Smacked

by Eilene Zimmerman

  All at once we’re out of our cars and walking to the side gate. Evan plugs in the security code and we walk through the yard to the glass front door. I open it and feel a rush of cool air that smells like yesterday. My legs shake a little as I walk upstairs, the kids and William behind me, into the kitchen. “What’s that smell?” Anna asks, crinkling her nose. She opens the fridge. It is the smell of sour milk and rotten fruit and spilled condiments. “Ugh.” She closes it. I notice there’s some water on the floor. “Looks like it’s leaking,” I say, and open the refrigerator door again. Half-empty wine bottles crowd the glass shelves, along with jars of jam, Nutella, a bag of chocolates, soda, Vitaminwater, energy drinks, milk. It looks like the refrigerator of an alcoholic with a raging sweet tooth. The fruit in the produce drawer is covered in fluffy white mold and the contents of what was once a bag of spring-mix lettuce has begun to liquefy. How long has it been here? How long had it been since Peter ate real food?

  The freezer doesn’t seem to be working right either. It looks like it hasn’t been defrosted in decades, although it’s probably not even five years old. Ice is everywhere it shouldn’t be, several inches thick, and embedded in it are bags of frozen peas, microwaveable dinners, veggie patties, and ice cream—so much ice cream. “Let’s not open it for now,” I tell Anna, who is standing next to me, also peering into the freezer. “I’ll have to clean it out and get someone to fix it.” The list of things I will have to do in the next few months to get this house ready for sale feels insurmountable.

  I have brought boxes and bags into which we can load items we want to take today. Anna wants to go start in the master bedroom, but I don’t want her to see the bathroom floor, which I know is stained with blood and feces and vomit and urine, all in the vague outline of her father’s body. But she is becoming frantic to get in there, to get as close to Peter as she can, so William says he will go in first to remove anything—mostly drugs but also, possibly, sex-related paraphernalia—she shouldn’t see. I start to walk in with him but my body thinks Peter is in there, and for the first time in my life I know what it means to have your knees buckle. It’s as if my kneecaps change from a solid to a liquid, the rubbery tendons and ligaments bowing outward. I don’t fall as much as I crumple down. “Mom! Mom!” Anna screams, thinking I am fainting. “I’m okay, I’m okay,” I say. But I don’t go into the bedroom.

  William systematically combs through drawers in the dresser, in the closet, in the bathroom, in the night tables. He looks under the bed, and checks all the shelves, depositing things I can’t see into a cardboard box. Then he tells Anna it is okay to come in. She races to Peter’s dresser, which sits below a window overlooking the backyard. Before I left yesterday, I pulled down the shades so that the neighbors—with a back porch that allows a clear view into this bedroom—can’t see the disaster in here. From my perch in the hallway I can see both the dresser and Anna. She is pulling shirts off the floor and out of drawers, putting each one to her face and inhaling to see which shirts still retain the smell of her father. Those are the precious ones, the ones she is jamming into empty bags and boxes. She buries her head in each piece of clothing, grabbing at anything Peter might have worn or touched. She wants everything, dirty or clean, on the floor, in the hamper, lying in a heap under the bed—she wants all of it, every scrap. She’s like a starving person, desperate for whatever crumbs were left behind.

  Evan is in the living room and kitchen, wandering around, opening cabinets and drawers as if seeing the house and its contents clearly for the first time. Anna tells him to come in and grab some clothes. “No, that’s okay. Just take what you want,” he says loudly from the living room. But Anna insists. “No, Evan, come in and take some things for yourself. You are going to want to keep some of this.” Evan ignores her—he is not going in there—so she grabs a few T-shirts for him. I already know he’ll never wear any of it, that it will sit in a drawer or a box somewhere because it can’t be thrown out, but it can’t be worn either.

