The Exact Nature of Our Wrongs Read online

  They seated themselves on couches and chairs in the living room. Billy took a stance with his back to the fireplace stones, gripping the mantel behind him, arms extended in a pose of crucifixion until he snapped out of a nod to declare, “For your information, ma chère famille, I know exactly what I’m doing.” Billy had been told, in Paris no less, that he had quite the accent. He took pleasure in strewing French phrases throughout his speech. He was hurt by his family’s constant monitoring, by the looks he saw pass among them, and he planned to show them how efficiently and carefully he could manage his prescriptions. Pulling an orange vial from the pocket of his thrift store blazer, he crossed the room to dump a pile of blue capsules into his mother’s aproned lap. Next he dropped in some peach-colored tablets.

  “These, if you must know,” he said, warming to his subject in an adenoidal voice, the result of past abuses to his sinuses, “cannot be taken with food and must be spaced over the day not to exceed six in a twenty-four-hour period, O heaven forfend.” He grinned drunkenly, luridly.

  Dropping white tablets into the mix, he shook the apron so the pills danced like jumping beans. “And these are Percocet and must be taken not to exceed two hours of the previous dose of the blue and peach. For my pain. Do you see?”

  Hattie cocked her head, trying to focus her gaze on the tablets, but a cataract made a blurred spot and she couldn’t get the image she was seeing to make sense—the nest of tablets and capsules looked like the spoils from a doll’s Easter basket.

  She and Billy were at one of their impasses regarding his medicine. Medicines plural, she should say. Out of her household account she had agreed to pay for those obligations that Medicaid and the Ryan White Foundation didn’t cover as long as he kept his drug usage down, as long as he took his prescriptions sensibly and as directed. But his habits were more than she could keep track of or handle. She knew he pulled the wool over her eyes on many occasions, but what could she do? It was so hard to tell what was pain and what was excess. She had determined to walk the fine line between doubt and belief, but mostly to give him the benefit.

  The whole issue was especially troubling because her son and her husband were at odds. Billy couldn’t bear the way he claimed Abel treated her. “Sharia law,” Billy sometimes said, always under his breath. Her son refused to hear her explanation that this was simply their generation’s way and that she’d accepted the bargain when she’d taken the vow to love, honor, and obey. And little did Billy know, she’d often thought wryly, the myriad ways she’d learned to get around her seeming subservience. She could be foxy when she had to.

  For his part, Abel resented the boy’s hold on his wife. He had tried, but he couldn’t get past his son’s—he couldn’t, he couldn’t say “gayness,” couldn’t say “homosexuality,” could barely bite out “proclivities.” It wasn’t so much the fact of the matter—he’d seen enough of humanity in his practice to understand and even to empathize—as it was his son’s flamboyance. Billy was a peacock. A showboat with flags and bunting unfurled, brass bands playing on all decks, grand feeling on parade. He made no attempt to tone himself down but rather, wherever he went, made a spectacle. Spectacle making in any form was roman numeral one on Abel’s unwritten list of everyday sins. And the way he went through money. And his froufrou French. And the way his mother doted on him.

  Were Hattie forced to choose between the two men, husband or son, duty would see a tack toward her husband, but love would send her wandering back toward the opposite shore. She had long thrown herself between Billy and the world, not only to protect him from Abel, who could be dismissive and even caustic in his criticisms, but in the hope of forestalling the ruin Billy was bound for. Try as she might, though, she could not tell him, “No.” Oh, she wanted to. She knew she should. But she always felt like Pilate washing his hands, or Peter before the cock’s crow. It was easiest to smile and go along, to look on the bright side and to believe the best of people.

  “And this big pink lovely is methadone, which I crush finely and then using a razor blade carefully form a line—” A bout of hiccups interrupted Billy’s spiel, but he forged on to explain how he cut and snorted the powder.

  Abel, too, had been trying to track his son’s sleight of hand, thinking that somewhere in the display would be a clue to the beta-blockers he thought might be missing from his nightstand, but for all he understood of the recital, his youngest son may as well have been a sideshow grifter fast-handing walnut shells over a dried pea.

  Bewilderment was Billy’s aim: if he baffled his elderly parents, his mother would say, “I give up,” and once again he’d have sole charge of his drugs, with none of her well-meaning interference. This had worked in the past. Had worked off and on since his positive HIV test at twenty-one; he had convinced his mother that any hitch in the ready cavalcade of drugs might signal his end.

