CHAPTER TEN
Withdrawal
LAKE
Not much longer in Boston Hope until I’m discharged. I know because every time my morphine dose is cut; I get another throbbing headache and a sleepless night. Withdrawal is the worst thing I’ve experienced. I’m not happy. I’m barely hopeful and I’m irritable.
I haven’t even talked much to Brooks. I roll away from him when he visits, staring out the window while he answers emails on his phone, worried the next round of cold sweats will cause me to explode and lash out at him.
My mouth is dry. My blood thinks for itself. I can feel it itching at my veins, searching for a dingy needle that isn’t coming. It’s impossible to focus on anything but the agonizing need for a fix. Once I start to itch, it doesn’t take long for my life to flood throughout me. My childhood, my mistakes and regrets, parts of myself I can’t stand, and people I hate.
All the trauma reaches my blood and pours it a drink. My blood chugs it, and before I can stop it, my brain fills with emotions I thought I suffocated to death long ago.
I don’t recall being this pissed the last time I got sober. I remember trying relentlessly to find distractions. Brooks was struggling to keep helping me with rehab payments, so I left his place. I think part of me realized I’d fail, but I convinced myself I could do it. On my own.
Those emotions still linger. The struggle to not pull my hair and pick my skin during a job interview. I started working a cashier job at a dead-end grocery store, but that was useful. I’d accomplished something.
I promised myself it would be fine when that thrill no longer got me pumped to live another day. I scanned items with a smile smacked on my face. Then it became me counting each item I checked, listening to the beep as the barcode slid across the scanner. I tried to use that beep to drown out the thoughts gnawing at my skull.
My sister’s death anniversary rolled around, and I couldn’t fucking take it. I needed something, anything, to use as an excuse. So I wouldn’t seem like a failure.
So I stalked my parents’ socials all day, even during my shift. I ignored customers. I waited past the sunset, but they posted nothing for their dead little girl. The little girl that raised her baby brothers. The little girl who kept it together for her crappy parents, so they never had to grow up themselves.
I was so done. Thinking. Being. I stopped answering Brooks’ calls. Avoided him. He’s my last thread. I just had to hope he’d give up.
On my twenty-third day of sobriety, I stuck a needle into my flesh and let it rot until it was all I knew. I went blank. I haven’t had to think about my sister or anything else since.
Until now. With all the stuff I crave draining from my body. Just me and my thoughts. Brooks is gone, and so is Serenity.
I lay my head next to the plastic table. A stupid amount of unturned brochures pile on top of each other.
Brooks has one clutched in his hand whenever he comes in. Sometimes Angel brings a handful. There’s so many damn brochures, I have duplicates. Might as well call it a collection and sell them online.
I reach over and grab some of them. Maybe this shit can distract me.
The first one is green and purple with bold white text. I scan along the words, but I take none of it in. It’s hard to process information when sweat is dripping from my forehead, but goosebumps coat my arms.
I shake my head and hold the brochure tighter. It rambles about horses and prayer. Not my thing. I toss it to the right of me and I pick up the next one.
I bite the inside of my cheek and chew. The words are scrambling. I can’t even read. My eyes feel heavy. My stomach tightens. I drop the brochure and bunch my hands into tight fists. The sweat dripping out of me is grossing me out, and now I’m shaking. It’s freezing in this room.
I know I need to do this. My sister’s inheritance means everything to me. She wrote her final words on paper for me to read once I got my shit together. Plus, there’s Serenity too. I said I’d help her. I want to help her.
Brochures fall off the bed and smack onto the tiled floors.
“Hell,” I murmur. I miss my sister. Everything she did for me. My lungs rise and crash, and I pray for my head to stop. Go blank. But my brain trails back to the memory of being kicked into the snow. Then when my ma fed me a moldy peanut butter sandwich, but her sandwich was two slices of fresh bread.
I’m overreacting.
Am I?
My jaw tenses. I should’ve been there for River. Instead of getting high and making her live in a shell half the size of her. She could have accomplished more in her narrow time on this fucked planet. She would’ve had more hours to herself if it wasn’t for me.
