Locust Lane(27)
For now, however, it was still there. It came as no surprise that she endured in his memory. He’d felt closer to Gabriella than any other person in his life. This wasn’t something he chose. It was just how things turned out. She’d been such a sweet, beautiful child. He’d push her down Centre in her stroller and watch the faces of passersby erupt in joy when they encountered her smile. Her first dozen years had been one long sunny day. Everything came easy to her. Friends and school. The violin. Soccer and dance. If there were tantrums or sulks, Patrick couldn’t remember them.
The transformation began when she was thirteen. Suddenly, she was prey to ungovernable moods, whiplashing between bouts of weeping and nearly hysterical enthusiasm. She became secretive and paranoid. Her relationship with her mother, Lily, turned downright toxic. If Patrick touched her, she reacted like an oft-whipped dog. Unbelievably, shamefully, he found himself avoiding her company.
At first, they put the change down to the usual tempests of puberty. But it got worse. Her eating became sporadic. Empty wine bottles turned up under her bed. And then there was the burning. She grew obsessed with the false idea that she had split ends and decided to torch them off with a lighter. The sickening smell of roasted hair began to fill the house. They’d be eating dinner or watching television and it would arrive like a ghostly visitation. Confiscating matchbooks and lighters made no difference. They lived in fear that she would light her head on fire or burn down the house. They fought with her, they punished her, foolishly thinking that this was simply bad behavior, that this was all something she could control, when actually it was just the first symptoms of the disease that would kill her.
Therapy began just after her fourteenth birthday. They shuffled through a half dozen well-meaning, ineffectual counselors who rolled out words like depression and compulsion and ideation, but never seemed to get to the heart of the matter. Next came psychiatrists and their magic bullets. Lexapro and Ativan and Klonopin—names that appeared to have been yanked from a fantasy novel. The pills made her sleepy and docile; they dried out her mouth and constipated her and messed with her periods. The only thing they didn’t do was make her better.
She was sixteen when she discovered the bittersweet deliverance of opioids. Lily had suffered a bad CrossFit accident around the time that Patrick had undergone dental surgery, leading to a glut of painkillers in the house that neither of them used—Patrick had his booze, Lily her innate toughness. They rid the house of any remaining prescriptions, but by then it was too late. The hook was in. Obtaining pills wasn’t hard for her. For months, they had no idea what was happening, blinded by their suddenly serene child. But her receptors got hungrier; the agonists agonized; supply couldn’t equal demand. The Scotty Parrish debacle happened and there was no more denying reality. She was drifting farther and farther away. She slept for entire days and then she didn’t sleep at all. More, her hungry brain called. More.
Heroin came to the rescue. It turned out it was a lot cheaper and easier to obtain than the pills. Which was news to Patrick, who’d always associated the drug with poverty and the outer reaches of bohemia, when in fact it was dangling from majestic suburban maples and oaks, ripe and ready for the picking. The needles you could get at CVS.
Gabi disappeared, right before their very eyes, to be replaced by a shifty impostor who lied and stole and vanished for days at a time. She limped to the finish line of high school and then enrolled at Barnard, while her parents crossed their fingers and hoped the change of scenery would do the trick. A dean called after less than two months to report her missing. Patrick eventually tracked her down to a B-movie motel on Long Island. She moved back home but was soon wandering the streets, a girl gone wrong looking to get right. God only knew where she wound up staying during that last wretched year and a half, except that she didn’t leave the area, remaining close enough to summon Patrick to fetch her and drag her to detox when things got too bad. Then the insurance ran out and they wound up spending close to forty thousand dollars on two useless stretches in rehab. It didn’t work. Nothing worked.
It was during this time that he came to understand that he was to blame. This was his legacy to her, more than her looks and smarts, more than her tendency to sunburn or her foot speed. The malignant gene that wound through his genealogy, killing his grandfather at forty-two and afflicting uncles and countless distant relatives and, truth be told, him, had now been passed along to her. By him. There was no other explanation. She’d been deeply loved and diligently instructed; there’d been no trauma or neglect. She’d been an angel. It was a sickness. And he’d given it to her.
He was desperate to do something to stop her slide, but it was too late. The cancer had spread too far. And so, to his eternal shame, he gave in to the urge to let go. Although he’d reacted to her first few disappearances with feverish panic, near the end he began to meet news of her latest vanishing with unspoken relief. There were times when he knew that she was sliding into danger and he didn’t raise a finger to stop it; times when he could have tracked her down but did not leave the house. Exhausted and weak and cowardly, he surrendered to the sickness he’d given her.
And then came the final abandonment. Her arrest at Whole Foods had been his last stand. Instead of taking her to the next expensive rehab place, he’d let the state load her into a van and deposit her in one of their grim brick junky warehouses. He told himself that it was tough love, but it was simply bone-weary weakness. The phone rang the next night; the institution’s name appeared on the LED screen. He and Lily were both in the kitchen at the time, clearing plates from another silent, stricken dinner. They looked at each other, he shook his head, she nodded. They listened as Gabi left a message, pleading to be picked up. The phone rang again and another message echoed through the kitchen, this one even more hysterical. They fled the house, sheltering at a multiplex in front of an absurd action picture. Sixteen more messages awaited them when they got home. Patrick erased them without listening.