"Since when is life a drag, Hamilton? Things are going well. Things have never been so good."

He made a pfffft noise and shot me a patronizing glance that made me feel eight years old, like I'd felt when I hid my mother's cigarettes to make her stop smoking. He sat on the bed. "Don't you understand, Richard? There's nothing at the center of what we do."

"I—"

"No center. It doesn't exist. All of us—look at our lives: We have an acceptable level of affluence. We have entertainment. We have a relative freedom from fear. But there's nothing else." I felt I was getting the bad news I'd been trying to avoid for so long.

"But didn'—"

He cut me off. "Shhh. At least Pam and I accept things as they are. And I wish you'd let us do that. We get our job done. We pay our taxes. We never forget people's birthdays. So just let us be." He stood up. "Good night, Reverend. Ta ta." He floated out of the room and yet again I had that sick feeling that accompanies a recently bruised friendship. I thought of all my recent years of AA abstention—weeks on end with my head feeling like a rotten pumpkin—all to combatdoubts, to kill time, to wait for something that might never happen, some revelation that a center did exist. I felt very lost there in the bedroom. I walked the four miles home.

Home was a small, recently purchased two-bedroom condo in North Vancouver—a ragtag old seventies condo with slatted cedar walls and Plexiglas bubble skylights. It had, according to Linus, an elusive "sex-in-the-hot-tub, cum-on-the-ultrasuede" character. I loved my little condo merely for its calmness and coolness and the view of the mountains out back; it was the first place I'd ever lived in that actually felt like my own. I was glad to be home.

Around eight o'clock the next evening my doorbell rang: Pam, white-faced and bushed after PA-ing a TV movie filming nearby. "Ghost Mom returns to Earth to help her family fight land developers." She sat pooped but birdlike on the couch. She shushed me and crossed her arms. She looked at the floor.

"What?" I asked, trying to be casual.

Silence. "It's happening again, Richard."

"What is?"

"You know. I know you know. Stuff. Junk."

"How long now?"

"A few months? It's manageable. Nothing hardcore yet. But it's getting bigger. It always does." She stood by the window.

"Are you—?"

"Shhh!" She huffed out a carbon dioxide sprite into the glass and continued: "I've escaped before, Richard, we all know that. Maybe I can again. I'm still a little bit fabulous."

"Okay. Can you function while you're on it? I mean, doesn't it zonk you out?"

"Au contraire, it makes us zingy."

"Zingy?"

"You look sad, Richard. Don't be. You'll do me a favor?"

A pause. "Sure."

"We've never judged you. Don't judge us. We enjoy liking you. It should stay that way.""It could stay that way"

"Shush."

We talked a bit, then went into the kitchen where she drank an Orange Crush. We talked more, mostly in circles. Then Pam chugged her pop and hopped through the rain and into her car, driving back to Hamilton in a halfhearted Transylvanian drag race.

Megan was going through teen dramas at that time. In 1996, at age sixteen, she was a little girl in so many ways. She read her fantasy books and her eyes lit up when she talked about magic. I thought she was a wise, cool kid who could obtain better marks in school if she'd only try. She dressed weirdly, but then big deal. She'd dyed her hair nighttime black (with mouse brown roots) and used black nail polish exclusively. Her skin was morgue-white. She had piercings up and down her ears, nose, and heaven only knows where else. She spent weeks sequestered behind her locked bedroom door, a nonstop boom box pumping out endless rotations of albums by the Cure. It seemed a typical enough rebellion.

Megan and Lois had a particularly vivid relationship. Lois considered Megan's friends losers—responsible for her rebellion. And Megan baited Lois to no end, as, for example, the time Megan and her friend Jenny Tyrell staged a phone conversation when they knew Lois was eavesdropping on the extension.

"How many cocaine straws do you think you could get out of a yellow McDonald's straw, Jenn?"

"Idunno. Three?"

"No. I think it's more like two and a half. I've got a whole pile here in my room. I'll cut some while we talk—I can see what looks like the best length." Lois stormed into Megan's bedroom at that point only to hear Megan crow.

Lois ranted, "You think you're so clever, don't you? Who gives you the money to pay for all your things?"

"I do. I sell your ugly little owl figurines one by one to collectors, Grandma."

Shrieks.Once a teenager decides to be bad, the cycle is hard to break. Megan's phase kept spiraling downward. And the drug issue was scaring me. I don't think Megan did as much as Lois suggested, but it was worrisome nonetheless. Drugs were so different than when I was young. Pot was once a few giggles, munchies, spaciness for a few hours, then a headache. Modern drugs—previously unknown acid molecules, dimethyl tryptamine, crack—were a parent's most fearful imaginings made compact and simple.

In early 1997 came a small crisis. Megan and Lois had an extreme scream-fest over a black cotton sock that had made its way into Lois's white laundry cycle. Megan vanished. That night, Megan was found by a jogger passed out on a Burnside Park bench.

The police constable said she'd been drinking heavily. "There was an empty rum bottle there. We went through her purse to try to locate an address; we found a large amount of pot and some psilocy-bin mushrooms."

The cops let Megan off with a warning. When they left, Lois said, "She can't stay here. This is it. I love her, but she's lost to me."

I understood. The next day I suggested to Megan, hung over and groggy, that she move into my spare bedroom, and she grudgingly accepted the offer. George, Lois, and the dog had gone away for the day, so the house was quiet. We grabbed a few posters and some knickknacks to make her new space her own. She spent most of her time at my house, too. She'd been suspended from Sentinel high school so often that having her around the house became the norm on weekdays.

"What is it this time?"

"I told my English teacher to go fuck up a rope."

Or:

"What is it this time?"

"I wore a black lace shroud to gym class."

"That's all?"

"I lit a cigarette after I walked in. I blew smoke rings."

We enrolled Megan in an alternative school in North Van; she seemed to do half decent. We were glad she was making progressuntil we learned the real reason she continued attending: the school was a close walk to the house of her charming new boyfriend, Skitter, whom I met by accident when I went to the school to drop off some documents. He and Megan were off for lunch (drugs) somewhere over on Lonsdale.

"You must be, like, the old man. Huh?" Muttonchop sideburns. Dice tattoo. Beady eyes looking out from a hopped-up '71 Satellite Sebring. A real doozy of a boyfriend.

"I'm Megan's father, yes." Lord, I felt old. "And you are … ?"

"Skitter, man."

"Skitter," screamed Megan, "just take off, okay?" She was in the passenger seat and refused to look at me. "Boot it."

"Hey man—gotta go." And with that, Skitter's car farted itself out of the parking lot.

Skitter was every parents' worst fears of a daughters' dream date. He lived in a moss-roofed 1963 cereal box in darkest Lynn Valley atop an unmown lawn sparked with gasoline burns and neglected auto parts. A disassembled black Trans-Am on blocks rested in the carport. One could almost hear the neighbors' groans of shame at Skitter's house. A few times Megan called me on his cell phone: "You don't understand, Dad. Skitter's different."