“You better apologize to me in the morning,” she told me, and even though I never got angry on opiates, that made me angry. Even if the emotion was really just a tiny kernel of frustration burrowing itself into my chest, it still counted.
“You were using too,” I muttered, well aware of how whiny I sounded.
She shook her head. “Not like you.”
And that was the last thing she said to me for a long time. Her next words were to the Uber driver when he picked us up. Then silence for the whole car ride back to Crown Heights. She kept jiggling her leg against the seat, and I wanted her to stop, but asking wasn’t worth the effort. So instead I tilted my face against the chilly window and watched the city lights flash past as we drove away, hipster Brooklyn receding behind us.
Chaya told the driver to drop us off a block away from my place. She let me lean on her for that short walk home, although she kept whispering orders under her breath, as if she thought the neighbors were watching us outside their windows even at three in the morning: “Stand straight…. Pay attention idiot, that’s a curb.”
My keys were in my coat pocket, but I was too useless to dig them out. Chaya had to do it for me, unlocking the door to my building. She paused there, holding the door open with her shoulder, and flipped through my keys till she found the right one.
“This is the key to your front door,” she told me, like I didn’t already know that. “Don’t drop it.”
“I don’t feel good. I think I’m dying.”
“You aren’t dying, unless you count dying from stupidity. You’re fine. Go take a cold shower or something.”
Chaya shoved me gently in the direction of the stairs. I made it all the way to the bottom of them before I realized what the problem was going to be—but when I turned around, Chaya was already gone. I crawled up on my hands and knees, fingernails digging into the winter grime smeared from the soles of twenty people’s snow boots. I rested on the landing, leaning my head back against the wall—but it was too much, too easy to slip under the surface of the dark water that rose up all around me.
I couldn’t fall asleep there. I had to pull it together.
I squinted open heavy eyelids and lurched forward again, grabbing the banister this time to drag myself up the next flight.
My key fit into the lock. I turned the front-door knob as slowly as possible, free hand lifting to graze the mezuzah on the doorframe, then touch my dirty fingers to my lips. Even though Hashem probably wished I wouldn’t; what god wanted the devotion of someone like me?
The apartment was warm and quiet as I slipped inside, shucking off my coat. It puddled on the floor next to our shoe rack, joined shortly thereafter by my hat and boots. I was too numbed out to be scared my parents were still up or even to worry about waking them. Things like that didn’t matter when you were high. It was kind of beautiful.
I shuffled down the hall in my sock feet and let myself into the bedroom I shared with my younger sister Dvora. She was a huddled lump in the bed by the window, the streetlamp light casting silvery waves over her form. I tried to be quiet as I stripped off my dress, but it was no good. I staggered into the dresser, and one of Dvora’s little wooden horse figurines tipped off its shelf and clattered to the floor.
“Whoops,” I whispered as Dvora made a muffled, displeasednoise against her pillow, then twisted around to squint at me from across the room.
“What are you doing?” Dvora’s voice was all thick and gloopy with sleep. “Ely, it’s like…four in the morning….”
The night air weaved around me like silk—beautiful but a little hard to breathe. I thought if I went to sleep right then, I might not wake up. The thought didn’t terrify me. Nothing did when I was high. But I was generally aware that dying is something people usually try to avoid.
So I found myself climbing into Dvora’s bed instead of my own, slipping under the covers and burrowing in close to the warm knot of her body. She shifted to make room, her hands tucked together between us, fingers worrying each other.
“Are you high again?” she whispered. Dvora was fourteen. My parents probably thought she didn’t know what “high” even was. But I was sixteen and had been getting drunk since I was her age. She wasn’t that young, so she knew.
I exhaled. My breath wisped through the hair at her forehead, thin dark threads fluttering in the dim light. “Maybe,” I said. I closed my eyes. “Yes.”
She didn’t say anything, but I could feel her breathing faster next to me. God, I wished I could feel guilty. I really did.
Behind my closed eyelids, little bursts of color swam around. “I think I took too much.”
“Do you want me to get Ima and Abba?”
I shook my head. “No. Just stay with me. Please?”
Dvora’s cold hands insinuated themselves between mine. She locked our fingers together and squeezed tight. “Okay.”
“Okay.”
We stayed in silence, the exchange of our breaths the only communication. Outside, the recycling truck made its way down the street with the familiar sound of bottles clinking and stacks of folded-up cardboard slapping against each other. The pills leachedout of my system slowly, venom draining from a snakebite. I cracked my eyes open enough to see Dvora’s face again, her dark lashes like coal smudges against her cheeks. If I were to take a photo of her right now, that’s what I’d do. I’d smear soot right there, blacking out a space beneath her eyes, scattering ash like freckles.
“Can’t you stop?” Dvora said, and my eyes opened the rest of the way; I’d thought she was asleep.
“Stop what?”
