Page 86 of Steadfast
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The restof the week went slowly. It was January and bitter cold. My drafty bedroom over the garage never got warmer than sixty-five degrees, and the garage was even chillier.
To keep myself busy, I sorted through our entire collection of exterior paints, throwing away the ones that were too old to use, and labeling the ones that were still good. A month ago I’d assumed the cleaning jobs I did would contribute to the future marketability of the place. Now nothing mattered, and it was depressing as hell.
Every minute I didn’t worry about my future I spent worrying about Sophie. I wondered where she was and what she was doing.
On Wednesday, I went to the NA meeting in the church. The others fussed over my arm and asked me where I’d been. I spared them the tricky details and told them I’d gotten jumped. They made sympathetic noises when I told them all about the unwitting fix they gave me at the hospital and how awful the withdrawal had been.
“And I had seven months clean,” I grumbled.
“You still fucking do,” the Harley dude argued. “It doesn’t count unless you did it to yourself.”
“On the bright side,” I added, “I’m on Suboxone, and that shit works.”
Some of them had taken it before so I got some tips. “And when they start to wean you off it, ask us for help,” Harley dude insisted.
“Will do,” I said. And I meant it, too. I felt shored up by this group of people, even if I wished I’d lived my whole life without knowing what meetings were like. I both loved and hated meetings, which is funny because I both loved and hated heroin, too. But one of those things wouldn’t leave me homeless and toothless within a decade. So I guess meetings were it for me.
When the meeting ended, though, I snuck out of the church and went home alone. Instant buzz kill. I ate some take-out food and listened to the radio just to hear other voices.
And I tried like hell not to wonder what they were serving at the Community Dinner and whether they needed any help. Now that I’d finally done the wise thing and distanced myself from Sophie, I knew I couldn’t go there anymore.
Having somewhere to go on Wednesday nights had been good while it lasted.
The next day, May drove all the way to Colebury to pick me up for Thursday Dinner. I didn’t want her to go to the trouble, but if I skipped it they’d worry. I brought a big, beautiful cheesecake and did my best to look cheerful and healthy. I let little Maeve Abraham draw on my cast with her crayons.
Friday afternoon I had a doctor’s appointment a few miles from home. So I got into the Avenger for the first time in weeks and drove it very carefully to the medical center. Shifting gears with my broken arm was a little clunky, but I got better at it by the time I reached the parking lot.
This clinic was new to me. It was a drug treatment center where they’d prescribe my Suboxone on an ongoing basis. Every two weeks I’d have to submit to a urine test and show up for a counseling session, or they wouldn’t give me the next installment of my prescription.
I was happy to pee into a cup if it meant that I could keep feeling mostly normal.
The low-slung building was nothing special. It didn’t scream BEWARE OF JUNKIES.
The receptionist handed me a clipboard and directed me toward an empty plastic chair. There were six or eight people in the waiting room. Except for one woman who held a sleeping baby, all the patients were men, most younger than thirty.
People think they know what an addict looks like—they think he’s shaking in a gutter somewhere and missing all his teeth. It’s possible to end up that way. But the addicts I’ve met look like the guys in this waiting room—ordinary. You can’t tell from their T-shirt choices or their shoes that they have a problem. (Maybe the per-capita tattoo and piercing ratio is a little higher than the general population, because addicts aren’t afraid to do shit to their bodies. But that’s just a theory I have.)
You can’t detect anyone’s addiction by looking at the outside. The guy sitting next to me might have done crank or ket or vikes, but it didn’t show on his face. Maybe if I got up close and looked into each pair of eyes I’d recognize something familiar. A flicker of shame. The shadow of mistrust. The memory of a loss or a heartbreak that was numbed with chemicals instead of human interaction.
I took the pen and began filling out my details. Name. Address. Depressingly, the form actually had to ask, “Do you have a permanent address?”
Why yes I do, but maybe not for long.
What followed was an ordinary medical history, including a laundry list of conditions I might have. The only boxes I checked were for drug addiction and family history of alcoholism.
“Nickel?”
Looking up, I found a square-jawed woman with a blue buzz cut scanning the room. When I stood, she beckoned to me. I followed her down a long hallway and into a small room with a table and two chairs.
“Good morning,” she said. “I’m your counselor, Delilah. Can we just get one thing out of the way—can I see some ID?”
“Sure.” I pulled out my wallet. They’d need to know for sure who they were handing drugs to.
She squinted at my driver’s license, writing the number down on a form. “Thank you, Jude. Have a seat.”
When she sat down, she explained that Denny had filled her in on my unwitting return to opiates at the hospital. “And I understand that you were prescribed Suboxone, too. Had you ever taken it before?”
