Chapter 45 Lauren
Lauren
It had been a slow afternoon at the restaurant where Lauren worked. Ironically, it was a Mexican restaurant smack-dab in the middle of the sovereign nation of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes in Arlee, Montana.
The tourists stopping in had long ago quit noticing or caring that she was a Native woman running tacos, burritos, and chimichangas out to the lacquered wooden tables.
She had turned off the sound system, closed the place down early so she could head home after the lunch shift.
On the front door, she hung the sign her husband, Marco, had made for her.
It read: Closed for the Evening. Gone to see the Warriors play. Go Warriors!
She thought of the person who’d come into the restaurant earlier, someone Lauren had seen before at her Tuesday night grief group in town and now more regularly in the restaurant.
When the restaurant was slow, the two talked about a lot of things, including how the rehab facility several miles up the road wasn’t quite working.
It made Lauren feel a little better. After all, it cost too much for most tribal members to use the place, so it had become a haven for the privileged.
They also talked about what happened to Lauren’s daughter, Nalia, and the idea that Lauren should find a way to expose the injustice nationally.
That nothing would fully alleviate Lauren’s pain, but doing one small thing might help a little.
A gale tore at her as she crossed the parking lot. She put her head down and charged forward, navigating through slushy puddles of ice and snow. In her car, Lauren turned the musty heater on and sat for a bit to warm the engine up before driving.
When she did, it only took five blocks to exit Arlee, a town where about half the residents were Salish.
It’s the place her people came after they were pushed out of the Bitterroot in the nineteenth century.
With the grocery store and coffee shop and art gallery behind her, she passed trailers and small houses before the landscape unfurled to fields swollen with ice and snow.
Lauren sighed, trying to switch some toggle inside herself to turn on the joy and anticipation everyone else would be fat with come game time.
She tried to transform her anger to eager excitement for her son’s sake.
And for her husband’s, too. She knew when she got home her husband, Marco, would already be wearing his red T-shirt with the Salish phrase for “Proud to be a Warrior Parent” scrawled across the chest. Pinned next to that would be a button showing their son, Wade, wearing his jersey and a wide smile.
She was proud, too. She really was.
Wade was one of the best players on the team.
And on the rez, Indian ball was everything.
Basketball gave the town hope. It gave Marco hope.
The gymnasium was the number one gathering spot for the community, a place where the old could honor the young and where the young gave back and made people happy—something the tribe felt was the greatest gift you could give.
Plus, playing basketball was a ticket out for some of them. It could be for Wade, too.
Marco was hanging his dreams on it, that Wade would get a scholarship to the University of Montana or to another state school.
Lauren wasn’t as hopeful. She knew Marco always said that a Native kid had one shot and one shot only at most of the state schools.
Some of the recruiters even asked beforehand if the player was Native or not because once in college, so many struggled without the support of their community and would drop out.
So Lauren was conflicted. She didn’t need the only child they had left to get alienated from them in white-bread college life and descend into alcohol abuse like far too many other famous Native American players had.
Or worse, start taking those little light-blue pills that were designed to look like a prescription, like OxyContin.
But mainly, the reason she couldn’t get excited boiled down to the damn anger. She wanted to rise above her conflicted feelings and be brimming with joy for Wade, but she couldn’t get there because of this seething rage that never seemed to leave her.
Lauren’s aunt Darla always used to say that Lauren had inherited her optimism, but it had left now, blown out like a rubber tire on the highway.
It had been four years, and nothing was going to change the fact that her firstborn was still gone.
Five years ago, prior to all the pills that were flooding the reservation now, Tim Mooney had rolled into Ronan and basically bribed Dr. Winnipeg into prescribing the deadly inhalant version of the drug and upping the dose so he could get more money from his company.
She knew this because Abigail Winter, Winnipeg’s PA, had told Terry, Lauren’s dishwasher at the restaurant.
She told him about all the parties, about the process of titrating—of upping the dose even when the patient didn’t need it to be increased.
