“These are Percocets, right?” she asked. “They look a little crumbly.”
“They’re probably just old,” I said without opening my eyes. “Hey. Give me a little too.”
Chaya’s finger slipped between my lips to rub some of the powder onto my gums. I hummed out my thanks and let the honey-sweet sea rise around me, drawing me under.
The next thing I heard was the sound of my sister screaming.
At first my eyes wouldn’t open. My lashes felt glued to my cheeks, all my reflexes slow, as if I were trying to move underwater. At last I squinted against the overhead light. Dvora was pressed against the wall by the bedroom door, both hands over her mouth.
“What?” I mumbled. “What’s wrong?”
Dvora didn’t answer, but she didn’t have to. I followed her gaze to Chaya, who sat next to me against the side of the bed. Her skin was the waxy color of old seashells. A thin dribble of vomit crusted the corner of her mouth. Her eyes were open and still as glass.
21
I wasn’t planning on relapsing.
Not when I first went out, anyway. Myplanwas to get some air. To fling myself into the city and blind myself with the lights illuminating strangers’ windows, forget who I was between the shoving elbows and screeching car horns.
But there are five billion different metaphors about good intentions for a reason. And that’s why I’m in a bar at midnight, staring at the bottom of my empty whiskey glass and wishing cellphones had never been invented.
Addicts are selfish. They tell us that in twelve-step programs all the time. We’re selfish, shitty people, right down to our rotten and gooey cores. You can’t trust us.Wecan’t trust us. There’s a little gremlin that lives in our brains that’s constantly trying to ruin us, and it’ll devour anyone who gets in its way.
I kept that gremlin at bay for fouryears,but it’s found me. It was always going to find me.
Because you can run from your problems, but you can’t run from yourself.
And I’m the biggest problem I have.
“Another, please,” I tell the bartender when he comes by. I wonder if he can tell by looking at me. Like, maybe bartenders have some secret sixth sense for when someone’s fallen off the wagon.
I get a fresh whiskey in hand and down it. This isn’t the good shit. This is the swill they mop up off the bar floor at the end of the night: rancid, sour, and all too good at doing the job. By the time I put down my empty glass the room has started to sway. Every time I blink it’s a little bit harder to focus my eyes again.
I bet Dvora has already forgotten about me. I bet she’s gone back to her perfect life and her perfect family. I bet her husband asked her who was that on the phone, and she said,Nobody,and when he pressed, she said,Just my useless addict sister.
Fuck, now I’m crying.I’m crying in a bar like the awful navel-gazing main character of a TV show about rich, quirky white women in Brooklyn written by rich, quirky white women in Brooklyn.
I fumble my phone out of my back pocket and swipe clumsily at the screen until it unlocks. I’m not gonna call Dvora again. I’m not. I’mnot.
I do something even stupider.
“Hello?” Wyatt says. His voice sounds too awake, too goddamnperkyfor how I’m feeling right now.
I sniffle and swallow another sob, the heel of one hand pressed to my damp mouth. I don’t even know what I’m doing or why I called him. Maybe I wanted to hear his stupid perky voice. Or maybe I just wanted to torture myself.
“Ely?” Wyatt says after a moment, a little softer now. “Are you there?”
My next breath shudders out of me. “Yeah,” I say. “I’m here.”
“Are you okay?”
What a question. I feel like I haven’t been okay in years—even if I know that can’t actually be true. I was happy the other day, when Ophelia landed that job. I was happy standing outside that Polish bakery in Greenpoint with Wyatt. But those things feel like they happened a long time ago, all of a sudden. Or like they happened to someone else.
I shake my head, a tremulous smile pressing across my lips. “I— No. Not really. I…fucked up, Wyatt. I really fucked up.”
There’s a moment of silence that answers that. It lasts just long enough for me to start to wonder if he’s hung up on me. If he, like my sister, wants nothing to do with me anymore.
But then he says, “Where are you?” And it’s only another half hour—and another guilty drink—before familiar hands slide along my upper arms and Wyatt is guiding me off the barstool and onto unsteady feet. For some reason the gentleness of it just upsets me even more.
