Chapter Fifteen
Fifteen
I hadn’t realized the meeting was a Nar-Anon Family Group. I’d thought it was a regular NA meeting, but it turned out those were on Mondays. This one was for partners and families of addicts.
People like me.
“I trust you know that everything that happens here is completely anonymous and private and you’re not to repeat any of it to anyone,” Dr. Nock told me firmly before he opened the doors. “And for God’s sake, get rid of those Care Bears.”
I stayed discreetly out of the waiting room during the meeting, surrounded by Dr. Gerrish’s Care Bears, but I could hear the whole meeting through the open door.
“Last week I went to a movie with this boy in my class,” a teenage boy said softly.
“He’s really wholesome. His mom and dad are dentists.
He paid for my popcorn, and he was really sweet and held my hand, and then he walked me to my car and kissed me goodnight.
And then I got home and found he’d turned up again.
And there they both were, sprawled in the lounge room, and there was vomit—and she was barely breathing and…
I can’t forgive myself for this… I kind of hoped she’d stop…
I wanted… I just wanted it over. Even if it meant she… ”
Memory can be a freight train. And there you are on the tracks with your back to it when it hits. You don’t even see it coming.
Or sometimes you see it, but you can’t move fast enough.
And sometimes you see it and you don’t even try and move. You just let it hit.
I was taken to foster care three times because Tina overdosed, but there were other overdoses, ones that only she and I knew about.
Sometimes she overdosed and I didn’t call for help, because I didn’t want to be taken away.
Like the time she shot up with the lady next door, without knowing what was in her spoonful, and she slumped through our front door, passing out cold.
I was seven. She stayed out cold for most of the day and I thought she’d stopped breathing.
I held my hand under her nose and felt nothing.
I went and got a mirror and tried to catch condensation from her breath.
Nothing. I pressed my ear to her chest to see if I could hear a heartbeat and held my hand on her skin to see if she was cold.
And I remember feeling a muddy electric buzzing inside me, like a live wire fallen into a puddle, sizzling.
I felt it in my guts, a crawling, loose, prickly feeling like I might lose control of my bowels.
I feel it now, as though I’m back there.
I feel it in my veins, like someone dumped poison into me.
At the time it was an animal feeling, and my instinct was to get low, to crawl under something, to hide like a defenseless creature.
But I couldn’t leave Tina. I sat there with my hand on her, thinking she was dead.
I only knew she wasn’t dead when she wet herself. The smell was ammoniac, astringent. As soon as the hot stream hit my leg, I made a keening sound. I didn’t have any control over it, the noise coming out of me. It scared me. But I kept making it.
After hours of being maybe-dead, Tina had stirred, making thick senseless murmuring sounds. Then she dragged herself to bed, still soaked in her own urine, leaving me there in the puddle. As she started snoring, I shook violently, juddering till my teeth chattered.
We never spoke of it. I don’t even know if she knew she’d almost died—she probably didn’t.
But I knew. And the smell of ammonia still gives me that loose, hot feeling in my stomach.
I can still feel the press of the floorboards into my knees and the heat of her urine on my leg.
I smell certain cleaning products and I’m seven years old again and sure my mother is dead.
I knew what the teenage boy in the Nar-Anon group meant when he said he hoped his mom would stop. I knew the endless tension of waiting for someone’s chest to rise again. Of just wanting it to end, one way or another.
Even though I needed her, sometimes I needed her to stop even more.
“Are you okay?” Dr. Nock asked when the meeting was over, and he caught sight of me cleaning the coffee machine. “You’re very pale.”
“Tired, I guess,” I said, feeling exposed.
He eyed me. “These meetings can be tough to listen to.”
My hands shook on the glass pot. “Addiction seems like a terrible thing,” I said, trying to sound like a passive bystander, and not like someone who’d just been flattened by the memory train. “Have you been running these long?”
“A few years. Opioids have been bad around here. Fentanyl especially. And now we have ketamine too.” He sighed.
Ketamine. I remembered my mom when I’d visited her in prison. She’d practically been drooling, completely unaware her mouth was even open.
