by David Sheff
I continually try Nic's cell phone but each time reach his deadpan voicemail: "Hey, it's Nic. Leave a message." I repeatedly check with his mother for news, but there is none. On a whim, I call the 800 customer-assistance number for our shared cell phone company to ask if there have been any recent calls to or from Nic's phone, but an operator says that she can't access the information. However, she explains that she can tell me if his cell phone is currently connected to the network. "It's against regulations," she says. "But I'm the mother of a teenager." After some clicking on a keyboard, she reports, "Yes, the phone is on. It's accessing a tower in Sacramento."
Sacramento?
I call his mother and his friends. No one knows why he would be in Sacramento. No one knows of any friends there.
Two hours later, the operator calls back. "I checked again," she says. "The phone is on still. It's now in Reno."
Reno?
A police detective tells me that Reno is a meth capital, which could explain it, though it seems farfetched because he wouldn't have to go to Reno to score the drug.
No, he cannot have relapsed. He just celebrated his seventeenth month off meth. Not only that. He works at a rehab center, helping addicts.
I try to work but can't. There is no news throughout the day. After school, Karen and I ferry Jasper and Daisy to swim practice at two different pools. After practice, a thrown-together dinner, homework, baths, and bedtime stories, the children are asleep.
I call the wireless operator again—she has given me her private cell phone number. She says that she will call in the morning from work, so I wait the interminable hours of another night. She calls and tells me that Nic's phone is still on, but now it's in Billings, Montana.
I wrack my brain for a plausible explanation. Has he been kidnapped? Is he dead in the trunk of the car of some psycho who is fleeing east across the country? I call the Billings police and the FBI.
19
It is raining outside. The children are still at school. Karen I and I sit on the concrete kitchen floor with Moondog. The vet is I here, also sitting on the floor. The dog's head rests on Karen's lap. She strokes his velvety ears.
Moondog's cancer has taken over—he can barely stand. He trembles and cries out from pain. It's time to put him out of his misery, but we are devastated. Karen shakes and weeps. The doctor has come here to do it at home. As the vet injects Moondog with something that puts him into a deep sleep, tears come from me, too. His breathing is labored. A second injection, and there are no more breaths. The vet sits with us awhile and then she leaves. Karen and I struggle to carry a blanket with Moondog's heavy body on it to a hole we dug under a redwood tree in the garden, where we bury him.
When Daisy and Jasper come home from school, they work with Karen in the rain making a shrine for Moondog. We cry for Moondog and for all of the sadness in our home. At their bedtime, we read to them from a picture book called Dog Heaven: "So sometimes an angel will walk a dog back to earth for a little visit and quietly, invisibly, the dog will sniff about his old backyard, will investigate the cat next door, will follow the child to school..."
Where is Nic? It is late morning on the fourth day since he disappeared. I continue to try his cell phone. Finally someone answers. A male voice. Not Nic.
"Ha-llo?"
"Nic? Is this Nic?"
"Nic's not here."
"Who is this?"
"Who is this?"
"Nic's father. Where is Nic?"
"He gave me his phone."
"He gave it to you? Where's Nic?"
"How the fuck should I know?"
"Where was he when he gave you the phone?"
"I don't even know him. He was at the bus station in LA. Downtown. He gave me his phone and I haven't seen him since then."
"He gave you his phone? Why would he give you his phone?"
Silence. He hangs up.
I call the cell phone operator and ask her to disconnect the telephone, telling her that it has apparently been stolen, thanking her for her help and her compassion.
Vicki and I are frantic. Once again. We make phone calls, hoping for some—any—news. Finally Vicki tries Z., and yes, Z. just heard from him. Nic called her—from San Francisco. Here we go again. She says that when he called her, he was high. Of course.
