The Lock
I spread the guts of a new lock on the foyer carpet: screws, housing, battery, keypad. Wood smoke breezed in through the open door, a smell that catapulted me back to our years in Vermont — middle-school soccer games, afternoons at the lake, the dogs curled at the wood stove. I stripped out the old lock and peered through the cavity at the house across the way and a slice of street that led to Central Square and the rest of the city. How little keeps the outside out.
I picked up my phone and hit play. The man in the YouTube video had nimble fingers, shirtsleeves rolled back over thick forearms, his tools extensions of capable hands. He wore a wedding band and I wondered if he had kids. He looked like the can-do type. A real father. If he came up against something he hadn’t encountered, he could figure it out. Action. Reaction. This guy wouldn’t take shit off anyone. Did he ever imagine his video would help a parent keep a child out of their own home? I torqued down screws. Snapped parts in place. Married wires. Punched keys, steeling our home with a new code. I told myself I was restoring control and safety. Through the screen door, a figure in a hoodie and backpack walked down the sidewalk. I tested the lock again, springing the bolt like a trap. The man glanced in my direction, holding my gaze just a beat too long. I grabbed my phone and googled “security cameras.”
Ever since we told our daughter she could no longer live with us, I’d been seeing hoodies-and-backpacks everywhere, convinced they were pals of hers, strung-out street commandos briefed on the layout of our unit. Sometimes I’d follow them to make sure they weren’t circling back, feeling stupid when I realized it was a couple of high school students on lunch break. The last thing my daughter said as she stomped out of our home was: “I’ll be back for my dog.” Those words sent me to the nearest Home Depot. We’d been caring for Hank for a year and a half now. Whenever I looked into his black marble eyes, I shuddered thinking about his days in her basement studio, where we’d find her unconscious amid needles and empty baggies. During that time, we’d delivered her to numerous detoxes and treatment centers, most of which she AMA’ed. After completing her last stint, with hopeful hearts, we let her back home. But as soon as she dropped her bags, she retrieved a secret stash. I found the syringes in her wastebasket under some used Kleenex.
The next week, we went to our first Learn2Cope meeting, yearning for answers, for a break in our misery, for a place to unload a story we could no longer bear. Slumping into a seat in that hospital chapel felt like waving a white flag. But with her out there somewhere bouncing between hotels and strangers’ apartments, my mind continued to spiral. She ran with a scary crowd. One of them busted into her place weeks earlier while she was in treatment, breaking windows, flipping furniture, and leaving with her TV and jewelry. Vivid fantasies of bashing in his skull accosted me — during client meetings, while running, standing in the grocery checkout line. I saw blood and shattered teeth among the milk and salad fixings. I had to remind myself I was not a violent person.
Convinced that a pair of stone-faced cops would be knocking at our door any day now, I wrote and rewrote her obituary in my head, wondering where we’d hold her funeral, how her headstone would read. I saw death everywhere, like it was stalking me: one day, I found a dead squirrel under the hostas in our yard; a week later, I came upon a crowd gathered around an owlet that had plunged from its nest at a local reservation; the next weekend, I found a baby rabbit gulping its final breaths along a running path in the woods. What was the universe telling me? That some of our young simply don’t make it? That this was natural, the cycle of life, and not everyone gets a pass? What makes you think you’re so special?
At one time, I even wondered whether our daughter might try and have us killed. I slept beside a hammer. We set up our will so nothing could go to her, no windfall with which to destroy herself. Whenever I got home from work, I ripped aside the shower curtain and probed closets. Even with the new lock, the black thoughts still snuck in. In my lowest, bleakest moments, I welcomed the cops at the door, for the relentless torture to end, ours and hers. But I knew the price would be unbearable.
At one support group, my ears pricked when I heard these words: “When the family changes, the addict changes.” But I didn’t quite understand. Why should we have to change? We’re not the ones with the problem. We’d been at the business end of her chaos for years. Sure, we’d made mistakes, but all to help. A few meetings later, someone put it another way: “When you are no longer able to change a situation, you are challenged to change yourself.” I heard a tumbler clicking into place.
For years we’d tried to impose our will: through punishment, screaming matches, removing the door to her bedroom, forcing her into treatment centers, therapist offices, and church basements. We eventually sectioned her, hoping to interrupt the relentless dark momentum, to give her brain another chance to detach from its single-track mission and inhale the vapors of recovery. While she sat in a locked ward, we shut down her apartment so she had nowhere to go, and upon release insisted on Vivitrol and sober living in another state, away from the city. Over the next year, she started coming back into focus, began working the steps, developing sober friendships, even releasing some belly laughs when we visited. But then things went blurry again.
While I didn’t recognize it at the time, showing up to Learn2Cope was our first uncertain lurch toward change and we made sure to let her know by texting some tip or resource that we hoped might register. We worked on adjusting our reactions to her behavior, pausing more often before responding. We tried to take care of ourselves, even just by taking deep breaths together, treating each inhale and exhale like medicine. We forced ourselves to shift the focus, whether watching Hank run free in the woods or taking a road trip to South Carolina just to prove that we could.
I came to recognize that love, while necessary, was not enough. Our daughter would only get better with the help of professionals and others in recovery, but most importantly with her own desire. No matter how we tried, we couldn’t will the “mysterious click” into being. All we could do was create the conditions for the mystery to unfold and for her to discover a way to solve it.
After her last run, which lasted five months, our daughter ran out of steam. She called from a downtown detox. Whether it was genuine or because she’d run out of options, only time would tell. We arranged a treatment center, agreed to pack up one last apartment and negotiate with one last landlord, then stepped out of the way. Over the following months, with the help of others, she found the courage to be vulnerable, confronting the emotions she had been numbing for years, and slowly, tentatively, began taking her place back among the living. As she rebuilt faith in herself, others put faith in her. She was eventually asked to manage her sober house and lead online recovery meetings during the pandemic. She earned her driver’s license and was hired at a local detox. She began visiting us in Cambridge again.
It was all pretty remarkable. But unlike the year of sobriety that followed her section, I divested from her recovery. No more cheerleading at every milestone, no more regular visits to Portland, no more shopping for groceries and supplies. While I was proud of her work and humbled by what appeared to be a miracle, I realized that we are not on the same journey. From 30,000 feet above, sure, the three of us had been in it together, but at ground level, her mom and I needed to move along our own tracks, toward our own destination. And perhaps, with some kind winds, our rails and hers might intersect along the way.
I also realized the feeling of death that had long haunted me was more than literal. It had been the end of dreams and expectations, the corruption of family traditions and holidays, the demise of the person I believed her to be and the parent I thought I was. But while her mom and I had kicked through the ashes of our reality, we sometimes glimpsed a phoenix. In our meetings, we’d heard stories of once-broken lives restored. “When your loved one finally embraces recovery,” a facilitator had said, “they won’t be the same person you once knew. They’ll be even better.” I had hoped the same for us, too.
On a recent visit home, my daughter and I drove to Harvard Square for takeout, chatting about her friends at the sober house, the shenanigans of some of the newcomers, her online classes, and plans for her own place. When we got back, she walked ahead of me up the front stairs. She stopped on the landing and looked back. I took in her full cheeks and blond hair, the gleam that had returned to her eye. I realized she was waiting for me to open the door. I had bags in both hands. The keypad stared at me and Hank began barking on the other side. Before I knew it, the drawbridge was down and I was whispering the numbers. I watched her punch in the sequence. For a second, I thought if things fall apart again, I can always change the code. A long beep snapped me back to the moment and the small entry light flashed green. My daughter turned the knob, opening the door, and we both stepped inside.
CD
