Katie sat on the hard wooden bench in the second row of the courtroom, dressed in plain, conservative clothes Cara didn’t recognize: a white blouse and a jeans skirt that hung loosely around Katie’s petite frame. Her hair had been washed, parted down the center of her head and combed straight on either side of her shoulders in the simplest way, as if she’d been forced to let it air-dry. Without the excessive black eye makeup she usually wore, she looked softer, sweet, almost angelic. She slouched carelessly on the bench, barely glancing at her mother and Mel as they entered the courtroom and settled into the row second from the back of the room. Cara’s right foot twitched nervously, keeping time with an imaginary beat. She willed Katie to have better posture, to sit up straight and look interested in her own well-being.
Cara never took her eyes off the judge; the woman who held her daughter’s future in her hands. She tried to read the judge’s intense demeanor, the way she shuffled papers back and forth and constantly cleared her throat. Just before Katie was called to the bench, Cara leaned over and said to Mel, “This isn’t the judge we want, Mel, she just doesn’t seem like she’ll understand Katie.”
“Katherine Lynn Clancy?” the bailiff read from the clipboard.
Katie shuffled to her feet, flanked on her right side by Lucy Johnson, the attorney Jack had hired the first time Katie had found herself sitting on the hard wooden bench, facing a judge. Lucy held Katie tight at the elbow, guiding her. It wasn’t that Katie needed the direction; she had this drill nailed. She sauntered, head up, through the wooden gate that separated the courtroom and the judge’s bench, her hands buried low in the pockets of the baggy skirt.
“Miss Clancy?” the judge addressed her, and continued. “We haven’t had the pleasure of meeting, but I see you’ve been a regular with some of my neighbors here at the courthouse.” The woman removed her glasses and peered at Katie, waiting for her to make some sort of response.
Lucy Johnson stepped forward just slightly, her black suit jacket folding open, and handed a few loosely clipped papers to the bailiff. “Yes, your honor, Miss Clancy is somewhat familiar with the proceedings.”
“And why is that, Ms. Johnson? Explain to me what we are doing wrong here on mahogany row to keep Miss Clancy from paying us a visit on Monday mornings? Because as I look over these papers, I’m really at a loss as to why she has now appeared in my courtroom.”
Katie slumped lower to one side and shifted her weight so that her right hip was sticking out, her weight resting on her left side. Cara willed her to stand up straight, to stop fidgeting. But Katie looked bored with the whole episode, as if she could have cared less.
Before Lucy could answer, the judge turned to Katie and addressed her directly. “Miss Clancy, do you have any idea why you are in this courtroom today?”
“Yes.”
Pause.
Dead air.
A defiant stare.
Over and over again in her mind, Cara pleaded with her daughter to answer the judge respectfully. Silently she prayed that Kate would realize the heap of trouble she’d found herself in this time.
“Would you be so gracious as to explain it to me?” the woman directed at her again.
“I can try,” Katie said, clear as a bell. “I was pulled over on Saturday night. The cop gave me a Breathalyzer and I failed it. I’d been drinking.”
“I see.”
“Really, that’s all there is to it. Not much more to the story than that.”
Lucy cleared her throat, hoping to quiet Katie before she said anything further, tugging on her wrinkled white blouse and holding her tight at the elbow again.
“Oh, I’m sure there’s plenty more to the story. I’m reading your file, Miss Clancy. I see that this is the third time you’ve been to see us in a year. Is that correct?”
“Um, yeah, I guess so.”
“And am I right to assume that you are driving on a suspended license?”
“Yes.”
“So I suppose suspending it is a bit pointless.”
“I don’t know that you could, actually,” Katie said to the judge.
“Excuse me?”
“I just meant”—she paused and started again—“it would be fairly difficult to suspend something that has already been suspended.”
Lucy Johnson cleared her throat again and shifted in her black pointed stilettos, visibly uncomfortable. On the clock, she was $275 an hour. But even she looked as if she wanted this to be over.