I want this to stop. I cannot bear it. I wish that I could expunge Nic from my brain. I yearn for a procedure like the one Charlie Kaufman invents in a movie he wrote, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. A doctor provides a service for people who suffer from the pain caused by a traumatic relationship. He literally erases every trace of the person. I fantasize that I could have the procedure, have Nic wiped from my brain. Sometimes it feels as if nothing short of a lobotomy could help. Where is Nic? I cannot take this any longer. And yet every time I think I can't take any more, I do.
Utter despondency is followed by a frantic impulse to do something, anything. I know better, but I am desperate to find him. When she hears the plan, Karen shakes her head. "It won't help to find him if he doesn't want to be found," she says. She looks at me with concern and—what is it? Exasperation. Sorrow. "You'll just be disappointed."
I say, "I know," and I don't say anything more, even as my brain calculates: it won't help to find him if he doesn't want to be found, but he could die and then it will be too late. Waiting is ghastly. Karen, sensing my anguish, finally succumbs. "Go ahead," she says. "Look for him. It can't hurt." I can tell that she's trying hard not to judge me or Nic, but she is increasingly angry and frustrated by the relentlessness, and she resents the impact on Jasper and Daisy. On us. On me. She resents that she has lost me to worrying. "Go on," she says. "Maybe you'll feel better for trying."
And so I am in the city again, driving along Mission Street, peering into the open doorways of shops and taquerias and bars. I examine every face, continually seeing Nic. Every other person looks like him. Next I park on Ashbury and slowly walk along Haight Street, zigzagging back and forth across the street, checking head shops and bookstores and a pizza place and café and Amoeba. I return to Golden Gate Park, making my way to the clearing where I met the meth-addicted girl from Ohio. Except for two women, whose toddlers play on a blanket, it is deserted.
Back home, I dial Randy. He listens patiently to the anguish in my voice and then assures me: "Nic won't stay out long. He's not having any fun." I hope he's right, but I am no less worried that he could overdose or otherwise cause irreparable damage.
Nic is gone a week. Then another. Interminable days and nights. I try to keep busy. I try to work. We make plans with friends—the same ones who were going to the beach with Karen and the kids when Nic was arrested. With bikes strapped onto racks that hang from the backs of our cars, on a pristine Saturday morning we meet them at the parking lot at Bear Valley. Between our two families, there are eight bikes, ranging from fancy fourteen-speeds to the littlest girl's tiny, rattling Schwinn.
Bear Valley is gold and verdant, and the sky, filtered through the trees, is a blue-white canopy. We pedal along a dirt trail to a meadow and from there down a rocky path toward Arch Rock. To reach it, we have to leave our bikes and hike the last mile.
The forest trail, which follows a stream, is edged with fir and Bishop pine and chinquapin and gnarled and twisting oaks. At the end, we climb up to a sheer cliff with a startling lookout on the sea, where seals poke their heads up near a jagged rock that emerges like a glacier from the ocean.
Now we follow another path, this one lined with sticky monkey flower, myrtle, and iris. Rust-colored moss grows on granite boulders. Jasper says it's like being in Lord of the Rings on Frodo's quest. At the bottom, under Arch Rock, timing it so that we can run past a crashing wave after it has been sucked back into the ocean, we traverse a rocky point and climb down onto a fingernail of beach. The floor is polished quartz and spongy seaweed.
The path leads back to the trailhead. Jasper and I are the first to arrive. We mount our bikes and continue ahead. The plan is to meet up again
at the meadow.
When we reach it, we lean our bikes against a tree and rest on a fallen log under an oak. Jasper points out into the meadow—"Look!" There's an astonishing swath of shocking pink flowers, exotics left over from a long-abandoned garden: pink ladies, pink like cotton candy.
We sit there quietly, listening to birdsong and wind in the leaves. Suddenly I am flooded with déjà vu. I have been here before. Sitting on this same log. But with Nic. More than a decade ago. My heart pumps and my eyes water. Nic climbed this tree. Climbing, he called to me: "Dad, look at me! I'm way up here!"
He absentmindedly sang: "All mimsy were the borogoves, and the mome raths outgrabe."
