“I know,” he said, holding up a hand. “Listen to me. I know.”
He pulled a chair over and sat down.
“Oxycodone. Ten milligrams. Sixty tablets,” he said. “Prescribed through an online telehealth clinic. A company out of Florida that the state attorney general has been looking at for about a year. They
write pain prescriptions after a five-minute video call. The patient fills out a form online. Name, birthday, insurance card.”
“I never did that.”
“Somebody did. Using your name, your birthday, and your insurance information off your father’s family policy.” He paused. “The prescription was filled at the CVS on Main Street. Twice. Once in August and once in October.”
He took a folded paper out of his jacket pocket.
“Here’s the thing about oxycodone,” he said. “It’s a controlled substance. When somebody picks it up at the pharmacy, the pharmacist has to check ID. Every time. And it gets logged in the
state’s prescription monitoring program. The name on the prescription and the name and ID number of the person who picked it up.”
He unfolded the paper. He didn’t hand it to me. He just held it so I could see.
It was a printout. Two lines highlighted in yellow. Two dates. Under Patient, my name. Under Picked Up By, a different name, and a driver’s license number.
Karen Elizabeth Walls.
I looked at that printout for a long time.
“The pharmacist flagged it the second time,” Officer Daniels said. “In October. She thought it was strange that a fifteen-year-old was getting a high-dose opioid from an online clinic, and that the
person picking it up wasn’t a parent. So she called the house to check.”
“Sunday,” I whispered. “That was the call.”
“Your father told her you weren’t available,” Officer Daniels said. “And he hung up. And he didn’t
ask anybody anything.” He folded the paper back up. “Maybe he suspected. Maybe he didn’t want to know. That’s something you’ll have to ask him.”
I closed my eyes.
Two lines on a graph. Find the point where they cross.
The pharmacy call. Karen’s bottle. Karen’s knee surgery. Karen floating. Karen locking her door every night.
They’d crossed right in front of him. And he’d looked away.
“What happens to Karen?” I asked.
“That depends,” Officer Daniels said. “Using somebody else’s identity to get a controlled
substance is a felony in this state. Obtaining by fraud. But she’s nineteen. No record. If she’s honest, and if she gets help, there’s a drug court program here. Treatment instead of jail.”
“And Dad?”
He was quiet for a moment.
“I’ve referred it to the prosecutor,” he said. “Child endangerment. Putting a minor out of the house without shelter in dangerous weather. What happens next isn’t up to me.”
He stood up and put his hat back on.
“For what it’s worth,” he said at the door, “your father hasn’t left this hospital in six days. He sleeps in the waiting room. He asks the nurses about you every hour. They’re getting sick of him.”
He almost smiled.
“I’m not telling you to forgive him,” he said. “I’m just telling you.”
Chapter Seven: Karen
Karen came on the seventh day.
She came alone. Angela Reyes brought her to the door and asked me if it was okay. I said yes before I really thought about it.
My sister walked into my room like she was walking into a church. Slow. Careful. Looking at the floor.
She looked terrible. Her auburn hair was greasy and tangled. She’d lost weight; her jeans were
hanging off her hips. Her skin had a yellowish gray color to it, and there were dark rings under her eyes like bruises. She was wearing an old hoodie of Mom’s, the purple Ohio State one, the sleeves pulled down over her hands.
She stopped at the foot of my bed. She looked at my wrapped hands. At the oxygen tube in my nose. At the bruises on my chest where they’d done CPR, which you could see above the neck of my hospital gown.
Then she started crying.
It wasn’t quiet crying. It was the kind that bends you in half. She put her hands over her face and her shoulders shook and she made a sound I had never heard a human being make, a high, thin,
broken sound, like something tearing.
I didn’t say anything. I let her cry.
After a while, she sat down in Roz’s chair. She wiped her face on the purple sleeve.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“You said that already,” I said. “That night. You said I’m sorry. And then you let him lock the door.”
