A nurse takes her to her room, starts to explain how things will work. Dizzy already, Peaches tries to think of a mantra, a phrase she can cling to when the sweats get worse and her muscles start to seize and her heart feels like it’s trying to punch its way out of her chest.
The first time she shot up was with Josh. She went first, as he helped her tighten the strap, find the vein. When she pushedthe plunger she felt her nerves sing. Josh, though, for no reason she knew, decided not to get high that day. Looking back now, it’s like he led her to a cliff, wanting her to see the view, then shoved her off the edge. Last time she heard from him, he was living down in Tampa, working at some marina where rich people spilled champagne all over the decks of their boats. The nurse is still talking, but Peaches only catches every other word. Doctors, therapy, seizures. The blinds are half-open, making stripes of sunlight on her bed. In the photograph on the opposite wall, a sunrise’s beams of light reaches toward the earth like fingers. She knows it is supposed to be inspirational, but she finds it insulting. Even after she detoxed, after she wrung her guts of the drugs and talked her mouth dry in therapy, her future was not a fucking sunrise. Every day, she’d grit her teeth against the desire to use herself up. To fail just like her namesake great-grandmother had known she would.
THOSE FIRSTdays’ shakes rattle her teeth; the hot cramps sear through her guts. She becomes so dizzy that the stupid sunset photograph turns on its side. But the nightmares are worse than the physical symptoms. Her dreams humiliate and terrify her. She moves through the underbellies of dark, unrecognizable cities, where she’s chased, attacked, beaten. In one, she is swallowed whole by a creature that looks human but can unhinge its jaw and consume her in a single gulp. She’s in the wet insides of its body, screaming and using her fingernails to claw her way out. She dreams of children she went to elementary school with, who lay her out on the teacher’s desk, tell her that her stomach is filled with worms and cut her open while she’s awake. They pluck the worms out, pink and thick, dangle them over her eyes. She tries to scream but finds that her mouth is stitched shut, even though she can feel them writhing under her skin.
Over the next seven days she sweats through her sheets until they smell sour and ammoniac, like pure animal fear. She pictures that tower again, the people free-falling away from the flames, reminds herself that this is her way of answering that card’s demand. And it is more terrible and torturous than anyone tells you. Even sleeping is full of effort. Her jaw aches from grinding her teeth in her dreams.
And then one day she wakes, and the room is clean and bright. She recalls snippets of troubled dreams, but in the morning they yield to something like peace. She realizes that’s her problem, has always been her problem. Peace feels too much like emptiness. She wonders if chemically, neurologically, she’s missing something that would help her differentiate between the two.
The doctor confirms that the worst is over, and talks to her about therapy, about group meetings, about methadone, but she stares past him, at the sunrise photograph on the wall. The metaphor well worn, clichéd, but maybe, just maybe, true.
THEY NEEDto give her bed to a new patient that night, so she stands outside of the facility, her bag at her feet. She counts her money and almost laughs when she realizes that her fifty is gone, all she’s got is a ten crumpled at the bottom of her change purse. She only left the bag unattended for a minute, while she signed her discharge paperwork at the front desk. She should know—that’s all it takes, a second or two; never trust a junkie. A group therapy session went on break, four or five people stepping outside for cigarettes. One of them knew to dip their hand into her purse, find the wallet, shuck the cash out. One of those people would go back to their circle, speak about how getting high wrecked their life, made them desperate and mean, then would go out and score later. The thought made her too jealous to be mad about the money.
When she hangs up the phone, the nurse offers to let her wait, try again, but she shakes her head no. A counselor drops her off at the bus stop, shakes her hand, and wishes her luck. She can’t remember the last person who shook her hand before that.
Back to AC, it is, she thinks. She wonders if they would let her back into the shelter, even though last time she got kicked out for stealing. It was only a half-empty pack of cigarettes, but rules are rules, or so they told her when they asked her to pack her things. She could pick up a john, though she hates the idea of sleeping with a stranger without the treat at the end, the relief of a needle in her hand—that was always the whole point of it all. But she just needs enough for a place to stay, for a bus ticket back to Pennsylvania. A hundred bucks. It seems both cheap and dear, the price of freedom—twenty minutes with a man.
Does she trust herself to fuck a stranger and not use afterward? Maybe. She’s not sure she believes in triggers. But she’s always moved through life throbbing with want. She tells herself she’s defeated the Tower. She chides herself for letting it bother her so much—that girl, that kid, in the shop, playing around with palm reading and cards—but there was something real in the girl’s face when she turned that card over, a combination of worry and sympathy that Peaches couldn’t ignore.
