Shards

by Allison Moore

  I went back to my apartment after the abortion, wanting to die. They had given me minimal sedation, and I was in real physical pain. Far worse than that was my emotional pain. I was furious at myself, furious at Keawe, disappointed with my life. It’s almost impossible to describe how much I loathed everything about myself at that moment. Especially the part of me that shut people out to the point that I found myself totally alone when I most needed support. I felt I was having some sort of moral breakdown or betraying my personal code.

  I took some painkillers to alleviate the cramping and lay on the couch to watch TV. I was bleeding a lot and could barely stagger to the bathroom when I had to go.

  I didn’t answer any of Keawe’s calls, but I listened to the messages he left. When he showed up that night, I didn’t get up to answer the door. He had his own key. I turned my face to the back of the couch when I heard it in the lock.

  “How are you feeling, babe?” he asked. When I gave no response, he sat next to me and rubbed my back. I started to shake him off, but the sad truth is, he was the only person who knew what I had just gone through. My only possible ally, though a completely flawed one in so many ways. I needed whatever love and comfort I could drum up. I couldn’t risk being angry at him. That would leave me with no one, no one at all.

  “I thought you might be hungry,” Keawe said. “I stopped at L&L’s and got some loco moco.”

  I didn’t answer, and he just sat there. “I feel really terrible,” he said. “Do you want me to stay with you?”

  Yes, I wanted to say, but of course my answer had to be no. He couldn’t stay. I wonder now if I had asked more of him, what would have happened. I wanted to ask more; wanted to say, Yes, stay with me. Let your wife find out and just deal with it. But I had learned at an early age not to ask very much of men. I had learned that from my father. Keawe would be sweet to me that night, but then it would be back to business as usual.

  The people at the clinic had told me to rest for a couple of days, but I went back to work early the next morning. The painkillers masked my physical discomfort, but I had all these feelings that I didn’t want to feel, and there was nothing to mask them.

  For once, being a workaholic didn’t help. I began to work so much that they wouldn’t let me work anymore. If you work six days in a row they insist you take a seventh day off. I got around that rule for a couple of weeks, until my sergeant figured out what was going on and made me take a day off. That day at home was torture to me. I had stripped my life down to the bare essentials of police work and an affair with a married man, and in their absence, I didn’t know what to do with myself.

  I sank lower.

  The next day I felt so depressed I could barely get out of bed. For the first time in my police career, I didn’t want to go to work.

  But I had to. To cope, I filled a thermos with orange juice and vodka and took it with me to the station. I wasn’t even a big drinker. I have no idea where I got that idea, but as soon as I sat down at my desk, I knew I was in real trouble. I went into the bathroom and emptied the thermos into the toilet, then stayed in the stall, crying quietly.

  I was screaming for help. That desperate action woke me up, but only temporarily.

  For a couple of days after that, I bounced back, but then very suddenly Keawe’s shifts and mine changed. We no longer had parallel shifts—now he was working nights while I stayed on the day shift. If I wanted to see him, it would have to be at night, when I was supposed to be asleep.

  Night shifts were always slow. He didn’t have much to do—usually patrol nights on Maui, you had a couple of hours where it’s pretty mellow. Keawe always had rookies working for him, and rookies are really proactive. They would either take Keawe’s cases or he would go to his case for twenty minutes and come back to the substation and see me. We were usually together three or four hours in a night.

  My new schedule worked like this: I would work in Lahaina from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., complete two or three hours of paperwork, and go home. After about two hours of sleep, I would get up at midnight and go see Keawe in Kahului. It was an insane schedule, and if my mother had been there, or anyone in my family, they would have told me so. But I was still young and stupid enough to think I was strong enough to do anything.

  I was running myself into the ground, running from my feelings. On some level, I knew that Keawe was using me, and I loathed myself for staying with him. But I needed him in the unhealthiest of ways.

