AMERICAN PAIN (23 page)

“. . . withdrawal symptoms . . . anxiety, irritability, sweating, trouble sleeping, diarrhea . . .”

“. . . SIDE EFFECTS: Nausea, vomiting, constipation, mild itching, drowsiness, dry mouth, lightheadedness, loss of appetite . . .”

Then two more sets of receipts from America’s Pharmacy. The logo: a druggist’s mortar and pestle on top of an American flag. And some advertising in bold letters: “GENERICS STARTING AT $2.99. BUY 1, GET 1, FREE.” Stacy had paid $20 for the alprazolam and $100 for the oxycodone.

Alice also found a card, the kind the doctor’s office gives patients to remind them of their next appointment. Stacy already had another appointment with Dr. Cynthia Cadet set for January 28 at 1:00 p.m., three and a half weeks away, at a place called American Pain.

They also found Stacy’s MRI reports, the ones Stacy’s doctor had ordered back in August after the accident. There were two of them, one for the cervical spine and one for the thoracic spine. Lots of words like “reactive osteophytes at C5-C6” and “diffuse bulging disc” and “small left paracentral disc protrusion at T8-T9.”

One other thing they found with Stacy’s things: a green plastic bottle, probably Mountain Dew, the label ripped away, heavy with coarse-grained sand.

They reckoned Stacy had seen the ocean after all.

Alice knew about the Internet, of course, but she didn’t mess with computers. She didn’t even know how to turn one on. But young Kevin was a wonder with electronic things, excited that something he called DSL was finally making its way out to Hummingbird Lane.

Kevin was glad to have a way to help. He’d known more than Alice about Stacy and the pills. He knew Stacy had begun crushing and snorting the Lortabs the doctor had prescribed him. He knew that Stacy had started going to the pharmacy a couple days before he was supposed to, trying to get refills early. He’d seen his brother high on the pills. But Stacy high wasn’t too different than Stacy sober. He was the same mellow, friendly guy, maybe a little more so.

So Kevin hadn’t worried much about the pills. A doctor had prescribed them. How bad could they be? And anyway, Kevin was busy with college and work. Kevin was going to have his own computer shop someday, be his own boss. College and computers were things Stacy and the rest of the family didn’t know much about. Stacy would have been happy to work masonry and live on the farm the rest of his life. But Stacy encouraged Kevin’s ambitions. He wanted the best for Kevin.

Kevin began searching for information about pain clinics in Florida. He wanted to know what his brother had seen and done on his trip.

Kevin looked up American Pain. On Topix and other websites, folks from Kentucky were talking about the clinic like it was somewhere in Somerset or Lexington instead of seventeen hours away. Apparently, Kevin told his mother, lots of people from Kentucky were going down to Florida to get pills. You just took them an MRI or a CAT scan and that’s pretty much all you needed.

Kevin looked up oxycodone. He read that a usual starting dose for an adult was maybe two 10-milligram pills a day. Dr. Cadet had prescribed Stacy a twenty-eight-day supply of 240 30-milligram pills. More than
eight
30-milligram pills every day.

And that didn’t include the 15-milligram oxycodone pills. Or the alprazolam.

Kevin was no doctor, but this didn’t sound right. Not for a patient’s first visit.

Alice got the prescription bottles and flushed the pills down the toilet.

Eugene always wanted to be buried on his land, so he and Alice decided to start a family plot on the pretty sloping meadow where the horses grazed, not far from the main house. Stacy’s tombstone would be the first.

But they decided it just seemed too lonely to put Stacy out there by himself, so they ordered their own stones at the same time, leaving the final dates to be engraved later.

Lisa, always organized, helped Alice plan Stacy’s funeral and burial. Lisa helped design the tombstone, adding a guitar and music notes. The mother and the girlfriend made arrangements, Lisa paying for things whenever Alice let her. And they talked and talked about Stacy, the trip to Florida, the pain pills. And as the initial shock dulled, what took its place was anger.

Why in the world, Alice wondered, had that Dr. Cynthia Cadet prescribed Stacy so much medication? She couldn’t get her head around it. That lady doctor giving him not one, but
two
bottles of the exact same kind of medication. The question was never far from her mind: Why in the world would a doctor do that?

