THE THINGS THEY CARRY

THERE’S A FAMILY that lived up the street from me when I was growing up. I remember playing in their backyard and the youngest, a boy around six or seven, would sit on a swing, his feet stationary in the dirt, his knees the axis for the slow circular movements of the swing, and he’d whisper to himself some kind of Euclidean geometry. His parents were physicists and his brain seemed full of numbers I would never understand.

The differences of families. There are families with super–taste buds that eat sea creatures for dinner, their kids eager for one more bite, and families with mental illness, and families with inherited heart defects, and circus families that go back generations, when their peculiarities could gather a return and sustain a certain way of life: vertebrae with the ability to bend back onto themselves, an uncanny knack for balancing large objects on pinky fingers, overly tall, lanky bodies, or the opposite: tiny people with tiny feet and tiny hands and squeaky voices to boot. Families that could prophesy, raise a table with the palms of their hands, lift their faces toward the gods, and utter cursory things in a profound way: twelve years minus five and a new individual will come into your life . . .

The difference of souls. We look sideways at each other and compare even though comparing is illogical. Our diseases are custom-made like our souls are custom-made and we inherit them along with our double-jointed elbows and savant-like math skills—things are nature and things are nurture and never shall the two divide. And whether you’re raised in a carnival or study at MIT, you can still break an ankle or need a root canal and end up with a bottle of hard-to-resist Vicodin on your bedside table.

It took a while for me grasp how incomprehensible and complex the factors are that lead to addiction. If I’d had a tablespoon of cherry-flavored medicine that heals all ills, and I could have slipped it into the mouth of every struggling kid I knew I would have, but that’s not the way addiction works. There’s no single way to cure all. And there is nothing and no one to pin the responsibility of addiction entirely on—no sister or brother or friend, no mother or father—all of us carry things, hurt ankles and hurt hearts, and the only real cherry-flavored medicine is love, which of course we all need—sober or not. Understanding that addiction is a disease with many causes and without a comprehensive cure has a way of draining the judgment right out of you.

There were the kids that hung out in our living room with Rick and ate brownies in the kitchen with me and stayed in our home and had parents I talked with on the phone and parents I prayed with, kids who knew the love of family and friends, kids who stayed here and kids who didn’t, kids I didn’t know but prayed for, kids far away and kids standing next to me. I’ll list them so you can practice not judging. Practice not blaming. Think of each one of them and love them from a distance and practice not judging because, regardless of why, they carried heavy burdens.

There was the girl who sat next to the wall in our living room trying to stay awake while Rick led a Bible study, then nodded off as she flaked out and gave in to the opiates seeping around every blood-corner of every organ in her body, and the kid with the pastor father who messed up and messed up again and finally came around, and the kid who smoked weed because it was the only way he could sleep. There was the kid whose parents kidnapped her and dropped her off at a camp for untoward teenagers so she’d finally figure out life, and the kid who hated his parents, and the kid who didn’t, the kid who stole beer from garages and the kid who drank Imodium to get high, and the other kid who drank hand sanitizer in rehab so he could suck as much alcohol as possible from it and hopefully feel a little bit less anxious but ended up on the bathroom floor with severe pancreatitis before he finally got sober. There’s the kid who went away for a year to a rehab on a beautiful mountain and sang songs to Jesus and saw rainbows when he really needed the encouragement of seeing a rainbow, and came home but couldn’t resist another needle, just one more needle and then I’ll be done. There was the kid who made his way across America visiting rehab after rehab and then would phone his parents asking for more money for clothes or food and use it for meth instead and then end up on a street in California where his mother finally found him and could barely recognize him he was so dirty and half-alive so that she held his head in her lap in the back seat of a car as they drove to another rehab which would work for sure, this one would. There’s the kid who did psychedelics until his eyes glassed over and he became terrified of the people trying to get him—the government or something was after him—so Rick asked him to mow the lawn because then maybe he’d think about something other than the government trying to get him and he mowed the lawn in spirals, like a thumbprint that matched his own mind. There was the skinny kid who smoked copious amounts of weed whom I’ve always loved so much who couldn’t get enough of his Bible, who loved his Bible until he couldn’t stop turning pages, reading too much into individual words and then saw the eyes of his friends speaking to him without words, like blue eyes said one thing and brown eyes said another, and ended up in a psychiatric ward, so that Sweetboy visited him to cheer him up while his mother and I prayed, only I didn’t pray for him as much as she did because she loved him, as parents say these days, “to the moon and back.” And there’s the kid who took Vivitrol for months so he’d stop using heroin because he wanted to stop using heroin, but if you use heroin after not using it for months you can die quickly; and he did use it, and he did die. The Vivitrol and Suboxone and Seroquel and Lamictal are burdens in themselves, but worth it if they help you quit the heroin. There was the kid who didn’t use heroin, but felt his body begin to freeze up and his heart pound fierce in his chest so that he went to Rick’s side of the bed in the middle of the night, kneeled down, and asked us to pray for him. There was the track-star kid I didn’t like much because he’d insulted one of Jules’s friends—and it must have been quite an insult because Jules punched him in the face even though she isn’t the kind of person who punches people in the face. He moved to the Bronx and made money in Manhattan by selling art and selling drugs until he messed with the wrong people and then they messed with him and he disappeared so that we all followed Facebook posts about him and felt sorry for his parents and wondered where he could be, until he showed up back in the Bronx in a downstairs club late at night dead, as they say, with a bullet through his head. Rick once asked how bad the clubs in Philly were and Sweetboy told him he’d once seen a girl who led her boyfriend around on a leash. There was also a kid who overdosed on the dance floor so that paramedics had to revive him and carry him out on a stretcher. I’ve always wondered if the people kept dancing, trying not to kick him in the face as he lay unconscious. There was the kid who prayed all the time and the other kid who prayed with him and the kid who went to an island somewhere with a group of Christians who spoke in tongues until it weirded him out and he came home so that he could figure things out for himself and then left for somewhere again and speared fish in the ocean and helped the people who lived there because he loves his God and he has a knack for spearing fish and building people houses. He’s the one who drywalled The Chill Spot and built me a compost bin. There was the really smart kid who finally felt Jesus go from his head to his heart while Sweetboy lay unconscious, the same kid, Sweetboy’s best friend, who Rick pulled aside in the CCU so he could hug him for what felt like forever and tell him that he needed to hug him because he was Sweetboy’s best friend and it was as close as he could get to hugging his own son. There was Stephan’s friend, the kid I talked to in the kitchen for a long time about how Jesus felt the same burdens as us when he was on the cross, only an infinity of them, so that our own burdens will be lifted and he will carry them for us and he cried he was so struck by the wonder of it—that same kid who, one day later, drank too much and flipped his car and died, so that Rick and I went to the funeral and watched as his friend who had been in the car with him limped to his casket to say goodbye even though he had a shaved head and a band of staples from ear to ear that we were all having a hard time not looking at. And there was the mother of the kid who died in the car that flipped, saying over and over give the boy a seat at his funeral because life didn’t make much sense at that point and she probably didn’t know what else to say. There were the two kids who tasted the love of Christ and loved him back so they went to college to learn more. And another kid who was doing heroin who ended up walking down Route 3 with her suitcase after her parents made her leave, so that her parents half laughed even as they were crying, it was such a sight, but then her parents loved her something crazy so we met every week to pray for her and now her face lights up and she loves freedom and has a personality that will cheer anyone who’s with her. There’s the kid in jail for trying to stab someone with the needle of a syringe, at least that’s the story. There’s that kid who went to jail, got out, used again, and drove his car over a woman so that she almost died and still the woman forgave him but he shot heroin one last time and then died anyway. There were those kids who prayed over and over for Sweetboy and, like a soldier wounded on the battlefield, carried Sweetboy’s metaphorical stretcher to a metaphorical Huey chopper so that our Lord and our God could fly him to safer ground even as Agent-Orange Evil was hovering over his face like a cloud.

THE JOY COMES IN

SWEETBOY WOKE UP ON July 3rd. I remember this because I had recently finished a novel I’d been working on in which a prayer vigil is held on July 3rd for a comatose girl. I found that remarkable. That night Rick and I went home together for the first time. A nurse promised to call if there was anything at all they thought we’d want to know.

Later that same night I got a call from the nurse. She told me Sweetboy had wanted her to call me. “He wants me to tell you he’s sorry and that he loves you,” she said. I stared at the open door with light flooding in from the hallway bathroom. I asked her to please tell him I love him too, tell him I love him so much. I thought about going across to the hospital, then rolled over on my side and quietly cried.

