Chapter One
The Boy in the Cape and Cowboy Boots
November 24, 2005, 12:30 A.M. Jeff is twenty-seven years old.
So how do I feel? Like a failure of a mother. Everyone in the field of drug addiction says, "Dont blame yourself. You didnt cause it, you cant cure it; you didnt make him a drug addict." But look deeply into a mothers eyes and tell her that her child is dying and its not her fault. Sure, it makes sense if its not your kid. But for a mother to do nothing to stop the pain, to alter its courseis it possible for a mother not to feel guilt, shame, intense hurt? Maybe for some, but Im not there. I doubt if I ever will be. For me, I think I will wear this like a skin. Maybe Ill forget I have it on sometimes, but it will be forever part of my being, my eyes, my smile, my thoughts like a breath that catches me short or my heart when it misses a beat. Thats it. Jeff is my heart murmurI have allowed his aches and traumas to damage my heart, and it is beyond repair. Maybe this isnt the case for other parents, and maybe Im wrong, not healthy. But this is what I feel, this is my heart.
Motherhood wasnt always this way, this battle with addiction, this feeling of failure. How did it all change? I wish I could trace the beginning of Jeffs drug addiction and point to a continuum of events, of specific blips on a chronological graph that cry out the alarm, danger, drug addict in the making, danger, addiction coming, like a trucks warning as it backs up. How does one become an addict? How does one become anything? Is it in the genes? Of course thats part of it, but not all. Is it in the upbringing? Life situations? Birth order? Specific events? I have two sons, and they are different. One is an addict; one is not. What is it that has kept Jeremy safe and put Jeff at such risk?
Their early years run through my memory like one of those picture books that you flip quickly with your thumb, the images blending together to tell the story. We lived at the northernmost end of Calvert County, Maryland, a rural tobacco- growing region, a peninsula surrounded on three sides by the waters of the Chesapeake Bay and Patuxent River. Our neighborhood was called Quince View Meadows, and the boys days were spent there, among the woods and trails. Their memories are filled with the deep greens of the woods at twilight, with the shades of yellow and orange as the light filtered through the leaves, with the laughter of playmates as they raced through the fields, with the crisp smells of autumn and the crunching sounds of leaves as they traipsed up the long driveway home, to their tree fort, to the tire swing that lifted them to the heavens and twirled round and round on the descent.
Jeff, from his earliest years, loved to imagine, to create, and I can trace his childhood through his fantasies. He was Superman, Batman, Spider- Man, and even Aquaman, then He- Man, a kind of invincible superhuman, followed by Luke Skywalker fighting for good against the evil Darth Vader, Indiana Jones on a search for trea sures, then a BMX biker taking to the air from the ramps he built with his buddies, and finally a skateboarder leaving the safety of the neighborhood behind as he discovered new frontiers.
Maybe Jeff always wanted to escape reality, live somewhere else. It seemed so harmless then, during his early years. It seemed magical.
When Jeff was just two years old his scarlet Superman cape became part of his daily attire, hanging around his neck and trailing down his small back. He had found an iron- on emblem on the back of a cereal box and asked, "Will you, Mommy? Can you make me a cape, just like Superman, with this on it?" When Jeff donned his homemade cloth, he became Superman and joined the fight for good.
I remember sitting next to two-and-a-half-year-old Jeff as we peered out his bedroom window on the third floor, high above the ground, and always feeling a little afraid that one day he might leap out in the belief that he could fly.
"Jeff, do you think you can fly?"
"Yeah, I know I can."
"Angel, do you know what fantasy is?"
"Yep. Its when things arent real, like fairy tales."
"And do you know what real is?"
"Uh-huh," he nodded his head slightly up and down, his dark brown hair cut short with long bangs that framed his eyes, intense and innocent, as he studied me quizzically, wondering, I think, what was my problem that I didnt understand this whole flying thing. "Real is true, like what happens, like what we see."
"Great. If fantasy is make-believe and real is what happens, do you really think you can fly?"
"Yep, I know I can fly, because Superman is real and he flies."
And so it went, to the grocery store, to preschool, Jeff wearing his trusty red cape, denim Wrangler jeans, the cordovan cowboy belt with his name embossed on the leather, and the saddleback-colored cowboy boots that my parents had bought for him when we last visited them in Florida. Quite naturally, the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., became one of our favorite destinations, since Jeff was enamored with space travel. Once, when he was about three or four, he wore his entire Superman outfit, complete with blue tights, T-shirt emblazoned with the Superman S, navy shorts, cowboy boots, and of course his cape to lead the way to the lunar space module on the first floor to the deep right of the entrance. He stood next to Jeremy and explained in a loud childs voice, unaware of others near us: "Jeremy, Neil Armstrong was the first man who ever walked on the moon, in Apollo 13. The moon has no gravity or air to breathe, so he had to wear a space suit and heavy boots made just for space. He got to the moon from the space ship in this lunar module. OK, now well go upstairs to show you the golf club that Neil Armstrong used to hit the ball." Jeremy, just twenty months younger, and who looked like he could have been Jeffs twinonly smaller, and with lighter brown hair and hazel eyes listened to everything his older brother said as if memorizing each word.
Of course I was proud proud of them both, my babies. I was a teacher, and that was my lifes profession; I was a mother, and my sons were learning together. These were the days when I could love them as openly as I wanted. Which I did.
As Jeff and Jeremy grew older and entered elementary school, their bonds became tighter. They would lie on Jeremys bed together, looking out his window at the woods beneath, and they would cloud talk, the kind of daydreaming that kids do. Although they were still confined by the borders of Quince View, their days were now filled with leaving home behind. There were other times, too, when Jeff hung out with his friends, and they would hide from Jeremy and his gang because the big guys were just too cool to play with the little ones. Jeff and his buddies built forts in the woods, played basketball at the courts, constructed bicycle ramps, careened through the neighborhood on their two- wheeled horses, and swung between trees on the vines in what they named Vine Jungle. They swam and perfected their cannonball dives in neighbors pools, hopping between the Saltas and the Kesslers. Winters made frigid playgrounds, with snow blanketing the woods and fields; their world became a crystal wonder