Suspended Sentence

by Janice Morgan

  Back at the work site, Dylan said he was sure there was still one big root down there somewhere that was holding in the ironwood stump. It was living up to its name, that’s for sure. Digging once more all around it, only more deeply, he eventually found the stump’s anchor. “Look at this,” he called out. The root was twice as large as the others he had already severed with the mattock, the ones that were lying in pieces in the wheelbarrow. The stump wasn’t going anywhere as long as that one powerful root, as big as the tree trunk itself, held it in place from below. Once it was finally cut through, the whole stump rocked loose and could be removed in chunks, like the others. Next the hole had to be filled in again with all the dirt that had been pushed aside. One last item for the workday: Dylan used an electric trimmer we found in the toolshed to cut the remaining tall grasses between the hemlock and the stone path. He placed the golden clippings over the rest of the bare earth, along with the other grass remains. To me, it looked like an Indian ritual, maybe an offering.

  “It’s just a good way to aerate the soil,” he told me. “Plus, the nutrients from the plants go back in.” I always marveled at how much horticultural knowledge my son possessed. But maybe that shouldn’t be such a surprise, since he grew up among gardeners.

  On another day, after Dylan had been working hard on the project, I remarked to him, “You know, you see yourself as so different from your dad, but you do have certain things in common. You both have an artistic sense; you like physical work outdoors; you enjoy working with plants, and you’re a perfectionist.”

  “I know,” Dylan replied. “That’s what scares me. Me, being like Dad.”

  “What’s scary about it?”

  “Dad’s too sensitive. He’s all about touchy-feely. He could use his design ability to make money and be successful—but he doesn’t. He doesn’t want to push himself; he holds back. He makes excuses.”

  “Well, I think your dad’s living just the way he wants to,” I countered. “He always told me he wasn’t willing to give up all his time and energy to be ‘successful’ by someone else’s standards. It was a choice.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s not my choice,” Dylan said.

  For Dylan, the garden project was a stepping stone to his foremost objective, and I knew he would be in no way distracted from the plan to get his license back and somehow obtain a vehicle. For him, doing that meant he would be on the Road to Success. So even before the idea came up of him working on the garden, even before he was released from his seven-day sanction at jail, I felt I had to visit Darlene Winchester at her office to ask a few more questions. Mostly I wanted her advice—post-relapse, post-sanction, that is. I knew her main concern was for her clients, but as parent and chief financial backer, I needed more input. When I arrived, she was busy moving aside piles of folders, probably Drug Court case files. Seeing me at the door, she put aside her paperwork and directed me to my now-familiar seat by the lamp-lit desk.

  “Thanks for agreeing to see me on such short notice,” I said. “So, now what?” I asked, looking her in the eye. “When we were both here a short while ago, Dylan was talking about a plan to get a car. Now, after the relapse, and with him taking the sanction in jail, do you still think this is a good idea?”

  She put her fingers together, looked thoughtful.

  “Well, has he told you about what happened?”

  “Yes, at least some of it. He told me some bad things were going on when I took him to an AA meeting, then he talked more afterward about a second relapse. With Jeremy.”

  “So do you feel he’s been honest with you?”

  I hesitated.

  “Well, yes … eventually. I know he was holding back at first, maybe because he didn’t want to lose my support for getting a car. But he told me what happened the second time right away. He said he was trying to call you about it, too.”

  “Yes, I remember.” She folded her arms on the desk. “OK, here’s how I see it, “ she said, leaning forward, with me hanging on every word. “If he hadn’t told you anything, if he hadn’t been honest with you, then I’d say no help with the car. But if you think he’s been open about it, then I’d say to go ahead.”

  She paused, and I exhaled slowly. She went on, “Me, I’m always looking for teachable moments for my clients, and I think this has been one for Dylan.”

  To elaborate, Darlene stressed how important it was for people in Drug Court, if they were serious about getting free of their addiction, that any relapse occur—if it was going to happen—within the structure of the program. That way, they could be guided through their feelings before, during, and after the relapse. They could analyze how it happened: What were the factors at play? How could this be prevented another time? How do they feel about being high? About being sober?

