Mom drove me the seven hours from home down to Malibu. The last section of the drive was on the Pacific Coast Highway, which is where car commercials are often filmed. You know, the ones where the car is zooming down a windy road, a mountain on one side and the ocean on the other, an endless blue sky overhead, with the words Trained drivers on a closed course. Do not attempt this at home on the bottom of the TV screen. It was stunning and looked like an alien planet compared to my home. Northern California and Southern California are in the same state, but they are not the same place.
Dad hadn’t come with us, though he’d helped me load my luggage into the car and even printed out physical maps for our drive—an odd gesture considering we all had GPS, but a touching one. If I’d been leaving for college, they both would have come with me. Together they would have gone through parent orientation, and offered opinions on which drawer I should use for shirts and which for socks, and demanded that my roommate come out to lunch with us. I knew this because they had done all of that for Emerson one year prior. But I wasn’t leaving for college; I was leaving for rehab, so things were different.
It was weird to think about. I, who had been too much of a good girl to ever try any drugs, or drink any beers, or commit even the pettiest of crimes, I needed to be rehabilitated.
“At least it’s pretty,” Mom offered as the waves crashed against the beach, surfers out in the distance and seagulls circling overhead.
“Pretty doesn’t even begin to cover it,” I said. “Try breathtaking.”
“Sumptuous,” Mom suggested.
“Resplendent,” I said.
She screwed up her face, struggling for a moment, before saying, “Magnificent?”
“Pulchritudinous,” I volunteered.
She nodded with admiration. “Very pulchritudinous.”
This turned out to be even more true when we found the retreat center itself, up a private drive flanked by palm trees. The house was cream-colored and massive, which maybe I would have been able to handle calmly, but when I saw the fountain out front, with a marble dolphin spurting water high into the air, I cracked up. “What is this place?”
Mom caught my laughter. “It’s a good thing your dad didn’t come,” she managed to say between giggles. “He would have lost his mind.”
“Do all rehab centers look like a multimillionaire from the 1980s brought to life a fevered nightmare of a Venetian palace?” I asked.
“That is exactly what it looks like, isn’t it?” she marveled. She put the car in park, then took my face in her hands. “You’re something else, Winter, you know that?”
“Um. In a good way or a bad way?”
“You’re headstrong,” she said. “You and your sister both. I raised two headstrong daughters.”
That didn’t exactly answer the “good or bad” question.
“That’s what got me into this trouble in the first place,” I pointed out.
“But it’s also what’s going to get you out of it,” she told me. “Look at you, Winter. Look at this place you’ve found, this thing you’re making happen. You could have gone with Personal History when I suggested it, but instead, you found your own way.”
I still couldn’t tell whether this was a compliment or a critique. Did she think my way was going to be better or worse than her way? “Do you still think I should have done Personal History?” I asked.
“I think you should do whatever is going to work,” she said firmly.
“Do you think this is going to work?” I looked again at the dolphin fountain.
“I think you’re going to bust your tuchus to make it work.”
And that was an assignment if ever I’d heard one.
We got my suitcases out of the car and pulled them up the stone drive, past the dolphin, and through the grand entry, where we were greeted at the enormous doorway by a couple with big smiles on their faces. I recognized them from the promotional video, so I smiled back. They both looked to be in their midforties. She was wearing slim-cut jeans, a V-neck black shirt, and strappy wedge sandals, as well as a delicate scarf around her neck, which seemed unnecessary for the weather, but fashionable. He had a reddish-brown beard with some flecks of gray and was dressed in jeans and a polo shirt. They looked very LA, though maybe I just thought that because I already knew where we were.
“Welcome to Revibe, Winter,” the woman said warmly, shaking my hand. “I’m Valerie Pigott, and this is my husband, Kevin. We’re the founders of Revibe, and we’ll be your advisors for the next five weeks.”
“So glad to have you.” Kevin shook my hand, too. “And you must be Mom.”
“Darlene Kaplan,” she introduced herself. “Thank you for everything you’re doing for Winter.”
That’s a Turn Them Toward the Sun technique, by the way. Say thank you in advance for what you want your kid to do (“Thank you for helping me do the dishes!”), and then they will be motivated to do it. Much more effective, Mom said, than ordering a child to do the dishes (which can get a “You’re not the boss of me!”) or asking (which can get a “No”). It generally worked, too. Most of Turn Them Toward the Sun did. People who didn’t want to hire my mom just because of me were idiots.
“Don’t worry, Darlene,” Kevin said, “we’ll take good care of her.”
“I’ll show you to your room,” Valerie said, and she led me and Mom down a long hallway. Paintings hung on the walls—wherever there were walls and not windows, which was not as often as you might expect. Valerie kept up a running commentary as we went. “We have six other Vibers this session. We gave you one of the downstairs bedrooms—I think you’ll like it. It gets amazing sunlight in the mornings. If you turn right here, you’ll come to Kevin’s and my offices. You’ll meet with one of us at least once a day to go over your progress and set new goals.
“This is the Great Room. I love the skylights in here, don’t you? We gather in the Great Room for conversations that include everyone, and it’s where we eat together, as a family. We have a cook who’s just terrific. If you have any food restrictions, let us know and Meghan will work around them. Last session we had a Viber who was allergic to all fruits and vegetables—can you imagine? I’d die!—and she said she’d never even realized just how much she could eat until she came here and had Meghan’s cooking.
“Here’s your room. It’s sweet, isn’t it? I hope you’ll forgive the carpeting. I’m going to leave you here to get settled. You have about an hour to yourself, and then everyone is going to meet up for orientation in the Great Room. If you want fresh air, you can keep going down your hallway and you’ll come to the porch. It’s lovely there: comfy Adirondack chairs and couches and a gorgeous view of the ocean. I find it very soothing to go out there sometimes just to meditate or watch the sun set. Please don’t open the window, though. We don’t want the air to get out.”
Mom and I agreed with everything Valerie said, or at least we did not disagree, and then she left us alone. My room was smaller than I’d been expecting, considering the grandeur of the building overall, and that was a relief to me. There were no original oil paintings or dolphins or chandeliers in here, just a normal-size bed and a normal-size closet.
I sat down on the normal-size bed and tried to catch my breath. I was nervous, because I was in a new place with new people and new rules, and what if nobody liked me, or what if I did it wrong in some way, or what if Revibe just couldn’t fix me at all and then there was nowhere else to turn?
But I also felt excited. I’d spent months getting kicked around, like a stuffed animal in the grip of a manic toddler. And now I was actually doing something, rather than just letting other people do things to me. I was acting, rather than just reacting. And even if Revibe didn’t work and it couldn’t fix me, because I was unfixable, even then I was here because this was my choice, and that was worth something.
And it was worth something to be away from home, which had become so lonely. I heard from Emerson in some way or another every day, but she was my only guaranteed interaction with the real world. I messaged with Mackler and Corey occasionally, but for the most part they were preoccupied with their new friends and adventures. And since I wasn’t fun anymore, I didn’t want to take up too much of their time.
Mom got busy unpacking my suitcases, organizing things, arranging my toothbrush and toothpaste in a little cup, and telling me where she was hanging my laundry bag. It was annoying (like, this room is not that big, you don’t need to tell me where you hung the laundry bag, I will look around for one second and see it with my own eyes). But I didn’t protest, because I knew that she was nervous, too, and this was just her way of trying to prove that everything was fine. As long as she could keep my socks in pairs and my washcloths folded, she was still in control.
“Mom,” I said, and she looked up from the shirts that she was arranging into rainbow order. “It’s going to be okay.”
She didn’t even pause before replying, “Kina hora.”
I nodded. Kina hora, indeed.