Now the doctor wheeled a steel cart to the front of the room to show them containers addicts used to hide their drugs. False pockets. A hairbrush with a handle that unscrewed to reveal a hollow core. What looked like a regular bottle of soda. Two commonly abused categories were pain-relief drugs and relaxants. Diazepams, the female doctor said. And every medicine cabinet has at least one.

  But Julie’s hadn’t. Lina knew that. So how had Donnie started?

  They described the myriad ways kids cheated on drug tests. They purchased urine from other kids. “They heat it and keep it in a lined thermos. They wear boxers. Most facilities don’t make them pull down their pants.”

  Lina stepped outside. She had to get air. She stopped at the tea table and filled a flimsy Styrofoam cup with hot water.

  When she returned, the doctors were holding up a web belt with what looked like a vibrator attached, with a balloon at the end. The female doctor lifted the apparatus. “They call them squirt guns. Somebody figured out how to drill a hole through a dildo. You can buy them on the black market in any color: white, tan, brown, or black. Some kid told me he was trying to get a patent on it. He wanted to market it as the Weeanator.”

  * * *

  —

  They’d planned to take Julie to dinner, but she wanted to give the dog a bath. “Let’s go tomorrow or the day after. Maybe by then they’ll let us take Donnie.”

  In the morning, the uncle brought two boxes of doughnuts. They were put into small groups to practice boundary setting.

  “No more me stayin’ up all night,” the diabetic mother said. Her husband, the longshoreman, nodded. “No more four in the mornings.”

  “No more drug parties in the house. That’s my boundary.”

  But Donnie didn’t live with them anymore. What boundaries could they set?

  In healthy communication, the goal is to understand, said the leader with bangs and overlapping teeth. (She noticed, behind the bangs, he had thick curly hair.) Most people listen in order to react or respond. True. Often, Lina felt aware of people waiting for her to finish; she tried to hurry up then and tripped.

  * * *

  —

  The next day, after lunch, a new doctor from Colorado armed the podium. He looked like a skier—in his early forties, tan, with light blue eyes. The white-coated Robert Redford had once been a patient here, he said. An addict.

  So this was the aspiration. Once here as a patient, now back as a doctor flown in from the mountains.

  He showed slides of the brain and talked about theories of addiction. Lina drifted off and jerked awake to him saying, “Drugs really do feel different to different people. Some people take one hit and it’s all over.” This sad, heavy fact dropped into her; there was genetic luck and Donnie had drawn the bad card. He’d had learning problems, too.

  The windswept doctor talked about a study in which rats chose dopamine over food. They starved themselves to death for pleasure. Glutamate, he said, preserved memories. Chronic stress caused anhedonia, a state in which a person no longer felt pleasure from the usual sources of happiness.

  Lina wrote down the word.

  “You want to get a doctor who understands addiction,” Robert Redford said, “and doesn’t prescribe Ativan to a person in recovery.”

  He showed a slide with a definition of addiction.

  A stress-induced (HPA axis), genetically mediated (polymorphisms, epigenetic mechs) primary, chronic, and relapsing brain disease of reward (nucleus acumbens), memory (hippocampus & amygdala), motivation and related circuitry (OFC, ACC, PFC) that alters motivational hierarchies such that addictive behaviors supplant healthy, self-care behaviors.

  Lina gave up trying to parse the acronyms. For addiction, Robert Redford said, we should follow the same treatment models as those for chronic illnesses, like post-chemotherapy cancer or lupus or major depression. “I like addicts,” he said, quietly.

  He let them go when it was still light outside. Julie had obtained permission to take Donnie off grounds, and Walter had heard about a new shopping center, twenty minutes away. Donnie had his dog with him now. She slept at his feet during meetings, Julie said. Donnie seemed himself, but awkward. Someone had given him a haircut. They ate at an open-air restaurant in the newly built wooden mall, and throughout the meal Donnie focused on the dog at his side. After dinner, they wandered in and out of small shops. Donnie looked down, his hands in his pockets. They encouraged him to try on a shirt in a vintage store. Lina had to take the leash out of his hand. They all liked the shirt and fought over who could buy it. But instead he found a collar for the dog. They bought the collar, and Julie snuck back to get the shirt, too. The evening felt like a pleasure trip in a foreign country, one they could finally afford.

  * * *

  —

  Robert Redford was back the next day to talk about “The First Year of Recovery.”

  Year, Lina heard, first year. It had been a month. She’d cast her horizon out three months, even four, to be generous. She was supposed to be married in September.

  “Relapse,” the Colorado doctor said. “What causes it? Anybody know?”

  He wrote the word on the blackboard: what they all feared.

  Navy pilots treated for addiction returned to work 96 percent of the time. Outcomes for commercial pilots clocked in at 87 percent. These numbers fell like golden beams slanting into the room. Lina had, by herself, walked to the Palisades Library and looked up the success rates of rehab. She guessed that every single person in this room had. Those statistics were grim; the vast majority of patients became active users again.

  “So, we have to ask, what is the model?” the windswept doctor said.

