The next thing I knew, Lyla was shaking me awake. She looked stricken.
“What time is it?” I said.
“I don’t know,” she said. Because kids never do.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, noticing on my alarm clock that it was close to midnight. “Did something happen?”
That’s when Lyla sat on the edge of my bed and dropped the second biggest shock of my life. “Mom’s at the door,” she informed me. “She wants to talk to you.”
* * *
—
THAT’S ABOUT WHERE I left off on memory lane when I fell asleep in Lyla’s chair after her puke fest. I awoke in the early morning to the sound of her phone vibrating. I got up and walked to her bedside, checked to make sure she was still asleep, then picked up her phone and entered 1919—the pass code I’d glimpsed over her shoulder a few days ago. A not so small part of me hoped she’d changed it since then, but the digits worked, and I found myself with complete access to my daughter’s personal life. Short of reading her journal, which I knew she kept in her top-left desk drawer, this was the ultimate invasion. I felt conflicted—guilty—but I told myself that her safety and well-being trumped her privacy, and both were at stake here. So I clicked on the text message icon and stared down at her in-box.
Most of the names that filled the screen I recognized, and all were girls. A wave of relief washed over me, though the fact that boys hadn’t texted her didn’t preclude the possibility that something had happened with one of them. I tapped on Grace’s name. Her most recent message, the one that had just come in, read: Are u okay? Sorry I called ur dad but you scared me!! I hope ur not in too much trouble??
My thumb hovered over the screen for a few seconds before I really crossed the line. Trying to think and talk like Lyla, I typed: Ugh. So hungover. What happened?
The moving ellipses appeared, then Grace’s reply came back with lightning speed: Um u don’t remember?
My heart raced as I typed as fast as I could: No. Tell me.
I held my breath, waiting longer this time.
U passed out. I’m sooo sorry I left u for so long. I didn’t know u were so wasted. What did u drink???? Did you hook up w Finch?
I don’t know, I typed.
Grace sent a sad-face emoji, and then, in a separate text: Something I need to tell you…There’s a pic of u being sent around. IDK who took it. But I think Finch.
My stomach dropped as I wrote: A picture of what? Do you have it?
Yeah.
Send it to me.
I steeled myself as an image appeared in the thread, too small to really make out. I tapped to enlarge it, then zoomed in to see my little girl, lying on her back on a bed, her breast completely exposed. I wanted to throw up, just as Lyla had last night, but my nausea turned to rage when I read the caption on it: Looks like she got her green card.
Fuck, I typed, forgetting I was supposed to be Lyla for a second, although I was sure she swore to her friends. What the hell does that mean?
IDK. He’s calling you an illegal or something. I guess because ur half Brazilian?
I’m a fucking American….And even if I weren’t…I typed, too infuriated to finish the sentence.
Grace replied: I know. I’m sorry. But at least you look hot!
I shook my head, marveling at the shallowness of the comment, and nearly outed myself—they’d both find out eventually, anyway—but decided against it. My heart simply couldn’t take any more.
Gotta go, I typed.
K. TTYL, she wrote back.
I deleted the thread, my head filled with awful images, some of them imagined and one of them very real.
* * *
—
“YOU READY TO tell me what happened?” I asked Lyla a few hours later, when she finally emerged from her bedroom, looking some combination of queasy and embarrassed. I was sitting in our living room, where I’d been waiting for her.
“You already know what happened,” she said softly, likely because she and Grace had pieced things together. Her phone was in her hand now. She put it on the coffee table, screen down, then sat next to me, probably to avoid my gaze. “I had too much to drink.”
“One drink is too many. You’re underage,” I said.
She slid down on the sofa closer to me, then dropped her head to my shoulder. “I know, Dad,” she said with a sigh.
It felt like a ploy, a bid for sympathy. I stayed strong. “So. How much did you drink?” I asked.
“Not that much, I swear.” Her voice shook a little, though I couldn’t tell if it was from emotion or from her hangover.
“Is that typical for you?”
“No, Dad….It’s not typical for me.”
“So is this the first time you’ve gotten drunk?”
She hesitated, which of course meant that it wasn’t, but also that she was considering lying about it. Sure enough, she gave me a straight, unwavering yes.
I stood, circled the sofa, and sat in the chair right across from her. “Okay, so here’s the deal,” I said, clasping my hands together, my voice firm but not loud. “I need you to be straight with me. I won’t punish you if you are, but you have to be one hundred percent honest. Otherwise, your life as you know it is over for a very long time. Got it?”
Lyla nodded but did not meet my gaze.
“When did you have your first drink?” I asked.
“Last summer,” she said, her eyes still glued to her lap.
“So you’ve been drinking since last summer?”
She hesitated for several seconds before nodding. “Yeah. Not all the time or anything. But yeah. Sometimes. Every now and then.”
I took a deep breath and said, “Well, let’s start right there. With drinking, generally.”
“Dad—” she said with a weary sigh. “I know—”
“You know what?”
“I know what you’re going to say….”
I stood up, calling her bluff. “Okay. Fine, Lyla. Your choice. We’ll just go the punishment route here.”
