I am on the asphalt-and-gravel street outside our home. I am barefoot. My eldest daughter, Sophie, is trying to run away. She is in front of me, screaming at me, telling me to quit following her. With every step, the pebbles embedded in the asphalt bite at my feet.
I’m angry at myself for stupidly rushing out of the house without shoes. That choice is seriously impeding my progress. As my daughter stepped noisily out of the door, she was simultaneously texting a friend to come pick her up, not at our house but at some undisclosed location. She’s about to be whisked off to Pueblo and a cadre of untrustworthy friends. I didn’t want to lose precious time putting on shoes, but now I was losing even more time picking my way through the sharp bits of asphalt-embedded pebbles with my bare feet.
Sophie is trying to get far enough ahead of me so that I will not see the car when it pulls up. I’m able to keep reasonably close, bare feet and all, so she begins to pick up the larger rocks by the side of the road and throw them at me.
“Quit following me!” she screams as she throws rocks.
She thinks that the prospect of getting hit by a rock will keep me from following her. It’s a reasonable assumption, but in the moment I am tenacious. I dodge the rocks and pick my way forward.
She gets to the street corner well before I do and turns onto a busier street, which overcomes my bare feet with a gutter full of trash and broken glass. She passes out of my eyesight. I admit defeat and pick a path back home through the pebbles that least hurt my feet.
I sit in the dark on the wet, dewy grass of my front lawn, my palms in the grass behind me. The wetness seeps into the fabric of my jeans, refreshingly cool.
Sophie is several blocks away by now, probably jumping into the back seat of her friend’s car to run back to Pueblo and party for days until she calls me or her therapist, exhausted and broken, for one of us to pick her up.
She successfully runs away that night. A few hours later, she sends her therapist and me a video of her, with her friend, literally falling down drunk. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with this.
She’s in Pueblo, while the rest of our family is in Colorado Springs, a hundred miles away.
When she tires of being a runaway, sick, exhausted, and burnt out, she’ll turn herself in to her therapist, who also lives in Pueblo. The therapist will call me. It’s an established pattern.
Once we return home, I start making all the calls: to the social workers, to DHS, to her therapist and psychiatrist and lawyers and all the other professionals gathered around our troubled family.
My wife, Diana, and I adopted Sophie and her younger sister, Shell, around six years prior. My memories tell me that the first several years as a family were happy and close, and while I’m open to the idea that I now revisit those early years with rose-colored sunglasses perched on my nose, I think those memories are accurate. We lived in a kind, loving home.
Any fault lines that existed within our family unit widened into cracks in our familial Earth when my wife was diagnosed with early-onset dementia. The disease went through our family like an earthquake. Looking back on it years later it feels cruel and unfair. In some ways, we are all still recovering.
While it affected every member of our family in wildly differing ways, it may have affected Sophie the most.
When Diana and I came home from the neurologist in Denver, we sat the kids down at the dinner table to explain the news to them. I wish I remembered what was said at the table, but mostly, I remember faces. Our youngest daughter Shell’s face wrinkling in pain and confusion. My wife Diana’s face shining bravely as she tried to explain what might happen next. Sophie’s face stony, her mouth set, her arresting hazel-green eyes staring into the middle distance, inscrutable.
In many ways, Sophie and I are still sitting at that table.
Sophie ran away from our home for the last time at the beginning of 2020, just as the cold uncertainty of Covid was taking a grip on the country. I reminded her to be sure and wear a mask. In retrospect, it seems such an innocent request.
Her previous binges had only involved alcohol and weed, but during this year, she gradually admitted she was using meth. It made conversations almost purely transactional. She’d call and say she needed money, ostensibly for rent at the motel, though it was clear more was at stake than rent. I began trying to tie rent money to a promise from her to enter rehab. You can guess how well that went. For several months, she promised to go into rehab, after one more week, one more day, one more phone call, another five hundred dollars, another thousand, endlessly.
After several failed attempts, I cut her off. Screaming, angry phone calls resulted. My core memories of that winter of 2020, the frigid winter of Covid and meth, she’d call at one or two a.m. and just scream at me, usually asking for money but sometimes reaching the level of inchoate rage, near wordlessness, consumed in anger and need.
She always seemed to be driving or in a car with someone else driving. The streets were often icy and dangerous during these calls, and I pictured her in some tiny compact car, swerving and sliding, teasingly close to death. I’d walk away from my warm bed and pace the hall as I talked to her, trying to keep myself from giving her more money, not allowing myself to be baited into an argument.
