Page 65 of The Treasure House

Dr. Nock was the old-fashioned sort and walked me to my car as we left for the night. “Get yourself some food, Zoe. You’re looking sickly.” He gently slapped the car on the side as I drove off. As soon as I was out of the parking lot, I felt the shaking start. My teeth chattered.

My mom hadn’t died, I reassured myself. Not that time, or any of the times. She was still breathing. And if she had ever stopped breathing, it wouldn’t have been my fault. Not that time, and not even the last time, when I wanted with every fiber of my being to put her out of her misery.

I was thirteen that time and she’d been in her meth era. She’d been gone for a few days and clearly hadn’t been sleeping or eating. I didn’t ask her where she’d been or what she’d been doing. Meth made her compulsive—she was likely to have spent eight hours peeling off her nail polish or talking to a cashier at a gas station. Once she’d been picked up in a dime store for counting all the red things in the store, including every red jellybean she could see through the clear plastic of the packaging.

That day she came home after all those days away, when I didn’t know if she was alive or dead. Tina was tweaking by the time she returned, irritable and mean, like a toddler due for a nap. She had sores around her mouth because she kept chewing on her lips and she was paranoid and unable to sleep, even though she was clearly desperate for rest.

Tina paced the apartment as I tried to do my homework, muttering under her breath. I kept my gaze fixed on the tip of my pen as I pressed it too hard into my notebook.

Mom, don’t. The thought was so bright it seemed as though it must be written in the air in neon.

The feeling of waiting for a person to explode is a caged feeling, like you’re holding all the stress of it inside your rib cage and it’s moving, writhing, slithering, coiling up to strike, and your ribs are bars too fragile to hold it in. I’d take surreptitious looks to check where Tina was as she crisscrossed the floor.

There was a violence to her pacing and muttering.

What would I do if she came at me? I played the scenarios out in my head.

Tina never actually had come at me. Most of my life she’d gravitated toward drugs that didn’t turn her into an angry zombie: molly, which made her cloyingly affectionate, or oxy, which made her drowsy. Now and then she got her hands on coke or bennies. But this, the meth, was the worst—at least for me. When I was twelve and thirteen, she started alternating between ice and oxy, swinging between being a wretched, scratching, wakeful creature, and a slumped-over shell of a person. Meanwhile, I struggled to sleep, always listening for Tina coming home, and I found myself struggling to breathe at sudden moments, like someone had dropped me into the ocean and expected me to breathe seawater.

The day I almost killed her, I felt like my lungs were filled with fluid. There was no room for air. She paced, scratching, muttering and whispering and making vicious hissing noises, shuffling wall to wall, shushing and fretting and chewing at the air. I couldn’t breathe no matter how much I told myself the room was full of air, not water.

Mom, I couldn’t say. Mom, stop it. Please stop it.

She didn’t stop it. And then she started to cry, desperate, tired crying, like she couldn’t bear herself, like she wanted to stop pacing but couldn’t, wanted to stop muttering but couldn’t, wanted to rest but couldn’t.

Then she had her phone out and I knew what she was doing.

I hated it when dealers came to the apartment. I hated it when anyone came to the apartment. I went and hid in the bathroom until she’d scored, every nerve of my body listening for voices and waiting for the front door to close.

“Baby?” Tina’s voice was jittery, stuttering over the syllables. “Angel?”

She was talking to me. She was alone and holding a little twist of cling wrap, inside of which was an oily brown square of ice. Her hands were shaking and she couldn’t get the cling wrap off it.

“Angel, help Mommy.”

And that’s when I almost did it. I almost shoved that whole brown chunk in her mouth. She was too agitated to find a needle or a pipe, so I knew she was going to eat it. Partly because she was grinding her teeth in anticipation. And for one very possible moment, as my unsteady fingers peeled back the cling wrap, I was on the edge of killing her by feeding her the entire cube. I just wanted it to stop. The thought was so intrusive that my hand actually moved toward her mouth.

“No, baby. Baby, no. Mommy needs some for later.” She was so deep in the agony of withdrawal that she balked at the thought of ever feeling that way again. She carved off half to rewrap and handed it to me because she was shuddering by that point, her fingers spasming. As the ice disappeared into her sunken mouth, I had a vision of ramming the half I was holding in after it. Of holding her jaws shut and waiting for the full overdose to hit her system. All I could think, as that vision made my hand twitch, was that it would be over. No more waiting. No more listening. No more no more no more.

I was early to pick Flo up, which wasn’t a good thing when I was in this juddery, shivery state. My thoughts were flying and I had that live-wire feeling flicking about inside me. Agitated, I got out of the car, feeling the urge to pace, the way Tina had paced the apartment, crisscross, crisscross. The comparison made my skin crawl.

I headed for the swings and sat down.

It was full dark and the golden-orange streetlights around the parking lot were like fat fireflies. I could smell the ever-present ocean and hear the soft sigh and kiss of the water in Camden’s safe harbor. I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate on being here on the swing, in this moment.

“Hey.”

“Oh my God!” I flew off the swing like someone had yanked me on a string. My heart was in my mouth.

Jake. It was just Jake.

He was open-mouthed and wide-eyed, holding both hands up, palms out, as though I were holding him at gunpoint.

“Oh God,” I exclaimed, pressing my own hands to my galloping heart. “You scared the hell out of me.”

“Sorry.” His hands were still in the air. “I, uh, just saw you here and thought I’d say hi.”

“What the hell are you doing in a school playground in the middle of the night?”