"Is something wrong?"

"No."

At home I felt edgy and restless. A glass of wine didn't settle me or block out the thoughts that were bombarding me. Bethany and Angelica. Where were they now? Had I been too hasty in leaving the program? They were probably at the main site by now. Maybe it had been a mistake, not sticking with them.

Or maybe they were all in jail. I'd been so busy with the conservatorship and the store that I hadn't taken time to ponder the possible outcome of Jean's little dilemma. No one had called me. If something had gone wrong, surely Brad would have contacted me. Or maybe not. Being stoic suited him. Not giving out names, taking the bamboo beneath his fingernails without flinching, not being afraid of the dogs yelping at his ankles: that's how he liked to think of himself.

I took my second glass of wine out to the hot tub, feeling very much alone. As the whirlpool jets began bubbling, I started crying for Trina, Orlando, Clyde, Adriana, and me. All the lost people. When the portable phone that was lying on the edge of the tub began to ring, I had just run out of tears.

"Keri? It's your mother. Please, please don't hang up. Please talk to me. Please."

I listened to Emma call my name over and over. I let her beg. Hang up, I told myself. Hang up right now.

"What do you want?" I said.

"I just want to talk with you. How have you been?"

"What do you care how I've been?"

"I do care, Keri."

"No, you don't. You never did. You're just calling me because you're old and lonely. You're probably wondering who's going to take care of you if things get really bad. Well, it won't be me."

Her voice was very soft. "You have a right to be angry with me."

"I have a right to hate you. And I do."

"I'm sorry. Please, let me try to make amends."

"I don't want you in my life." I was shouting.

"All right, all right." She paused. "How's Trina?"

I wanted to tell her that Trina was at Brown University pulling a 4.0 because I'd been a great mother, not some drunk who didn't accept her responsibilities. If only I could have flung those proud words in her face. But I began sputtering and then crying.

"Keri, what's wrong?"

I hung up.

BY THE END OF THE FIRST WEEK, TRINA SEEMED MORE SUBdued, her psychosis not as evident, except when she asked me if I was her mother and tilted her head and narrowed her eyes when I said that I was. I always thought of Emma when she said that, even though I didn't want to think about her. "Where's my real mother?" she asked me, over and over again.

A fixed false belief. It came with the territory. In her mind I wasn't her mother, but at least she wasn't calling me the devil. I was grateful for any small bit of progress.

Clyde and I visited together at lunchtime each day, and at night I'd return to visit alone. The afternoons were almost fun, like Family Day at college. Trina appeared to enjoy us. We played Scrabble and brought puzzles and ate fruit. Trina talked a lot and laughed when her father teased her. At night she was more subdued. I usually arrived at eight, and by the time I got there she'd already had her evening meds, including a tranquilizer. She didn't talk much, but she seemed happy to see me and listened as I chattered on about the shop. We did girly things at night. I gave her a pedicure. I curled her hair with electric curlers, which brought out an appreciative audience. And, of course, I massaged her.

I started with her fingers toward the end of the first week. She let me hold her hand without pulling away. My thumb brushed against her palm, back and forth, back and forth. She didn't resist. Every day I rubbed her a little more. She grew limp and relaxed under my touch. I soothed her.

I was doing reflexology one night, pressing against the balls of her feet. Her eyes were closed. She opened them and looked at me. "What it is," she said, "is that I start flying. It feels like flying. I'm going up, up, up, and I can't come back down. So I just go with it. Everything whizzes by so fast. There's the sky and the trees and the people, and I pass them so fast. Nobody can make me stop."

I kept rubbing.

"Do you want to stop, Trina?"

"I was supposed to go to Brown, wasn't I?"

I nodded.

"In September."

I nodded.

"But I can't go to school if I'm flying, Mom. All the letters on the page come together and the numbers are jumbled. Nothing makes sense when I'm flying. And I don't know when I'll take off again."

"Take the medicine and you won't fly," I said.

"I can't smoke weed, Mommy."

"No."

