“I’m sorry,” Keawe said when I called him. “You must be feeling terrible. Can you come see me before you leave?”
“No, I have to leave right away,” I said. “This afternoon. I’ll call you when I get back.”
Erin was off that day and came over as soon as she heard the news. With a cake. A cake.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, hugging me. “Do you want me to come with you? I’ve got some time off coming. You shouldn’t make a trip like this on your own. Jesus! Your mother.”
“No,” I said. “I mean, thanks, but I’ll be okay. My family is really supportive.”
“Take care of yourself, okay? You look awful. Which is understandable.”
There was no reason for anyone at MPD to disbelieve me. No one knew a thing about my family—that’s how isolated and secretive my life had been. It was an easy, easy lie.
I took five days’ bereavement leave. Everyone thought I was in New Mexico, but I never left my apartment. For five days, I didn’t drive my car or open the blinds or leave to buy food. I ate Erin’s cake and some Ritz crackers and yogurt and whatever else I had in my cabinets, which wasn’t much.
I did nothing but sit there and smoke meth for the entire five days.
Best five days of my life.
13
My ability to lie is a skill I wish upon no one. I am a chameleon in the worst way: I can slither and adapt to suit the needs of anyone I want something from. This is what made me a good cop. I was able to appeal to anyone I came in contact with—my superiors, my CIs, my worst criminal offenders—and build a rapport with them almost immediately. Everything about me is inviting, trustworthy. I appear innocent.
I placed a lot of faith in lies. They could save me, sustain me, keep me shielded from anything that threatened me.
Even myself. Especially myself.
And they came to me as easy as breathing.
When I was fifteen and came to in the helicopter after driving myself off the cliff in Tijeras Canyon, the first thing anyone asked me was whether I had tried to kill myself. My lie, automatic, was: It was an accident, I was driving too fast.
Instead of dealing with the feelings that had led me to that cliff, I lied away their very existence. I detached completely from my suicide attempt, telling no one about it. Ever. My lying turned the suicide attempt into an accident, even in my own mind.
In movies and books, certain characters always attempt to draw others out of their isolation, trying to get them to open up, to share the truth. Real life doesn’t work like that, at least not in my experience. Most people are happy not to deal with someone else’s shit. Keeping it locked up inside, that’s your strategy? Works for me. So when people ask how I kept that secret for all those years, I tell them it wasn’t hard at all. I’m a good liar, and nobody really minded.
And now, when I was a newly minted vice cop and a dedicated meth addict, my lies began taking on a breathtaking life of their own. They shot out every which way, joining together to create the rickety scaffolding that was supposed to be my life.
My mother died. I need to go to Albuquerque.
Easy as breathing.
By necessity, my lie about my mother dying spawned another lie. In early December, my mom called and said, “Alli, we want you to come home for Christmas. It’s been too long! We really miss you.”
“I can’t, Mom,” I said. “I just can’t. I’m working on this huge case.” That wasn’t a lie—Kal and I were closing in on a big dealer in what was the biggest case of my career, and one of the biggest cases Maui vice had ever handled.
“Come on, Alli,” said my mom, who always had a dramatic sense of occasion. “It’s Christmas!”
“I don’t have a choice. I need to be here. Now that I’m in vice, things are different. And AC Patrick is kind of an a-hole about stuff like that.”
“I get that,” my mom said. “But everyone needs family time at Christmas. Can’t you get away for just a few days? I can’t stand thinking of you being all by yourself during the holidays.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said. “I’ll probably be working the whole time.”
“I’m not happy about this,” my mom said.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just can’t leave.”
I should have chosen my words more carefully because my mom called three days later with another plan.
“Guess what?” she said, sounding happier than she had in a long time.
“What?” I said.
“Mimi and I are coming to spend Christmas with you!”
“You are?” I asked uncertainly.
“Yes! Since it’s the first Christmas since Granddad’s death, everybody thinks it would be good to give her a change. Get her away from home. Too many painful reminders here.”
“Do you really think that’s a good idea?” I asked cautiously. I was starting to panic. “Does Mimi even want to come?”
“It was her suggestion,” my mom said happily. “And a brilliant one. I don’t know why we didn’t think of it sooner.”
“So when are you coming?” I asked.
“A week before Christmas. And leaving New Year’s Day. I’ve got lots of time off coming to me. It’s not a problem.”
Two weeks! My heart sank. How in the world would I keep my using from them for two solid weeks?
In the past, I had loved when my family came to visit. I had begged them to. This time, I did everything I could to discourage them.
“Do you really think Mimi’s up to the trip?” I asked my mom.
“She needs it,” my mom said. “This will be the hardest Christmas of her life.”
“I know, but she’s so . . . frail.”
“She’s stronger than you think,” my mom said. “It’ll do her good.”
I tried another tack. “I just don’t know how much time I’ll have to spend with you,” I said. “I’ll be working all the time.”
“Do you not want us to come, Alli?” my mom asked sharply.
I had to lie to avoid hurting her feelings.
