Imperfect Birds

  She remembered all of their names—how bad off could she be? Ava, Lew, Tiana, Sophia, D’ron . . . She swung some of them for a few minutes, but this made her feel more nauseated, so she plopped down in the earth and made a lap for them. Jody called the other children over and they all sorted themselves out, some on top of Rosie’s neck or legs or head, some on Jody’s, some rassling with one another.

  The cough syrup she and Fenn had drunk was hitting her hard. It was over-the-counter, not even something anyone could test for, except that sometimes the DXM made your urine test positive for PCP. What a stupid fucking idea that had been. She couldn’t believe she had drunk it with him; she’d done it only because he couldn’t come today and it made them feel close. She was seriously mad at herself. She hadn’t meant to have any, she’d meant to say no. Her hands were trembling. She wanted to lie against Jody, but there was no space to do it with all those kids, like Jody was the old woman who lived in the shoe. She and Jody held hands, and she knew Jody could see the tremor, but she didn’t say anything judgmental. Rosie had to keep swallowing back vomit.

  We are here for all generations.” Anthony’s voice broke through Elizabeth’s memories. “Our babies, children, youth, adult, and aged, all the way through to the wise ancestors who are always around for us. We feed them by saying, ‘I remember you, love you, need you.’ ”

  Elizabeth went to find Rosie, needing to hold her, ecstatic that her girl was here, on sacred ground. She could not find her in the crowd. Finally she saw her, sitting on a bench in the children’s area, Jody squatting in the dirt beside her. Elizabeth headed over. Rosie’s black hair spilled down over her back, halfway down the lavender shawl she had wrapped around her shoulders. Jody must have said something to her, because she looked up slowly. Jody wiped something from the side of Rosie’s mouth, pushed away strands of hair, put her dark glasses back into place.

  Elizabeth knelt on one knee and peered into Rosie’s face, as if she had complained about having something in her eye. Leaning in, Elizabeth gently removed the dark glasses. Rosie closed her eyes as tightly as she could, and Elizabeth waited. Rosie didn’t breathe. At last she sighed, and her lids fluttered open, and she looked calmly back at her mother. Her pupils were full: the pterygium crept from the bloodshot whites to a fine rim of Siamese blue surrounding a total black eclipse of the sun.

  How quickly the urge not to make a commotion took over. Instant composure kicked in, masking Elizabeth’s dread, even as word went out that something was terribly wrong with Rosie.

  Rae came rushing over. “We need the keys to your car,” Elizabeth whispered. Rae fished them out of her pocket and handed them to Elizabeth. Rae, James, and Elizabeth led Rosie away in slow motion through the crowd, as if showing her to a seat for afternoon tea. Elizabeth decided on the spot that she would not take her home. People looked toward them and spoke softly with concern. Rosie started protesting, but Elizabeth whispered, “Shh,” and they went around to the side of the church toward the parking lot. As they approached the parked cars, Rosie tried to break free, and James gripped her arm. Then he all but shoved her toward Rae’s car.

  “She’s stoned,” Elizabeth told Rae. “Her pupils are dilated. What should I do?”

  “Take her to the emergency room. Check her into an inpatient rehab.” Rae took hold of Elizabeth’s shoulders. “Just don’t do nothing today. Today, do something big.”

  It was perfectly quiet in the car. Rosie thought about jumping out at every traffic light, and again when they were on the freeway. She saw herself standing on a mountain, screaming for Fenn. She looked down at her nails, bitten to the quick. So much adrenaline was pumping through her that she had to persuade James to pull over so she could throw up. When he did, she was too weak to bolt into the woods.

  The fresh paper under Rosie’s body on the examination table crackled as she turned away from the wall. She stared at the ceiling. There was a water stain. That was a little tacky. The attending psychiatrist did not show up for at least two hours.

  James and Elizabeth stayed in the waiting room while Dr. Reynolds examined Rosie. James paced. Elizabeth studied her nails and tried to hold back tears. She did not feel like talking. Talking led to thinking, and thinking led back to talking, and for the time being she was done.