Rick and I were sitting next to Sweetboy’s bed when a doctor I didn’t know showed up. She didn’t say hello but went straight to the curtains and briskly pulled them open. His breathing had been labored to the point of him asking me about it and I didn’t know what to tell him since I’d been concerned about it too. I could see his chest rising and falling and his speech was labored. Nurses weren’t checking on him as much as they had been at first and it made me nervous, I felt that if anything serious happened, it would be up to me to call someone in. After she opened the curtains, I asked her why his breathing was so labored.

“That’s what drugs do to you,” she said and left as quickly as she’d come in. I still don’t know if she meant the antibiotics or the heroin. I think she left it for us to figure out.

After that, a social worker came and talked with him. She told him if he was healthy enough he would be discharged to a rehab in a few days. When she left, Sweetboy sat up and peeled off the tabs and the wires stuck to his chest that were monitoring his heart, pulled out his IV, and left the hospital. He was about to leave still wearing a hospital gown when one of the nurses gave him his jeans. We begged him to stay but he left anyway. I wanted to struggle him to the floor, tie him to the bed, anything to keep his warm body where I could still touch it. Heartbroken, Rick and I went home. I tried to get the peace that I had in the elevator and think about how no matter what everything would be okay. I was a little bit successful.

When we got home, we found him in his room with his head in his hands. He looked at us and told us he couldn’t do it, that he couldn’t go to rehab and if we made him, he’d only leave. We said he had to and that he didn’t have a choice. We had found a rehab that was supposed to be a very good one. It was beyond our ability to pay for, but at that point it didn’t matter. We could sell the house if we had to. We told him it was only an hour away, Get your things together, we’re going. He said, “I can’t,” and to underscore that we were going anyway, I grabbed a bag from his closet and put a few things in it I thought he would need. Rick led him out to the car. Sweetboy was sweating and pale and shaking. I wondered how many beats per minute his heart was beating and if it would suddenly stop and if there was a defibrillator at the rehab.

Sweetboy got in the front seat next to Rick and I got in the back. Rick’s dad had come down by that time and he came out the back door and headed toward the car. He was about to get in the back seat with me when I told Rick that I didn’t want him to come with us and that I thought we should be alone. Rick seemed reticent at first, but when his dad slid in next to me, he told him it would be best if he stayed here. “Oh, okay,” he said, and slid back out.

I tried to keep my tears to myself as we quietly pulled out of the driveway and onto the highway. Rick appeared calm. We were silent. Sweetboy rolled his window half down and lit a cigarette. I stopped crying as we passed farms and fields planted with knee-high corn and soybeans. It was gray out and every once and a while we’d pass one of the many newly redesigned rest stops. Halfway there my brother called. He said he wanted to pay for rehab.

When I heard his voice, I started crying again. “It’s so much money.”

He was reassuring and calm, I could tell he wanted me to know it didn’t matter how much it was. “How about I start by sending $15,000?”

“I can’t believe how much it is. I’m so sorry. Thank you so much. I can’t believe you’re doing this. Thank you, thank you so much.” I spoke quietly. I didn’t want Sweetboy to hear me.

Wyomissing, Pennsylvania, although it sounds similar to Wyoming, is nothing like Wyoming. Wyoming is dusty and waterless, like an expanse of cracked, dry skin. Wyomissing is lush and green. It thrives. Narrow roads wander through trees so intertwined some of the trunks have become grafted together into fat pasta-like contortions. There are pockets of houses and antique shops, oil paintings, chairs, things made out of tin placed on sidewalks to lure the occasional bevy from the city. Farm tables and pottery. We headed up a mountain to the rehab center. The road wandered between tall pines in wide switchbacks. We passed a few cleared areas with cabins and outdoor fireplaces and they made me hopeful, as though all we were doing was dropping Sweetboy off for summer camp where he would canoe and swim and learn archery and meet a cute girl. I began to imagine rehab solving everything; it would all be over soon. We’d have him back, and I would no longer be afraid.

I prayed in a series of paragraphs, each one slightly different, but in all of them asking God to heal our son. Between each paragraph I caught my spiritual breath, thanked God for something, and continued on. The rehab was situated in a wide clearing at the very top of the mountain. There was a large sign like you might find for a new housing development named Forest Knoll, or Meadow Fields, as though combining two pastoral words together will automatically fill the place with laughing children who will never think of doing drugs. Village Greens, Abington Ridge, Orchard Ponds, all of them fake like Kensington is fake.

As we pulled in, I immediately hated the place. Although there was an enormous old farmhouse and another older mansion, and the place was clean and well kept, there were no cozy cabins or archery targets or canoes, some of the buildings had faux stone siding and the windows had plastic inserts as stand-ins for real mullions and for some reason I just plain wanted everything to be real. We parked in a lot next to a small building with a sign that said “Admissions.” I grabbed Sweetboy’s bag and we got out of the car. There was a round white pergola next to the parking lot with a stone pathway that led to the building. Each stone was engraved with a step from the twelve-step program: admitting you have a problem, higher power, yadda yadda yadda.

Inside there were two small glass windows, one with a sign taped to it that said Please take a seat, someone will be with you shortly. There was a comfortable hotel lobby–like couch and two hotel lobby–like yellow chairs and an oval coffee table. A box of Kleenex. Good call. Behind the couch was a large, fading photograph of what looked to be the facility in the fall. The carpet was the type you might find in CVS, non-descript gray with virtually no give. You could bounce a basketball on it. The room had an affliction of blandness, as though every drink of alcohol or needle of dope rejected—every day without—had the anemic side effect of no longer being able to experience color, and the photograph of the facility in the fall with its faded reds and yellows and greens had been hung there like a prescription drug to mask the side effects of detoxing. Rick went over to a Keurig coffeemaker and made himself a cup of coffee. Sweetboy looked out the window. He was still shaky and sweating. His face was pale. I looked for a defibrillator.

A kind woman came around the corner, introduced herself, and shook Sweetboy’s hand. We followed her to a small room with a conference table and comfortable chairs and sat down at one end. Protocol. Questions. Sheets of papers to fill out. A male nurse came in and took Sweetboy to a room around the corner to make sure he was physically okay and part of me hoped he wasn’t okay, that he’d be sent back home with us and I could squeeze myself backwards through some kind of hole in the spacetime continuum and build a fort with him in the backyard.

Is all of this odd? Am I more distraught than other parents who’ve been through the same things? If Sweetboy was angry and fighting us would I have been less distraught? Or more distraught? I don’t know the answer to this.

When Sweetboy’s counselor came in to meet us, we immediately liked him. He was warm and understanding and confident, like he understood how difficult things were for us. He told us that Sweetboy was in the right place and would be okay. I don’t remember his name, only that he made me feel hopeful. He said he’d be in touch to let us know how things were going. His office was lined with books, books on addiction, Bibles, concordances, C. S. Lewis. He told us later that Sweetboy had spent a lot of time in there hanging out and reading.

When we got home Sophie and one of my friends were cleaning up the kitchen and sweeping the floors. My friend was sweeping dog hair off the stairs and asked me whether there was always so much dog hair and how can you keep up with it. Usually I would have made a joke about it, mentioned something about how we should shave Joey once a month or something, but I just smiled and gave a half-hearted laugh and said I know. There was a bag full of food on the dining room table, a salad, and chicken and rice, and I could smell it as soon as we came in. I wasn’t hungry but the thought of someone caring for us by bringing food almost startled me. As though like a prism, there were facets to what we were going through that we hadn’t begun to see yet. Smells are memorably strong. Sometimes God being good to me can make me uncomfortable the way receiving from others can make me uncomfortable—it’s hard to think I deserve it.

By that time it was late at night and Sophie suggested we should rest so we went to the guest room and lay down, prayed quietly, and fell sleep. Three hours later I got a phone call from Sweetboy’s counselor.

“He ran about an hour ago and since he isn’t eighteen yet, we can still go after him, but I sent some staff to find him and they weren’t able to. I’m not sure why he left—things seemed to be going well. Everyone seems to like him here. His roommate is kind of upset. I’ve actually had to work to calm him down some. I thought I should let you know right away—this kind of thing happens a lot.”

Wyomissing is near Reading. If he made it to Reading he’d find heroin. If he did heroin, his heart would fail. If his heart failed, he would die. We got in the car and we headed back to look for him somewhere within the forty-mile radius encircling Reading. Somehow we’d find him. At least if he hadn’t caught a bus to Oregon.

