She’d invited him to Michigan over the summer. But by then he was here.

  * * *

  —

  They spent a long time preparing for family week. Donnie had never been in the drama department at school, but from noticing his classmates cycle through adrenaline to exhaustion, he thought this was like the annual Shakespeare play, only real, the long rehearsals culminating not in a performance but in face-to-face revelations and apologies, not conversations exactly because they were so practiced, with the people who meant most to you who’d now seen into your box of failures. Your betrayals, your lies, your greed, your cheating—they had seen them and could pick one up to examine.

  Julie owed them nothing, but she’d taken them in. She’d laughed with him, told him her daily news, learned to cook what he liked. They’d watched movies together eating Jiffy Pop and almond brittle. But then he’d stopped that and left her to worry while he was out destroying himself.

  Not that it felt like that to him at the time.

  * * *

  —

  He had a long letter prepared to read, but he couldn’t get through it. Julie wanted to take the blame from him and make it all her fault.

  He told her not to a thousand times, but she couldn’t not be responsible. A switch had been turned on in her once long ago, and it was stuck to that setting now forever.

  * * *

  —

  His brother was a cipher as always. He took Donnie for a walk on the grounds and when they sat down, he zeroed in on Donnie as a man, which he viewed as something completely different than being, well, Lina. “You know how when we were growing up, I was considered, like at least in the family, smart.”

  “Yeah. You and Lina.”

  “Well, when I got to college, I found other people way better at school. Even Lina. She likes all that. I’m good at finding things that have fallen apart, like old buildings, and making something out of the pieces. Maybe when you’re done with all this, you can come work with me.”

  Lina kept trying to jump down into the well of the past together. She saw them as twins. And she was this goody-good! He’d never been like that.

  In a letter, though, she’d told him things he couldn’t forget.

  She wrote that Mom may never live outside again.

  Donnie,

  I feel tentatively happy at the end of family week. I’m grateful for the hours I spent with you and for learning how you’ve been going through your days. Walter said that after he brought you here, he went home and had the best night of sleep he’d had in years. He said he slept twelve hours. This week here I feel as if my life were all in one place again. Norwalk. Who would have thought here? This is the first time the four of us have been together since Walter left for college. It may be the last time; I think I’m finally accepting that Mom may never be able to leave.

  The years we lived together in the bungalow, I felt better than I’ve felt since and a lot of that was you. I tried to live up to who you thought I was, someone smart and capable and good. I’m not those things without you. Maybe I never was. It was probably all your imagination.

  You’ve always been a cool kid. Popular, like Mom. Now I understand that you had a whole life outside us, a life of danger, maybe with its own kind of beauty also and even love.

  But I’m scared of you relapsing. My best art friend said that he admired you. He said that we—he and I and this would apply to Walter too—never gave ourselves permission to fuck up. That requires a kind of privilege, he said. But you didn’t have that privilege either. You ran awful risks without a net. That’s still true. We don’t have the money or the power to pull you out of trouble. If you get arrested, you’ll be lost in a web of injustice, maybe forever. In a few years, I could be standing at your grave in my sad outfit and stupid heels, and if that happens, my life will be over, too. You will be taking me with you. And Mom.

  If you manage, though, to stay right, you’ll have a whole good life ahead of you. You’re kind and charismatic and loyal. You’ll always find people to love you. I want you to get to have that life that you deserve.

  He folded her letter in eighths and kept it in his wallet. He took it out, usually once a day. The folds turned into creases, then began to rip, so eventually it became eight tiny rectangles the size of elementary school photos you cut from the sheet and traded with your friends. He kept those, too. He still had one of Evan.

  * * *

  —

  Lina must have told her friend Jess where he was because Donnie received a package from Evan: a thermos. In the note, Evan offered to visit.

  Donnie fingered the thermos. A present! For being here. There was a joke.

  It was a very nice thermos. An orangey red.

  At this time in his recovery, Donnie couldn’t help but keep track of who called or wrote to him and who didn’t. He didn’t hear from Dino. Or from any of his college friends.

  He wrote to Evan that he would welcome a visit.

  * * *

  —

  One night on the beach, Donnie had seen the Sears building lit like a temple. He and some other people stood on the Santa Monica Pier parking lot, which was made of ancient trees split in half. They were uneven logs, pitted and cracked, loud waves frothing below. He no longer remembered how he’d gotten there. The rectangular Sears building was lit from the ground. He was tripping and could remember the monumental catalogue, years ago. Mid-century children, they’d moved through a series of Valley apartments with wall-to-wall carpets and landlords who harrowed his mother, women with elbows out. His sister lay on her belly, feet up in the air, as she studied the nine-hundred-page Sears catalogue more than her homework or than any Bible. Could she have worn her hair in two braids? Her dark feet in penny loafers? The company was pushing red-and-white calico that season. Shorts, dresses, skirts, pedal pushers—all the same checkered cloth. His sister deliberated because she could get only one. He wanted to buy her another.