  He loved Hattie, but he also knew he could use her. He hated this dishonesty in himself, but the appetite that drove him had grown stronger than love. She would believe anything he told her, no matter how outré. While he was in her care the world was his and the fullness thereof, for she couldn’t bear it when he suffered pain. If he told her he needed to go to a ramshackle house in a sketchy part of town because some unspecified someone there owed him money, off they went in the Skylark, Hattie with her hands at ten and two as Abel had endlessly instructed, peering over the wheel, pocketbook by her side, as Billy had lost his license after a third driving-under-the-influence. If he told her that a prescription was accidentally flushed down the toilet, in her quavering voice she’d call his doctor to vouch, in her innocence repeating his apocryphal tale of the mishap in exacting detail. But this time, as she stared at the pile of pills in her lap, she sighed, and then she raised her head, turned to her older children, and said weakly, “This can’t go on. I’m old and I’m tired and sometimes I can’t even think straight. We have to do something different.”

  “Well,” said Billy, trying for humor, “in that case I’d better take control of these.” He bent to scoop up his pills, clumsily dropping them into his pockets. A blue capsule fell to the floor. Everyone looked at it but no one would move to pick it up. Billy hadn’t seen it and when he turned to leave the room, he accidentally ground it beneath his shoe, leaving white powder on the nap of the dark Persian carpet.

  Thinking to lighten the mood, ClairBell said, “Let me get that.” She mugged a greedy, salacious face, put index finger to nostril, and pantomimed a spectacular snort. She was hurt when nobody laughed.

  “You would,” Billy said when he realized who was mocking him and why. He and ClairBell were often at odds. ClairBell had accused him of purveying drugs to her son Garrett. Billy had countered that it was the other way around, that Garrett was stealing from ClairBell’s stash of prescription painkillers and selling them on the street. No one who witnessed the argument could determine guilt or innocence. “It’s your chicken and your egg kind of deal,” Jesse was known to say.

  Billy left the living room. When the rest of the family heard the glass patio door slide in its tray, they knew he had drifted outside into the south yard to light up a Maverick.

  Hattie shook her head. “I don’t even know how to think about this.”

  “I do,” Abel said pointedly, getting up to make his way to the back-room den where the History Channel was waiting, one mind-numbing click of the remote control away.

  Hattie rose from the sofa and left the room. She went to the kitchen to survey the wreckage of the birthday dinner and get things put right.

  In the living room the others discussed the new development. The dilemma was always the same and so was the conversation. They went over the outrages Billy put their parents through. Money, shame, legal quagmires, fear that he would be killed or that he would die of an overdose. But this time was different. This was the first time their mother had asked for help. So rare was the occasion that they decided to step in.

  When they were agreed, Jesse called Hattie to the room and
explained their intention.

  “Leave it to us,” ClairBell said, cobbling her fingers through a bowl of Gardetto’s to pick out the rye chips. “We’ll get him on the right road.”

  “Do you think you can?” Hattie asked dubiously. “I just don’t know…” Her voice trailed off.

  “We’ll get it done, Mom,” Jesse pledged. “Don’t worry.”

  For years Jesse had wanted to ride to his mother’s rescue, to relieve some of her misery. He was protective of her against his father, who dominated her, he thought, and against Gideon and Billy, who took advantage of her trusting nature. He’d learned during his last few years at the Sunset Limited AA group that Hattie was a classic enabler, and he’d tried to tell her she contributed to her own dilemma and to Billy’s habits. But he hadn’t been able to get her to see how she made him worse. She genuinely believed she was helping. Jesse sighed. The way he did with Patsy, his sometime lover, who drank herself to life every afternoon and into oblivion every night at the Pay Dirt.

  Hattie went to the sliding doors and peeked outside. Billy slumped in a lawn chair on the patio where years before a swimming pool had been, now filled in with dirt and paved with flagstone. His chin rested on his chest, a forgotten Maverick burned between his fingers. Quietly she opened the door, tiptoed across the flagstone, and removed the cigarette from his hand. She stubbed it out and put it in the ashtray and then slipped back into the kitchen, where she started on the dishes.

  As the eldest, Doro conducted the meeting to set the agenda for how to deal with what they had long called the Billy Problem.

