Imperfect Birds (38 page)

W
e are here for all generations.” Anthony’s voice broke through Elizabeth’s memories. “Our babies, children, youth, adult, and aged, all the way through to the wise ancestors who are always around for us. We feed them by saying, ‘I remember you, love you, need you.’ ”

Elizabeth went to find Rosie, needing to hold her, ecstatic that her girl was here, on sacred ground. She could not find her in the crowd. Finally she saw her, sitting on a bench in the children’s area, Jody squatting in the dirt beside her. Elizabeth headed over. Rosie’s black hair spilled down over her back, halfway down the lavender shawl she had wrapped around her shoulders. Jody must have said something to her, because she looked up slowly. Jody wiped something from the side of Rosie’s mouth, pushed away strands of hair, put her dark glasses back into place.

Elizabeth knelt on one knee and peered into Rosie’s face, as if she had complained about having something in her eye. Leaning in, Elizabeth gently removed the dark glasses. Rosie closed her eyes as tightly as she could, and Elizabeth waited. Rosie didn’t breathe. At last she sighed, and her lids fluttered open, and she looked calmly back at her mother. Her pupils were full: the pterygium crept from the bloodshot whites to a fine rim of Siamese blue surrounding a total black eclipse of the sun.

How quickly the urge not to make a commotion took over. Instant composure kicked in, masking Elizabeth’s dread, even as word went out that something was terribly wrong with Rosie.

Rae came rushing over. “We need the keys to your car,” Elizabeth whispered. Rae fished them out of her pocket and handed them to Elizabeth. Rae, James, and Elizabeth led Rosie away in slow motion through the crowd, as if showing her to a seat for afternoon tea. Elizabeth decided on the spot that she would not take her home. People looked toward them and spoke softly with concern. Rosie started protesting, but Elizabeth whispered, “Shh,” and they went around to the side of the church toward the parking lot. As they approached the parked cars, Rosie tried to break free, and James gripped her arm. Then he all but shoved her toward Rae’s car.

“She’s stoned,” Elizabeth told Rae. “Her pupils are dilated. What should I do?”

“Take her to the emergency room. Check her into an inpatient rehab.” Rae took hold of Elizabeth’s shoulders. “Just don’t do nothing today. Today, do something big.”

I
t was perfectly quiet in the car. Rosie thought about jumping out at every traffic light, and again when they were on the freeway. She saw herself standing on a mountain, screaming for Fenn. She looked down at her nails, bitten to the quick. So much adrenaline was pumping through her that she had to persuade James to pull over so she could throw up. When he did, she was too weak to bolt into the woods.

T
he fresh paper under Rosie’s body on the examination table crackled as she turned away from the wall. She stared at the ceiling. There was a water stain. That was a little tacky. The attending psychiatrist did not show up for at least two hours.

James and Elizabeth stayed in the waiting room while Dr. Reynolds examined Rosie. James paced. Elizabeth studied her nails and tried to hold back tears. She did not feel like talking. Talking led to thinking, and thinking led back to talking, and for the time being she was done.

She watched movies in her head, of Rosie’s peers in failed rehabs. Jody had gone off for three months at a cost of $30,000, and found it very easy to score while in treatment. Then she had used again almost the whole time she’d been back, until fairly recently. A senior named Jane had successfully completed county outpatient, before needing a shot of Narcan during fifth-period art class. Alexander the sweet heroin boy was high his third night home from a sixty-day program. Several of the girls in Rosie’s class had been sent from the ER at Marin General, after overdosing on alcohol, to recovery places out of state—one to Montana, two to Utah—and you saw them all the time at the Parkade, buzzed out of their minds. It seemed that most addicts, especially the young ones, needed to try and fail a couple of times. After a full year at Allison Reid, one girl had gone on to Stanford, a total success story, but she overdosed on OxyContin her first semester there and died.

