by Tim Murphy
PART III
GROWN-UPS
(1992–2021)
FIFTEEN
Together Again
(2012)
Four months after Mateo went briefly to L.A. County Jail, then into a prison-diversion residential program for first-time drug offenders, Milly sat in Terminal 5 at JFK Airport waiting for a plane to L.A., an unread copy of the Friday New York Times by her side. It was November, right after Obama’s reelection, which had been a mild source of happiness for Milly. There she sat, nearly forty-three years old, hair in a loose ponytail, wearing a leather car coat, skinny jeans, and old suede cowboy boots and sipping coffee out of a white-and-red Illy cup, occasionally fussing with her iPhone. Most people still found her a beautiful woman—slim, her face a bit leaner and harder than it had been when she was twenty-four, but her hair was still a gentle mess of loose curls, espresso brown as ever thanks to a color job, which concealed the dozens of wiry gray rebels that had sprung forth.
Sometimes these days, when friends and colleagues engaged Milly for long periods in conversation, they would notice a tic she had, even while she was being perfectly polite and still often very warm and kind. Her eyes would repeatedly glass over, as though she were about to cry, then they would dart away as she fussed with a lock of hair or with her iPhone, emitting a slightly peremptory “Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, ahh, hmm,” to whatever someone was saying to her, as though she were trying to take it in faster, hurry them along a bit, and wrap up the conversation. It was as though, underneath her measured surface, she was saying, Leave me alone, let me be alone again, even if she had no particular reason at that moment to want to be alone. She was still teaching at the arts high school, and on weekends, she would trudge to her little studio and plunk away at her own art, as someone unpracticed plunks at piano keys. But the truth was she had not engaged in her art with true satisfaction in about two years—about as much time as she’d known that Mateo had a drug problem.
And as for her life mate, Jared . . . Well, in her most unguarded moments—with herself, that is, not with others, for she would never admit this to others—she would feel a stab of blinding rage toward Jared, her husband of nearly fifteen years and her partner for more than twenty, that startled her because she couldn’t fully account for it. It was something similar to the rage she had felt back in those early years before she’d broken it off briefly with him: a panicked, hysterical feeling that, underneath his ministrations, affection, and stabilizing demeanor, he was holding her back from something big and important that she couldn’t quite put her finger on.
It had become strained between them. They flat-out hadn’t had sex in four months, not that that was any surprise given that they’d been in a state of trauma over Mateo’s freshest tumble into disaster. Kyla gave reports from L.A. while they went about their lives in New York, amid a version of empty-nest syndrome they hadn’t envisioned while they were raising Mateo: their son across the country, not in some MFA program at, say, CalArts or UCLA, but in a halfway house for drug offenders. Several times a day, Milly would remember this fact and feel a stab of self-recrimination. Where had they gone wrong? Had she overloved him, overneeded him, overtolerated his adolescent aggression because he wasn’t her born child, because she’d felt badly for him? Milly turned over these questions in her head constantly, all the while imperceptibly drifting from things that had long defined her—her painting, her teaching, her friends, her marriage. Then she would remember the incident with the sculpture and shudder and half wonder if perhaps Jared wasn’t right.
Milly picked up the Times, halfheartedly attempted to absorb the front page, then put it down again with a sigh. The truth was, if she were being honest with herself, that even prior to the last few months—that is, in the fairly calm period after Mateo’s first L.A. rehab, when he was cleaning up his act and living with Kyla, when everything seemed to be finally going okay, until it no longer was—even in this period of relative calm, Milly and Jared had barely had sex. Sitting there in the JetBlue terminal, she almost winced remembering one Saturday morning when they actually were having it but she mentally checked out from beginning to end—organizing her coming day, shuffling around the timing for various things she wanted to accomplish, like visiting her mother and buying a new, better vacuum—while Jared humped away at her. She made a few obligatory noises to make Jared think that she was coming, or at least engaged, but really she was just bearing up, relieved that he was climaxing. When he finished, he stayed inside her, his heaves subsiding, and they held each other without saying a word, Milly overcome with the deadness she felt.