“Of course I want you guys to come,” I said. “I mean, gosh, I’m so excited.”
Inwardly, I thought, Oh shit.
Everyone thought my mother was dead. How would I keep her presence a secret from Keawe? He had a key to my apartment and would show up whenever he wanted.
I would have to fabricate a very special lie for Keawe.
“I need my key back temporarily,” I told him the next night when I went to see him at work. He was working on his own, as he was most nights. He sent his rookies out a lot and was very choosy about his cases. He had a reputation as a complainer in the department, but he always got what he wanted.
“Your key?” he asked. “You breaking up with me?” He smiled, joking.
“I’m going to be away over Christmas, and I told my landlady that nobody would be using the apartment.”
“Sure,” he said, removing my key from his key ring and handing it to me. “But where are you going?” As far as he knew, I had nowhere to go. My parents were dead (I had told everyone long ago that my father was dead), and I never took vacations.
“Well, I wasn’t going to tell you this,” I said. “It’s kind of embarrassing. It’s just that, my family—my sister and my aunt and my grandma—they think I’ve been working way too hard. They’re worried about me.”
“Everyone knows you work way too hard. My little ripper.”
“Yeah, well, they think I need help. Mental help.”
“That’s extreme.”
“I guess so. But they know me pretty well, so . . . Anyway they’re sending me to a mental facility for two weeks.”
“Jesus,” Keawe said. I wanted him to rush in with concern, to say I had no idea things were that bad; what can I do; I’m here for you, babe. Instead he said, “Well, if you think it will help.”
That was it? No outpouring of support? No requests for my family’s contact information? Not even any commonsense questions, like, Where is this “facility”?
“Yeah,” I said. “Whatever.”
Just then a call came in. “I gotta go,” he said. “You’ll call me when you can, right?”
“Right,” I answered, the bile rising in my throat as I watched him walk away. We were in the station so of course he couldn’t kiss me or show any sign of affection. Even so, his indifference chilled me.
I had sent out a desperate cry for help to Keawe. A cry that he didn’t answer.
• • •
On a day before my mom and Mimi arrived, Erin came over with an armful of Christmas gifts. I didn’t tell her the mental institution story, but she knew I wasn’t going to be around for Christmas.
She handed me six or seven nicely wrapped packages that she couldn’t wait for me to open.
I hadn’t gotten her a thing. I looked around my apartment, as if a tree and presents would miraculously appear out of nowhere. I had done nothing to prepare for the holiday.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t—I haven’t had a chance to get to the store—”
She brushed me away. “I know you’re really busy with work,” she said. “I didn’t expect anything. I just saw a couple of things that made me think of you.”
Erin was such a generous person, a straight shooter with a Boston accent and a heart of gold. She’d been trying for a while to make our friendship more than it was, and I had resisted. For one thing, she drank too much, and I had no interest in hanging out in bars. But more than that, she was just one of the many people who passed through my life without my really seeing them, knowing them, because I was so focused on using and work.
I was happy to see my mom and Mimi when I picked them up at the airport that Christmas, but within a day I just wished they would leave. They wanted to go out for dinner all the time, visit tourist spots, sit and talk for hours on end. They insisted on buying a tree and decorating my apartment for Christmas. They wanted to take me Christmas shopping every day.
All of this interfered with my using. And it got old very quickly, listening to them tell me how I was too thin, how I worked too hard, how I was young and needed to get out and have more fun.
After three days I couldn’t stand it. I told them I needed to travel for work, and of course they believed me. They had an enormous respect for law enforcement and didn’t really understand the particularities of what I did. They would have believed anything I told them.
I flew to Oahu and checked into the Queen Kapiolani Hotel, where I could smoke meth without having to hide it from anybody. I called Keawe every day or so, pretending to be in a mental health ward.
“Be sure to listen to the doctors,” he told me. “Don’t be combative. Just try to relax and you’ll get better in a few days.”
To make my situation seem realistic, while I was on the phone with Keawe, I would pretend the orderlies were asking me questions and then pretend to answer them. Sometimes I would scream at these fake orderlies. “I’m getting off the fucking phone!” I would yell. “Just leave me alone!”
It was insane.
Keawe didn’t have much to say about my situation. It seemed he didn’t know what to say, and looking back, I still don’t know what he was thinking. Most likely, he thought I was crazy, but if so, why did he keep calling me, talking to me? Why didn’t he break things off? It didn’t make any sense.
Every time I got off the phone with him I felt this hole in the center of my chest. His lack of reaction devastated me, but what did I expect him to do, really? Rescue me from my fake institution?
After more than two years with Keawe, I felt like I was starving for love. He had made all these broken promises to me. Sometimes when I think about him now, I wonder if all my lies, even the worst of them, were just desperate attempts to get him to be with me. It’s like those mothers who try to make their children sick just to get attention for themselves.
It’s terrifying to think that I would do that, that lying would come so easy to me.
I’ve carried this character defect of lying throughout my life. At times I have justified it because of my job—the need to be versatile, to make friends with everyone from police sergeant to junkie—but it’s something I’ve been struggling with in all areas of my life.
