FEBRUARY/MARCH 2010
Jane’s mom tells me Jane failed a home drug test.
Jane’s mom kicks her out of the house.
Jane moves back in with her grandmother.
SPRING 2010
Jane’s getting lazy. She doesn’t even bother to smear makeup over her track marks anymore. The lies get more outrageous; she contradicts herself midsentence sometimes. One night she drops off Gracie, asks to use the bathroom and runs the shower for half an hour. Says she’s waxing when I knock. I wait, knock again. When she doesn’t answer, I open up the door and she’s asleep on the toilet. Cigarette turning to ash in her fingers, steam fogging up the mirror. Leg wax like puddles of honey on the bathroom floor. Strips of pale skin on her legs. I go through her purse and find stamp bags and needles. I turn off the shower. She comes to and I confront her and she starts sobbing.
“I need help. Don’t take Gracie away.” Jane tries to hug me. I step back.
She has no one to take her to detox. She’s too fucked up to drive. I can tell she’s stuck between wanting to get indignant over me looking in her purse and the fact that she’s guilty. Guilt I can’t imagine. And she knows that I know she’s been lying to me for years even though she’ll refer to it later as a “slip.” Like, she just had that one little slip where she got high for five years after she’d been clean for seven. No big deal. One day at a time. But for the grace of God. Et cetera.
Gracie is watching Tinker Bell in the living room, in her pajamas.
“Your mom has a really bad headache,” I say. “I’m taking her to the doctor. You’re going to stay with Gram. You’ll have so much fun.”
“Okay, Dad. Is Mom okay?”
“Yes. She just needs to go to the doctor. For her headache.”
I take Gracie to her grandmother’s and head to Mercy Hospital. On the way, I stop outside a house in Perrysville and give Jane ten bucks to cop a couple Xanax.
I drop Jane off at Mercy. On my way home, Jane calls. They don’t have a bed for her. I stop at my place, hide my few valuables. Then I pick up Jane, and she spends the night detoxing in my bedroom. I fall asleep downstairs in front of the TV.
Two days later, we go to the Suboxone clinic in Monroeville. None of the places that will take her insurance can see her without an appointment. The office is like something from a Vonnegut story. There’s New Age music playing, incense burning. Motivational posters on the walls. Mini-waterfalls flow over decorative rock gardens in the waiting room. The well-manicured male receptionist talks like a telemarketer and smiles too much. While Jane deals with the doctors, I take Gracie outside. We sit in the grass island between the strip mall and the office, and toss a plastic ball back and forth while the nurses take their smoke breaks by the Dumpster. Then I pay for Jane’s Suboxone, and we leave.
Jane refuses to go to rehab, but the new custody order states I can request Jane be drug tested, and that she must live with another adult for Gracie to stay overnight. Unless I can prove Jane is causing Gracie physical harm, or is under the influence while she is in her care, I can’t get full custody.
FALL 2010
My second year of grad school starts, and I spend my loan overages on another retainer for my lawyer. I move to Bloomfield. I start teaching creative writing in the Allegheny County Jail. I’m assigned the women’s class. My students who have children miss them dearly, but I can’t sympathize the way I think I’m supposed to. Maybe two of them aren’t in on drug-related charges. Their stories are all so similar. Stories like Jane’s. A woman is born into poverty. Subjected to domestic abuse from parents and stepparents and partners. She finds heroin or crack or both. A way to cope, maybe. Then comes the crime in support of the habit, but she can hustle, at least for a while, but it gets to be too much. Maybe, she thinks, having a child will help. She’ll have a new purpose, someone to love her unconditionally, but when the son or daughter comes, it gets worse. Maybe her man leaves and her family won’t have her, and there’s a familiar way to cope but she can’t hustle like she used to. Then maybe the state takes the kid to be brought up in the system, ready to repeat the cycle.
Sometimes during class, I wonder what I have in common with the men in my students’ lives. In Jane’s version of her story, I’m the bad guy. I’m the one who wouldn’t take her back when I found out she was pregnant, and now I’m trying to take her child. I make fun of her father going blind from MS in the hills by State College. Call her every name you can imagine. Tell her Gracie would be better off if she’d hurry up and overdose and die. Get it over with already so we can move on with our lives. I become self-righteous and indignant. But I hate myself for the position I’ve put my child in. I hate myself for hating her mother. For being too scared to take Gracie and skip town. And so many of the beautiful moments I spend with my daughter during the first four years of her life are experienced under a cloud of constant worry and self-loathing.
SPRING 2011
Jane’s friend Lisa goes to inpatient after getting caught with stolen goods and heroin.
I finish grad school.
Lisa gets out of rehab, overdoses, and dies.
SUMMER 2011
When I show up to get Gracie, she’s crying on the
