The Stardust Lounge_ Stories From a Boy's Adolescence - Deborah Digges [31]
Driving through town one evening, I was pulled over by the police. When the cop came to my window he apologized.
“Whoops!” he said. “I thought you were Steve. I know the car, you see …”
The car, the car, the car. The gun, the car, the gun, the car. Where is Stephen at this moment? What speeds did he drive to get there? I'm remembering along Route 2 the makeshift shrine—a cross, some teddy bears—erected at the spot where a teen collided head-on, killing himself and the driver of the other car.
The car, the other car, the car, the tree, he lost control of the car… trying to pass on a hill… a high-speed chase ending in disaster… The car, by now full of dents, scrapes, hardly recognizable from just six months ago.
“Is that the same car?” a friend asked me recently. “Christ, it's taken a beating.”
“What are you waiting for?” I ask myself. “What?”
“I hadn't figured on the car,” I answer. “It hadn't occurred to me. I don't know why. I should have been more prepared. I should have anticipated this better …”
Looking out over the yard, the first green dusting the woods beyond the fence, I'm numb at the center. There are mothers rising this Saturday morning to fix breakfast for their children, or packing the car for some outing with them—a game, a hike, a shopping trip. These mothers do not jump every time they hear a siren.
And there are mothers who are preparing to drive to some prison or other to visit their sons, sons who have committed crimes that have landed them behind bars for a year, for five, for life.
There are mothers, too, who wake to a day that includes the knowledge of the death of one of their children, the knowledge simply of one of them gone, pictures around the house, memories, but the child—that one there—dead and gone. Was there any rescue possible, any postponement that might have derailed tragedy? No doubt they ask themselves this from time to time. And what advice might they have for me this morning? What would they tell me?
Moving through the kitchen, I head down the basement steps and open the storage room door. By the light of a weak bulb, among old mops and brooms, boxes of childhood toys and baby clothes saved through our many moves, I survey a steamer trunk I have secretly packed with new clothes for Stephen, soap, toothpaste, toothbrush, one pair of dress pants, one white shirt, and tie, the kind of trunk we might have packed once for summer camp.
Stephen's father has found a residential treatment center to which we plan, at last, to send Stephen. Of course, he would never agree to this solution. But the center we have in mind will actually send people, heavies, as I think of them, who come to town, then wait for the best opportunity to take him away—late at night or early in the morning. They spirit him away to the center where under close supervision he will go to school, work, attend therapy sessions, play mandatory team sports, etc.
If, after a year, he is fit to reenter the community—he'll be sent home. If not, he is detained another year… It's up to me to make the call.
Summer, 1994
Baba Yaga's house sits on chicken legs, walks by itself, and twirls around from time to time like a dancer. Baba Yaga does not welcome the initiate who has come to ask her help: The fire has gone out at home. Could she please borrow some fire? No, answers Baba Yaga, not until Vasalisa has completed a number of difficult tasks.
The story I read to Stephen many times when he was small comes back to me. Now, like Vasalisa, I'm at work in the first initiations, coming to grips with the fact that I must not look to Stephen to change, but to myself. The fire has gone out at home. Much is in question, here at the eleventh hour. I find myself relearning things. Under siege I forgot them.
Along with Stephen's troubles, my sense of failure at the prospect of a second divorce undid me for a while. I lost the way. Through last winter, as the dog and