About all the wining and dining in Missoula at fake educational seminars on this powerful inhalant containing fentanyl, an opioid up to a hundred times stronger than morphine, which Winnipeg had prescribed Lauren and Marco’s Nalia for neck pain after her car accident.
Lord knows how many patients he got so addicted that, when the feds finally cracked down and he quit prescribing, the patients turned to the cheap street drugs to fuel the habit he’d cultivated in them.
Three years later, after Nalia had turned to the street stuff and Lauren caught on to her addiction, Lauren desperately searched for local resources with Indian Health Service to treat her and found hardly any options. No surprise there, given their meager funding.
The day before Nalia passed, Nalia told Lauren that her boyfriend, Dakota, had proposed to her. They’d both cried, and Lauren didn’t want to ruin the moment by asking if she was ready for such a thing when Lauren suspected she was still using.
Later, when she got up the courage to ask and Nalia said she’d stopped months before, Lauren was skeptical. But that night, Lauren dreamed of her daughter’s wedding, dreamed she was making meat stew and fry bread for the guests.
The next morning, she found their daughter face down on the floor, no longer breathing. Lauren screamed and called the ambulance, but Nalia was long gone when they arrived.
Some days were worse than others. On the days it was bad, Marco would keep telling her that she needed to let it go or it was going to make her sick.
She thought of the visitor again, with the terse smile and aching but penetrating eyes.
How they mentioned that if Lauren did find a way to expose it nationally, she should expose the enablers, too, while she was at it .
. . the ones on the sidelines who never are held accountable.
All the enablers in all their slithery forms need to gain some serious self-awareness.
Everyone out there ready to avoid being burdened, ready to pretend they’re not complicit.
It could go all the way down the line to the ladies at church, but starting with the ones right by their sides is a beginning.
Lauren agreed. She had pictured a bunch of intertwined rattlers vibrating their tails on a hot day, like in the den she’d come across on the Bison Range north of Arlee when she was a kid.
It struck a chord with her because Tim Mooney was a sideliner and she had a special cache of rage stored up for him, almost more than she had for Dr. Winnipeg.
She tried different things to quell her fury. She took long walks. She joined in on community jump dances. She meditated. And she worked harder, scrubbing the fryer longer and more vigorously until she got tendonitis in her elbow. Nothing worked.
Lauren got involved with Trisha, the tribal police investigator she met when Nalia passed, to help distribute flyers.
After the tribal council created a task force to respond to the opioid crisis, Trisha took the lead and began to hold seminars to educate the public on how to give naloxone, since more and more fentanyl was taking root on the reservations.
Hopefully people could at least help their loved ones if they found them unresponsive, like she’d found her own daughter.
This was a good thing, but it didn’t take the rage away.
The wrath was like a flock of birds. Sometimes it flew in unison and made precise patterns against the bloodred clouds, and sometimes it scattered everywhere in messy, senseless swirls.
Today, it flew in concert, the birds spiraling and swooping together and darting forward with a mission, with a new plan against the gray, cold sky.
She wanted to share the idea with Marco, even if he would be distracted as he got ready to leave for the game.
As she drove by more pastures with cattle, she saw a flock of chickadees depart from a snow-covered swale. She kept her eye on them. They rose and turned together in a tight arrangement, dissolving against the dark ridge behind them.
The road curved through more ranchland until eventually she reached their own place, a one-story ranch-style home that hunkered below a timbered ridge rising east of town. The Jocko River flowed through their land.
Marco’s truck sat outside. She parked and got out and filled her lungs with the February air.
When she shut her door, another flock of birds—this one huns—dispatched from a hedgerow of tall grass sticking out from the snow off to the side.
They darted out at an angle. Lauren watched the flurry of cinnamon-colored, whirring wings and admired how they also all rose of one accord.
An omen, she thought.
Marco was sitting in his lounge chair, chatting on his phone. She’d been wrong: He wasn’t in his red T-shirt yet.