Shards Read online

  Halfway to Taos we stopped at a Circle K so my mom could get some caffeine. I could tell she was itching for a drink. Willpower wasn’t her strong point, but she was driving and would settle for a coffee.

  I got out of the car and looked around. She had deliberately chosen to stop somewhere off the highway, nowhere near a town. If I tried to run, there was nothing but desert all around. I would have to sprint all the way back up to the highway and see if I could hitch a ride before she got to me.

  “I have to pee,” I said.

  “Okay,” she said. She followed me to the bathroom, and I half expected her to come inside with me, just like when I was a little girl. She opened her mouth to say something, then waved me in by myself.

  After I peed, I figured I had enough time to do a line of coke. I pulled the packet out of my pocket and looked around the filthy bathroom for a flat surface. Still high from all the meth I had snorted that morning, I caught sight of myself in the mirror. It was one of those gas station mirrors that isn’t even really a mirror, just some unbreakable acrylic silver thing in which you can barely see the shape of your own face. Plus it was spattered with dried soap and some scummy orange stuff. Looking at myself in that mirror—trying to see myself at all—I can’t say I had a moment of clarity, but I did make a decision.

  “Alli,” my mom called, pounding angrily on the door. “Come out of there right now. We’ve got to get going.”

  “Just a minute,” I said, and then I did something I still find hard to believe.

  I threw that packet of cocaine away.

  I buried it deep in the trash can, under a pile of brown paper towels.

  That’s it, I thought. I’m done. I didn’t finish the coke. I didn’t try to sneak it into rehab. I just threw it away. I hadn’t chosen rehab, but I did choose sobriety for myself on that day.

  I would do it. I would throw myself into it full-force. I suppose for someone like me, even sobriety can become a kind of addiction.

  • • •

  Very few addicts experience the kind of rehab I was given. Brand-new adobe-style buildings, gorgeous landscaping, king-size beds, fluffy towels. As we pulled up to Vista in the car, I thought my mom had been joking with me and wasn’t really taking me to rehab after all. It looked like a resort for rich people, not a place for drug addicts. Turns out it was costing my mom twenty thousand dollars for thirty days. I was still so focused on myself that I couldn’t appreciate that my family had gotten that much money together in a single morning for my treatment.

  Bill, the head of Vista, came out to greet me, acting as if he had been waiting for me the entire day.

  “We’re so glad you’re choosing sobriety, Alli,” he said, and took us into his office. He rattled off a bunch of other rehab bullshit about group sessions, primary treatment, complementary therapies, and other stuff I didn’t listen to. I stared at the painting above his desk. A peaceful river painted in thick brushstrokes. A hint of blue sky in the distance. Sun.

  Bill asked me for the names and addresses of people I wanted to invite to Family Week, the last week of treatment. My mom gave him her address and my sister Carol’s. It didn’t occur to us to give him my father’s. I gave Bill Keawe’s address, sure that he would want to come.

  Suddenly Bill said, “Say good-bye to your mother, Alli.”

  I turned to my mom with panicked eyes. “What? Already?”

  She hugged me and started to cry. “This is how they do things, sweetie,” she said.

  “I need you, Mom,” I said. “I just got back to you.”

  “It’s important to find your own journey through sobriety,” Bill said. “After three days you can call your family.”

  “Don’t leave me,” I said, clinging to my mom, burrowing my thin, bony frame into the soft roundness of her body. I felt panic rise through my chest, my throat. I was twenty-eight years old but felt about seven. Suddenly I was convinced that my mother, who I had done nothing but lie to and avoid for two solid years, was the only one who could keep me safe.

  Bill gently pulled me away and led me down a long, tiled hallway to the huge room with four beds where I would be staying all by myself. I felt like the smallest little person in the world.

  He left me alone in my room. It was a beautiful room—fourteen-foot ceilings, a fireplace—but I didn’t care. I was worried about the door out to my own little porch. I checked the door four or five times to make sure the dead bolt was locked. I was sure my dealer would track me to Taos and kill anyone at the rehab in order to get to me.

