As the months go by, hope builds. We wonder if maybe, just maybe, we’ve made it through the worst days. Maybe it really was just youthful experimentation combined with normal adolescent anger and frustration and the universal pushing away from the people you love the most in order to establish your own identity. Robyn and Alison needed their distance, too, but they were quiet about it, almost secretive, mostly keeping their thoughts and feelings to themselves. Ben never has been able to keep things to himself; he is forever asking questions—the same “what if?” questions I find myself asking. Maybe his anger and resentment are related to an existential angst, not so uncommon in teenagers, about the meaning of it all. Who am I? Where do I fit? Why am I here on this earth?
Who knows? I try not to spend too much time analyzing the positive changes in Ben’s attitude and behavior. Honestly, I think a good part of the reason he’s staying away from drugs are the random UAs and the fact that he doesn’t want to get caught again. More than anything, he wants to get out of Walla Walla, go to college (University of Washington is his first choice), and be on his own. The more time he has clean, the better his brain is going to function; the healthier his brain is, the better his decisions will be. A healthy, functioning brain is what matters most to me.
We settle into a comfortable routine, daring to believe that the dark days are behind us. Ben spends hours looking up colleges and universities in the Fiske Guide to Colleges 2005. He has a lot of fun memorizing college mascots—hundreds of them. Some of his favorites are the Wake Forest Demon Deacons, the Santa Cruz Banana Slugs, the University of Delaware Fightin’ Blue Hens, Idaho State’s Benny the Bengal, the Texas Tech Red Raiders, and Louisiana-Lafayette’s Ragin’ Cajuns (a costumed chili pepper). Pat and I play a game, looking up the most obscure mascot names, but no matter how hard we try to stump him, he has the names down cold.
He looks healthy. He acts healthy. He no longer erupts, suddenly and seemingly without provocation, stomping out of the house. He seems happy to come home after school or tennis practice, have dinner with us, tell stories about his friends, teachers, classes. We disagree, even argue at times, but he’s reasonable and respectful.
His fellow students elect him to the homecoming court. His grades are good, and at fall conferences, his teachers tell us what a terrific student he is—polite and responsible, a bit of a jokester (“You might want to speak to him about toning that down in class,” his math teacher says), and popular with both the boys and the girls. “When Ben walks in the room,” one of his teachers confides, “the girls are all eyes.”
In October, he auditions for the school musical, Guys and Dolls, and gets a small part in the chorus with a few speaking lines. One of his closest friends lands the lead role of Sky Masterson but loses it when he’s caught drinking at a party. With just three weeks to go before the first show, the director offers the part to Ben.
“But I can’t sing,” Ben protests.
The director pats him on the back, smiles, and says, “You’ll learn.”
Weeks of intense rehearsals, including dozens of extra hours in singing lessons with the choral director, follow. Ben practices by singing in the shower and in the hot tub, singing before and after school, singing at breakfast and dinner, and singing in his bedroom an hour or so before he goes to bed. He’s a singing fool.
He’s smiling again, and there’s a playfulness about him, a tender goofiness. He talks to us about the scene where he kisses a pretty girl who plays Sergeant Sarah Brown, a sister at the Save a Soul Mission.
“She gave me the tongue!” he says, his eyes big with amazement. “She’s a Mormon in real life, and she gave me the tongue! She’s pretty cute, don’t you think?”
“She’s adorable,” I agree. We laugh together, and I think how handsome he is, with his big smile and his flashing brown eyes.
Watching him on opening night, I’m in tears—good tears, happy tears. My sisters and Ben’s cousins make the five-hour drive from Seattle to cheer him on, hooting and hollering every time he appears on stage, knowing what a big moment this is in his life and how far he has come from the troubles of the past. We are all so darn proud of him for standing on that stage in front of hundreds of people and singing his heart out.
