Winnie
I was completely trashed by midnight, and I stayed that way for a very long time.
I felt destroyed in a way I hadn’t before. All hope of Dawn, Lincoln, and now even my mother and sister was lost.
Loss like that kills something inside a person.
I couldn’t face it, and so I drank it away.
I even spent years raging at Dad and drinking at him, too. What right did he—he who had everything!—have to kill himself? He had had a devoted wife, and two daughters who wanted to cure him with picture books.
Fuck you, I thought, at a ghost of him I conjured in my mind. I have none of those things and I’m still here.
There were days I stayed alive just to prove I was better than the man who’d deserted us all and left a landmine of loss and grief behind him.
For a while, that was the part of me that tried to get sober.
And I would be for a while, as I made headway on my writing and I subbed in Arcata and Fort Bragg.
I lived lean and took long walks. I even had a cat for a while.
But inevitably, after six, thirteen, once even twenty-two months, something would send me walking into the bloody battlefield of my losses, and I’d pick up again.
When I let myself, I wondered what Miranda had been apologizing for at the end.
Was it that she hadn’t been able to save me from myself?
That she kept the truth about Dad from me, or that she refused to talk about it?
That she felt bad that she couldn’t let Dawn be a part of my life?
Or was she just mirroring back what I’d said, to be nice?
For so long, those answers couldn’t measure up to the pain I felt. The entitlement I felt to my own bottomless pain.
There was one time during my longest sober stint that I thought I had finally figured it out.
Everything was going well—I’d published six picture books, and I was teaching full time, my one-bedroom apartment was clean, and I was volunteering at a women’s shelter.
I felt terrific every day, with a clear head and energy to spare.
Then Mom died suddenly of a stroke, just six months after Emilio died of a heart attack.
I read both obituaries in the Napa Valley Register, which I often skimmed at my local library.
Immediately, I wanted a drink, but I went to a meeting instead.
I went to two meetings every day, in fact.
Three on the weekends. I shared in meetings how much I wanted Miranda to get in touch so that we could grieve together.
I even sent her condolence notes for Emilio, then Mom, pleading for her to introduce me to Dawn as someone else—a cousin, a family friend. Anyone.
I waited.
And waited.
I hoped, and went to meetings.
I didn’t drink, even when no answers came, and I was so proud of myself.
After about three months of this, my new sponsor observed that I hadn’t yet grieved the loss of my mother, and suggested that grieving—instead of ignoring—might be cathartic for me. “What we bury haunts us,” she said.
I couldn’t afford a therapist, so I talked about Mom in meetings.
About how much fun it had been to cook with her, about how much her praise had meant to me and how rare it had been.
About how much I wished she’d been able to accept me for who I was and how she’d done the best she could under the worst of circumstances after Dad basically left her.
I didn’t understand then, no matter what anyone told me in meetings, that it hadn’t been his fault any more than it had been mine.
But since I hadn’t forgiven myself for leaving Dawn with Miranda, there was no way for me to forgive Dad, either.
I couldn’t imagine that Miranda would ever forgive me.
What we bury haunts us.
I wasn’t ready for compassion, and so I drank again to numb those first stirrings of real understanding.
I went to meeting after meeting and complained. Hundreds of people in church basements and community centers and school cafeterias showed me the greatest care. They invited me to picnics and graduations and bridal showers and wakes.
But I could not make sobriety stick again for a long time.
Even as I went round and round on that merry-go-round, I followed Dawn’s progress by reading the Register.
I was so proud that she won a Lions Club oratory competition her junior year of high school, and that she played the nurse in Romeo and Juliet senior year.
She made the dean’s list every single semester, then she chose Columbia University all the way in New York City, over Berkeley and Stanford, which I assumed she also got into.
I was so proud.
And I wondered…Why Columbia? Was she trying to get away from something? Or had Miranda given her such beautiful, sturdy wings that she was able to test them by flying far away?
I chose to believe the latter.
Much as I loved and cheered her from afar, there always seemed to be a boomerang effect. Every time, I thought, Maybe now Miranda will write to tell me it’s safe to come back, since Dawn’s doing so well. I got my hopes up, then crashed on the rocks again.
