Troubled Times

by Selena Kitt

  So, in the end, I’d agreed to let Sarah pick me up from the airport.

  I hadn’t known that living with her was going to be like living with a born-again Christian or a Jehovah’s Witness—if they were preaching rehab and the twelve steps instead of God.

  “Katie?” Sarah called again. “Are you okay?”

  “Fine!” It came out a lot harsher than I felt. Or maybe it didn’t, because really, I wanted to strangle Sarah, even though she was being so nice. Probably because she was being so nice. “I just… I want to take a bath.”

  It was two in the morning but that sounded like a promising idea. I wondered how hard it was to drown yourself. Thoughts like that came to me a lot now. I wondered how easy it was to slit your wrists, for example. Or overdose. That seemed the easiest, but I had a hard time with that one, because while I’d been contemplating it, I’d taken the very last of the Oxy just a few hours ago, and I had no idea where to get any more.

  “Do you need anything?” Sarah called through the door.

  In another life, in different circumstances, I probably would have liked Sarah. She was sweet, a little too saccharine for my taste, but she occasionally pulled off a one-liner or two that made me laugh out loud. Or maybe that was just my influence rubbing off on her. She was a stunning beauty—long, dark hair, dark eyes—and that made me wonder how she and Rob knew each other, but when I’d asked her that, Sarah started talking about rehab again, so I tuned out.

  “No thanks,” I called, feeling exasperated.

  She hadn’t left my side for two weeks, and I hadn’t seen anyone else. I’d been looking forward to seeing Sabrina when I got home, but then I looked in a mirror and decided against it. I didn’t want her suspecting anything—and I’d sworn Rob to secrecy, although after telling Tyler about Sabrina’s secret pregnancy, I knew how that might turn out—and so I’d made my excuses all week until she was due to fly out to California to be with Rob.

  To finally tell him she was pregnant, a fact I’d been privy to for over a month.

  I’d see her when she got back, I told myself. Then we could both commiserate together about our lost rock stars, and we’d be in the exact same boat again. I had no doubt, after what Tyler told me about Rob’s feelings about having kids, what the outcome of her visit was going to be, in spite of Rob’s claims he wanted to marry her. And Sabrina seemed to think so too, from the fears she’d expressed to me on the phone.

  What a fucking nightmare, I thought, staring at the pink roses on my bathroom tile wall. We both ended up with exactly what we thought we wanted. Sabrina got Rob, and I got Tyler. She also got pregnant, and I got a huge monkey on my back. And that, in the end, was what we were going to be left to deal with. I had a feeling her pregnancy and my addiction would be all that we had to hold onto, because Rob, Tyler and Trouble would be long gone.

  “Do you need me to get you some towels?” Sarah called. “You really need your sleep. We’re going grocery shopping tomorrow, remember? It will do you good to get out of the house.”

  Which, of course, implied that I hadn’t been out of the house since I got home. Which would be the truth. Not that I liked her pointing it out. In fact, I really did need a bath. I hadn’t taken a shower in three or four days, and I smelled pretty rank. I just couldn’t be bothered with much except Netflix, the remote, and taking my Oxy—secretly of course.

  “No, I’m fine!” I called, waving her away, even though she couldn’t see me. “I’m going to take a bath, wash some of this stank off. Then I’m going right back to bed.”

  “Okay, good!” Sarah sounded so hopeful it was painful to my ears.

  “Thanks for asking,” I called, tossing her a bone.

  “You’re welcome.” She sounded so pleased.

  My God, I was a monster.

  The plan was already forming in my head.

  I ran a tub full of water just to have something to do. I knew Sarah would wait up for me. Of course, she would. She slept on my couch, and I could hear the sound of the television in the living room. I waited a long time, a good half hour, maybe more. Then I drained the water and slowly opened the bathroom door. I held my breath, waiting for her to call out to me, but she didn’t. I went down the hall to my room, slipping on shoes, grabbing my purse, before tiptoeing through the living room toward the front door. Sarah was asleep, although I wasn’t sure how soundly.