  I have spent no small amount of time thinking about how everything could have turned out differently if I had sought help at this time. The department had a psychiatrist, but there are old-school stereotypes about talking to a shrink. The fear is they’re going to pull you off the job, and nobody wants that. I saw it happen with one of my friends, Manu. He had gotten into a shooting in Kahalui while he was on the job and ended up killing his neighbor. Afterward, he suffered from severe PTSD and they pulled him off the road for a year. It was like a punishment; he was embarrassed by it.

  It was an unspoken rule in most departments that you don’t just go and talk about your problems. Instead, you fix them by going out drinking with your buddies. I was drowning in my depression, exhausted from lack of sleep, but I didn’t ask for help. I had spent my whole life keeping my own secrets, believing that if I didn’t tell anyone my story, it couldn’t possibly be happening to me.

  I also thought a lot about killing myself. Almost daily I imagined how I would do it, mostly quick and easy, with my firearm.

  But then another solution presented itself. A couple of weeks after the abortion, I was working with Bergen, one of my beat partners in Lahaina. Everybody knew I was the narcotics girl—that was my niche, that was my thing—and Bergen had a case where a mom in Lahaina had found a packet of ice in her son’s room. She didn’t want to prosecute, and we couldn’t make her, but she wanted to turn the ice over to the cops. Bergen was a great guy but a bit lazy. He couldn’t be bothered with it, so he came back to the station and threw me the packet of ice, saying, “You can make this case if you want.” He assumed I would file a report because I always did, but this time I didn’t.

  I put that packet of ice in my pocket and carried it around with me all week. I was never one of those cops who thought they were above the law, but I did recognize the power I had. No one searched a cop. No one questioned a cop. Except for our random drug tests, we were immune. I could carry a packet of ice around with me and no one would ever know.

  I decided to risk even more.

  I waited until my day off, Saturday.

  With all the blinds in my apartment closed, I closed my bedroom door and decided I would try the smallest little line. Just to see how it felt.

  I didn’t even know how to do it. I knew everything about narcotics except how to actually use. I laid out a small amount, about half the length of a paper clip and very skinny. You’re supposed to smoke ice, but I bent over and snorted it.

  “Damn!” I yelled. The ice burned my nostrils, and my eyes began to water. I could feel the crystals go up my nose and what felt like into my brain. It felt like the insides of my nostrils were getting ripped out. I grabbed my nose instinctively, as if to stop the drug from entering my brain.

  What had I done? I was terrified. So much for my badass behavior. I started to laugh.

  But then the pain subsided and the feeling, the feeling of meth, the best feeling in the world, began to set in. I could taste the meth running down the back of my throat, a taste similar to that of metal. Bitter, strong, almost sour, but not quite. My jaw muscles clenched. My eyes were still watering, and I felt each tear run down my cheek, but the tears had changed. The release of the water from my eyes was the best sensation of crying I had ever felt.

  A wave of enlightenment came over me, a feeling that all was right with the world. A caffeine rush without the jitters; drunkenness without losing control; your first love without the heartbreak. Suddenly I could feel the hairs growing on top of my head. I didn’t have five sense
s, I had thirty! My thoughts began racing:

  What do I want to do first? work? clean? go running? wash my car? go to the beach?!!!! there are so many possibilities!!!!! I can bake something for Keawe, do laundry? no, no, no, I can do anything I want to do, I have three days off, I can take an extra shift at work, no I can’t go to work high, should I go shopping no don’t leave the apartment, this is incredible, I should call my mom, my sister, Mimi, I should call Keawe, Dina, Slim, no don’t do that!!! clean, that is what I want to do!!!!!!!! I want to clean and organize my entire apartment, yeah, yeah, that is what I want to do!!!!!

  The pain in my nose was gone, replaced by a grandiosity. I was a much better version of myself. This was going to be great.

  8

  Keawe came over that night. I greeted him at the door and gave him a deep, lingering kiss. I hadn’t given him a kiss like that in weeks. Lately, he had been letting himself in to find me lying on the couch, silent and depressed.

  “Wow,” he said. “You’re feeling better.”

  “Better than ‘better,’ ” I said. “I feel amazing.” I couldn’t even remember how bad I had felt just a day before. It was as if the abortion, my anger, my feelings of confusion about Keawe—all of it was suddenly gone. And what replaced it was euphoria.