In the spring, he’s cast as the King in the The Three Musketeers, and his days are once again full of rehearsals. And then the capstone event of his high school career: the day he opens the acceptance letter from the University of Washington. He’s officially a Husky. All is right in Benny’s world.
With less than a month left in school, the play over, college decided, he spends more and more time with his friends. He still doesn’t have his license, so he’s dependent on his friends for rides and spends most of his afternoons and many of his evenings with them. It was the same with Robyn and Alison—in high school, their friends were the center of their universe—so we’re not too concerned. On nights when he comes home after we’ve gone to bed, he always comes upstairs to let us know he’s safely home.
But the doubts start creeping in. We can’t pin it down, exactly, because he’s polite and respectful, but he lacks his usual energy and enthusiasm. He’s difficult to engage in conversations and mumbles one-word answers to our questions. In the mornings, he sleeps through his alarm clock and grumbles about having to go to school. “What’s the point?” he asks one morning, adding, “I can’t wait to get out of this stupid town.” That seems to be the gist of his conversations with us—school is ridiculous, and Walla Walla is the pits.
One day I take a photograph of Ben hugging Sophie, our springer spaniel. It’s a close up, and I can’t miss the heavy, red-lined eyelids or the bloodshot eyes. When he leaves the house, I actually get out a magnifying glass to look a little closer. There it is—the same faraway, glazed look in his dark brown eyes, even as he looks straight at me and smiles for the camera. He’s using again.
The demon is clawing its way back into our lives.
On May 9, 2005, I write in my journal:
I am sick at heart about Ben. He is lost and I don’t know how to find him.
Tonight at dinner he talked about being a stoner and how his old friends—David, Riley—talk about him. “I don’t care,” he said. “I am a stoner.”
I drop him off at a friend’s house and he says, “I care about marijuana more than I care about you and Dad. More than I care about my sisters.”
The rest of the pages in the journal are blank, along with my memory of the next few months—except for one event, sometime that spring.
Ben is still on probation, and rather than drive him to the Juvenile Justice Center, we decide to give him random UAs at home.
Pat and Ben are arguing on the landing of the second-floor stairway. I’m in the kitchen making coffee.
“I’m not peeing in that fucking cup.”
I walk to the bottom of the stairway. Ben has his fist raised to Pat’s nose.
“You want to hit me?” Pat says in a quiet voice. “Is that what you want to do?”
Ben grabs the plastic UA kit out of Pat’s hand and throws it at the wall, just above my head. He bounds down the stairs and out the door.
I walk up to the landing and put my arms around Pat. He’s sobbing, his shoulders heaving. I can feel his tears falling on my cotton shirt. He is a man of few words, a private man who keeps his thoughts to himself. When I ask what he’s feeling, he says just one word: “Despair.”
We talk about calling Ben’s probation officer but decide against it. Just one more month and he will graduate from high school. Just six more weeks and we’ll drive him across the state to the YMCA’s Camp Seymour in Gig Harbor, Washington, where he’ll spend the summer as a counselor. My brother Mike is the camp’s executive director, and Ben’s cousins Will and Casey will both be campers there. Casey is in a wheelchair; she is slowly dying of a rare neurological disease, and this might be the last time Ben will have with her. Summer camp—a healthy place, a safe place where Ben will be surrounded by family and water an
d woods and young campers who need him to be responsible and take care of them.
Then he will be off to college, called to task by his professors, out from under his parents’ worries and demands, living the independent life he seems to crave. Perhaps these coming months will reveal new worlds to him and give him the space and time he needs to fit into his own skin and to find that it isn’t such a bad place to be.
To be honest, one reason we never call his probation officer is because we want Ben out of our house. Any obstacle standing in the way of graduation, summer camp, or college threatens our own future happiness. It does not make us happy to admit that, but it is the truth.
“What do you want to major in?” the academic adviser at the University of Washington’s Advising and Orientation session asks Ben. It’s just a week after his high school graduation.
“I don’t know,” he says, a bewildered look on his face.