The judge perched her thin wire-framed reading glasses on the end of her nose and the courtroom fell silent while she rifled through the paperwork.
“Are your parents in the courtroom today, Miss Clancy? Your mother? Or your father, perhaps?” Her eyes lifted from the paperwork to rest on Katie before she began to scan the room.
Cara swallowed hard, suspended on the end of the bench, and gripped the leather handbag tighter in her lap. Mel placed her hand on Cara’s shaking leg, steadying her.
Lucy glanced toward the bench and urged Cara forward with a nod, but Katie never met her mother’s eyes. Instead she said to the judge, “My father isn’t here, but my mother is.”
From behind, Mel pushed Cara forward a little until she found her feet and somehow her legs knew how to support her. She stood, cautious at first, weak with uncertainty, until she seemed to gain her balance and courage, and approached the wooden gate that separated Katie, Lucy, the bailiffs, court stenographer, and finally the judge.
“Mrs. Clancy?” The name seemed foreign to her, disassociated and unattached.
“Yes, your honor. Katie’s my daughter.”
“Is there a reason, at least one you can think of, why I have the pleasure of your daughter’s company in my courtroom this morning?”
“Nothing other than what is stated in the report, your honor.”
“And may I ask, just for curiosity’s sake, what it is you expect me to do with her, Mrs. Clancy?”
“Well.” Cara paused. “I was hoping you might release her to her father and me so that we may continue with her treatment program. She has been seeing a psychologist and has been attending regular AA meetings. It would be my hope that we could continue that program.”
“Mrs. Clancy, does it appear to you that these programs are working on behalf of your daughter?”
Cara fidgeted with the buckle on her bag, clipping it and unclipping it nervously. “Well, your honor, I can assure you that Katie has been working very diligently on her program. We have been seeing to that on a daily basis, and her fath—” Cara stopped short before she finished her thought, thinking of Jack, how much she would have to lie on his behalf. She started again. “I have personally been responsible for seeing to the fact that she has been attending AA. I drive her there myself.”
“Mmmm-hmmm,” the judge answered her, not looking directly at Cara, but jotting notes on the papers in front of her. “Again, does it appear to you that the program you have set out on your daughter’s behalf is working for her? Am I to believe that this visit here today is part of your so-called program?”
Cara blushed furiously, hot with embarrassment and anger. She felt the weight of every person in the courtroom, all eyes staring at her, evaluating her, judging her. She gripped the wooden gate that separated the two sides of the courtroom until her knuckles turned white. Her legs buckled, and she shuffled her feet.
“Mrs. Clancy. I am sure that you and your husband have your daughter’s best interest in mind, but I’ll ask you again. Do you feel that this program you have set about for her is working in her best interest?”
Slowly Cara began to answer her. “No, your honor. I would have to say these programs don’t seem to be working for Katie. Otherwise, I’d expect this is the last place you’d find us today.”
“Very well.” She dismissed Cara with a nod, her mouth a thin line.
As Cara tripped back to the bench where Melanie sat, she stared ahead with her back arched, her shoulders squared, her jaw locked. Cara was rigid when she took her
seat again, and Mel scooted in close next to her.
“Breathe,” Mel whispered, and Cara continued to stare straight ahead.
The judge gathered the papers together, signing them one by one, and handed them to the bailiff before she addressed Katie. “Miss Clancy, I do not wish to see you in this courtroom again, do you understand that?”
“Yes.”
“In order to assure that that happens, I am remanding you to a ninety-day court-ordered live-in drug rehabilitation program. You will check into this program tomorrow morning. The facility will handle the transfer of your scholastic studies. You are still attending classes, are you not, Miss Clancy?”
Cara took a sharp breath that nearly cut her in two. Her hand went to her throat and she was frozen with fear. A live-in program. Ninety days.