  “I’m relieved,” Keawe said. “I’ve been worried about you.”

  “I’m good,” I said. He had shown up with some take-out chicken katsu from L&L’s that he was going to cajole me into eating, but after I had finished cleaning my apartment I had made him his favorite corn chowder and pani popo, a Hawaiian coconut bread that he loved. Ignoring all the food, I led him straight into my bedroom, where we had sex for the first time since the abortion.

  Ice sex is great sex. You’re aroused times eight hundred, and if you feel that great, a lot of it transfers to your partner. Keawe had no idea what he was in for.

  “Jesus, Alli,” he said afterward. “That was worth the wait.”

  We ate after that—or he did, anyway. I had no appetite, and I didn’t touch the food on my plate. But it gave me pleasure like I had never experienced before to watch Keawe eat with relish the food I had cooked for him.

  He didn’t want to leave (why would he, after that?), but he was expected at home. Usually when Keawe left I started to feel despair creep over me, resentment and insecurity displacing my happiness, but not this time. Now, I put on some Bob Marley and continued to clean my apartment.

  “There’s no such thing as problems,” I said aloud.

  My apartment was immaculate already, but now that I was high I could see how wrong things were, how they must be reorganized. I cleaned my already clean apartment for almost three days. I rarely answered my phone because I didn’t have time, I had to clean. I cleaned the grout in white tiles individually with a toothbrush and bleach. I steam-cleaned my carpet. I washed all of my clothing. Color-coordinated my closets. Alphabetized my spices. Alphabetized everything! Painted my front door.

  Also, I didn’t eat for three days. Starvation felt good.

  When Monday morning came, I hadn’t slept a minute, but I wasn’t even tired. I went to work.

  Work was fantastic that day. I had a couple of traffic stops and then a domestic abuse case, which was unusual for the daytime. But the guy was all coked up and had this idea that he was going to use his girlfriend’s head as a crowbar.

  Later, I had a meeting with a CI about a buy we were trying to put together. The guy’s name was Oscar. He was a punk, a little junkie I had traffic-stopped while on patrol in Wailuku, but he was leading me toward something bigger, I felt. I had been trying to introduce him to Bryant, in vice, who could get at the big dealer more quickly, but most CIs got jittery when I brought someone new to meet them. Oscar trusted me, but that was it. He did not want to meet Bryant. He knew that when he did a buy, it might send up a red flag with the dealer, because if the dealer got popped two weeks down the road, he would remember the one guy they sold to who seemed a little nervous. He was probably going to think Oscar was a CI, and then he would be in big trouble. I spent a lot of time that afternoon coaching Oscar though his next buy, and when we were finished, he was ready to do it.

  I was everywhere in Lahaina that day, responding to every call, getting there first. My sergeant actually commented, “You clone yourself over the weekend, Moore?”

  I passed the L&L between calls and saw a bunch of cops in there, eating for free, pursued by all the badge-bunny waitresses. I felt nothing but contempt for them. Some of them didn’t even bother to put their duty belts on until the call came in. I was working doubly hard and loving it.

  After my shift, I followed up on paperwork until nine, catching up on what felt like weeks of work. Then, instead of going home to sleep for a couple of hours like I usually did, I went straight to the substation to hang out with Keawe. We joked and laughed and ate chicken katsu. Everything was absolutely perfect.

  I had told myself when I did that line that I would only try it once. I would never do it again. But when I started to come down, I couldn’t face being plunged into the icy cold water of my real life. I couldn’t bear to have those feelings return. I did another line, bigger than the first. It made me feel calm, confident, excited about my future. Meth was the answer to all my problems.

  Along with the euphoria, at that time I was still able to see ahead, to when I would not allow myself to do it again. The faces of meth burned my brain. My thoughts turned to all the meth-related cases at work, my plans for my future, the worries of a random drug test, the shame, the knowledge of having worked with addicts and seeing their behavior. But these logical thoughts were overcome by the effects of the narcotic. No clear-headed thought stood a chance against that one little line.