  I was so tired. I felt like I hadn’t really slept in years. Two years, at least. Going to bed at a normal time felt strange, but an orderly came in and started me on some drugs—trazadone to help me sleep; clonidine for anxiety and panic attacks (I wasn’t given preferential treatment after I was diagnosed with PTSD); and the antidepressant Paxil, thought to help with meth cravings.

  I woke up around midnight to go to the bathroom. As I walked across the room my heart started to beat so fast I thought I was having a heart attack. Dropping to my knees and then my stomach, I lay on the cold bathroom floor and prayed for my heart to slow down, begging God for it not to stop altogether. I knew if I could get a hit I would be all right. I decided my body couldn’t survive without dope, and I was probably going to die.

  Tears washed down the bridge of my nose and onto the tile floor. I wanted to call out to my mom to take care of me. Or Keawe. But I couldn’t even make a sound. All I could hear was my heartbeat. I had no idea what was happening to me.

  Slowly, my heartbeat returned to normal. My body became responsive, and I felt better. I knew I would live. I crawled back to bed, but first I checked the lock on the door to the porch again. I should have gone to the night orderly and told him what had happened, but I was determined to keep it to myself.

  I later found out I was experiencing the side effects of trazadone. If you try to get up too quickly, the drug can cause a rapid heartbeat and light-headedness. I was lucky I hadn’t passed out.

  • • •

  In the morning, I awoke to find a man bending over me.

  “Get the fuck away from me, you fucker,” I screamed. I lunged at him, getting my hands around his throat within seconds.

  He was strong, able to shove his hands under my grasp.

  “Whoa there, Miss Allison,” he said. “I’m not trying to hurt you.” His voice was surprisingly gentle.

  Thrashing around in the bed, I freed my legs from the sheets and started kicking him. He backed away, and I could see him clearly for the first time. A white guy, middle-aged. My worst nightmare.

  “I’m Arnie,” he said, again in that gentle voice. “Your orderly. I just came to wake you up.”

  “Oh God,” I said, embarrassed. “I’m sorry. I thought you were—”

  “Next time I won’t get so close,” he said, and he was true to his word. It became a standing joke between us: every morning after that, he woke me by standing in the doorway and poking me with a stick.

  For three solid days it seemed I did nothing but sleep, take my medication, and go to the bathroom. I don’t think I ate anything. When I woke up that third morning, I was in the pink cloud of sobriety. I looked out the window at the roses on my porch and was sure I had never seen that color pink before. I stared at the beautiful little stream running through the grounds and absolutely could not believe what I was seeing. It was as beautiful as the painting in Bill’s office.

  Everything felt wonderful. I was going to be sober for the rest of my life.

  When my counselor Greg came by that morning to give me my schedule, I said, “I got the shit out of my system, I’m good to go.” He started laughing and couldn’t stop.

  Greg was there to start me on the “Vista routine.” He had a clipboard, a schedule, and brochures, and he went over the things I had to do in the morning: up at seven, make your bed, brush your teeth, shower, go to breakfast, go to group. Every day, no exceptions. Starting now.

  “Fine,�
� I said. “Now. Okay.”

  Greg nodded, but he and his clipboard didn’t leave.

  “We find that new guests are sometimes resistant to our schedule,” he said. “They see it as a bit of a regime. We find it’s best to accompany our guests through each step of the routine the first day or two.” He glanced at the clipboard. “First up, make your bed.”

  He lowered himself into the plum-colored suede easy chair in the corner of my room and watched me make my bed. I started to feel a little queasy by the end. What the fuck was the difference between rehab and Seattle? A middle-aged man telling me what to do every minute, then watching me do it.

  “Good, Alli,” Greg said once I had finished. “We want our guests to go through the motions of daily life, to meet the expectations that will be there when they move back into the world. Now it’s time to brush your teeth, then a shower.”

  “You’re going to come in the shower with me?” I asked.

  “Of course not,” he said. “I’ll wait here.”

