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  As always, I looked for a way out. And then I took a deep breath. “Things got very bad with this dealer I knew in Washington,” I said. “He used to, he sometimes, you know, he raped me. And after a while he wouldn’t let me leave.”

  I hoped this was enough. I didn’t want to say any more. But the way they were looking at me, I was suddenly terrified that they would start asking questions: Why couldn’t you leave? Did he force you to take the drugs? Aren’t you a cop—didn’t you know how to overpower him? These were all questions I couldn’t yet answer for myself. There were so many things about Seattle that I hadn’t even begun to explain, or understand.

  In order to avoid their questions, I kept talking. “He kept me high on cocaine and meth all day, every day. I didn’t know where I was. I barely knew who I was.”

  I told them as much as I was capable of at the time, which wasn’t much. I didn’t tell them about the beatings. I didn’t tell them about the men. Afterward, the talking left me so shaken that Janice let me go to bed. She gave me a couple of clonidine to calm me down, and I slept for a day and a half. When I got up at six the next evening, I was surprised that I felt a tiny bit . . . better?

  I felt excited, somehow, as if I had a secret I actually wanted to share. A completely new feeling for me. I still had one ten-minute phone call left that week, and I used it to call Keawe. I wanted to tell him that for practically the first time in my life, I had shared.

  But when Keawe answered the phone his voice was ice cold.

  “What’s up?” I asked uncertainly.

  “I can’t talk to you, Alli,” he said.

  “I won’t be able to call again for four days,” I said. “Please—”

  “No,” he said. “I can’t talk to you anymore. Ever.”

  “Why? What are you talking about?”

  “Colleen found out about us. I’m sorry, but I can’t talk to you. Don’t call anymore.”

  “But you told her,” I said. “You said she knew. California . . .”

  “I just said that to get you to go to rehab,” he said. “And then I get this letter from that place you’re at, inviting me to come to Family Week. Family Week! Jesus Christ, Alli. She opened it and went ballistic. What were you thinking, having them send that letter?”

  “You told me she knew about us, you told me—”

  “I’m sorry, but it was never going to happen. I have to stay with my family.”

  “What?” I whispered. I started trembling and tried to hold on to the phone.

  “I could never leave them.” Not for you anyway, I heard in his voice.

  “Keawe, please—”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I wish you all the best, I really do, but—”

  Before he could finish, my shaking hands dropped the phone.

  Other people besides me can lie.

  25

  It seems miraculous to me now that I didn’t start using again after Keawe broke up with me. That I didn’t cut and run, find my way back to the dealer, and let him finish me off.

  Keawe’s words had shattered me, destroyed every ounce of self-esteem I had won back. I had gone to rehab for him, stayed there for him, and now he was gone from my life.

  Family Week was excruciating without him. My mom expected him to be there, so I had to tell her what happened. Over the phone, she kept telling me it was going to be okay, but she was shocked. She saw him as my hero, my rescuer, and thought it was unbelievable that he would do this.

  Carol’s feeling were not so generous.

  “The guy is just not there for you,” she said. “He never shows up.”

  “Carol!” my mom scolded her. “Keawe was instrumental in finding Alli.”

  “Yeah, but how did he know she was with a drug dealer if he didn’t know she was on drugs? It doesn’t make any sense.”

  They bickered about Keawe as we waited for our first family session to begin. Carol was deeply suspicious of Keawe and his motives. I had no idea what to think about him anymore. Except that I still loved him desperately.

  My mom and my sister looked so tired and pale. It was apparent what I had put them through, but I wasn’t thinking about that at the time. I was thinking about myself.

  I was so shocked that my sister had even come. I couldn’t understand how she could forgive me, and in a way I didn’t believe it.

  My contact with Carol and my mom was surprisingly limited during Family Week. They had lots of educational sessions with other people’s family members. We shared only a few sessions together. Carol and my mom hadn’t had time to process what I had done to them, and now they were being forced to talk about it in a circle with strangers. Compared to the others, my family was wonderful. My friend Julianne’s father was there, and he shouted, “My daughter doesn’t have a disease! She’s just weak morally.”