In my darker moods, I took some pleasure in realizing that Lincoln had never hit the radio again.
The Cards had been a one-hit wonder. Occasionally, I’d allow myself to think about what he might be doing.
His mother had died of a cocaine overdose in the mid-eighties, and the pictures of him looking far too thin with an ill-advised goatee at her funeral sent waves of love and rage through me so powerful I had to stop them with some of the strongest weed they grew in Arcata.
The article also said that her death had left her son saddled with debt.
I had limited ways to check on people, and those that existed—phone books, mutual friends, archives of magazines for someone who’d once achieved some fame—were not avenues I was willing to walk down in pursuit of him.
Thankfully, by the time he came looking for me one last time, I was able to meet him with a clean and level head.
It was when Vineland started to gel in my mind that I started to think maybe I had something to live for.
I knew it was a great idea. I’d been teaching enough high school English, reading the trash in the school libraries, to know that kids were hungry for something engaging as well as challenging. Something entirely new.
Plus, I had an inkling that Vineland might heal something inside me.
I hadn’t been able to raise Dawn, but I could raise Phoebe.
I woke up one summer day in 1998 on the linoleum floor of my filthy kitchen, bright light pounding mercilessly into my eyelids.
Was it morning or afternoon light? I didn’t teach in the summer, and I was left too much to my own devices.
I’d had a job bagging groceries, but I had been let go for being late too often.
I sat up and the world spun. I went to the toilet and made myself throw up three times.
I choked down a glass of water, then opened a can of Coke and sipped.
Taking the soda with me, I sat on my church-sale love seat and put my avocado-green plastic phone on my lap, praying I’d paid the last bill so it would still work.
I never had a cordless phone, but I had an answering machine to capture Miranda’s voice in case she ever called, though all it ever captured were bill collectors.
Once I’d tolerated about half the Coke, I called Bernard, who was living in West Hollywood, making a name for himself directing a new kind of show they were calling “reality TV.” I had no idea what that was, because I didn’t have a television, but I understood from my students it was all the rage.
He and I had seen each other and talked on and off over the years, but I couldn’t quite remember when the last time had been.
“Hi there, old friend,” I said.
“Winnie! It’s good to hear your voice. Tell Uncle Bernard all about it.”
I broke down right away, and told him about Dawn, and Miranda, and Mom, and Vineland, which I lacked the discipline and energy to start. “I really want to write this book,” I said. “I think I finally have something I want to stay sober for. Something that won’t let me down.”
“It’s funny you called this week, because I have a funeral to go to that I’d rather not face alone. And more on the way. I need someone to help me get through them,” he said.
“I can be that person.” The idea that Bernard might need me also sparked hope inside me, as mournful as the reason was.
“Don’t you dare die of something you can fix,” he said with a fierceness I’d never heard in his voice before.
I wondered how it was possible he’d escaped the wretched plague, but I didn’t ask.
Later, I would realize that I myself had only escaped AIDS because I’d maintained just enough self-preservation to stay away from heroin; I had intuited that there would be no way back from the poppy for me.
“I won’t,” I said. And for the first time, I really meant it. Somewhere deep inside me, I meant it. I wanted to live. Even if I couldn’t know my daughter. Even if I couldn’t have my family; I wanted something to live for. I wanted to help Bernard, and I wanted to tell the story of Vineland.
I don’t know what strings he pulled, or who paid for it, though I’ve always assumed it was Bernard—yet he refused to admit it—but he got me a spot at the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage for after I’d detoxed in a state hospital.
I spent a week sweating toxins into scratchy sheets while nurses who should be body builders held my arms so I didn’t harm myself.
I never wanted to do that again.
When Bernard poured me into his shiny Mercedes sedan, he actually said, “You never have to do that again.”
I didn’t want to, and I didn’t have to.
I felt so much relief. A profound and real relief.
The Betty Ford Center was not the spa people think it is. I kept a rigorous schedule of meetings and individual and group therapy. I took step aerobics classes, and played Twister and whist and Scrabble with the other “inmates,” and generally learned how to be human again.