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A fathers drops off a coat to his daughter, a coat she will need to take with her when she goes to the halfway house for drug addiction.
—
I’m driving away now, from the place they have you housed, the place of restitution.
Only a few more days, and then you’ll go to the halfway house. Halfway between release and the restitution center. They kept you in the county jail first, halfway between the street bust and a chance for restitution. From your cell on the women’s block you heard the male inmates yelling and banging their bars, all night long.
As I drive the culturally denuded streets away from the downtown core of this county seat and its governmental high-rises, I know that I am part of the landscape now. As surely as if it was me walking the spittle sidewalks, and crossing furtively the angry intersections as though my life depended on it.
Like I became part of the strip-mall restaurant where you pulled graveyard while punching a clock at the local methadone clinic, anxious not to miss your dose. Connected now to these places I would never have known, which I’ll never visit again without recalling the time of our lives when you were addicted.
The upstairs bedroom is where you slept days during the graveyard year, and where, under my roof, you went off the “done” and back onto the street drugs. You ran the table when they pulled you over that warm September night after I’d lost contact with you again: meth, heroin, “oxy.” During medical detox you puked blood.
I’ve read two textbooks, been to the trial dates, the mediation sessions, the meetings, and I’m in this with you now. A fellow traveler who struggles to grasp the void of love and esteem that brought us to these places, my parental complicity like a scorched spoon under a bed. Part of your treatment involved exonerating me, but a father will always wonder.
It wasn’t like your trajectory was ignored. Diversion classes after a high school minor-in-possession charge, me thinking, it’s just booze. A well-regarded adolescent psychiatric counselor and a physician specializing in addiction were both retained.
But the quality of the crew you ran with plummeted, you dropped out, and when you reached the age of maturity, the state stepped in. I became an interested bystander, driving to and from government buildings.
I’ll remember the women in restitution, daughters like you, moms, wives and sisters, revealing their drugs of choice and days clean on Family Night. Mug shots were shared; I had to look twice to see you in yours.
I’ll remember, darkly, the man who got you started on the needle, how I hated him, and how his subsequent 25-to-life sentence received for something he did after you were safely locked away doesn’t make that big a difference now.
♦◊♦
I’m driving away from restitution, having dropped off a carton of cigarettes, and the coat you’ll need to take to the halfway house. I think that someday we will drive though this place together.
For you it will be a memory of rock bottom, the loss of freedom, and, hopefully, the turn-away from drugs.
For me it will always be a bittersweet place where I did not let go.
On April Fool’s Day you’ll leave the halfway house, barring complications. They’ll cut you loose, or at least as loose as a twenty-something who owes the state a lot of money, has no driving privileges, and is sentenced to three years probation can be.
I wonder where you will go. Maybe you’ll live here again, upstairs.
Another chance. I think I’m getting you back, hollowed in some lost place of your own, but it’s you, praise be, it is you.
—
Photo: hashir / flickr
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