  William emerges with boxes full of things like expensive stereo speakers, notebooks, cameras, all kinds of electrical and USB cords, an iPad, and Peter’s work bag. Inside the bag is $1,000 in cash, a pill bottle with no label, and an Advil bottle—both bottles contain a variety of different colored and shaped pills. There are three slim silver tubes of scar cream, individually packaged alcohol wipes, and tiny clear plastic tubes I have never seen before. Later I will learn they are plastic needle caps, presumably from hypodermic needles that were used at the office. William has taken Peter’s iPhone and wallet off the bed and put them in the bag as well. There is a small spiral notebook with what looks like notations about daily injection times and dosages of tramadol (an opioid painkiller in the same category as morphine) and cocaine, a combination usually referred to as a “speedball.” Tramadol works to lessen pain by attaching to certain receptors in the brain, which changes the brain’s perception of the pain. It also allows the chemical messengers serotonin, which makes us feel good, and norepinephrine, which makes us feel energetic and alert, to hang around the brain for a longer-than-usual period of time.

  Peter was able to organize himself to get drugs, but not anything else. All of this is sandwiched within a thick stack of work-related papers and a yellow legal pad with notes about client matters scrawled unintelligibly in blue ink.

  A week from now, I will use the thousand dollars to pay American Cremation Service to transfer Peter’s autopsied body from the city morgue, cremate it ($595 before tax), and get me a permit to spread the ashes in the ocean. I will use what’s left to purchase two small pewter urns, one for each child. In hindsight, I will wish I had purchased urns for Peter’s parents and siblings, but I didn’t have time to think it through—the city had autopsied the body and wanted me to do something with it; they wouldn’t hold it there for long. Peter’s death was so unexpected and shocking that my concerns at first were all about helping my kids deal with their trauma and grief. But very soon I learn that death comes with a host of very pragmatic, non-lofty concerns. How much does it cost per day to store a person’s bodily remains in the morgue? How much does an autopsy cost? How will I get the remains to the crematorium? Where can we legally spread ashes? Will the crematorium put some of the ashes in each urn, or will I have to do it? How heavy will the ashes in the box be—will I be able to carry it into the house by myself?

  I will spend months repairing and emptying out Peter’s house, cleaning out cabinets, drawers, closets, shelves, laundry room, garage. The number of things he accumulated over the past five years is staggering.

  There will be stuff everywhere and a good deal of it random, like a shopping bag full of never-used wrapping paper rolls and birthday cards, foam surfboards (Peter didn’t surf), a silver measuring tool for pasta, and a beautiful salt bowl from Williams Sonoma. In the kitchen cabinets, I will find high-end baking pans, some with price tags still glued to their surfaces, three different kinds of olive oil, two different kinds of salt, craft beers, craft root beer, cases of organic, Stevia-sweetened craft sodas, two coffeemakers, boxes of new CDs, many of them in duplicate. Discarded receipts will be stuffed into every nook and cranny, most from CVS Pharmacy. All Peter ever seemed to buy there were prescriptions, medical supplies, and candy. Lots of candy.

  Long after Peter’s house has been sold, I’ll learn that craving sweets is a common side effect of opioid abuse. Opiates relieve pain by acting through what are known as mu-opioid receptors in the brain, and that has an effect on sugar intake and regulation of the body’s blood sugar levels. Clinical studies have shown that opiate use often produces a preference for sugary foods, and researchers speculate that’s because sweet-tasting foods activate the body’s own pain-relieving system. Sugar, it turns out, may actually enhance the experience of the opiate user. Even if sugar hinders the effects of opiates, as some other studies have shown, it still results in greater cravings—both for sugar and for drugs.

  In t
he bathroom cabinet in Peter’s bedroom, I will find several unused enemas, perhaps needed for the chronic constipation that comes with opioid abuse (there is actually a term for it, opioid-induced constipation), discarded needle tips, cotton balls, scar cream, rubbing alcohol, Band-Aids of all sizes, and two gigantic bottles of tramadol from Mexico, which the police missed. There is a roll of what I think is toilet paper—it will actually be a relief to see something so ordinary in a bathroom—until I try to use it and realize, when it will not tear, that it isn’t toilet paper at all. It is a roll of latex tourniquet.