  She stirred when I opened the front door but didn’t wake. I let out a breath as I shut the door behind me and hurried out to my car. The sound of it starting would probably wake her, but by the time she could follow me, I hoped to be gone.

  I was no rock star, and I didn’t have a drug dealer on speed dial, but I lived in a suburb of Detroit. You couldn’t swing a tire iron without knowing someone who knew someone who sold drugs. My brother had smoked weed like a Deadhead throughout high school and knew a guy they called the Genie. I was sure I still had his number.

  I dialed as I drove.

  “Hello?” The Genie answered.

  My whole body lit up at the word. I was saved.

  I told him what I wanted. My wish was his command, if the price was right, of course.

  I had just enough money in the bank.

  But that was fine. I wouldn’t need money anymore where I was going.

  I was going to get so high I’d never come down.

  I came to a couple times before I arrived at rehab. I dreamed I heard Sabrina’s voice, and Rob’s. They were far away and I was floating. Then someone picked me up and carried me. Later, I found out that it was, indeed, Rob who had lifted me off that dirty mattress in a drug house in downtown Detroit. They’d come looking for me, both Rob and Sabrina, who had cut her trip to California short because I wasn’t answering my phone and had probably saved me from killing myself with an overdose of heroin.

  I came to again on my own couch, Sarah’s troubled face above me, a cool hand on my brow. I’d left her there, I remembered, to sneak out of the house in the middle of the night like a runaway teenager. She didn’t scold me like my mother would have though. She just put a cool cloth on my head and told me to sleep. Which was good, because that was all I wanted to do.

  Somewhere on the car ride I came to again, this time for good. Or bad. My head was in Sarah’s lap in the back seat. Up front, Sabrina was driving, and Rob was sitting beside her. When they told me, I was going to rehab, that jolted me awake. I struggled to sit up and protest, although my throat was raw and felt like it was on fire. I’d been vomiting, I realized. I couldn’t remember how much the Genie had shot me up with, but it was a lot. Couple hundred dollars’ worth of heroin, and God knows what it had been cut with. I was used to the pure stuff, with Ty. My body had reacted violently.

  “But my car,” I croaked. “It’s still in the parking garage.”

  “Already taken care of,” Sabrina told me without taking her eyes off the road.

  “My apartment...”

  “Taken care of,” Rob replied, looking over his shoulder at me. “It’s all taken care of, Katie. We don’t want you to worry about anything else but getting better.”

  Getting better. What did he know about it? I didn’t want to get better. I wanted to get dead. There was nothing to live for anymore.

  “Tyler?” I managed to choke out his name.

  “He’s getting better too,” Sarah soothed, gathering me up, pulling me back down so I could rest my head in her lap again. “You’ll see him soon.”

  I knew that was a lie.

  The European leg of Trouble’s tour started in a few months and I wouldn’t be on it.

  Maybe by then, I’d be out of rehab, going to twelve-step meetings and living in my mother’s leaky basement, none of which appealed to me on any level.

  But Tyler was getting help. Tyler was out of the woods. Tyler would make it, would continue for years playing lead guitar for Trouble, hopefully until he was a creepy old dude like Mick Jagger, because people still loved him. He wouldn’t end up in rock and roll heaven with Jim
i Hendrix and Sid Vicious and Kurt Cobain, at least, not from a drug overdose.

  The important thing was Tyler.

  I didn’t care what happened to me.

  Even if the professionals hadn’t advised it, I would have still refused Tyler’s calls and returned his letters unopened. It was like tearing my own heart out every time, but I did it. I had to. What surprised me was that he called or wrote in the first place. Sabrina said Tyler had gone on a rampage after Rob put me on a plane. She got all her information from Rob, so it was second hand, but I guess he trashed the bus completely. They had to put him in restraints to get him into treatment. And he signed himself out AMA three times. The third time, they’d caught him in the airport buying a plane ticket to Michigan.

