The Contract

Published in Stone Canoe, October 2025

The Contract

Once-a-week my daughter and I would meet with Jacqueline Noble. In late February, at Jacqueline’s insistence – she was a germaphobe – we moved to FaceTime. It was better that way because Lily and I were in separate rooms. Sometimes we clicked off with dazzling smiles and a feeling we had resurrected a relationship that had tanked during Lily’s teenage years, but then there were times when Lily would lose it. For instance, I would remind her about number eight on our contract: Treat Mom with civility. There were rules about attending therapy, not smoking in the house, and adhering to quiet hours. Sixteen rules in all.

Lily was twenty-seven. She was also an addict in recovery. 

“This is not working out!” Lily would scream. 

“I was just asking why you can’t write down on the calendar the hours you’ve worked? Then there’s no argument later.”

“Not your turn to talk, Samantha,” Jacqueline would say. “Lily, do you want to finish?”

“Wait a minute,” I’d say. “She has no accountability.”

“You want to get into my business and control me.”

“May I answer?”

“Not your turn,” Jacqueline would say more sternly, her pale, house-bound face suddenly occupying the entire screen.

I was paying the copay. Also in the contract. The contract was security for me and guidance for Lily. It could be the legal argument for evicting her in New York state. As the weeks wore on, Lily met fewer of the contract’s conditions.

⁂

A month ago, when Lily first came to live with me, I heard only tears in her voice, a rhythm lurching between despair and fear. Nothing in the world could stop me, a mother who had carried this baby inside her womb, from hearing it.

On Lily’s first day with me, Lily, the dog, and myself stood behind a wall of loosely interlocking maple and cedar branches. I had trees removed because they’d been too close to the house. Beyond the branches were broken cinderblocks, concrete, pieces of lumber, flower pots, and compromised wooden pallets. Giant kudzu vines reached out from the woods.  

“Move the branches first,” I said. One hour of work a day was number seven on the contract.   

“Where?”

“Back into the woods. They’ll degrade.” 

The dog looked up at us, long tongue out, head shaking as if to say, No way.

 “That’s not going to happen anytime soon,” Lily said.

“Make sure you drag them far back as you can.” The debris pile, building for decades, had become a home for groundhogs and skunks. My neighbor, too, contributed to the monstrosity, but then suddenly during a two-day January thaw, three muscled landscapers with loppers and a Bobcat appeared, leaving nothing on his side but the earth’s blank slate.

“Mom, I need to get a cup of coffee.” This was Lily telling me, This chore is overwhelming. 

“You want to sleep tonight, right?” This was me saying, Get your shit together.

“I always want to sleep.” Not true.

“Re-consider the coffee.”

Jacqueline Noble would have said, Stay out of her business. I had to be careful not to send mixed messages, or God-forbid, take away her agency and make her problems mine. Even though Lily and I had this contract, Jacqueline had not been keen on Lily living with me.

But Lily had no money.   

“When I finish disbanding your junk piles, then what?”

“Junk piles?”

She sneered, as if this convoluted mess somehow symbolized my life. 

“When you’re finished, you can pull weeds.” I demonstrated by tugging on a kudzu vine. “Two hands.” I braced myself, feet firmly planted. “This is one of the most satisfying weeds to pull but you need a good grip, preferably near the base.” A wire was snaking out of her ear — the brain sucker – and I wondered how much she’d heard. “Once you get that solid grip, you pull, then you pull more.” I gave that vine all I had, yanking up ten feet of the ropy root: that nasty, no-good, invasive with its pigheaded-tentacles. The tentacles were like an octopus’ arms: each limb reaching out as far as it could, struggling to be an individual. The plant spread far and wide throughout the backyard, slithering out from the woods setting up new hubs of havoc in the lawn and flower beds.

“You see what the kudzu does, Lily? It sneaks up the trees and by the time you notice it, the tree has been defoliated. The tree is already half dead.”

I slipped inside the house to respond to an e-mail. I wrote the University’s newsletter, Sustainability Initiatives, most of which I did at home which meant my work schedule was flexible. When I had spare time, I helped read and ‘grade’ the college application essays. When I returned, Lily had nested herself in her Hyundai. Tapping ashes from her cigarette out the car’s window, she hunched her shoulders, protecting her phone from probing eyes.

“Be right back, Mom. I’m getting coffee.” Before I had a chance to gather my thoughts, she was racing downhill into town.

