The Storm

The Storm

Gathered above the snow-capped mountains was a tight cluster of clouds that had become swollen and black like a bruise. With another dull day at the law office behind me, I loosened my tie, and put my silver BMW M2 into gear. As I was trudging through rush hour traffic, the dark cluster of clouds seemed all at once to disperse and a shadow spread like ink across the sky.

I hadn’t been able to escape the image I’d left home with. My daughter—the only person I have in this world—was stumbling about the kitchen, pale faced and suffering from withdrawals as I brewed my morning cup of coffee. She could barely look at me, let alone hold a conversation.

I knew a confrontation was imminent. When I’d left for work that morning I had promised myself that today marked a crossroads. If my daughter was going to continue to use drugs, she would need to do so outside of my home.

I drove up the windy mountain roads without the noise of the radio. I was rehearsing what I would say to her. “I don’t want you to leave; I want you to get treatment,” I repeated into the vacuum of my empty vehicle. 

Still, when I pulled off the main road and onto the gravel that marked my lot, I hadn’t been able to put the speech together. Everything that came out of my mouth sounded inauthentic, like I was just repeating what my therapist had been telling me. I was even hitting all the key-words like dependency, withdrawal and enablement. 

I sat in my car looking at my old brick mountain house and trying to summon the perfect speech; It never came. I decided I would go inside and try to write it down. Things like this always come easier to me when I can edit them along the way. 

I threw that idea away when I walked into my house and saw her—eyes closed and crumpled on the couch in an opiate induced paralysis—the sharp tip of a blood-stained needle pointing at me from the coffee table. 

The sight was salt in my wound. I snapped; my temper flared and I yelled at her, “Enough Clara! I can’t come home to this one more day…” I held my breath. “Clara, are you awake? Can you hear me?” 

She nodded, dark hair covering her closed eyes. “I can hear you Daddy.”

“Well, this is the end of the road. You choose: either you agree to get treatment or you find another place to stay. I won’t have you living this way in my home any longer. I’m enabling your dependency Clara. I can’t go on with myself knowing that’s my role in your slow...decomposition.” 

Silence entered the room like an uninvited guest arriving at a dinner party. I let the words breathe, I knew she had heard them. I was waiting for her to speak when she grabbed the remote and turned on the television. Our cable contract had ended last month and I hadn’t gotten around to renewing it. The screen showed nothing but static and the buzz of white noise replaced the room’s silence. 

“Clara…?”

“Do you remember when you used to read mythology to me Daddy?” 

“Sure, of course I do.”

“I’m sorry I became a monster and not a hero,” she said, as she brushed the hair away from her face. 

“You’re not a monster Clara. It’s hereditary—not your fault—you’ve got a disease and there’s treatment available.”

“I’ll leave.” The words dropped from her mouth like stones from the sky. 

“Please, Clara, I have the money, you can detox in a safe environment.”

“No, I’ll leave,” she said, gathering her paraphernalia from the table.

I hadn’t wanted this but I heard the voice of my therapist in the back of my head saying, “She needs to hit rock bottom and not have you catch her before she gets there. She needs to know you’re serious.” So I backed off, hoping she would come to her senses half-way through packing her stuff and agree to treatment. 

I walked into the kitchen and stopped at a photograph of the three of us on our first trip to Japan—before her mother passed—before Clara had ever played the violin. She used to have the brightest smile, I thought. Then the reality of an empty house settled in my mind and the loneliness seemed unbearable. “Is this really the best option?” I asked the image of my wife in the photograph. Then, as I had done many times since she passed, I looked for a signal, a direction from her spirit. 

Before anything came though, Clara flung the front door open, left it ajar, and stepped into the chilled mountain air. I followed and closed the door behind her. “She’ll be home before nightfall,” I reassured myself. I had to have faith that she would make the right decision. 

After she left, I made myself a cup of black tea and lit a fire in my study. I was proud of my efforts but unhappy with their results. I thought about calling my therapist. Instead, I turned to my marked page in Dostoevsky's short works, put Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue on my record player and tried to turn my attention elsewhere. 

My study is east facing with a bay window that provides a spectacular view of the Rocky Mountains and the vast expansion of the Great Plains below. I spent more time looking out this window then actively reading my book. The clouds had begun purging their contents and snow was colliding with then melting on my window. I couldn’t keep my mind focused on the story. It kept drifting away from the pages towards the direction of my wife and daughter.

I put the book down and started to make another cup of black tea. As I poured boiling water through the bag I heard the first cries of wind brush against the house. Clara’s mother had wanted to name her after the sound the wind makes, Kazane. I was against it—I’d been adopted—and unlike Clara’s mother, had no family or friends in Japan. My perspective was that a foreign name would only hurt our daughter’s chances of fitting in. But Clara’s mother still used the name Kazane around the house.