I probably should have quit picking up the phone, but what was I supposed to do? She was my daughter. She was dying.
Following the diagnosis of early-onset dementia, Diana lived in our home for four more years, and a steadily increasing level of chaos ensued.
One morning, as I was getting the girls ready for school—tying shoes, preparing homework, checking the clock—Diana rushed into the living room with a large kitchen knife in her hand. It looked like a prop from a horror movie. When I saw it, I heard that metallic sound they always play in movies when a knife is shown. Zyyynnnggg!
I was on the couch with Shell, helping her with her shoes. We both froze at the sight of the knife. Sophie stood apart from us all near the front door that Diana tried to escape through several mornings a week. Her eyes were focused on the living room window, looking outside, beyond the chaos in the room.
I stayed frozen on the couch. Shell gently talked her Mom down. I eventually stood and took the knife from Diana, and led her back to our bedroom upstairs.
I knew she could not live in the house with us much longer. Lives hung in the balance.
When I came back down the stairs, Shell sat on the couch, upset but composed.
Sophie stood at the front door, backpack slung on her shoulders, already halfway out the door, her extraordinary green eyes centered on the wide world outside, beyond the walls of the house.
The hospital called me one cold winter morning to tell me Sophie was in the ICU. I grabbed my bag and drove straight to the hospital.
The police discovered Sophie’s motionless body under a bridge, on a night where temperatures were dipping into freezing. She didn’t respond to attempts to revive her, so she was taken by ambulance to the hospital in the middle of the night.
She had either OD’ed or attempted suicide, or some hazy combination of the two, under that bridge. She was hours, if not minutes, from death. The paramedics and hospital staff revived her.
When I arrived in her room, she was sleeping. I sat in a large, comfortable chair at the side of her bed. I’d brought my laptop so I could work from her room, so I plugged in and began to work as I waited for her to wake up.
“Get the fuck out of here!” Sophie glared at me from her bed. She had awakened in a poor mood.
“The hospital called me and told me you were here.”
“I didn’t tell them to call you.”
“Somebody did. How would they have known to call me if you didn’t give them my number?”
“I didn’t, and I don’t know who the fuck did, and I want you to get out of my fucking room.”
Less than a minute into our conversation, things had turned argumentative as easily as slipping on an old pair of slippers. I tried to lower the temperature of the exchange.
“I just came to see if you were okay.”
“Well, I’m okay. So you can leave.” She turned away from me, closed her eyes, and fell quickly into sleep.
Why did I stay in the room when she asked me to leave? Mostly, I didn’t want her to think I left her. I wanted her to know I stayed there in the room with her.
I sat with her for three days. Mostly, she yelled at me for three days.
“I was trying to kill myself,” she told me. “Did you know that? Do you care?”
“I’m trying to. I’m here.”
“Go away.”
“I love you.”
“Fuck you.”
During those three days, I showed up late in the morning and stayed until late afternoon. I brought my laptop and remained in the comfy chair pulled around to the side so Sophie wouldn’t immediately see me. I ate hospital food for lunch, right there in the room, brought to me by a nurse. The food was surprisingly good, and the nurses were nice to me.
Sophie mostly slept. She’d awake from time to time, and usually, she didn’t see me. When she did see me she’d yell at me, though the power and the duration of her monologues lessened over the days. I let her rant and tried very hard not to join her arguments.
Our first ceasefire occurred when she turned on the television. I’m not sure she saw me initially. She turned on the TV, flipped channels, and stopped on a daytime talk show she wouldn’t normally stop on. At some point, I saw her turn her head and notice me. She didn’t yell at me. She watched TV. I watched TV. Occasionally, her attention would wander from the screen to my face, meeting my gaze directly. Her extraordinary sea-green eyes studied the distance between us.
I won’t speak for my daughter, but I know that in the hospital room, I slipped into a comfort zone. We sat together with no agenda, no purpose but easy comfort in the shared space around the television. We watched the images float across the TV screen like motes floating across our eyes.
For two of those three days in the hospital, the television-related truce allowed us a few precious moments of non-combat.
On the fourth day, she was gone.
She’d been discharged and checked out of the hospital. She returned to her friends and her life in the streets.
She called to ask me for a favor shortly afterward.
She was living in a motel with friends. The favor was to retrieve some of her belongings from where she used to live and bring them back to her motel room.
I picked her up in the parking lot of a cheap motel. She didn’t want me to know which room they lived in.
She had a child with her. He was a small boy, maybe two. She held him tenderly, which touched a place deep down in my parental core. I asked her who he was.
