* * *

  —

  Lina meant to see their mother that first day, but by the time they were free to go, she and Walter were so exhausted they sank into his car and opened the windows so the soft air batted their cheeks. When Lina blinked awake, Walter had parked in the driveway of a house. His house. That he owned.

  They walked through the quiet entry and Lina ran her hand over the top of a cabinet. Nice wood. There was a sofa. Chairs. She called Sacha from the kitchen phone while Walter stood in front of the open refrigerator. She said, in as few words as possible, what had happened. It was hard to talk with Walter listening. There wasn’t much to eat. A leftover burrito, a jar of almonds, and carrot salad in a take-out box. That night, she cried in her bed. A phone waited on the low bedside table, but she didn’t call Sacha again. He would be sleeping, and there was too much to tell. She would try him in the morning, when he would be rushing and she could summarize.

  This house was so nice. Why couldn’t Donnie be here instead of in that institutional ward that felt like a prison?

  The next day, they learned about rules. Phone calls were allowed only on Sundays.

  No visits the first fourteen days. A visit is a privilege, the man said, that they have to earn. He passed out the schedule. Peer counseling. Mentor meetings. Donnie would have obligations all day long. Group sessions and two twelve-step gatherings. A therapist twice a week. Physical exercise started right after detox. They took them in a van to the gym. They could see a trainer there, but that the family had to pay for. Julie raised her hand. Walter levered her arm down. “My turn.”

  Week two, they would be given chores. Attend meetings off-site. Everyone got a job in the community after forty-five days. Eventually, the more intellectual ones took classes at the local college. Family week started day 26. The families would watch them receive their one-month chip.

  They trekked to their mother in the hot middle of the day. Ward 301 seemed old in comparison. She looked beyond them.

  “Donnie is here in the hospital,” Lina said, trying not to talk the way people talked to impaired people. “He had a problem with drugs. We have to pray for him,” she said, although she didn’t pray, really. Their mother fell asleep in her chair. She’d put on weight, the way older people did, tiers of fat stacking on her belly. But she wasn’t old. Her legs looked purplish, and she was wearing green cotton ankle socks she would’ve hated once. No one had been doing her laundry for years. It went in with everyone else’s.

  They still had time before the afternoon Al-Anon session, so they walked to the superintendent’s office. Dr. Moss had become smaller with age. When Lina asked about Isabel, he said she was doing her residency in Oakland. “She’s on call eighteen hours a day. Surgery rotation.”

  So she’d quit art. Lina was shocked. Mr. Riddle and then Isabel were why she’d started. Lina still believed Larkin was a genius. What happened to the work those two women would have made? She wondered where she could see Mr. Riddle’s work. Was it for sale in some gallery?

  At the end of the day, they finally saw Donnie. His face looked terrible, his beauty marred, maybe forever. He was smoking, right in front of them, as if to flaunt the fact that he had turned into someone else.

  Lina started crying. They had been asked to write out what they wanted to say to him, what they were afraid of and what they hoped for.

  “I’m terrified that you’re going to do something stupid and die,” Walter said.

  “I’m afraid, I guess I’m afraid, I mean our mother’s here, our dad’s a gigolo, I’m afraid we’re bad, too,” Lina said.

  “We’re not bad,” Donnie said, holding on to her hard when they hugged and not letting go. “And she’s not bad either.”

  Lina asked then about school, if he wanted to go back.

  “That’s the last thing on my mind now,” he said.

  “Easy, Lina,” Walter said, a hand on her shoulder. “I’m a dropout, too.”

  School meant too much to her. She knew that.

  “I just hope you’ll get better so you can have the life that you deserve,” Julie said.

  “That first night I brought him here,” Walter said when they got into the car, “I drove home and slept twelve hours. Better than I’d slept in years. Knowing he was locked up safe.”

  * * *

  —

  “How’s the wedding coming?” Susan asked.

  They were sitting in Walter’s kitchen. The question startled Lina.

  The wedding. Could she even get married with Donnie in there? “Hard to think about now.” Lina felt ashamed of her preposterous bouquet. Twigs, cocoons, dead bees. Just then, she remembered the champagne glasses still in the box on the floor of Sacha’s closet and thanked Susan. At the other end of the long wooden table was a stack of canvas totes, printed I’ve got some real estate here in my bag.

  From the guest bedroom, she talked to Sacha. He asked about her day and she answered in monosyllables. He didn’t coax out more. He sighed. “Is there anything I can do to help?” There must be, but what? The casement windows opened with no screens, and a watery smell of dirt floated in.

  Lina could have reached out and touched a rose.

  Sacha called back after they hung up. Her hopes rose. He had to ask her something. There was too much to tell, but she wanted him to know. He’d scheduled a dinner with his parents the night of her return, he said. Should he cancel? She said no, it was fine. So there would be another meal, in another restaurant. Every meeting they’d had had been in a public place.

  68.

  The Saturday she returned, they hurried to a midtown Italian restaurant to meet his parents. His mother laughed at her husband’s jokes, looking up at him, gold rings on all the fingers of her left hand.

