Into the Go Slow

by Bridgett M. Davis

  After Ella’s overdose, their mother tried to get her into rehab but she refused, claiming, “That was the first time I ever tried shooting up and I had a bad reaction, that’s all. Trust me, I’m done with that.”

  Their mother sighed so hard her shoulders trembled. “I hope so. God do hear me say, I hope so.”

  Right away, things started to go missing from the house, a slow drip of thefts at first. Where was their mother’s fourteen-carat chain with the pot of gold hanging from it? The silver dollars she had in a jar? The nice boom box she kept in the laundry room? Soon enough, bigger things disappeared along with Ella’s excess pounds: Angie’s clarinet, Denise’s babysitting money, their mother’s diamond-encrusted watch. In the course of a few weeks, Ella’s weight dropped so dramatically, her plus-size clothes started hanging on her. One night, saying she was about to meet Nigel for a date, she begged their mother to let her borrow the soft, blue leather coat. “Mine is swallowing me and I want to look nice tonight. We might get back together. Mama, please?” Their mother finally conceded; Angie hoped Ella and Nigel would get back together, believed he’d be her big sister’s protector. Ella returned home two days later without the coat, claiming she’d left it at a friend’s house. She didn’t mention Nigel.

  It broke Angie’s heart to see her mother give Ella money then vow not to, then do it again in hopes of keeping her oldest daughter off the streets, free from men who might mistreat her. Vicious, sad cycle. Angie blamed Nigel for the men who came in his wake. She hated every last one of them, men who leaned to one side as they strutted with fingers grazing their palms, men who chewed on toothpicks, men who kept a cigarette behind one ear. She especially loathed a feral-looking junkie named George. Clearly Ella’s life was in more peril with that awful man, who left her in places that her mother would frantically rush to get her out of. Once Ella spent a few days in jail on a shoplifting charge, left hanging by George when he ran off. Angie took her a few toiletries. In the bag were activator spray and moisturizer for her Jheri curl—which had once given Ella lovely “wash and wear” hair, turning her coarse, tightly coiled locks into glossy, loose ringlets—and a tube of Neet depilatory for her chin hairs. But the prison guards wouldn’t allow Ella to have the toiletries and when she appeared in court three days later, her hair was dried out and dirty with old, crusted activator. She’d apparently borrowed someone’s disposable shaver and shaved the unwanted hairs from her face; she now had a five o’ clock shadow covering her chin. Angie couldn’t decide which was worse—Ella’s damaged hair or her stubbly face.

  A year passed. And then another, and soon Angie’s entire high school experience was colored by having a drug-addict sister. A missed class trip to Chicago because of that shoplifting arrest was but one example. Her mother always wanted her home after school “just in case,” so she had no real social life. In a sense, she too felt addicted, as she lived like a junkie to potential tragedy—panicked by the possibility of bad news every time the phone rang, stomach knotted when it fell silent for too many days.

  Middle of the night, harsh knocks at the door. Her mother goes to see who it is, peeping through the tiny window on the front door.

  “I’m looking for Ella,” says the man, head covered in a knit cap.

  “She’s not here.” Angie and Ella stand beside their mother.

  “Yeah? Well, she got something of mine, so tell her I’m looking for her ass.” Their mother watches through the peephole as he struts back to his car.

  “Who in the hell was that!” she yells at Ella.

  Ella coughs. “Just some dude.”

  “Some dude? Some dude? You mean a drug dealer? You let a drug dealer know where we live!”

  “Mama, I told you it’s just some dude I was dating. Relax.” Ella climbs back up the stairs to her room.

  After that, their mother started sleeping with a pink-handled pistol under her pillow—Samson had given it to her half as a joke—convinced Ella’s dealer was going to seek revenge and “the whole family could get wiped out on a humble,” as Nanette put it.

  When Denise heard about the incident, she demanded that their mother put Ella out of the house. “Mama, she’s not herself,” Denise reasoned through the phone. “She’s a damn junkie! She could get you all killed, and then what? It’s not safe to have her around.”