Like a manual I have to keep flipping through to find the right page, peace eludes me when I’m looking for it. Biblical hope is really the opposite of hoping; biblical hope is the sense of expectation arising from a fact understood by faith, and when we were driving through city streets and up winding mountain roads desperately looking for Sweetboy, I was hoping we’d find him, but what I really wanted was to expect we would find him. I wanted to be confident that the outcome would be victorious even though confidence that it would be, in effect, was impossible unless I believed the ending would be victorious. (And I don’t mean manipulative belief, the way some might say, “If you only believe such and such will happen,” as though it’s a matter of mustering up something in ourselves to make a specific thing happen.) Of course, we don’t know what that victory will look like, only that it’s a good thing, and if it’s a good thing, there’s peace in that. Some of the root words for faith are assurance and firm conviction. Belief. Faith. Trust. A spaghetti of words. In philosophy it’s called a conditional. I needed hope after all, I just didn’t understand what the word meant.

Christian Wiman wrote his poem “From a Window” after being diagnosed with cancer. The poem touches on how perceptions can change when experiencing grief and suffering. In the last stanza he writes, That life is not the life of men / And that is where the joy came in. God transcends the life of men, and as I wound up a hill in Reading, Pennsylvania, looking for Sweetboy, I finally found that page in the manual I’d been looking for. A lot of conditionals, but things began to come together.

We found him walking down a hill not far from the rehab, and when he got in the car he gave me a small yellow flower. I pressed it flat between two fingers and held it tight for the rest of the day. The Sweetboy I knew would give me a flower—Sweetboy, who weighed ten pounds nine ounces when he was born and when he was four stood on the chair in the kitchen to help me bake cookies, would give me a flower.

After we picked him up and began to drive back up the mountain so that he realized we were taking him back to the rehab, he said he wouldn’t stay. He was becoming agitated and Rick talked to him the whole way up, explaining how important it was, that everything would be okay, and I prayed. I prayed that he’d go in and stay. I prayed rehab would change him. I prayed that he’d never do drugs again, but when we pulled into the parking lot he jumped out and ran toward some woods and disappeared. It was very dark. The last thing I saw was one leg, the bottom of a sneaker, and his middle finger; and then he was gone.

Worse than needles and intubation and comas and septic shock will always be that finger in the air; it was the antithesis of the flower he gave me and it symbolized much more than the finger itself did. It symbolized one of two roads he could take. The flower symbolized the other. First the flower, then the finger, and I had no idea which one would win. Is it possible to hand someone a flower and at the same time flip them the bird? Would that cancel both of them out? Insert irony so that the whole altruistic/blasphematic act is obliterated?

Rick and I drove home. When I finally got into bed, Rick was already snoring. He’d been so levelheaded. I was wide awake and I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep. Not knowing where Sweetboy was was the colossus of my emotions. It shouldered its way past everything else and made sleep impossible; eating too.

I lay there listening to Rick snoring. Before Sophie’s wedding there hadn’t been any curtains on the windows, so I’d made some in haste out of some burlap I’d found in the basement and you could see right through them. It was a corner room; one window faced the backyard, which was dark, and the other faced the neighbor’s driveway and garage, which had a light above it. The light came into our room as though sifted through gauze, hitting the bedside table then touching the floor before it disappeared.

The phone rang. Some number.

It was Sweetboy.

“Hey, can you come get me?” He was mumbling.

“Where are you? Tell me where you are.”

“I don’t know.”

“We’ll pick you up, just tell me where you are.”

“I’m at some restaurant. I don’t know, it’s near a town.” He began to sound irritated.

“We have to know more—Sweetboy, is there anything else? What’s the restaurant called?”

“I’m not sure, it’s a little farther down the road from that parking lot next to the hill.”

“Stay there. Whose phone are you using? Don’t go anywhere.”

We drove back and forth on the road for twenty minutes before we found him. He was at a restaurant, Wyomissing Restaurant and Bakery, on the left, after a firehouse. When we pulled up he was waiting next to the parking lot with an older guy. When we got out, Sweetboy introduced us to him, “Hey, this is Mike.”

We shook hands and told him thanks for letting Sweetboy use his phone. It was a short conversation. He told us he’d picked him up walking on the side of the road and that he looked so young he thought maybe he needed help so he took him to the restaurant and bought him a meal. We said, “Thanks so much, thanks, thank you.” Sweetboy said, “I really appreciate it”; the man said, “Of course,” and headed to his car.

We got a room at a hotel and decided we’d think about what to do in the morning. Sweetboy told us the guy at the restaurant was really nice and had been clean five years, that he’d shown him a gold coin he’d earned from AA, and I thought maybe angels are like that, maybe sometimes they don’t wear brilliant white shirts but look just like people so they won’t scare you.

The next morning we talked. I didn’t know what to do, I had no idea what to do. I knew if we took him back to rehab he would run again and it would accomplish nothing, perhaps even make things worse if he made it to Reading. Mostly I prayed. Rick took him outside and they talked for a long time. I was glad to be alone.

In the end we decided to take him home. He agreed to go to another rehab, only an outpatient one, and be tested every day. We drove home. He rolled down the window and lit up a cigarette.

The humbling that parents experience when a child is lost in drugs is a precious thing. That invisible seed of humility (that, when pullulated becomes authentic love, selflessness, compassion; tools bound, albeit invisible, to a parent from the first day their baby sees light) needs to make its striking—its beautiful—appearance. The humility of everything falling apart, of every loved thing you have veering away like a meteor slipping from orbit, reveals your true state of affairs.

And something else wonderful happens when you stop obsessing about how you’re perceived. In 2 Corinthians 1, the only passage of the Bible I’ve ever memorized, it says we comfort other people with the same comfort we’ve received from God. If I wasn’t willing to be honest about what we were going through, I doubt many people would have opened up to me about their own struggles; I wouldn’t be much use to any unfortunate kindred spirits out there. You can’t comfort someone with a wayward child if they think your own kid studies hard, gets up early to walk the dog, and makes you breakfast every morning. So I think in the end humility—that same thing we’re always running from—makes rubble of The Evil. It’s all about being humble because when you’re humble you start to pray and when you pray you’re comforted and when you’re comforted you comfort others.

WAYS TO SAVE A KID

THERE ARE TWO TYPICAL WAYS to deal with alcohol when it comes to kids. One theory goes like this: if you don’t freak out about alcohol, if you demonstrate to your child that it can be enjoyed in moderation, it will remove the novelty of it, and thus take away any desire they might have to go get blotto when they’re older. Ultimately, they’ll be less likely to abuse it. The likelihood of rebellion is diminished since there’s nothing to rebel against. A child taking a few sips of wine from an adult’s glass becomes an inoculation.

The other view sees twenty-one as the only acceptable age for a sip of anything, other than cough syrup, that has alcohol in it. A sip of wine before age twenty-one is not okay. Self-control, respect, rule-following, prevention. It’s a parent’s duty to make sure their child is following the rules, and that includes not drinking alcohol before it’s legally permitted.

Until recently, within reason, I would probably have leaned toward the first view. Rick and I don’t drink much, so it wasn’t something we gave much thought to, but it makes sense to me to allow a sip of wine here and there. A sip of wine at fourteen to see what it tastes like doesn’t seem harmful, maybe even beneficial. No big deal. Teach them moderation, all’s good.

Richard Mattick and his colleagues at the University of New South Wales in Australia monitored the alcohol intake of almost two thousand teenagers, age twelve to eighteen, over the course of six years (“Association of Parental Supply of Alcohol with Adolescent Drinking, Alcohol-Related Harms, and Alcohol Use Disorder Symptoms: A Prospective Cohort Study,” The Lancet, January 25, 2018). They specifically focused on the parent’s role regarding whether or not they allowed their child to drink in moderation at home, even if it was only a sip of wine here and there. They were looking for correlations related to future binge drinking.

The results surprised me. While it wasn’t a clear one-to-one, overall the kids who were supplied alcohol at home were more likely—at 81 percent—to self-report binge drinking as they grew older. Teens with no access to alcohol reported having the least amount of alcohol-related problems.

However, keep in mind that this study was based on self-reporting, which provides for a good measure of unreliability, and doesn’t take into account whether a child was given a case of Carleton Draught or a couple sips of Merlot. (Also, some European countries with lower drinking ages have been assessed as being the “least risky” for later drinking problems in young people by the World Health Organization.) Stuff to think about.

