I am twenty-four when Debby saves my life.
I am sitting alone in Daddy’s house and I am staring at the small white pills that I have lifted from the medicine cabinet and the pills that I had already had before Jaime died and the coke I’d scored about twenty minutes ago, in Tommyknocker’s, a miracle, as usually that place isn’t about the fancy drugs.
I snort the coke and snort more, my hand lifting to my nose, feeling the acrid, racing burn on the tender part of my flesh—and then I duck back down to the mirror, the new white line, making another line, again, again, and finally I feel like I’m floating up to the ceiling and I briefly wonder what it will do to Daddy when he finally wakes up and comes down to my body on the couch, staring up.
But it’s hard to care about things like that when you’re high like I’m high.
And I’m so high I barely know my own name right now.
I’m looking at the pills and they’re all lined up on the coffee table, the same coffee table that my mom set her coffee on twenty-four years ago, but I don’t want to think about that because she’s a horrible bitch who abandoned me, left me to care for Daddy and I hate her.
And without Jaime I am totally alone, and I know it.
I pull one of the bottles up and shake the pills onto my palm and sift through them with a finger and I think about Jaime’s beautiful, heartbreaking face, right after I found her. That’s what comes to me, again and again and again, in my dreams and in my nightmares and in my waking life, a distinction I no longer really feel exists.
The door bursts open as I start to shovel the pills down my throat, one after another after another in the most satisfying and pitiful motion, Jaime’s face floating in front of me like a good and lovely dream, but it isn’t Jaime’s face in front of me, it’s Debby’s—and she says I knew it! Dammit, Kari!
Leave me alone, I tell her. Let me do this.
Leave you alone until I have to find your body, you mean, she says, and if I could cry, I would.
She comes charging at me like a bull and for the first time in my life I am afraid of Debby instead of the other way around, but she just pulls the pills from my hand and hits me on the back of the head. I cough the little white pills out onto her waiting palm, strings of saliva following. Then she yanks the pills from the table and sifts through the ones that are Daddy’s, and shoves those in her bag, and goes to the toilet with the other ones, and I can hear her flushing, I can hear her muttering, angry.
God, I had hope a minute ago, but now I feel so empty.
When she comes out she takes me in her arms, and she holds me, and again I wish I could cry, but I can’t, I’m broken that way. Just fucking broken, like the clock on the wall. Stopped in time. But she rocks me and rocks me like a sleepy child and I let her.
After a while she takes me outside, into the good, cold night, and tells me to look up at the stars.
To just look up at the stars.
At first it is only black but then after a minute I see light, I see formation, I see structure and beauty and life and Debby tells me see? See?
I do see.
A year goes by.
Debby feeds me like a baby bird, and I am weak for a long time, living at my father’s house and taking care of him because that way, I have something to do. That way, I don’t have to think about the next step and for a long time, that’s all I need.
I take Debby to the graveyard on the edge of town near the old high school, where Jaime and I used to go to get drunk, to get high, where Jaime is buried. Now all I drink is cold air.
All night, laying by the headstones of the long dead, I tell her about Jaime, about everything we’d done, and she doesn’t judge. I show her the constellations we had considered ours, the ones we’d watched whenever we were too high, or the men we were partying with too rough, the stars that reminded us that no matter what happened, we were so small, and that was a good, right, thing. All of that eternity.
I ask Debby to forgive me for what I said when I was sixteen and she says it’s okay, but I tell her what I thought she’d meant, that maybe she’d meant something ugly about Jaime’s Blackness and she gets very red and says that I should’ve known her better than that.
And she’s right.
I feel strong by the end of that year, I am healed. But I don’t realize that healing requires scars, and I am still rough beneath them, I still have pain locked behind that ropy skin. And there is weakness there, there is vulnerability, a thing I have always been terrified of. A thing that has festered. A thing that can take me down into the dark. And feed. And feed.