Harris walked into my house at 8:00 p.m. wearing his signature baggy jeans, white T-shirt, blue hoodie, and black North Face backpack. I assaulted him with a bear hug. He was home. He was safe. He was going to get sober. Seeing him in the flesh gave me a momentary break from my despair, although the scent of stale smoke that accompanied him into every room was especially potent to my postpartum nose. I was acutely aware that he would be holding my new baby in a moment, smelling like he was recently set on fire.
He took the baby, awkwardly at first, not knowing where to put his hands for proper support but became more comfortable after a few moments. I could see his spirit lift as he took her in. I could see that he loved her already. She was already validating his decision to get help. He stared with wonder into the eyes of his niece, into all that innocence and hope and promise, and said, “Hi, I’m Uncle Harris.” My heart bounced around in my chest like a pinball.
• • •
Over the next few days, Harris set up camp on the couch with Iris. She slept on his chest for hours at a time, and he was at peace with her there. It was good to have him home, even though I cried through most of his visit. It wasn’t even crying, really. It was just this sort of constant leaking out of my eyes.
“This is the most depressed I’ve ever seen you,” Harris said one day, holding Iris on the couch during one of her napping jags. “Steph, this will always be normal for her,” he said matter-of-factly. “She’ll never know any different. And then she’ll get her hearing aids, and those will be normal, too. She’s not carrying a heavy burden. She’s just a chill baby who wants to be a baby. This is hard on you—not her.” Such a simple notion, but those are often the ones that ring most true and something my brother was always good for. And I needed to hear it. I still felt like shit, but I filed his sentiments away and pulled them out often in the future for review.
Harris researched a variety of upscale rehab facilities while he was home. They all looked like spas and employed professional chefs. The one he finally chose in Malibu had a long history of celebrity clientele. He had terrific insurance that would cover his stay, but as a frame of reference thirty days at this place without insurance would literally cost more than I made in three years as a public-school teacher. But this is how Harris did things: excessively and to the extreme.
I trace this behavior back to childhood. When we were kids, my mom would turn Harris loose inside the grocery store with his own cart, allowing him to fill it to the brim with whatever sugary garbage he could find. Once, when he was six, we went to a Ruth’s Chris Steak House for someone’s birthday. Grandma (Dad’s mom) and Ganny (Mom’s mom) were both there. Harris wanted lobster, and Grandma told him to go pick the one he wanted from the tank, while Ganny shook her head in exasperation. Naturally, Harris picked the biggest one. This poor lobster was over five pounds. The waiter came over to the table clutching the squirming crustacean between his metal tongs. “This is a $150 lobster,” he said, certain an adult would intervene and say, “Please put that beast back in the tank. Our apologies. His eyes are bigger than his stomach.” But that didn’t happen. “Of course, he can have it!” Grandma exclaimed. So, Harris got the $150 lobster and learned that the finer things in life could easily be had. I think he ate two bites.
As an adult, this tendency toward overindulgence continued. I was eight months pregnant when he came home for Christmas a few months earlier, and we drove an hour outside of town to a highly-rated-on-Yelp steak house for my mom’s birthday. Harris insisted we order the authentic Japanese Wagyu four-ounce filet mignon from Kagoshima Prefecture for $100 even though nobody wanted it but him because it cost $100 for four ounces of meat. He wanted this dish in addition to our entrees, as an appetizer of which we could all take a single bite: a $25 bite. I, of course, said this was an absurd waste of money, but he argued that if you have the opportunity to experience something for the first time, why not do it regardless of the cost? Money wasn’t money to my brother like money is money for normal people; it was merely a thing you needed to experience life to the fullest.
This isn’t to say that everything he owned was gilded and covered in diamonds. Quite the opposite. While he enjoyed expensive multicourse meals, his true love was fast food. He appreciated cinematic masterpieces but DVR’d every season of The Bachelor. He had a professionally decorated home, yet a pink bottle of Mr. Bubble was always perched on the side of his bathtub. This was Harris. He did life in his own unique way and was as complicated and contradictory as they come.
Since he had the money, Harris decided to splurge and spend it on the finest of rehabs, and we were confident that his thirty-day luxury hiatus would fix whatever bug had lodged itself inside of him. It had to. Because despite outward appearances, his pilot light was off. Even though Harris was always surrounded by friends and made fun and funny a guiding priority in his life, he struggled