  I got out a change of clothes and went into the bathroom. I hadn’t taken a shower in at least a week. I laid out one of Vista’s luxurious white towels and even turned on the water, but there was no way I could make myself go in the shower. Not after Seattle, not after the men. I was terrified, but I didn’t want Greg to know what was going on. I let the shower run while I washed my hair in the sink.

  “Feel refreshed?” Greg asked when I came out of the bathroom.

  I nodded, and he “accompanied” me to the dining room for breakfast, where the Mexican wood table was set with cloth place mats and beautiful stone-colored pottery in all different bright shades. Orange, turquoise, purple, yellow. A vase was filled with purple and yellow desert wildflowers. Platters of fresh pineapple and papaya sat in the middle of the table.

  I took one look at the faces around the table and said a little prayer to Keawe—Get me out of here. That’s all I wanted. To be with Keawe, headed for California.

  Greg sat next to me and tried to get me to contribute to the conversation, but I was silent while I tried to choke down some tea and a piece of dry toast. This fucking shit is for the birds, I thought. I’m sober now, can I just leave? Some woman was talking about how she didn’t want to go outside because of all the spiders at Vista. Another woman was complaining about the chipped nail polish on her toenails. Apparently they felt they were slumming it. What did a vice cop meth addict have in common with a woman who was more concerned with going thirty days without a pedicure than getting sober?

  I was the only meth addict at Vista, I learned a few minutes later in group. The others were mostly alcohol or heroin. Julianne, a gallery owner from Santa Fe who always drank too much at art openings. Christian, a heroin addict, cutest little skater kid in the whole world. Meg, a middle-aged mom who couldn’t stop using painkillers after a skiing accident. Shira, a college student whose parents were concerned about her partying and bad grades. Sam, a middle-aged white guy with cold eyes and a strong appetite for heroin. Diana, an alcoholic from California, an actress I was pretty sure I had seen in something once.

  As we went around the circle and talked, I started to fall asleep, which the counselors tolerated, knowing that I was detoxing. Suddenly the craving for meth hit my body like a semi.

  “I need dope!” I wanted to scream, yell, run from the room.

  I clutched the edges of my seat and started to rock back and forth to keep myself from running out the door. I didn’t know where I was going to go or how I was going to get meth, I just knew that I had to run out of that room. Everything in my body was screaming for me to do something. It took all my strength to sit in that chair and endure that craving. It seemed like hours, but I think it was less than thirty minutes before the craving went away.

  There would be more cravings, but this would be the worst. The others would come and go in a matter of minutes, and I would learn to deal with them.

  When I was finally able to loosen my grip on the chair and look around the circle again, I found Sam staring at me. I looked down at my wet hair, my tank top, tried to cover myself. All middle-aged white guys were threats to me now.

  At dinner that night, Sam sat next to me. “I got this for you,” he said, and handed me a Suboxone. Suboxone is a big thing in rehab. It’s kind of like methadone, used a lot with heroin addicts. We were all given different meds, all nonaddictive drugs, but some of them can get you high, and Suboxone is one of them. I didn’t know what to do, so I accepted it, but with the Suboxone in my pocket, I felt I wasn’t safe anymore. I was in a place where I could still get drugs if I wanted them.

  I went back to my room, my heart pounding, and flushed the pill. I didn’t hesitate even a moment.

  It gave me a lot of self-confidence to flush that pill. I couldn’t wait to tell Keawe what I had done. I had earned my first phone call that night, and I headed to the phone room for my allotted ten minutes.

  “Hey, you,” he said. His voice was so tender a sob rose in my throat.

  “I miss you so much,” I said.

  “Me too. How are you doing?”

  I barely wanted to talk. I just wanted to hear his voice saying my name over and over again for those precious ten minutes.

  “Is the rehab working?” Keawe asked. “Do you feel like you’re getting better?”

  I told him about the pill, about Sam.

  “Just stay away from him,” Keawe advised. “Isn’t there someone else you can hang out with?”

  I pictured all the women from group. “No,” I said. “They’re all too . . .” And then I thought of Christian, eighteen, practically a little kid. Plus he’d been using heroin for three years, so he was probably fifteen at heart. He wasn’t a threat to me.

