Stepmother Remembers Lights, Shadows of Alex Hopping's Life

Editor's note: The short life of Alex Hopping was told in a series of stories chronicling her overdose death in her mother's home in Wauwatosa and the Police Department's six-month investigation to find and arrest the men who supplied her with heroin. Alex had another family and life in California, where she spent summers and holidays with her father, stepmother and their children. This is her stepmother's recollection of the girl she loved but could never fully understand.

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By Kathryn Hopping

Three a.m. and the freeway is dark and empty. It takes me just 20 minutes to drive from Alameda to San Francisco General Hospital where my stepdaughter, Alex, has been put on psychiatric hold while she’s processed for theft charges.

My thoughts whiplash in my head: “This can’t be true. She was doing so well. What will we do now? She stole a coat, for God’s sake, to buy drugs? She’ll have to stay with us. She told her mother she didn’t want to live? This just cannot be true. What the hell was she thinking? Was everything she told us a lie?”

I follow the signs to psychiatric emergency. There's no parking, except where it says “No Parking.” Wonderful. I park anyway.

I remind myself to inhale-exhale, then walk up to the entry. The glass doors slide open and I cross the lobby to the desk where a man in white sits picking his teeth and talking on the telephone. He glances up at me and waves me over to the row of chairs against the wall. I sit down and wait. A tall, thin man paces in front of me, his green army blanket dragging on the floor. His feet are bare. He hums in a low monotone, shakes his head at his thoughts.

Thirty minutes and the desk clerk is still chatting on the phone. He lets out a burst of laughter that screeches along my spine, driving me up and out of my chair. Beyond him in the next room, I see a woman at a desk filling out papers. I walk past the clerk, avoiding his hand as he reaches out to stop me.

“Excuse me? I’m looking for my daughter? She’s supposed to be released. Where can I find her?”

“Oh, honey, you’re in the wrong place. This is admissions. Go on outside, turn right up the drive and go up the stairs. Door’s to the left. Just ring the bell.” The man in the blanket stops pacing, hums louder as I walk past him.

Outside, a heavy fog has settled in, muting the early morning street sounds. The building looms formless above me as I climb the stairway. I look through the wire-laced window and ring the bell. I can see her. There, across a hallway in another windowed room. She looks as if she’s been crying. A young Hispanic woman in a blue uniform appears at the door and smiles as she lets me in.

“Are you Mrs. Hopping? She’s sure gonna be glad to see you. Let me go get her. You wait right here.”

I brace myself, expecting the attitude I was so familiar with these past months. Expecting anger. Expecting arrogance. I am not prepared for the frightened girl wrapped in a dark green blanket who throws her arms around me.

“Kathryn, I’m sorry. Thank you for not leaving me here. I’m so sorry.”

Alex’s pretty face is drawn and acne dots her chin and forehead. The dark circles under her eyes don’t belong on a 19-year-old face. The blanket slides to the floor and I hold her. She’s shaking; I can feel her bones through her sweater.

“Shhh. It’s OK now. We’re going home.”

I don’t remember much of what we talked about on our way home. I remember Alex was alternately animated and quiet. That she punched the buttons on the radio searching for music that wasn’t “stupid.” She told me how awful the psych unit was. How they made her strip and only let her have a blanket. That she nearly froze to death in that room.

She told me how she’d learned her lesson; that she never wanted to go through another night like this one again. And I remember wanting to press her for details on her arrest. I wanted to start off on the right foot. Be honest and no-nonsense. Be clear and direct. I considered telling her I was the one who requested a psych hold.

But I did none of those things.

The physics of Alex   

At 7 a.m. that same morning: “Alex, wake up. We have to leave for court in a half hour.”

She groans and rolls over. “It’s too early. I’m tired.”

“We have time to stop at Starbucks if you get up now.” She squints an eye at me.

The ride back to the city is filled with intermittent silence and bursts of complaints.

“We don‘t need to be there at 8. It says 8:30. It’s 7 now. God, Kathryn. This is so stupid.”

I don’t answer. One word, and I’ll end up saying too much. As the traffic thickens and stops, Alex sighs, pulls her poncho hood over her head and puts her headset on, listens to the music on her iPhone. We get there and the courthouse doors are still locked. Alex just looks at me.

At 8:30, we are let in and go to her assigned courtroom, where the doors there are locked, too. We sit on a bench, wait, watch a 20-something man peel something off the bottom of his shoe while an older woman speaks to him in an angry whisper. My head feels like it’s stuffed with dirt clods.

“Hey, Kathryn. I have a great idea. After this, let’s go over to the sober house so I can get my stuff.” I look at her, considering. “Yes!” she says, smiles for the first time this morning.

“Will anyone be there to let us in? I thought you said everyone leaves in the morning to go to work.”

