Vicious Cycle

by Terri Blackstock

  “I know. Just chill.”

  “Is this where you spent your time before treatment?”

  “Some of it.”

  As she turned down a road next to a sleazy bar and drove through a neighborhood where men loitered on the corners, she realized just how right Lance was—this was a dangerous part of town. She’d never been clearheaded enough to worry about it before. Tension made her head ache as she slowed at the old rusted warehouse Belker had taken over after a factory closed down.

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s where she is,” she said. “My old stomping ground.”

  “Jordan uses crystal meth. I thought you never used that.”

  “No, but I got crack here. You can get almost anything. It’s a one-stop shop for junkies.”

  “That’s not funny,” he said.

  “Do I look like I’m laughing?” She started to get out. “Wait here. I’m going in.”

  “No way! I’m not letting you go in there by yourself. Are you crazy?”

  She groaned. “Lance, what kind of sister would I be if I dragged my little brother into a dope house?”

  “And what kind of brother would I be if I let my drug-addict sister go into one the day she gets out of rehab, without some kind of accountability? We’ve been through too much with you, Emily.”

  “Where did you even learn that word? Accountability.”

  “Family counseling, hello-o! I’m not an idiot.”

  She sighed and got out. “All right, come on. We’re in and we’re out, just that fast. Don’t talk to anybody. And don’t argue with me. Let me do the talking. I know how to handle these people.”

  She closed her car door and went to the door, knocked, and waited as someone peered out through the window. She recognized the bouncer. His name was Charles, and he usually packed a pistol. The threat of anyone turning into an informant could turn him deadly. He recognized her and opened the door.

  “Emily? Whassup, girl? Long time, no see.”

  “Yeah, I’ve been busy. Let me in,” she said. He moved back as they stepped over the threshold. “This is my brother.”

  He gave Lance a once-over. “You sure he’s cool?”

  “He’s fine. Would I bring anyone who’s not?”

  “New customer?” he asked Lance.

  Lance shrugged. “Yeah. Whatever.”

  The bouncer seemed satisfied. As Emily moved farther into the building, she smelled the meth cooking. It smelled like chemicals burning and would get all of them decades in jail if the police were to raid the place now. The state didn’t take meth labs lightly—not when they poisoned soil and drinking water and created fire hazards that put entire neighborhoods in danger.

  Lance coughed and tried to get a clear breath. She hoped he didn’t realize what was cooking. One unwise word from him could get them both killed.

  “We ain’t seen you since you murdered that chick,” Charles said.

  Emily’s eyes flashed. “I didn’t murder anybody.”

  “You were all over the news. What was it happened again?”

  There was no one in the front room, so Emily looked toward the dark hallway. “I was rescued and cleared.”

  “So where you been all this time? I thought you was in jail.”

  Giving him a travelogue of her last twelve months wouldn’t help. “Whatever. I’m out now. I’m just looking for somebody.”

  She glanced toward the makeshift kitchen. Through the doorway, she saw a table covered with syringes. A junkie sat there with a lighter’s flame under a spoon, melting a rock of crack. The sight brought back a vengeful craving. All those months of sobriety hadn’t taken away that door in her soul that opened and closed so easily. The dragon was still alive, and this was his lair.

  Suddenly she was glad Lance was with her.

  “Who you looking for, Emily?”

  She glanced back at Charles. “Jordan Rhodes. She still here?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  “I need to find her. She’s sick and she could die. She had a baby and lost a lot of blood. They had to give her a transfusion, and she was dehydrated … but she ran from the hospital.”

  Suspicion narrowed his eyes.

  “Seriously,” she said. “I need to find her. She might have it in her head to overdose on purpose. You don’t want to deal with a dead body, do you? Please, if she’s here, tell me where she is. I just want to help her.”

  “First you come with me.” He put his arm around her and walked her away from Lance. She knew where this would lead. He would give her a freebie, get her started again. And as they’d taught her in treatment, every time she relapsed it would be worse.

