? Yes yes yes! Antibiotics, antipsychotics, money, whatever you need, help is on the way, Mia, we love you please come home!
“Mother, I just want some money and antibiotics. Tell her to meet at the convenience store tomorrow at eleven. If she says one word to me, I’ll take the stuff and I won’t call you again.”
I promise Mia she won’t, trying to keep the happiness out of my voice. Jack generously agrees to stay an extra day to pick her up.
I think I’ve found a new pen pal. I send a Him thank you card immediately.
My mom finally did something right. My aunt’s van is there, and there’s a grocery bag sitting in front. I go to open the door and grab the bag, but it’s locked. Aunt Vivian gets out and walks around to where I’m standing. Shit, I didn’t want to talk to her.
She unlocks the passenger door, reaches for the bag, hands it to me and hugs me, saying something about how much my family loves me. Just then I hear a door open behind me. I go to turn around but my arms are grabbed and I’m lifted in the air. My heart skyrockets out of my chest and I start looking around in every direction, panicking.
“Aunt Vivian, help me!”
She’s saying something and looking at me sadly but isn’t doing anything to stop this. What the FUCK is going on? Who is this guy? I vaguely hear him say, “It’s okay, your mother sent us.” Right! I’m sure those are the last words heard by every abducted girl from here to LA.
I’m pushed into a car, which speeds off immediately. My hands reach everywhere, the window, the handle, I’m trapped. They keep repeating that it’s okay, I haven’t been kidnapped, my mother sent them.
“Prove it, you fucking assholes!” I yell, on the verge of tears.
The guy turns around to me and says with a smile, “Twinkletoes.”
I freeze. That was our secret family password when I was little.
Everything falls into place, the sad look on my aunt’s face, my mom’s willingness to send me money, the locked door. I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck. My own mother had me kidnapped.