He climbed higher up and then began to shimmy out onto a thick branch that reached over the meadow. "Look at me, Dad! Look at me!"
"I see you."
"I'm up in the sky."
"Fantastic."
"I'm higher than the clouds."
He slid farther out along the gnarled limb. "Pulling weeds," he sang. "Picking stones. We are made of dreams and bones." A puff of wind shook the tree; its leaves trembled and branches swayed. "I want to come down," Nic said suddenly.
"It's OK, Nic. You're fine. Just take it slowly."
"I can't," he called. "I'm stuck."
"You can," I said. "You can do it."
"I can't get down." He began crying.
"Take your time," I said. "Find one foothold at a time. Go slowly."
"I can't."
"You can."
He wrapped his gangly legs and arms tighter around the branch.
"I'll fall."
"You won't."
"I will."
I stood directly underneath and yelled up to him, "You're fine. Take your time." I said it, but I was thinking, I'll catch you if you fall.
Sitting here with Jasper, remembering, a few tears slide from my eyes. Jasper immediately notices. "You're thinking about Nic," he says.
I nod. "I'm sorry. I was just reminded of him. I remember when he was your age we were here."
Jasper nods. "I think about him a lot, too." We sit together under the ancient tree saying nothing until Karen, Daisy, and our friends call out to us.
On a morning the following week, Karen notices that something is amiss in our house. Just a few things out of place. A hairbrush on the floor. Some books and magazines strewn on a couch. A sweater is missing.
I am working in my office, but I join her in the living room. "What are you talking about?" I ask. Immediately I am protective. My knee-jerk reaction is that Karen is overreacting, paranoid—always ready to blame Nic.
"No. Someone—" She stops. "Come look."
I follow her, and my mind clicks from defensiveness to acceptance. Nic has been here. He broke in. Together we check throughout the house and find, in our bedroom, a broken deadbolt on a French door. The door's redwood astragal is splintered beyond re pair. Only then do I notice that my desk drawers have been ransacked.
Each time Karen or I discover another violation, we are hit anew by a combination of sadness and fury. How could he do this? We closed our bank accounts when he forged our names on our checks, canceled credit cards when he stole them. We'll have to do it again. Now I call a locksmith and a burglar-alarm company.
I also call the sheriff, reporting the break-in. If anyone had told me before I encountered addiction that I would be calling the sheriff on my son, I would have thought that that person was the one on drugs. I don't want Nic arrested. Imagining him in jail sickens me. Could anything good come of it? Suddenly I share the feelings of the parents I met in some of the Al-Anon meetings whose children were in jail and who said, "At least I know where she is." And: "It's safer." The sad irony is that as violent as jail can be, as bleak and hopeless, it is probably safer for Nic than the streets.
The locksmith who comes is a burly man in jeans and a work shirt. I show him the locks on the doors and windows that we want him to change. It's an expensive and humiliating experience, because I'm honest when he asks, "Just a precaution or have you had any problems?"
My voice catches when I reply, "My son."
The next day, we hear from friends who live in Inverness below Manka's, the former hunting lodge that is now a renowned restaurant. A workman arrived this morning, meeting his crew, and saw two boys duck out a window of their house. The boys cut along the side and retreated in an old sun-faded red Mazda. The boys were quick in their flight, but the man, whom we know, recognized Nic. I go over to the house. The remnants of Nic's night are untouched: he and his friend slept on the living room floor. Nothing much is disturbed, but there are cotton balls, silver foil packets, and other accoutrements of smoking and shooting meth.
Where else might Nic break in? It's never easy to fathom exactly what motivates a drug addict, but I am struck that Nic is drawn back to places where he is loved—our house, our friends', his grandparents'. It's probably merely convenience, when he doesn't know where else to go, but could it be an unconscious desire to return home to safety? Whatever the reason, when he inflicts his craziness upon us, it becomes even more difficult to feel compassion. We become afraid of him.
