Page 21 of All In
“It’s okay, Kace,” he said, rubbing the sleep from his eyes and nodding. “I’m right here.”
CHAPTER
SIX
It didn’t take long for the addiction to torture her.
She had no real food in the house. After leaving my hotel the night before, I’d bought a bunch of healthy foods and bottles of water at a 24-hour grocery store. Mid-morning of the first day, I foundDirty Dancingon a cable channel and coaxed Kacey to the couch to watch. She had a thing for 80’s movies. She sipped water as the movie played but didn’t eat. Her leg bounced and she constantly wrung her hands together.
By afternoon, watching movies was abandoned. She paced her small living room, her face dampened with sweat, her eyes wild.
By early evening, she alternated cursing me out with begging for a drink. Soon, dry heaving was added to the rotation. Rage. Plead. Retch.
I stayed out of her way. I gritted my teeth through her tearful begging. I held her hair until she regained the strength to start the cycle again.
Rage. Plead. Retch.
Occasionally she fell into short, exhausted sleeps that gave me ten or fifteen minutes to catch my breath. They didn’t give her anything. She woke up more angry, more desperate, more wretched.Thirstier.
By midnight, she was in free-falling anxiety. There were short fits of uncontrollable tears as she paced—she never stopped pacing, pulling at her hair and glancing around with frantic eyes, as if she’d lost something precious.
I watched helplessly, unable to do more than block the front door and coax her to drink water. Sometimes she clawed and hit me. Sometimes she curled limp into my arms, her body trembling as if she were freezing to death.
It was a long night. The second day dawned, and we were already exhausted. Withdrawal, however, was just getting warmed up.
Day Two nearly killed her. And it nearly broke me, too. By afternoon, I wanted to call it quits. Resign and take her to a professional.
“No, Teddy,” she begged. Her face was blotchy red from crying, her clothes drenched in sweat, her voice hoarse from screaming at me. “Don’t give me to strangers. Please…I can do this. I can. Iwill.”
What could I say? If she could, I could. I held her close until she pushed away to pace more, to vomit the water I’d managed to get her to drink into the kitchen sink.
I didn’t think it could get any worse. Then delusional tremors—the DTs—started.
Kacey’s hands shook as if she’d been doused in ice water, and it scared me to the bone.
I answered a knock on the door in the late morning to an African American woman in jeans, an orange shirt and wielding a baseball bat. She jumped back when I opened the door and readied her bat for a swing. Turned out she was a nurse who lived next door. She heard Kacey’s screaming and thought something criminal was happening.
I let her in, and she helped me check Kacey’s vitals. Her pulse was fast, but not too fast. She wasn’t hallucinating. She wasn’t convulsing beyond tremors. The nurse—Yvonne—okay’d me to keep her home unless it all escalated, and I felt a little calmer after she left. The ordeal still tore at my goddamn heart, but I was less terrified.
We spent the second night on the living room floor. It must’ve been eighty degrees in that small house with no air conditioning, yet Kacey bundled herself in blankets, crying at how cold she was. She didn’t sleep more than a handful of minutes.
I didn’t sleep at all.
Day Three.
Kacey burst out of her blanket cocoon and sat up, ramrod straight, as if she’d remembered what she’d lost and knew where to find it. She kicked her legs free. Her T-shirt stuck to her skin with sweat, all down her back to darken the waistband of her sweatpants.
When she glanced at me, her eyes had a clarity I hadn’t seen in days. The terrible fever had finally broken, and hope rose in me. This fucking nightmare was almost over.
“How do you feel?” I asked.
“Hot,” she said in a croak. “It’s so hot in here.”
She scrambled off the floor and hurried to the bathroom, stripping off her shirt. Her tattoos were dark blotches against her pale skin. I followed.
“What, you don’t trust me alone?” she said, turning on the shower then stripping off her sweatpants, leaving her in nothing but her underwear.
“No.” I averted my eyes from her almost naked body, and busied myself getting a clean towel from underneath the sink.
