In the recovery world, we often speak of outcomes: who succeeds in treatment; who relapses or disappears or dies. My ability to stay sober was more than explained by my ACE score, the metric for Adverse Childhood Experiences, which in my case was an almost unheard-of zero. Loving family; no incarceration, addictions, or domestic violence—all of which raised the question of why I’d turned to drugs in the first place. Was there some trauma I’d repressed? That was entirely possible; Own Your Unconscious has turned up all kinds of repressed brutalities, and thousands of abusers have been convicted based on the evidence of their victims’ externalized memories, viewed as film in courtrooms.
But what I kept coming back to was my cousin Sasha. Her ACE score would have been high: Her father, an embezzler, vanished when she was six. As a teen, she’d fled the country and drifted through Asia and Europe for a couple of years before my father tracked her down in Naples and persuaded her to come back. I saw now that Sasha’s stealing was an addiction like my own. Yet she and Drew were still married, and their kids—even the boy, Lincoln, whom I remembered as being impossible—were reportedly fine. How had Sasha done this? Curiosity: I had to know. So I asked my dad to put me in touch with Sasha and wrote to her out of the blue, asking if I could come to San Bernardino County and see her sculptures. And she wrote back, more graciously than I deserved, and invited me to visit.
DREW
On our way to pick up Miles at the airport, Sasha and I try to figure out how long it’s been since we last saw her oldest cousin. We both remember the occasion: a gathering at Sasha’s mother’s, in L.A., maybe a year before Miles’s accident. I never liked him. He was the opposite of his dad, Sasha’s uncle Ted, whom we both love. If I could pick a single expression to capture Miles Hollander’s relationship to the world, it would be a wince. Sasha’s tortured history made him wince. Our son, Lincoln, who was a difficult kid, made him wince. It was something to do with Lincoln that prompted my ultimatum: We were finished with Miles Hollander. Looking back, I see my own pathology on display: I hated having an “abnormal” son, a son who made people wince, because I thought it revealed something wrong in me. And it doesn’t get much worse than being responsible for another person’s death. I was an excellent swimmer—a lifeguard—but I’d just had a fight with the friend who followed me into the East River in our sophomore year at NYU. I was ignoring him. And by the time I realized that a current had pulled him out, he was too far away for me to reach him.
It might startle the average person to know how unremittingly these facts are still with me. You’d think the guilt would relax over thirty-six years, and for a time I thought so, too. But I hadn’t counted on the circularity of life: the way it delivers us, with age, back to the beginning. I dream of Rob’s drowning, I weep over it, would do anything to be exorcised of it. But how? Mandala’s MemoryShopTM only really works for recent traumas: You externalize the portion of your memory containing the “event” and then reinternalize it with that part erased, overriding the original. But how can I erase awareness that has permeated every minute of my life since the event itself? I’d have to erase the life I’ve built, and I can’t. I love it all too much.
Rob’s folks passed away in the pandemic, just a few weeks apart. Before that, Sasha and I used to go to Tampa every couple of years to visit them. Rob was their only son （an older sister lives in Michigan）， and it seemed to mean a lot to his mom and dad to see his college friends moving through our lives. They believed Rob and Sasha had been a couple, and we never corrected them—our goal was to give comfort, and our presence in their living room seemed to do that. The room never changed: clean white shag, cut-crystal ashtray, porcelain cats tumbling porcelain balls of yarn. Framed pictures of eighteen-year-old Rob in high school graduation pasteboard; at prom with a girl in gauzy pink; in football regalia, stripes of dark grease under his eyes. Only his folks altered with the years, their hair going silver, Robert Sr., a high school football coach, ultimately on oxygen for emphysema, both of them seeming to shrink on the couch cushions in a way that made the crystal and porcelain artifacts look bigger each year. It took me days to recover from those visits—to stop asking myself, and Sasha, how the Freemans’ lives would have been different if their son were still alive.