  Lina liked watching his back move. Taut thighs showed through the light corduroy jeans. He wasn’t thin, like Sacha. He was the oldest man Lina had ever found attractive. The chalk squeaked as he wrote on the board.

  Medical Detoxification.

  Inpatient residential treatment.

  Aftercare, 3–5 years.

  Three to five years! In five years, Lina would be thirty.

  “Now you’re thinking, three to five years, what does that mean? Well, it means after residential treatment, a sober-living place. Ritualistic, daily, sometimes even hourly, stress-management activities. Regular testing. Eventually, a return to duty. Service work. Meaningful goals. And finally”—he sighed—“a relapse plan.

  “But first, let’s look at the things that threaten sobriety.

  “Exposure, even brief, to the drug itself. Exposure to cues. Remember, glutamine stores memories. Even now,” the doctor said, “I’m twenty-one years sober, but when I landed in Orange County yesterday, there were certain roads I couldn’t take. There’s a blue door I’ll never see again.” Regret lingered in his voice, even love. “Cravings aren’t all conscious. Picture how you drive home from work without thinking about it. That’s where AA comes in…”

  Trying to imagine Donnie on a three-to-five-year plan felt like deafening noise. The doctor was talking about monkeys now. After a social defeat, a beaten monkey relapses more quickly.

  You needed good testing, he said. Twice a week. An experienced tester will notice: Are the pupils blown? Pinned? Sober-living houses varied. Some had a 60, 70 percent rate of going out. Going out meant getting back on drugs.

  Would they have to watch him forever? There could be no life for her, then. For a second, Lina imagined him dead, then, guilt flooding her like a liquid—she’d wished her most-loved brother dead—looked at Walter and Julie, relieved they couldn’t see inside her.

  After lunch, they would work on relapse plans. But not with the blue-eyed doctor. He was flying back to Colorado. “I try to think what it was like for my mother,” he was saying to Julie and the uncle of the girl whose father had gone AWOL.

  * * *

  —

  The relapse plan turned out to be another letter. Their workshop leader, the tall man with crowded teeth, outlined a formula. The first paragraph read: I’ve written this letter to you because I’m cautiously optimistic and hopeful for your recovery, but I’m also realistic in that you could relapse sometime in the future.

  Then they had to write about all the good qualities the loved one had when he was not using. There should be no negatives in this paragraph, the leader said. Only things you’ve loved about the person in the past, before drugs, and again this month in recovery. The week had done its work; Lina didn’t resist. For paragraph three, they were told to use the transition However before writing a broad description of the future as you see it if your loved one continues to use. Describe the potential deterioration of his physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health. Lina looked up at the leader. Tall and lean; he turned out to be handsome after all, in a different way than the Colorado doctor. Envision the loved one’s inability to maintain relationships or keep a job, he said. Imagine him dying, prematurely and alone. You can even describe yourself at the gravesite. Use your feelings. When I think of this future, he said, I feel devastated, cheated, and incomplete. He advised starting paragraph four with the transition But. This final part should conjure a hopeful future, with relationships, work, a long happy life.

  Lina just then realized the difference between the Colorado doctor and this man. It was class. That was all. His teeth had looked to her the way she’d looked to Martine.

  69.

  They trekked over to see their mother. Diane, Walter called her now. Lina would meet Donnie and his therapist in an hour. Walter and Julie had already had their sessions. In the codependency group, Julie told them as they walked, the leader had encouraged her to write a tough-love statement. The uncle had written to his niece, “If you choose to go out, I’ll stop communicating. You will be totally on your own.” Julie couldn’t write that. “What he said made sense but it depends on how old the person is. I don’t think it’s the right approach for us.”

  Their mother wasn’t in 301. Shirley told them to check the shed, where she made her arrangements, and they found her there. She had nine or ten dented black buckets filled with branches and weeds—none of the stalks held what would qualify as a flower—and she was concentrating. She didn’t want to be disturbed. Walter talked at her ten minutes before giving up.

  When Lina found the therapist’s office, in a small building on the edge of the grounds, Donnie was standing in a huddle, smoking. The other kids looked hardened. Lina couldn’t say exactly how. The therapist was a middle-aged man who clasped his hands between his knees. In the dim room, Lina brought up the crime they’d committed, years ago. Donnie thought their mom had gotten the job innocently and then hatched the idea for stealing from being around so much stuff. “Probably just too tempting.”

  Her system of theft had involved all three of them. “We could have been arrested,” Lina said. She wanted Donnie to acknowledge how reckless their mother had been. There was not much light in the room. The therapist asked about Walter. But Walter hadn’t known. “She kept him clean,” Lina said.

  It was a long, racking exchange. Lina felt she was trying to prove something. She remembered, for a darting second while talking, that she’d never told Sacha about this crime. She never would. She didn’t want him to know that her mother had sacrificed them. It was her deepest shame.

  “You may never fully agree about the level or tilt of your mother’s illness. Lina, you believe she sent you into danger, while, Donnie, you think it was something she fell into herself. Divergent memory is normal. We each have a different experience of our parents.”

  So she should let Donnie have his adamant, sweet fantasy about his mom. Wasn’t that what she was doing with Sacha? Cutting out the parts of her life she didn’t want him to see?