  Sabrina said Tyler had finally stayed in treatment when Rob told him I wouldn’t see or talk to him until he was clean. Really, truly clean. And I had to work on doing the same. That’s what everyone kept telling me, but I didn’t care about that. I just wanted to curl up and die.

  Detox was the worst week of my life. I ached all over. I couldn’t stop throwing up. I couldn’t eat because everything went straight through me. And I felt like I wanted to punch everyone. All the time. Mostly I just wanted to die. I actually begged them to just let me die. More running away, trying to escape. I didn’t want to be in my body, and I definitely didn’t want to have anything to do with life.

  They didn’t tell me about Tyler until after detox, until I was assigned a therapist and started going to group. Working the twelve steps, reading the big book. Apparently, those step-things applied to any addiction, not just alcohol. That wasn’t all we did, but it was part of it. The most important thing I learned was take what works and leave the rest. The whole higher power thing didn’t work for me—but hearing how other people were coping did. Sitting in a group of people who had struggled with addiction, who continued to struggle every day, like I did, with craving more, that was incredibly humbling.

  I didn’t exactly make friends, but I did have a connection with those who went through treatment with me. We were survivors, the walking wounded, learning how to live again. Maybe even learning how to live for the first time. So many things I’d never faced before, so many things I didn’t even realize I was running from.

  My mother came to see me and that feeling of wanting to punch someone—mostly her—returned with a vengeance. I’d meant to call her and tell her I was on tour with Trouble, but I just lost track of time. And then, I got addicted to heroin and didn’t want to talk to anyone. And then, I was in treatment, and the fourth step came around, and I had to deal with all my pent-up resentments. I had no idea I was so mad at her for her neglect. The way she’d neglected my father, me, my brother—she ran away from everything. And oh, the moment I realized, I was exactly like her.

  Then I wanted to punch myself in the face.

  So, when she came to see me, when she looked at me across the table and asked me why? How could I do this to her? What in the world would possess me to let myself get addicted to heroin, to go off gallivanting across the country in a rock star’s tour bus, risking life, limb, sanity and disease just for some celebrity affection and a temporary high? When she asked me all the questions I’d asked myself, I didn’t have an answer for her. For the first time in my life, I didn’t have an excuse, I didn’t try to mitigate or placate.

  For the first time, I was honest with her—and myself.

  I told her everything. From beginning to end. And it was the early stuff, strangely, that made the biggest difference. The fact that I hadn’t told her about my breakup with Alex, getting fired, going on tour with Trouble, those were symptoms. They weren’t the problem. They were just my solution. More hiding and running away.

  Being honest, telling the truth. Forgiving her and myself. Those were the things that were supposed to set me free. So, I opened my mouth and let the truth spill out instead of sarcasm. I told her all the things she didn’t want to hear.

  How I’d felt inferior to my brother from the day I was born—how she put him up on a pedestal and left me to wallow in the mud. Because I was a girl. Because I wasn’t her perfect, shining first-born son. Because I reminded her so much of her. Because, until my father left her, I was the one he loved most. And when he left, he took all the love with him.

  And that’s all I ever wanted. It was the hardest thing I’d ever had to say out loud, when I spoke those words to my mother, tears in my eyes, trying hard to blink them away. But I couldn’t hide them anymore.

  “All I ever wanted was for you to love me.”

  And I think maybe it was even harder for her to respond.

  “But Katie, I do. I do love you.”

  It didn’t make it all better. It was more like a Band-Aid covering a wound. It would scar. But it would heal, eventually.

  And then my brother came. And my father too, with his new wife, and the sister I’d never met. I told my group that if I’d known getting addicted to heroin would be all it took to get my father to come see me, I would have done it a long time ago. The truth was, when he was finally there in front of me, we didn’t have much to say. I had more in common with his new wife—and my little sister, Emma—than I did with the man who had fathered me.