⁂

Lily eventually moved the wall of doom. Then she hauled crushed stone by the five-gallon bucket and we built a small walkway together. She trimmed the ten-foot-tall forsythia hedge, but her favorite task was smacking apart wooden pallets with a sledge hammer. After all pallets were dismembered and de-nailed, Lily seemed to lose steam. I focused on my work and read the canon, including Unhealthy Helping and Don’t be an Enabler. I perused the online testimonies, the missives of dire warning, and the failures confessed, the deaths that never should have happened. When Jaqueline said, Go to Al Anon, I went. I attended a dozen meetings but I must have said something naïve about boundaries because the facilitator flung boundaries back at me in a way that stung and told me cross-talking was verboten. Whereas many felt release and camaraderie with the group, I felt pain and isolation. The meetings depressed me. It was possible I was too anxious and fearful to consider new ideas. Like the Twelve Steps. I could understand Lily’s reluctance to conform but I could not understand her embracement of self-destruction.  

⁂

In early March, Tom Hanks and his wife announced that they had COVID-19. Ray, my boyfriend, and I were following the news in China, then Italy, Washington State, and California, shaking our heads, thinking: too bad for them. This is not going to happen to us. We’re too smart for this.

Meanwhile Lily had turned day into night, and night into day. After devouring every gram of sugar in the house, she would announce she was going shopping. She’d be gone an hour and return with dog food, ice cream bars, chocolate-chip cookies, and makeup, and insist it was too late, or she was too tired, or not feeling well, and therefore could not complete the required hour of work.

“Why does it take her so long at the grocery store?” Ray said. “The grocery store is two miles away.”

“I have no idea what she’s doing.” But mothers do, especially mothers in my situation. Taking the back road to the grocery store, you pass by the mobile home park with its bimodal population: the elderly and disabled living on social security with their tiny, barky runt-dogs, and the down-and-out-mostly-homeless who have nothing to lose and will do anything to survive.

A few weeks later, the university in our small city gave its students twenty-four hours to vacate the dorms. The grocery stores had already run out of dried black beans, and it wasn’t long before Governor Cuomo declared a declared a lockdown: we had become the world’s epicenter for the virus. In our county, in the Finger Lakes, anyone who could sew was asked to make cloth masks. We wore them every time we left the house. Cuomo assured us: “We follow the science, and we will control the virus. We are tough, we are smart, and we are strong.” Yet even in my own house, I questioned how much control I really had.   

Lily would fall asleep at my wakeup time and rise when I was sleeping, or trying to sleep, but I did not sleep much. I was always on alert. Her bedroom was directly above mine. I’d hear boxes moving, or her door quietly opening and closing. I knew she had to work things out for herself, yet I felt anxious, like the scientists questioning the virus: where did it come from? How did it kill so many people? Can we stop it? But it wasn’t just that the virus was in our bodies, the virus was a poison in our lives and it poisoned the culture, setting people against one another.         

⁂

My home situation steadily deteriorated. I wanted to tell Lily – who acted as if she was forced to live with me – how much I loved her, but the atmosphere was contentious, and I feared getting in her business. No longer did she eat dinner with us. She ignored the dog and would slam the front door so hard the house would shake. She missed online meetings with her counselors. At night she would cook, eat, and go out, and when I asked her to be quiet, she snarled and swore. When Roy and I had decided this living arrangement helped no one, the governor declared evictions illegal. 

“Nearly every rule has been broken,” I said once to Jacqueline.

“And why does that surprise you?” 

⁂

The joke is: how can you tell when an addict is lying? You can see her lips moving.

⁂

Lily came downstairs in a daze. Her tidy coiffed hair was unwashed and uncombed. Even on this hot July morning, she wore long sleeves, but I noticed a smear of blood on her wrist, and when she left for coffee, Ray picked the lock on her bedroom door. He found a paper bag of bloody tissues and needles beside her bed. When she got home, I confronted her.

“I begged Dr. Shafer to send me to rehab,” she said. “He told me to go to outpatient first. Outpatient won’t even open until Monday! What am I supposed to do?”

Rehab required repeated phone calls, perseverance, luck that a bed would open, the willingness of the insurance company to call addiction for what it was, and the stamina to sort truths from lies. When Jacqueline said, She must make all calls herself — it is her recovery, I remained silent.

⁂

The next day when Lily left for coffee, Ray picked the lock again. We searched through her backpack, desk drawers, and the garbage can. There I found the name of the proposed rehab on a crumbled yellow sheet of paper stained with coffee. I made the phones calls. From what I’d read, I understood that Lily’s mind was hijacked: the decision-making, executive functioning part was severed from the rest of her brain. Survival was all in the moment. The future did not exist. Even so, I begged and pleaded with her to pack her bags, and when I realized that wasn’t working, I stood outside her bedroom door until Lily understood that I was not leaving.