  Her mind groped for the Scripture she’d recited a thousand times in rehab. God is faithful; He will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, He will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it.

  She looked back over her shoulder at Lance. No surprise—he wasn’t waiting quietly by the door. He was following her. She shook Charles off. Lance was right. This kind of place opened a craving in her soul. For her own sake, she had to leave now.

  She felt a sheen of perspiration on her forehead. Her eyes burned, and her breathing was shallow. She grabbed Lance’s arm for strength.

  “Emily?” a girl’s voice said.

  She turned and saw Paige standing in a doorway. “Hey, girl!” Paige staggered over and hugged her. Paige smelled of body odor and oily hair. She looked awful. Her arms and legs were nothing more than thin skin stretched over bone, and the wrinkles in her dehydrated face made her seem thirty years older than she was. Her face was covered with what looked like acne, but it was probably sores from filling her bloodstream with toxic substances and then tweaking at her skin when hallucinations convinced her things were crawling on her. That was why they called meth addicts Tweakers.

  It was the common look of a meth addict.

  “You look great,” Paige rasped. “I’m so glad to see you back. We need to hang out. You still have my number, right?”

  “Maybe later,” Emily said weakly. “Just … show me where Jordan is.”

  “Back here,” Paige said, turning back down the hall. “She looks really bad.” Paige wobbled like a newborn colt, but in only a few steps they came to the room where Jordan was. Charles followed on their heels, his menacing presence reminding her that she was still in danger. Jordan lay passed out on a mattress on the floor, looking like death.

  “Jordan!” Emily knelt beside her and took her pulse. She had trouble finding it, it was so weak. “Lance,” she said quietly, “we’ve got to get her out of here. Her heartbeat is really faint. And her breathing’s shallow.”

  “Let’s call an ambulance.”

  “I don’t have a phone,” she whispered. “Where’s yours?”

  “Broken,” he said.

  “Nobody’s calling nobody,” Charles said. “You want to take her, go ahead. But we don’t need no flashing lights here.”

  Emily wished they’d planned this better. She tried to lift Jordan up, but she was limp. Lance got on the other side of her and put her arm around his neck. They got Jordan to her feet, but her head lolled forward. This wasn’t going to be easy.

  God, help us!

  “What are you doing?” Paige asked.

  “She’s going to die, Paige. Help us get her out of here.”

  Charles moved slowly aside, watching them suspiciously, and Paige led them back through the warehouse. But their commotion made too much noise. Just before they reached the door, Charles stepped back in front of them.

  “Emily, what are you gonna tell the police?”

  “Charles, let us out. I won’t tell anyone where I found her, but she’s really sick.”

  She heard the echoing clank of a metal door, and turned.

  “Well, well. If it ain’t the tragically beautiful Emily.” The infamous Belker, who ran his dope houses like a CEO, stood smiling at her.

  Emily shifted Jordan’s we
ight. “Belker, we’re taking her to the hospital, but we won’t tell them where we found her. I know you don’t want her to die here and have to deal with—”

  “Leave her alone.”

  Charles took his cue from Belker’s flat voice and drew his gun.

  Lance gasped and held out a hand. “Whoa! Don’t shoot. Please …” Sweat dripped down his temples.

  “Feel her pulse, Belker!” Emily said. “Listen, I could have told the police where to find her—they’re looking for her. Instead, I came myself.”

  Belker moved in front of her, stroking the soul patch of hair under his bottom lip. “Maybe you didn’t tell the police because you want to be able to come back,” he said, bending down close to her. He pulled some rocks of crack out of his pocket. “This is what you like, isn’t it? Or maybe some pills?”

  Emily felt the sheen of perspiration dampening her face. “I really don’t want it. Just let me out of here.”