“He’s my kid.”
I knew it wasn’t her biological kid. “What do you mean?” I fought against my instincts to lecture her.
“He’s mine.”
“Meaning?”
“He lives with us.”
“Okay.” I tried not to push. “What’s his name?”
“Mike.”
I let it go. “Hi, Mike.”
Mike looked at me but did not otherwise react. He seemed comfortable with Sophie and clung to her easily. His face did not look fearful or sad so much as blank.
He didn’t talk.
They climbed into the back of my soccer-mom minivan. He sat in her lap. She did not put on her seat belt, and she didn’t put one around the boy. I did not admonish her, though I was immediately reminded of all the times I watched her and her sister buckle in, with the rule that the car didn’t move until everyone was buckled in.
I drove slowly. Sophie didn’t give me an address, but she told me where to turn and which roads to take. A few minutes later, we pulled into another parking lot. An apartment building loomed behind us.
“Stay here,” Sophie told me. She and Mike got out of the car. She took Mike into her arms again and walked off toward the building. As Sophie and Mike approached a side door, it opened.
A woman carrying a laundry basket of clothes and belongings emerged from behind the opening door. Sophie walked up to meet her.
The woman set the basket on the asphalt and went back inside. Sophie put Mike down and picked up the laundry basket. The two of them made their way toward the car. I wrestled with the idea of getting out of the car to help her load the basket in, but I didn’t want to upset the delicate balance of the situation.
Sophie struggled to get the basket inside the car and still hold Mike’s hand.
“Why don’t you let me take him?”
She shot me a guarded look.
“While you’re packing. I’ll hold him. It’s okay.”
Wordlessly, she considered my offer. I sat in the driver’s seat of the car. She stood outside the car, apart from me. Her arresting green eyes measured the situation, a guarded gaze sweeping across me, Mike, the car, the cracked asphalt of the parking lot.
“Really, honey. We’ll just sit here in the car.”
She handed the boy over to me. He surrendered easily, and sat in my lap, wearing the same blank-but-game expression. I turned on the heater. I did what I usually did when hanging out with a little kid: I described things. I’d done it a thousand times with my own kids. Sophie and the woman were behind us, loading stuff into the hatchback. I told the boy what we watched out of the front windshield, in the opposite direction.
“That’s a streetlight. And look, a bus stop and someone is sitting on a bench. And look, way up in the sky! Do you know what that bright thing is? That’s the moon.”
He listened without reacting. I described the view through the windshield as if we were watching TV. The distance comforted me, as did his calm presence in my lap. This boy lived a nomadic existence in a series of motel rooms, taken care of by adults who were themselves on the cusp of ruin. I comforted him with the same parental trick I’d used on my kids, describing what we saw in front of us, but in truth, my own child was wrecked and hurting behind me, piling what little remained of her life into the back of the car.
The woman brought out a few more laundry baskets of belongings, which Sophie dutifully unloaded into the car’s hatch.
She returned to the driver’s side. I handed the boy back to her, and they sat in the back, the boy again on Sophie’s lap.
We drove back to the motel, Sophie giving the directions.
We pulled into the parking lot. She showed me where to park: next to an outdoor staircase leading to the second floor.
When I picked her up, Sophie had met me outside, and I had no idea which motel room she lived in. She didn’t want me to know. Now, however, she was taking her belongings from my car to the room. She had no way to hide where she was living.
Her room was on the second floor. She carried armloads of belongings up the stairs and into an open doorway, where light spilled out onto the dark concrete outside. I took an armload of clothes and followed.
The stairs were slabs of concrete on a metal frame. I focused on my footsteps. The open doorway was just to the side, on the floor above me. I couldn’t see inside.
When I reached the second floor, the open door to the room stood in front of me. I slowly strolled toward the entrance, reached it, and turned to look into the room.
The room held two beds, with a bathroom at the far end. The light in the room seemed unnaturally bright. The five of them were in a clump at the back of the room. Two men, boys, really. Two women, one of them my daughter. The small boy I had held on my lap. The sight reminded me of a group hug, but they weren’t hugging. They all stood extremely close, talking in low voices, dramatically exchanging seemingly vital information.
They looked like a family standing there together.
They felt ten thousand miles away.
The woman who was not my daughter saw me in the doorway. She gave a half-hearted wave. I set down the things I carried just inside the doorway. No one made a move to retrieve them.
Sophie was out of pocket. She was going to die. Drugs, or suicide, or some fellow addict with anger issues and a loaded gun. It was only a matter of time.