  For himself, he’d seen a drill with nine bits.

  Lina remembered this differently, he’d found out at family week. He flashed on that catalogue again; the children they were, cutting out pictures of his tools and her dress, things they would never even see. The glossy items were “catalogue only.”

  She did her best, Donnie tried to tell Lina. Donnie never doubted that their mother loved him. She loved Walter, of course, he was first. She struggled to stay her best, can-do self until she saw him off to college. But Lina was her girl and he was her baby; she loved them a closer way. She must have known she wouldn’t make it to their finish lines. When Lina left after family week, Donnie mopped the hall, going back and forth. She hadn’t even had Julie, not like he did. Their mother walked out on Lina in the middle of her growing up and there was no one else for her.

  He could thank LSD for handing him the truth. The night, long ago, in a dirty sleeping bag by the thundering surf, he’d been alone in the dark. The stars sparkled closer. He wasn’t afraid to be alone. Then he saw a shape that was really there, not a person, just denser air. The height of his mother. She had tried to kill herself; that was why. The figure stood there, the edge of its density waving a bit in the wind, like a cut piece of cloth. Nobody told him; but the waves and the pressing stars and the figure had given him to understand. She’d wanted to die.

  72.

  “Are you experiencing cravings?” Trish, his caseworker, asked.

  He wasn’t, he didn’t think. Sawdust in the mouth was a problem. A flat horizon, world without commotion. He’d done drugs to wake himself up.

  Trish talked to him about classes at Cerritos College. Small, birdlike, but slope-bellied in pregnancy, she sipped from a fourteen-inch container of iced tea. If he maintained a B average, he could eventually qualify as an addiction counselor. Just what his sister feared; Donnie laughed. He missed the college town on a hill. He thought school would be something anyway. A coffee shop. Used bookstore. Some bustle.

  At the end of ninety days, he was allowed to go up to LA for the weekend. Walter would fetch him. He wrote to Evan suggesting that they meet.

  * * *

  —

  He told his group about drawing the counselor and the principal. They took the whole hour on it. He kept waiting for them to turn to the next person. “I can’t undo it now,” he said, his hands acting without him on his lap.

  “That’s the thing about damage,” someone said.

  His roommate, with the snake tattoo, suggested an amend.

  “I tried,” Donnie said.

  “Wonder if there’s something else you could do for her. Like if her garage needed painting.”

  “I’d love to do that.”

  Some people thought it would be good to try. Others thought, leave her alone. Even giving required a relationship, he was learning. The receiver had to want your gift.

  * * *

  —

  His next meeting with Trish she wanted to figure out a job for him; she had a list of shops that hired kids from the unit.

  He hoped to work here on the hospital grounds.

  “Because you want to see your mom?”

  “Yes. Other things, too. I want to be near her kind of people.”

  Trish seemed to take that as an acceptable answer.

  A calm seeped into him.

  Trish put in calls, but the only opening she found was in Geriatrics and the head nurse there would take him but no dog. “We’ve got more than enough incontinence,” she said.

  “Sylvie’s house-trained,” Donnie argued.

  “Didn’t you say you know a nurse from your mom’s unit?”

  They called Shirley, who said she needed to meet the dog. Donnie hiked over to the library, and Sylvie folded herself into a perfect triangle at his feet. “She’s my luck,” he said. Shirley convinced Geriatrics to give them a try.

  “New person always takes diaper detail,” said the head nurse, whose profile was like the cut side of a key.

  Donnie had been handling poop in plastic bags for a year now, with Sylvie. There was a rubberized sheet you flung over the beds. The person either sat down and then spread out, or, for those who were in chairs, Donnie would lift them and set them there. They were fantastically light. Then, as he changed the soiled diaper and cleaned the sagging skin, fixing a disposable on tight, a face would hang at the other end of the bed, looking up at him with shame and gratitude and something else. He folded the soiled paper into a package and brought it to the lidded garbage. “It’s not all poetry,” he’d once said to a girl who’d asked about his mom and looked at him with pity and romance. But he could do it, with a face looking up at him.

  He taught Sylvie to sit near the person’s head, and often an arm would reach down to touch her.

  “The goal is bowel and bladder,” the head nurse told him. They used tricks from preschool teachers to teach them to hold it and use a toilet again.

  “Why not just diapers?” Donnie had seen way worse in drug houses. Diapers kept them clean. But the key-faced nurse explained that, out of diapers, families were more inclined to take them back. “Could be the difference between dying here or at home.”

  Evan wrote that he could drive up to LA. He suggested Saturday lunch. Their arrangements were careful, weeks in advance. Donnie said he’d ask Walter about eating at his new shopping center (maybe an attraction) and told Evan to invite Dino, if he wanted.

