People were shaking their heads in accordance and dismay. “If he’s disappeared, it’s not my fault,” she said, now actually a bit alarmed at the bite in her voice. “Because nobody can get you sober. You have to want it.” God, she sounded like the hard-ass old program cranks that she always complained about! Boaz put his arm around her.
“Anyway, thanks for letting me pipe up, and I’m grateful to be here and grateful to be sober today, because it doesn’t matter that I have almost twenty years sober. This is what I have. This is what matters. Today.”
“Thanks, Drew,” the room chorused. She sighed and sank back down in her seat. Others were called on, but she couldn’t hear what they were saying; she found that she was stewing in fury. Surreptitiously she pulled out her iPhone and texted her sponsor: “Mateo didn’t show up to meeting, I’m freaking out.” Three minutes later, her sponsor texted back: “Relax, don’t jump to conclusions.” That’s what she needed to hear.
After the meeting, Boaz asked if she wanted a ride home and she accepted.
“Can we swing by Intelligentsia?” she asked.
He glanced at her sidelong. “Sure,” he said.
Mateo wasn’t sitting outside the huge hipster café and he wasn’t sitting inside. She told herself not to, then she did: she asked the manager if Mateo had been in, but the manager, a pretty blond girl with a tiny diamond stud in her nose, had seen no sign of him. She felt a sick, cold pang in her stomach and walked out to Boaz’s Prius.
“He never was here, the girl said,” she announced, getting in.
“Oh, shit,” Boaz said. He drove her home.
“Will you wait here one second?” she asked him when he pulled into the driveway. “I want to check something.”
“Sure,” he said. Drew hurried into the house and found exactly what she’d feared she’d find. Her wallet, which stupidly she’d left in her purse on the kitchen table, since she was just walking to a meeting, was shorn of cash and credit cards. And in the room where Mateo had been staying, all his stuff was gone. She charged back out of the house toward Boaz.
“Well, that’s just as I feared,” she said. “My cash and credit cards are gone and so is his stuff.”
“You’re kidding,” Boaz said.
“I’m not.” She started crying. “We were fools! He could’ve stayed in the halfway house and we could’ve just met at meetings. But no, I wanted to help my friend.” She pushed back her hair. “Well, the joke’s on us, I guess.”
“You want me to come inside?”
“No, sweetie, get back to Becca. I’ll go inside and cancel my cards and call Christian. And, oh God, then I have to call his mother.”
She and Boaz hugged good-bye. Then she went inside. Her eyes were throbbing and she wanted a glass of white wine. It amazed her that she could still have that instinct in times of freaking out, even after nearly twenty years. She poured herself a glass of water instead and called the bank, gazing around the house while she waited for the service rep to come on to see if Mateo had left a note. He hadn’t.
The rep finally came on. Yes, said the rep, a withdrawal at a Silver Lake ATM had been made at 1:37 P.M. for $400, the maximum, and another at a nearby ATM at 1:47 P.M., also for the $400 max. That was it so far. Drew froze the bank card and did the same to her credit cards, which, somewhat miraculously, hadn’t run up any charges yet. It occurred to her that, somewhere along the line, somehow, Mateo had gotten her ATM PIN number. How on earth? she wondered. No cokehead, no crackhead, she thought, was ever as conniving, as utterly zombielike and self-serving, as a fucking junkie.
Then she caught herself and took a deep breath. When she and Christian took Mateo in, she reminded herself, they’d acknowledged to each other that this could happen. It had already happened to Milly and Jared in New York. So it had happened again, and it was pointless, she told herself, to be infuriated about it; it was simply beyond her control. But the most curious feeling, which she couldn’t shake, was that she was letting down Milly all over again, nearly twenty years later.
She called Christian and relayed the news.
“This is making me incredibly fucking sad to hear,” Christian said.
“You said he should spend the year in a halfway house after rehab and I was the one who pushed and said we should make him the offer,” she said. “And I have to come clean: after all these years, I did it out of guilt. I couldn’t believe Milly was going through a drug thing with somebody again — first her mom, then me, then her own son — and I did it out of guilt.”
“You didn’t do it out of guilt. You did it out of love,” Christian said. “You know that.”
Drew slumped in the kitchen chair and felt more tears coming. “I wanted to pay her back.”
Christian laughed lightly, startling her. “Because you’re in love with her, darling,” he said agreeably. “I’ve always known there’s one other love in your life besides me, and it’s Milly. Saint Milly.”
“That’s a mean thing to say to me right now,” she complained through her tears.
“Well—” he protested. Then he had a long pause. “I’m sorry. It was. But I still think you did it out of love, not guilt. We don’t have anything to feel badly about—”
“Except he probably already has a needle in his arm.”
“Eight hundred dollars is not so much. Why don’t you wait until I’m home in an hour or two to call Milly?”
“Because you think he might come back?” she asked.
“He can’t live with us again,” Christian said swiftly. “The most we’ll do is make calls to try to put him in a halfway house, or in detox if he needs it.”
Drew let out a very deep sigh. “This is the day it all went south,” she announced.
“Call your sponsor, darling. I love you and I’ll see you soon.”
She sat there for another fifteen minutes, crying weakly. She walked around the house, looking for signs of Mateo. He’d denuded the guest room of his belongings, except for the black knit skater-boy-type cap he’d been wearing day in and day out, as a kind of security blanket, pulled down low so that the fold touched his massive opaque-black sunglasses. Now he was out there with a needle in his arm without his security hat, which prompted Drew’s first raw, excruciating pang of true maternal misery over the situation.
Because she’d been growing to love Mateo. “What’s the biggest moment you’ve ever felt in your work?” he’d asked her just last week when they were walking Lewy — he’d asked her very, very casually because he was a very, very cool customer who never gushed or effused or let on that he derived any satisfaction or thrill from making art. And they’d ended up talking for a very long time about their creative processes, and Drew had wished Milly could’ve been a fly on the wall and overheard her son’s amazing, articulate thoughts about making art, which obviously Milly and Jared had infused him with. He had loved cooking at night with her and Christian, and after dinner the three of them would watch that stupid but addictive art-competition reality show on Bravo together, then maybe a movie like Opening Night, because she and Christian had gotten Mateo hooked on Cassavetes. And she’d also loved going to meetings with him, presenting him with his sixty-day chip, and she was going to present him his ninety-day chip. She was bringing the story with Milly full circle.