  She summed it up by saying, “We want the person to be pushed by the relapse incident to find out: what is going on with you to make this happen?”

  As before, I felt reassured by her words. For me, there would be no risk-free decision, but with eyes open, I could make a choice. I nodded, thanked her, and we shook hands before I left her office.

  In fact, as the weeks went by, I noticed this post-relapse self-interrogation by Dylan was occurring. Though not an official member of the Drug Court group, I sometimes had a front-row seat on the sidelines. To me, it all felt like part of that road trip my son and I were on. I say this because our talks would frequently occur while the two of us were seated side by side in my car. After I’d taken him somewhere, before I dropped him off, he’d slowly unearth his thoughts with me. Some of what Dylan revealed from the past frankly horrified me. I realized how little I really knew about what had been going on behind the scenes. Once, when I took him back to his apartment, he told me more about how his connection to Jeremy recalled aspects of his risk-taking life back in Cincinnati. Jeremy was somehow tied in with an old buddy back there, Nick. As often happened with my son, the story would start with a fragment. Then, after a pause, his words came in a steady stream, a torrent, a rush of memory and emotion.

  “It took a long time to admit that I’m an addict. At first, I was in denial. I also denied what I was feeling during my time in Cincinnati. Especially that year when I dropped out of school to work on my own. I had plenty of things going then. I used to think that was my high point in life, at least, so far. I had a lot of money sometimes—that is, when I wasn’t scrounging for my next dime. I’d be sure then that Caitlin knew I had a lot of money. We’d go out to the clubs; we’d have the best new clothes, and we’d order Grey Goose. We’d drop hundreds of dollars a night. I thought that was the high life. Baby, I’ve arrived! But then—and somehow I hid this from myself for a long time—I started to realize that was bullshit. Those ‘golden times’ really lasted only a few hours. The whole rest of the time was hell: the fear when me and my roommate Gabe made the pick-ups, the shame, the shady characters, the constant anxiety. We really only had a few moments of glory. The rest of the time we were miserable. Take Nick, for example.”

  “Nick? Wait, was he the high-rolling club guy you used to talk about sometimes, especially that first summer?”

  “Yeah, Nick was a guy who seemed to be a real player at the clubs—and later on, we had the most amazing conversations on all kinds of topics. Only I found out he kept most of his stuff—his clothes, his shoes—in a trash bag! I mean, he was ready to run at any moment. He totally depended on his girlfriend for a place to live—otherwise, the guy would’ve been homeless! He didn’t have a regular job; his life was mainly on the street. But what’s strange is that up until recently, I would often think back on the ‘glory days’ of my life in Cincinnati. I called them that way because it was a time when I felt important, powerful, like I was in control. That’s what I told myself then. But I wasn’t. I was just in deep denial.”

  He shook his head and stayed silent for a while.

  “I didn’t get arrested in Cincinnati for what I had done. They had shootings and armed robberies to deal with. The police w
eren’t worried about pot being sold, or even cocaine, unless it was obvious. We were below the radar. But, eventually, it did all come down on me: Life, God, the Universe—whatever spiritual force you want to call it—punished me. Everything crashed down. I couldn’t continue what I was doing. I had to leave all that behind. I’ve had to slowly try to build myself up since then.”

  In listening to this, it felt like I was sitting next to a total stranger. It’s not as if I’d held onto the blind belief that my son was some kind of saint, but I didn’t exactly see him as a criminal, either. I mean, he had charges, but I thought of him as someone who was just irresponsible, thoughtless—frustrated, too. Someone who’d temporarily lost his way. But now the stories he told me gave me a different slant on it, as if my son had felt like a desperate ghetto kid who’d chosen to go underground because he didn’t think he could ever do things the right way, the usual way, the way other people with more means did them. That’s the part of his identity that I never really understood because it seemed so alien to me. I remember how he used to tell me (whenever I launched into one of my indignant mom sermons), “You don’t know. You’re not like me. Only God can judge me.” That last one was a quote straight from Tupac. It’s taken me a while to revise my thoughts.