“I love you so much, Millipede,” Jared finally said.
She smoothed his hair. “I love you, too,” she said back. Which only increased her dead feeling. Not that she didn’t mean it, she was fairly certain. Just that it stirred no warmth in her to say it.
“You got therapy today?” he asked.
“Mm-hmm.”
“I’m gonna hit the studio then shoot hoops with Asa. But walk up and down the river after? Burgers and beer?”
“Mmm,” she said, wondering if she sounded as flat as she felt when she was saying it.
Therapy was where she’d come up with her best understanding of the cold rage she felt toward Jared a great deal of the time. It was, she determined, because of Mateo. Because they’d always had a split on Mateo. Jared had basically agreed to adopt Mateo in the first place because Milly had wanted to. And Jared had actually turned out to be a very good father, and back in what they could consider the “good years,” Jared and the boy developed what appeared to be something approaching companionability, taking their bikes on Metro-North upstate to Beacon to visit the Dia museum and ride along the Hudson, sometimes with Asa and his two daughters, that sort of thing.
But it was in the recent, truly hellish years—especially, curiously, after Mateo turned eighteen—that Jared detached. Not to say Jared wasn’t dismayed when they learned of Mateo’s latest relapse or hospitalization, but it consumed Milly in a way it didn’t with Jared. In fact, stunningly to Milly, in the very years when Mateo was really declining, Jared went deeper into his own art than he had in years—more time in the studio, more time with art people, then his first solo show in years, in a small but well-regarded Williamsburg gallery.
That first rehab in Connecticut hadn’t stuck for Mateo. He stayed three weeks there, complaisantly enough, but when he returned home, in time to hop onto the new semester at Pratt, he seemed to be doing nothing to preserve his clean status. Prompted by Kyla, Milly asked him if he was going to meetings for Narcotics Anonymous, to which he replied, “The counselors at Silver Hill said that’s not the only way to stay clean.”
“How are you going to stay clean, then?” Milly had asked him.
“Focus on my work,” he’d said.
Then, walking home in the neighborhood one evening, she came across him having beers and smoking cigarettes outside Sidewalk Café with Fenimore and Keiko, who urged her to join them, but she demurred. When Mateo returned home, drunk enough to stumble a bit en route to his room, she called out, “I thought you were supposed to be clean and sober.”
“Dude, I didn’t have a drinking problem,” he called back, mimicking her cadence, before slamming the door behind him and blasting hip-hop.
Did they know when he picked up heroin again? Milly figured it was sometime in late September a year prior, 2011, when his comings and goings became more erratic. More than once in those weeks, Milly woke in the middle of the night to the sound of the front door unlocking and Mateo’s uncertain steps in the dark to the bathroom, then his room.
One of those nights, right after four A.M., she woke to the sound of a giant crash in the kitchen. Jared, typically, kept snoring.
“Wake up,” she said, shaking his shoulder. “Someone’s in the kitchen.”
Jared lifted his head, his eyes sticky with sleep. “Are you sure?”
“I just heard
a giant crash.”
They went into the kitchen, Milly in a long T-shirt over her underpants and Jared in his boxers, and snapped on the light to find Mateo on his knees in jeans and a camouflage hoodie, picking quarters out of a huge mound of loose change they kept in a blue ceramic vase, which had shattered everywhere.
“What are you doing?” Milly cried.
Mateo looked up. “I didn’t think I’d wake you,” he said.
Jared bent down, grabbed Mateo’s arm. “I can’t see your pupils, Mateo,” he said. “Jesus Christ. Not even home six weeks.” He roughly lifted Mateo by the arm into a standing position, then reached for the pockets of Mateo’s jeans. “Come on, buddy, you gotta give us the house keys and go. I can’t go through this again.”
Milly felt a lump in her throat. “Wait!” she said, grabbing Mateo by the other arm. “Mateo, just be honest with us, did you use again?”
“Milly, look at him!” Jared cried. “He’s high as a kite.”
