I pressed my thirty-day chip into the palm of her hand and told her she could have any life she wanted. We sat in my truck. She stared at the small red token I had given her. I had received it five months prior in an all-women’s AA meeting I was attending regularly. I had a sponsor and was working my way through the steps.
A few months before I moved home and into the tailspin that led me to AA, Sarah had broken up with Ethan and met Tyson. Within a few weeks, Sarah was in a van full of lost boys driving to music festivals and doing ecstasy until her body’s serotonin became depleted and no longer gave her the high she wanted. She looked for that feeling in other drugs: acid, alcohol, coke. She found it in OxyContin. She quickly dropped out of high school and moved away from home. Ran away, initially, and when my mom threatened to call the cops, Sarah came back and informed my mom she wasn’t going to live at home anymore but would stay in the area. I think my mom was exhausted and scared, and at least this way, she would know where Sarah was.
Sarah moved to a house that was known as the Aloha House because of a giant mural painted on the side, depicting an ocean scene. It was also known for its giant parties: every drug you could want, and a particularly sketchy man named Skid who liked to touch girls after they passed out. I have a journal of Sarah’s from that time. She vacillated between being madly in love with her “soul mate” Tyson and wondering if he was cheating on her. She hated her body, described it as fat and disgusting, documenting her use of diet pills and throwing up after meals. She wrote about being an addict.
I am addicted to a drug and it has been haunting me all day. I want to do some so bad but I can’t. I really wish I could, my body hurts so much. I hate it.
—Sarah’s journal, February 14, 2007
Sarah and Tyson moved from oxy to heroin, which was much cheaper. I would find small squares of tinfoil in jackets she had borrowed, could see a glint of silver flashing from her purse as she rummaged for a cigarette. She smelled like vinegar or chocolate that had turned bad. I knew something had shifted in her, that she had moved past partying and into something stickier that I couldn’t quite understand. No one else in my life was doing these kinds of drugs. Outside of cocaine, I had no knowledge of the world she was living in. She didn’t want to talk about it. The only thing I could think to do was yell at her. It didn’t help.
Sarah and Tyson broke up after a series of blowout fights and cheating accusations. Sarah quickly moved on to Blake, which was not his real name but the name he sometimes went by. He drove his car too fast and regularly got tickets for throwing lit cigarettes from a moving vehicle.
The day I told her she could have any life she wanted, Sharon and I had driven to the apartment where Sarah and Blake lived to convince Sarah to go to rehab. Since they had started dating, I could not recall seeing my sister without pinpoint pupils and droopy eyelids. The two of them were noticeably high when we arrived. Blake couldn’t control the volume of his voice, shout-asking us if we wanted anything to drink. It was a little surreal, Sarah telling us she hadn’t used in days before nodding off on the couch while Blake bellowed that the two of them could get clean at home. I finally got Sarah up and convinced her to go out to my truck.
“Take this.” I handed her the chip. “And when you hit thirty days, I want you to give me yours.”
She went to North River Rehab a few days later, a facility within reasonable driving distance from us. Sarah would manage to do quite a bit in those thirty days, but getting clean wasn’t one of them.