Lisa came out to the farm, bringing news stories she’d found on the Internet about people dying of overdoses after receiving drugs from Florida pain clinics. She showed the articles to Alice and Kevin. People were dying in Florida too. Even if the police in Kentucky couldn’t do anything, maybe someone down there in Florida could.

The funeral home brought Stacy’s body to Sand Hill Baptist Church the evening before the funeral. The small white frame church stood at the crossroads of two wooded lanes cut into the mountainside. Alice spent the night there with him.

The next day, the sanctuary was overflowing with hundreds of people.

Rev. Tommy Miller, an auto mechanic during the week, preached a sermon of peace and forgiveness, but inside he was angry. If you asked him to speak his mind, he’d tell you he was hearing more and more about the pills, to the point where it seemed every family had a tragic story to tell. And the government was doing little that he could see. Oh, they had money to bust hardworking coal truck drivers for speeding, an easy form of local revenue, but they didn’t bust drug dealers unless they had $200,000 in the bank, an amount of money worth the trouble of seizing.

Shelby, Lisa’s mother, came to the funeral. While Lisa and Stacy had been living together all these years, more or less common-law married, Shelby had been out to the farm on Hummingbird Lane only once before. The property contained a scattering of dwellings: the clean-swept and simple main house, two trailer homes for various Mason kin, a row of rooster hutches fashioned from barrels, the rust-streaked tin barn. A milk cow, three skinny mares, and a gelding. The Masons were hill-country people, meaning they took their time getting to know you. You were lucky to hear two words out of Eugene. On that single visit, Shelby had seen but not really met Alice. Stacy’s mother was maybe not quite five feet tall, shaped like a beanbag, face reddened by sun and wind, some teeth gone, the rest stained brown by the chaw of tobacco usually lodged in her gums. During warm months, she preferred to get around her farm on grubby bare feet, an oversized stars-and-stripes baseball cap perched backward over her chopped-off white hair.

At the funeral, Shelby met a different Alice. Grief had demolished her barriers. The little woman grabbed Shelby and hugged her close, wanting Lisa’s mother to feel at home even on this day. Alice had Stacy’s pale eyes, eyes like a girl’s, showing exactly what she was feeling. One minute, they were all mischief. The next, a hard look of wrath. Then, over and over on this day, crumpling into deep wells of sorrow.

Shelby saw Lisa and Alice fueling each other’s fire, and she worried about it. Lisa was so stubborn once she set her mind on something.

And Lisa was the one who said it first.

Lisa told Alice: We have to find out what happened. We have to go to Florida.

Sheriff Mike Peters had been called out to Hummingbird Lane on the day Stacy died. He didn’t know the Mason family, who kept to themselves out in the woods and presumably obeyed the law. Alice Mason was completely torn up, as was to be expected. She seemed like a nice lady to Sheriff Peters, about as simple and country as you could find these days, pinning up her laundry on the clotheslines behind her house.

Sheriff Peters had talked to Alice and Eugene Mason, taken some notes, and written up a report. Stacy’s toxicology report came back a few weeks after his death. The medical examiner found that Stacy had died from “acute oxycodone and alprazolam intoxication.” Trace amounts of hydrocodone and marijuana were also detected in his system.

Sheriff Peters didn’t take it any further than that. What was he going to do? He’d been elected to his first term as sheriff two years earlier. He had a simple redbrick office and a tan Ford Explorer and three deputies to cover 17,056 residents spread out over 314 square miles of terrain. Their job already included transporting prisoners, collecting taxes, providing court security, and serving court papers. What could he do about doctors in Florida?

When Sheriff Peters was a boy, which wasn’t yesterday, the biggest drug problem in Rockcastle County was the town drunk. A sheriff could do something about that problem, throw the drunk in the tank now and again. And then came marijuana. Don’t get him wrong, weed was illegal, but if people smoking pot was the worst problem in the Rock, things would be pretty good. Sheriff Peters knew plenty of folks he would call alcoholics or potheads. Friends, neighbors, family. Most could hold down a steady job, and he didn’t know any who stole to support their habits.

Pills were different. At their worst, pillheads needed two or three hundred bucks a day to get by and would steal from family members to get a fix. And painkillers weren’t like crystal meth, which was something that tended to be restricted to a certain lowlife element. Pills truly changed the county, turning normally law-abiding folks into junkies and thieves and bad parents.