Shards (25 page)

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.

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.

The therapists discovered that my PTSD was among the worst they had ever encountered. They put me in intensive therapy and tried a new combination of meds, but I wasn't responding to therapy or to drugs very well. I couldn't sleep. I didn't know how to deal with the nightmares and the flashbacks, and so I did nothing.

All I could think about was the dealer coming after me. Or worse—I thought of him living in that house, carrying on exactly as before, only with someone else in my place.

I ached for the girl who might be in my place now. I knew from his recordings that I hadn't been the first, and there was no way to stop him from continuing to prey on other desperate addicts.

I knew there was nothing I could do for that girl. I couldn't just call the police department in Everett, Washington, and tell them to search the dealer's house for drugs or hidden cameras. As a former police officer, I knew what was needed to order a search warrant, and I didn't have it. By this point, the dealer would have encrypted all his videos anyway, so there would be nothing to find. I could have alleged abuse, but with no witnesses and no physical evidence, it would have been his word against mine.

Sometimes I thought if I could just get stronger and conquer the PTSD, I would be strong enough to go after him. I fantasized
about driving up there and killing him, but mostly I worried that he would find me and kill me first.

I found myself thinking back to the day I had planned to kill the dealer and myself. I wished there had been ammunition that day because sometimes, living with the aftermath, it was as if I was still there in that house.

And in a way, by not moving forward in my life, I was acting as if there had been bullets in that gun.

All I could say in my favor was that I was still alive and I wasn't using. These weren't small things, given my recent history, but they weren't enough to constitute a life. The truth was, I couldn't handle a life. My poor mom couldn't even work; she had to stay at home and watch me all the time. I felt like a broken person. No one could fix me.

I was no longer suicidal, but I felt into a deep, dark depression. I didn't even have enough energy to start using again. All I wanted to do was to stay in my own little cocoon in Mimi's back house and occasionally venture into the courtyard, completely shielded from the world, protected on all sides by stucco walls.