The wind was getting stronger so I placed a shield in front of my fireplace to make sure no ashes blew around my study. At first, this was the only adjustment I made due to the weather. I sat back down facing the window, picked up my book and tried to make my way through a sentence or two without veering off course.

Then, the gravity of the situation occurred to me. My daughter was out alone in a snow-storm. This was a girl who had never skipped a meal, let alone had to fend for her own shelter. As far as I knew she didn’t have any money. She would die of exposure before she could come to her senses about receiving treatment. Or worse, she would spend the night with some man just for her own survival. The thought bittered my tea.

I headed directly to my BMW, not even taking the time to put on a proper coat or hat. I turned the heat all the way up and started to head down the mountain. She couldn’t have gotten far on foot, I reasoned. If she’d been picked up, she may have gotten to the bottom of the canyon already and there would be almost no hope of having her return to the house. I tried calling her phone—no answer. 

The clouds overhead were the lifeless color of charcoal and snow was falling at a rapid pace. It was already beginning to stick to the streets. I became concerned that the weather would get so thick that I wouldn’t be able to see Clara even if I drove right past her. 

Then, like a flash of lightning in a black night, her thin figure shone through the falling snow from the side of the road. I turned my hazards on and pulled over. She was painfully unprepared for the storm. I opened the passenger side door and she half-heartedly climbed in.

“You would have died out there,” I said, wanting a thank you.

“I know,” she whispered. 

“Well, you can only stay as long as there’s a storm. After it blows over it’s just as I said earlier.”

She didn’t say anything in response to this. She closed her eyes and her hair slid in front of her face again. When we got home she went straight to her room. I felt disappointment and relief. I found my way back to my study and called my therapist. 

After I caught them up to date, she assured me in a soft voice that, “The way things played out were actually positive. It demonstrates that you care and buys more time to show your daughter the treatment programs we selected; it buys more time to push her in the right direction.” 

Ⅱ

Outside my window was a great grey wall of suspended vapor. It was as though the entire house was encapsulated within a cloud and there was no seeing out of it. It snowed all night and snow was still falling the next morning. The local news reported that over six feet had come down. With the roads the way they were, neither of us were going anywhere until the storm passed.

I was in the habit of rising before the sun. I enjoyed the tranquility and freedom before I had to bury myself in casework. I came into my study with a fresh cup of tea and tried to pick up where I’d left off with Dostoevsky. I still couldn’t focus on reading. My mind was retracing the events that brought me to this place in life. I was ashamed; I’d been so distracted from everything that was happening right in front of my face.

Money had blinded me. Just a few years ago my law firm had put me in charge of a three million dollar case. My work became all consuming and in those days, I barely left the office to sleep. Clara was in Boston with her violin working through her sophomore year at Berklee’s College of Music. My wife...was struggling. She had been for a long time. Still, I should have seen the signs that things had taken a turn for the worse. I should have noticed that our bank statement no longer showed a payment to her psychiatrist or that our medicine cabinet was nearly empty.

But she smothered her demons with music and in her last months she played as much as I worked. She was Colorado Symphony’s first chair for the violin. I saw her play before we were introduced at a regional arts fundraiser and gala. Later I learned that her attachment to music was tied directly to her suffering. The only times she felt free of this invisible war, were instances when she was lost in song.

Then, when Clara became interested in the instrument, her mother designated herself as lead instructor. The two would spend endless hours practicing a piece until Clara perfected it. At times I questioned whether or not the relationship was healthy. But, Clara seemed to share her mother’s passion for music and so I did my best to leave the matter between them.

When Clara left for school and I became absorbed in the case, my wife was back to being alone in her mind.

I look back now and it’s all so clear. It was like I’d found myself in a life raft but became so focused on stockpiling my supplies that I’d failed to recognize the person drowning beside me in open water. I never threw her a buoy. She’d left a note saying that she was going to her sister’s house a few hours away from ours. I didn’t even think to check in. Four or five days later her sister called me asking if I knew where my wife was. 

“I thought she was with you,” I’d responded.

They found her body in the remnants of our bright red Porsche 911, buried in the rocks along a cliff only a few miles from our house. My opinion was that she’d done it that way for Clara, so that she had the option to believe her mothers death was accidental. In reality, both of us knew it was suicide. 

Clara returned from Boston and never did make her way back to school. I knew she’d been experimenting with drugs and alcohol but figured it was normal teenage behavior. I certainly did my fair share of experimentation before becoming a lawyer. I just had no idea the extent of what she had gotten herself into. 

When I noticed I was missing the bottle of OxyContin that I’d been prescribed after a skiing accident, I became concerned. At that point I probably pushed too hard. I set her up with a therapist. God, this family has had half a million therapists and were still fucked up. I encouraged her to go back to school but she wasn’t ready. I didn’t mind her living with me though. Plus I figured she may spiral out of control if she jumped back into life on a college campus too early. 