  “There’s this skater kid,” I said. “He’s like a little brother.”

  “Stick with him,” Keawe said.

  I had been waiting so long to talk to Keawe, but things felt almost worse now that I had. All I could think about was getting back to him.

  That night, after checking the locks in my room more than a dozen times, I lay in my bed and cried from missing him. Keawe was the one good thing I had been able to hang on to while I threw myself into hell. I felt sure that if only he were with me, he could make the dealer go away.

  The next morning before breakfast, I tried again to take a shower. I turned the water on and took my nightgown off, then hugged myself to keep warm while I worked up the nerve to go in.

  Suddenly, the dealer was there in the bathroom with me. Get me a drink, he said in my ear. I smelled his vodka breath on my neck. I whipped around, crashed into the wall trying to get away from him, and then collapsed onto the floor.

  I missed breakfast and was late for group because I literally couldn’t move from the bathroom for half an hour. How could I share any of this? Sitting in group listening to these women talk about how they had one too many glasses of wine while they played mah-jongg made me feel like such an outsider. It’s not that I didn’t want to fit in. I did, but I wasn’t about to tell anyone what had happened in Seattle.

  These secrets, they ate away at me. They were breaking me, they were killing me. I was so sick of secrets, and yet that’s all I had. Once, I had had the opportunity to have a wonderful, normal life, and now I never would. It was over. I was done. I would carry on being detached and cold, pretending none of these things had happened. My meth use had always been about selfishness and avoidance, and so far sobriety hadn’t changed that. Selfishness and avoidance.

  At lunch, I looked for Christian, but he wasn’t there yet. I found a seat between Julianne and Shira, and in less than a minute Sam came over and sat across from me. I closed my eyes, willing him to disappear.

  Rage boiled in my throat. I hated Sam. I grabbed the knife from my place setting and flew at Sam, plunging it straight into the base of his neck. It went in fast and deep and I gave a little gasp, almost of pleasure. It was so easy. I pulled the knife out and went at him again. The blade slipped in a little higher t
his time, near his Adam’s apple. Strings of blood spattered everywhere.

  Opening my eyes, I looked directly into Sam’s face. He was taking a bite out of the tortillas they were serving for lunch.

  I mumbled, “Excuse me,” and got up from the table.

  It had felt so real. Completely real—my need to stab him convinced me that I actually had.

  I stumbled back to my room, checked the door lock a few times, and lay down on my bed.

  I was crazy. Flashbacks, now hallucinations. I was still seeing the dealer everywhere. Get me a drink, he would say, or Go run the shower. His breath, his smell, the terror of what would come next. How was I ever going to get over this?

  In refusing to tell my counselors what was happening, in refusing to deal with any of it, I missed an opportunity to get better, and instead kept myself living in the dealer’s house.

  • • •

  By my third week at Vista, my counselor Janice was fed up with my silence, my noncompliance. I would go to the breakfast table but I wouldn’t eat. I would go to group but I wouldn’t speak. I didn’t want to talk about meth, think about meth or anything that had to do with drugs, yet twenty-four hours a day I had to talk, think, and learn about addiction.

  When the orderlies came to offer me massages or aromatherapy, I always turned them down. I couldn’t bear to have anyone touch me. At nine o’clock every night I would think, My God, I have to go to bed soon and I can’t do it. And when it was three in the morning and I had lain awake all those hours, I just wanted the sun to rise so I didn’t have to go to sleep and fight the dealer again. If I did fall asleep, my nightmares were so bad I peed the bed.

  One morning in group, Janice made all the men leave the room and then turned to me with imploring eyes.

  “Alli,” she asked, “what are you hiding? What happened to you?”

  Immediately I became nauseated and light-headed. I looked around the small circle of women. How could I tell them what had happened to me? They all had nice clothes, expensive homes, husbands or parents who cared about them. What in the world would they have in common with a meth-addicted cop who had become the prisoner of a drug dealer?