As for Lucy Vasquez, she crashed, burned, and moved back to California. For the duration of all upcoming school years, according to court orders, Callum would live in Wisconsin with Remy and his girlfriend, a new mother figure in the boy’s life. Callum would see Lucy for major holidays and summer vacations, and at the final hearing, Lucy earned Mother’s Day weekends with her son, in Wisconsin or California, her choice, every year going forward. I began to realize that maybe Lucy needed her own mother, still a pretty young woman herself, more than she needed the responsibility of raising the next generation.
Some days Ryan could not switch out of his lawyering mode. Even on dates, when we’d sucker a babysitter into supervising our four kids, he’d itemize his thought processes, presenting them to me as if I were the judge or jury. One early summer night at Koreana, as we waited for the chef to roll our sushi, he circumstantiated all the reasons we’d reached our limit with four children, and for the first time ever, beleaguered by the anxieties of motherhood, fearful of bad news, loss, or spiriting away, I was willing to hear him out.
He might as well have begun with “Your Honor,” or “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” laying out his focused and convincing argument In re the Family of Ryan Ulrich and Laura Jean Baker, advocating for “enough already.” He repeated all the evidence of our case, a bulleted list for me to consider, as our fate remained in my hands. “Just think about it. We’ve already achieved the full experience of both sexes, a family with gender equality—two girls, two boys. What more do we want?” We might even be able to afford a more spacious house one day. At this point, piano lessons and sports team fees wiped our bank account clean, resulting often in overdraft fees, but we could dream more freely and realistically if we stopped at four children. True, occasionally we were saved by an impromptu visit to Cash in a Flash, where scratch awaited us, having been sent Western Union from some client’s crony eager to settle his street debt by contributing to the legal fees—someone who needed to be on good terms when Ryan’s client was finally released—but was that the kind of stability on which we wanted to hang our family’s future?
“Our little house is overflowing with noise, people, and those people’s junk. Let’s not be those parents who just keep kicking the can down the road. Honey, Your Honor, we aren’t getting any younger.”
We were sitting beside a half wall in the middle of the restaurant. Ryan was looking at me and beyond me, through the window onto Wisconsin Avenue, and beyond that into a forthcoming decade. I ordered a martini and drank it faster than normal. We may have even toasted to our future before eating sushi faster than advisable, the wasabi burn a much needed palate cleanser. Maybe Ryan was right. Maybe four babies were plenty.
CHAPTER 8:
Sawdust Days
When Rob McNally, our junkie magician incarnate, finally resurfaced in our lives, he seemed more like a genie than ever, even if methamphetamine was the opposite of magic. Out of curiosity—cursed as I was with intense desires to possess knowledge, otherwise just plain nosy—I studied and cross-referenced online instructions for “how to make crystal methamphetamine” as if researching recipes for scones, and I wondered if “chemist” were just as fitting for McNally as labels like “drug user,” “career criminal,” or, as he called himself in a message to his parole officer, “street scum.”
I’d not been in the mind frame of reading instructions for a science lab since high school. From what I gathered, patience and precision were just as necessary as other required supplies like measuring spoons, scissors, rubber hoses, empty soda bottles, Energizer batteries, rubber gloves, books of matches, coffee filters, engine starter fluid, Sudafed, distilled water, a big old tarp, and a little bit of lye.
McNally’s meth method was “shake and bake.” He fashioned a lab at his latest girlfriend’s house where he went to work unrolling guts of batteries in order to extract lithium strips, agitating bottles with solvents until the cloudy parts dropped out, and using a hair dryer to harden white smoke into crystals, all the while using a replica of the air-filtration systems he once sold over the phone, his only arguably legitimate day job.
Of course, back when Ryan first knew McNally, the guy was proud to have stopped drinking alcohol. “I picked up a pretty bad heroin habit, though,” he said, laughing in a wry and lugubrious way. This time around was no different. He admitted to Ryan, equal parts sardonic and sad, that he’d devolved from heroin to meth, the most toxic drug around. And McNally wasn’t just using meth. He was manufacturing the dope, running it to places like Illinois and Indiana, true entrepreneurship. “Addict” was a label he owned, free and clear, and making his own drugs proved, at the very least, he was a self-made and self-sustained American. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, son, and make your own meth.
If you were to have passed McNally on the street by this time in his life, you’d look twice, even if your gut instinct was to look away. His face was tattooed now with permanent sideburns of ink. Very little of his Matthew McConaughey good looks remained. He seemed more pathetic, less human, self-destruction