  My mother had at least been willing to talk about it. My father just wanted to avoid. He talked about what a nice facility it was—the best Rob’s and Trouble’s money could buy—and how much I’d grown. Seriously. How much I’d grown. The man hadn’t seen me since I was twelve. What did he expect? He said several times how much I looked like my mother, which I could only assume wasn’t a compliment, given how much he disliked the woman.

  Thankfully, they didn’t visit at the same time. Even I wasn’t ready for that, recovery or no recovery. So, my father remained an asshole, my mother cried and wrung her hands, but she didn’t really change much either. And I had to let that go too. Because it wasn’t about changing them, it was about changing me. I had to love them and forgive them for being imperfect human beings, and not just my idealized version of parents.

  In the end, I faced it all. It was harder than I’d imagined, but I did recovery like I did everything else—I jumped in, started swimming, and hoped I wouldn’t drown. A few times I thought I might. When my father said his first marriage was the worst mistake he’d ever made. When my mother said I was the most ungrateful child she’d ever met. No exaggeration there. When my father’s new wife—Claire—asked me how old I was again? When my brother hugged me goodbye and told me he thought I could do anything I wanted to do, anything at all. With no caveats, no “if onlys”—just a hug and an assurance that he believed in me.

  I cried enough to drown myself in my own tears. I cried alone, I cried in group, I cried in therapy. I cried at dinner, sniffing through meals of grilled cheese and tomato soup. I cried on the phone to Sabrina. I cried when she came to see me, bringing Rob with her, the two of them so happy and shiny it hurt to look at them. She was still pregnant—and Rob was thrilled with the news. They were going forward with future plans, while I was stuck in limbo, trying to decide if I wanted to have any future at all.

  Mostly I missed Tyler. I craved him like a drug, even when all my physical cravings for actual drugs were gone. He was a far bigger addiction to kick than heroin. I shook at night in bed, remembering him sleeping beside me, the memory so painful it made my teeth chatter like my first few days in detox. My body and my heart were at war with my brain. Logic told me that everything my therapist said about us was true, but my heart disagreed. Vehemently. And my body’s argument was even more adamant. My body thought it was missing a vital working part. That part of me ached, like a phantom limb.

  I missed him. I wanted him. I needed him.

  My therapist fought my crazy with logic.

  “That’s not love, Katie, that’s codependence.”

  I stared across the desk at Mike, knowing he was right, but that didn’t make me want to throttle him any less. Pain wasn’t the only thing that had come b
ack after the numbness faded—rage had come with it. It was sometimes so overwhelming, I had to literally sit on my hands to keep from strangling someone.

  “But there was love there too,” I told him, feeling defiant. “I loved Ty, and I know he loved me. I know he did.”

  Mike didn’t say anything. He just sat there, looking at me over his big, black desk with his big, black face, the one I wanted to punch him in. Never mind he was three times my size and probably could have crushed my skull in the palm of his hand.

  “Say something!” I finally blurted. I said that a lot during our individual sessions. “I hate the way you just sit there waiting for me to say something. I mean, isn’t it your job to do the talking? Aren’t you supposed to be trying to fix me? What do they pay you for anyway?”

  More silence. He was an infuriating man.

  “Look, I know we were codependent,” I grudgingly admitted. We couldn’t have been more codependent if we’d been Siamese twins. “But that doesn’t mean we didn’t actually love each other… does it?”

  “I didn’t say that.” Mike sat back in his chair, crossing his enormous arms. “What I said was you couldn’t necessarily trust your feelings when you were high.”

  Bastard. With his damned logic. I hated how he was always right. It was a great trait in most doctors. If I was going to get a heart transplant, I’d want my doctor to always be right. But it was a really annoying trait in a psychiatrist. Why couldn’t he just give me some pills and shut the hell up?

  “You’ll have to see what happens now, Katie,” Mike said, not unkindly. “You’re clean, Tyler’s clean. Now that neither of you are using anymore, you’ll both have a lot of catching up to do.”

  Would we?

  I doubted it.