Did You Ever Have A Family

George

My son Robert got married this year. He and his wife, Joy, called me from their honeymoon in Big Sur, California, to let me know they’d gone to city hall in Oakland to say their vows. Do I wish I’d been there? Of course I do. But it’s how they wanted to go about things and it’s their business. I was glad for the phone call. Joy is a strong woman and I think the two of them make sense together. They’re not exactly what you’d call an affectionate couple or terribly expressive, or at least not from what I’ve seen in the few times I’ve seen them together. But given what Robert’s been through, just making sense is more than adequate. They’re both journalists, both busy, both black, both sober, and neither wants children. Robert writes about human rights abuses in government prisons, and Joy is obsessed with the impact of oil pipelines on indigenous lands. She spends a lot of time in Canada. When they talk about what they’re working on, they both tend to shout, so when we speak on the phone or see each other, neither of which is often, I try to steer the conversation to safe subjects like the weather and pets. I love Robert and I know he loves me, but since his mother died over a decade ago, he’s stayed away from Atlanta, his sisters, and me. For instance, his sisters haven’t met Joy yet and they’ve been together for over four years. They don’t make a fuss about it. Robert for them has always been less a brother and more like a cousin or young uncle who visits occasionally. Boarding school in Connecticut, five months in hospitals, two years of rehab and aftercare in Minnesota, and eventually college in Portland kept him away, sometimes even during Christmas. They knew a lot about him — he was so much and so often the subject of dinner-table talk in our house — but I don’t think they ever had a chance to know him.

Robert was a fussy toddler. Easily upset, quick to cry. After kindergarten he calmed down and became quiet. Smart as hell and skipped the fourth grade, but he never appeared comfortable in his own skin. Didn’t make friends easily. He had one friend from the neighborhood, Tim, a chubby, redheaded boy whom he played Dungeons & Dragons with and wrote adventure stories for, which Tim would illustrate with complicated pictures of four-armed, sword-wielding soldiers and magic fairies with no eyes. Robert never liked to share with us the little books they made. Kay and I would sneak peeks from time to time when Robert was in the bath just to check what was going on. Mostly the stories and pictures were pure fantasy. Occasionally you’d see something upsetting that suggested what our old family therapist would call displaced anger. I’m thinking now of the twin monkeys who got their heads snapped off by a flying griffin with an enormous beak. If the visual symbolism wasn’t obvious enough, Robert’s story described the death of the twin monkeys as necessary for the survival of the human race. That they would eat all Time, and without killing them the world would run out of hours. Impressive on the one hand for a ten-year-old, but especially disturbing since his room was across the hall from his twin sisters, who from their premature birth required lots of developmental and physical therapy and who ate up a lot of, well, time. Still, as rattled as I remember us being by that particular story, I don’t remember talking to Robert about it, at the time, anyway; or discussing with him any of the books he and Tim made. I’m sure we should have, just as I’m sure we should have done many other things differently. But I think we were grateful he had a friend in Tim, creepy and aloof as he might be. Together, they had a sneaky air about them, and they’d spend hours in each other’s room scribbling away and talking in a kind of code that Kay and I could never crack. Maybe all that sneakiness and escapism should have been a sign of what would happen later with Robert, but as a parent you just have no idea what anything means. On some level everything your kids do and say is in code. I’m sure some parents are expert at translating, but with Robert we didn’t know where to begin. Also, we had a lot of other things to focus on at that time. The girls needed attention, and when they were three, Kay was diagnosed with stage-three breast cancer. Robert was ten then and often left alone to fend for himself. Between the girls and chemo appointments and trying to keep afloat the real estate development business my brother and I owned, there wasn’t a lot of time to play basketball or go over homework assignments. The funny thing is that Robert was the one person, the one area of our lives, we didn’t worry about. He was so tidy and bright, so self-contained and quiet, that I assumed he didn’t need me as much as everyone else did. Sure he had a spooky side, but he never got in any trouble. I was putting out a lot of fires then, and because with him there was no smoke, no flame, no alarms, I wasn’t paying attention. Nothing that wasn’t on fire got much of my time, which was something he must have understood from an early age. For the most part, I took him for granted. That he would shower and brush his teeth in the morning, get dressed and pour his own bowl of cereal. You’d think I would have been grateful to have a self-sufficient kid. I think for the most part I was. But a few times he drove me crazy. I remember one morning loading the girls into their car seats while Kay sat in the front sobbing from a migraine brought on by the chemo. The girls were fidgeting and whining and making it impossible to buckle their seat belts. We were late for school, for Kay’s doctor’s appointment, and at the time my brother was threatening to sell his half of the business if I didn’t get in the game, as he put it. At the edge of all this sat Robert, cross-legged on the front step of the house, scribbling in his black-and-white composition book, writing one of those wild stories with fire-breathing turtles and dusty witches, completely oblivious to what was going on. I remember looking at him and feeling furious that he was exempt from responsibility, untouched by struggle. This is, of course, what you are supposed to want for your children, but in that moment it seemed unfair. What I wanted was to hit him, shake him violently, rattle his calm, and inflict some of what I was experiencing. It sounds insane, but a part of me felt that if I went near him in that moment, I might kill him. That’s how angry I was. I couldn’t stand it that nothing seemed to register with him, and I could not have been more wrong.

We sent Robert to boarding school when he was fifteen, which was when Kay’s cancer came back and had spread to her lymph nodes. This time it was stage four and we panicked. The girls were eight by then and we reasoned that if Robert could focus on high school away from the chaos, it would be better for him. He had few friends, and Tim had left for Harkness the year before. Robert wanted to go, too, but at the time we didn’t take the idea seriously. It was expensive and in the hills of Connecticut, where none of us had ever been. But a year later we felt under siege. We told ourselves it was what he wanted, and on some level by then I think we trusted his instincts about how he should be raised better than our own, so we said yes. What we didn’t know was that by that time Tim had become quite the little drug czar at Harkness. I don’t blame Tim, though for a long time I did. I’ve since learned that addicts are born, not made, so if it wasn’t coke and heroin at Harkness, it might have been liquor and pills in Atlanta. Who knows. What I do know is that when I got the phone call from the headmaster at Harkness telling me that Robert had overdosed on drugs and was in a coma at the local hospital, I thought it was a joke. I’d never seen my son smoke a cigarette or even sip a beer. He was a straight-A student and played trumpet in the school marching band. He was a homebody and scarcely made a peep. The headmaster walked me through the prior twenty-four hours — a hiking trip that Tim and Robert and another student did not return from, a search party, a woman calling the police when she heard voices in her barn, and finding Robert unconscious when they arrived and the two other boys running away down the back field. You need to come right away, the headmaster said, and so I did.

After I landed in Hartford, checked into the motel in Wells, and visited Robert at the hospital, I saw clearly that the situation could change at any moment. My sister and mother moved in with Kay and the girls, and we agreed I should stay put until, hopefully, Robert could be moved — back home or to a rehab somewhere. I was out of my mind. I remember that strange little motel — with a girl’s name, the Betsy — with bad art on the walls and orange Dial soap in the shower and by the sink. Not the little motel-size soaps, but the big, thick ones you buy in a grocery store. Something about that place was makeshift; definitely not a chain motel. It was clean and quiet and I spent the first two weeks coming back at night from the hospital and wondering how on earth I’d ended up in this room with flowers painted on the headboard and my son in a coma on the other side of this white, Norman Rockwell Connecticut town. Not until after Robert came out of the coma and was eventually moved from the ICU to the rehab unit did I see that motel room in daylight. This was when I met Lydia.