Shards (24 page)

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 this 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?

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.

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.