Katie started to answer the judge but Lucy cut her off, stated clearly to the judge that Katie was still in school, in an excellent accelerated program and couldn’t the judge, no, wouldn’t the judge take her academic performance into account and, perhaps, allow her to continue the treatment she is receiving under the care and supervision of her parents?
“Ms. Johnson, I think it’s a bit obvious to all of us that the care Miss Clancy has been receiving under her parents’ watchful eyes haven’t done her a bit of good. I’m hoping this will.” The judge turned toward Katie. “Miss Clancy, when you are finished with this program we will revisit your status and the best course of action at that point.” She stapled a final group of papers and shuffled them into Katie’s file, before saying to her, “As I said, check in tomorrow. I’ve requested regular monitoring of your progress and reports on your academic status. I want you clean and sober. Do you understand what that means?”
“Of course.”
“Clean and sober. Ninety days. See if you can manage it, Miss Clancy.”
Cara never thought it would come to this. Taking her baby away. Sending her off to get clean and sober. The words echoed in her head over and over again and ridiculed her. Immediately she felt like a failure, absorbing all the responsibility for Katie’s addiction. She had failed her daughter and she would barely be able to look herself in the mirror for it.
“Clean and sober. Ninety days, Miss Clancy. See if you can manage it.”
7
Katie’s addiction hadn’t started out of weakness, but rather from the stubbornness that she’d been born with. She was angry. Angry with her father for his extramarital affairs, the way he had abandoned their family. Angry with her mother for standing back and allowing that to happen. She was out to prove she could control something in her life, even if everything else in her life had become completely uncontrollable.
Cara believed Katie had willed the addiction to life, as if she had taken her first drink purposefully and never looked back. It was as if she had been born to achieve the status addict and so she did so with drive and vigor, putting everything she had behind it. She was an excellent scholar, a master at getting drunk.
Cara had tried to reason with her daughter, explaining to her the downsides of drugs and alcohol as if she was reading from the script of a TV after-school special. But by that point, Katie was long past a lecture. By that point she knew how to tap into Jack’s liquor cabinet, refilling his gin bottle with just enough water so that he wouldn’t notice. She knew how to tap the shoulder of an unsuspecting college student, look him in the eye with a promise of something more, and get him to buy her beer. She knew which kids to hit up for pot, which ones could get her the best cocaine, and which could, on request, get her something stronger like ecstasy. She knew that she could lift prescription painkillers from the medicine cabinets of her friends’ parents, and she knew which ones would leave her feeling like she was floating and which ones would leave her feeling like she’d been hit by a truck.
Katie wasn’t so much bothered by the court-ordered lockdown. As far as she was concerned, it was three months away from her morose mother; thirteen Wednesdays and thirteen weekends away from her idiotic father and his bubble-headed blonde bombshell. Katie could survive anywhere; she didn’t think she needed help. She believed she could shut off her desire to drink, the craving for drugs, anytime she wanted. She just didn’t see the need to want to.
Cara and Mel had been arguing about the lockdown program from the minute Katie walked through the heavily alarmed doors at the rehabilitation facility, away from both of them.
“She’s going to hate it in there,” Mel said, shaking her head and lighting a cigarette as they walked back toward Cara’s car. “But it’s the best thing for her, Cara. She’s strong enough to survive this.” She inhaled deeply and held the smoke in her lungs, then blew it away from her.
Cara glared at her friend. She loved that Mel could speak her mind; it was one of the things she admired most about her. But not now; not where Katie was concerned. Where Katie was concerned, Cara wished Melanie would keep her opinions to herself.
“It’s extreme, Mel. It’s far too extreme,” Cara said, shaking her head.
Mel held strong. “It’s what she needs.”
Cara cringed at the sound of Mel’s words—they weighed heavily on her shoulders. She hated the way Mel confronted the subject, as if she was ripping off a Band-Aid to reveal a scab that hadn’t quite healed. “I know what she needs, Melanie; she’s my daughter. I recognize she’s screwed up. God, I get that. But honestly, don’t you think she deserves to be home in her own bed, home where she can have the support we can give her? Certainly that would be more productive than, well, the next thirteen weeks of awful cafeteria food and self-humiliation sessions with these people.”