  She watched movies in her head, of Rosie’s peers in failed rehabs. Jody had gone off for three months at a cost of $30,000, and found it very easy to score while in treatment. Then she had used again almost the whole time she’d been back, until fairly recently. A senior named Jane had successfully completed county outpatient, before needing a shot of Narcan during fifth-period art class. Alexander the sweet heroin boy was high his third night home from a sixty-day program. Several of the girls in Rosie’s class had been sent from the ER at Marin General, after overdosing on alcohol, to recovery places out of state—one to Montana, two to Utah—and you saw them all the time at the Parkade, buzzed out of their minds. It seemed that most addicts, especially the young ones, needed to try and fail a couple of times. After a full year at Allison Reid, one girl had gone on to Stanford, a total success story, but she overdosed on OxyContin her first semester there and died.

  Elizabeth and James did not have the $10,000 to send Rosie off for a month of rehab, let alone three, unless they dipped into her college fund. Also, the odds were good that as soon as Rosie got back to town she would keep trying to figure out how to get high without being busted. There seemed to be no way to stop her. Elizabeth stared fretfully off into space, seeing Rosie on the blacktop of the Parkade, surrounded by burnouts and friends, getting a shot of Narcan in her shoulder or heart. “It’s like she keeps climbing into a dryer,” Elizabeth said to James. “And her head keeps hitting the sides, hard. So I get in there with her, to try and protect her, to keep her brain from getting too banged up. But isn’t that just crazy?”

  Rosie lay on top of the crackly paper with her eyes closed. Her parents had come back in, but she did not look over at them. She kept repeating a line from her French test, a mock cooking class on crêpes, using invisible ingredients and bowls: Utilisez votre main droite pour tourner ce groupe de deux bulles sur elle même!

  “Did you say something, darling?” her mother asked. Rosie shook her head. In the French test, you had to describe cooking something: Use your right hand to fold this grouping of two bubbles over onto itself. What did that even mean, this grouping of two bubbles, ce groupe de deux bulles? And she’d gotten an A on it.

  Rosie sat up on the exam table, looking like her old self, slightly embarrassed, wary.

  “Have a seat,” Dr. Reynolds said to Elizabeth and James, indicating two folding chairs against the wall. Elizabeth swiveled around to study her daughter for another minute. Rosie had her best face on; you might momentarily believe that she understood her place in the order of things: a minor, in a psych emergency room, with the head of the department and her parents watching.

  “Things are in some ways worse than you may have thought,” Dr. Reynolds began. “We’ve sent off a urine specimen, and Rosie has prepared us to find a medley of illegal substances—mushrooms, cough syrup, alcohol, inhalants, plus prescription Adderall that she buys from a boy at school.”

  “Inhalants?” James sounded aghast. “Inhalants?”

  “As a result, she is close to a diagnosis of borderline psychosis, along with deep exhaustion from the use of OTC stimulants and cough syrup.” Elizabeth gritted her teeth to hold back the bile. “Obviously, this isn’t good, although it is almost surely temporary.” James took his wife’s hand. “But we’ve reached an understanding, Rosie and I. Right?” the doctor continued. Rosie nodded. “Why don’t we check her in on a fifty-one fifty, a seventy-two-hour hold, while she detoxes. We can help her build her health back up, help her get some sleep. In a couple of days, we’ll sit down together and figure out our next move.”

  “Yes,” said James. “We agree. Seventy-two hours. And only the two of us can visit, plus Rae.”

  Later, Rosie di
dn’t really remember their good-byes, although she didn’t think anyone had cried. Her mother had hugged her and said they’d see her in the morning, but the video in her mind of everything else had been erased. They’d been here and then they were gone. She had to share a room with a fat woman with acne who had a clear plastic tube up her nose, and a dust mask on her face. Rosie used the pay phone to call Fenn and tell him where she was, left a message on his machine that everyone was watching her like the Gestapo, so she couldn’t call often and he couldn’t visit. But she would be out in a day or two, and if he called Alice, Alice could call Jody. What a joke, she added, that all this had come down because of over-the-counter cough syrup.

