“Why do you keep doing this?” she screamed. She started slapping him and he didn’t even lift his hands to his face. By that point he was twice her size. All he would have had to do was grab her arm, push her back. He did nothing.

“This has to stop,” she kept saying as she hit him. “This has to stop. This has to stop.” But she couldn’t stop hitting him and he couldn’t stop being hit. He couldn’t stop any of it.

My God, my God, how ashamed I still am.

33

Most of the time in my work, I begin with the answers, with an idea of the results. I suspect that something is true and then I work toward that suspicion, experimenting, tinkering, until I find what I am looking for. The ending, the answer, is never the hard part. The hard part is trying to figure out what the question is, trying to ask something interesting enough, different enough from what has already been asked, trying to make it all matter.

But how do you know when you are nearing a true end instead of a dead end? How do you finish the experiment? What do you do when, years into your life, you figure out that the yellow brick road you’ve been easing down leads you directly into the eye of the tornado?

* * *

—

My mother hit Nana, and Nana stood still. Finally, I stepped in between them, and when the first of my mother’s slaps landed on my face, she withdrew her hands, flattened them to her sides, looking all around the room in a crazed panic.

She didn’t believe in apologizing to children, but this, the flattened hands and look of horror, was the closest she had ever come.

    “This ends here,” she said. “This ends today.” She stood there for a while longer, watching her two children. My face was stinging from the slap, but I didn’t dare lift my hand to soothe it. Behind me, Nana was dazed, still high, hurting. He hadn’t spoken.

Our mother left the room, and I eased Nana toward the couch. I pushed him a little and he fell onto it, crumpled into a ball at the armrest, his head nestled near the spot where the treacherous wooden piece had once been. I took off his shoes and looked at his foot, healed scar-less, leaving no trace of nail, of oil. I draped a blanket over him and sat down, and we stayed like that for the rest of the night. For the rest of the night, I watched him come down, nod off, whimper. This is it, I thought, because surely none of us could take another day like this.

By morning our mother had come up with a solution. She had been awake all night making calls, though I don’t know who she talked to, who she trusted with the addiction that we had been doing our best to keep secret. Nana, sober now, was all apologies, repeating the old mantra: I’m sorry. It will never happen again. I promise you, it will never happen again.

Our mother listened patiently to all of those words we had heard before and then she said something new. “There’s a place in Nashville that will take you. They’re coming to pick you up and they’ll be here in five minutes. I’ve already packed a bag for you.”

“What place, Ma?” Nana said, taking a step back.

“It’s a good, Christian place. They’ll know what to do. They can help you so you won’t be as sick as last time.”

“I don’t want to go to rehab, Ma. I’ll quit. I promise, I’m done. Really, I’m done.”

Outside, we heard a car pull up. Our mother went into the kitchen and started packing food into Tupperware. We could hear her prattling around, shuffling through all those lids she kept in perfect order, stacked by size and labeled.

    “Gifty, please,” Nana hissed, turning to me for the first time. “Say something to her. I—I can’t…”

His voice trailed off and his eyes filled with tears. The sound of my name, the tenderness with which he’d spoken it, made me feel as though I’d been dunked in cold water.

Our mother packed the Tupperware into what she still called “polythene bags,” grocery bags that she collected and reused like they would run out one day. She brought the food and a suitcase into the living room and stood before us.

“We shouldn’t keep them waiting,” she said.

Nana trained his pleading eyes on me. He looked at me, and I looked away, and outside, the car horn beeped.

* * *

—

Before I started my thesis project, I had floundered a bit, trying to figure out what to do. I had ideas and impressions but I couldn’t make them coalesce, I couldn’t figure out the right question. I would waste months on one experiment, find that it led nowhere, then backtrack only to end up in the same place as before. The real problem was the fact that I didn’t want to look at the question that was staring me right in the face: desire, restraint. Though I had never been an addict, addiction, and the avoidance of it, had been running my life, and I didn’t want to give it even one more second of my time. But of course, there it was. The thing I really wanted to know. Can an animal restrain itself from pursuing a reward, especially when there is risk involved? Once I had that question figured out, everything else started to fall into place.

* * *

—

The rehab in Nashville was a thirty-day program. The facility didn’t allow visitors, but, after Nana’s detox period ended, every Friday we were allowed to call and talk to him for a few minutes. The calls were depressing. “How are you?” I would ask. “Fine,” Nana would say, and then silence would hang in the air, counting us down to the end of the phone call. It was the Chin Chin Man all over again, and I worried that this would be the way of things, that Nana and I would spend a lifetime of silent minutes, strangers on the phone.

    I’m glad I didn’t get a chance to talk to Nana while he was detoxing. I don’t think I could have withstood watching him sweat out his addiction again. As it was, those sober Friday calls were enough to break my heart. Every week the sound of his voice changed. He was still angry at our mother and me, still feeling betrayed, but every week, his voice got a little clearer, a little stronger.

My mother and I drove to Nashville to pick him up on his last day there. After thirty days of shitty rehab food, he told us that all he wanted to eat was a chicken sandwich. We pulled into the nearest Chick-fil-A, and Nana and I sat at the booth while our mother ordered. Thirty days, three Friday phone calls, and we had so little to say to each other. When our mother came back with our orders, the three of us ate, making the same dull small talk we’d made before.

“How are you feeling?” my mother asked.

“Good.”

“I mean, how—”

Nana took our mother’s hand in his. “I’m good, Ma,” he said. “I’m going to stay sober. I’m focused and I really, really want to get better, okay?”

“Okay,” she said.

Has anyone ever been watched with as much intensity as a beloved family member just out of rehab? My mother and I looked at Nana as though our gazes were the only thing that would keep him there, rooted in the bright red seat, dipping waffle fries in sweet-and-sour sauce. Above his head, there was the Chick-fil-A cow urging us to “eat mor chikin.” I’d always found those ads clever, and I’d always had a strange southern pride in this place that retained its Christian values even as it grew. Years later, after my politics and religion had changed, when friends were protesting the restaurant I couldn’t make myself do it. All I could think about was that Saturday with Nana, how happy I’d felt to be with my family, to say a quick prayer of healing over our trays of fast food.

    As we finished eating, Nana told us about how the staff at the rehab had taken them through morning prayers and taught them meditation. Nana was the youngest one there by a mile, and the staff had been kind and encouraging. In group therapy meetings every evening, the patients talked not simply about their troubles but also about their hopes for the future.

“What did you say?” I asked. The future was something I hadn’t allowed myself to think about for some time. While Nana was sick, our lives moved in slow motion and at great speed simultaneously, making it impossible to see what direction things might take.

“I just said that I want to get right, you know. Play basketball, spend time with y’all. That kind of thing.”

* * *

—