Free The Stardust Lounge by Deborah Digges

scam, and the events of this night, we feel that we have every right to forgo Dr. Mike's advice of putting Stephen on the honor system.
    At this moment we both debunk all the child psychology nonsense we've been feeding on: the Erikson, even the Bettleheim, as we remember grueling, interminable therapy sessions we've sat through—a mute, sullen teenager on one hand and a pompous Dr. So-and-so on the other. We remember our hope following these sessions, how each time that hope set us up for disappointment.
    “I read a piece in the
Times
the other day,” Stan interrupts our silence. “It was about a father whose teenage daughter kept sneaking out to do drugs. Then she'd come home sick or out of it. She wouldn't go to school. One night she overdosed and he rushed her to the hospital.
    “The hospital staff and the police gave her a choice of rehabilitation or jail. She chose the former. While she was away the father prowled the streets at night looking for the dealer.”
    “Did he get him?” I ask.
    “No luck,” Stan continues. “But before the girl came home from the hospital he installed more locks, nailed her window shut, and put up bars.”
    “There you go.”
    “Wait—her first night home from rehab she wanted to go out. Said she was going and no one could stop her. Thefather got out some chains and a padlock he'd recently purchased and had been keeping in his closet. He chained the girl to the stove.”
    “How?” I ask. “Where did he chain her?”
    “Her ankles, I think.”
    “Like hobbling a horse,” I offer.
    “Yes, and then, I guess, to the stove. Then he moved her bed into the kitchen, all her books and school materials. The chain was long enough that she could move about pretty freely. She could even take a shower,” Stan adds, as if to hold up the father's excellent calculations of the length of the chain in deference to his daughter's needs.
    Stan watches as I imagine the scene—a girl dragging her chains into a shower stall, turning on the faucets. A girl in chains cooking supper, reading a book, doing math, or writing a paper. In chains, yes. Doing drugs. No.
    “Did it work?” I say.
    “He kept her from going out for more than a week. But one day he forgot to unplug the phone and put it out of reach and she called the police.”
    “Rats,” I say. “Busted.” We look at each other, then gaze, baffled, out into the dark.
    We are no longer surprised with ourselves for our mutual consent to behaviors such as the father's, or of any parents we hear of whose desperate attempts at control are meant to keep their children from harm.
    As we linger in our new kitchen, I'm noticing how thin Stan has become, his shirt and shorts loosely fitting his frame. Who could have told us, when we married seven years ago, that our lives would descend into this hell otherwise known as Stephen's adolescence, into one crisisafter another with this child, at first just little things, complaints now and then from his teachers, his grades dropping in one subject, then another, then another.
    Then the move to the Park School, where at first he appeared to apply himself, renew his hope and pride in things as we renewed our hopes in him and in ourselves as parents, only to have them dashed as street gangs infiltrated our world, as charges were brought against him, restraining orders brought to our door, cops to our door, guns.
    When Stephen's own terror took hold of him now and again, when he wept in despair in our arms—just when we thought he might turn around now—he'd run away, disappear, come home, weep, threaten suicide, run again.
    Sweeping his hand through his hair, Stan leans against the sink. We can hear the cicadas in the back trees as the late September night smells drift in the kitchen—wet wood and the first downed leaves.
    Something in Stan has given up. I know it beyond my own dim sadness. As we move through the house now, shutting doors and turning off the lights, I try to remember the last time