As I walked past her, she reached up and tugged on the back of my shirt. “I’m sorry, Dad. Sit down. I’ll listen.”
I stared at her a beat, then sat back down next to her, thinking once again of the birthday night Beatriz came back. She’d been drunk, of course. I made her leave, but she came back the next morning and stayed in town for about a week, promising Lyla she’d move back to Nashville—which I took as more of a threat than a promise. One night things got ugly, and Beatriz told Lyla that her dad had too big a temper problem for her to stay. Then she took off again.
That was seven years ago, and since then, I hadn’t been able to keep up with all the places Lyla said her mother had been living (Los Angeles, Atlanta, San Antonio, and back in Rio, to name a few) or the number of times she’d passed through town, graced us with her intoxicated presence, made Lyla a few empty promises, then disappeared again. With the help of a school guidance counselor I talked to following one of Beatriz’s more egregious interruptions, I’d vowed to stop denigrating her in front of Lyla, and I had kept my word up until now. This was too important. Besides, I told myself, alcoholism isn’t a character flaw—it’s a disease.
“It’s safe to say that your mom’s an alcoholic,” I began.
Lyla made a clicking sound and rolled her eyes. “Um, yeah. I know that, Dad.”
I nodded, choosing my words carefully. “Okay. Well, then, do you also know that alcoholism runs in families?”
“Dad, please! I’m not an alcoholic,” she whined. “I don’t drink like that. And besides, Mom is way better now. She’s been going to meetings.”
“Well, she’s still an alcoholic,” I said. “That doesn’t go away with meetings. And it will always be in your genes. It will always be a danger for you.”
“I don’t drink too much.”
/>
“Well, the ‘too much’ happens gradually, Lyla. It’s a slippery slope. It was for your mother.”
“I know all of this, Dad—”
I cut her off. “Let me finish….Beyond that, we have more practical concerns…meaning all the bad decisions people make when they’ve been drinking. Take last night, for example….Do you even remember what happened?”
She shrugged and said yes, then added, “Sort of.”
“Sort of? So that means there are things you don’t remember?”
She shrugged again. “I guess.”
“Were you…with…a boy?”
“Da-ad,” she said, looking appalled.
“Answer me, Lyla.”
“There were boys there,” she replied. “If that’s what you mean.”
“No. That’s not what I mean. You know what I mean….Did you have sex?” I forced myself to ask. “Could you be pregnant?”
“Dad!” she shouted, putting her hands over face. “Stop! No!”
“So no, you couldn’t be pregnant because you didn’t have sex? Or no, you couldn’t be pregnant because you used birth control?”
She stood up and shouted, “Oh my God, Dad. Just go ahead and ground me! I’m not having this conversation with you!”
“Sit down, Lyla,” I said as sternly as I could without actually yelling. “And don’t you dare talk to me like that.”
She bit her lip and sank back into the sofa.
“Did you have sex last night?” I asked.
“No, Dad,” she said. “I didn’t.”
“How can you be sure if you don’t remember?”
“Dad. I’m sure. Okay? Just stop.”
I took a deep breath, then cut to the chase. “Okay, then. Who is Finch?” I asked.
She stared down at her fingernails, her lower lip quivering. “I know what you did, Dad. I know you talked to Grace on my phone. She sent me screenshots. I read the whole thing. Just admit it.”
I confessed with a nod, bracing myself for a self-righteous tirade about her right to privacy. But she somehow exercised a modicum of restraint.
“Who is he?” I said.
“He’s a senior,” she said.
“Does he go to your school?”
She nodded.
“Well, then,” I said. “I’m going to be letting the Windsor administration know about this.”
“Oh my God, Dad,” she gasped, jumping up, her eyes wide and frantic. “Don’t do that. Please!”
“I have to—”
“You can’t! Please…I won’t drink ever again! And I’ll forgive you for snooping through my phone! And you can ground me, whatever….Just please, please don’t turn him in.” She was now shouting, leaning over the coffee table, her hands in prayer position.
I was accustomed to her melodrama (she was, after all, a teenaged girl) and knew I’d get pushback. But something about her reaction seemed irrationally over the top. I ran through the mental calculations, wondering whether there was more to the story than I knew. I asked if she was telling me everything; she promised that she was. “It’s just not that big of a deal,” she added.
“It is a big deal. It’s a huge deal,” I said, as calmly as I could. “And something needs to be done about…”
She shook her head, now in tears. Real tears—I could always tell when she was fake crying. “No. It doesn’t, Dad. It really doesn’t….Can’t we just drop it?”
“No, Lyla. We can’t just drop it.”
“Why, Dad? Why not? God! I just want this to go away. Please. Can’t we just let it go away and not make it a bigger deal than it needs to be?” she begged.
I looked into her eyes, wanting to stop her tears, give in. After all, I told myself, she had enough challenges in her life. They weren’t insurmountable, of course, nor were they holding her back in any major way. But they were there, and they were real. For one, she was a carpenter’s daughter at a rich-ass school filled with entitled kids. For another, her mother sucked. So of course I was tempted to take the path of least resistance and give her what she wanted now. But was that best for Lyla in the long run? Didn’t I owe my daughter more? Didn’t I need to show her how important it was to stand up for herself and for what’s right? And besides, even if I caved, would anything really “go away”? Or would the problem just resurface, sometime later when we least expected it, the way her mother always did?