  On the bedroom floor I will discover a large cardboard box from Patrick James, a high-end men’s clothier in town, which contains more than a thousand dollars’ worth of clothing Peter ordered the previous February. He hadn’t even opened it. In the back of his closet I will find a stack of shoeboxes taller than I am. On the outside of each box he has taped a photo of the running shoes inside. Another shoebox will be found behind the washing machine, only this one won’t have shoes in it. Instead it will contain a square mirror, its surface still sticky with a filmy white residue, a tiny glass tube, a multicolored headband Peter must have used as a tourniquet, an actual rubber tourniquet, syringes, loose pills, tweezers, and two small baggies with milky quartz pebbles I will later learn are crystal methamphetamine. Perched on the shelf in Peter’s night table I will see a cashier’s check dated June 1 from Citibank for $4,492, written out to an auto body shop he has already paid. On the receipt from the bank that day I will note an additional withdrawal of $9,950 in cash.

  The garage, however, will be the worst, like a multilayered time capsule with boxes buried under boxes holding all the detritus of Peter’s life, from childhood, his twenties, our marriage, and after marriage, a period in which he purchased a lot of things that probably seemed like good ideas at the time (or a good idea while high) and then turned out not to be. There will be an unopened Sonos Playbar system worth close to a thousand dollars, although the house already has one, three bicycles, and two new televisions still in their boxes. I will work my way through crates of old record albums, several sets of speakers, guitars, unwanted furniture, unwanted window treatments, tool sets, motorcycle gear, car washing and waxing kits, unopened kitchenware, big bags of Halloween candy. A metal cabinet against the wall by the water heater will hold enough medical supplies to open an urgent care clinic, as well as pills, lighters, and more of those little glass tubes, which I will learn are used for smoking meth. There will be a tower of Vitaminwater Zero variety packs from Costco, cases of protein bars, storage bins filled only with power cords and surge protectors, old computer keyboards and monitors, window screens, a new Blu-ray DVD player, shelving that hadn’t been unwrapped, two grills, and on and on it will go.

  At the bottom of all this, its top partially crushed inward, will be a box that holds evidence of who Peter had been long ago, when I first met him. Inside will be his business cards from Adam Personnel in New York City, his Eagle Scout patch, a silver charm with a Native American–style design strung on a leather necklace, some photos of him playing bass at a bar in Syracuse, a photo of the two of us in our tiny cottage in upstate New York, an old passport.

  Although that box had been forsaken long ago—carried around from place to place only because it hurt too much to toss it—going through all the old things I remembered will break my heart. This was the man I’d fallen for back then.

  I will be both archaeologist and anthropologist, combing through the physical evidence of this man’s life, preserving the ordinary and unremarkable, things like grocery lists, hastily written notes to the kids, receipts, silly photos, a children’s piano book with which he once tried to teach himself piano, his favorite coffee mug. In death, these objects have been transformed; now they are history. Every scrap of paper with Peter’s handwriting on it is an irreplaceable artifact. The last cup from which he drank can never be washed. The last guitar pick his fingers held, the needle tip that may have penetrated his skin before he discarded it onto the bedroom floor—are saved. Even the stain in the bathroom made by his prone body will feel sacred; as do the discolored sheets, the sticky residue on the night tables; the pill bottles with their psychedelic handmade labels.

  It will become my job to create a true and meaningful history of Peter through these objects, all of which I will package up and transport to a rented space in a self-storage facility not far from my house.

  Anna, meanwhile, will curate her own private stash of items, salvaged when she was alone at Peter’s house. She will keep them in a sturdy cardboard box—one she will name “my most precious and important things”—on a shelf in her closet. After she goes back to school in September I will peek into it so I can understand better whatever is in her head.