  “They say that if you tell someone, you’re more likely to leave that life behind,” Dylan continued. “I know now that I could slip back into that life. It started to happen just last month with Jeremy. You know, I liked him. We got along. His dad owned a local business, a movie and game rental shop with a tanning salon. He’d traveled to places like Aspen, Colorado with his family—places I knew about, so we had things in common; we could talk. He was in Drug Court, too, and for a while, he was doing fine. Since I didn’t have a car, he ended up being my main ride. He was a poker player, used to make hundreds or a thousand a game playing poker. He used all his smarts, and he would read people, so he knew the ones he could beat and take their money. But he had his hard-luck story too. He’d been a hard user of drugs. It all started when his grandma got cancer and was prescribed strong pain control medicines, like OxyContin. These opioids were around the house, and Jeremy tried them. When he got addicted, he had to spend a lot of money to support his habit. He even started stealing from his own share of the family business, robbing himself to pay off the drug dealers.”

  I wondered later how his family found out, if they’d had to turn in their own addicted son for theft or if he got arrested somewhere. Probably the latter.

  “When Jeremy got into Drug Court, he stayed clean for weeks. But then, he was feeling down, like he wanted to get high again. I was at a real low point; I did, too. Once, when he started drinking and reaching for his pills, I told him, ‘Come clean, tell them you’re having a relapse, so you can get help and stay in.’ But Jeremy, he somehow thought that he couldn’t mess up at all. He didn’t understand how it worked in the program, how he could slip but still get back in. Or maybe he just didn’t care after a while, after the addiction became too powerful. He just went into total free fall. Can you believe that?”

  I shook my head, and there was silence.

  An image came into my mind. I saw a young man climbing up a sheer rock face. Somebody was inching up a granite wall like Half Dome at Yosemite, and he may or may not have any ropes on him. He may just be using his hands and feet—and every muscle in his body—to go upward, one handhold, one foothold at a time.

  “Well, then what happened to him?” I asked.

  “Oh, he’s way out of Drug Court now. When I had to do my sanction time in jail, I heard Jeremy was locked up in there somewhere, in another cell—only for longer. I never saw him after that incident.”

  I had a sense of the young rock climber falling off the cliff. How would he be able to crawl back up again? If he didn’t change, he could die young. Or maybe he’d live for years and keep doing the same painful things over and over, go through the same addiction cycles. What would help him?

  Dylan’s revelations were painful to hear, but—following Darlene Winchester’s statements—I knew it all had to come out. Like they say, you have to bring what’s hidden out into the clear light of day if you want to heal. Maybe it was like those tree stump roots; they had to come out, too, in order to free up space for a new plant. Otherwise, they would just keep sending up more shoots to interfere. My hope now was this: if Dylan could learn to observe himself more closely, if he could understand his own motivations, then maybe he could catch himself faster from falling into destructive behaviors. Eventually, maybe he’d be less likely to put himself into a precarious situation in the first place. He’d be less drawn to take a detour.

  You know, in movies, there’s always one dramatic moment when everything changes for the protagonist. From that one moment, the character either rises to the heights or falls into the depths. But in real life, there can be many incremental moments, and you don’t always realize which way they’re going at the time. The path isn’t clear ahead. For a recovering addict, just getting through a day without resorting to drugs is a triumph, while giving in to the urge to use again can lead to disaster. And who knows what the factors are that allow someone to know the difference, to care about it, to seize the possible right hold on the rock face in that moment and take it?

  As for what Darlene Winchester said, it seems to me there would always have to be way more than just one teachable moment for a person. To me, the way we each learn different lessons about life, about ourselves—even side by side within the same family—this seems to be one of the greatest mysteries of all time.

  Not long after this, Dylan told me about a talk he’d had with Darlene after he got out of jail in early August.

  “When I was a teenager, because I didn’t feel that I fit in, I started hanging out with the troublemakers.”

  “So what were your best times, the times when you felt you belonged?” Darlene asked him.