  “A mercy kidnapping?” she suggested, trying to wring some humor out of a situation that wasn’t really funny. She was disappointed when Jesse and ClairBell didn’t laugh. Among friends and colleagues she was known for humor. Back east she was considered a card. People thought she was funny, or at least amusing. She loved to liven up stodgy committee meetings. But here on the plains in her hometown it was as if she spoke another language, as if she were a washed-up comic, bombing in a hostile room. She pushed up her glasses, cleared her throat, and went on. “We need to get him some help,” she said, “before this gets worse.”

  After a long discussion they decided that it was too late this night but that the next time Billy called expecting their mother to fetch him home for another Lost Weekend, a posse would ride. The posse would intercept Billy and take him to the ER.

  “Haul his scrawny bew-tox to detox,” said ClairBell. She put her fingertips together and in a sinister voice said, “Excellent.”

  Jesse laughed at their sister’s clowning, and Doro remembered—again—that when she’d moved east she’d made herself an outsider. She had to be careful not to come on too strong, too bossy. As it was, her brothers and sister thought she was a Goody Two-Shoes a know-it-all, and a meddler. She needed to watch her step and try not to offend them. She needed to remember that their refusal to laugh was their way of circling ranks. She knew they called her “The Coastal Elite.”

  “Sounds about right,” Jesse said. “It’s way past an intervention. We’ve been down that road before.”

  ClairBell said, “Speaking of roads, remember that time Billy ran Honky into the Forty-seventh Street ditch?”

  “That sorry Chevette.” Jesse shook his head. “And we had to pull it out so Hizzoner wouldn’t find out…”

  ClairBell picked up the tale. “… and there was old Billy Boysie, dressed in his waiter’s tuxedo, all bow tie and cuff links and that pleated thing around his middle, wandering down the road, chatting up those Hondurans who ran the cantaloupe stand and saying how they should wrap this fancy-ass bacon around a piece of melon…”

  “Prosciutto,” Doro supplied without thinking.

  “Gesundheit,” said ClairBell, smirking, giving Doro the side eye. “And we made him promise to stop drinking and he signed this pledge he wrote up and decorated to look like the Bill of Rights?”

  “Might as well have burned it,” Doro said, hoping to move past her gaffe. She thought of telling about the time Billy called her from jail, sobbing that he needed bail money, but this would just lead them down their well-worn path of cataloguing his misdeeds and it would make her look like a jerk for refusing to post his bond. “So what are we going to do?”

  After they talked out the difficulties they made a plan to commit him to a drug rehab facility so Hattie couldn’t undo with her endless forgiveness what had to be done in his, and of course her own—Doro had said this so often that Jesse and ClairBell sighed when they heard the words—best interests.

  They concluded their business by electing Jesse to return Billy to his apartment later that evening. “That way, if he needs to be carried…” ClairBell began, but just then their father, having shaken himself from his post-dinner nap, presented himself to announce that he would be turning in for the night.

  ClairBell hastened to fill him in on their plan. He nodded. At times of high feeling, Judge Campbell relied on sayings of the great English barrister William Blackstone, confounding to most hearers. “I have tried,” he said magisterially, “since time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary to effect this very change. But in vain. Oh, in vain since the ages ornate.” He meant that he had long tried to get Hattie to butt out of Billy’s life.

  ClairBell petted his arm. “It’s all right, Daddy. We got you.”

  * * *

  The next morning after breakfast Doro sat at the kitchen table with her cell phone, making arrangements. She dealt with the county social services, with Medicaid. She worked out the details so that if she happened to be back east when the time came Jesse and ClairBell would have a protocol to follow.

  As it turned out, they had to wait only a few days, and Doro was still in Amicus wrapping up her visit when Billy’s come-and-get-me call came. She mustered the others and they set off toward the bus stop in her rental Focus.

  Jacked up on a brilliantly calibrated pill cocktail that unfortunately he couldn’t remember the recipe for, Billy stumbled down the steps of the crosstown bus. Hoping to earn a laugh from the greeting party—two silver-haired sisters and one graybeard brother, God woot!—he plucked a cheap advertisement sign from the weed-grown easement to flash over his head: “CASH MAGIC!” He cut a crazed jig and then flourished the sign like a courtier doffing a cavalier hat. “Monsieur et mesdames!”

