![]() ![]() When I did manage to get out the door, I’d forget to keep pace until I was shuffling, lost in fantasies of demolishing the faces of guys Shea hung out with, breaking bones, knocking out teeth. I registered for races and didn’t show up. My road mileage had all but collapsed, my drive depleted. Lately, I wasn’t much of a runner at all. Shortly after that, Hank and I began making the 20-minute trip north on weekends, and then during the week. □ To always be in the know, sign up for our newsletter “A state of grace,” Chris whispered, rubbing Hank’s brindle flank as he waited for a treat. It didn’t stop the tears, but for a few moments the world made sense, seemed regular. I could feel my blood pressure drop just watching him run. With his barrel chest, tapered waist, and tight haunches, he moved with ease and alertness. The next morning, Chris said, “I just want to go watch Hank in the Fells.” We hiked the root-threaded paths in silence as he hurtled through the brush, zipped after chipmunks, and bounded over moss-covered logs, hanging in the air for an impossible gravity-defying moment. “Could you please take Hank another night?” I knew where she was going but could do nothing more than plead. Chris never even saw the ocean.Īs soon as we got home, Shea squirmed out the door, eyes trembling. I picked them up at Logan Airport 24 hours after dropping them off. Frantic, Chris had dragged her, sick and groaning, three hours back to the Cancún airport. But if the body hasn’t adequately detoxed, severe and sudden withdrawal symptoms can set in. Shea had banked on getting by with smuggled Suboxone strips, which can blunt opioid cravings. My wife, Chris, and I sought refuge there after she’d returned from a disastrous mother-daughter trip to Mexico in 2017. Situated about 10 miles north of Boston, the Fells is a 2,575-acre wilderness dotted with reservoirs, ponds, and meadows and shot through with more than 100 miles of wooded trails. I started running with him at the nearby Middlesex Fells Reservation a few times a week after a particularly low point in Shea’s journey. The only thing of Shea’s that I could reach out and touch was her 3-year-old dog, Hank, a 30-pound mutt who was now living with us. I couldn’t think where we would bury her. I expected a pair of stone-faced cops to knock on our door any day. Now I didn’t know where she was or who she was with. She used to be a lot of things-a soccer player, a prankster, someone who sang in the shower. ![]() That kid had been replaced by someone I no longer recognized-a stranger with vacant eyes and sores hidden beneath thick makeup, thin as a coatrack. Where was that impish blond-haired girl who loved to draw and silly-dance to TV theme songs, who didn’t care what people thought? I struggled to conjure anything meaningful from the previous 10 years. All these sepia-toned memories were of her as a child. During a trip to Los Angeles, we watched with pride as she bravely approached Owen Wilson in a Venice Beach bookstore to ask for an autograph.īut then I’d get stuck. At our courthouse wedding she was the official witness, our marriage certificate bearing her loopy signature. Shea was a witty, big-hearted kid who loved Buffy the Vampire Slayer, old-time game shows, and vamping on stage. ![]() ![]() It usually cropped up during a run, as if the movement jarred the sentences loose from the dark place where I hid my fears. I had taken to writing my daughter’s obituary, revising it week after week. ![]()
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