"I can't smoke weed and I can't take Ecstasy and I can't drink. All that stuff used to make me feel normal. Now they all make me fly so fast. Too fast. That's what Elton and Thaddeus told me."

"Who are they?"

"They took me to the other hospital. They were nice to me."

"How did you meet them?"

"I hitched a ride with them. They could tell I was flying."

"At the hospital, they told me you were very sad. Did you tell the men that you wanted to die?"

She averted her eyes. "I want to go to Brown. I studied so hard. I passed all the tests, and now I'm not smart anymore."

"Yes, you are."

She shook her head. "I'm so slow, Mom. When I try to think, everything is so slow. I can't remember things I used to know."

"That's just temporary. You've been under a lot of stress."

She sat straight up. "You put me under stress." Her voice began to rise. "You made me go with those people and sleep in the room with a strange man. You stressed me out. I didn't want to go with them. You made me. And now you want to lock me up." The last was a shriek that filled the visiting room. A nurse rushed over.

"You're going to have to keep your voice down or your mother will have to leave," she said.

"I want her to leave. Make her go right now," Trina said.

"Trina, I did what I thought was best."

"You're not my mother, bitch."

It's going to take a while; that's what the nurse told me. That's what I kept telling myself as I drove home. My driveway was dark; the automatic lights hadn't come on. When I hit the remote control for the garage door to open, nothing happened. I looked up and down the block. The streetlights were out and all the houses were black.

"Damn!" I said, with more vehemence than was warranted. I got out of the car, took my keys out, and headed for the front door. When I got to the top of the steps, something moved.

"Keri."

I jumped, and then I looked. "Adriana, where have you been?"

"Keri, I need, uh-" She giggled.

It wasn't so dark I couldn't see that she was thinner, that she was trembling, that something was wrong.

"I cashed a check today, and I was on my way to my car and some dude snatched my bag so now I need some money, and I was wondering-"

"Don't come to me with that bullshit," I said, feeling anger replace my fear. "Just don't. You've been using drugs again. That's why you haven't been to work. I can tell by looking at you."

"No. No, Keri. I'm not on any drugs. The reason I didn't come to work was I've been sick. I had the flu. I meant to call, but I was too sick. And then, as soon as I left the house, I got jacked."

She spoke rapidly, moving from foot to foot.

"Get out of here. And don't come back," I said.

"Why are you gonna do me like that?" she said.

"If you want to get back in rehab, I've got your back. If you want to call your sponsor and start going to meetings, I've got your back. But if you're going to be a whore and a junkie, you're on your own. Don't come here, and don't come back to the store until you're ready to get some help."

"I don't need any fucking help from you, bitch."

It was instinctive. One bitch too many. Past my quota. I grabbed Adriana by her shoulder and slammed her into the door. And then I started yelling.

"You come to me, and I give you a job, get your ass in school, try to show you how to have a decent life. And then you fuck up, get back with your lowlife friends who just want to bring you down, and I'm the bitch?"

She was more shocked than hurt, although I couldn't swear that she wouldn't be black-and-blue in the morning. But the shock kept her still, forced her to listen. Listening, of course, didn't mean a damn thing, not with every cell in her body wanting drugs.

"I'm so sick of you goddam kids. If you want to wreck your life, do it."

I unlocked my door and slammed it in her face. The phone was ringing when I got inside, but by the time I answered it the caller had hung up. Maybe it was Clyde, I thought. He'd told me earlier that he'd be going out of town for two weeks. So much for fatherly commitment. It was better to miss the call, better to realize that I was alone, that I had no backup, that Trina was going to be in and out of sanity for the rest of her life and I'd just have to deal with it. Ma Missy had learned that lesson a long time ago. Why couldn't I? Why did I keep holding out for rescues and miracles and perfect endings? The program had tried to disabuse me of that notion. Jean and Eddie, Pete and Cecilia, Margaret-even Celestine, Melody's mother, frying hamburgers for three grandchildren and holding her breath until her daughter made it home at night-they'd all learned acceptance. Things could be worse. Much worse.