Crap. I need to forget all of this, but it’s impossible. Like Brooks said, I can’t run from this anymore. I squeeze my eyelids shut as the cold sweats get worse. And everything I’m feeling circles into one thing. I have nothing to lose, do I?
“Lake?” Her voice cuts in, an angelic tone I’ve grown familiar with.
I open my eyes, and there she is, standing at the end of my hospital bed. Her hands clapped on the end, holding herself up on tipped toes. I swear I can see a literal glowing circle appear a few inches above her head and wings tearing from her back, reaching out to the sides of her.
She’s wearing blue scrubs, with her pager clipped onto her waist. “Are you okay?”
I sit up, unsure of what to say, so I throw my arms up in frustration. “No,” I croak. “I can’t do this.”
Her doe eyes go wide and she frowns. She rounds my bed, gathering my wrists into her hands. She stalls for a moment as her touch tingles at my skin. I wonder if she feels it, too. The tiny, soft zaps in my skin where she’s latched onto.
“What’s upsetting you?”
Everything. It’s all too much for me, Serenity.
I open my mouth to speak and I let it hang apart. For a moment, Angel locks eyes with me before turning her attention towards the brochures spread across my blankets.
“Is this overwhelming you?” she asks, raising one of them in the air.
I bow my head forward.
“Would you prefer if I went through them with you?”
I haven’t seen her since I asked her to marry me. Then Fletch Fugly waltzed his pathetic self into my room, so Serenity broke our staring contest and bolted out. But now she’s back again, with wings soaring behind her and a gentle smile on her lips.
My mouth is still wide open. When Serenity walks into my space, I forget everything that tackles my brain. I swear, if I met her in a stadium, packed full of people, mid Super-Bowl, she’d still stand out.
The pain still lingers. The compressing sensation in my stomach, the shivering and the headache, but it’s not enough to overwhelm me. She creates this bubble of warmth and the thoughts of needing to feed my body with heroin go away.
I can’t have heroin regardless. If she’s the only thing that’ll quit my thinking, so be it. I’ll breathe her in until I can’t anymore. Until failure runs me down again. Hopefully she’ll come to my funeral when it rolls around, and she won’t hate me for what I’ve done.
Her smile widens. She drops onto my bed and scoots close to me. Her hand grabs onto a brochure and she unfolds it.
Angel snickers. “Okay, you don’t want to go on a ranch and pet horses, do you?”
If I get thrown into a ranch with horses, it’ll for sure be the last anyone sees of me. “Hell no.”
She throws her head back and laughs. Her hair falls in place, and her nose scrunches. That tingle I had earlier pounds at the back of my jaw, begging me to take her chin in my hand, turn her head so I can see that smile clearer. Capture it so it stays.
“I’m surprised. You seem like you’d ride on horses and wrack up cattle with rope.”
I squint my eyes at her. “I’m more of a tattoo guy.”
She hums and hovers her finger down my leg where the brochures are. An inch lower and she’d be brushing her finger on my sweatpants. My body tenses. This woman has no idea the power she holds.
She whips her head from the brochures to me. “You don’t have tattoos.”
I take a second to remember what we’re talking about. The same finger is now pointing at my arms. They are bare, other than my scabs and scars.
“There’s one on my chest.” I tap on my shirt.
Serenity’s eyes narrow. She makes a ticking sound with her tongue and shakes her head. “No, there isn’t.”
I square my shoulders. “You don’t know that.”
“I cut off your shirt to resuscitate you. You don’t have a chest tattoo.”
Damn. Well, I am lying. There’s not a drop of ink in my skin, but that doesn’t mean I’m not a tattoo guy. I’m not much of a planner, but I’ve planned out my tattoos. I just never had enough money for it, usually spent it elsewhere. Hence my scars. They’re the closest things to tattoos on my body.
I could fess up now and tell Serenity I have none, but it’s entertaining to watch her face morph around in confusion. I grin. “Alright. lied. I got leg tattoos.”
Her head tilts to the side.
Once again, I’m narrowing in on her green eyes. I give her a sad smile before dramatically sighing. “Terrible. I know. Nobody gets a leg tattoo first.”
She smiles from ear-to-ear. Her smile is innocent. That’s what I like about it. The exhaustion she tries to hide disappears when she grins. She’s not pretending anymore. I can see that exhaustion is gone.