She had also stopped playing her violin. I didn’t know whether that was a good or bad thing. She’d learned the instrument from her mother and I imagined the memories associated with the music they had shared were too painful for her to enjoy playing again. This posed an obvious obstacle for her re-entry into Berklee. But, she never stopped making music. Clara began composing on her computer, making an electronic form of jazz that she called Lo-fi. 

I didn’t understand it, but I wanted to give her something productive to spend her energy on. So we bought thousands of dollars worth of equipment and built a top of the line pro-quality studio together. And that was just the beginning of her expensive pursuit, the real money was in her jazz collection. When Clara wanted to sample something she would go to any length to satisfy her compulsion. 

I felt like I was helping her stay out of trouble by rewarding her for productive behavior. I knew she was still partying; she would go out to concerts, spend a few nights with her friends, then return only to disappear into her room for a few days. I thought she was off the pills though, that’s what she had told her therapist and that’s what her therapist had told me. 

She may not have been lying, but without question, she had intentionally held some things back. I should have been more worried—she’d progressed, switched one opiate out for another—kicked the pills and replaced them with the needle. I was frozen when I found my first syringe in her bathroom trash can. I couldn’t believe the information my eyes were processing and sending to my brain. 

I ignored it. For a week I just went back to work and pretended like everything was normal. Then I found another, and many more after that. It was like she was screaming out silently to me. She never asked for help, but she wasn’t careful about hiding anything either. 

We fought about it. I started restricting her finances, restricting her from leaving the house with people who I thought were bad influences. But, it didn’t stop her. Nothing stopped her. 

I worried about her dying on a daily basis and had found her limp and barely breathing too many times to count. The shadow of death is an awful burden. Losing my wife was enough tragedy for one lifetime, having to bury my daughter might put me in the grave too. 

Ⅲ

Clara didn’t stir until well past noon. When she entered the room, I was in the kitchen listening to Solitude by Billie Holiday and making a turkey sandwich on rye. I glanced up and took note of her outfit, but I didn’t make eye contact. She looked like she was dressed for a 90’s grunge concert in Seattle. My therapist insists that let her speak first so as to allow her to: “comfortably set the conditions of our conversations.” At that moment, I realized how poorly I’d executed this technique the day before.

“What year was this recorded?” she asked. 

“Hmm, somewhere between 1955 and 1960,” I replied.

“Do we have it on vinyl?” 

“I believe we bought all of Billie Holiday’s records together as a package deal,” I said, trying not to let it show that I was a little offended about her having forgotten.

“Good, I need it, is it in the garage or the study?” 

“They’re all together in the garage...are you sure it’s an obscure enough sample for you though? Miss Holiday is rather popular, you know,” I said, hoping for more conversation. 

She didn’t acknowledge my question; she was counting out the beat on her fingers and dissociating from the moment in favor of the music in her head.

“Hello? Earth to Clara…”

She stopped with her fingers and said, “God, is it going to snow forever? I can’t see anything but grey outside my window.” 

“Seems as though it could continue for a while.” 

“With gloom everywhere, I sit and I stare,” she sang along with Billie Holiday, turned around and began heading for the garage.

“Aren’t you going to have anything to eat?” I asked.

She neglected to respond and I finished my sandwich with only the music to keep me company. After taking my last bite, I decided I would make her one and bring it up to her room. I couldn’t force her to eat. But, I knew sometimes when she became focused she would forget about her body's basic needs until she’d finished with the project. I hoped having easy access to a meal would make things easier for her. 

After I finished putting the sandwich together I threw some salt and vinegar potato chips onto her plate and brought it up to the studio. 

“Thanks Dad.”

“It’s no problem, really,” I said, setting her plate down and making my way back towards the door. I tried to give her privacy in the studio. Also, she had decorated the room with a few pieces of ‘modern art’ that I didn’t particularly care for. So I had to use just about all the energy I possessed not to comment on the absurd amount of my money she’d spent on them. Clara didn’t particularly enjoy discussing money.

Before I could reach the door though she said, “I think…after the storm I’d be okay with trying rehab.”

My heart jumped. “That’s great! That’s great news, I couldn’t be happier, really. I’ll email you some links to the facilities I’ve researched.”

“Okay.” She never turned her face from the computer screen. 

“And you know what? If you get through the program, you and I can take a vacation. A trip to anywhere you’d like.”

She thought about that for a moment before replying, “I want to see Hakodate in the snow. Mother always talked about how beautiful Japan was in the winter.”

I nodded, “She did.” 

