He never said anything about his family or any past relationships. I didn’t know his age or if he had any friends he hung out with. I did know that Caleb became addicted to painkillers after nearly dying in a car accident, and a year later he still suffered from the pain.
Caleb became chattier when his Oxy and Xanax cocktail finally kicked in. I kinda liked the predictability of it, as dark as it sounded.
“Do you have any pets?” Caleb asked, his voice slowed and slurred. The pills had kicked in.
“Nope,” I said, running my finger in a circle on my dining room table. “Thought about getting a cat a few times but never made the jump.”
“How come?”
I considered his question. There were plenty of excuses I’d made over the last couple of years, but there was a real reason that I kept hidden away from everyone I was close to. Caleb was mostly a stranger, but he also felt like a friend in a weird way. With Caleb. there were no boundaries because he understood. I didn’t have to worry about making a total ass of myself.
“Mostly out of fear of commitment,” I said, curling my fingers into a fist. I hooked my index finger over my thumb’s knuckle and squeezed.
“I had a dog once. Not anymore, though,” Caleb said. “Gave it up to my ex. It’s better that way, though, because I didn’t take care of him. I didn’t take care of my ex either. I loved him, I really did, but I knew I wasn’t making him happy, and that’s why I wasn’t nearly as upset as I should’ve been when he left me.”
Caleb talked about this a lot, too. A man he loved a lot. His voice changed when he talked about the man who left him. He talked about that man in absolutes, of before and after.
He drifted off a bit, but eventually he let me go, telling me he’d talk to me next week. I took a few more calls after letting Caleb go. A woman from Michigan who’d left rehab for three days before she bought heroin. A sophomore in college who snorted Adderall and needed someone to talk to when the shakes got too bad. A mother of three who scored another hit of meth.
There was the reminder to always hide their gear. Make sure they kept their Narcan nearby if they had it. Each time I talked to them, I told them how I’d been there.
I’d talked to people from all over on the hotline. People who wanted to be free from their addiction. They’d put themselves up in rehab and get clean, but then the itch would come back, and they couldn’t ignore it. Helping anyone toward sobriety was out of my hands, but the one thing I gave them was time. I gave time to keep going, to make another decision, to survive another day.
Maybe if survival were more fun, everyone would make it out of addiction’s hell alive.
Once I was done with the calls, I straightened up the house for when Chance and Duncan came over for dinner. Sometimes one of us cooked, or else we ordered in. It began when I was just out of rehab after my overdose and over the years it turned into a ritual.
My phone pinged with a notification. I was expecting Chance telling me they were about ready to head over, but when I looked at my screen, it wasn’t Chance.
It was Micah.
Hey, wanted to reach out and see if maybe you’d be down to meet up again.
Heat tingled my face and into my arms and fingertips. I looked over my shoulder as if a camera crew would jump out of one of the closets, yell Surprise! and laugh at my embarrassment for getting my hopes up about a round two.
There were no cameras and no one hiding in my closet. It didn’t make Micah’s text any less alluring, though.
I tossed the phone on the couch and cupped the back of my neck. As enticing as the offer was, fear jabbed its sharp edges into my side. I sent a text to the group chat with Duncan and Chance, letting them know that the front door was unlocked, then turned my phone on silent, refusing to let Micah’s invitation haunt me.
When the guys showed up, they both had their arms full of stuff to cook. Duncan had a habit of making one meal big enough to feed a whole ass family reunion, but when I started living out on my own, I figured out his reason for doing it was because he wanted to make sure I didn’t go hungry. Even still, tonight was a bit over the top.
While Duncan worked in the kitchen, Chance and I stayed away in the living room while I put on a movie for background noise. We watched it for a bit, the scent of Duncan’s cooking making my stomach rumble.
As if on cue, Duncan yelled, “Five more minutes and we can eat. I got a few things I need to keep an eye on, though.”
I looked toward the kitchen with suspicion, slowly turning toward Chance. “Okay, be for real. Y’all comin’ in my house with food like you’re making my last meal. Should I be worried?”
Chance shook his head as he adjusted on the couch so that his back sat against the armrest. His fingers played along the couch cushion, the deep circles under his eyes darker in the dull living room light.
“Duncan wants to go out of town next week to reset.” Chance flicked his dark eyes toward the kitchen with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes.