  There will be a sheaf of papers on which Peter had made lots of work-related notes, specked with spilled coffee and stained with ink from his fingers. There will be little notes he wrote to Anna and her brother and left on the kitchen counter, telling them he was out on a run or working but would be back later. There will be an expired passport and an old driver’s license, nearly every medal for every race Peter ever ran, a collection of recipes the two of them often used to make dinner (back when Peter still cooked meals). Her box will also contain some loose pills she no doubt found in her father’s bedroom, an asthma inhaler, a half-used tube of face cream, even two loose Marlboro cigarettes. Peter’s hands had pulled them out of their box at some point and put them—where? In a jacket pocket? A pants pocket? In the glove box of his car? Perhaps between his lips for a second? And they somehow wound up rolling around a kitchen drawer. I found them while cleaning out the kitchen and meant to throw them out but never got to it. When I see them in Anna’s box, their creases tenderly smoothed out, their delicate paper bodies lying like little mummies in a protected corner, my heart will hurt.

  She also saved a few of the slim notebooks in which her father had recorded injection times and dosages—and which addiction psychologist Sam Ball, head of the executive treatment program at Silver Hill Hospital in New Canaan, Connecticut, says shows Peter had almost surely lost control of his drug use. “His choice about using was probably gone the moment he felt he needed to keep monitoring it, felt the need to have some kind of system, to keep it from getting any worse,” Ball told me.

  Evan will save some things too—a coin collection of Peter’s, the old driver’s license, a corporate ID from when he worked in pharma, and a couple of pairs of earrings. What means the most to him, though, are Peter’s bass guitars, record albums, and CDs. Evan will probably come to know his father by listening to the same music Peter did, some of it at the same age Peter was when he first discovered it. Evan will also save his father’s used guitar picks. One of those tiny purple plastic picks, worn down in the middle from Peter’s thumb, Evan will put in his wallet so he can have it with him all the time. In September, I will take it to a jewelry maker in San Diego who will create a silver holder for it engraved with Peter’s initials. Evan will wear it like a dog tag, every day, on a silver chain around his neck.

  When he leaves for college later this year, I will find a plastic grocery bag holding a forgotten pair of pants and a favorite T-shirt, way back on a shelf in his closet. I will wash them and pack them up to send to Evan at school, first calling to let him know I found them. “You don’t have to send those,” he will say. “They are…” I will hear him hesitate. “They are the clothes I was wearing that day.” He’ll pause. “At Dad’s house.”

  “Oh. okay. Well, they’re clean now,” I’ll say with a laugh, trying to make the moment less heavy. “I’ll just put them in storage, okay?”

  “Yeah,” he’ll say. “That would be perfect.”

  The word storage is really the word limbo. It’s the place for all the things no one really wants, at least not yet, but that can’t be thrown out either. There these things will stay for however many years is enough time for Anna and
Evan to be ready to confront them. The plastic bag with the clothes Evan was wearing on the worst day of his life will become part of this collection, but there won’t be room for most of everything else in Peter’s house, the majority of it unimportant to his children anyway. It is hard to imagine that it gave Peter any kind of lasting happiness, and research actually shows it doesn’t. Studies done by consumer psychologist Marsha Richins, a professor at the University of Missouri, found that although people who like to buy things feel happiness at the moment of purchase, it doesn’t last. “Research consistently shows that high-materialism consumers are less happy than others,” she writes. We adapt pretty quickly to more, bigger, and better, she says. People who are less materialistic likely find emotional fulfillment elsewhere, suggests Richins, through pleasurable experiences, interpersonal relationships, spirituality, and other intangibles.

  Peter was addicted to more than just drugs; he was addicted to work, to shopping, to sugar, to status, to power, to money. The experience of each of these hit the pleasure center of his brain, pinging or flooding it with dopamine. But he was also trying to figure out what “success” looked like and how it felt. Did it look like a house with an ocean view? Like fifteen pairs of running shoes? Did it feel like a $3,000 mattress? Robert H. Frank, an economics professor at Cornell University and author of the book Luxury Fever, says when people at the top of socioeconomic and professional ladders need to answer the question “How am I doing?” they look at those around them. “All competition is local,” he says, “so the answer to that question is very flexible. As you get higher up on the ladder you have a much higher level of opponent.” In Peter’s case, the opponents were the attorneys with whom he worked, sending their children to expensive private schools, driving their new Porsches and BMW sedans into the firm’s parking lot.