Mel closed her eyes to Cara’s words and took a deep breath in and out. Like it or not, Katie was now part of the group her mother so lovingly referred to as these people.
Jack didn’t visit his daughter in rehab. He managed every excuse, every justification, like he was juggling balls in a circus act. He asked Cara for regular progress reports every time he picked up the rest of their brood, and made his own summarizations from there.
“They didn’t have visiting hours that day.”
“I was stuck on a conference call all afternoon.”
“You said Katie’s mood wasn’t all that up right now, so it just didn’t seem like the right time to visit her.”
“Given what you told me the therapists there said, by all accounts, she’s doing much better.”
Jack hadn’t been able to handle it: his pride and joy drowning herself, self-medicating. What he didn’t have to see, he didn’t have to internalize, he didn’t have to feel.
Cara went to visit her daughter every day they’d let her, which was three times a week for an hour each visit. When her mother was there, Katie would clam up, cross her arms over her chest and stare at the television set droning on in the corner of the visiting room. She bit her nails and paced the room like a caged tiger, ready to pounce. She gave her mother little information to go on, saving her deeper conversations for someone who might actually enjoy having a meaningful conversation. Those conversations were usually reserved for Mel.
Mel saw Katie at least once a week, sometimes twice. She and Katie had an agreement that Katie would not mention to her mother that Mel had been there and, in turn, Mel would not mention it to Cara. That way, what passed between Mel and Katie stayed between them. Neither of them was left to answer Cara’s incessant barrage of questions or betray the confidences that had been built between the two of them all these years.
Katie could do what her mother could not. She could admit that she was an alcoholic; she readily acknowledged it to Mel. She told Mel she drank because it helped fill the emptiness she felt in her life nearly every minute of the day from the second she woke up. She’d started drinking because it helped her cope with every uncontrollable thing in her life; she kept drinking because drinking had become the thing she did, it was part of who she was. When her friends described her, they used terms like wasted and hosed and plowed. She’d lost a sense of the little g
irl she was before she’d started drinking, of the person that existed somewhere deep within her, the person who could survive a day sober. Katie claimed she was strong enough to survive a day without taking at least one drink; she just hadn’t done it in a long, long time. Mel knew she had it in her but that it would be a hard, long road before Katie found that person again.
Katie loved the way alcohol made her feel—fearless. It numbed her head and dulled her senses and afforded her a warm, soft space that was hers alone. It was as if she was falling but would never hit the ground. It was as if she was spinning but never felt sick. It was as if she was awake but never left the dream. Her mother could be yammering at her in that incessant whine that meant Cara was unsatisfied with everything in her own life, her father could be slobbering over his girlfriend, and still Katie could survive it all. She chose to live in a drunken-filled world whenever she had the chance, self-medicating her way through the hours.
In the early days when her mother was naive and didn’t believe Katie had ever touched the stuff, she’d stashed beers under her bed, in her drawers, at the back of her closet. Cara never bothered to look; she refused to acknowledge that her daughter could be the type to drink in the first place. Later, when Katie’s moods began to swing and her grades began to suffer, Cara was forced to own up to what she had known all along. By then Katie’s drink of choice was Absolut and the evidence much less easy to spot. Kate was a pro at concealing the goods; in her shampoo bottles, rolled into the bottom of her sleeping bag stuffed in the rear of her closet, back behind a stack of DVDs in the media room. Finally, as if she no longer cared, Katie began drinking straight from her father’s bar in the study; long, full draws on the bottle as if she was hydrating with Evian after a long run. When he questioned her about stealing his booze, she readily admitted she had done so. When he locked the cabinet, she broke the lock. When they finally cleaned the house of any bottles, she bought her own.
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