As it turned out, Sweetboy had a very addictive personality and I don’t think either strategy would have necessarily prevented anything. Familial genes are peculiar things. One child wrinkles his nose when Aunt Phyllis gives him a sip of her Pinot Noir, another one asks for a second. And for some people, marijuana is poison. If you inherited a variation of the AKT1 gene, a bong hit or half-inch roach can be enough to trigger psychosis: depression, mania, schizophrenia.

If, with genetic testing, we could discern the likelihood that someone will develop an addiction later in life, would it be possible to prevent alcoholism the same way you prevent anaphylactic shock from a stray peanut? Could we prevent addiction to oxycodone or cocaine or heroin or meth? Could parents clasp a silver bracelet with a red caduceus to their child’s wrist as a warning, to warn people they aren’t like other kids—that their child is hereditarily predisposed to addiction and should not be given certain substances ever? Could that same parent drill these things into their child from a young age so they’ll know that if they ever abuse drugs—even one pill or hit of weed—for them it will lead to rehab, jail, or death? I like the idea of a bracelet with a caduceus on it. Prevention is always better than treatment.

I recently read an article in The Atlantic by Gabrielle Glaser (“The Irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous,” April 2015) that postulates that the success of Alcoholics Anonymous—as well as rehab—is significantly lower than certain prescribed drugs in preventing relapse. (The article focuses mainly on alcohol addiction, although much of it is apropos regarding opiates as well.) In short, both alcohol and opiates bind to receptors in the brain that produce dopamine, the neurotransmitter responsible for producing a feeling of well-being, then tickles them into overdrive so they experience a super-duper feeling of well-being rather than your basic, What a beautiful day, perhaps I’ll take the dog for a walk and then invite my good friend Sally over sense of well-being. Certain drugs, such as Naltrexone, bind to these same receptors and elbow out Mr. Alcohol or Mr. Opiate so that you can get back to enjoying a beautiful sunny day in the way that beautiful sunny days are meant to be enjoyed; in short, the drug prevents an addict from getting high.

Just like cancer, ways to save a kid are about prevention and treatment. There’s the nature and the nurture and the studies and the medicine and rehabs, and for a parent it can feel like standing in the middle of a rotating circular platform trying to figure out what to focus on. It was disconcerting to bring Sweetboy home from rehab. We wanted so much to do things right. We tested him. We took him to IOP. I sold his car and hid the keys to ours. I kept nothing but a dribble of gas in it so that if he ever did get the keys, he wouldn’t make it to the city. It caused the fuel pump to go, but it was well worth it for the peace of mind it gave me.

GOLDEN BOY

FOUR WEEKS AFTER we brought him home I still wanted to chain Sweetboy to his bed so he couldn’t go to the city. Before I sold it, I unscrewed a spark plug from his car like a nun from The Sound of Music—I took advantage of any opportunity for control, and would have bricked in his windows and slid slices of pizza under his door for dinner if Rick would have let me, but Sweetboy did seem to be doing well. We faithfully tested him every day. It takes a month for weed to leave the system, so we were eager for him to test negative for it. One afternoon, Rick stood outside the bathroom and waited for his sample:

“What’s taking so long?” Rick said. It had been a few minutes, and still Sweetboy was in there.

“I can’t go.”

I yelled from the living room, “We’ll wait!”

“I’m shy.”

I was starting to worry. I looked at Rick. “He’s shy?”

“It’s a thing. Guys can’t pee when people are looking. Or waiting.”

“What about if you’re at a urinal?”

“Right, it’s a thing.”

He came out and handed me his T-cup. I felt the sides to make sure it was warm and took it upstairs to wait for the results. Sometimes I tested Stephan too. He was always clear.

It was clean. One month after his overdose, Sweetboy tested completely clean. Blue staccato lines up the side of a plastic cup. Not one drug in his body. I placed the cup on the mantel like a trophy.

There are always the horrible stories about prison, and even though I’m sure there were many stories to tell, the only thing I heard about Waylen when he was in prison was that he sang in the church choir. Stephan told us this and it made Rick laugh. I pictured him standing on the upper row of a set of bleachers because he’s so tall, or maybe in the middle, singing “How Great Thou Art” and “I Have Decided to Follow Jesus,” but I’m sure that’s not the way it was. More than likely they sang the Christian songs you hear on the radio. Maybe they rapped in the choir; maybe there were a few gifted prisoners that stepped down off the risers and belted it out.

In prison they make everyone buzz their hair. It was hard to imagine Waylen without his hair, I wondered if I’d even recognize him. If he wasn’t wearing his ponytail, his hair was striking: honey gold and soft curls. He was tall, but in my mind he was still a boy. The most lost of The Lost Boys. His ponytails and smile and homemade bows and arrows in the backyard. His shorts in the basement after he left. Stephan said when he had to cut his hair in prison he actually liked it, without the blond curls bleached by the sun, his hair was dark, just like everyone else’s. He looked like a man’s man. Of course, once he got out of prison he let it grow out again.

I’m not sure how long it was before he used heroin again, only that a month later he still wanted to stay clean. I didn’t see much of him, but he and Rick got together a few times and almost every night Stephan stayed at his place to keep him from going out and talked him down when he needed to be talked down.

One night Stephan asked us if Waylen could stay here for a while—it would be safe and he’d have Rick to talk to and he’d feel like he was a part of a family. I knew it could be the difference between him going back to his old friends or staying sober, but I also knew by then that sobriety can be short lived and that it’s easy to be fooled, that it’s not always obvious when someone’s doing heroin and sometimes you don’t know they’re shooting up again until after they’re making trips to The Badlands once a week and it’s too late to turn back now.

You know how sometimes people say things like I love so-and-so, only the real reason they’re saying it is to hide the fact that they hate so-and-so? That it might as well be followed by however—that in fact so-and-so irritates them to no end? There was no however when it came to Waylen; we just loved him. We loved his long hair and his smile and his aviator sunglasses, and we loved that morning when he and Rick prayed together and Rick told him he would be dead in a few years if he didn’t stop using heroin. Waylen didn’t irritate us to no end, we plain loved him, and even as I write this my eyes are starting to tear up. I loved him but I said no, I love you Waylen, but you can’t live here.

I texted him after that and told him I was sorry, I wish I could say yes but I can’t, I’ll only worry. About you and about Sweetboy. I was so tired. I was sleeping too much. All I wanted to do was sleep. I love you and I’m really sorry but I know it’s the right thing to do. He texted back:

“I understand its ok”

I texted back, “I really want you to stay here”

“I know and I totally understand”

I texted, “I’m so sorry”

“its ok you know I’d never do anything though right? not with sweetboy”

“I know Waylen I believe that. I love you”

“love you too”

Later on he bought flowers for me. Stephan put them upstairs in my studio so I could look at them when I worked.

Sweetboy had been sleeping in the downstairs guest room, and one day he asked if he could move back up to his old bedroom across from ours, the one with the crawlspace and the eaves and the slant of sun in the afternoon. He and I spent the rest of the day taking apart his bed and hauling up clothes. Before we moved the furniture in, and when he was about to put his rug down, I told him to wait so I could clean the floor.

While I was down on my knees with a rag and a bucket of soap I remembered a confusing verse in the Bible that talks about scrubbing your house after an evil spirit leaves, and to be careful because after it’s all clean seven more evil spirits could come in. On my knees with the wet rag, I told Sweetboy what I could remember about the verse. “I know, I know,” he said.

I began lining up the clean pee tests on the mantel as a joke. Sometimes I made them into pyramids. Humor helped me feel like things were wrapping up; I’d stamped Sweetboy’s overdose as that was then and begun to get up earlier and eat and do the necessary things required to get to a healthy old age. The T-cups on the mantel became my art. I would stack them and line them up and arrange them in all manner of patterns. I even humored myself by thinking how easy it would be to turn the whole mantel-T-cup thing into performance art; pouring pee from cup to cup, tossing something at them, stacking one on top of the other like Jenga blocks and watching them fall. I thought all of this was very funny.

Week after week and then month after month he tested clean. Sober, sober, sober, sober, sober, six months sober, seven months sober . . . eventually I stopped testing as much. Occasionally I would, but not often.

THE REVELATIONS OF DOORS

HOUSES ARE DEFINED BY THEIR DOORS. Like the way a hairstyle can hint at someone’s personality, doors, if unhinged from their frames and removed to a faraway field, could tell legions about the house they came from; whether it was old or new or a colonial or ranch or split level or quaint or utilitarian or had a garden or nothing but overgrown conifers, whether it was full or empty or warm or cold. Houses with solid wood doors hint at prelapsarian youths spent playing in rose gardens, while hollow doors imply Saturday morning cartoons and tuna fish casseroles.