  The face of meth wouldn’t happen to me. I was smarter, better, stronger than everyone else. I was invincible.

  I bought a pipe and started to smoke the dope, like you’re supposed to. I told myself, okay, I’m only going to do this packet, this one packet of ice, and then I’m done.

  My time with Keawe was now just how I wanted it to be. We had great sex, some laughs, good hang-out time. Then I would go back to work, where I was supercop. I didn’t have to think about the abortion. Or his wife. Or my loneliness. Or anything at all.

  That bag of dope lasted me three months. When it was gone, I lay on the floor and cried. I didn’t know what to do without it. Ice was the only thing worth living for—I had felt that from the second it entered my body. I needed it to survive the world. Regardless of the fact that it had begun to kill me, ice was now my savior.

  9

  Now I was an addict, and like any addict I had to figure out a way to get more.

  If I had stopped to think about it at the time—if I had stopped to think about anything—I probably would have seen that I had always been an addict. Throughout my life, my addiction had never been a substance. I’m addicted to more. More work, more control, more exercise, more sex. I’m one of those people who has a bottomless bottom. Whatever it is, bring it on. I will go until I die.

  Becoming a cop wasn’t a wise decision for me. Addiction is so prevalent among cops because we’re trained to suppress whatever anger or emotion we have and stay calm. Where do those emotions go? They go into beating your wife, or they go into exercise, or they go into steroids, or workaholism or alcohol or drugs. Since I had entered recruit school exactly three years earlier, I had put everything into work.

  Now it was the drug.

  There was no way for me to get ice on Maui. Too many of the dealers knew me; I would be busted instantly. If I wanted to pick up, I would have to go to another island.

  I was familiar with Honolulu because I had done some training there in my rookie days. I knew where to find the prostitutes and crackheads, and they would lead me to dope.

  That Friday night, I took the 10:50 p.m. flight to Honolulu, rented a car, and drove to Hotel Street, where the prostitutes work. Most of the Chinatown prostitutes are beautiful, but I spott
ed one who looked like she really needed some work. I drove up next to her and opened my window.

  “Hey,” I called. “Want to get in?”

  She turned toward me. Thin as a rail with skin as wrinkled and leathery as a Florida grandmother’s, she was probably thirty-five but looked past fifty. A crackerjack, easy to spot.

  She didn’t hesitate before getting into my car. As soon as she was sitting in the passenger seat, she said, “What you got in mind?”

  She didn’t look at me while she spoke. She had a huge bag with her, almost like a homeless person’s bag.

  “Looking for ice,” I said.

  She nodded. “What you gonna pay?”

  “You use?”

  She nodded. “Rock.”

  “Fine.” We agreed that she would buy ice for me if I would buy her some crack. I gave her a hundred bucks and dropped her off near a gated doorway on River Street.

  “I’ll leave my bag,” she said, “so you know I’m coming back.” A cop car was parked directly in front of me. They were all over Hotel Street and Chinatown, but they’re mostly there to keep the peace and collect “taxes,” not to arrest anybody. I sat listening to Tool on my iPod while she went inside.

  She came out a few minutes later with my ice, and we drove to another location to get her crack. After that, I drove her back to Hotel Street.

  “Can I look for you again?” I asked her.

  “Almost always here,” she said. “If you don’t see me, ask for Angel. Everybody knows Angel.”

  After dropping Angel off, I drove to Waikiki Beach and parked at the Honolulu Zoo. No one was around, and I walked across the street to Queen’s Beach, sat on my jacket in the sand, and smoked ice. I smoked all night until it was time to drive to the airport.

  I caught the 5:50 a.m. flight back to Maui and was back home by 8 a.m. No one in Maui even knew I was gone.

  When I walked into work Monday morning, I saw Dina and another female officer, Erin, talking quietly. They stopped when I came up to them and turned bright, fake smiles on me. I could tell they had been talking about me. My meth paranoia was already kicking in, and I was sure they had somehow figured out what I had just done. Still, I tried to make light of the situation.