Elizabeth and James did not have the $10,000 to send Rosie off for a month of rehab, let alone three, unless they dipped into her college fund. Also, the odds were good that as soon as Rosie got back to town she would keep trying to figure out how to get high without being busted. There seemed to be no way to stop her. Elizabeth stared fretfully off into space, seeing Rosie on the blacktop of the Parkade, surrounded by burnouts and friends, getting a shot of Narcan in her shoulder or heart. “It’s like she keeps climbing into a dryer,” Elizabeth said to James. “And her head keeps hitting the sides, hard. So I get in there with her, to try and protect her, to keep her brain from getting too banged up. But isn’t that just crazy?”

R
osie lay on top of the crackly paper with her eyes closed. Her parents had come back in, but she did not look over at them. She kept repeating a line from her French test, a mock cooking class on crêpes, using invisible ingredients and bowls:
Utilisez votre main droite pour tourner ce groupe de deux bulles sur elle même!

“Did you say something, darling?” her mother asked. Rosie shook her head. In the French test, you had to describe cooking something: Use your right hand to fold this grouping of two bubbles over onto itself. What did that even mean, this grouping of two bubbles,
ce groupe de deux bulles
? And she’d gotten an A on it.

Rosie sat up on the exam table, looking like her old self, slightly embarrassed, wary.

“Have a seat,” Dr. Reynolds said to Elizabeth and James, indicating two folding chairs against the wall. Elizabeth swiveled around to study her daughter for another minute. Rosie had her best face on; you might momentarily believe that she understood her place in the order of things: a minor, in a psych emergency room, with the head of the department and her parents watching.

“Things are in some ways worse than you may have thought,” Dr. Reynolds began. “We’ve sent off a urine specimen, and Rosie has prepared us to find a medley of illegal substances—mushrooms, cough syrup, alcohol, inhalants, plus prescription Adderall that she buys from a boy at school.”

“Inhalants?” James sounded aghast. “In
hal
ants?”

“As a result, she is close to a diagnosis of borderline psychosis, along with deep exhaustion from the use of OTC stimulants and cough syrup.” Elizabeth gritted her teeth to hold back the bile. “Obviously, this isn’t good, although it is almost surely temporary.” James took his wife’s hand. “But we’ve reached an understanding, Rosie and I. Right?” the doctor continued. Rosie nodded. “Why don’t we check her in on a fifty-one fifty, a seventy-two-hour hold, while she detoxes. We can help her build her health back up, help her get some sleep. In a couple of days, we’ll sit down together and figure out our next move.”

“Yes,” said James. “We agree. Seventy-two hours. And only the two of us can visit, plus Rae.”

Later, Rosie didn’t really remember their good-byes, although she didn’t think anyone had cried. Her mother had hugged her and said they’d see her in the morning, but the video in her mind of everything else had been erased. They’d been here and then they were gone. She had to share a room with a fat woman with acne who had a clear plastic tube up her nose, and a dust mask on her face. Rosie used the pay phone to call Fenn and tell him where she was, left a message on his machine that everyone was watching her like the Gestapo, so she couldn’t call often and he couldn’t visit. But she would be out in a day or two, and if he called Alice, Alice could call Jody. What a joke, she added, that all this had come down because of over-the-counter cough syrup.

She ate the crappy food, and read a copy of
A Passage to India
that her mother had found in the lending library. It was amazing. She stayed in bed. The room was too white and smelled like cleanser. They gave her some syrup to help her sleep. She slept deeply, but as usual, she did not dream. It had been months; none of them was dreaming anymore.

T
he rain turned to slashing storm around the time that James and Elizabeth crawled into bed. She’d been crying off and on since they had said good-bye to Rosie at the hospital. The whole world was in a deluge. James had phoned a local twenty-eight-day rehab called Serenity Knolls, to see if it would take Rosie for a month—it was close, built on a low hill by a creek, surrounded by redwoods—but he learned you had to be eighteen years old to get in.

“Can you tell us the name of another place?” James pleaded. “If this were your child, where might you consider?”

“I’m not supposed to make recommendations,” the employee at Serenity Knolls told him. James took a deep breath. “So I’ll just mention that there’s a wilderness program in Utah called Second Chance, that’s different from the rest.”

“We’re not looking for a wilderness program—I read that a kid died in one back East last week. But tell me this,” James said. “How do you know about Second Chance?”