  I was barely four weeks sober during Family Week and still had a lot of the meth addict behaviors. I twitched and bounded in my chair. My eyes darted everywhere. My mom and sister saw me in a light they had never seen me in before.

  Things between Carol and me were very strained. She was having a hard time forgiving me for the danger I had put her family and her daughters in—and she still didn’t know the half of it. No one did.

  My mom was her usual upbeat self, happily and naïvely assuming I was now “fixed” after a month in rehab. For her sake, I desperately wanted to believe I could be fixed, but even my own delusions couldn’t take me that far.

  After one of the family sessions, my counselor Greg pulled my mom aside and said, “I know you really want to help Alli.”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Well, if you really want to help her, you’re going to have to stop drinking.”

  My mom looked stricken. “Has Alli been talking about—”

  Greg shook his head. “She hasn’t said a word. But I know you’re a drinker. I can recognize it, and you have to stop.”

  Greg’s words shocked my mom to the core. He was trained in addiction and spotted the signs—her broken capillaries, her swollen ankles, her barrel chest. My mom was mortified. Like me, she had thought that life with an addiction was manageable, that no one really knew about her alcoholism. She had quietly drunk herself into oblivion every night for ten years, but she was very secretive about her disease and very high-functioning. No one had called her on it. As far as I know, all her family and friends accepted my mom’s drinking as harmless.

  But Greg’s words—his naming of her problem—made my mom quit drinking. That very day. I had stopped using on the sixth of September, and on the sixth of October she stopped drinking—a month to the day after I had thrown away the packet of cocaine in the gas station bathroom. From then on, we would celebrate our sobriety together on the sixth day of each month.

  Vista desperately wanted to keep me another month, but my family couldn’t afford the fees. Instead, at the end of Family Week I moved into Sober Living, an extended-care program housed in a rambling hacienda just off the main Taos square. It was called Casa Feliz—“Happy House”—and I was going to be living there with four girls all a little farther along in the sobriety process than I was.

  In Sober Living I had a local sponsor, Barb, and had to go to Narcotics Anonymous meetings in the community all the time. I also had more freedom, more real-life perks, than at Vista. A house mom provided constant supervision, and there was lots of group and individual therapy, but they made it clear that I was there voluntarily. They couldn’t keep me there. If I wanted to leave, well, there was the door. That freedom terrified me.

  At Casa, I had Internet access and was allowed a cell phone, both of which made me feel more vulnerable. My mom bought me a phone the day she moved me into Casa.

  “It’s pay as you go,” she told me. “Now, I don’t want you running up a huge phone bill.”

  “Who would I call?” I asked. I was completely serious. I had no friends left. I had alienated every single person I had ever known on Maui. I had betrayed all of them for drugs.
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  They say sobriety is like waking up from a coma, and for me it was true; I had disappeared from my life for two years. Now that I was awake, I missed my friends badly, yet I could never have them back. I had betrayed them in the worst, most hurtful way. The pain consumed me, and when my mom left me alone to unpack at Casa, I just stared at that cell phone and the four numbers she had programmed into it—hers, Carol’s, Mimi’s, and my aunt’s—and felt so grateful that my family had not abandoned me. They had every right to.

  And then I called Keawe. Of course I had his phone number memorized, but mine was unfamiliar to him. He answered very tentatively.

  “Hello?”

  His voice—the way it hit me—suddenly, I could barely breathe.

  “Hello?” he said again.

  I gulped air and then forced out a couple of words. “It’s me.”

  I expected him to hang up, but his voice was warm. “Alli. How are you doing?”

  “I’m okay,” I said. “I just wanted to see how you are.”

  “Getting by,” he said. “Trying to keep my marriage together.” He said this matter-of-factly, not accusingly. His voice didn’t sound angry, and the fact that we were still talking suggested he wasn’t.

