Her parents had been weirdly calm on the subject of her grades. Her father did say, in his gentle way, “Do you want to go back and live with Mom and Toby? Maybe this is your way of telling me you don’t want to be at Alabaster.”
But Adelaide did want to be at Alabaster. Mikey was there. And she loved the freedom of living in the residence halls. Also, she didn’t want to go to Baltimore. It was too intense and suffocating.
Her father said softly, “You do know Alabaster’s not free, right? It’s reduced tuition, and they take it out of my salary.”
Adelaide knew. She was ashamed. But Levi didn’t yell or say how disappointed he was. He just asked if she thought she could complete the necessary work over the summer.
She told him yes.
The assignment was to plan a set for Fool for Love by Sam Shepard, then to build a set model for it, then defend the model verbally, to the teacher, in a project-based assessment. That is, Kaspian-Lee would quiz Adelaide about why she’d done what she’d done, and Adelaide needed to be able to explain it. Adelaide could use the studio classroom over the summer.
Now Kaspian-Lee walked Adelaide through the party to the kitchen, where the countertops were covered in wine bottles. She refilled her cup, which was made of red plastic. “Have you read the play?”
“Of course.” Adelaide had only read the first five pages. She knew it took place in a motel room.
“You have to get on it,” said Kaspian-Lee. “I say this with respect. Why would you fail my class? You are very capable.”
“Thank you.”
“You measure correctly. Almost nobody measures correctly. And your glue is neat. I say this to encourage you. You simply have to stop mooning and force yourself to do this project.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“This is my lover’s house,” said Kaspian-Lee, opening the freezer. “I am entitled to go in here. I’m not being rude.” She took out some ice. “Let’s get cheese before it’s gone. Look, people have decimated the Brie. They don’t know how to cut it properly, these philosophers.”
“How are you supposed to cut it?”
“It should always form a triangle. You don’t chop off the point. Here, eat this, it’s a Morbier. Have you had a Morbier? It’s one of the best-looking cheeses. And look, fig jam. The philosophers have ruined that, too.”
Adelaide ate the Morbier and Kaspian-Lee turned abruptly to a tall, heavy young man, only about seventeen, wearing a blue button-down with the sleeves rolled up. “Will you play now?” she asked him.
The young man shrugged. “If you want.”
“I do want,” she said. “Adelaide, this is Oscar. He’s here to play the piano.”
“Hi, Adelaide.”
“Hi, Oscar.”
Oscar took a suit jacket off the piano bench and put it on, despite the heat. He sat down and began to play.
Adelaide had never thought about the piano in her life. She had never listened to classical music. But Oscar rained on the keys with an enormous concentration. She did admire it.
Kaspian-Lee disappeared. The philosophers swarmed, anxious and argumentative, talking as if conversation were blood sport.
Adelaide was suddenly very hungry. She grabbed the misshapen Brie by its rind and huddled with it in a corner, where she leaned against a bookshelf and watched the party. She ate the cheese like a slice of pizza and thought,
Toby is an addict. Toby is an addict.
Her brain settled into the thought. It was an old habit, whenever she had a moment, undistracted.
Of course, Adelaide’s mother and father always said Toby was sick. Or ill.
Sick and ill are what the medical establishment suggests you say. The words are accurate, but to be clear, Toby went to rehab at age fourteen.
Fourteen.
At one point, he needed to get high so badly that in order to get a prescription, he smashed his own wrist with a hammer.
Then, when the scrip ran out, he told them
he was sick with migraines. He told them
his wrist still hurt. He got another jar of pills, and another.
When he couldn’t fake pain, he stole Adelaide’s money. And their parents’ money. He told them
he was sleeping over at Ian’s house. He told them
he was exhausted from basketball practice, so exhausted he couldn’t keep his head up, when in truth, he was nodding off.
He told them
he was throwing up because of stomach pain when really, the nausea was a side effect of narcotics; he told them
he had a virus. He went back to
saying he had migraines.
He was taken to a neurologist, and a headache expert.
He frightened his parents. They thought he might have a brain tumor.
When Toby went to rehab, his addiction taxed the family’s financial resources sorely. The Buchwalds sold their home and the Good Sheep Yarn Shop, spent their savings, and then spent Levi’s pension money. While they knew they were lucky as hell to have the funds at all, they were looking at a very different future than the one they had saved for.
The thing that bothered Adelaide most was the
loss of Toby himself. He had disappeared on her,
even when they were in the same room.
She knew she was supposed to hold him blameless. She knew he had susceptible brain chemistry. There was an opioid epidemic across the nation. It was a social problem. A structural problem.
Levi tried to stay balanced, burying himself in a book he was writing about teaching Shakespeare in the high school classroom, emerging to be warmly present and loving for about a half hour in the morning and an hour at night. He would be chatty and upbeat, focused completely on sharing bits about his day, listening to Adelaide and Rebecca. He made garlicky pasta and did the dishes before declaring himself tuckered out and going to bed. It seemed to Adelaide that Levi was giving all that he could. If they asked him for any more, he might collapse.
Rebecca tried to match Levi’s attempts at normalcy and connection, but she flailed wildly from self-hatred (blaming her own parenting for Toby’s addiction) to fury at the factors other than herself that had led to it. Had she been too permissive, or too strict? she’d wonder aloud. Had she been too smothering, or too involved with her career? How could those idiot other parents leave addictive drugs in their medicine cabinets for anyone to find? How irresponsible were they, leaving their teenagers home alone to throw wild parties? And the problem with opioids wasn’t simply caused by overprescription, like so many people thought. Rebecca researched the epidemic in her spare time and told Adelaide all about her reading. The drug crisis was caused by social and economic upheaval. Even though middle-class kids like Toby were the ones the media often wrote about, most addicts were people struggling with poverty, trauma, and ill health. Rebecca investigated wide-ranging solutions like harm-reduction services, faith-based healing, government regulation, and lowered barriers to care. Mostly, in the day-to-day, she managed Toby’s health: insurance claims, therapists, doctors, researching factors that led to successful recovery. It wasn’t long before Rebecca became nearly overcome with pain from sciatica.