Over the years they’d been together, Duncan learned that when Chance had rough times like this, it was good for him to go somewhere quiet and rest. It wasn’t gonna fix the fact that these dips would stick with Chance forever, but it did help him come back to himself a bit.
“When do you leave?”
Chance turned his attention back to me and rubbed a knuckle over the seam of his mouth and said, “Next Friday. We get back Monday.”
My blood ran cold. For five years, we’d never missed Sunday dinner. If one of us was sick, there’d be an extra body to play backup nurse. When my brother was in town to visit me, Duncan practically made a three-course meal. Hell, not even a snowpocalypse stopped Duncan and Chance from coming over so we could spend the Sunday together.
Eventually, I accepted Sundays with them was gonna be the thing that started my weeks. Even during the days when I didn’t want to go to their place or have them at mine, I pushed through it because the idea of ever missing it would be a sign that everything was going to shit.
Duncan walked out of the kitchen, the tip of his tongue poking at his lip ring, eyes creased with worry. “You can join Tristan and Kurt at the Collective on Sunday. They go to dinner every week with Maddie.”
I pointed between Duncan and Chance. “And you’ve already spoken to them about all of this?”
“Not officially,” Duncan said, taking a chair from my dining room table, flipping it around, and straddling it. “But they won’t mind.”
I scratched my arm and rolled my neck. Duncan gave a lot of his life to support me, and I should’ve been able to shift my routine a little for him by now. But the sour fear still sat in my stomach, and I gritted my teeth to stop it from bleeding into my voice when I said, “Well, at least I get a week of dinners out of it.”
Chance smiled for real this time. “I’ll make sure to bring you back a souvenir.”
“Damn right,” I said, giving Chance a pat on the knee as I stood up. “Now let’s go eat, okay? I’m starving.”
MICAH
Sundays always had a purpose. For some, it was the last day of a weekend free of work. For others, it was the last day they could spend with their family before the rush of school and activities chewed into each day. People went to church on Sundays and prayed for salvation to something far more vast and powerful than they were.
My Sundays, I went to the Collective, determined to find a way to fix Ada. I’d been on the search for months, and when I ran into one wall, I wandered somewhere else, hoping to meet someone with a modicum of wisdom to share how I could make my sister better.
The Collective wasn’t just a community center; it was an entire community. Outside, kids played kickball, while adults hung out near the food booths. Inside, life classes were held on the first floor; today I headed up to the second floor toward the Nar-Anon support group.
I sat down and looked at my phone to see if Ada had reached out. She’d been silent for days and sent all of my calls to voicemail. Yesterday she turned off her location sharing. She did that when she was pissed at me, and as much as I knew it’d happen, her disappearance fueled my imagination, waking me in the night, panicked, thinking our invisible string had severed.
The therapist walked inside and closed the door. She looked about my age and always wore Vans and yoga pants, her long nails painted weekly in a variety of bold colors. She didn’t write anything down on a notepad like the one in the last group I attended. And she didn’t give sad eyes like the one I’d attended before that.
She listened, and she thought about what she was going to say. I liked that. It meant she wasn’t going to dole out the same useless shit I’d heard before.
The young woman next to me sniffled, her hands twisting around themselves as she tried to hold back tears. Her mouth quivered at the corners as she whispered, “I know I shouldn’t let him back in my life again if he doesn’t stop using, but . . . I just can’t cut him out. I’m—I’m not ready.”
That was talked about a lot here, stopping contact with addicts. My folks did it after Ada walked away from her third round of rehab. It tore them apart, their love for Ada, and it took me pleading with them to go to therapy for them to understand that their love could bring them back together. They believed in their choice of cutting Ada off. Now I wondered if it would help Ada realize how much danger she was in if I were to cut her off too.
Ada bore the burden of guilt for driving on the highway with her friends after pulling an all-nighter studying for the LSATs. Her best friend called her up for a ride back to her apartment because everyone had celebrated her birthday a bit too hard. It was an easy request, but when Ada wrapped her car around a light pole and was the only one who walked away alive, she refused to consider herself lucky. She thought she was being punished.
She’d been thrown into war with dark and cunning demons, and it had crippled her defenses. She’d lost her love of life, her blazing confidence. I’d always admired her brazenness, how her charisma was so infectious it was impossible to ignore.
I lost my sister that night. And if telling her that her bedroom was no longer there for her would bring back my best friend, then maybe I should do it, but I could not yet make myself believe that wouldn’t make things worse.