  Belker kept his eyes on her, and for a moment she thought he could see into her soul, to the tangle of emotions smothering her. Finally, he dropped the rocks into Emily’s jacket pocket. “On the house,” he said. “Take her, but come back and see us. We’ve been missing you.”

  Lance’s eyes snapped at Emily over Jordan’s head. His cheeks blotched red, but he didn’t speak.

  “Lance, let’s get Jordan to the car.”

  Paige opened the warehouse door, and they walked Jordan to the car and laid her in the backseat. Belker and Charles watched from the door, but they didn’t stop them.

  Lance got into the front passenger seat and held out his hand. “Emily, give me that stuff.”

  “Chill,” she said, closing her door and starting the car. “I’ll flush them when I get home.”

  “No, you won’t. What are you doing?”

  “I’m getting out of here before they change their minds. And we’re in a hurry, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  As she turned the car around, he yelled, “Emily, you’re scaring me. If you don’t get rid of those rocks right now, I’m gonna go crazy.”

  She wiped the sweat from her eyes and drove as fast as she could out of Belker’s sight.

  “I can’t believe this,” Lance shouted. “Please tell me you’re not gonna drag us through this again.”

  “I’m not dragging anybody through anything. I’m just trying to save Jordan.”

  “Then first save yourself. Give me the rocks.”

  “Shut up, Lance,” she cried. “I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “This is a test, Emily. God is testing you. You’re about to flunk!”

  She drove, her hands trembling, intent on getting to the hospital to help Jordan. But as she did, those nuggets of crack in her pocket called to her. She could so easily melt them down and shoot them into her veins or put them in a pipe …

  She could even swallow them. It took longer for the high to kick in, but after a year of sobriety, that high would be amazing.

  But as she reached the highway, she heard the echo of one of her twelve-step sayings. Do the next right thing.

  The next right thing. What was that? Was it taking Jordan to the hospital or getting rid of the drugs?

  She looked at Lance. There were tears on his face. He was so disappointed. It was bad enough that she’d led him into a crack house, but it would be even worse if she used. This was why she had to stay away from places and people like that. Why she had to cut herself off completely from anything having to do with drugs. Anything that smelled like them or dragged up memories. She had to make a clean break.

  She pulled over to the curb. “Lance, get the rocks out of my pocket,” she said, staring through the windshield. “Throw them out, and make sure they go down a storm drain.”

  He let out a huge sigh, tugged her jacket toward him until he could reach into the pocket where Belker had dropped them. His hands shook as he pulled them out. Opening his car door, he slipped out and found a gutter, threw them in. When he got back in and closed the door, he blew out a deep breath. “Thank you. You had me going there.”

  She started to cry and slammed the steering wheel. “I’m stupid,” she said. “I’m weaker than I thought.”

  “No, you’re not,” he said. “You’re stronger.”

  She stepped on the accelerator and pulled back into traffic. “I wouldn’t have been strong without you.” The confession was hard to make, but there was no point in pretending.

  “Well, I was here,” he said.

  “You were my way of escape. God does provide it.” Her mouth was dry as cotton. “I’m sorry, Lance. I shouldn’t have gone there, even for Jordan. I should have told Mom and Kent.”

  “As long as you don’t do it again. It’s good that you know this early on.”

  “I’ll do better,” she promised. “But don’t worry Mom with this, okay?”

  He just stared out the window.

  Chapter 38

  While the three of them waited in the ER examining room, Jordan drifted in and out of consciousness, giving Emily hope that they weren’t too late. They had hooked her to an IV and done a tox screening, then started her on medications to fight the effects of the drugs. As soon as she could, Emily called her mother to tell her they’d found Jordan, careful to evade her questions about where they’d found her.

  The hospital readmitted Jordan, and two nurses rolled her on a gurney to the same room she’d been in before. Emily followed them, but Lance waited in the lobby, afraid that his appearance on the same floor as the baby could cause trouble. When the nurses had transferred Jordan from the gurney to the hospital bed, Emily wet a washcloth and washed her friend’s dirty, war-torn face. “We’re not giving up on you, Jordan. You can make it. God can help you start over. You should see what He did for me today.”