  “I don’t want to put out my own daughter,” said their mother, hopeless. “At least I can keep an eye on her if she’s here. That’s my way of thinking about it, anyway.”

  But Denise was relentless, calling from Atlanta daily, pressing their mother to do it. Finally, after her mink cape came up missing, their mother relented. She kicked out her firstborn.

  With Ella out of sight, Angie imagined all sorts of horrific scenarios. Where was she living? And without the steady supply of money from their mother, what was she doing for cash? The possibilities terrified Angie, who couldn’t accept that Ella was an addict. She kept waiting for this impostor, this intruder to leave and for her real sister to return.

  “I don’t understand what happened to her,” she confided in her mother one day.

  “She’s greedy,” said her mother. “She’s always been greedy. Whatever it is, she can’t get enough, and that’s the worst thing you can say about somebody doing dope.”

  If Ella came by—claiming she wanted to see Angie but really to ask for money—Angie would let her in only if their mother wasn’t home. “If she’ll steal from her own Mama, you know she’ll steal from you,” warned Nanette. “Don’t. Let. Her. In.”

  She found herself giving Ella her own money from the part-time job she had at Olga’s, a restaurant at the mall. Ella always promised she’d pay it back soon. And she always took something on her way out, something small that Angie couldn’t see, shoved into a giant, fake-leather purse—nothing like the buttery soft ones Ella and Nigel used to shoplift. Still, every time she let her in.

  Middle of the night. Telephone’s frightening trill. Their mother’s friend calling to say that someone who knows someone saw Ella go inside a certain house, a known drug den, just minutes before. Angie watched as her mother got up, dressed, slipped her pink-handled pistol into her pocket, and left. Terrified both for her mother and her sister, she sat in the living room, peering out the window, chanting and waiting. An hour later, her mother came back, wordless as she put her gun on the bedroom dresser.

  “What happened?” asked Angie.

  “She wouldn’t come,” said her mother. “I tried to pull her out of there and she wouldn’t come.” Nanette crawled into bed, fully dressed. “I’m done,” she said, staring at the wall. “I can’t do this anymore.”

  In the last, horrible year of her addiction, Ella completely stayed away from her family. In that time their mother never called her name. Until one day, Ella showed up and banged on the side door. Angie pulled back the lace curtain, eyed her through the door’s window. A car idled in the driveway, a strange man at the wheel, chewing on a toothpick. Angie imagined all her sister’s possessions piled on the backseat in a large, black garbage bag.

  She bent down, talked to Ella through the milk chute. “I can’t risk it,” she said.

  “But I’ve got to pee,” said Ella.

  “I can’t.”

  “Please, please,” begged Ella. She reached into the milk chute and gripped Angie’s neck, wouldn’t let go. “Please, Princess. Open up.”

  Her fingers felt cold to the touch, dead. Angie let her in. She relished seeing Ella, and was repulsed by her. She wore polyester stretch pants that sagged, her hair was matted and her hands were so swollen they looked like flesh-colored boxing gloves. Her sweater had cigarette burns. Ella tried to be casual as they stood together in the small kitchen. “So how’s it going, Princess?” Words slurred.

  “OK.” Angie studied the sweat beads gathering at her sister’s hairline.

  “Where’s Mama?” Nose scratch.
r />   “She’s not here and you better not be here when she gets back.”

  “Yeah, OK.” Arm scratch. “Listen. I need to borrow a little piece of change.”

  “No.” Angie had decided she wasn’t doing that anymore. “You need to get some help.”

  “I am, I am.” Another nose scratch. Loud sniff. Sweat dripping like liquid sideburns. Ella took off her glasses, wiped her hand down her face. “I just need a little something to tide me over. For food.”

  “Eat here.”

  Ella laughed, a jagged sound. “Nah, I got a taste for Red Barn. You know how I love their chicken.”

  The car horn beeped. Ella moved from foot to foot. “Come on, my man’s waiting outside.”

  “Your man?”

  “Yeah, George. He’d come in but we’re in a hurry.”