  She ate the crappy food, and read a copy of A Passage to India that her mother had found in the lending library. It was amazing. She stayed in bed. The room was too white and smelled like cleanser. They gave her some syrup to help her sleep. She slept deeply, but as usual, she did not dream. It had been months; none of them was dreaming anymore.

  The rain turned to slashing storm around the time that James and Elizabeth crawled into bed. She’d been crying off and on since they had said good-bye to Rosie at the hospital. The whole world was in a deluge. James had phoned a local twenty-eight-day rehab called Serenity Knolls, to see if it would take Rosie for a month—it was close, built on a low hill by a creek, surrounded by redwoods—but he learned you had to be eighteen years old to get in.

  “Can you tell us the name of another place?” James pleaded. “If this were your child, where might you consider?”

  “I’m not supposed to make recommendations,” the employee at Serenity Knolls told him. James took a deep breath. “So I’ll just mention that there’s a wilderness program in Utah called Second Chance, that’s different from the rest.”

  “We’re not looking for a wilderness program—I read that a kid died in one back East last week. But tell me this,” James said. “How do you know about Second Chance?”

  “I got sent there by my parents when I was seventeen. It’s probably why I’m still alive.”

  Elizabeth stood behind James at his desk and watched him try to log on to his computer, but the phone line was acting up in the storm, and he gave up. He got the phone number from Salt Lake City information, then called and left a message.

  “How can we have gotten to this place?” he asked Elizabeth. “She could probably get into almost any college she applies to. But we may need to send her away instead.” She nodded. “We’d have to use her college fund. And cash in the IRA that Andrew left for her.”

  Outside, the rain crashed against the house and the wind howled. Elizabeth read until three, listening to the downpour; it sounded like the surf. Rosie in wilderness? Elizabeth went and stretched out on the couch, then pulled into the fetal position and tried not to throw up. Help us, she cried, feeling insane and numb, a silent roar inside. Help us help us fucking HELP US.

  The wind shrieked like oil pouring up out of the ground.

  When she was little and it rained, she and her father would walk the dogs down to Harrington Park. He would take a matchbook from his pocket, tear two matches out of it, bend the end of one, and leave the other straight, to distinguish whose was whose. Then they would lay them in the gutter on Appleby Street, which would be rushing with water, and race their matches.

  She woke to discover that they had not in fact blown away in the storm, but the cost was spiky fatigue. She had been holding the house down all night with bungee cords. Green redwood branches whipped in the mist like sails, where the day before the juncos had played. Rascal snored beside her. “The storm has been waiting, patiently, grimly,” James said, handing her his mug of coffee.

  “The storm? Waiting for what?”

  “Release. Muttering, creaking around behind something in the closet, till now.”

  The phone was working again, and he logged on to his computer. She stood behind him and read over his shoulder about Second Chance, and The Camp in Santa Cruz.

  “These are places kids run away from. And I bet they hate their parents forever,” Elizabeth said.

  “I know,” said James. “Now leave. Go visit your spawn. I’ll find out everything I can.”

  Rosie slept until seven, and woke up feeling better than she had in weeks—sort of stoned in a mild way. It was storming outside, crazy, maritime, and she loved it. She daydreamed about Fenn, and how she would be out that night, after a shower. Her mother would be here by nine, and if Rosie was clean, smelling like shampoo, totally contrite and like her old self, her mother would help get her out of here. It was ridiculous she was here in the hospital at all, but she could see that it was time to pull her act together. She was freaking her mother out.

  She got up, put on her robe. There were ten people sitting around, mostly looking completely ordinary, except that they were in pajamas. She was the youngest person. She had breakfast with a group of four, and they talked about the storm. They all had interesting, poetic ways of talking. One guy about thirty said he’d stayed up all night listening to the fitful wind nag and fret. One aging lady said she thought she’d heard the howl of wolves. The most intense man said Rosie had the best vibe, like she must be great with children. Rosie said yes, she was, that was such an intuitive thing to say, and she told them all about her bucket kids.