She flinched like I’d slapped her.
“I know.”
“Why, Karen?”
She told me everything.
She told me about the pills after her knee surgery. About how they made her feel, for the first time since Mom died, like the world wasn’t crushing her. She said it was like somebody had finally taken a heavy coat off her shoulders.
When the prescription ran out, she called the surgeon’s office and asked for more. They gave her one refill. Then they said no.
She bought them from a guy at the community college for a while. Then he got arrested. Then she
found the telehealth website.
“They wanted an insurance card and a name,” she said, staring at the blanket. “I couldn’t use my name. My name was already in the system from the surgery. They’d see I’d had them before.
They’d flag me.”
“So you used mine.”
“You were fifteen,” she whispered. “You’d never had anything. You were clean. Nobody would look.”
“I didn’t think about it,” she said. “I swear to God, I didn’t think about what it meant. I just needed them. You don’t understand what it’s like when you need them. It’s like your whole body is screaming.”
She took a long breath.
“Then the pharmacy called. On Sunday. I heard Dad on the phone. I heard him say your name and prescription, and I knew. I knew it was over. I knew he was going to figure it out.”
“So you got there first.”
She nodded. Tears were dripping off her chin.
“I thought if I told him first,” she said, “if I said I found them in your bag, then when he looked
into it, he’d think it was you. He’d ground you. Take your phone. Make you go to some counselor. You’d be in trouble for a couple of months, and you’d be okay, because you’re always okay. You’re the good one.” Her voice cracked in half. “I never thought he’d throw you out. I never,
never thought that.”
“But when he did,” I said, “you didn’t say anything.”
She was quiet for a long time.
“I was going to,” she said finally. “After the door closed. I stood there in the hallway. I said, Dad. And he turned around and looked at me. And he said, Not now, Karen. Go to bed.”
She pressed her sleeves against her eyes.
“And I went,” she said. “I went upstairs and I took two of them and I lay down on my bed and I let the floating come. And I thought, she’ll go to the Hendersons’. She’ll go to a neighbor. She’ll be back in an hour.”
She looked at me. Her face was wet and red and swollen.
“I was floating,” she said. “While you were dying on the side of the road. I was lying on my bed, floating.”
I didn’t know what to say. There isn’t anything to say to that.
I looked at my sister. My sister who used to braid my hair so tight it made my eyes water. My sister who let me sleep in her bed during thunderstorms. Who stood at Mom’s funeral with her
arms crossed and never cried.
I realized, looking at her, that she hadn’t stopped being that sister. She’d just been drowning. For three years. Right in front of us. And nobody had seen it, because Dad was drowning too, and I
was too busy being good.
“Karen,” I said. “Are you still taking them?”
She looked down.
“Officer Daniels took the bottle,” she said. “I haven’t had any in four days. I’m so sick. I’ve been throwing up. I can’t sleep. My legs won’t stop moving.”
“Then you need help.”
“I know.”
“Real help, Karen. A doctor. A program.”
“I know.” She nodded and nodded. “There’s a place. The drug court thing. Officer Daniels told me
about it. It’s ninety days in a residential program in Dayton, and then outpatient, and if I finish, they drop the felony.”
“Are you going to go?”
She looked up at me. For the first time since she walked in, she looked me straight in the eye.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m going on Monday.”
Chapter Eight: Aunt Diane
My mother’s younger sister, Diane, drove in from Columbus that night.
I hadn’t seen her in almost two years. Not since Mom’s second anniversary, when she and Dad had a fight in the driveway about something I wasn’t allowed to hear, and she drove off without
saying goodbye.
She came through the door of my room at nine-thirty at night like a hurricane in a puffy coat. She was a high school vice principal, short and fierce, with Mom’s same green eyes and Mom’s same
laugh.
She took one look at me and burst into tears.
“Oh, Bean,” she said. “Oh, my Bean.”