  “To get to Red Barn?”

  “Look, let me have twenty dollars till Friday, OK?”

  “No.” She would hold firm.

  “Come on.”

  “No!”

  Ella sighed, sat down in a kitchen chair, and pulled out of her raggedy purse a bottle of Robitussin Maximum Strength Cough Suppressant. She took a long, hard swig. Angie watched Ella gulping down the cherry-flavored gunk, bottle turned up, head thrown back. She got a good look at her sister that day, the dingy sight of a ravished young woman, and her heart hardened. Such a waste, she thought.

  Ella wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, stood, and pushed past her sister, down the narrow hallway to Angie’s room. “I know you got it. You always keep money,” she said.

  Angie followed close behind. “What are you doing?”

  Ella’s eyes darted around the room. “Where is it?”

  “You’re just gonna come in here and steal my money? It’s like that?”

  “I told you I’d pay it back.” Ella went to the top drawer of Angie’s bureau and pulled it out, so aggressively that it fell to the floor with a thud, Angie’s underwear tumbling out.

  “Hey!” yelled Angie. “What’s wrong with you?”

  Ella looked at the drawer lying at her feet. “Just give me some money, OK?” The car horn blew again, long and hard.

  “Tell him to stop fucking doing that!” yelled Angie.

  “You tell him,” said Ella.

  “I will!” Angie stormed out of her room, striding toward the side door, ready to curse out this asshole that dared to lay on his horn in her driveway. But she stopped suddenly, realizing what she’d done and turned back to her bedroom, arriving in the doorway just in time to see Ella with Angie’s ceramic pink piggy bank over her head.

  “Don’t!” she yelled just as Ella hurled it to the floor. The piggy bank smashed open, revealing gold dollar coins. Ella dropped to her knees and began grabbing them.

  Angie ran over and gripped Ella’s wrist. She pushed Angie hard. “Move, you little spoiled bitch!”

  Angie fell back against the bed. She sat frozen, watching her sister gather one dollar coin after the other, and toss them into her giant, cheap purse, those puffed-up hands working fast. The aunties had given Angie that piggy bank, filled with gold dollar coins, when she was five, had sent five more every year since. When Ella had gathered all the money, purse sagging from the weight, she stood, eyes avoiding Angie’s.

  “I’ll pay you back,” she said, and rushed past her baby sister, moving toward the steadily blaring car horn.

  Angie picked up the broken pink pieces, eyes stinging, vowing to never again give in to her sister’s pleas. After that, she braced herself for another confrontation at the side door, but Ella never came back.

  She hit rock bottom on a breezy May afternoon in 1982, when Angie and her mother were on their way to Denise’s college graduation in Atlanta. As they were about to leave for the airport, a man called the house. “I found your name in Ella’s wallet, under emergency contact. I think you need to come get her. She’s at 9278 Van Dyke.” Click. Angie and her mother rushed over to a harsh flat in a rundown building hidden behind a freeway on a dead-end street, tall weeds growing in the front yard. They found Ella splayed across a naked mattress, unmoving, eyes half-opened. Angie called for an ambulance, which rushed her to the hospital. They missed their flight to Atlanta.

  The doctors weren’t sure she’d make it through the night. Angie and her mother kept a vigil. When she opened her eyes, Nanette cried from relief. Then she stood over Ella, placed her hand on hers and said, “I love you, I do. But I’m tired. And I got other daughters who need me. Whatever you want to do, I can’t stop you. But I can make sure you don’t take this family down with you.”

  She turned to Angie, eyes pleading.

  “I’ll stay,” said Angie.

  Her mother nodded, walked out, headed straight to the airport. But she didn’t get there in time. She missed Denise’s name as it was called, wasn’t there when her middle child walked across the stage, something Denise would remind them of for years to come.

  Left in the room, Angie sat in silence as Ella cried quietly. “I’m tired too,” she said, wiping the tears away with the back of her hand. “You don’t know how tired.”