⁂

Roy and I pushed and pulled and stuffed three gigantic suitcases into my Honda. It should have been a four-hour drive; it was nearly double. Ten minutes into the journey, Lily insisted we stop for coffee. We did. When we had driven for another half hour, and had entered Whitney Point, Lily said, “I need more coffee.”

Ray who was driving, shook his head. Thankfully, he said nothing.

“Be quick,” I said. We waited in the car for twenty minutes.

Less than an hour later, she had to pee. Then the motion of the car was making her sick and she needed a walk. At the next rest stop she disappeared into the woods, taking her large purse with her.

“This is not good,” Ray said.

“One false move, one false word, and it’s all over, Ray. This is what addicts do, and nothing’s going to change until she detoxes.”

We waited. I turned on the Honda’s radio and we listened to a Beethoven Symphony (distorted, the signal bad), and when I opened the door to look for her, Lily magically appeared. Her face looked pale and dull. I glanced at Ray and shook my head. She slipped into the backseat without a word, and we drove on, but it wasn’t long before Lily said, “Mom, I need more coffee. The coffee at rehab tastes like water.”

“We’re on the highway,” Ray said. “Next exit thirty miles.”

Lily did get more coffee, and within twenty minutes as predicted, she needed to pee. We were finally on the Taconic Parkway near the New York State-Connecticut border when Lily started sobbing that she needed a toothbrush.

“Just five minutes at a Walgreens, Mom! That’s not too much to ask, is it? A stupid toothbrush?”

And then her favorite shirt had been left on her bed, because I had rushed her. She claimed she wasn’t ready, that we were kidnapping her, and when I said nothing, she threatened to open her door in traffic and jump out. We argued back and forth, and with minutes to go (on hour seven), Lily started hitting the back of the driver’s seat, and when I put my arm across it to protect Roy, she slapped my arm, twice, hard enough that it turned black-and-blue. Do not touch her, I quietly warned Roy, or we will be in big trouble. As Lily raged and threatened us, Jacqueline’s words, You cannot control her, echoed in my mind, and I was close to the breaking point when I screamed: “Stop it right now! We are doing this so that you will not die.” As I turned around to see Lily’s reaction, I saw a police car trailing us. I pushed down on the horn, long and hard.

⁂

“You can put her jail,” the policewoman said, as she turned over my arm. “Or you can ask her to go voluntarily to rehab. It’s up to you.” Then she glanced at Lily, sitting on the concrete wall, squinting at the traffic on Route 7, blowing her cigarette smoke that way, her right leg shaking non-stop. The policewoman called for backup.

 An electric gate lifted. We drove up and around a small hillside and suddenly, like in a movie, there appeared a gorgeous three-story-stone building with lots of transparent glass, a wall of swirling metamorphic rock a hundred feet tall behind it, and waiting for us, a man in a white hazmat suit wearing a sturdy face shield. He stood quietly and still, his hands clasped in front of him, looking saintly. Springing out of the car, I announced: “We’re here! We made it!” I felt tears of victory and shock that had been building up behind my eyes for months. 

The man remained still and nodded in silence.

The two police cars behind us waited.

Ray extricated himself from the Honda, taking the keys with him. 

“She must come freely,” the man encased in white said. “Of her own will.”

And that is when Lily emerged from the back of the police car: her hair combed, makeup perfect, pulling on the sleeves of her jean jacket. “I just need to get my suitcases out.”

Ray snapped to, and the two of us pushed, pulled and squeezed, and we got the two large ones out of the trunk. The one in the back seat was easier. The tires of the Honda car inflated.

Lily walked inside the glass building with a slow, but even stride, not once looking back.

⁂

Due to an adrenaline surge, Ray did not sleep for a solid twenty-four hours, but I slept, and nothing was going to wake me up because I slept the sleep of the relieved, and of the miraculous. 

Meanwhile the scientists reported that the virus was transmitted through the air, so we hiked at Taughannock Falls and Watkins Glen. On the weekends, we had picnics beside the lake or hosted outdoor potlucks with masks and hand sanitizer, and we promised ourselves that even when the snow came, we’d find a way to connect. Do the normal things that normal people do.

After a week of detox, Lily called. I did not ask how are you, that would have been too personal, but that would come later, these ordinary questions that mothers ask their daughters. I weighed my words, considering the message sent. Please let me for once, say the right thing.

“I’m in a safe place,” Lily said, “for now.”

              “For now.”

            I sent Lily photos of the hillside she had cleared and the walkway she had constructed, and she said, “I did that? All that?” And she looked at me, her eyes clear, and she blinked once. “I did all that by myself.”      

The dog sitting beside me stuck out her tongue, and the leaves on the locust trees flickered, and they’d fall, which was inevitable, but in the spring, the cycle would start again, but with the energy fresh, stronger, and ourselves, a little wiser.