What I Loved

loves me just for that. I know that some of the others thought I was bonkers when I said I wasn't Debbie no more. But in the family meeting I could tell that you were understanding of me. I had to be Deborah after I heard them singing. You are a real good person and Mark is lucky to have you for a stepmom. He told me about how you helped him through withdrawal when he was shaking and barfing so bad before you came to Minnesota. I always wished I had somebody like that for me. I've been asking everybody to pray for me, so I hope that you can pray for me too. Merry, merry Xmas and a great new year! LUV, Deborah P.S. I get my cast off next week.
    When Violet was finished reading, she lay the paper on her lap and looked up at me.
    "You never told me that Mark had withdrawal symptoms," I said.
    "I didn't tell you because he didn't have them."
    "Why would Deborah write that, then?"
    "Because he told her that he did."
    "But why would he do that?"
    "I think he wanted to fit in, be more like the others. I mean, Mark has a drug problem, but he was never physically dependent on drugs. It probably made it easier to explain all the lying and stealing he did if he pretended he was a hard-core addict." She paused for several seconds. "By the end, they all loved him—the counselors, the other patients, everybody. They made him a group leader. Mark was a star. Nobody liked Debbie much. She dresses like a tart and has a bad complexion.
    She's twenty-four years old and has been in detox three times already. She almost drowned once. She got so drunk she fell into a lake. Another time she drove off the road and smashed into a tree and had her license revoked. Before she landed in Hazelden, she came home smashed, fell down the stairs in her mother's house, and broke her leg in five places. She's got a cast up to here." Violet pointed to her thigh. "Well, she stole from her mother and lied to her, just like Mark. She turned tricks for a while. Her mother's had it. She just kept screaming at Debbie—'You're a big baby. It's just like I've had a crying, puking baby for twenty-four years. You're not a companion to me at all. My whole life is taking care of you.' Then the mother cried and Debbie cried, and I cried. I sat in that chair and sobbed my guts out for poor Debbie and her poor mother." Violet gave me an ironic smile. "I didn't know them from a hole in the wall. Well, sometime during the second month, Debbie had her vision and turned into Deborah."
    "The singing," I said.
    Violet nodded. "She came back to the next family meeting shining like a light bulb."
    "That can wear off, you know. It usually does."
    "Yes, but she believes in her story and in the words she uses to tell it."
    "And Mark doesn't. Is that what you're saying?"
    Violet stood up. She pressed her hands into her forehead and began to pace. I tried to remember if Violet had paced before Bill died. I watched her take several steps and turn. "Sometimes I think he doesn't understand what language is. It's like he never figured out symbols—the whole structure of things is missing. He can speak, but he just uses words as a way to manipulate other people." Violet took out a cigarette and lit it.
    "You're smoking a lot now," I told her.
    She inhaled the Camel and waved her hand in a dismissive gesture. "It's more than that. Mark doesn't have a story."
    "Sure he does," I said. "We all do."
    "But he doesn't know what it is, Leo. At Hazelden they kept asking him to talk about himself. In the beginning he would mumble a few things about the divorce—his mother, his father. The counselor prodded him. What do you mean? Explain. And he said, Everybody keeps telling me that it has to be the divorce, so it must be.' That made them angry. They wanted him to feel—to tell his story. So he started to talk, but when I think about it, he never said much of any significance. But he did cry. That made them happy. He gave them what they wanted—feeling, or the appearance of it. But a story is about making connections in time, and Mark's stuck in a time warp, a sick repetition that just shuttles him back and forth, back and forth."
    "You mean the way he went from one parent to another?"
    Violet stopped pacing. "I don't know," she said. "Lots of kids go between their divorced parents, and they don't turn out like Mark. It can't be that." She turned her back to me and walked to the window. I looked at her body as she stood with the cigarette burning near her thigh. She was wearing old blue