Dawn
Losing Morbus and saying goodbye to Tatiana and Rhule and the Matriarch was the hardest thing Phoebe had ever done, but it was time. And she could return, now that she knew how, though she had a feeling it wouldn’t be for a long time.
She walked for many hours in the dark of the tunnel beneath Vineland until she saw a glimmer of daylight on the other side. It glowed brighter and brighter as she got closer, and then she ran toward it, excitement fizzing inside her and spurring her on. She couldn’t get home fast enough.
—Vineland Transcendent
The morning of the Oscar nominations, I’m awake before Phoebe for once.
Friends with older children keep assuring me that my daughter will eventually sleep past six thirty in the morning, but in all her five years so far, she’s done that fewer than five times, and one of the times was because she was jet-lagged from a trip to Hawaii.
This morning, though, I’m too excited to go back to sleep.
The documentary Audrey and I made about the new recovery scene had gone viral and gathered momentum, with more and more glowing and prestigious reviews and streams online.
As the buzz intensified, we began to think we might have a shot at the Documentary Short Film category.
Leaving Dennis and Phoebe blissfully asleep, I steal down to the kitchen, crouch to pet Alfie’s graying head, start the coffee, and open a window in my iPad to the site streaming the announcements. Just as I pour my first cup, my phone lights up with a text from Audrey.
Are you up?
Yep. Just having some coffee.
I’ve been awake for an hour. I made five bowls in the studio. The suspense is killing me.
I know. Me too. Let’s try and distract ourselves. I’m excited to start shooting next month!
I know. Chez Panisse and the French Laundry!
You sure you don’t want to set aside the vegetarianism to taste the full menu? You know, in the name of art?
If they can’t make great vegetarian dishes, they are not true Pioneers of California Cuisine.
Lol. I know. Just teasing. Will Oliver be able to join us? Dennis can’t wait, and the grandmoms are excited to take Phoebe to all the theme parks, plus Joshua Tree and Yosemite.
He wouldn’t miss the French Laundry for anything in the world. He might have to be in Paris when we do Chez Panisse, though.
Saving the world again, sheesh.
They should really call it Médecins Sans Life, lol.
Omg! It’s starting!
I turn up the volume on my iPad and text with Audrey some more about the bigger-name nominees, our impatience mounting as we wait for the documentary announcements.
Just as they finish the feature-length announcements, Phoebe wanders into the kitchen rubbing her eyes and trailing her favorite blanket. “Mommy?”
“Come here, sweetheart, and please be quiet for just a moment, okay?”
Phoebe climbs into my lap, and I hold her gangly form close as I listen.
When Sober Curious is announced, I leap to my feet, still holding Phoebe.
“Yes!” I shout, then set my bewildered daughter down. “Guess what? Mommy’s movie was just nominated for a really big award!”
“Can I have some chocolate milk?”
I laugh. “Anything you want.”
Audrey calls, and I talk to her through my earbuds as I stir chocolate syrup into cold milk, then serve it in Phoebe’s favorite pink straw cup, with PBS Kids on the television as a special treat.
“I can’t believe it!” Audrey shouts.
“I know!”
We squeal and discuss what we might wear, and who will do our hair and makeup, and wonder if we will get to bring Dennis and Oliver.
Then, speak of the devil, Dennis appears in the kitchen with an expectant look on his face.
I tell Audrey I’ll call back later, and I fling my arms around him. “It was nominated!”
He hugs me tight.
“I knew it would be,” he said, his voice low and growly in my ear. Even after nine years together, the sound of his voice still sends shivers down my spine.
“Oh you did, did you?”
“You and Audrey put everything into that film, and it’s great. Really and truly great,” he says. “We’ll celebrate tonight? Chocolate soufflé?”
“Mmmm, yes,” I say, picturing this cloud of perfection at my favorite restaurant on College Avenue, a fifteen-minute drive from where we live in the Berkeley Hills.
We considered living closer to Audrey in Southern California, but two years of film school at USC cured me of ever wanting to drive the highways down there again.