“I didn’t use,” Mateo said, his words a slurry. “I wanted change for a juice.”
“But you don’t look right,” Milly said. “Have you been up working all night?”
“Milly, give it a rest,” Jared said, dragging Mateo by the arm through the dim living room toward Mateo’s bedroom. “Grab some clothes and give us the keys and get out of here. Enough is enough.”
Mateo shuffled forward alongside Jared. But suddenly he broke away from him and picked up Jared’s three-foot weathered steel sculpture, of a kind of wolf creature with jagged edges all around, and threw it through the glass top of the coffee table. Mateo then stepped back from the wreckage and stood there, shaking wildly. “Don’t you fucking touch me!” he screamed at Jared, his eyes now wide open. “You fucking fraud mediocre rich piece of shit.”
Jared stepped back now toward Milly, fury and fear warring in his eyes. “Milly, call the cops on the kitchen phone,” he said, steeling his voice. “Mateo, drop your keys on the floor and get out.”
“I didn’t work out so great for you guys, did I?” Mateo sneered, still shaking.
“Mateo,” Milly pleaded, “just sit down and try to breathe and let me call an ambulance, okay?”
But Jared took the phone out of her hand. “We are calling the police, Milly. This ends tonight. Get out, Mateo.”
Mateo pulled his keys out of his hoodie pocket and flung them at Jared, hitting his knee. He stormed out of the apartment, his back pocket heavy with change he’d collected, and slammed the door behind him.
Milly just stood in the kitchen, her hands over her mouth, trembling, Jared breathing hard beside her. Neither of them said anything for nearly a minute. Then Jared turned to her and said, “This is over, Milly. He’s eighteen. We are done.”
“Jared—” Milly began.
“Done!” shouted Jared, raising a hand to stop Milly from saying more. He turned into the living room, carefully extracted his intact sculpture from the glass wreckage and set it on an end table, and retreated to the bedroom, closing the door behind him. Milly sat at the kitchen table and stared into space.
Kyla had stepped in the next day in response to Milly’s despairing phone call. “There is such an excellent, affordable rehab here in Pasadena called Gooden that’s just for men and that does really intensive, deep work,” she’d told Milly.
“But he’s already been to rehab,” Milly said.
“But maybe a reset outside of New York and all that context will be really good for him. I know so many guys who’ve gone there and say it turned things around for them. Believe me, Millipede, he’s not the first to go to rehab more than once.”
“I’m not sure he’ll go again.”
So it was Kyla, in fact, who reached out to Mateo—“one addict to another,” as she put it to both Milly and Mateo—and got him to agree to come out, on a ticket that Milly surreptitiously paid for. But it was Milly who pulled some of Mateo’s things together, including new toiletries and underwear and his iPod and some of his cherished Frank Miller graphic novels, and then, unbeknownst to Jared, met Mateo at the airport to see him off. To her colossal relief, he actually showed up—his handsome face blotchy and sallow, that same camouflage hoodie smeared with faint stains, his eyes unable to meet hers for more than a moment. His whole presentation wrapped itself around her heart and twisted it.
“I tried to think of everything you might need out there,” she said, handing him the bag.
“Thanks.”
Please make it work this time, she wanted to say. But she knew she wasn’t allowed to say that.
“I’m rooting for you, honey,” she said instead.
He seemed to roll his eyes and scowl. “Thanks,” he said again, before turning and walking away, leaving Milly standing in the terminal, bereft, wanting to reach out, pull him back, put him back together, turn back the clock, fix everything.
That had all been seven months ago. In the coming weeks, her heart swelled when she received reports from Kyla that Mateo seemed to be thriving at Gooden, embracing the process, the group therapy, even the self-examination workbooks. She worried slightly when Kyla said that Mateo had taken her and Christian up on their offer to come stay with them and continue going to outpatient sessions and AA meetings in L.A. What if Mateo failed them like he’d failed her and Jared? But, based on calls and texts from Kyla, that’s not how it seemed to play out.
