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I wasn’t afraid of her anymore.
I was no longer afraid of anything.
I took a long hot shower, God, the bliss, the ecstasy of a shower and soap!
God, the bliss of merely standing upright.
I dressed in my too short, too small jeans I’d outgrown last year, a faded, holey tee-shirt, and filched one of my mom’s jackets.
Then I ate every can of beans in the pantry, all three. Then I turned to the half-soured contents of the fridge.
When there was nothing left to eat, I sat at the kitchen table, folded my small hands and waited.
He came first.
The man that was supposed to pay her. He didn’t bring money. She sold me for drugs.
I killed him, too, and took them.
She came shortly after.
Saw the open cage, the dead men in the living room.
My memories of that night are crystal clear.
It was three days to Christmas, the telly was showing an old black and white version of It’s a Wonderful Life. The volume was low, the strains of “Buffalo Girls” faint but unmistakable as George Bailey flirted with Mary Hatch beneath a starry sky in a world where people lassoed the moon for each other.
She saw me sitting motionless at the table and stood in the doorway a long moment.
She didn’t try to run.
Eventually she joined me at the stained, peeling yellow Formica table trimmed with aluminum, sitting across from me in an orange melamine chair, and we looked at each other for a very long time, neither of us saying a word.
Sometimes there’s nothing to say.
Only things to do.
I removed the Baggie from my pocket.
She gave me her lighter and spoon.
I learned almost everything I know about life from TV. I watched things kids shouldn’t see.
Taking subtle cues from her eyes, a shake of her head, a nod, with eight-year-old fingers and an ancient heart I cooked my mother’s last fix and gave her the needle.
Watched her tourniquet her arm and tap the vein. Saw the tracks, the gauntness of her limbs, the flaccid skin, the emptiness in her eyes.
She cried then.
Not ugly, just eyes welling with tears. The emptiness went away for the briefest of moments.
She knew.
She knew whatever was in that needle would be her last.
If I’d understood more about heroin and fentanyl, I’d have made sure there was enough heroin in the needle to make the dying beautiful, but those sons of bitches must have brought pure fentanyl.
She closed her eyes a long moment, then opened them and poised the needle above her vein.
