Subject: Iris is one month old today!
And she loves you and is very proud of you. Xoxo
He responded:
she’s cuuuute!! thanks for writing. write often if you can. I don’t have much other connection to the outside world. I heard you’re living with mom and dad. iris probably doesn’t care where she is, so whatevs.
love,
uncle harris
Good news: He was still funny!
Bad news: We had been displaced to my parents’ two-bedroom condo with a newborn baby. And a dog. And a bassinet and a baby tub and a bouncer and diapers and wipes and various creams and hearing-aid accessories and ample changes of clothes for daily blowouts and a suitcase full of favorite books and toys. The day after Harris flew back to LA, I found mushrooms growing out of the carpet in the baby’s room—in the home we’d purchased just five months before. Once they tore out the sheetrock to get to the toxic poison, the house was rendered uninhabitable, especially with a baby in the mix.
If this was fiction, and I was the author, I’d think it sounded too far-fetched to be believable. Yet there we were. At my mom’s. Indefinitely. I was starting to understand that I’m not in charge and nothing is in my control.
Iris got fit for her first pair of hearing aids a few days later. I emailed Harris another photo of her, this time with pink bubble-gum putty stuck in her ears. I told him how terrible it was to watch. She was so mad—screaming, crying, and bright red. I told him my doctor put me on Zoloft, albeit a small dose because of the breastfeeding. I’d gone in for a routine checkup and they gave me this 32-question test on an iPad to determine whether I had postpartum depression. The test concluded that I was a fucking mess. I hoped the meds would help. I needed them to help. I told Harris how relieved I was that he was also getting help. “I was afraid we’d lost you,” I said. Then, I told him how much I loved him. “Love, Sister.”
He replied with a favorable rehab review: “When you meet someone in rehab, your very first conversation is ‘I stabbed a guy on meth’ or whatever. Just very open here.” He seemed content overall. He liked the people, the food, and even the sobriety. He sounded enthusiastic about the journey. I was confident that he was finally in good hands and headed in the right direction.
We talked on the phone later that week during a rare sleeping-baby moment. And I mean rare. Harris and I seldom talked on the phone, but he called often in rehab. He seemed eager to reconnect with the family, to rebuild. My mom and I were both struck by the literal tone and pitch of his voice. It was different. He sounded awake for the first time since all this madness began. We talked for a long time that night. He admitted to taking twenty Oxys the night before he went to rehab and not even feeling high. “Okay, I have a problem,” he finally admitted to himself. “Rehab is the only option or I will die.” He vomited in the cab on the way to the facility.
Harris asked a ton of questions about how I was feeling and coping and really listened to my answers. He was unbelievably present. It was sort of unfamiliar. When I described how terrified I was about all of Iris’s upcoming medical tests, he coached me to stop future-tripping. “Today is all we have for sure,” he said. Maybe I should go to rehab, I thought.
I was sitting on the sofa in my parents’ living room as we talked, staring at the framed needlepoint picture that hangs above the doorway in their kitchen. It says: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” My mom made it long ago, before we were born. It hung on the wall in our breakfast room when we were growing up, directly across from where I always sat at the table, right above Harris’s head. It was always there in my line of vision, but I never really saw it until now. On the other end of the line, my brother told me they say this prayer at the end of every meeting.
I was bludgeoned by a notion that hadn’t struck me until now: we were the same. We both had to surrender to our shitty circumstances and “accept the things we cannot change.” We both agreed that we had to at least try to take it one day at a time.
Neither of us had any idea how to do that.
12 Four Months, Two Weeks, Six Days
Getting rid of your things is difficult. Most of the furniture went to the Upright Citizen’s Brigade green room in LA. They also took the piano that came with the house. The kitchen stuff went to Goodwill. Your massive DVD collection went to our friend Johnny. The drums went to our friend Danny. Various friends took the T-shirts. The Phish posters went to Matt Marcus, who drove the BMW back to Houston, where Mike and I traded it in for a Subaru. We sold the two ridiculously large televisions and stereo equipment to friends of friends. Iris got your vintage Happy Meal toys, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Simpsons characters, and other plastic action figures from childhood. She also swiped a large rock from outside your house. She collects them.
The actual house is the last big thing to go, and it happened today. As we slept, the funds were transferred into our account via direct deposit—just like that. All your toil, sleepless
