Gayle comes home for the third time after she has spent twenty months living on the streets. This time her parents, Drew, and Lois, have made it clear that they will no longer pay for rehab should she decide to run away from home to live on the streets. It is in Gayle’s conversations with Harriet, the cook, and a former drug abuser, that Gayle reveals what it was really like for her to live on the streets. For her parents, Gayle’s struggles with drug abuse have left them anxious, uncertain of whether she’s come home for good, and every moment she leaves reminds her of the precarious nature of living with someone struggling with sobriety. Despite Gayle coming home, her parents still worry that she might return at any moment, and they find that even with her home, her past disappearances are a cloud anxiety over the house.
After five months of sobriety, just when it seems as though Gayle’s life is finally heading in the right direction and she is going to Junior College with the hope going on to a career in hospitality, she vanishes without warning. The family initially believes that Gayle has relapsed and gone back to the streets and that what they saw as a positive change was nothing more than a respite.
But what takes place in the aftermath of Gayle’s disappearance is what shapes the rest of this tragedy. Drew, Lois and the rest of the family are left with the task of making their lives over with the fractured pieces that are produced by Gayle’s absence. Gayle’s disappearance brings up not just feelings of loss, but what the impact of drug abuse does to those who are intimately affected by it.