  “Are you getting better?” he asked me.

  “Yes,” I said. “Slowly. Four weeks sober.”

  “That’s great.”

  “How’s everyone at MPD? How’s . . .”

  “Fine,” he said. “They’re all fine. It’s just that nobody understands . . . I don’t understand. What the hell happened? Were you high the whole damned time we were together?”

  “No!” I said. “Of course not.”

  “I just need to know,” Keawe said, sounding a little lost. “I just need to know . . . some things, about what happened.”

  “I can’t imagine what you’re going through,” I said. “I’ll tell you everything. If you want me to.”

  “I’ve got to go,” he said abruptly. “But you could email me, send me some of the details of how this all went down.”

  “Sure,” I said. “I can do that.”

  “I think that’s better than us talking,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said. “I will.”

  We hung up just as my mom returned.

  “How about some lunch?” she asked. “I’ve scouted out a great little place on the plaza.”

  “Okay,” I said, and maybe I sounded too enthusiastic because she paused to look at me.

  “This place agrees with you already, honey,” she said. “You’ve got some color back into your cheeks.” She put her arm around me, and we walked together to the restaurant.

  It made me nervous, being around so many people. I surveyed the whole plaza. Looked behind me constantly. The dealer always liked to sneak up and push me without warning, and I had learned to always be aware of what was behind me.

  We sat outside at a table with green umbrellas. It was a beautiful, bright October day and I felt I should be happy. I had been missing Keawe so desperately, and now I thought he might let me back into his life.

  We had just finished eating when my cell phone rang. I was so pleased—I thought it might be Keawe again.

  But it wasn’t Keawe.

  “Hi, Alli,” a voice said.

  Not the dealer.

  The dealer’s friend, Joe.

  I slammed the phone down on the table.

  “Who was it, honey?” my mom asked. “What’s the matter?”

  I shook my head.

  “Was it him?” my mom asked.

  I nodded.

  “Damn him. Why can’t he just leave you alone? Doesn’t he understand you’re done with all that?” She was referring only to the drugs. My mom still had no idea what the dealer had done to me, and I intended for her to never know.

  My eyes scanned the plaza. Was he here? Was he watching me?

  I didn’t see him, but that didn’t matter. He had found me. It would only be a matter of time before he came and got me.

  How had he gotten this number? Had he tapped into my mom’s email? My sister’s email? Had he stolen her phone bill?

  I didn’t learn until later that he had been calling my mom, too, and messaging her on Facebook. She didn’t want to alarm me, so she didn’t tell me. He finally left her alone once she threatened to call the police.

  Back at Casa that afternoon, we had a house meeting in the kitchen. Our house mom, Lila, a tiny, gray-haired, motherly woman, was telling us about a roller derby team she thought we should all join. She put on a helmet and gave us her imitation of a roller derby queen. Laughing along with everybody, I turned away for a moment to pour myself a glass of milk, when out of nowhere the dealer appeared in front of me.

  I screamed and threw the glass at him, but instead of hitting the dealer, who wasn’t there, I hit the kitchen window. The glass broke, the milk spattered everywhere, and all my housemates knew there was something wrong with me. I was mortified.

  “What’s wrong, Alli?” Lila asked, while my roommate Josie and another girl started to clean up the mess.

  “I am so sorry,” I said. “I just—I have these flashbacks. I see things.”

  Lila patted my arm. “I’m sorry for this, honey. It must be very rough on you.”

  Everyone was so kind at Casa, and I tried to follow the rules, but I still wasn’t talking in therapy. It was taking everything in me not to use. The other girls were all so much farther along in their recovery, and they weren’t dealing with the same things I was. Now, with a roommate, I wasn’t able to keep my severe nightmares and flashbacks a secret any longer. I would wake up in a panic and bolt across the room, scaring Josie, who did her best to calm me down. It wasn’t really fair to her.

  “I thought you were on meds for those,” she would say drowsily as she tried to fall back to sleep after one of my episodes.