I went into the kitchen, got the bottle of Merlot that was in the cabinet above the refrigerator, and poured myself a glass. I was sipping it and my tears had tapered off when the phone rang for the second time. The area code of the number that was revealed was unfamiliar. But the voice wasn't.

"It's okay. Everything is okay. They went back and worked everything out."

"Bethany!"

"Yeah."

As we talked I could feel myself missing her and maybe missing the dream I'd let go of.

"Tell Brad I said that the hype on Harriet Tubman-the "never run my train off de track, and I ain't never lost a passenger" thing-that had to be PR spin. She must have lost somebody."

But maybe not forever.

31.

THE CIRCLE OF CHAIRS IN THE BASEMENT OF THE PRESBYterian church was tight and close. Summer was traditionally a slow time for the support group, a season when attendance was sparse. Those who came regularly, if they were able, took off on vacations designed to relieve them of the stress of taking care of mentally ill relatives. Of course, in many cases, those relatives accompanied the caretakers, in which case the word vacation was a misnomer. It would be more accurate to say that those people went on a trip.

Mattie, Gloria, Milton, and I were not on vacation. It was Mattie who had reminded me of the regularly scheduled meeting. She'd been calling me for prayer almost every morning since I'd returned. Now she held my hand as I sat beside her.

Right back where I started from. It seemed almost surreal for me to be sitting between Mattie and Gloria, to be surrounded by others with stories ranging from horrendous to unbearable and, of course, the one or two people whose loved ones could be filed under Doing pretty well. Not Flourishing at Brown, not Taking the world by storm. Just Doing pretty well. Regular. Ordinary, as in "The kid no longer breaks windows." As in "She takes a couple of classes at community college and volunteers at church." The happy endings were when the Social Security disability checks came through before all the money ran out, when Medicare or Medi-Cal finally cranked up, when there was a vacancy at a decent residential treatment facility, when the shrink or the therapist knew what the hell she was talking about. When the kid took the medication on her own, without being prompted, because she knew she needed it. Listening in the tight little circle, I realized there were many people who were holding steady on the seesaw of mental illness. The pretty well stories had been attenuated in my mind because I'd been looking for another ending.

I am not alone, I thought, looking around the circle. Not everyone here is sad.

"Your turn," Mattie whispered, and nudged me.

I felt suddenly tongue-tied and foolish. Milton gave me a nod and a smile. "I've been going . . . my daughter and I have been going through a tough time recently. If you recall, she has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Up until a few months ago, she was taking her medication regularly and was talking about going to college in the fall. She was- uh, she was accepted at Brown. But then I think someone gave her a joint, which led to her smoking some more joints, and the next thing I knew-"

"You were starting all over again," one woman said.

I nodded. "You got it. She got very hostile. I'll spare you the details. So now she's in the hospital and I'm waiting for a conservatorship trial, which should be coming up in the next few weeks."

"Try not to go on a Thursday. Judge Boch is there on Thursdays, and he's a horrible man," another woman said.

Several others volunteered bits of information about their own trial experiences. Don't be late. Don't expect too much; just because you have a conservatorship doesn't mean everything will get better.

"I feel as though my whole life is crashing. My kid is in the hospital again. My ex-husband, who promised to support me through this, took off for two weeks on some work-related assignment. My trusted and beloved assistant is on drugs after being clean for a long while, so on top of everything else I'm short-staffed at my store. Oh, and my boyfriend is pulling away. Plus I haven't a clue as to which of the institutes for mental diseases I should place my daughter in."

"Not Havenbrook," someone volunteered.

"Is that the place out in Pasadena?" I asked.

"Yes. My son was placed there, and his experience was terrible. Lots of fights. Lots of homeless people. He went there smoking a couple of cigarettes a day; he left smoking a pack and a half."

"My nephew was there. It helped him a lot. He got stable there."

"What about the Light House?" I asked.

Another woman shrugged her shoulders. "I don't know about that one."

"My brother was there for about three years," said a man. "It wasn't a bad place. They took good care of them physically; they got their checkups, went to the dentist regularly. Their best doctor is Dr. Felix. How long would your daughter need to stay there?"

"I'm hoping no more than three months."