Then, Clara pushed her slowed down version of Solitude through the studio’s speakers. She was trying to catch a note at the perfect time; I was a distraction. I closed the door and left her to her work then headed downstairs to check up on some emails. Later I would call my therapist. Clara agreeing to treatment was a huge victory. Still, the thought of returning to Japan threw me off balance.

Ⅳ

Time slipped away from me while I was reading and replying to emails. In my line of work there is never a shortage of things to be done. Infact, I always have too much on my hands. If I was unable to delegate certain tasks I would be working 168 hours a week and still failing to tend to every matter. Having ‘nothing to do’ gives me a guilty feeling, like my ‘freedom’ is contingent on someone else being forced to do my work.

I didn’t need to work as much as I did that day. No doubt, the same could be said for just about every day of my life since I began at the firm.

Still, I’d worked up an appetite in front of my computer screen. I logged out of my account and headed back up to the kitchen. On the way I shot Clara a text that said, “I’m making chicken and pasta for dinner unless you have any major objections.”

While on my phone, I reconnected to the bluetooth speaker and searched aimlessly through my music library. When I made it to the kitchen I decided to put the music on hold and reached out to my therapist. 

“Hello?” she answered, sounding as though my call had interrupted her.

“It’s me, I’m calling about Clara,” I said, annoyed that she always forced me to introduce myself when I called. 

“Ah, yes I was going to call you if you’d taken much longer. I got worried that the storm may have interfered with your reception up there in the mountains.”

“No, we’re quite prepared for weather of this magnitude.”

“Good. So… has there been any movement?” 

“This afternoon Clara said she would be willing to try rehab.” The words felt artificial as I said them.

There was a pause on the other end, then she asked, “Did that statement come with any conditions?” 

“No…well, not at first. She made the offer and did so out of the blue. After she said she would try, I told her if she got through it, we could take a trip. It’s been a long time since we’ve gone on a vacation. Plus, I figured it would buy some extra time away from her place of habit. I’ve read that the addicted brain builds associations with certain places or things. So, I thought coming right home might not be the easiest for her.”

“How did she feel about the vacation?”

It’s always another question, I thought. “She seemed interested.” 

“Did she want to go anywhere in particular?”

“Japan,” I murmured.

“I’m sorry do you mind repeating that? There was static on my end.”

“She wants to go to Japan. Hakodate, her mother's home city.”

“I see.”

“Yes.” I said, predicting her next words.

“And, how do you feel about that?” 

“I haven’t had time to process it yet. I’ve been very busy today.”

“Well, this is a big step in the right direction. Unfortunately, you may be snowed in for a few days up there. Usually we like to send someone off the moment they agree. Lingering can cause doubt and second thoughts to creep in. If that becomes the case here, she’ll likely become afraid of what the future holds and start to come up with excuses for why she has to be here.”

“I’ve been dreading that possibility.”

“I understand, just remember it’s normal for a person in these circumstances.”

“Sure, but how do I get her to stay on track?” I asked.
“The most important thing is to assure her that she can be comfortable in treatment. Since she has such a strong relationship with her music, I would make sure she recognizes that her studio equipment can be transported to a number of the facilities.” 

“That makes sense. Anything else I should be aware of?”

“Just that her life is in her hands. You’ve tossed her the rope, now she’s got to pull herself out of the quicksand.”

“Okay, thank you doctor.”

“Of course, don’t hesitate to call if anything changes.”

“I won’t,” I said, then hung up the phone. 

I hadn’t received a reply yet from Clara, not that that was abnormal. She was probably still fine-tuning her song. I decided I’d cook for both of us again. As I boiled water on the stove-top I went back to listening to Miles Davis and wondered why he and Billie Holiday had never collaborated. When the meal was ready, I made my way up to the studio. I knocked twice then slowly entered. 

“Clara?” I didn’t want to walk in on her shooting up. I wanted verbal permission before entering. But, the only thing I heard was her new song coming through the speakers.

I tried again, “I brought up some more food. You’re welcome to come eat with me in the theater if your song is finished.”

Only Billie Holiday responded, “In my solitude, you’ll haunt me.”

“Clara?” 

Now I was becoming concerned, I gritted my teeth and swung the door open. Clara was laying face down on her computer keyboard. It wasn’t the first time I had seen her this way, not that that made it any easier, I just knew not to panic. I set the plate down and went over to her 

“Clara,” I said, reaching out and touching her shoulder. She was cold and stiff. 

“Clara, please,” I turned her to face me. There was a needle in her arm. I checked her pulse—nothing. She had been gone for hours. 

I collapsed to the floor and became paralyzed with sorrow. The song in the background mixed with the howling of the wind and put me into a trance. I felt unable to pull myself off the ground and so I listened to it repeat over and over. I felt as though Clara was trapped within her music. Or perhaps, she was finally free.