  Lina had a feeling she was prone to in certain restaurants (white tablecloths, candles)—My mother would love this. And she would never have it. She wouldn’t have minded the unevenness between husband and wife, either. Her mother was better suited to her life than she was. Lina wished, for a stray moment, that she could give it to her.

  They were complimenting the wine. “Be good for a reception,” Sacha’s father said.

  “But, honey, remember, Lina’s from California. She may want the wedding there. And they grow some of the best wine in the world.”

  Lina looked at Sacha. She was pretty sure a wedding cost more than all the money she had.

  As dessert was served—floating island—Sacha’s father asked about the surname of their future children. Sacha looked as if he were helpless to stop him.

  “I’d like our children to have my family name, too,” Lina said, two fingers on the tablecloth, “maybe with a hyphen.”

  “But your father wasn’t even there!” his father burst out, in something akin to laughter that held no merriment.

  Both families had had trauma, but theirs was different. It was tragic. Historic. Nazis had hounded Sacha’s grandparents out of Europe. Lina respected his family for what Sacha’s grandparents had suffered. On her side, she had only the selfish and the mentally ill. Maybe her children could have their name, she liked it anyway. Jacob. These elegant, sophisticated people agreed to take her, but they wanted her pulled free of family, alone.

  * * *

  —

  “You have to admit I’m not what they expected.”

  “Thank God,” Sacha said, taking off his tie. “You’re not Jewish. You’re from California. You propose hyphenation. There’s Barnard, though. And my mother likes that you’re an artist. I wish you had more to poke her with. Seriously, though, do we have to hyphenate? It’s so clunky.” He asked, “Do you really want to give your father that honor?”

  “It’s my name, too,” Lina said.

  * * *

  —

  Lina’s work felt dead after only a week away. She’d left one tube open and the paint had dried. Her canvases felt inconsequential. You will change nothing, they taunted.

  She’d felt close to her brothers and Julie; they’d been a family in that depressing place with drab walls and highly polished floors. They’d made their sad confessions and she felt a string of hope. She paged through a catalogue of bright-colored kitchen appliances that had come in the mail. The phone rang and she leaped—thinking, The place? Something about Donnie—but it was only Walter. “They scheduled family week Monday through midday Friday! It doesn’t even overlap with a weekend. I can’t go for five days.”

  “I think we have to,” Lina said. She looked at the room, the shapes of her easels. She had twenty days to fall back under their spell before she’d have to go again.

  “You’ll be there. And Julie. I’ll come as much as I can.”

  * * *

  —

  By the time Sacha came home, she was in bed, reading. He clicked on the TV while undressing. When he crawled in, she said she’d have to go back for family week, in May. He nodded, serious and quiet. She didn’t tell him her work felt dead. She’d talk to Troy about that tomorrow.

  Sacha stood up to get a glass of water. “Is there anything I can do?” That moment, he seemed taller, a dark pine. She fell asleep holding his back. But what had happened to sex? That urgency had ended. Still, she loved the safety; maybe she needed it more.

  * * *

  —

  It was spring. Tiny red pointed buds stretched from the tips of branches as she walked along the river, up to see Troy. They met at the Cuban Chinese restaurant. Semipermanent litter rustled in the street.

  Troy asked about the place, how the treatment was supposed to work.

  “They keep saying we can’t control it. We can’t cure it. Then what the fuck are we doing there?” It was good to be with Troy. She could sound like herself. “You never did anything like this, did you, no groups? Me either.”

  “You and me, we never gave ourselves permission to fuck up,” Troy said. “I’m kinda surprised your brother did. I’m a little impressed.”

  “I’m so scared.” She took out the schedule of Donnie’s days.

  The list of NEA grants had come out. Martine was on it and another painter from their program, who’d never said a word. They gossiped. Finally, Troy asked how things were with Sacha. She wished the two men she was closest to would like each other.

  “He’s going to Florida,” she said. “Have you heard of Christo?”

  “The guy who wraps things?”

  “He’s a couple, actually. They use just his name to be taken seriously. Sacha is going to watch them wrap some island. I fly back for family week and here’s the weird thing: I’m looking forward to it.”

  “How’s your mom?” Troy asked.

  “The same. I’ll see more of her in twenty days.”

  “Hey, I’m learning how to make boeuf en daube.”

  “Is this all because Jackson Pollock baked a pie once?”

  “Bouef en daube, remember? The dinner party in that book you gave me.”

  Troy had read the book Lina heard about from Sacha that Etienne had given her for nothing. Her three men were invisibly connected.

  * * *

  —

  Lina kept Donnie’s schedule taped to her easel. Monday, she called his case manager, who said that despite the wild cocktail they’d discovered that night in the emergency room, Donnie had finished detox and it hadn’t been too hard for him.

  “So he’s clean,” Lina said.

  “Yes. Now the building starts.”

  Each week, the case manager reported incremental progress, and Lina felt a sense of pride in that which her work didn’t yield.

  At the Evergreen, she told Harry about family week. He looked away and asked if she needed a leave of absence. Did he want her to resign? “I think it’ll be just the one week,” she said.