The most defining characteristic of a door is whether it’s a hollow door or a solid door. I grew up in a house built in the 1970s that had second-generation hollow doors, which are better than first-generation hollow doors only in that they have secret locks. The only way to lock my childhood bedroom door was to press the knob in and turn it slightly to the left, but it could easily be opened from the outside by inserting a paperclip into a small hole in the middle of the knob. There was a tiny lever, or tab, and if you pressed it the knob would turn and the door would open. It was an exciting thing to discover at eight years old, the hidden lever that opened locked doors.

The house we live in now is a collection of both solid and hollow doors with a few present-day fabricated ones thrown in, so that none of them, lying in a field somewhere, would reveal that the house was built in 1953. Our hollow doors have no locks to speak of, and some have indentations where a foot or elbow, something, banged into it—it doesn’t take much more than a slight smack of an elbow to make a dent. A few of them have actual holes. You could drop a penny in them and punch another hole at the bottom to get it out. These kinds of doors are easy to kick in.

Sweetboy, to make a little money, had begun doing mailings for Rick. Often, when I came downstairs, he would be at the dining room table surrounded by papers and stamps, folding letters and tucking them into envelopes. One afternoon I noticed he looked pale, but also flushed, as though underneath the pallor of his face there was a red flush riding up his neck and inching over his cheeks. There was a kind of grayness and he looked like he’d been sweating. I asked if he was feeling okay.

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

“Really? Because you look like you’re sick.”

“I’m okay.” He kept folding letters then got up and went outside for a smoke.

Later that same week, around ten in the morning, Rick and I were in the living room working on our computers. Things were good. Like the apostle Paul, I had begun to pray without ceasing, thanking God. Everything was going to be okay. Sweetboy would finish college and get a job and get married. We would have grandkids and take them to the lake to swim.

My computer was about to die so I went upstairs to get the cord. When I passed Sweetboy’s room, I knocked lightly on his door to wake him up. He’d always had a hard time getting up so I often had to knock on his door numerous times to get his attention. I went back downstairs to work. Half an hour later he still wasn’t up so I went upstairs and knocked again, harder this time. Twenty minutes later he still hadn’t come downstairs up so I went up again, banged on the door, and yelled. That’s when Rick ran upstairs and kicked the door in.

Sweetboy was propped up against his headboard with his computer sliding off his lap, one ear bud in an ear, the other lying on his chest. His head was slumped over to the right and he was blue.

When we saw him, some kind of trebuchet fission split us and we both ran; Rick into his room and me out of it. I grabbed my phone, bent over shaking, moaned in such deep sorrow I wasn’t sure it was my own voice, and called 911. Rick pulled Sweetboy off the bed, held him up against the wall, and slapped him over and over trying to wake him. He pounded on his chest and slapped him and yelled his name. Later, when we told a nurse that he had kept hitting him to try to wake him up, she said it’s what she would have done. I don’t know if Rick did CPR or not. I don’t think I’ll ever know, because even though Rick said I could interview him for this book, when I sat down in the kitchen with a notepad and asked him what happened after he kicked the door in, he said, “I . . . ,” stopped short, looked at the floor, then said, “I’m sorry, I still can’t talk about it.”

I was hunched over in our bedroom trying to call 911 and Rick was trying to make our son breathe again. God had abandoned us.

Job’s wife tells him to curse God because he’s nowhere to be found. John the Baptist, waiting to have his head cut off, tells one of his disciples to go ask Jesus if he really is the Christ and when given the affirmative, hunkers down and waits for the sword.

If everything you thought was good is turning to crap, you have to wonder if it was really good to begin with. I felt like I was back in college curled up on a beanbag chair afraid of not believing in God.

The dispatcher was calm, which I assume they’re trained to be, but it’s a horrible thing, because when your kid is not breathing, you want them to be as upset as you are. You want them to care as much as you because then they’ll call an ambulance faster, prep the ER, whatever has to be done. They have to be freaking out almost as much as you’re freaking out or your boy won’t live. Please, he’s not breathing, please, just come now!

“Is he responsive?”

“No! He’s blue, please get an ambulance here,” and I told her my address, and again and again to hurry.

Calmly, “They’re on their way.”

I ran outside, stood on the lawn, and looked down the street. The dispatcher told me to stay on the phone. “Why aren’t they coming? They should be here by now.” I was still shaking. The front door was open and I could hear Rick still trying to wake him up. The ambulance didn’t come and it didn’t come. “They should be here by now!”

“It’s only been”—she was so freaking calm—“three minutes.”

“We live across the street. We live two blocks from the hospital . . .”

“They’ll be there shortly.” Truly, she sounded bored. She was probably eating lunch.

When they finally arrived they pulled forward and took the time to back in the driveway, the ambulance slowly beeping until it came to a stop. What the hell? I told them he was upstairs, “the door on the right, please hurry, please just hurry . . .”

They headed into the house. One of them asked if anyone was with him.

“Yes, my husband, he’s trying to revive him . . .” Run! What are you doing!

I followed them closely up the stairs as though I was planning on shoving them into the room, then stood in the hall, at which point they began to work fast, ripping open medical paraphernalia: needles, gauze, paper, and dropping them on the carpet. Things landed on his chest, a needle on the floor. They brought up a stretcher, lifted him onto it, and slowly inched back downstairs.

As they were headed down, Sweetboy’s eyes fluttered open for a moment and he mumbled, “Am I going to die?” before drifting off again. I stood on the lawn as they slid him into the ambulance. Rick and I got in the car to follow them to the hospital and Rick hugged me. “It’s okay,” he said, “I’ll believe for you.”

The same emergency room doors. This time we followed him into the ER and watched as they attached the IVs and tabs for the heart monitor. They clamped a pulse monitor on his finger and covered him with a light blanket. His eyes fluttered open then closed. I asked a nurse if he was in septic shock. She told me he had some sepsis. Stephan came and sat on the floor. I cried. I asked if he was going to make it. Sweetboy opened his eyes and groggily asked again if he was going to die. The nurses wouldn’t answer him. Rick told him he would be fine and that everything would be okay. He said it a few times and I said, “Don’t say that.” Rick, angry, took me into the hall and asked why. I told him to stop lying because we still didn’t know whether he was going to make it. Rick said he wanted to encourage him. I told Rick if Sweetboy makes it through this, I want him to know he almost didn’t.

I think about the second overdose as one of those memories that are the opposite of nostalgia. Nostalgia hits the senses like a water that runs fast and clear, where you can see things like crawdads and pebbles and minnows the size of fingernails swimming in clusters under the surface. Bad memories come at you like a kind of destabilized molecular disassociation because as hard as you try to make them, they won’t ever form a pattern.

TRIPPING

EVEN THOUGH THE doctor in the ER said the heroin had been cut with so much crushed up rot it was impossible to figure out what it was, Sweetboy was going to be okay. And to put a spiritual bow on a spiritual package, and to affirm that I do in fact still believe in God, I’ll point out that if he never had this overdose he could have kept using. It was a sovereign overdose. Opiates, like smoking, weigh as heavy in the veins as they do the heart, and a body too familiar with them is a body that craves like a baby craves its mother.

Although plenty of people wax on about how we should live life to its fullest, like it’s one long beautiful ribbon—live, love, laugh, ad infinitum—it’s also a life of sorrows. But there can be contentment in both. Not contentment with the sorrow, but contentment in spite of the sorrow. If we metabolize sorrow with even an iota of wisdom it’s possible—like drinking fresh water from streams lit with plankton—to experience the peace of an amaranthine God. This is what St. Paul says in the Bible. I might be an inattentive Christian but I depend on an attentive God.

They moved him upstairs and sometimes Stephan or Christopher would visit. We joked and talked, happy because of the pure fact that Sweetboy was still with us. This time, if he went through withdrawals at all, they weren’t severe since he hadn’t been using long—as I understand it, he’d gone to the city with Spider-Kid, bought three bags of heroin, and overdosed on the first bag. I asked him where the other two were and when he told me I went home to get rid of them.

It was around 10:00 p.m. and Rick had gone home to rest; he was exhausted. He’d prayed all night for Sweetboy the night before and slept little. When I got home he was lying on the bed praying again, so I slipped into Sweetboy’s room to get the heroin. I’d never seen it before: the tiny—almost translucent—glassine pockets, the miniscule paper lunch bags protecting less than half a teaspoon of fragile powder loose in the creases. Forgetting that Stephan had dropped bags of heroin in Rick’s lap—that Rick already knew well and good what heroin looked like—I thought I should show it to him. I went to our room and sat down on the bed. I opened my palm so he could see it.