  While the therapist talked, Donnie took a crushed pack of cigarettes from his pocket, shook one out, and lit up. His long fingers had a finicky delicacy.

  Lina interrupted to say, “I want you to quit smoking,” and Donnie told her, in a frantic voice, fingers spread, that he was trying so hard and she always wanted more from him, nothing was ever enough, he could never…

  The therapist sat forward to list the jumbled litany of Donnie’s achievements: meetings, working out, reading, helping others, Step Six. She would have to learn. She had stayed up until midnight writing her letter. She gave it to him, at the end. They hugged, standing, and, as they had every time since he’d been here, they held on a long time with palpable intent.

  * * *

  —

  Friday afternoon, the man with bangs and curly hair led the families in a ceremony. He lit a candle. They went around the room and wished each other well. The uncle told the group he owned a boat—he pulled out a packet of photos and passed them in both directions; it was a midsized motorboat—and said that every single person in this room who was sober in one year—you, too, he said to the leader—was invited onto his boat.

  The leader smiled a beautiful smile. That moment, Lina wanted to kiss him.

  “Reunion on the boat!” the longshoreman’s wife toasted, lifting her walker and knocking it on the ground. Then everyone said it, vowing to meet again. Julie and Walter joined. Next year on the boat. Someone proposed Baja. Point Reyes. Lina kept quiet. She’d read the statistics. Next year, not all these people would be celebrating. Many would be back in this room or another, with these same folding chairs. She fervently hoped Donnie would beat the odds.

  She looked at the leader; he looked back. He seemed to understand. The leader called people up one at a time. Donnie was awarded his token for thirty days.

  * * *

  —

  Walter was driving to Northern California that afternoon and Lina hitched a ride so she could see Jess. She found her in an old building on the Berkeley campus, in a lab where many people seemed to be quietly working.

  “I bought food,” Jess said. “We can walk to my place.” Jess told Lina that since they’d talked Tuesday she’d figured out how many experiments she could run in five years. She’d gone to a gynecologist to ask how long she could put off having kids. If she pushed it to ten years, which the doctor said was risky, eventually she’d still have to quit. If she wanted children. That was what she’d been trying to decide. And she kind of had. She cared about being a scientist more than she cared about being a mom. That turned out not to be a choice, though. He wanted them. Thinking of quitting was like imagining an early death. An engagement shouldn’t feel like a diagnosis, her mom said. So Jess had taken the red-eye Wednesday. “I had it in my mind that when he saw me, he’d…I was shaking. I cried in a restaurant, outside on the sidewalk. He took me back to the airport.” This was a lot for Jess to say. She was usually minimal.

  Lina was astonished that Jess had said no. Lina didn’t know if she could have. They made dinner, talked until midnight, then Lina slept on Jess’s couch and woke to the sounds of her friend making coffee. Nothing felt as peaceful as waking in Jess’s apartment. Walter came to get her an hour later. Lina had once thought of fixing them up, but they barely noticed each other.

  * * *

  —

  “I’m taking you to see the sculpture I told you about,” Walter said, driving over the Bay Bridge. “The mermaid first.” Lina looked at him to see if this was a joke. But there were literal cast-iron mermaids, bare-breasted, one nursing a baby that looked like a doll. Cast-iron turtles. Disney kitsch, but Walter loved it. Lina would have bet the artist herself was beautiful. She tried to think of something nice to say. “I like the hair,” she said. A group of children pressed close to the splashing fountain.

  They got back into the car. “I’m going to show you another.” The next fountain was vertical steel, folded to look like paper, surprisingly modern. Lina liked it better. But how could the person who made this have done the first one?

  “I want to take you by her house on the way to the airport. We have just enough time. The stuff there; I can’t describe it. Fountains are her public work. I don’t know much about art—but her work makes you feel something. Like yours does. I tried to commission her for a fountain in Aviation; she said no. I bought one of her pieces anyway. She’s Japanese American, from LA. She and her husband have six kids.”

  So it couldn’t be a crush. Lina vowed to be polite. In two hours, she’d be on the plane. The woman’s work would be good-intentioned, she thought, overt and virtuous. Lina pictured a pretty Asian woman in Birkenstocks, children crawling at her feet.

  Walter parked in front of a small house in Noe Valley. A man with a white beard opened the door. “Albert,” Walter said. “This is my sister.”

  The artist wasn’t home. Nothing had prepared Lina for what she saw when the man swung open the living-room door. In a high room with an arched ceiling hung dozens of wire sculptures—light Brancusi shapes shot through with air. A blown dandelion, three feet wide. Lina had to remember to breathe. Her brother, of all people, had stumbled onto beauty.

  They stayed in the room until Walter said it was time to go. They thanked Albert, who was reading The New Republic.

  “Does she have a dealer?” Lina asked in the car.

  “Probably. She’s had shows. But I don’t know how recently. She’s been involved in a lot of community projects. She helped start an arts high school here. The piece I bought is like the ones we saw. An older one.”

  Lina asked for pictures. She wanted Sacha to see.

  * * *