And then came another nighttime phone call from Courtney, this one later in the night and more desperate. I had a telephone in my room, a low-profile desk phone that I usually left in the middle of the floor. It didn’t reach all the way to the bed, and so most of my calls were spent lying on the carpet and staring at the ceiling. I liked how all the sound was right there in my ear and up above me was just light and shadow. But I was in bed, not on the floor, that night. The phone rang at around two or three in the morning. Shoved out of sleep, I kicked the phone by accident before I answered—a little brawl between me and nobody. A recording said it was a collect call. Then my sister’s first and last name: Courtney Atherton, calling from jail.
For once my parents were home. I went to wake them up. I think that was the only time I ever saw them both asleep at the same time—they were on their backs, under a comforter. The phone had half-roused them, and as soon as I said “Mom, Dad” they sat up, my mother leaning against the headboard, my father planting his legs on the floor, and once he got on the line he told me to hang up my phone and go back to sleep. Here was another problem they wanted to pretend didn’t exist, but I couldn’t possibly pretend that. After Dad left to pick up Courtney, I went down to the kitchen, poured a glass of juice, and sat at the table and waited.
Thirty minutes passed, then an hour, and I went back up to my room. I lay down on my bed with all the lights on. Just to rest, I vowed, but the next time I opened my eyes it was morning.
I crept up to the third floor. Courtney’s door was shut. I went back down, back up, back down—she slept until noon, and when at last she appeared in the kitchen, still wearing her pajamas, she acted as though it were just a normal Sunday. I couldn’t get more than a single word at a time out of her. She brought the milk and a box of cereal to the table and ate two bowls in a row.
Finally she said, “Surely you have better things to do than to stand there and watch me eat,” and I could have countered with the truth, which was that I did not have anything better to do, but instead I took a basketball outside and started shooting.
What I didn’t learn that day but found out over the next couple of weeks: Courtney had gone to hear a band play, and then on the way home she was pulled over for driving with no headlights. The policeman smelled alcohol, according to his report, and he brought her in. By the time they tested her she was well under the limit, but she was underage, and they’d found prescription pills in her purse that had not been prescribed to her by a doctor. They charged her with possession of a controlled substance. My parents hired a lawyer (another lawyer!), who got the case transferred to juvenile court, the charge reduced to minor in possession.
She told our parents that she’d just wanted to see what it was like to drive on Rock Creek Parkway without lights. They didn’t understand that, and neither did I. There were still streetlights on that road, other cars with lights on. It seemed to me that by switching off your own headlights you would not experience the dark but merely raise your odds of hitting something or being hit. The judge suspended her license and made her attend teen Narcotics Anonymous meetings and do community service. She wound up going two afternoons a week to a big downtown homeless shelter and got involved with some homeless activists for a while, who tried to make a radical out of her, unsuccessfully, though they did convince her not to go to prom.
My parents were at a loss. In any other year, this would’ve been our crisis, but in ’87 it was another blip on the screen. Courtney had been accepted by Brown, and briefly they panicked about whether that offer would be revoked, but once they had been assured that she could still enroll there, and once she had made it through the court system, they just let it go.