“But my God… pot’s bad enough, but cocaine…” Kerry sank heavily into her chair. “Maybe she hasn’t tried it yet. Maybe somebody gave it to her and she’s just thinking about it.”
“Maybe.”
“But you don’t think so.”
“I don’t know what to think. I’m as hammered by this as you are.”
“It’s after five. She should be home by now.”
“Where’d she go after school?”
“The library to study with a couple of her friends. So she said.”
“Don’t start doubting her, babe.”
“Aren’t you doubting her? After this?”
“I’m trying to keep an open mind.”
“So am I. Oh, God, I hate this-I fucking hate it!”
Kerry almost never used the f word. And hearing it from her didn’t have any effect on me; I felt like using it myself. Neither of us had been this upset since the early stages of her breast cancer.
To calm both of us down, I went into the kitchen and poured her a glass of wine and opened the beer I’d been wanting for myself. The alcohol did its job, but there was no enjoyment in the after-work drink now. The beer seemed bitter, left a lingering sour aftertaste.
“When she gets home,” Kerry said, “let me do the talking. You just back me up.”
“Always,” I said.
Emily came in fifteen minutes later. All breezy and bouncy as usual-until she saw Kerry and me in the living room, standing like a couple of stone statues. She stopped, her smile sliding away, and blinked her brown eyes and said, “What’s the matter?”
Kerry told her, flat voiced, to take her coat off and then come back in and sit down.
“Why? What’s going on?”
“Just do what I asked.”
Emily looked at her, looked at me, bit a corner of her lip, and sidled off to hang up her coat. When she came back, Kerry and I were both sitting down again in our side-by-side chairs. Emily went around and perched on the couch with her knees together and her hands in her lap, her gaze on a neutral point between us.
She looked very young sitting there and at the same time almost grown-up: lipstick, eye shadow, a sweater too tight and a skirt too short for my liking. A real beauty in the making, the only worthwhile gift she’d gotten from her screwed-up birth parents. Those big brown eyes, creamy skin, delicate bone structure, long silky hair, a trim body that was already filling out noticeably. Heartbreaker someday. Males would swarm around her-probably had started to already, though she didn’t talk much about boys. Or have any boyfriends yet, as far as Kerry and I knew.
They grow up so damn fast these days, I thought. Everybody says so-it’s not just my perception. They’re kids-Emily had been ten when she first came into our lives-and then all of a sudden they’re virtual adults with adult attitudes, needs, vices. No transition period, or so it seemed. No time for an extended childhood and a slow easing into the grown-up world, as there had been with my generation. We hadn’t been adults, hadn’t considered ourselves adults, until seventeen or eighteen; nowadays kids stopped being kids as early as twelve. Or thirteen.
Nobody said anything for a minute or so. We all just sat there. Up to me to get this started because I had the tin box in my pocket. I took it out and set it on the coffee table between us, unopened.
Emily looked at it, closed her eyes, opened them again. “You’ve been in my room,” she said. Not accusing, not sullen or angry-emotions she seldom expressed. She sounded hurt.
Kerry said, “I went to get my thesaurus. The box was right there on your desk.”
“That’s supposed to be my private space.”
“I just told you-I wasn’t snooping. How long have you been using drugs?”
“I don’t use drugs. Never.”
“Are you going to tell us you don’t know what’s in there?”
“I didn’t, not at first.”
“But now you do.”
“It’s cocaine, isn’t it.” Statement, not a question.
“And you’ve been thinking about trying it.”
“No.”
“Don’t lie to us, Emily. The evidence is right there in front of you.”
“I’m not lying. I don’t lie, Mom; you know that.”
“Then where did this box come from?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Why can’t you?”
“I just can’t.”
“It doesn’t belong to you. Who gave it to you?”
“Nobody gave it to me.”
“Then how did you get it?”
“I… found it.”
“Found it where?”
“I can’t tell you. I promised.”
“Promised who, if you found it?”
Silence.
“Did some boy give it to you? A boy at school?”
Silence.
“Emily, answer me. Did a boy give you this box? Do you have a boyfriend you haven’t told us about?”
“No.”
“So it wasn’t a boy. One of your girlfriends?”
Headshake.
“Carla? Jeanne?”
Headshake.
“Kirstin?”
“Nobody. I found it.”
Kerry glanced at me; the frustration in her face mirrored what must have been showing in mine.
My turn. I said, “Emily, you remember the talk we had about drugs?”
“I remember.”
“You said you understood how dangerous they are, how much damage they can do. You swore you’d never use them.”
“I do understand. I’ve never used drugs, not any kind, and I never will.”
“Then explain the box.”
“I already did, Dad. I found it.”
“Where?”
“I can’t tell you that. I promised.”
“You keep saying that. Why would you make such a promise?”
Silence.
I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Reason wasn’t working, and reason was the best way to deal with Emily on any subject. Threats, even if I believed in that kind of parental approach, wouldn’t work, either. You couldn’t force a girl like her into submission and confession. Punishment, constant badgering, would only cause her to withdraw.
It was already starting to happen; I could see it in the way she was sitting, eyes remote, face pale, shoulders hunched. Same hurt look, same unwillingness or inability to communicate, same form of self-defense, as when she’d first come to live with us-a fragile kid, badly damaged by the violent deaths of her parents and the lonely existence their sins had forced her to lead. Lost and hiding in a place deep inside herself that no one could reach. The fact that she’d been a near witness to an incident not long afterward, in which I’d been ambushed and nearly killed, had made her situation even worse: she’d had so much loss in her young life, she couldn’t bear the thought of any