It is the next morning, and Karen is outside when, surreally, she sees Nic drive by in his Mazda, smoke billowing from the tailpipe. They make eye contact. He steps on the gas, gunning the car, which creeps up the hill past the house.
Karen, puzzled, does a double take. Yes, it is Nic. She calls to me.
I jump in the car and chase him. What will I do? I suppose I will just tell him how heartbroken we are. And warn him that the police have been called. He had better stop, get help, call Randy.
I drive the winding hillside streets above our house. There was a wildfire here ten years ago. Forty-five homes and more than twelve thousand acres burned. The returning oaks, pine, and Douglas fir are now the size of small Christmas trees. I drive streets that snake through canyons and on the ridge side, but I can't find him.
I head back down the hill and pull into our the driveway, noticing that our other car is gone. I run inside. Jasper and Daisy tell me that Karen saw Nic driving down the hill—somehow I had missed him—and she leaped in the car. She is following his ancient car in our own ancient car, the beat-up, rusted-out Volvo station wagon that can hardly reach forty miles per hour.
I try Karen's cell phone, but it rattles and rings in the bedroom, a few feet away from me. The kids look worried, so I reassure them. By now they know that Nic has relapsed, but how can they understand what it means that their mother has jumped into the car, left them home alone, and driven off in pursuit of their brother?
She doesn't come home for almost an hour, by which time I am crazy with worry, but for the kids' sake pretending that this is normal, again reassuring them. We wait in the living room. When Karen pulls into the driveway, we rush outside. She says that she followed Nic down Highway 1 and up over the mountainous Stinson Beach Road. Finally she realized that it was ludicrous—what would she have done if she'd caught him?—and so she stopped.
"What would you have done if you caught him?" Jasper asks.
"I'm not sure," she says. She looks beleaguered; she has been crying.
Later, when we're alone, she confides to me, "I wanted to tell him to get help, but mostly I was chasing him—chasing him away from our house—from Jasper and Daisy."
It's not that we need a reminder, but the absurd morning tells us how out of control our lives have become. It was foolish to try to chase him, but we have succumbed to the irrationality that festers along with addiction.
Three days later, on Sunday morning, the phone rings, but no one is on the other end. Then it happens again. There's a number on the caller ID that I don't recognize.
Using the reverse lookup feature on anywho.com, I learn that the phone is under a familiar name. It takes a while for me to place it. It's the parents of a girl Nic knew in high school. I call but reach an answering machine, on which I leave a message. "I'm trying to reach my son. His name is Nic Sheff. He called from
this number."
The girl's stepmother returns my call. I am astounded by what I hear. "You're Nic's father? It's so nice to talk to you," she says. "What a great son you have. He's a pleasure to have around. We've been so worried about April, and he's such a good influence on her."
"A good influence on her?"
I sigh and tell her about Nic's relapse and disappearance. She is stunned. She explains that her stepdaughter has been in and out of rehab for drug addiction and Nic has seemed so supportive of her recovery.
In the afternoon, Nic calls. He tells me everything—he has relapsed, is using meth and heroin. I have rehearsed my response. I shakily tell him that there's nothing I can do. It's up to him. I say that the police are searching for him, that his mother reported him missing to the Santa Monica police, and that the Marin sheriffs are patrolling our home and the home of our friends where he broke in. I say, "Do you want to wind up in jail? That's where you're headed."
"God," Nic says. "Please help me. What do I do?"
"All I know to tell you to do is what you already know. What do they tell you in the program? Call your sponsor. Call Randy. I don't know what else to say."
He is crying. I say nothing. This isn't how I want to respond. I want to drive to the city to get him. But I repeat, "Call Randy." I tell him that I love him and hope that he gets his life together. I may sound resolved or resigned, but I'm neither of those things.
I hang up. My temples pound. I want to call back. I want to tell him I'm coming. But I don't.
Randy calls in a half-hour or so. He says that he heard from Nic and encouraged him to return to LA. "I told him that I miss him," Randy says. "I do. I told him to get his ass back here—I'm waiting. He sounds ready to come in."