“Want to see what it looks like?”

He looked at it and didn’t say anything.

“I’ve never seen it before,” I said. “I hate it.”

He reached out and touched it.

I found some scissors, went to the bathroom, cut it into little bits, flushed them, and went back to the hospital.

Forty minutes later I was at the hospital again with Sweetboy. It was after 11:00 p.m. by that time, and we were discussing when he could come home. Sometime while we were talking Rick came in and quietly sat down in a chair on the other side of the bed. The halls were empty of nurses and the room was dim, lit only by a small fluorescent light above Sweetboy’s bed that had a long string he could reach to turn it on and off. Rick sat silently with his elbows on his knees and looked into the middle distance. I made a useless joke about hospital effects—the dinner tray still there since five o’clock with the ugly green plastic cloche covering some cold, unknown food, the plastic mugs and plastic pitchers—and slowly poured lukewarm water from a pink carafe into a brown mug. I handed it to Rick, then placed a flimsy pink vomit basin on Sweetboy’s lap. “Just in case,” I said. He smiled.

I looked toward the hallway, “No one’s been in for a while.”

Sweetboy fingered his IV. “I don’t really need this anymore.”

“Yeah, well you gotta keep it in,” I said. “You need the vitamins, the nutrients. It prevents scurvy.” I was still joking about everything, as though the whole event was one last necessary skim off the top of his life before he would settle back into the real Sweetboy—that same ten-pound, nine-ounce baby who grew into the loyal kid who made rockets and boats out of cardboard—and as long as I remained lighthearted nothing would change that.

Rick pulled his chair closer to the bed and took a deep breath. “Something just happened.”

I looked at him. He still wasn’t looking at us. “What do you mean?”

“I can’t explain it. I’m not sure. I don’t know, everything came alive, like the dining room chairs. They were like cartoons, only evil—but they didn’t scare me. Everything had a personality. Everything was evil but I wasn’t afraid. And bright, like extremely vivid.”

“Wait, what?”

Sweetboy was staring at him.

“It was some kind of paranormal experience.”

“You dropped acid,” Sweetboy said, “you had to have.”

“No, it started as soon as I touched the heroin. Everything got really vivid.”

“You had to of taken something,” Sweetboy said. “Are you sure you didn’t? By accident? You had to of.”

“Wait,” I said. “What? I’m really confused.”

“No, I didn’t even take a Tylenol,” Rick said. “It started right when I touched the heroin. Right when I touched it an audible voice said, ‘Lazy motherfucker,’ and then everything immediately changed.”

“You were tripping,” Sweetboy said. “You had to of been,” and he started asking Rick questions. “Did everything come alive? Like trees?”

“Exactly. Everything was personified, like they had little smiley faces on them and they were terrifying, only I wasn’t afraid.”

“Did you feel like you were connected to them?”

“Yes!”

And the two of them started talking, sharing experiences, Sweetboy asking clarifying questions and Rick answering in the affirmative. It was startling. They were experiencing some kind of new connection that I didn’t understand. I just listened. Sweetboy was telling Rick what it felt like to do LSD and Rick kept nodding.

“You were definitely tripping.”

“It was so strange.”

I asked Rick, “Do you still see things? Is everything normal now?”

“Yes, it started when I touched the heroin and stopped when I got to the hospital.”

“You were definitely tripping,” Sweetboy said.

I don’t know if Timothy Leary ever stayed in our house in 1967 and left psilocybin decomposing in the rafters, but something triggered what Rick experienced that night. Rick didn’t take anything, but by that time little surprised us. By then The Lost Boys had dragged in enough supernatural gimcrack that what happened could almost be expected. From what I understand, acid trips are confusing as much as they are revelatory—like heavy-lidded contorted truths—but then truth isn’t truth if it’s in bed with a lie. Regardless, I’m not the one who had the acid trip so this is all speculation.

We doubled down again. By then, minus fresh pee falling from the bathroom ceiling, cheating on a test was impossible. The only way to pass a test if he had drugs in his system would have been to replace dirty pee with clean pee, and I made sure that didn’t happen. There would be no stranger’s pee strapped to a leg, no powdered pee in a pocket or synthetic pee in a plastic cup waiting in the shower stall. I didn’t rest until I knew of every possible way to cheat and eliminated them. But the truth is, Sweetboy wanted to stay clean.

His countenance began to change. He got a job and went back to school. Rick would stand outside the bathroom door and wait—T-cup after T-cup, week after week became month after month became a year became a year and a half became two years. This time, when I tested him, I didn’t bother making art on the mantel. I threw the cups in the trash until I didn’t have to anymore because I stopped buying them to begin with.

I had a dream that tiny seed pods, like boys, were bursting in the air like cottony fireworks and each time one burst, more seeds sprouted out and floated up into the wind until there were millions of them, tiny seeds scattering and bursting. Every time one exploded it was remarkable and more than I could handle it was so beautiful, but then another would explode. I’d think it was all over but then another one would burst and scatter its seeds. It was like each pod was a boy holding the love of a multitude and I was watching as they all took flight.

KAYAKING THE DARK RIVER

AT ONE POINT SWEETBOY tried to quit cigarettes, and of course we were thrilled. I assumed it would mean a week of irritableness and then he’d pull out of it, squeaky clean and smelling of Ivory soap, but I swear, there should be someplace with rubber rooms and nothing but air holes for people to detox from cigarettes, because without cigarettes, Sweetboy was immediately inhabited by a squirm that nearly popped all his blood vessels.

One night in early fall, void of nicotine and particularly kvetched, he asked Rick to drop him off with his kayak at the Brandywine River then pick him up farther downstream, which Rick was happy to do, as being outside tended to clear Sweetboy’s head. It was a dark night and there wasn’t a moon. Rick helped him struggle the kayak on top of the car, and as they pulled out of the driveway I could hear them talking. It was such a pretty fall night.

Rick dropped him off at a small park with a picnic table and two parking spaces right next to the river where it bends to the left then disappears behind a thicket of bushes and poison oak climbing a large dead tree. When he got home Rick told me that after he backed the car up to the river and helped Sweetboy get the kayak into the water, it was so dark he could barely see his shadow as he paddled around the bend and disappeared into the darkness. I asked him if Sweetboy had his phone and he said yes.

Half an hour later he called Rick and asked him to pick him up at another park downstream but when Rick got there he couldn’t find him—it was hard to see anything—so he went to the middle of a stone bridge to see if he was approaching from upstream. The river was shallow and running slow. Without rain the usually mud-spongy grass at the river’s edge is firm, with no muck to sink into, and rocks appear like shark fins in the barely moving current. When Sweetboy finally called him, Rick told him he was standing on the bridge looking, but he couldn’t see him or hear him. In the stillness, and without the usual sound of fast running water, Rick thought it would be possible to hear the faint echo of the kayak, of paddles dipping into water or hitting the hollow plastic of the boat. Sweetboy tried to explain where he was but it was so dark he couldn’t see anything; every tree was the next tree and the water was without rhythm or color. There was no marker or house or fence to direct Rick to. He didn’t know how far away from the bridge he was, or if he was even close to it.

They hung up and Rick held his phone above his head like a beacon while Sweetboy kept paddling, pushing himself through the shallow water. At one point it was too shallow to float and he climbed out of the kayak and dragged it down the river as it scraped the riverbed. Rick kept his phone in the air until he began to hear the scraping and bonking of paddles on the boat. He yelled and Sweetboy yelled back—he yelled that he could see the light and Rick watched as his son, slowly and arduously, made it to the bridge.

When they got home I asked how it went and Sweetboy said it was so dark it was kind of terrifying because he couldn’t tell where he was.

WALKING IT BACK

I’VE OFTEN WONDERED that if E=mc² were to allow it, and I could head back down that mountain in Wyomissing to find that he’d never experimented with drugs or snorted a pill or shot heroin; had never left youth group or went to the Brandywine to smoke weed—if that first cigarette had never entered his mouth; if he’d kept his boyhood friends and went to camp and learned to build fires and pack light for hikes into the mountains; if he’d eaten his vegetables, and hadn’t thought twice about the vitamins plus iron in the medicine cabinet; if he’d weighed eight pounds nine ounces, not ten pounds nine ounces when he was born, would heroin have bothered with him? Would The Evil have never left its banks and violently sideswiped Sweetboy?