I like making Serenity smile.
“What a disgrace.” She giggles. “But you don’t have any leg tattoos either, mister.”
I squish my lips together and look down at my legs. “I could.”
My head dips to the side. Serenity sits up straight and the newfound confidence shoots out of her. I know, at this moment, she’s already caught me in my lie.
“No. You have two positions when you sleep. Sometimes you sleep on your back, but you usually sleep on your side. You tuck your blankets between your legs and hold them, too.” She sucks in a breath, then continues. “So I’ve seen your legs. Bare. Just skin.”
So the angel watches me sleep. Enough times to know my only two sleeping positions. She’s a guardian angel. She keeps the same confident grin for a moment, but then her face drops and her cheeks turn cherry.
Brooks brought me actual clothes a few days after I got to Boston Hope. He said he was sick of catching glimpses of my bare ass poking out of my hospital gown. Sounds like a him problem. I’d sleep naked if I could.
Angel’s a tomato, but she still thinks she’s won. I can’t let that slide. If Brooks has seen my naked butt, so has she. “Seen more than my legs then, Angel.”
She tucks in her lips and whips her head to the side. Her entire head is redder than roses. “No, I haven’t.” Her voice snaps, which only embarrasses her more.
I’ve never seen a person get so easily flustered.
“Wow Angel. Seen me naked and didn’t even compliment me. My self-esteem is in the gutter.”
Serenity shoots her head up and shakes her hands around, “No no, you’re—” She stops speaking, examining the evil grin on my face.
“Screw you!” she shouts, lightly smacking my arm.
I’m enjoying this way too much. If only she hated strings. No. if only I didn’t enjoy her company so much. Otherwise I’d take her. I’d eat her soup, then show her how good it tastes. I’d smooth my hands up her hips and waist, and sink my lips right into hers—
“We are going back to brochures!”
I jump at her raised voice. It’s like she was thinking of something impossible with me. She stabs at one brochure, gripping it aggressively.
She reads over the brochure. I’m not sure if her face is confused or disapproving. “This one has very outdated values.” She pulls it far away from her face.
“Also hell no.” I pick up a brochure and start reading. Angel tosses hers and grabs another. “This one isn’t so bad. Only three days a week, though,” I say, flipping it to the back.
“Well, I guess that’s okay. I’d get Brooks to barricade you inside when you’re home.” She grins, lifting her head to look at me.
“Trust me Angel. Brooks would lock me away if he had somewhere to lock me away.”
Her face drops. “Right. I forgot you have nowhere to go when you’re discharged.” Her bun is loose, undoubtedly from running around the ER. Strands of her hair are framing her face.
Of course, Brooks shared those details with her, but I’m not sure if I want to elaborate on my housing situation. Right now, Angel looks so peaceful. The hair draping around her face is making her seem more relaxed. Like sitting here with me is her escape from all the trouble downstairs. I don’t want to ruin it.
“Is that why you overdosed?” She says that so softly, studying the window ahead of us.
“Well, had an apartment, but I lost my job.” I huff. “Then I blew my savings, so I lost my apartment.”
Her hands draw together in her lap and she fidgets with her brochure. “So that is why. It was too much to handle?”
My life was falling apart. I lost my job and my home. Brooks is my only family, but I wasn’t contacting him. I wanted him to cut off. Not that it mattered. I already sold my phone to pocket drugs.
“No, Angel.” I try to sound reassuring. “It was an accident. Didn’t mean to go lethal on myself.”
No idea if I’m faking that or telling her the truth. Half of me is too exhausted to keep going. That same half of me realized I squeezed too much into that needle. I still knew that as I slid down the ugly peeling paint in the restaurant bathroom. Half of me wanted all of it to be over.
Serenity turns back to me and hesitates to speak, but her eyes decide to meet mine. “If we get married, you’ll really try, right? You’ll try to live your life differently? Without the accidental overdoses, and all the scary uncertainty?”
I slouch back. “I’ll try. Angel. Already trying.”
“Lake.” She sighs. “Brooks and I are here, but we can only do so much. Marrying me will only do so much. Is your sister’s inheritance enough to keep you motivated?”
