Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
Vanna
The first day is the worst.
Actually, that's a lie.
The first day is just the beginning of the worst.
A preview of the hell that's coming for me.
I'm lying in a bed that isn't mine, in a room that smells like industrial cleaner and false hope, and my body is starting to remember what it means to be denied.
The doctors gave me something to ease the transition—Suboxone, they called it—but it's not enough.
It's never enough.
My skin feels like it's been turned inside out.
Every nerve ending is screaming, raw and exposed, and even the soft cotton of the sheets feels like sandpaper against my flesh.
I'm sweating and freezing at the same time, my body unable to decide which torture it wants to inflict on me first.
One moment I'm throwing off the blankets because I'm burning up; the next, I'm curled into a fetal position, shivering so hard my teeth chatter.
The cramps hit without warning—waves of agony that roll through my muscles like electrical shocks.
My legs jerk and spasm.
My stomach clenches so tight I can't breathe.
Every joint in my body aches like I've been beaten with a baseball bat, and the pain in my bones—god, the pain in my bones—feels like they're being hollowed out from the inside.
I curl into a ball and try to think about Garrett.
His hands on my skin in that motel room.
The way he looked at me like I was still worth something.
The way he said "I love you" like it was the truest thing he'd ever spoken.
But even those memories are slippery, sliding away from me like water through my fingers.
All I can think about is the hunger.
The need.
The desperate, clawing want for something to make this stop.
Just one more hit. Just enough to take the edge off.
I know it's the addiction talking.
I know that's exactly what got me here in the first place.
But knowing doesn't make the wanting any less intense.
Doesn't make my body stop screaming for the poison it's come to depend on.
A nurse comes in to check my vitals.
She's gentle, professional, her face carefully neutral as she takes my blood pressure and temperature.
I wonder how many junkies she's seen lying in this exact bed, making the same promises I made.
I wonder how many of them actually kept those promises.
"How are you feeling?" she asks.
I want to laugh.
How am I feeling?
Like I'm dying.
Like my body is eating itself from the inside out.
Like every cell is crying out for something I can't give it.
"Fine," I say instead.
She doesn't believe me.
I can see it in her eyes.
But she doesn't push, just makes a note on her tablet and tells me she'll be back in an hour.
An hour.
I don't know how I'm going to survive an hour.
The clock on the wall ticks away the seconds with excruciating slowness.
Each minute feels like an eternity, stretched and distorted by the misery consuming my body.
I watch the second hand move and try to focus on just that—one second at a time.
One breath at a time.
I can do this. I have to do this.
For Garrett.
For myself.
For whatever's left of the girl I used to be.
By the second day, I've stopped pretending I'm fine.
The vomiting starts sometime around midnight and doesn't stop.
My stomach heaves and convulses, expelling everything I've tried to eat, until there's nothing left but bile and dry heaves that wrack my entire body.
My muscles cramp and spasm, my legs kicking involuntarily, my arms jerking like a puppet whose strings are being cut one by one.
The medical staff is prepared for this.
They've seen it all before.
They hook me up to an IV to keep me hydrated, give me something for the nausea that barely touches it, and speak to me in calm, soothing voices that make me want to scream.
"You're doing great," one of them tells me.
I'm not doing great.
I'm dying.
I'm falling apart.
I'm being unmade, piece by piece, and I don't know if there will be anything left when it's over.
Between bouts of vomiting, I lie in bed and stare at the ceiling.
The tiles are off-white, dotted with tiny holes in a pattern that my fevered brain tries to make sense of.
I count them. Lose count. Start over.
Anything to keep my mind occupied.
Anything to keep from thinking about how easy it would be to walk out the door.
No one's stopping me.
I signed myself in voluntarily.
I could sign myself out just as easily.
I could be back in Morgantown by tomorrow, back in a trap house by nightfall, back to the blissful oblivion that's the only thing that makes any of this bearable.
The thought is so tempting it makes me shake even harder.
But then I think about Garrett's face when he dropped me off.
The tears he tried to hide.
The way his voice broke when he said "Come back to me."
I can't do that to him again.
I can't be the reason his heart breaks one more time.
So I stay. I suffer.