This is a mind game I shouldn’t play, but it’s a tempting game for a parent. When you’re going through the various tumults that accompany having a child caught in addiction, control steps up like a potential hero, but shrivels in the end. When we mess around with “if onlys” and “what ifs,” oddly and irrationally, we’re trying to stamp our present knowledge onto our past ignorance, as though what we know now can retroactively heal all things. Like that song by The Faces, “Ooh La La,” we reggae next to our dark oceans—I wish that, I knew what I know now / When I was younger . . .

But you didn’t know then. If you’re E=mc²-ing, you’re accomplishing nothing. As the apostle Paul says in Philippians 3:13-14, “But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.”

That peace I experienced in the elevator as we ascended to the CCU came with a sudden revelation that caused my “what if?” to become “even if.” Of all of the mind games a parent—or anyone who loves an addict—can play, “what if” is the worst of them. We roll the dice but we don’t want the ones and there’s always a moment where the breath holds still before the dice land. That moment of air is the most painful thing because what if we roll snake eyes? We can try not to think about them, but it’s still possible to roll them.

My peace came when I realized that snake eyes or no, everything would be okay. As counterintuitive as it might seem to someone who’s not a Christian, I realized that even if I lost my son and experienced the unimaginable pain I knew it would bring, my God is a good God and a loving God and someday, as it says in the book of Revelation, he will wipe away every tear from my eyes.

I prayed often that Sweetboy would grow into a wise and praying man. Four things happened that I took as promises from God that Sweetboy would thrive. They were random things, and odd, but for some reason I was moved by each of them. They gave me an assurance that things had changed forever, as though every crumpled can and plastic bag and cigarette butt within Sweetboy’s radius had been swept into a massive pile and burned.

One time he and I were driving through town and the traffic slowed so that we came to a stop next to a kid on a bench nodding off. We were both looking at him when Sweetboy told me his name. “That’s so sad,” I said, and we pulled away. Nodding off on a bench was a distant life for him that was only growing fainter.

Another time when I was in town by myself I saw an old man—perhaps in his late seventies. His yellowed teeth were barely distinguishable from his rotting gums and the edges were worn down and dark, like they’d been brushed with black chalk. I imagined him smiling wide, like the whole point of him smiling was so I could examine his teeth. I smiled at him as he passed by.

One day I went for a run in a park where I often prayed and I stepped on a snake. I didn’t see it until it was under me, and then it glided away like a fish in water, back into the grass. A few days later I went for another run and stepped on it again, but this time it was dead.

A month or so later we went with some friends to a state park where we climbed up a steep path to picnic under two enormous shade trees. Their trunks were so thick the bark had separated and split in long, dark crevices. From the hill you could see rolling fields planted with corn and soybeans. Our friends had a newborn baby and I held him so they could eat. They’d given the baby his father’s name, which is also Sweetboy’s name. He’d been born on Sweetboy’s birthday and his hair was the same auburn color that Sweetboy’s had been as a baby. As I held him I walked farther up the grassy hill and stood next to a field of corn. I looked at the expansive valley dotted with trees and fields spread so far I could see our town in the distance. As I held him I sang a song; I don’t remember what. I have a terrible voice, but the baby didn’t mind.

WAYLEN

ONE AFTERNOON I came in the back door with a bag of groceries. Before I put it on the counter Rick walked in. There was something sad about his eyes, and when I asked what was wrong all he said was, “Waylen.” We hugged and cried for a long time.

Stephan was sitting on the front porch, staring at nothing. I sat down next to him and hugged him tight because it was all I could think to do.

SUNFLOWERS

IT’S BEEN A LONG TIME since Sweetboy’s second overdose and Rick’s mystifying, unexplainable acid trip. The Evil hijacks brains and bodies for a good laugh if nothing else; its invisible Uzi with its forked tongue that spits into crowds and fells whoever it hits. The Badlands are a sagging net of half-alive people, and as one fifty-three-year-old addict recently said, “A lot of people die down here, and they’re letting them die because they don’t want the cops to come, so they push the bodies to the side.”

The Evil’s spit grazed Sweetboy’s head and heart and they bled something awful, but it in the end it wasn’t a direct hit because both overdoses, although they came very close to killing him, stopped him short. I prayed and God yanked him aside before anything lodged in his skull. The scars are there, at least for me, but they’re tough with faith and I don’t think there’s a needle on the face of the earth that could penetrate them now.

Last spring I went for a walk. It was a beautiful day so I decided to walk up an alley and look at the gardens behind the houses. There were fences covered in roses and blooming clematis and the grass was that dark green—that unparalleled beauty that can hurt it’s so beautiful to look at. There were a few wooden gates and some of them were open. I could see the back doors of the old houses with vines climbing above them and smell the sweet honeysuckle that I remember pulling the pistils out of as a child and sucking out the nectar. As I walked up a short hill I noticed three kids walking toward me—two boys and a girl—around thirteen or fourteen years old, and they were laughing. One of the boys yanked something from a vine and threw it at the girl. She ducked and then punched him in the shoulder. As I passed them I smiled and was going to say hi but they barely noticed me. I stopped when I reached the top of the hill, turned around, and prayed they would never do drugs.

Sweetboy has a dog now, a black lab that he got from the SPCA with a short tail, and when the dog sees Sweetboy and excitedly wags his tail, its length makes it look like it’s wagging double-time, faster than the tails of other happy dogs. His love for Sweetboy is manifest in that tail, as though the dog is wagging grace, as though every swipe in the air is erasing every needle that touched Sweetboy’s skin.

Last year Sweetboy took the dog with him on a camping trip, strapped on a small backpack made for dogs, and put his food in it for him to carry. The hike was difficult, uphill and with a lot of stones, and when he got back two of the dog’s paws had cuts on them, so he cleaned them and bandaged them and began looking online for padded dog shoes so it wouldn’t happen again. Another time he and Jeremiah hiked to a river and set up camp on a small patch of land that jutted out into the water. That night they heard a pack of wolves growling like they were right outside the tents circling a carcass. Jeremiah stood outside next to the tents with his knife ready to stab anything that came close and Sweetboy stayed in the tent to protect his dog that was curled up and shaking next to him.

That winter Sweetboy bought a row house in town and planted sunflowers in the backyard that grew a full foot taller than me. He brought me three of them and I put them in a vase above the fireplace until their powdery yellow dust began to fall in a golden shadow on the mantel. Sunflowers blow my mind the way their faces stare at the sun all day, turning as it passes from east to west. They remind me of stars in awe of the light, stars like the faces of children, mesmerized by the warmth of a generous sun.

A long time ago, when I wanted to be like Suzanna Wesley with my head draped and a cup of tea on the table, I didn’t know that ten of her children died. She had nineteen children and nine of her children died as infants. Four of the children who died were twins. One of them died when a maid accidentally smothered her. When Susanna herself died, only eight of her children were living. Her husband, Samuel, left for a year because of a minor dispute and then spent time in jail because of financial issues. Also, their house burned down twice.

Susanna didn’t see any of those nine children come back to life, and God didn’t save them from death even though I imagine she prayed herself crazy that they wouldn’t die. I’ve discovered that when that murmur of angst begins doing its thing—which it can still do—turning my body parts to wax, it helps to remind myself of that platitude that no one else is allowed to say to me and trust God.

PROVENCE

WE WERE IN FRANCE because my brother was turning fifty. I like to say my brother has a charmed life. And I’m not even sure if it’s his down to earth, beautiful wife or the vineyard or the trips or his three beautiful children. I think his charmed life has less to do with those things and more to do with generosity. He and his wife live palms up and they flew us to France where we stayed in a villa in Provence that overlooked vineyards that retreated into the valley below and then rose up on the other side to the town of Venasque, its ancient buildings clustered on top of the mountain as though carved from rock. Our first morning there I woke to the distant sound of the church belfry, its deep ring vibrating and then thinning as it spread into the air.

The last day we were there we hiked to Venasque. It took us less than forty-five minutes, and instead of taking the narrow switchback road that leads to the village we hiked a trail straight to the top; it was a steep path covered with stones and roots, and more than once I had to stop and catch my breath. There were cherry trees and sycamores with trunks that look dappled with sun and shade until you get closer and feel their papery-smooth bark that looks like camouflage from far away. You don’t feel deceived when you find out the tree is different up close; it feels more like you’ve discovered the tree’s true beauty, the smooth outside that hints at an undiscovered depth within.