I turn my head away from her and glare at the wall. I hate feeling ambushed, but her and Brooks keep doing this. They know damn well I’m searching for any reason to avoid another rehab program. I could sit here and argue that they don’t understand, but I’m not alone with issues here. I’m just the idiot that chose a crappy coping mechanism and now I need to cut it for my sister’s letters.
River’s death wasn’t the only reason I fell into this rabbit-hole, though. I was using long before she passed. It doesn’t make it okay, but I’ve fallen so far. I’m afraid to go back.
“If we get married,” she says to the wall, “your rehab would be covered. And you’d have a place to live, with me.”
What is with her always trying to save everyone else? Does she ever relax? I still can’t believe this woman doesn’t have a big flashy ring suffocating her finger.
There’s no way I’m going to leech off of her. I’m not just doing this for myself anymore. Guess I never was. “Angel, if we get married, you’ll be okay. You don’t need to do this to fix me.”
The room goes silent. I can see her out of the corner of my eye. She’s got a small frown on her face. The rest of her expression is blank. It pains me that her only option is to marry a user.
“I’m not trying to fix you.” Her voice is a whisper.
She tucks loose hair behind her ear. She’s the only witness to my heart plummeting from my chest. That muted sentence hits me like a truck.
“The last thing I want for you is to stress about some junkie,” I tell her. “Again, this is for you too, Angel.”
She pushes her palms deep into her thighs and rubs down the skin. “We’ll get married. You’ll move in with me, and we’ll worry about each other. That’s the only way this works.”
I rub the side of my neck. “This is fraud, though. We gotta have a plan, or you can get in a lot of trouble.” I wanna make sure she knows how risky this is.
She looks me dead in the face. “I’m already in a lot of trouble, Lake.”
Again, my hospital room goes dead silent. I’m her last resort of help.
If we go through with getting married, I’ll have my finances covered for rehab, and since she isn’t paying out of pocket, I won’t feel like complete trash if I relapse. She’ll be taken care of. At least for a while. Enough time for her to get stable. She saved my life. She deserves that. If by some damn miracle this all works out how it’s supposed to, I’ll get my sister’s last words to me.
Serenity turns her body to face me. Her hands reach forward, and she holds onto my hands. “Marry me, Phoenix.” Her cheeks turn a shade of pink.
My lips quirk. “Okay, Angel.”
She lets go of one of my hands and holds up her pinky. “Promise?”
I stare at her in amused shock. “Not gonna pinky swear you,” I grumble.
“Yes, you are. Do it.”
She is just like a bag of hallucinatory mushrooms. The wings she can’t see flap behind her, eager for the chance of rising. Her eyes are blooming with hope for a brighter future.
I reach, latching and squeezing my pinky with hers. The pinkies stayed locked. So do our eyes. She stares at me until my ribs pound like she’s punching at them again.
“Lake—”
Her pager goes. She abruptly stands up. I guess her break is over. She walks around my bed and for a moment I don’t think she’ll turn around, but she does.
“I’m really not trying to fix you, Lake.” She stuffs her phone back into her pocket. “I think you’re great.” She shrugs her shoulders and weakly smiles. “I’ll be back later.”
I sit there at a loss for words and watch her disappear, taking her wings with her. I’m stuck replaying that frail smile, telling me I’m great.
The hell is happening? Am I melting? My insides are thawing. Gushy. I glance at where Serenity was sitting moments ago. The brochure is scrunched with the TV remote on top.
She’s so stubborn. How’d she sneak the remote there?
I hold the brochure and envy the man’s smile, splattered across the cover of the brochure. Recovery. What’s left of me if I recover? There’s nothing for me to show off. Nothing to be proud of.
But I’m great?
That pretty girl with a home and a degree, she thinks I’m great? And she’s gonna marry me. Damn. My muscles are doing gymnastics. Am I trying to smile or frown?
I separate the brochure from the rest and shove it under my pillow. Then I grab the clicker and turn on the TV. A girl flashes on screen, bawling her eyes out and dashing out of some preppy school in a prom dress. I haven’t changed the channel since my rom-com marathon with Angel.
It takes a while as I scowl at the movie, but eventually, my lips decide to smile.