“If you pick a major now, you’ll be on pace for graduation in four years,” she explains. The room is full of students, and she seems to be in a bit of a rush. “Otherwise, it might take a few extra quarters to get your degree.”
“Well, I like to write,” he says. “And I love to read. Maybe English?”
She suggests that he take four English classes, they work out a schedule, and he logs onto the computer to register online. I call Pat while Ben is registering and tell him about Ben’s schedule.
“Four classes in the same subject?” Pat sounds completely flummoxed. “That doesn’t make sense to me. How is he supposed to know what he wants to major in before he’s even taken a class?”
When we get home late that night, Pat talks to Ben about the possibility of changing his schedule and selecting a more balanced set of courses, but Ben is overwhelmed with the whole process. “If I need to drop or change a class, I can do that later,” he says, in a seriously annoyed tone of voice. “Right now, I just want to be done with all this shit.”
A week later, we drive to Gig Harbor to drop him off for counselor training at Camp Seymour. He stands apart from the group of counselors, most of whom seem to know each other, looking lost and out of place. This is his first job as a counselor, and he’ll spend the entire summer here. He’s been a camper before, but only for a week at a time, and I wonder if he might be feeling a little homesick. That would be weird, I think, after he’s spent the last few years counting the days until he could get away from us.
Back home, life settles itself into a new routine—early morning coffee on the patio with Pat and Alison, who is home for the summer; weekend visits from Robyn, who is working with children with autism in San Diego; taking the dogs for long walks; golf; gardening (the roses that I haven’t killed are coming back to life). It’s a relatively quiet, peaceful summer. Ben sends playful letters home about his first skinny dipping experience and confesses that he has a serious crush on one of the counselors. He calls her “Q.”
“I think I’m in love,” he writes. “And she really likes me.”
Three hundred miles away, we breathe a sigh of relief, knowing that he’s in a serene, peaceful place surrounded by pine trees and salt water, far away from drugs and the “people, places, and things” that might pull him back into using. It feels so good not to worry about him every single moment of every single day. Walla Walla without Ben is a new experience—we can breathe. He sends more letters about “Q,” telling us how amazing she is and how much he loves her. “And she loves me, too.” Once again, we have hope—he will find his way; he’s a good, kind, sweet person (when he’s not using drugs); he has new friends; and he’s in love. Camp romances are notoriously short-lived—I had several of them myself back in the day—but still, I find myself heartened by his newfound happiness.
I tell a close friend that Ben is in love. “Hmm,” she says, looking at me with a little sideways smile. “Love? Or is it just infatuation? He’s only known her for a few weeks.” Her words—and especially that knowing little smile—make me cranky.
“Teenagers can fall in love,” I say with an edge to my voice. “I have friends who fell in love in seventh grade, and they’ve been married for forty years.”
But Ben? I think I hear the questions she doesn’t ask. Ben who has had so many problems, Ben who gets sober for a while and then falls into the same damn hole again and again, Ben who hasn’t had a chance to deal with his emotions or with life itself because of his drug use? She knows the trouble he’s been in; although she doesn’t say the words, I’m sure she thinks we’re deluding ourselves. I realize later that she’s worried about me—she doesn’t want my heart to be broken once again. In the moment, though, I am hurt and irritated. Why can’t she be happy for me, for him? Why does she have to let the past rule her thinking about the present?
I want to live in hope, float in it, get carried away by it. I don’t care whether we call it love or lust or a summer camp crush; what matters is that Ben is happy right now. I need this break. I need to believe that everything will work out now that he is away at camp and soon to be in college and on his own. Pat and I are reclaiming our lives; slowly, surely, we are beginning to think about ourselves again. After a quarter century of tending to our children and after nearly six years of on-and-off-again worrying about Ben, we can begin to focus on our own lives.