  “Take your time,” he answered, not looking at her.

  * * *

  —

  Walter attended family week after all. During breaks, Julie took out the LA Times and circled rental listings. Her landlord had given her unit to a family with a baby and, anyway, he’d doubled the rent. “When I went for parents’ weekend at the college, he didn’t seem so good to me, but he said he was fine. I should never have believed him. The roommates weren’t any better. Not a one awake when I knocked at noon. I don’t need an upstairs-downstairs. Just two bedrooms. For when he gets out.”

  The group leader, a tall man with bangs who would have been good-looking if he’d had braces, Lina thought, passed out a list: Characteristics of Codependent People. Lina checked eleven of the seventeen traits. (A tendency to confuse love and pity. An unhealthy dependence on relationships. Do you have difficulty taking compliments or gifts?) She circled the question: Have you ever lived with someone who hits or belittles you?

  “You haven’t, have you?” Walter asked, looking at her paper.

  She was touched by his concern. Their mother had hit her. But she said, “No. Just ‘belittles.’ Such a perfect word.”

  * * *

  —

  They were sent to a workshop on restoring boundaries. A therapist wrote formulas on a green board with blanks to fill in.

  When you _____­_____­____, I feel _____­_____­____.

  Julie bit down on her pencil. She was taking this very seriously. Lina resisted the exercises, dire and terrifying as the situation was. She couldn’t help herself.

  “When you drive your ma crazy and scare ’er half to death, I feel, I was gonna say mad, mad at my brother, your dad, but what I really feel is helpless,” the uncle said.

  Everyone murmured. Everyone, that was, except Lina. Julie was one of the louder murmurers.

  A few other family members read their sentences aloud. You didn’t have to.

  Walter had finished quickly. Lina wished she could read his.

  The next hour was devoted to consequences. The therapist gave an example: “If you raise your voice with me, I won’t share my feelings with you. If you continue, I’ll hang up and not speak with you for two days.”

  But Donnie never raised his voice. He just disappeared.

  They were supposed to list their own enabling behaviors. The therapist passed around a cheat sheet. Julie said that she recognized quite a few. Calling to check if he was going to classes. Apologizing for him. Back in high school, explaining his behavior to the administrators when he chalked that picture on the wall. Believing he might be sick when she should’ve known. She kept shaking her head.

  Then they were supposed to write a letter to the addiction.

  Dear Heroin,

  Dear MDMA,

  Dear Vodka,

  Lina sat listening to Julie’s pencil on the paper. She and Walter looked at each other. It was the end of the day and hard to address a letter to a drug.

  Driving home, Walter said that Susan had made rice pudding. “Oh, and turns out this engagement business is contagious.”

  So the story of her brother had an ending. “Was it Donnie, you think? That tipped you over?”

  “Yeah, sure, partly. Made me realize what matters. I don’t want to tell him, though. For now, let’s just focus on getting him better.”

  Susan stood in the doorway holding a stemmed dish in each hand. Jess had called and said it was important, she said. But it was already late and they had an eight o’clock session the next morning.

  * * *

  —

  She called Jess during the morning break, standing on a strip of dirt littered with cigarette butts. Everyone here smoked. Lina wanted to talk to Donnie’s therapist about that.

  The troubadour’s brother had flown out to look at rings. He pooh-poohed Berkeley jewelry shops and made an appointment to see diamonds in a back room at Tiffany. He told Jess he was proud of her. He understood what an achievement a PhD represented.

  Lina was having trouble concentrating.

  When she got her first job, Jess went on, he could follow her. “I’m very hireable,” he’d said. “But then, later, when we have children, you’re going to have to quit.” “Quit?” Jess had managed to ask. He’d said, “Being my wife is going to be a full-time job.”

  “Like first lady.” Lina smashed a twisted butt with her heel. It was oddly satisfying. The guy was planning to run the world.

  He told Jess she should think it over. So she was thinking. But Lina had to go. The next session was starting. She promised to call soon. After all this agony, Jess would end up marrying him and they’d be rich. It was hard to imagine Jess without science, though. Her little brother, Evan, was studying quantum gravity at Caltech. Lina had always envied Jess’s immersion in her work. You did your small piece and it contributed. She’d said that once, and Jess had said, “Sure, but isn’t everything like that?”

  Art’s not, Lina had said. But could it be? She wondered as she hurried to the next session. Two doctors were showing packages of synthetic quaaludes, cocaine, methamphetamine, and heroin. Lina took notes. Cloud Nine. Pearl. Reindeer Dust. Snowball. Woolie. Cielo. White Sugar. She hadn’t guessed the language of drugs would be poetic.

  A multimillion-dollar industry, the doctors said. Synthetics were sold as incense or tea, labeled “Not for human consumption.” Kids melted the drugs with Hershey’s bars, froze them, then ate it. Angel dust, Lina wrote down, was an elephant tranquilizer and an embalming fluid. A side effect of something called bath salts was severe strange aggression, the male doctor said. After taking quaaludes, a rock musician raped another member of the band.