The ride
A letter to my daughter
Nov. 1, 2020
Today, we drove our 2013 Toyota RAV4 to Portland, Maine, for the last time. We’d made the two-hour trip from Boston countless times over the past two years. Across steel-truss bridges, through toll booths, over state borders, readily embracing the generosity of Maine’s 75-mph speed limit. I always read the welcome sign as we sped by. “Maine. The way life should be.” Oh, how desperately we wanted life to be the way it should.
The first time this RAV rolled into Portland was the summer of 2018 after you were done with your section at Shattuck Hospital in Jamaica Plain. Released from your locked ward, you climbed into the back seat and we drove straight to a sober house 110 miles away, no negotiations, Vivitrol a must. We kept the car gassed up for regular and increasingly frequent visits, the faces of gas station clerks and rest area attendants becoming as familiar as the landscape. We logged thousands of miles to buy you groceries and warm clothes, to take you to lunch, to bring you down to Boston for medical appointments, then just to lay eyes on you. Even though you were racking up month after month of sobriety, we were anxious, suspicious, scared. It had been a long and bumpy road.
Five years earlier, not long after driving this RAV off the lot, we raced over to your first apartment when you texted that your boyfriend was beating you. And where we saw needles for the first time. The cops urged us to get you into treatment immediately. But then you vanished. To California it turned out, with that same boyfriend, hustling on the streets of Berkeley, flying signs, sleeping god knows where. Numbed with confusion and despair, we loaded the contents of your abandoned apartment into the car, the evidence of your secret life, no idea what would happen next. Some five months later, in front of South Street Station, I opened the passenger-side door and you climbed in, beleaguered and exhausted. Even though you’d finally come home, your departure had just begun.
Over the next several years, this RAV would cruise the streets searching for you. Race over to your place when you went radio silent, hearts in our throats as we flipped on the lights to reveal a scattering of syringes on the floor and your form hidden under blankets and comforters. That awful moment when I put my hand on your shoulder. The waterfall of relief when you finally stirred. That apartment, too, was later packed into the RAV. And it would go on to deliver you to detoxes and IOPs and rehabs, seemingly every other week, your head often bobbing in the rear view mirror. It brought us to the parking lot of a treatment center on Christmas Eve, so we could be near you, both hopeful and heartbroken. Idling in the dark, the dogs curled in the back, we guessed at which window was yours, wondering if you might appear, praying this rehab would be the last. Little did we know, you had stashed drugs in the backseat pocket for the day you were released.
But this RAV also started bringing us to Learn2Cope support-group meetings in a hospital chapel and taking us home 90 minutes later with a speckle of hope in our hearts, or at least the feeling that we weren’t alone. We drove to addiction conferences and slipped in CDs of the experts we’d heard, the cabin filled with the sound of hard-won wisdom and faith and pain. We pulled up repeatedly to trail heads at the Middlesex Fells, a wooded sanctuary outside Boston where we hiked under the canopy, sometimes in silence, sometimes in tears, and watched the dog you could no longer care for run free. This RAV carried us 1,000 miles to an island off the South Carolina coast just to change the scene, to breathe different air, to insist to ourselves we could take a break, that we deserved a break, that we weren’t forever anchored to a situation we had no control over.
Finally, last winter, after a hard relapse and a five-month run, this RAV drove you to a treatment center in New Hampshire where you at long last ran out of steam and surrendered, the monotonous cycle of pain and desperation seeming to finally outweigh the terror of the unknown and the reckoning with emotions you’d kept numb for years. Where you truly began the work, where you opened yourself up to your struggles, mustered the courage to be vulnerable, found the humility and strength to face the past, and began to rediscover your sense of promise. Meanwhile, the last apartment we vowed we’d ever box up was loaded into the RAV and driven home.
Today, we parked that black RAV in front of your sober house. A house you now manage. A house filled with women who have become lifelong friends. Your community. You are still doing the work every day, sponsoring the newly sober, leading recovery meetings, spreading your strength and hope. Your life is moving forward. You’re working a steady job and, at 28 years old, you finally earned your driver’s license, 12 years after getting your learner’s permit, an achievement we once never dreamed possible. My parents helped buy me my first car. Likewise with your mom. We wanted to do the same for you. Maine winters are tough on the carless. More importantly, we saw you building out your world. These wheels could be wings.
In your once-scarred hands, this car, which served as a vessel for so much pain and struggle and tearful conversation, would now become something else. Deliver a new story. The past is the past, for you and for us. We may not be able to change its facts, but we can redefine our relationship to it and the meaning we draw from it. We can always adjust the rear view.
Before handing you the keys, I took a last look inside, making sure we got everything out, double checking the cup holder and side pockets. Even though music is all on streaming these days, I hit the eject button on the CD player just in case. I was surprised when it spat out a disc. Diana Clark’s “What Love Looks Like: When Your Child Struggles with Addiction.” I smiled. It had been sitting in there since we first listened to it three years earlier. It was as if a blessing had been given, that we had been released. As a writer, I relish symbolic moments like that. But as the parent of someone in recovery, I know we’re never quite out of the woods.
That night you texted that you’d loaded a bunch of women into the car and taken them grocery shopping and in a few days planned to drive another to the same New Hampshire treatment center you’d been at so she could celebrate her one-year. I told you I thought that was so great, that I was proud of you. “I’m just doing what was so freely done for me,” you said.
I liked that answer.
Life as it should be.
CD