  Emily sat quietly in a chair she’d pulled close to the side of Jordan’s bed, wishing Lance had joined them to keep her company in the silence. She found the remote and flicked on the TV. She’d been unable to watch TV for the past year, except when she was home on passes or when she earned a half day off from her work at New Day. She had usually spent those half days off in the TV room watching a DVD or a favorite program that no one objected to. Freedom to choose when and what she watched now gave her a little thrill.

  She channel surfed until she found her old favorite music channel, then sat back to see the latest videos. The first video that came up was blatantly sexual and hit her like a handful of sand in the eyes. No, that wasn’t the image she wanted to trap in her brain. She switched to another channel. One of her old favorite singers, with black eyeliner caked around her eyes, sang a song that Emily knew was about cocaine. Even lingering there a moment caused those dreaded cravings to ache through her again.

  Distraught, she changed the channel again, this time to a decorating channel her mother used to watch. Was this how it was going to be? Would she have to guard against every image that flashed before her eyes? Every smell? Every sound? Would the slightest slip send her barreling down the slope of addiction?

  The words in Second Peter about a cleansed person relapsing into sin cracked like a whip through her brain. For if, after they have escaped the defilements of the world by the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and are overcome, the last state has become worse for them than the first.

  They’d been over and over this in treatment. Relapses always pulled you deeper, and the consequences were worse each time. Emily just couldn’t go there. She had to stay clean.

  A knock shook her out of her reverie, and her mother rushed through the door. “Emily, I saw Lance downstairs. Kent is taking him home.” Barbara went to the bed and leaned over Jordan. In a low voice, she said, “She looks awful. Where did you find her?”

  Emily hoped her mother couldn’t see the guilt on her face. “Just … in one of our old places.”

  Her mother’s eyes flashed. “You went there?”

  Emily swallowed and thought of telling her mom tha
t it was no big deal, that she hadn’t been exposed to anything, that she hadn’t exposed Lance. She could deny the cravings that had almost done her in.

  But secrets were her enemies. Things hidden in darkness had a way of attacking later.

  Her mother wasn’t going to like it. She drew in a deep breath. “Mom, I thought I could handle it. Paige called and told us she was there. Lance went with me.”

  “What?” Barbara whispered harshly. “Emily, do you know how irresponsible that was? I trusted you. The first day …” Her voice broke, and her eyes filled with bitter tears. “The very first day you’re out you go to a drug house and take your brother?”

  “I know,” Emily said. “Mom, you’re right. I shouldn’t have. It was stupid. But Paige said she’d taken too much, that she might have overdosed.”

  Barbara went to the vinyl couch under the window, sat slowly down. “What happened? Tell me every single thing.”

  “We found her, but I also found out that I’m weak.” She glanced at Jordan, trying not to wake her. “I saw the drugs. They even gave me some. My old dealer put them in my pocket.”

  Her mother covered her face, as if it would protect her from this blow. “What were you thinking?”

  “I thought I could do it.” Her face twisted. “But it’s okay. I gave the crack to Lance to — ”

  “You gave your brother crack?” Barbara said too loudly.

  “No! Let me finish. I had him take it out of my pocket to throw away. That’s so I didn’t even have to touch it. He tossed it in a gutter.”

  Barbara sprang back up and walked across the room, clutching her head. Then she turned back, lowering her voice. “Emily, how could you do something so stupid and dangerous?”

  “For Jordan! Yes, I could have sent the police, but if the people there found out I ratted them out, they might take revenge. I didn’t know what else to do. Jordan could have died, so I had to move fast to get her to the hospital.”

  Barbara stood beside the bed, looking down at the fifteen-year-old lying limp under the blanket.

  Emily looked at her mother across the bed. “Mom, she overdosed. I think it was intentional.”