Plus, Dennis was promoted to full professor at Berkeley, and we found the perfect house with a recently renovated kitchen and a small sound-editing studio already built in.
It helped that my favorite all-women meeting on the Oakland–Berkeley line was a five-minute drive from the house, too.
For a few years, I went several times a week; these days, I still go twice a month to see my old sponsor and all my friends—who I see anyway for coffee and dinners on rotation at our various homes—but my true sober home base has become an online community that formed during the pandemic, when recovery went online and found new ways of building community.
This explosion in sobriety options was a big part of what inspired Sober Curious.
I now lead three meetings a week online, and as a result I’ve gotten close with sober friends as far away as Louisville, Nova Scotia, and Sydney, Australia.
My phone is full of people I can call when I am struggling, which is much less with alcohol these days than it is with motherhood, the demands of a burgeoning career, and the normal (I am assured) spats of married life.
Basically, these friends understand my particular brand of anxiety all too well because they also sought to numb theirs with alcohol.
No one was more surprised than I was that I love making documentaries—so much so that my desire to make a feature film evaporated entirely.
There are so many stories to tell in this medium!
Following a modest success with a five-minute documentary about censorship in public schools that I did as a class project, which now has over a million views on YouTube, Uncle Bernie (as Bernard insisted I call him) was the next biggest reason I embraced documentary filmmaking.
After amassing great respect and quite the fortune in network television, he took some of his money and made a full-length documentary commemorating the gay scene in San Francisco on the fiftieth anniversary of the Summer of Love, which went to Sundance and made him the documentarian to watch.
I met him for the first time at Winnie’s place in Mendocino, and we hit it off right away.
He’s a true member of the family, a guncle who sometimes feels more like a fairy-tale godfather.
Especially because it turns out he was the old friend of Mom’s who’d gotten me that first props job at the Curran Theatre.
I’m closer to him than I am to Lincoln, though that seems to be changing. The first time I met my father for coffee at the Intelligentsia in Silver Lake, we recognized each other right away.
“Lincoln?” I asked at the same time he said, “Dawn.”
He was tall and still as wiry as Winnie had described him, and his full head of curls was mostly gray now, like the stubble on his chin. When we shook hands, mine felt small in his, and his smile was instant sunshine.
“You look just like your mother,” he said.
“I definitely have your eyes, though,” I replied, and his glinted before he swiveled them away.
We ordered the same thing—decaf iced lattes “because it’s afternoon,” we both said at the same time, then laughed.
After small talk at one of the little metal tables outside, he said, “I’m really glad you called. I wasn’t sure if you would, once you knew everything. And I would have respected that.”
Winnie explained that Lincoln had reached out when he was on the ninth step for the fifth time, and slowly the two of them had gotten to be friends.
She was up in Mendocino, and he was living in Venice Beach and teaching music at UCLA while also volunteering at a clean-needle clinic.
“We emailed almost every day for a while.” Winnie laughed.
“I felt so modern! And I had my own computer, too, by that point. The second Vineland book had just come out. He knew I’d written it, and he told me how much he loved it. ”
“Is he still…in LA? Are you still in touch?” I asked.
“He is still in LA, and we are less in touch now. We said all the things we needed to say to each other.”
I asked if she’d forgiven him, and she said, “I don’t bear him any ill will, which is one definition of forgiveness.
There was a moment, after we’d been emailing for a while, when it felt like maybe we could be a couple again, but I searched inside and realized that wasn’t possible for me.
Too much had happened. I was someone else.
I was a much more whole and satisfied person than who I’d been when I was with him.
I didn’t need him to complete me anymore. ”
She continued, “When we last spoke, he told me that if you ever got in touch and learned the truth, he’d love to talk with you.
If you wanted to do a DNA test, he’d do that also, though I can tell you that you look so much like him, in your profile and long arms and legs, and those remarkable blue eyes, I think there is little doubt.
He doesn’t have any other children, though he’s been a foster father and a big brother to a number of troubled teenagers over the years, which he seems to have a special gift for. ”