  Only then did Angie notice that Ella’s ring finger on her left hand was missing. She couldn’t hide her horror. “What happened to your finger?”

  Ella didn’t look at Angie. “Gangrene.”

  She’d seen the track marks all over Ella’s puffed-up hands, knew she’d been desperate for a vein that hadn’t collapsed. But this was different. It hit her that the drugs could decimate Ella, that she could start losing body parts, one by one, snatched from her by the flesh-eating monkey on her back.

  “I can’t bear the way you’re looking at me,” said Ella. “You think I’m disgusting.”

  “I just don’t want you to die.”

  Ella turned her face into the pillow. “I wish I’d died last night.”

  Ella’s heart monitor beeped in her ears as Angie’s eyes welled up. She hated herself for the thought that popped into her mind. Then we’d be free.

  “Get some rest.” What else could she say? “I’ll be here tomorrow to take you home.”

  But Ella didn’t leave the hospital. She signed herself into Herman Kiefer’s drug abuse clinic, as an inpatient.

  SEVEN

  Angie now felt wiped out in a way she never had—exhausted but anxious, like she’d just awakened from a ragged sleep on a crowded train, fearful of missing her stop. She lay across her bed, in the throes of post-high letdown. She wondered was this how Ella felt every day of her recovery?

  Back then, with Denise away in Atlanta, and her mother working long hours at Dr. B.’s office, Angie had been the one who sat with Ella every day of her inpatient stay—during those long, wretched weeks of withdrawal. Ella always said, “It’s not as bad as I look,” and they’d both smile but Angie could barely deal with the dark crescents under Ella’s eyes and the chain-smoking and the shaking hands.

  She came home from six weeks in rehab just as Angie entered twelfth grade. She was fat again, having lived off vending-machine snacks and bad food in the dining hall. At the house, their mother stood guard: timed how long Ella stayed in the bathroom, counted the spoons in their silverware drawer, forbade her from staying in the attic bedroom, made her sleep on the den sofa in full view. Angie was grateful for her senior-year schedule, out of school each day by noon, and opting not to work. From that September until Ella left in June, the two were together daily. For Angie it was a poignant, sweet time. Here was this dear person who’d been lost to her for so long, now returned. Yes Ella was different, a familiar stranger really, not unlike coming face-to-face with a distant pen pal. But it was also like falling in love again.

  During those nine months Angie was Ella’s willing chauffeur, taking her sister to various mandatory appointments. Ella had never learned to drive. (“I can drive a horse but not a damn car,” she’d joke)
, so every day Angie took her first to get a dose of methadone then to her daily counseling sessions at Herman Kiefer. Wednesdays were family day and so their mother joined them. Those sessions revealed little: her mother saying “I did my best,” and Ella agreeing too quickly; and when their mother did venture to ask what she’d done wrong, Ella said, “Nothing. It’s not you. It’s me, something I did for no good reason.” And her mother’s response, “You didn’t have it to do.”

  Angie waited in the lounge during the individual and group sessions. Those were hard for Ella, she could tell, even though her sister never talked about it afterward. But she’d smoke nonstop all the way home, the butts of her Salem Lights tumbling from the car’s ashtray. The weekly Narcotics Anonymous meetings were better. Angie often sat in the back of the room and listened, oddly jealous as the group members shared searing personal tidbits amid halos of smoke, some sipping fruit-flavored Hi-C and others strong coffee from their Styrofoam cups. They had a forged intimacy not unlike a fraternity of hazed members, or refugees, all the more potent for having suffered. Angie had never belonged to any group—no sororities or sports teams or after-school clubs—and she envied their common bond.

  Often at the end of the day, as she and Angie hung out together in the den, Ella spoke of her dreams. She planned to go back to college, get a master’s degree in social work. Then she wanted to start her own drug-rehab center, a place where patients practiced Buddhist chants and meditation and acupuncture, a place where reading rooms were filled with classic American literature and books from the movement and spiritual self-help guides. She’d encourage every patient to keep a journal, to share their thoughts on paper more, in talk therapy less.