Nobody had called me Bean since Mom died. Mom gave me that name when I was a baby because I was so small. Aunt Diane was the only other person who ever used it.
She sat down on the edge of my bed and held my bandaged hands very, very carefully in hers.
She held them like they were made of glass.
“Mrs. Bell called me,” she said, after she’d stopped crying. “From Children’s Services. They need a safe place for you to go when you get out of here. I said I’d take you.”
“Take me?”
“To Columbus. To my house. For a while.” She looked at me. “If you want. Nobody’s going to make you.”
“What about Dad?”
Her face changed. She looked toward the hallway. Toward the waiting room, where my father was probably sitting, staring at the wall.
“Your father,” she said carefully, “is going to have to show a judge that he can keep you safe. That’s how it works now. There’s going to be a hearing. They call it a dependency hearing. A judge will decide where you live while all this gets sorted out.”
“A judge,” I repeated.
“You’ll get your own lawyer,” she said. “A guardian ad litem. Somebody whose whole job is to speak for you. Just you.”
I didn’t know what to think. My whole world had flipped upside down in a week. I’d lived in that house on Linden Street my entire life. Mom’s sewing machine was still in the dining room. My bedroom still had glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling that Karen helped me stick up when I was
seven.
“I don’t know what I want,” I said.
“That’s okay,” Aunt Diane said. “You don’t have to know yet.”
Later that night, after Aunt Diane went to her hotel, I couldn’t sleep. The beeping machines kept me awake. My hands throbbed. My ribs ached every time I breathed.
At two in the morning, I heard voices in the hallway.
One of them was Aunt Diane. She must have come back. The other was Dad.
They were trying to whisper, but they were both too angry to do it right.
“You locked her out,” Aunt Diane was saying. “In an ice storm. Fifteen years old. No coat, no
phone. Do you know what Jenny would have done to you?”
Jenny was my mom.
“I know,” Dad said. His voice was ragged.
“Do you? Because I don’t think you do. I think you’ve been sitting in that house for three years with the curtains closed, pretending you’re fine, while one of your daughters turned into a drug addict and the other one turned into a ghost.”
“Diane…”
“I begged you. At the anniversary. I begged you to get help. Grief counseling. Something. And you told me to get off your property.”
Silence.
“I know,” Dad said again. Quieter.
“You don’t get to say I know anymore, Tom. You get to fix it. Or you get to lose them both.”
There was a long silence.
Then I heard a sound I had never heard in my whole life. I didn’t recognize it at first. It was a deep, choking, gasping sound, like somebody trying to breathe underwater.
It was my father crying.
He hadn’t cried at Mom’s funeral. He hadn’t cried in the hospital when she died. He stood by the bed holding her hand, and when the machine went flat, he just nodded and walked out to the
parking lot and sat in his truck.
Now he was crying in a hospital hallway at two in the morning, so loud the night nurse came out to see what was wrong.
I lay in my bed and listened. I didn’t call out to him. I didn’t know if I wanted to.
But I didn’t put my hands over my ears, either.
Chapter Nine: What Dad Said
He came in on the ninth day. Angela Reyes was there. She sat in the corner of the room with her clipboard, because those were the rules for now.
He sat down in Roz’s chair. He held his hands together between his knees. They were shaking.
“Hey, kiddo,” he said.
“Hi.”
He looked at my bandaged hands. They’d taken some of the wrapping off by then. My fingers
were swollen and purple at the tips. Dr. Feldman said I’d probably keep all of them, but the two on my left hand might always be sensitive to cold.
“Do they hurt?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
He nodded. He looked at the floor.
“I knew,” he said.
I looked at him.
“Not all of it,” he said. “But I knew something. When the pharmacy called on Sunday. I knew you’d never taken anything. I knew Karen had been different since her knee. I’d find her asleep in the
afternoon. I’d hear her up at three in the morning. I’d count the money in my wallet and it would be wrong.”
He rubbed his face with both hands.
See more on the next page