Her probation officer told me there was a warrant out for her arrest. She cared about Sophie. Her clients were important to her, and she did her best for them.
“A warrant for her arrest. What does that mean, exactly?”
“She’ll be arrested when she shows up for her next probation appointment.”
I paused before asking the next question. “Does she know that?”
“No.”
A plan began to occur to me.
Even when she was in the wind, Sophie still called me nearly every day. That connection has never changed. I don’t know if that’s healthy or not. I imagine it’s a lot of things, some of them healthy, some not so much.
So, during our calmer conversations, I’d ask her if she was going in to see her probation officer. She’d tell me the date for her next appointment. She usually told me she was going, though she never did.
She didn’t know a warrant had already been issued for her arrest. I told her the PO would issue a warrant if she didn’t show.
So, yes, to clarify, I was lying to her. She was about to die if something didn’t change.
In addition to calling me nearly every day, she also called her younger sister. They shared secrets with each other that never reached my ear.
She, too, steered Sophie toward her PO.
Sophie’s biggest excuse for not seeing her PO, often true, was that she didn’t have a ride.
Her sister offered to pick her up and take her.
She said yes.
The PO, my youngest daughter, and I were now focused on getting her to that next appointment.
I’ll let my youngest daughter tell the next bit of the story. I asked her for her version via text, and she responded. She was there; I wasn’t.
“I went, and I picked her up and we went and got lunch at this crappy little fast-food Mexican restaurant. We got these giant Horchatas that were the size of our heads. We ate the food at Acacia Park. We had the windows rolled down. It was a nice day. We swung on the swings. She didn’t even look like herself. She looked so thin and sick. We spent about an hour sitting there just talking, then it was time to go to probation.
“We got to her probation appointment. Sophie asked if I could go back with her probation officer. The PO said no. I assume that’s because she was about to get arrested.
“A few minutes later, her probation officer came out and told me she had been arrested. She handed me her purse.”
The PO returned and told my younger daughter that Sophie was going to the county jail. Many court dates would follow.
I was also told that Sophie’s first words as she was tackled by police and hit the cold, hard linoleum of the PO’s office were, “Tell Dad I’m sorry.”
I’d love to believe that, but I think that’s just my daughter trying to make me feel better.
Those court dates followed, as did incarceration, a failed attempt at a halfway house, more court dates, and more incarceration. There’s no need for me to recount all that.
Sophie is in prison now. She will be for quite some time.
We talk nearly every day, but the situation enforces a certain distance in our conversations. She has to call me. The call doesn’t always go through, and when it does, the charges are usurious, as the company that created the phone system has no one to answer to but prisoners with few rights.
She’ll be out of prison in a few years. I expect she’ll stumble a time or two before getting her footing. I also expect her to transition successfully to the larger world. She’s worked hard while incarcerated to work on her addiction and anger issues and to complete her college degree.
Yes, those meth-fueled phone calls in the middle of an icy Covid-ravaged winter swim upstream from my store of memories. When I answered the phone those nights, it was almost like I was in the car with her, in the dark, careening down icy 2 a.m. streets, slick with calamity.
I remember holding that little boy in my arms in the middle of the night, watching the motherless world through his mute eyes as my daughter assembled the broken pieces of her life in the trunk of my car.
Diana and I sat our kids down at the kitchen table a decade ago, forever bifurcating events into a before and an after. Life and people move on. Diana died a shockingly short time after her diagnosis of early-onset dementia. Our youngest daughter has a child now and misses her mom in very practical ways. I live with my second wife in a city less than an hour’s drive from the house that held that kitchen table.
We’re all solidly embedded in the here and now, but for Sophie and I, it feels like we’re still stuck, sitting at that kitchen table. She’s still staring into space, inscrutable, her sea foam eyes a world away. I’m still waiting for her reaction to the news. She seemed ten thousand miles from me when she lived in that motel room. Prison walls impose that distance now.
She’s no longer slinging rocks at me in the dark. I’m no longer dodging her missiles. We’re no longer moving farther away from each other.
We’ve traveled through therapists, psych units, treatment centers, halfway houses, jail, and now prison, trying to find a way back to each other.
***
Artwork by Catur Argi
If you or someone you know are experiencing suicidal ideation or opioid addiction, help is available: Call or text 988 to connect with trained counselors at 988 Lifeline who can provide support for mental health crises, including suicidal thoughts. The CDC’s Naloxone Toolkit provides information on how to access and administer Narcan (naloxone), a life-saving medication for opioid overdoses. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services also offers comprehensive resources for those impacted by opioid addiction.
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