“Yeah, but I can get in anyway. I know where the emergency key is hidden.” This is already too typically complicated, and I know working it out is beyond me right now.

“No, Alex. We need to call the house to let them know we’re coming, and we need to talk to your dad first. Besides, we don’t know if you even have to leave or what’s going to happen in court.”

“Kathryn. They. Are. Not. Going. To. Care. And I need my charger or my phone will die. We can leave the rest of my stuff and get it later.”

I look at her. “C’mon, Kathryn. Pleeease.”

My stomach twists. Too late, I realize I have once again fallen into Alex’s physics: Every answer must be accompanied by a response of equal magnitude but opposite direction. The only way to stop is to stop.

“No. We’re not going this morning.”  I touch her shoulder. “It’ll all work out.”

“Don’t. Touch. Me.” She plugs her headphone into her ears, jerks her hood hard over her head. I look at her, struggle to remember why I care so much for her, try to feel something beyond the anger boiling in my stomach.

Complex relationships

Mark and I met through friends, and had been seeing each other for several weeks. We had yet to meet each other’s children. My oldest daughter, Erin, was away at college, and my son, Brian, lived with his father and stepmother in Pleasanton, where he was finishing his last year of high school.

Shannon, my youngest daughter, lived with me every other week. Mark’s daughters lived with their mother in Grass Valley and stayed with Mark when they weren’t in school. It was, to say the least, complicated. So I was excited and nervous when I finally had the chance to meet Mark’s two girls.

The first time I met Alex and her sister, Monica, was at the Spaghetti Factory in Oakland. Mark had invited me to a mutual friend’s birthday party. Everyone was seated at a long table, and Mark pointed out his daughters. Monica was 9, almost 10. She had bright red hair and the most beautiful ivory skin. Alex was 6, almost 7.  She was wearing a floppy hat and her blonde hair stuck out around the brim. Monica was laughing at Alex, who was scowling, with spaghetti sauce all over her face.

A few weeks later, we all met at my house. I watched them from my porch as they walked up the sidewalk. Monica was holding her dad’s hand and Alex was bouncing along in front of them, skinny arms and legs akimbo. When she saw me, she yelled and ran up to me, grabbed my hands. “Hey! My Dad said we’re going to go get ice cream. Can we? He said it’s up to you. Tell him we’re going to get ice cream.”

She was like a small tornado, whirling around me, talking without taking a breath, her face lifted up toward me. I thought, “She’s a little elf child,” and she had my heart.    

What did I love about Alex? Let me count the ways. She had such energy, always moving thinking feeling as if there would never be enough time to do all of the things she wanted to do. And her endlessly curious mind: Alex was the most goal-oriented child I’d ever known. She was always doing something: drawing, making things, inventing adventures, making up stories, coming up with things to go do. A car ride was never boring when I was with her. Or a walk. Or fixing meals. She was always there, “What’s that? Why are you doing it that way? I have an idea!” But that chamber in her heart that loved my daughter Shannon, well that I cherished.

Sisters of the soul

Alex and Shannon met at Fairyland near Lake Merritt in Oakland. Mark and I arranged to meet there. I brought Shannon; he brought Monica and Alex. We figured it would be less awkward for the girls. I don’t think we needed to worry: The three of them looked like and responded to each other like sisters, as if they’d known each other all of their lives.

But it was Alex and Shannon who flew toward each other, leaving Monica and Mark and me behind. They were like their own flock of birds, darting from swings to slides to fairy tale houses, moving in unison as if the thoughts and the bodies of each were of one. In that late spring afternoon as the shadows lengthened into evening and the warm sun cooled, Shannon and Alex became each other’s first best friend.

It made sense. They were both 6, born three weeks apart – “sisters from a different mister,” Alex liked to say. Both were tall for their age and slender, with strawberry blond hair and blue eyes. They loved music and books and drawing and animals and American Girl dolls and inventing adventures. They spent most of every summer in their “bunk room” at the back of the house engaged in top secret conversations.

We used to say that Alex and Shannon were flip sides of the same coin: their abilities and personalities were complementary. Where Shannon was reserved and shy, Alex was exuberant and gregarious; where Alex was high-energy and emotional, Shannon was calm and logical.

But they shared the same intelligence and intensity and creativity. And they shared an understanding of each other that perhaps came from neither of them ever having lived in a family with both parents.        

I don’t know the all of their friendship. I never will. But I do know what I saw: With each other, they were more often patient than not; more often kind; more often tolerant of each other’s quirks and ways. As they grew older they would grow apart, and they would walk down different roads. But their understanding and love for each other remained. For that I’m grateful; my own relationship with Alex became tattered, torn by anger and fear. After Alex’s arrest, I became unable to discern the truth of her, unable to hold to what I knew, unable to act on what I knew.