I know exactly where my lying comes from.
My father.
I share a lot of his traits—the lying, the manipulation, the detachment. It makes me ill. All I ever wanted was to be nothing like my father, and now I had become the spitting image of him.
My mom liked to say that that my father learned to “approximate” normalcy. He was an exceptional imitator, a shape-shifter who could take on the appearance of any group as needed. Just like I did.
My mom blamed his detachment on the polio he had had as a child. He was a victim of the last viral wave to strike the United States in 1948. He spent from age two to age five in Texas hospitals, much of that time in isolation wards. It had a disastrous effect on him, we found out, and eventually all those around him. He didn’t experience the human bonding and socializing that we all need. Polio left him with a weakened leg, but his biggest loss was that human spark that ignites connections from one to another. Throughout his life, he cut people off—first his closest friend, and then his father, and then later his family.
It had been eight years since I’d seen him.
In a way, when I told people that my father was dead, I was telling the truth.
• • •
As I sat in that hotel by myself in the days leading up to Christmas, juggling my lies to Keawe with my lies to my family and to the department, I tried not to think about my mom and Mimi back in Maui, driving around the island like tourists without me—to Haleakala, up to a luau in Lahaina, out on the Hana highway. But I did think about them. And I also thought about my granddad, and how I had spent my last time with him high.
No quantity of meth could make these feelings go away. I just wanted to die.
Actually, I had two moods at that time: high and suicidal. On one particular day, the suicidal took over and I tried to figure out how to kill myself. Unfortunately I didn’t have my firearm with me, and the Queen Kapiolani didn’t have a lanai to jump off, so I had to find another way.
I broke a glass from the bathroom and used the jagged edge to cut my arm open. Sitting on the tiled floor of the hotel bathroom, I watched my arm bleed for a while. The cut was deep, but not deep enough to kill me very efficiently. The pain didn’t bother me, but the boredom did. It was tedious waiting to die, and I still had some meth left to smoke. I made a tourniquet from the hotel towels and smoked meth until the bleeding stopped.
Later, I put a bandage on the wound, and when I got back to Maui, my mom asked immediately, “What happened to you?”
“Oh, this,” I said, waving my arm as if such things happened to me all the time. “I was on a case. This dealer tried to run, and I had to climb over a chain link fence to chase him. I snagged my arm.”
“Oh my gosh,” my mom said. “Let me see.”
“It’s nothing,” I said, though it actually was pretty substantial. I should have gotten stitches—it ended up giving me a permanent scar.
“Have you had a tetanus shot?” Mimi asked. “You don’t want to get an infection.”
“The hospital took care of that,” I said, though of course no one but me had looked at it.
My first night back in Maui, I crashed, and for the rest of the holidays, all I did was sleep. We made it through Christmas, but then my mom got annoyed with my endless sleeping and she and my grandma ended up leaving early. I felt terrible about that—my poor little eighty-year-old grieving grandma—but also I felt relieved because I needed to get back to smoking meth.
As soon as they left, I called Keawe and told him I was back. He came to my apartment that night and the first thing he said was, “What happened to your arm?”
Weirdly, I told him the truth. I looked him in the eye and said, “I tried to kill myself.”
He was visibly shocked but didn’t seem
to know what to say.
“How?” he asked.
How? Not why?
“At the institution, I broke a glass and cut my arm.”
“They let you have glass in those places?” he asked. “You’d think it would be too dangerous.”
“I guess,” I said.
“But you’re better now, right?” he asked, and what could I do but nod my head.
I was sick and I was looking for him to rescue me: Leave your wife for me, I’m so miserable, I’m so ill.
But he wasn’t going to rescue me. When Keawe left that night, I had the small realization that he wasn’t going to save me. Nobody was going to save me. I would have to save myself.
I swore to myself that I would quit. I would stop disappointing my family and become the me they used to know. I was done with ice. No more.
I put together two sober days before I was back to smoking ice. I couldn’t survive without it.
Keawe was working on New Year’s Eve, and the night before he asked me, “So what you doing for New Year’s?”
I didn’t want him to think that I would be home by myself doing nothing. I needed him to think that I had all sorts of friends and a social life.
“I’ve got a party to go to,” I said.
“Nice. Think of me stuck here working.”
“Too bad for you.”
“Come see me before you go,” he said, and smiled. “Please.”
And so I got dressed up for New Year’s. I bought a new dress, put on lots of makeup, straightened my hair.
“Wow,” he said when I walked into the substation that night. “I’d like to be going to that party.”
“You wish,” said Maliko, who happened to be in the station.
I spent about a half hour talking to Keawe and then went back to my apartment. I had nowhere to go, absolutely nothing to do. I might have called my family to wish them a happy New Year, but it was too late in Albuquerque now. Still, I justified it to myself: If Keawe believes I have a social life, it’s enough for me.
Waiting for midnight, I sat around in my tiny black strapless dress, smoking meth, completely alone.
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