Prologue
Ionly neededto hear this story once. When I was twelve years old, Granddad sat me down on one of the white, wooden porch chairs in front of our house and placed his hand on my knee. “I think you’re old enough now to know the truth, Raine,” he began.
No one is ever old enough to know certain truths. I believe that wholeheartedly now.
“What is it, Granddad?” I asked, looking into his tired eyes. In those eyes, I saw a darkness that had grown over the years.
“Raine, we live in a world filled with great people, but there are also some people who—well, some people receive gifts from God when they don’t deserve them.”
“You mean, there are bad people in this world,” I correct him.
“That’s not what I said. It’s just that some people don’t care about others as much as they care about themselves. I would call them selfish, but not necessarily bad.”
“Like my parents?” I calmly asked him, as if it didn’t hurt to confirm what I had wondered. Carly and Rick were only names spoken out loud occasionally. They were never referred to as a mom and dad because they weren’t around long enough to be my parents.
“Well, yes, unfortunately. Carly—your mother—had a problem with a drug you’ve probably heard of…cocaine.”
Of course I had heard of cocaine before, but I never suspected that anyone I knew used it, least of all my mother.
“As you probably know, cocaine is a drug some people can’t stop taking once they start, no matter how hard they try.” I learned about drugs in school, but I couldn’t understand why people couldn’t stop themselves from doing something so bad. “You see, when women get pregnant, they need to follow certain rules to keep the baby safe.”
“Rules?” I asked.
“Sure. You need to make healthy food decisions and stay away from certain foods and drinks, things that could make the baby sick while he’s in his mother’s belly.”
“So, like soda? That’s not healthy, right?”
Granddad laughed at me. I would have laughed at my innocence too. “Soda isn’t great to have during pregnancy,” he said with a smile. “But that’s not what I’m talking about. Carly continued to use cocaine while she was pregnant with you, and that’s worse than any bad food or drink.”
“Oh.” I was confused and trying hard to piece together what he was saying.
“When a mother takes a drug while she is pregnant, it’s like the baby is using the very same drug, except the baby isn’t big enough to handle it as a grown up can. The doctors pleaded with your mother to change her unhealthy habit, but she loved cocaine too much to stop.”
“She loved it more than me?” I asked.Yes. She loved cocaine more than me. Dad did too.
“I don’t know the answer to that, Raine. I do know she wasn’t strong enough to make that decision. Drugs like cocaine do that to people. That’s one of the reasons they’re illegal.”
“What happened, then?” I asked him.
Granddad pulled in a full breath and leaned back into his porch chair that creaked and moaned against his weight. “When you were born, the doctors had to take you to an isolated part of the hospital so they could help you get the cocaine out of your body.”
“How did they do that?” I asked, curious, not knowing what any of this truly meant at the time.
Granddad’s big sage eyes welled with tears, and his chin trembled as he looked over at me. “Honestly, Raine, we’re lucky you’re alive. I’ve never seen something so heartbreaking in my whole life. You were born a month too early and weighed only one pound. You were so small and helpless. Between that and the internal pain, the doctors said you were feeling, you were inconsolable for weeks. Your cry shattered my heart. I’ve never felt pain like I did while sitting there day after day, waiting for you to feel okay for the first minute in your short life.”
“That’s why I have the problem I do now, isn’t it?” My simple question was so innocent.
“The doctors were confident you’d outgrow the side effects, but I’m afraid we’re going to have to cope with what we’ve been left with.”
“So, this is forever?” I’m not sure I understood what forever meant back then.
Granddad slipped off his chair and struggled to his knees as if he were going to start praying. With a slight groan, he kneeled right in front of me and made a promise. As the wind blew against the few white strands of hair left on his head, he began, “We have medication that works, and we should be grateful for that. You’re going to be okay,” he said, looking right into my eyes. “That is my promise to you. As long as I’m alive, you will never feel that pain again.”
I believed every word he said, and I never considered what might happen to that promise when he died before I was old enough to care for myself. I also never thought much about the fact that there are plenty of sick people in this world—people besides my parents—people who would never care about another person.
Drugs may turn people into assholes, but so do other things, and some people are just born assholes.