  “Not when I was doing what I was doing in Cincinnati. I remember times when I was young and in school; maybe a teacher would come over and talk to me so I would feel special, or it could have been when I was with a church group doing fun things, or maybe taking trips with Dad. It wasn’t so much being with Dad, but with his friends, like up in Maine or in Arizona or someplace like that. We would have such good times! Those times made me realize how good life could be.”

  In the remaining weeks of August and September, in between classes, rains, meetings, and responsibilities, the garden took shape. Dylan and I collaborated on what needed to be delivered when. We made a couple more visits to the nursery to select plants, soil, and mulch. By late September, I could see a small Japanese maple with star-shaped red leaves standing atop a gently sloping mound. It stood amid patches of low pacifica junipers that would one day fill the space to look like a blue-green sea. The tall, wide hemlock looked more nestled in, more at peace, less besieged by grasses. The whole garden was neatly defined, with a curving line and narrow trench along its borders. A thick carpet of fragrant cedar bark chips covered the soil, preventing weeds and retaining moisture. The summer heat was gone now, and the root systems of the new plants could grow for at least two more months before winter. Along the curved walkway to the right, Dylan planted four small drift roses that would eventually expand to twice their current size, each of them filled with miniature red blooms. The next May, these would make a fine contrast to the surrounding evergreens, a celebration to behold each day. And to the left of the walkway, I could maintain a small herb garden for the kitchen, starting next spring: rosemary, basil, sage, even a few strawberry plants with their decorative, seashell leaves.

  And who would have believed what this whole area looked like a few short months earlier? Of course, I told Dylan how wonderful it all was. About that, we were in complete agreement. Even John was amazed when he saw the transformation. After this, I vowed to be a better gardener. Every week of the next growing season, I would scan the area for suspect intruders and pluck them out when they were tiny. Eventually, t
he new plants would spread and grow vigorously enough to discourage implantations from outside. However, even then I’d have to be vigilant. An unintentional forest could happen again if I didn’t watch out. And I did not ever want to resort to a chainsaw or herbicide again—at least not for another ten years.

  The Queen knew all along that the sturdy woodsman was really her son, the Prince. So that when she saw how steadfast he was in clearing the woods and cutting back the vines, she was proud. And when she witnessed the beautiful garden being created in place of the wilderness, her satisfaction was all the greater, knowing this was the handiwork of her own son, and there was harmony between them. What she really wanted for both of them was greater understanding, mutual respect, and affection.

  Every day the Queen walked outside, she marveled, especially when she saw the roses. She vowed to protect the garden for as long as she lived there. Never again would she allow the wild forest to come so close to the castle.

  CHAPTER 25: FIREFLIES AND STARS

  When my son was very young, maybe five, he went through a phase in the springtime in which, just before we all went to school or work, on his way to the car he would suddenly run around in the yard or in the open field next door and pick dandelions. He would run up to me and give me his bouquet. I’d tell him how beautiful they were. Then he’d laugh, get in the car, and we would all be on our way.

  Like boys everywhere, Dylan loved catching all kinds of wild creatures: tadpoles, frogs, toads, large insects, crawfish. But in the summer, a favorite pastime was capturing fireflies. Once he drew me into the house shortly before nightfall. He stopped me right inside the screen door of our porch. “We can’t turn on the lights yet,” he said. “OK, now close your eyes,” he said. “You can’t peek.” I kept them shut, but I was getting nervous. It was hard enough to keep up with this child even with my eyes wide open. Who knows what he had in his pocket or up his sleeve this time? “OK, now you can open them,” he commanded. When I did, at first I didn’t see anything. It was pretty dark, after all. Then I started to see a small glow of light nearby, then another near my son’s head. Dylan said, “Look up there,” and I looked up to see another glow of light, then another and another right near the high rafters of our living room. They were fireflies, and he’d just released them from a jar he’d concealed to carry them in. We laughed to see them; they were joyous and magical. He knew I loved the tiny, flying light bulbs that flashed at night among the trees in the early days of summer. The area around our house in the woods was a flickering light show most early summer evenings.