“He’s finding himself,” Kyla had texted her after Mateo had been with them for nearly a month. He even had a part-time job at a coffee shop.
“Can I finally exhale?!??!” Milly had texted back alongside a smiley emoji. And she thought: He’ll show you, Jared!
Then she got a distressed voice mail from Kyla and learned that the story had changed.
Kyla picked her up at the airport. They hadn’t seen each other in over a year, since well before Kyla had drawn Mateo out to California. Milly stepped into Kyla’s VW and the two hugged wordlessly for a good long time.
“You look really good,” she told Kyla, half-consciously inspecting Kyla’s peasant blouse, her armful of pearly bangles, her big, slouchy leather bag. She always thought Kyla looked good when she saw her, and the next thing she thought of was Kyla walking at an effortful clip around that reservoir near her house with her dog, which Kyla did religiously every morning before she went to her meeting.
“So do you, Millipede,” Kyla said in the kind of supportive tone where she may as well have just appended in spite of everything.
As Kyla drove, they made small, inconsequential chatter about work until they got to Kyla’s house in Silver Lake. Kyla brought out lunch—a huge salad of greens, roasted squash, farro, and pomegranate seeds in a big bright yellow enamel bowl—and Christian joined them in the sunroom.
“My dear Millicent,” Christian said, hugging and kissing Milly. “Haven’t we all been through it with that kid?”
Milly was relieved that Christian had finally thrown it on the table. “I don’t think Jared even wanted me to come out here—well, to see Mateo, I mean,” she said. “I don’t mean seeing you two. How do I even thank you for dealing with the arrest and all that? I barely left the house for four days after you told me.”
“We think he may finally be licked,” said Christian. “In a good way. Like, the addiction has finally kicked his ass enough for him to know he’s powerless over it.”
Even hearing kicked his ass in reference to her son was a bit too much for Milly, who found herself tensing.
“He’s horrified—no, I think he’s terrified—by what happened,” added Kyla.
Milly nodded slowly. The news of what had happened had sent Milly into utter bewilderment, then fury at her mother’s old colleague Hector, whom she’d come to see as the absolute worst person who had ever wandered into her family history, especially when she learned that he and Mateo had been getting high together all along in New York, just blocks from th
e Christodora.
And apparently there had been two other people, including a young woman who’d died of either overdose or cardiac arrest, or both. Milly had barely been able to believe the whole horrific story when she’d heard it. But after Kyla told her about Mateo’s taking off with the credit cards and his massive second relapse with a girl dying and then his ending up in jail, Milly began thinking maybe Jared was right: that Mateo was beyond hope.
Milly finally picked her fork back up and ate a few bites. “What’s up with Hector Villanueva, anyway?” she asked, grimacing as she said his name.
“He’s in jail here still as far as I know,” said Kyla. “Some AA folks are checking in on him. Nobody put up his bail. And nor should they. It probably makes sense that he just sit there and start getting sober until they mandate him into a rehab program, which I’m sure they will. His charges weren’t that major.”
“He can stay in jail for the rest of his life, for all I care,” Milly snapped. “He’s bad news.”
Kyla and Christian glanced at each other. Then Christian shrugged. “He’s an addict,” he said. “Just like Mateo. They both need help.”
Milly said nothing. She felt guilty that she couldn’t see the situation as dispassionately as Kyla and Christian. But she also didn’t like hearing her son called an addict, even if it was true.
So instead, she finally said what had been nagging at her the whole flight to L.A.: “Jared wouldn’t come with me. He said if I wanted to come, it was my choice, but he was in a work cycle and he couldn’t afford to break it off.”
Kyla and Christian once again gave each other that minute, what-should-we-say? glance. Kyla reached over and put a hand on Milly’s arm.
“Sweetie,” she said, “I’m just glad you came out here to see us. And I know you want to see Mateo because you love him, and I know not seeing him is eating away at you. But you also have to know there is nothing—nothing—you can do at this point to make Mateo stop if he doesn’t want to stop.”
