Free Lost Girls by Caitlin Rother

the mix.
    â€œHe was happy and not so depressed and I was like, ‘Hallelujah, he’s doing better,’” she said.
    He stayed up all night, slept during the day, and became more irritable, displaying weird mood swings. When a friend of hers suggested that he might be doing cocaine, Cathy dismissed the idea, but she had to acknowledge that his behavior was growing increasingly bizarre.
    While Cathy was working sixty hours, seven days a week, John Sr. was spending more time with their son. Cathy got the boy ready for school before she left for work; it was his father’s job to make sure he got there. After John Jr. got home from school, his father played video games with him and made sure he finished his homework.
    Despite this bonding opportunity, the boy still didn’t feel connected to his father. “I think his desire was to be close to his dad,” Cathy said. “John’s dad loved me, but I think he was always focused on me.”
    At that point, Cathy said, she didn’t feel connected to her husband either. Then one day, she was questioning him about why a certain bill hadn’t been paid. He confessed that he’d been doing speed and cocaine for the past year, and had completely drained their $10,000 in savings to buy drugs.
    â€œThat was the beginning of the end for us,” she said. All the money they’d saved from her double shifts was gone. “Furious doesn’t even scratch the surface. I felt so betrayed by him... . I basically said I couldn’t pull through. I didn’t feel I could go through that drug and alcohol scene again.”
    She hung in while John Sr. went to substance abuse therapy, but she slept on the couch, feeling very confused. Part of her hated him.
    How could he do this? Here I’ve been so supportive of him all this time and he did this?
    By this time, Shannon and Sarina had moved out, so it was just the three of them. Cathy got her husband into a research study at UCLA, where they got him off the coke and speed, persuaded him to take antidepressants and to do individual therapy. But three months into it, he rebuffed Cathy’s suggestion to enter couple’s counseling.
    â€œI can’t do it right now,” he said, explaining that he was so ashamed of what he’d done that he needed to get to a place where he could face her again.
    She asked a couple more times. “We’ve got to go to counseling, or our marriage is done,” she said, but he still refused. He said he was sorry for everything, but he couldn’t do or be what she wanted. “You’re probably better off because I don’t deserve you.”
    So, in February 1988, when John Jr. was in the third grade, Cathy told him she was going to stay at Grandma’s in Hawthorne, because she was working a lot of hours. She would see him every other weekend.
    â€œAre you and Daddy getting a divorce?” he asked.
    â€œNo,” she said.
    A few months later, she got an apartment. “You’re going to come and spend the summer with me,” she told him. When he asked if he could still see his dad, she said, “We’ll see how it goes.” (In 2011, John Jr. said he was actually scared that he would get into trouble if he went to live with her for good back then, fearing that decision would anger his father. “I was afraid of my dad. He always hit me—if I woke him up, if I got into trouble, if I went around the block without asking.”)
    As mother and son lived together that summer, he threw a couple of tantrums and showed what Cathy described as “baseline sadness,” but overall, John Jr. seemed to be dealing with the separation. He even did okay with not being on Ritalin, which Cathy thought was unnecessary as long as he didn’t need to pay attention in class.
    When school was about to start, he asked, “Can I go back with Daddy? He needs me.”
    Cathy still remembered how she’d felt when she