  I would have loved you to see them build the lake, Walter said, driving him to meet Evan. Huge machines dug the core, a mile alongside the hangar, then a crew lined the cavity with red clay and filled it with two million gallons of water. Walter brought in ducks. He’d show Donnie the catalogues. Machines the height of parking meters dropped feed corn into your hand when you put in a dime. They had to make sure the ducks got the right kind of food. Ken had picked out aquatic plants. Families could feed paper cones of corn to the ducks and buy their own lunches from a dozen different food carts.

  In the parking lot, Walter asked if Donnie wanted him to wait somewhere—the restaurant, maybe, where they’d be eating lunch. Walter had booked them a good table. He’d sit by himself in a back booth. But Donnie wanted to go alone. Evan would give him a ride back. He and Evan walked around the oblong lake, which looked natural, with ducks hiding among cattails. Evan said he’d tried to get in touch with Dino, but his phone number had been changed and there was no forwarding number. Evan was living in Pasadena. He’d worked in a lab over the summer, on something called Q switching, which had to do with the spikes of lasers, and he hoped to keep working there, during school. He was thinner and he’d grown a mustache. He talked about a professor he admired who ran nine miles every day and had a tailor make the pockets deeper on all his pants. Almost to the knees. Donnie ran into the restaurant to cancel Walter’s reservation; they’d decided on tacos from one of the trucks. At moments, it felt like they were gaining traction; other times, conversation felt like work. Evan asked Donnie if he planned to return to school this fall.

  “Winter maybe,” Donnie said.

  At Walter’s house, Evan stood out of the car to say goodbye. “I’m proud of you,” he whispered into Donnie’s shoulder. “Wish Dino would do what you’re doing.”

  * * *

  —

  An accordionist in his sixties played every Wednesday in Geri. He’d been a patient at Orchard Springs when he was young, and drove himself down from Altadena to see his friend Artie, who by now had been here most of his life. After the fifteen-minute recital, the two friends drank together. The head nurse kept their bottle in a locked cabinet. Working in Geri, Donnie began to understand the hospital. Most kids in the unit never did. Their parents checked them in or the court sent them, and they orbited between the unit and town, where they worked in coffee shops and lifted weights at the gym. Some cycled out and back and never knew that the hospital was a world. It had a shoe repair. A barber. What they called the fashion center. A really good bakery that Donnie would miss.

  He wrote a letter to the only professor he’d actually talked to at college, saying he hoped to return in a semester or a year. He mentioned that he was taking classes at Cerritos Community. That felt like a lie. The classes weren’t much.

  He would be moving to sober living. It had taken Trish a while to find one that would allow Sylvie. The house she’d found was in the direction of the college. Donnie would have more freedom, but with that came responsibility. He was strong enough to manage, she said. And she would be here; he could always pop in. “You’re going to be dazzled by choices. You’ll need your supports. Tell me your dailies.”

  “I run.”

  “What else? You’ll find a meeting there. Do you meditate or anything? You know I pray.”

  “I read. I’ve been reading more.”

  “You need strong dailies to structure your recovery. Oh, and your house will have its own rules, but one thing we recommend is, and this comes from a lot of experience, the first year, try to avoid romance.”

  Donnie laughed. “No problem there.”

  “No cravings for that either?”

  His last day in the youth unit, he saw Horsegirl balanced on two feet, looking the way dogs do when they’re made to stand. Chagrined. To go from being a beautiful horse to a mental patient pulled up by your parents: talk about a flat world.

  * * *

  —

  Donnie didn’t mind the new place. He called it Humble House, and he abided by the rules. He ran with Sylvie, five, sometimes six miles a day. He drove his mother’s old car to the hospital for work and on Sundays, again, to visit her. She was used to Sundays. Julie, who’d moved to Long Beach, took him out to dinner after. He filed the paperwork to return to college. The professor wrote back after five weeks, when Donnie had given up, and sent him a copy of his fall syllabus. He offered Donnie a place in the class. But fall felt too soon.

  January ’83 was fine, Donnie wrote.

  * * *

  —

  Returning filled him with dread. “You can’t drop out twice,” he said to the group he attended in the unit Wednesday nights. “I feel like I’ll be falling down the same well.” Before, with each failure, came the relief of familiarity. But now he would be trying.

  He’d organized workers in the college town. That was the one good thing he’d done. He’d never been a student. He had learning issues. Maybe because of those, he’d avoided homework.

  “I have to read everything three times,” he said.

  “But you were good at organizing,” someone said.

  “You just collect signatures. Anyone could do it. Convince people to join the union.”

  “Those are real skills,” someone else said.

  “Not school skills.”

  “We’re unionized here,” Trish said. “It’s expensive to pay people a living wage. But you get a better quality of care.”

  Donnie wondered if he should just stay at Cerritos.

  “I get that,” said a sixteen-year-old from Santa Monica. “If the other school is too pressurized.”