I suddenly thought of Beatriz again—her face on the night I told her it was better for Lyla to have no mother than her as a mother. It wasn’t true; I shouldn’t have said it; and I wished so deeply that we had her around now. That we weren’t so alone.
“We’ll see, Lyla,” I said, often my go-to answer. Then I stood and told her I’d be back later, pushing down all my terrible, guilty emotions and focusing on what needed to be done. For my daughter’s sake.
“Where are you going?” she asked, her voice high and sad.
“To the workshop,” I said, pretending to be matter-of-fact. “You might want to drink a lot of water.”
First thing Monday morning, I got the call I’d been both expecting and praying I wouldn’t receive. Although I had rare occasion to talk to him, Walter Quarterman’s name was programmed into my phone. I saw it appear on the screen, but I was too scared to answer. Instead, I waited, then listened to the voicemail he left, asking if Kirk and I could please come in and speak with him that afternoon about a “serious issue that has arisen.”
Walter, or Mr. Q as the kids called him, was the long-tenured and enigmatic headmaster of Windsor Academy. On the surface, he was a stereotypically serious academic with white hair, a bookish beard, and wire-rimmed glasses. But at some point, we’d all discovered that he’d been quite the hippie activist in his former life, the kids unearthing (and publishing in the student newspaper) a photo of Mr. Q protesting the Vietnam War at Yale, his beard darker and longer, his fist in the air as he carried a sign that read: HEY, HEY LBJ! HOW MANY KIDS DID YOU KILL TODAY? It made him something of a cult figure with the students, though many of the parents appreciated his politics less. In fact, Walter took some heat during the 2016 presidential campaign, when he made a few not-so-subtle anti–Donald Trump references about wanting to build bridges at Windsor, not walls, irritating many in our conservative, predominantly Republican enclave of Nashville.
Kirk was among that miffed contingent, and he was even more riled when the subject of transgender bathrooms was raised later that year. I understood where he was coming from, at least as a practical matter, as there was only one transgender student at Windsor that we knew of. But mostly I was all about taking the path of least resistance, whether at Windsor or in our community, and especially with my husband. Only occasionally did I take a real stand with Kirk, at least on anything smacking of political correctness, such as my insistence that we make our holiday cards as inclusive as possible.
“But ‘Happy Holidays’ sounds so cold and corporate,” Kirk had said when the debate first arose several years back. I resisted the urge to tell him outright that he needed to stay in his lane. He did our finances, and I handled cards and gifting, holidays and decorating, and really anything related to celebrations or making our lives feel more special. It was a nineteen-fifties sort of split, but it had always worked for us.
“Okay. What about ‘Merry and bright’ or ‘Comfort and joy’ or ‘Peace on earth’?” I had thrown out to appease him.
“I hate all of those things.” He’d smirked, obviously trying to be funny.
I’d smiled—because he was pretty funny—but pointed out that we had Jewish friends. My own dad was Jewish.
“Not really,” Kirk had said.
“He’s as Jewish as you are Christian,” I’d said.
“Yes, but we’re sending the card. And we’re Christian. Get how that works?” Kirk had asked with a trace of condescension.
I’d dug in. “But we’re wishing them a happy holiday. You wouldn’t think it bizarre if the Kaplans sent us a card wishing us a ‘Happy Hanukkah’?”
“I wouldn’t care,” Kirk had said with a shrug. “I don’t care if someone sends me a Kwanzaa card if that’s what they want to do. But I don’t want anyone to tell me what to do, either.”
Maybe that was it in a nutshell, I remember thinking. Kirk really didn’t like to be told what to do, a trait that had become more extreme over the years. It was probably a function of getting older—I think we all become exaggerated versions of ourselves, and Kirk had always been independent and strong-willed. But sometimes I worried that it had more to do with his love of power—power that seemed to increase along with financial wealth. I’d recently called him out on this, accusing him of having the “old-rich-white-guy mentality,” pointing out that it was often that guy who was cutting a line at the airport, or blathering away on his cellphone after the flight attendant asked for devices to be put away, or pretending not to see you when you were anxiously trying to merge in traffic (all of which I’d observed Kirk do on a fairly regular basis). His response was simply that at forty-six, he wasn’t yet “old.”
All of this is to say that I wasn’t completely surprised at his reaction when I called him at work to tell him about Walter’s voicemail.
“Does it have to be today?” he said.
“Um, yes. I think it does,” I said. “Our child is in trouble.”
“I know that,” he said, tapping on his keyboard. “We’re the ones who spent the entire day yesterday crafting his punishment. Does Walt know how hard we’re coming down on Finch?”
“No. Of course not,” I said with a loud sigh, thinking that it was Walter, not Walt. “Because as I told you, he left a voicemail—I haven’t spoken to him yet.”