My drug of choice was alcohol or cocaine, but preferably both at the same time. Sarah’s drug of choice was heroin or boys. Preferably guys who would make her feel loved and wanted and chosen, and if they liked to slam dope, all the better.
After our father’s death, Sarah went back to rehab, only to be promptly kicked out for violating the no-sexual-contact rule. She moved into a sober-living house in the same small town and committed to staying there for at least thirty days while attending meetings regularly. It is advised (although not explicitly written in any of the AA or NA literature) that people who are not already in a relationship refrain from dating and sex for the first year of sobriety. Sex and alcohol were inextricably linked for me, so I chose to stay single for two years after my first AA meeting. It forced me to focus on the blood and guts of my dysfunction, without any distractions. In the end, my hiatus didn’t stop me from dating assholes.
Sarah met Cory and then Mike and then Don and then Ryan, who was Cory’s best friend. She met Ryan at an AA meeting. He was on probation for drug-related charges. Within six months he would be in prison for failing a drug test and violating his parole. He wouldn’t get out for a year. Sarah left her sober-living house and moved into his family’s home. He and Sarah stayed together. They fought. They got engaged. She cheated on him; he broke up with her. They wrote long letters to each other. They got back together. She bought her own engagement ring and drove his giant black truck to her job delivering pizzas for Papa John’s.
Sarah was sober, Sarah was slipping, Sarah met Jack and stopped writing to Ryan, except sometimes. A sometimes-sober Sarah dated both Jack and Ryan, floating between the two depending on whom she was fighting with or loving too hard. She fell off the wagon and took some pills, then got back on and started spending time with her new sponsor. Sarah introduced oxy to Jack, who liked to drink, and they drove around in his big truck drinking beer, sometimes getting high. Ryan came back from prison, and Jack became the side piece who occasionally was the main piece, depending on the day of the week. She would steal from these boys: money, credit cards, a shotgun once. They always forgave her. The stolen items were rarely returned.
Sarah and I fought over text about Ryan, Jack, and oxy. We sent misspelled, angrily typed messages criticizing each other’s life choices. She drove to Humboldt to visit and would spend the entire time with her friends or on the phone with one of the boys who loved her.
I remember standing over Sarah one day while she was on Facebook, about a year before her death, and seeing a photo on her timeline. “Who the fuck is that?” I said, pointing at a man in the picture who had 14/88 tattooed on his forearm. I knew the hate those numbers represented. “And why the fuck are you friends with him?” They had met in recovery, she explained, and she felt sorry for him because his appearance alienated him from most people. They had become so close, they referred to each other as brother and sister.
“He looks like a Nazi. Why would you hang out with someone who is a white supremacist?” I asked her angrily. She tried telling me that he had only gotten the tattoo because he joined a white power group while in prison, for protection. We got into an argument. She told me I needed to believe that people could change, that, being in AA, I should practice forgiveness and understanding and that I was being judgmental. I told her she was an idiot and naive. We didn’t talk about him again.
I cried into my One Line a Day journal. For a whole year, every entry is about either how much I am worried about Sarah—fragmented, messy sentences that read “Wtf, Sarah” or “I am afraid one day she won’t call anymore”—or complaining about my weight. I watched her life on Facebook, her long blond hair windswept as she took pictures while driving, a can of sugar-free Red Bull in her hand. She was beautiful, and I was tired.
Swimming with her friend Noelle
Sarah lied about being sober and then told the truth and then got sober again. She moved back to Salmon Creek, the area where our stepmom lived, to work and get away from bad habits. She moved into a tiny cabin with her childhood best friend, Tess, and they worked outdoors in the heat and swam in the river in the afternoons. Sarah called her sponsor, Lynn, every day and worked hard to save up for a trip to Thailand she wanted to take.
But the boys, the boys, the boys remained. Sometimes not Jack or Ryan but mostly them. She couldn’t quit for any significant period of time. The heroin yes, but the boys no. Or maybe they were connected. The drugs and the boys always came back together. There was no way to separate them. I begged her to go to therapy to talk about the boys, the drugs, anything. She looked at me and said, “I can’t go to therapy, they will want me to talk about Dad.” And I realized then that the grief of losing our father, long before he was ever dead, had so wounded my sister that she didn’t know where to begin.