I count the holes in the ceiling tiles and wait for the next wave of misery to hit.
The third day brings the hallucinations.
I know they're not real.
Some distant, still-functioning part of my brain understands that what I'm seeing is just my neurons misfiring, my body's desperate attempt to make sense of the chaos it's experiencing.
But knowing doesn't make them any less terrifying.
It starts with shadows.
Shapes moving in the corners of my vision, disappearing when I try to look at them directly.
Then the shadows start to take form, becoming figures that watch me from the edges of the room.
Their faces are blank, featureless, but I can feel their judgment radiating toward me like heat from a fire.
And then my mother appears.
She's sitting in the chair by the window, the same chair where the nurses sit when they come to check on me.
She looks the way she did the last time I saw her alive—gaunt and hollow, her skin the color of old paper, her eyes sunken and empty.
"You can't do this," she says, and her voice sounds like it's coming from very far away. "You're not strong enough. You've never been strong enough."
"You're not real," I whisper, but my voice shakes.
"Aren't I?" She tilts her head, studying me with those dead eyes. "I'm the realest thing in this room, Savannah. I'm the truth you've been running from your whole life."
I squeeze my eyes shut, pressing my palms against them until I see stars. "Go away. You're not here. You're dead."
"And you will be too, soon enough." Her voice is closer now, right next to my ear. "It's in our blood, baby girl. It's what we're made for. The needle. The high. The sweet release of not having to feel anything anymore."
"No." I'm crying now, tears streaming down my face, mixing with the cold sweat that covers my skin. "No, I'm not like you. I'm not going to end up like you."
"You already have." I feel something cold brush against my cheek, like dead fingers. "Look at yourself. Look at what you've become. You think getting clean is going to change that? You think a few weeks in this place is going to undo years of damage?"
I open my eyes, and she's right there, inches from my face.
Her skin is gray now, mottled with the patches of decay I saw on her body in that trap house.
Her lips are blue, her eyes glazed with the film of death.
"You'll end up just like me," she whispers. "It's only a matter of time."
I scream.
The nurses come running, and my mother disappears like smoke in the wind.
They check my vitals, adjust my medication, speak to me in those calm, soothing voices that make me feel like a child.
I try to tell them what I saw, but the words won't come.
How do you explain that your dead mother just visited you to tell you that you're going to die?
They give me something to help me sleep, and I let the darkness take me, hoping that when I wake up, the hallucinations will be gone.
They're not.
By the end of the first week, I've lost track of time entirely.
The days blur together into one endless cycle of suffering.
Vomiting. Sweating. Shaking. Cramping.
Brief periods of exhausted sleep punctuated by nightmares so vivid I can't tell where they end and reality begins.
My mother visits me every night.
Sometimes she's the woman I remember from my childhood—beautiful and warm, before the drugs took her away from me.
Those are the worst hallucinations, because for a moment I forget that she's gone.
For a moment, I'm a little girl again, safe in my mother's arms, and then I blink and she's the corpse I found in that trap house, and the grief hits me all over again.
"Why did you start?" she asks me one night, sitting on the edge of my bed like she used to when I was sick as a kid.
I know she's not real.
I know this is just my brain torturing me.
But I answer anyway, because I'm too tired and too broken to do anything else.
"Because of you and my own fucked up issues," I whisper. "Because I found you dead. Then I was in my accident and I didn't know how to handle it. Because the pain was so big and the needle made it small."
"That's not the whole truth."
"It's enough of the truth."
She reaches out and brushes hair from my face, and I swear I can feel it.
The ghost of her touch, as real as any memory. "You were always so strong, Savannah. Stronger than me. That's why I was so scared for you."
"Scared?" I open my eyes, looking at her.
In this version, she's somewhere in between—not the healthy mother of my childhood and not the corpse of my nightmares.
Just... tired. Worn. Human.
"You were scared?"
"I saw myself in you. The same hunger for escape. The same desperate need to be anywhere but inside your own head." She smiles, but it's sad. "I knew that if you ever found the needle, it would own you the same way it owned me."
"So it's your fault?" There's anger in my voice now, hot and bitter. "Is that what you're saying? You passed this down to me like some kind of fucked-up inheritance?"