And then my mother appears.
She's sitting in the chair by the window, the same chair where the nurses sit when they come to check on me.
She looks the way she did the last time I saw her alive—gaunt and hollow, her skin the color of old paper, her eyes sunken and empty.
"You can't do this," she says, and her voice sounds like it's coming from very far away. "You're not strong enough. You've never been strong enough."
"You're not real," I whisper, but my voice shakes.
"Aren't I?" She tilts her head, studying me with those dead eyes. "I'm the realest thing in this room, Savannah. I'm the truth you've been running from your whole life."
I squeeze my eyes shut, pressing my palms against them until I see stars. "Go away. You're not here. You're dead."
"And you will be too, soon enough." Her voice is closer now, right next to my ear. "It's in our blood, baby girl. It's what we're made for. The needle. The high. The sweet release of not having to feel anything anymore."
"No." I'm crying now, tears streaming down my face, mixing with the cold sweat that covers my skin. "No, I'm not like you. I'm not going to end up like you."
"You already have." I feel something cold brush against my cheek, like dead fingers. "Look at yourself. Look at what you've become. You think getting clean is going to change that? You think a few weeks in this place is going to undo years of damage?"
I open my eyes, and she's right there, inches from my face.
Her skin is gray now, mottled with the patches of decay I saw on her body in that trap house.
Her lips are blue, her eyes glazed with the film of death.
"You'll end up just like me," she whispers. "It's only a matter of time."
I scream.
The nurses come running, and my mother disappears like smoke in the wind.
They check my vitals, adjust my medication, speak to me in those calm, soothing voices that make me feel like a child.
I try to tell them what I saw, but the words won't come.
How do you explain that your dead mother just visited you to tell you that you're going to die?
They give me something to help me sleep, and I let the darkness take me, hoping that when I wake up, the hallucinations will be gone.
They're not.
By the end of the first week, I've lost track of time entirely.
The days blur together into one endless cycle of suffering.
Vomiting. Sweating. Shaking. Cramping.
Brief periods of exhausted sleep punctuated by nightmares so vivid I can't tell where they end and reality begins.
My mother visits me every night.
Sometimes she's the woman I remember from my childhood—beautiful and warm, before the drugs took her away from me.
Those are the worst hallucinations, because for a moment I forget that she's gone.
For a moment, I'm a little girl again, safe in my mother's arms, and then I blink and she's the corpse I found in that trap house, and the grief hits me all over again.
"Why did you start?" she asks me one night, sitting on the edge of my bed like she used to when I was sick as a kid.