  He was funny, their baby brother, adept at self-parody, inventive, witty and sweet-natured, prone to displays of temper under only two circumstances: if someone showed disrespect for his mother, whom he loved without reservation, or for Doro, whom he loved madly despite her refusal to lend him money; or if someone maligned his intentions, which were always, he insisted, always good. But now his siblings didn’t dare to laugh at his antics or he would be encouraged to greater effort. He was flying too high. Even from a distance his pupils looked like dark pools. “Look at those eyes,” ClairBell muttered. “World’s Largest Hand-Dug Wells.”

  Doro pulled the Focus around the lot, stopped the car, and into the backseat went their brother. Ray-Bans shielding her eyes and silver-gray chignon loose and whipping in the oven wind of August, Doro hit the gas and the car took off. ClairBell—shorter, plumper, cracking wise, her platinum clip-on wiglet a corkscrew cascade—rode shotgun. Straw summer Resistol cocked back on his head, Jesse manned the rear seat so he’d be on deck, ClairBell had whispered, in case the captive needed a body block by a silverback cowpoke with a bunged-up knee, ha ha, no offense. “None taken,” said Jesse.

  Billy settled happily, not suspecting where he was headed. “My sisters, my brother, my saviors,” he said royally from the backseat as the Focus pulled onto the right-of-way.

  “You don’t know the half,” ClairBell turned around to say, but Billy had nodded out.

  As outlined in the plan, they stopped at a strip-mall pizza joint. “Let’s get some food on your stomach,” Jesse explained as he shook his brother awake. So wrecked was Billy on his cocktail of prescription as well as street drugs
that he didn’t notice their grim expressions. At Papa G’s he flirted with a teenage counter boy in a ONE LOVE T-shirt. The kid lifted his lip in a languid sneer and rolled his eyes, but Billy didn’t notice.

  Billy had once been handsome. He’d been told he looked like a smaller, skinnier Marco Rubio but with a buzz cut going gray and better politics. Or like Robert Downey Jr., smaller and more delicately made, but with the same dark, soulful eyes. He’d had good teeth and a dazzling smile, an endearing way of sweeping grandly into rooms, as his pitch for irony was perfect, tastes that ran to gold collar stays and French cuffs. But now he wore a soiled olive drab T-shirt and wrinkled madras shorts that hung on his thin hips. He was unshaven and hollow-eyed, and the effect of his licking his grizzled chops over the counter boy made him look, ClairBell said later, like the Little Bad Wolf.

  As they piled back into the Focus, Jesse’s bad knee seized up. “Shit fire and save matches,” he said through gritted teeth, working out kinks that each year grew worse, the effects of the skywalker stilts he used to hang drywall. He was fifty-six but his body felt eighty.

  Billy touched Jesse’s arm and asked in a slurred voice, “Can I give you something for that, brother? Vicodin? Percocet? Opana? It’s new.”

  Jesse was tempted. If his sisters hadn’t been there, he’d have taken his brother up on his offer. He liked painkillers as well as the next person. Sure, not enough to go out and seek them, but if a pill or three happened to roll his way, he wouldn’t turn them down. But this didn’t seem like the right time. “It’ll pass,” he said, massaging his knee. “But thanks.”

  ClairBell craned around, dramatically putting one hand to her forehead and cupping the other toward Billy. “Headache. Maybe I’d better have some.”

  Billy drew back the hand that offered the pills. Doro pretended interest in the road and Jesse took off his hat and examined the hatband. The subject of ClairBell’s history with opiates was forbidden by threat of a ClairBell fatwa. Some years before, Doro and Jesse had tried to talk to her about her problem, but she’d cut them dead, citing her many illnesses, some real and some phantom. She concluded with an exacting audit of everyone else’s vices. Nicotine for Doro, who was forever trying to quit smoking, add booze and the occasional pill for Jesse and Gid, and for Billy all three, plus fentanyl patches, morphine, the kitchen sink, and whatever-addictive-else. Everybody was an addict, she said. Every last one of them. And at least she, ClairBell, didn’t smoke. The silent treatment she gave them had lasted from Easter until Christmas. No one spoke of her problem again and so it had ceased to exist. But the truth was that she could mimic diseases so successfully tailored to the drug she wanted that she never lacked for stores. She had undergone elective surgeries in the hope of doses. She was blackballed in two of the city’s emergency rooms and had recently begun to frequent the pain management clinic in the old bowling alley. People said the place was a pill mill—one of the doctors who staffed it had just been indicted. When Billy continued to ignore her, she turned around, crossed her arms, and slumped in her seat.