The story of Abraham willing to sacrifice his son Isaac is in the twenty-second chapter of Genesis. Abraham was old and didn’t have a son but God had promised him one so he trusted God and kept waiting. He was still waiting when he turned one hundred and his ninety-year-old wife, Sarah, conceived. When the baby was born they named him Isaac.

There’s something about a son. There’s something about a daughter too. But there’s something about a son. When I sat with Sweetboy on my lap in the emergency room after he drank the cough syrup or when he ate the bottle of vitamins plus iron, I felt overwhelmed by the son thing. Maybe it was because of the emergency room, some vague feeling that I could have lost him, or maybe it was the sheer amount of time that we sat there, his head leaning back on my chest as I stroked his soft auburn hair from his damp forehead. Maybe it was because he’s my only son, the only son I have, as though I was beginning to realize he would one day move on and I only had so much time left with him. I think for girls it’s different. I think they need you for life and you stay close forever. I think we hold our sons tightly because they’re only with us for so long.

And so when God tells Abraham to take his son, his only son, and sacrifice him on Mount Moriah—literally lay him on an altar, raise his knife and kill him—that son thing must have struck his own heart, as though the knife he carried was already lodged in his own gut and with every step up the mountain it wiggled around mashing his organs to bits.

Abraham bound his son, his only son, and went up to a mountain.

We’re allowed access to almost everything: Abraham gives Isaac the wood to carry, and takes the fire and the knife, and leads his son up the mountain. And then this: “And Isaac said to his father Abraham, ‘My father!’ And he said, ‘Here I am, my son.’ He said, ‘Behold, the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?’ Abraham said, ‘God will provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.’ So they went both of them together.”

But here’s the thing: even though he commands Abraham to do this, God seems more sorrowful and heartbroken than Abraham does. Each time he refers to Abraham’s son, he doesn’t stop at “your son,” he goes on to say, “your only son.” “Take your son, your only son.” It’s like God is mourning his lost son more than Abraham is, like he’s mourning the loss of his only son, Jesus, who he knows will one day be crucified.

When we reached the top of the hill at Venasque, the path turned to stone stairs. We rested there, and when I looked up at the belfry, I saw—like a scene from a movie—a flock of pigeons fly out from it and scatter above the village. To the right I saw another section of stairs that led to a flat rock farther up the mountain. I started to climb.

The earth is so many live things pointing up: trees, blades of grass, even flies stalling on roadkill. There are the fires sparking into the night. There are humans. We’re both obvious and obscure, I think. Our mere existence points to God and yet we hide like Eve behind a bush. We either fear his power or we don’t believe in him because we can’t have both, and without the magnificent thing I saw when I reached the top of that rock in Venasque, I would feel as insignificant as that fly on roadkill that doesn’t have a clue where it comes from.

When I stepped onto the rock, sweaty and out of breath, I was met by a cool breeze and an expansive view of the valley below. The vineyards made a patchwork out of the land, the rows of tangled vines like threaded stitches, and I could see the villa where we were staying in the distance, but even as my hair parted with the first gust of cool air, I knew there was a crucifix beside me.

It was carved from white stone and the loincloth was painted gold. The paint was dull and chipping and was smudged onto part of one of his thighs as though it had been applied haphazardly. His head hung down to the left. His eyes were closed. The crown of thorns. The pierced side. The nails. The feet. His bleeding hands. The land spread out before him, the faraway grapes like so many drops of wine. He towered above me, and as the blinding sun reflected off the rock, I knew that I should remember what I saw, a scene like a vision to hold close for the rest of my life. This crucifix beside me. My majestic Christ who stayed put on the cross even though he owned the world.

In Genesis 22, when Abraham raises the knife over his son, a ram appears from the woods as a sacrifice in place of Isaac; Isaac is saved; and his father is saved from heartache unimaginable, because this is the way God works; and this is the way he loves; and this is the reason we trust him.

When we dropped off Sweetboy at the top of the mountain and he disappeared into the woods, Jesus had been standing on that mountain forever, his head hanging sorrowful, waiting for Sweetboy to finally look up. Jesus stays put for everyone even though he owns the world. He stays put for mothers in crack houses and babies full of opiates quitting cold turkey and screaming in pain. He cries for everyone, Jesus does. The meth addict on the street with the crazy eyes and the father who keeps leaving his family because he’s following that fake love even though he’s got the real thing right in front of him, the fifty-year-old with the tracks down his arm, his ankles, his neck. The girl, the boy, the kid, nodding off under a tarp-covered hut next to train tracks, the dealer hawking mollies on a dark street, the cheerleader snorting her mother’s pain meds before school, the teenage boy who gives your teenage boy his first oxy to try because shit, that stuff is good. The man who rolls his unconscious friend out of the passenger side of his car at the doors of the emergency room because who knows, maybe he’ll live after all. The leathery-faced blonde woman on the corner in her tiny jean skirt waiting for the right car and the right man and the right fix. The girl or boy or man or woman in their bedroom with a gun to their own head. The guy who gives his son his first shot of heroin. The boy in the pool house who won’t wake up.

NOW

NEIL AND SOPHIE are in the kitchen cutting up sausages and vegetables for raclette. It’s the holidays and there’s snow outside and a cozy fire in the fireplace. Sophie has brought food and games for later and I can hear her and Neil joking about how she’s a vegetarian but doesn’t eat vegetables. I’ve turned the couch to face the fire for the winter and there’s a leather sling chair to one side and an old yellow velvet wingback opposite it. Joey the dog and Sweetboy’s lab eagerly sniff boots and crotches before they’re pushed away.

I’ve lit five candles on the mantel and lined them up in a row beneath a late-nineteenth-century oil painting of dark ominous waves that I picked up in an antique shop in Lancaster. The fireplace is painted black and it makes the candles look even brighter. I hear Rick in the kitchen laughing about something and I think about how much I love his laugh and I think that it must make people feel known, that laugh. Someone is setting the table in the dining room and a fork or spoon hits the floor. Sweetboy stands behind his fiancée who’s sitting in the leather sling chair and covering her chin with her turtleneck and laughing. He has his hands on her shoulders and leans down and says something. She slaps him lightly on his cheek and rolls her eyes.

Jules is home from San Francisco and is on her computer pulling up a video she did for work that I want to see. She pulls up another one she made on her own time and it’s beautiful. It’s about Black Lives Matter and it makes me cry. The back door opens and closes and I hear Jeremiah’s voice and then Rick bursting into laughter and I know it’s because he hasn’t seen Jeremiah since he got back from a missions trip to India and he’s so glad to see him. I smile when I hear them laughing. Stephan and Christopher come into the living room and sit down on the couch next to Jules. Jules is wearing a red sweater that says Budweiser on it, and black jeans and her hair is shoulder length and bleached blonde. She puts her feet on the coffee table and shows them her new shoes. She says something that makes them laugh.

We all go into the kitchen where Sophie and Neil have put out the food. Jeremiah digs into some hummus and Rick asks Stephan what he’ll do after he gets his PhD. Christopher and Jeremiah, home from college, tell me about a professor they think might be homeless because sometimes he dries his clothes over the bushes on campus. They tell me how brilliant he is and that students love him. When we ask Christopher his plans, he says it turns out he’s good with languages and wants to go into translations. We ask how Troy’s doing, and Sam, and Quin, a boy who once brought his cello over and spent the night playing it in The Chill Spot, and he tells us Max has been hanging out with Manni, a kid Jules used to spend time with, and that Quin and Troy are working at a restaurant in town, but other than that he hasn’t heard much. Sweetboy tells Rick how hard it’s been to fix some wiring in the old house he bought, and Rick asks him if he’s done with a complicated project at work; they talk about Java and Magento and Python and computer things I don’t understand, and his fiancée tries to put a piece of broccoli in his mouth as he’s talking. Rick asks him what he’s doing tomorrow because we’re all going to Longwood Gardens to see the fountains. Sweetboy’s face looks beautiful to me and I know that I will always pray for that face, the healthy flush of his Irish cheeks and that magnificently strong heart that beats inside of him. I’ll pray for his marriage and that he’ll comprehend how deep and wide God’s love for him is. I’ll pray for angels to protect him and for any monsters to trip and smash their ugly faces to bloody bits if they even look his way. I’ll pray for that one, sweet, pudgy baby, born years ago and lying in a hospital nursery like a half-grown king among a patchwork of normal sized infants; I’ll go to him and pick up his fat hand and kiss it and bring him to my chest and shift my weight from one leg to the other—back and forth—and rock him and comfort him now, even before he needs comforting.