She arrives amid the white light of the afternoon. An ugly, revealing time. For AC, for herself. She imagined that after detoxing she would look like herself again, whoever that was. But her face is puffy and pale, and for some reason the whites of her eyes are jarringly bright, like a child’s.
She doesn’t know what she’ll do about the night, about getting back to her mom’s. Whether her mom will even let her stay. She decides that when the bus gets into the depot, she’ll go to the old parking garage at the Taj Mahal. Whenever she needed to be alone she would slip past the broken pieces of plywood at the entrance, the spray paint warningKeep Out, walk up the sloping ramps until she was at the top. She liked to press herself into the concrete barrier and look out over the city. An ocean view to the east, the hospital to the west, the ambulances pulling in and out all day long. She’d watch EMTs hustle in with their gurneys. From that height, the human drama was shrunk to the size of a diorama like the ones her mother’s students built out of shoeboxes and filled with miniature cars and trees. Easy to watch and think she was not a part of it all.
Her mood gets more resigned, grimmer, as the bus speeds down the Black Horse Pike. Past the Ramada Inn, the Sunset, and all of the other little aqua and pink and coral stucco motels just rotting into the side of the road. She tastes the scatological stink of the marsh, which she’s learned is the sulfurous smell of the mud exposed at low tide. Other people cover their noses with their hands or their shirts. She starts to feel paranoid—that the smell is coming from her, that everyone knows it. Without the drugs to cover it up, the thing that makes her wrong inside is seeping out, filling the air like poison.No, she thinks. Paranoia: the brochures warned about that. It’s a symptom, real but not.
But even after she gets off the bus, she feels the smell of the marsh on her, in her. She wants to shower. Drink a glass of water so cold she can feel the chill sliding down her throat. She uses the pay phone at the bus terminal—before she can decide anything about how and where she’ll spend the night, she needs to know about all the nights after that. This time the phone rings twice before her mother answers, the briskhelloshe reserves for strangers.
The word feels unpracticed, underused, and it takes her a second to say it. She can feel the pressure of all the questions she wants to ask.Do you still love me? Do you know that I really am sorry, so sorry? Will you tell me all of the bad dreams weren’t real?
It’s another question, and an answer, at once.
“Mom?”
LILY
I KNEW CLARA WAS WAITINGfor me in the casino lobby at the end of my shift, but I needed a drink first, some cold blunting gin, the familiar rattle of ice cubes in my glass. I made my way to the bar on the casino floor, the one near the penny slots. I was still rattled from making the phone call earlier that afternoon and kept replaying the conversation with Julie Zale’s aunt in my head. What did it mean that Clara was right? I told myself that all she really knew was the colors of Julie’s room. A few details. Maybe Clara hadn’t even really intuited them. I found the website that Julie’s family had made, asking for tips, and scrolled through to see if any of them showed a shot of her bedroom—maybe Clara had already seen it subconsciously, and what she was calling a vision was really just submerged memory, something sifted from the millions of images and impressions we’re bombarded with every day. I squinted at the background of every shot, but nothing seemed to match what she and Julie’s aunt had described.
I finished my gin and tonic too quickly, ordered a second anyway. I couldn’t bring myself to meet with Clara, to face what she thought her visions meant or to confront her about those burns. Was it worse if she’d done it to herself? Or if it had been someone else? I was so tired of living in a world that abused women. I keptpicturing Steffanie’s face, the bruise already tender around her eye, when I found her in that bathroom, rag dolled around the base of the toilet. Didn’t anything ever change?
Someone put their hand on my shoulder, and I nearly dropped my drink. But it was only Clara.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“What areyoudoing here? This isn’t where we were supposed to meet.”
“I just needed a second to … think …” Clara pulled out the stool next to mine. “Maybe we should go somewhere else. You could get in trouble here.”
“Don’t worry about that,” she said. Sure enough, the bartender came over without a word and poured her a rum and coke.
“You a regular?” I asked.
“I come here from time to time.”
I sighed. “I don’t think I want to know any more about that.” I had a chance to study her fingers. She had put on fresh bandages. She noticed me looking at them and dropped her hands into her lap. “So. What are we doing? You really think that something has happened to Julie, and to the woman who came to your shop?”
“I do.”
“Why?”
