When You Were Mine
“For you, Mommy. I crossed the street so I could get you a flower.”
My heart and anger both melted, and I scooped him up in a hug and made him promise not to do it again. I treasured the flower, pressed one of its petals between the pages of a dictionary, and related the whole story to Nick later, my heart bursting with love for this little boy of mine, impish and so very sweet.
That moment now feels as if it happened to someone else. Someone’s else son, another mother. There’s no flower now.
“So when?” Josh asks, impatient.
“I don’t know,” Nick snaps. “It depends on you, Josh, and whether you can respond the way we need you to respond. Because right now you’re not seeming very sorry about what you’ve done. You’ve been supplying illegal substances to minors—”
“Oh come on,” Josh scoffs, “it’s just stuff you could get online if you wanted to. It’s not like it’s cocaine.” Which is what I thought a few moments ago, and yet I don’t like it coming from him.
“I read an article about teenagers who bought what they thought was Adderall online and it killed them,” Nick states. I think I remember skimming it in The New Yorker a few months ago, when such sordid dealings seemed a world away from me and my charmed life. “These drugs from China—”
“I’m not buying drugs from China,” Josh interjected, rolling his eyes.
“Where, then?”
He shrugs, shoving his hands in the pockets of his jeans. “Different places.”
Nick stares at him for a moment, his whole body seeming to sag. “Don’t you care?” he asks after a moment and Josh shifts from foot to foot impatiently.
“Can I go?”
“Are you even sorry?”
“Dad—”
“Josh. Answer me. Are you sorry?”
Josh sighs and stares at Nick. “Not really.”
Nick deflates further, his expression bewildered, his face looking almost gray with pain and disappointment. “But…”
“It’s not like I’m doing any harm. Everyone takes this stuff, Dad. It’s like—it’s like Skittles were in your day, all right? Or caffeine pills. It’s no big deal. No one cares.”
Josh speaks with the most emotion I’ve heard from him in months, a kind of evangelical zeal that repulses me even as I long to be convinced. It’s no big deal. This doesn’t have to become a big deal. If we can just handle this, move past it, then life can continue on as it has been.
Except already I know that’s not true. Already I know that everything has changed, our perception of everything has changed—of Josh, of our family, of all that we’ve lived for and believed in.
How could our son do something like this? He had a good upbringing. He had all the quality family time a child needs—family dinners, camping trips, stories at bedtime, bike rides and board games. He had security and stability, affection and love. I did everything right. And now this? A white-hot flame of anger shoots through me like a fiery geyser, and then it flickers out. Surely I know by now there are no guarantees in this life, not for anything. Not for anyone.
“Go get your laptop,” Nick says flatly. “And your phone. I’m taking both until further notice.”
“What?” Josh’s jaw drops as outrage flashes across his face. “Dad, I need my phone—”
“No, you don’t,” Nick says in that same final tone. “Not if you want to stay in school, and on the baseball and cross-country teams.”
“I don’t even care about the fucking teams,” Josh explodes, making us both flinch from both the expletive and the emotion. “I don’t even like baseball, okay?” Then he storms upstairs while Nick and I look at each other helplessly, swamped with confusion and grief.
21
BETH
In the end, I decide to go with Mike to his mother’s for Thanksgiving. I wasn’t planning to, but the thought of being alone for the whole holiday felt more and more dismal, and more significantly, I was realizing that I wanted to start being proactive—about a lot of things.
I think it started with the counseling I was skeptical about but have come to, not enjoy, never that, but need, and perhaps that’s better and more important.
During the second session, I talked about my mother and then about Marco, and first there were tears and then, to my surprise, there was anger—a consuming rage I never expected to feel. I was nearly shaking with it, and as ever, Anna seemed unfazed by my reactions.