Not seeing the signs

“Alex. I can’t believe this. Where have you been?” I’m standing in the kitchen door as she comes in the house, followed by her dad. I’d been worried, frightened, my stomach felt like I’d eaten sandpaper. She’d left at noon, said she was going to a meeting. It is now almost midnight. She’d called while she was riding the BART train, asked if we could pick her up at the Fruitvale Station nearby. Mark had to get her; I was too upset to trust what I’d say to her.

Alex walked over to me and put her arms around me. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think you’d be worried.”

The fear I’d been in all evening comes crashing back. “What were you thinking, Alex? Anything can happen out there. Anything. Don’t do this again, Alex. Don’t scare us like that again. What do you want, to be under lock and key?”

“No. I’m sorry. I’m going to bed.” She hugs her dad goodnight and shuffles past me into the bedroom, pats my arm as she passes. “ ‘S’okay, Kathryn.” Later that night I hear her get up and go into the bathroom. I listen for awhile, but fall asleep before she comes out again.
   
What we don’t see. How much of that is a choice? And once we do see, where do we go from there? I keep returning to this field of memory. Scenes flash by:
   
Of Alex holding Mark’s and my hands after giving a homeless man some money, looking up at us and smiling, “We’re good people, aren’t we?”

Of Alex sitting in her dad’s lap, her arms wrapped around his neck, telling him she loved his hair, making him laugh.

Of Alex and Shannon racing through the house with tiny notebooks in their hands, “on the job” as Pet Detectives.

Of Alex relentlessly teasing Monica, and Monica more patient than any saint.

Of all of us at Oakland A’s games: Monica and her dad intent on the game; Alex and Shannon intent on the ice cream and Cracker Jacks vendors. Me, somewhere in between, glad to be there.

Of Alex giving me a picture she had drawn: funny stick figures of Mark in his beard, me with my wild hair, and herself, smiling. On it she had written: “Make new friends and keep the old, one is silver the other gold.”
   
Of Alex sitting in my car after her final court date in San Francisco a month after her arrest, happy with the outcome: community service, 12-step meetings. All she has to do is show up for court in Wisconsin and hopefully be able to come back here. Her flight is booked for tonight.

One last favor, please?

Alex is full of energy, excited. “See, Kathryn, I told you things would work out,” she says as she texts someone. “And oh, can I ask you a really really huge favor?” I look at her, all lit up and happier than she’s been in weeks.

“What’s that, honey?”

“Well. I would like to say goodbye to my friends before I leave tonight. So can you take me to Starbucks down on Market? We’re just going to hang out for awhile.”  I hesitate, state the obvious about being home in time to get to the airport, listen to her reassurances, hear her happiness, see what I want to see.
   
And finally: Of Alex, as she gets out of the car and skip-walks toward Starbucks. Someone honks at me, and she turns and grins, waves, then disappears into the crowd. I will never see her alive again.
   
She did get on the plane to Wisconsin, but barely. Alex had gotten high and the airport authorities had to escort her to the plane. For the next six months, Alex’s life cascaded over all of us – her mother and stepfather, her dad, Monica, Shannon, me, even Erin and Brian were checking in, concerned for her.

She transited from jail to rehab and back to jail, where she would stay and, finally we thought, get clean and stay clean. When she was released, she stayed with Monica for a few days, then went to live alternately with her stepfather, then with her mother. Over time, it seemed she was doing well. Mark would talk with her on the phone; I would chat with her online. She sounded good. She got a job. She wanted to go to Bonnaroo. She sounded good.

How to reconcile what we remember with what happened? I still have the picture she drew, along with the Pet Detective notebooks, game tickets, photos of Mark and Monica and Shannon and Alex, all kept safe in a cedar chest. Lives pieced together, held with imperfect memory.

Still, there is truth in memory – although there are some truths that cannot be spoken of to any other, except maybe God. There are things I’ve learned about myself that I was unwilling or unable to look at until Alex died. Now, after these long first six months since Alex left us, I can look at those truths, but I cannot speak of them yet. I can say that I lost sight of her, of Alex, of who she was – what she meant to me.

I would like to tell her that. I guess I would just like to sit down with her again, talk about the world, each other, love. I would like to tell her that the shadows in her were like any other shadow: unable to exist without the light from the sun. That it’s the sun of her I cherish. The sun of her that I miss.

So here I am, thinking of you, sitting in the sun in Adin, California, visiting your Uncle Roger and Aunt Paula. It seems I understand a little more now. Still, I know so little. I don’t know where you are, Alex. And I don’t know who you really were. Except who I remember you to be. That I loved you. That’s no small thing, knowing that. And knowing you were here, in this world. You always will be. Here, in the sun, bright between the shadows.

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Read Wawuatosa's Patch's three-part series on the life and death of Alex Hopping.