“It’s a horse tranquilizer, you know,” Dr. Nock said in his laconic way.
“Originally. Now there’s good research on its possibilities for treating depression in humans—there’s a nasal spray that’s very promising.
But that’s not what these folks are taking.
They’re dosing with enough to anesthetize a horse.
” He sighed again, staring at the empty circle of chairs.
Then he seemed to shake himself. “Now, where are those stupid bears? I’m going to put them in my wife’s wastepaper basket.
” He disappeared into the back room to gather up the Care Bears.
Dr. Nock was the old-fashioned sort and walked me to my car as we left for the night. “Get yourself some food, Zoe. You’re looking sickly.” He gently slapped the car on the side as I drove off. As soon as I was out of the parking lot, I felt the shaking start. My teeth chattered.
My mom hadn’t died, I reassured myself. Not that time, or any of the times. She was still breathing. And if she had ever stopped breathing, it wouldn’t have been my fault. Not that time, and not even the last time, when I wanted with every fiber of my being to put her out of her misery.
I was thirteen that time and she’d been in her meth era.
She’d been gone for a few days and clearly hadn’t been sleeping or eating.
I didn’t ask her where she’d been or what she’d been doing.
Meth made her compulsive—she was likely to have spent eight hours peeling off her nail polish or talking to a cashier at a gas station.
Once she’d been picked up in a dime store for counting all the red things in the store, including every red jellybean she could see through the clear plastic of the packaging.
That day she came home after all those days away, when I didn’t know if she was alive or dead.
Tina was tweaking by the time she returned, irritable and mean, like a toddler due for a nap.
She had sores around her mouth because she kept chewing on her lips and she was paranoid and unable to sleep, even though she was clearly desperate for rest.
Tina paced the apartment as I tried to do my homework, muttering under her breath. I kept my gaze fixed on the tip of my pen as I pressed it too hard into my notebook.
Mom, don’t. The thought was so bright it seemed as though it must be written in the air in neon.
The feeling of waiting for a person to explode is a caged feeling, like you’re holding all the stress of it inside your rib cage and it’s moving, writhing, slithering, coiling up to strike, and your ribs are bars too fragile to hold it in.
I’d take surreptitious looks to check where Tina was as she crisscrossed the floor.
There was a violence to her pacing and muttering.
What would I do if she came at me? I played the scenarios out in my head.
Tina never actually had come at me. Most of my life she’d gravitated toward drugs that didn’t turn her into an angry zombie: molly, which made her cloyingly affectionate, or oxy, which made her drowsy.
Now and then she got her hands on coke or bennies.
But this, the meth, was the worst—at least for me.
When I was twelve and thirteen, she started alternating between ice and oxy, swinging between being a wretched, scratching, wakeful creature, and a slumped-over shell of a person.
Meanwhile, I struggled to sleep, always listening for Tina coming home, and I found myself struggling to breathe at sudden moments, like someone had dropped me into the ocean and expected me to breathe seawater.
The day I almost killed her, I felt like my lungs were filled with fluid.
There was no room for air. She paced, scratching, muttering and whispering and making vicious hissing noises, shuffling wall to wall, shushing and fretting and chewing at the air.
I couldn’t breathe no matter how much I told myself the room was full of air, not water.
Mom, I couldn’t say. Mom, stop it. Please stop it.
She didn’t stop it. And then she started to cry, desperate, tired crying, like she couldn’t bear herself, like she wanted to stop pacing but couldn’t, wanted to stop muttering but couldn’t, wanted to rest but couldn’t.
Then she had her phone out and I knew what she was doing.
I hated it when dealers came to the apartment. I hated it when anyone came to the apartment. I went and hid in the bathroom until she’d scored, every nerve of my body listening for voices and waiting for the front door to close.
“Baby?” Tina’s voice was jittery, stuttering over the syllables. “Angel?”
She was talking to me. She was alone and holding a little twist of cling wrap, inside of which was an oily brown square of ice. Her hands were shaking and she couldn’t get the cling wrap off it.
“Angel, help Mommy.”