  “I am,” I said. “They just don’t seem to be working.”

  Fed up, I stopped taking my meds. It was hard to tell if the hallucinations and nightmares got better or worse.

  Keawe and I started emailing each other regularly. I knew it was a bad idea—he was putting his marriage back together, and I needed to put Maui behind me. But once that door was opened again, I couldn’t stay away

  One night, about two weeks after I got to Casa, I was out in the courtyard with my computer, trying to email Keawe. I was wandering from wall to wall, trying to get a signal, when suddenly I heard a voice in my ear.

  “You think Keawe still loves you, you cunt?” I looked up from the computer. There, in the bushes, was the dealer.

  “No,” I started screaming at him. “You leave me alone.” I lunged toward him and collided with a stucco wall. The next thing I knew I was running into the house, my face cut up and bleeding.

  “Hide me!” I screamed at Josie. The dealer was right behind me. I held on to Josie, and she started screaming and struggling to get away. I wanted comfort; she was terrified. All the lights went on, and everyone came to help Josie. “Get me away from him,” I said, shaking them off as they tried to restrain me.

  “He’s going to get me,” I yelled, careening around the room, dodging the dealer’s blows. I had never had a hallucination that lasted this long. I was bleeding and wild-eyed.

  Lila called the doctor. I was rambling, raving, incoherent. When the doctor showed up, he gave me a sedative right away.

  “We need to 51-50 her,” he told Lila.

  Lila nodded grimly.

  I knew good and well what that meant. The doctor had decided I couldn’t make my own decisions and was sending me to the psych ward for an involuntary seventy-two-hour admission.

  “Don’t do that,” I pleaded. “Just call my mom.” But in the middle of all my ravings, no one was going to trust me.

  The sedative knocked me out and I slept all night. First thing in the morning, Lila had to drive me to the Presbyterian Hospital psych ward, four hours away in Albuquerque. I begged her not to leave me there, and I could tell she felt bad about
what had happened, but she had to get back to the other girls at Casa. She assumed I would be safe, staying in the psych ward until I normalized.

  I was completely over my episode by the time I was admitted to the psych ward, and the sedative had worn off, so I was lucid, conversational, and funny. I managed to convince the doctors that everyone was overreacting, and they let me go after a few hours. They didn’t bother to hold me for seventy-two hours like they should have; they didn’t call my mom or even Lila. They let me walk out of the hospital. By myself. At eleven o’clock at night.

  I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. I could head to West Central, where I knew I could pick up. My meth cravings were so strong at that moment. But the Albuquerque drug scene was rough. Last time I had tried to pick up there, I had gotten robbed by a crack addict who stole my phone. I didn’t want to deal with that shit.

  By the grace of God, instead of going to use, I got in a taxi and went straight to my mom and Mimi’s house.

  I didn’t have anything with me when I showed up at the door, just the small overnight bag Lila had packed for me before she took me to the hospital.

  “Alli?” my mom said. “Honey, what happened?”

  “I want to come home,” I said, and started to cry.

  She took me in her arms and brought me inside.

  I spent the night at home and she drove me back to Sober Living the next day. I didn’t want to go back. In my mind, I was done, and I only lasted a day or two before I called my mom to come pick me up again.

  “No,” she said. “You can’t come home, Alli. You need to stay there.” She was worried about my treatment, worried she couldn’t handle me at home. She refused to come get me, and I didn’t have enough money to get home by myself.

  I left anyway. I went to my sponsor Barb’s house, and she let me sleep on her couch. The next day, when my mom realized I was serious about leaving Casa, she picked me up and brought me home.

  I never returned to Sober Living. Instead of using the opportunities presented to me there to talk about what had happened and to get better, I got to my mom’s house and stopped functioning. I couldn’t do anything but lie on my bed with Bella and watch cartoons. I never got out of my pajamas, I refused to see anyone, and I only left the house for therapy and doctor appointments.