Toward the end of summer, Ben calls to tell us a story. In the dining room after lunch, he stood up and told the roomful of campers and counselors that he wanted to make an announcement. Then he walked over to Q’s table, got down on one knee, and sang “I’ve Never Been in Love Before” from Guys and Dolls.
As he’s describing the scene over the phone, I’m smiling ear to ear. I want all the details. What did she say? What did she do? Did his campers kid him about it afterward? I want to be there in the dining hall, listening to him sing his heart out. I need this story in the same way I need oxygen, and I breathe it in with gratitude, letting the images settle in my heart where I can pull them back into memory when I need them.
When the summer ends, Ben moves to Seattle and decides to join a fraternity. We debate whether we should put our collective feet down and insist that he live in the dormitories instead. Then we think maybe it will be okay; he’ll have “brothers” who will make him feel more at home in a huge university. What control do we have, anyway? He’s nineteen years old—old enough to vote, old enough to go to war, old enough to get married and have children, get a job, become a tax-paying citizen. It’s time, maybe long past time, to let him go, give him space, allow him to make his own decisions, even if we disagree with them. And live with the consequences.
In October, three weeks after the quarter starts, Pat drives over for a Husky football game. He and Ben have a plan to meet for coffee, go to the game, and then have dinner together. It’s a day for father and son to be together, just the two of them, and a big deal for Pat who, like Ben, is a diehard Husky fan.
When Pat arrives in Seattle, he calls Ben’s cell phone. Ben doesn’t answer. Pat tries a few more times before going to the game, where he calls Ben perhaps a dozen times. Ben never answers. Pat calls home to ask if I’ve heard from him. I haven’t. Pat drives back home without ever seeing or talking to Ben. When he tells me about the phone calls and not being able to reach his son—or find him with 65,000 people or so in the stadium—he has tears of anger and frustration in his eyes.
We know then that Ben is in trouble. We look through the cell phone bill, which lists all our calls broken down by phone numbers; my hands shake as I leaf through the pages. From September 8 to October 7—twenty-nine days—Ben made or received 696 phone calls, an average of twenty-four calls a day. On just one day—Tuesday, October 4, a school day—he made thirty-nine phone calls.
We look at Ben’s bank account statements for the past month and notice a suspicious pattern of withdrawals of twenty or forty dollars every two or three days. In one week alone, he withdrew $173.00. At the beginning of the quarter, we had deposited $500.00 dollars into his account, figuring it would last thr
ough the quarter, since most of his needs—books, food, lodging—were already covered. He blew through that money in less than six weeks.
Pat types a three-page email to Ben, starting off with a few chatty paragraphs about how the new semester is going, classes he’s teaching, the upcoming installation of Whitman’s new president, progress I’m making on my book, and a hunting trip with Sophie and Murphy, our seven-month old springer spaniel puppy. Nessie, our golden retriever, had died almost exactly a year ago.
Then he jumps into the hard stuff.
I am sitting here looking at our most recent phone bill. I don’t think I have made 696 phone calls in the past 10 years (but I’m not, as they say, a phone person). I can’t understand how anyone could possibly get anything done in the course of a day with that many phone calls.
What really hurts is that of those 696 phone calls, maybe a handful were to us, and of those that were to us, a smaller handful were of the type where you wanted to let us know what your life is like. Most were of the type where you told us you needed more money. We aren’t asking for the world here, nor are we asking for you to divulge your secrets or the details of your life. Nor are we trying to tie this to money. It isn’t about money. We are simply interested in communication with our son as he enters this newest phase of life, and we aren’t even getting that.
Our relationship has been out of balance for some time now. Is there some way that we can agree on how to bring the balance back? I ask you—what can we do? What have we done that has resulted not just in your total silence, but in your refusal to even pick up the phone or to answer an email? All we want is to know that you are OK and that your life in college is going as smoothly as a first-year student can expect.
Love, Dad
Ben writes back less than an hour later:
Dude, write to me like im your son.
The Only Life I Could Save Page 12
