I'll Be Gone in the Dark(40)

“I need to come get my swimsuit,” she said.

Her mother’s stony reply surprised her.

“No,” Cheri said.

A spike of rage torched Debbi behind the eyes. She gripped the phone and dug in. Mother and daughter were back where they’d left off.

That was four days earlier and around the corner at 1311 Anacapa Street, in an unassuming little house that was the headquarters of Klein Bottle Crisis Shelter, an organization for troubled





teens. Debbi had shown up there in the middle of July, a runaway on a bike with one hastily packed bag and a well-honed detection system for rules and how to flout them. But Klein Bottle was hardly a stern lockdown facility. The abundance of ferns hanging in macramé planters told you that. This was the peak era of Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child, a self-help bestseller that aimed to expose the subtle bad parenting that lurks in even the most functional-seeming families. Miller urged her readers to “find their own truth” about possible childhood abuse; in doing so, she helped ignite the talk therapy craze. Klein Bottle counselors drank tea from earthenware mugs and assured inarticulate adolescents that no feeling was too banal or shameful to share.

In addition to assigned chores, there was one house rule: the kids could come and go as they pleased, but they had to sign an agreement to participate in therapy sessions. The staff arranged for Cheri and Debbi to meet together with a counselor to help resolve their problems.

The Domingos must have seemed like an optimal case for mediation. Neither was a dull-eyed drug abuser exhibiting the ravages of stress and neglect. Far from it. Mother and daughter were both delicate-featured beauties. They sported matching beach-casual styles: easy on the makeup, huarache sandals, print tops, and jeans. Debbi adorned her hair with the occasional braid or side barrette. Cheri was thirty-five, a pin-thin Natalie Wood lookalike with a no-nonsense, pleasant demeanor, the result of working as an office manager. Debbi was more voluptuously built; her wide, blue eyes were attuned, as most teenagers are, to the short stretch rather than the long term. Both radiated good health and a core of self-assured calm.

The meeting time arrived. Cursory pleasantries were exchanged as everyone took a seat. As soon as Debbi and Cheri touched down on the couch, alighting like two birds on a wire,





they erupted. Their battles were by then front-loaded with fury, a miserable lockstep in which the only changes in position were who was incredulous and who was aggrieved. They needed no coaxing. Boundaries. Rules. Boyfriends. Disrespect. Debbi can’t remember if the counselor was a man or a woman. She only remembers shouting and a vague third presence in the room; someone who’d presumably seen it all but who exuded dumbstruck ineffectualness. In the end, Debbi fled abruptly, as she had before, a dark-haired storm of a girl pedaling away with her belongings crammed into a bag. In two weeks she’d turn sixteen.

Cheri watched the city swallow her daughter and worried. Santa Barbara beguiled. It deceived. The promise of romance reigned, and the potential for danger was obscured. After a nineteen-second earthquake shattered much of downtown Santa Barbara in 1925, the city was rebuilt in a unified Spanish Colonial style—white plaster walls, low-pitched red tile roofs, wrought iron. Preservation-minded civic leaders continued to keep buildings low and billboards out. There was a gentle small-town feel to the place. Every day for thirty-two years, a Greek immigrant, “the popcorn man,” sold pinwheels and popcorn from his station wagon at the foot of Stearns Wharf. The smell of night-blossoming jasmine drifted in through open windows on hot evenings. The roar of the ocean rocked people to sleep.

But instability lurked. A raggedy undercurrent roiled. The recession had gutted a lot of downtown businesses. There was not yet an open-container law on lower State Street; at night weaving drunks shouted at each other between breaks to piss and puke. The music clubs were changing. Folk and disco were out, replaced by angrier punk. The local papers were reporting that an anonymous male caller was telling children ages eleven to fifteen who answered the phone that they were going to die. Another caller, maybe the same man, was telling women that he’d hurt





their husbands if they didn’t comply with his demands. Local cops nicknamed the unidentified creep “our breather.”

There was a stoplight at State Street and Highway 101, one of the main north-south routes spanning California, and for more than a decade a colorful parade of hippies held up signs there asking for rides to places like San Diego or Eureka. It was such a Santa Barbara tradition that the Texaco gas station kept felt-tip markers for the hitchhikers to use on their cardboard signs.

But lately it was hard not to notice that, despite their Summer of Love robes and tambourines, the hippies weren’t young anymore. Up close, you could see they’d weathered not just wind and sun but gradations of defeat that had turned the light off in their eyes. There were fewer signs marked with destination requests. Some just paced in circles all day.

Santa Barbara’s magenta bougainvillea could distract you from its hairline cracks. Cheri hoped no harm would come to Debbi out there. Every mother’s brain cycles through the litany of terrible things that might befall her child. Rarely does the reverse occur. Why should it? Especially for teenagers, who between seeing their parents as God and then as human view them temporarily as an obstacle, a particularly cumbersome door that won’t quite budge.