  Then an older psych nurse came along and broke the peaceful spell by horning her way into the conversation, like she was one of them. Her name tag said “Angie,” and had a happy-face sticker next to her name, but she was not happy. She looked like a mixture of Gertrude Stein and Mrs. Danvers from Rebecca or like the bad fairy who, at the end of the lovely christening, after all the good fairies had said lovely things and given various talents and blessings, came along and cursed Beauty.

  “I seriously need my mother,” Rosie told Angie, confidentially, worried.

  “You’re okay. Visiting hours start at ten. Let’s getcha going.”

  She felt sort of normal again on her feet. All she had to do was kill a couple of hours reading until her mother could come and get her out. Whatever bad spell it was had passed. She glanced at Angie, at those eyes staring right at her, and did not look away, just tried to look composed and bemused as Angie lumbered off. But she had to look down at her bare feet in slippers just to check that there was still a Rosie body there and not a pile of smoldering ashes.

  Rosie was in the lounge, lost in her book, when Elizabeth arrived at ten. She got up and raced toward her with outstretched arms. They both held on for dear life.

  “God, Mommy. I’m so sorry.” She shook her head. “Did you bring clean clothes?” Elizabeth nodded. “Did you smuggle Rascal in?” Elizabeth smiled. “I’m so much better. I feel like I’ve come back from a thousand miles away. And I feel okay today—rested, like me again. Did you bring me a brush? Will you brush my hair?” She turned her head so that her black hair cascaded down her back. Elizabeth fished out Rosie’s toothbrush, toothpaste, and lotion, and put them on the table. Then she took the hairbrush, and gently drew it through Rosie’s hair, pausing for extra attention to the ends. Rosie reached back for her mother’s hand, to stop her for a moment. “I can’t believe what I’ve put you through. I am so starting over—I just got off the phone with Fenn. He understands completely, that we have to start over. Hey,” she called to a middle-aged woman, “this is my mom!” The woman, a pretty housewife of forty or so, started pointing with burlesque enthusiasm at Elizabeth like she was the bomb, and Elizabeth smiled and waved, the shy celebrity. “So Mama, will you ask Reynolds if I can go home now?” Elizabeth continued brushing. “Say something. I’ll go to a meeting with you tonight.”

  “Rosie,” Elizabeth managed to say, her throat closing up, “I offered to look away from it all, if you would stay on campus at lunch. But you wouldn’t even give me that much. Another night here won’t kill you.”

  “I changed my mind, I will totally obey you. I swear to God.” She whirled around to face her mother.

  “You need to stop
smoking weed, and taking anything else, till you’re eighteen. Period.”

  “God, this is such an overreaction. It’s crazy. I don’t want to be like the one Mormon in my senior class.”

  Elizabeth turned her palms upward. “It’s very simple, Rosie. You’ve been doing weed, Ecstasy, cocaine, getting drunk, taking cough syrup, acid, mushrooms, sniffing glue.”

  “Glue once. Jeez, I can’t believe this. You’ve gone crazy.” Rosie stopped reacting then and nodded, as if the second person inside were whispering in her ear, telling her to fake understanding and agreement. She heard her mother say her name.

  Rosie did not speak during the short morning group meeting, although she found that her face was wet. She would say later, when Elizabeth came back with James, that she was okay with not drinking, that she would quit everything. Study, be with Fenn and her friends, get through senior year. She would say what her parents wanted to hear. There were good prescription drugs at school now, plus Alice still had Adderall. She could make it work. She would stage a moment of clarity later today. Some people from a local AA or NA group were bringing a meeting to the inmates, like little temperance union missionaries. She could win her parents’ trust back, do a great job on her college apps, score a scholarship somewhere, maybe San Diego, eventually get to spend weekends with Fenn again. Angie, standing in front of the meeting group in her satanic fashion, delivered a passionate speech on recovery, and how they might make the most of this opportunity. It was just ludicrous, a howler, as Alice would say.