I looked at that printout for a long time.
“The pharmacist flagged it the second time,” Officer Daniels said. “In October. She thought it was strange that a fifteen-year-old was getting a high-dose opioid from an online clinic, and that the person picking it up wasn’t a parent. So she called the house to check.”
“Sunday,” I whispered. “That was the call.”
“Your father told her you weren’t available,” Officer Daniels said. “And he hung up. And he didn’t ask anybody anything.” He folded the paper back up. “Maybe he suspected. Maybe he didn’t want to know. That’s something you’ll have to ask him.”
I closed my eyes.
Two lines on a graph. Find the point where they cross.
The pharmacy call. Karen’s bottle. Karen’s knee surgery. Karen floating. Karen locking her door every night.
They’d crossed right in front of him. And he’d looked away.
“What happens to Karen?” I asked.
“That depends,” Officer Daniels said. “Using somebody else’s identity to get a controlled substance is a felony in this state. Obtaining by fraud. But she’s nineteen. No record. If she’s honest, and if she gets help, there’s a drug court program here. Treatment instead of jail.”
“And Dad?”
He was quiet for a moment.
“I’ve referred it to the prosecutor,” he said. “Child endangerment. Putting a minor out of the house without shelter in dangerous weather. What happens next isn’t up to me.”
He stood up and put his hat back on.
“For what it’s worth,” he said at the door, “your father hasn’t left this hospital in six days. He sleeps in the waiting room. He asks the nurses about you every hour. They’re getting sick of him.”
He almost smiled.
“I’m not telling you to forgive him,” he said. “I’m just telling you.”
Chapter Seven: Karen
Karen came on the seventh day.
She came alone. Angela Reyes brought her to the door and asked me if it was okay. I said yes before I really thought about it.
My sister walked into my room like she was walking into a church. Slow. Careful. Looking at the floor.
She looked terrible. Her auburn hair was greasy and tangled. She’d lost weight; her jeans were hanging off her hips. Her skin had a yellowish gray color to it, and there were dark rings under her eyes like bruises. She was wearing an old hoodie of Mom’s, the purple Ohio State one, the sleeves pulled down over her hands.
She stopped at the foot of my bed. She looked at my wrapped hands. At the oxygen tube in my nose. At the bruises on my chest where they’d done CPR, which you could see above the neck of my hospital gown.
Then she started crying.
It wasn’t quiet crying. It was the kind that bends you in half. She put her hands over her face and her shoulders shook and she made a sound I had never heard a human being make, a high, thin, broken sound, like something tearing.
I didn’t say anything. I let her cry.
After a while, she sat down in Roz’s chair. She wiped her face on the purple sleeve.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“You said that already,” I said. “That night. You said I’m sorry. And then you let him lock the door.”
She flinched like I’d slapped her.
“I know.”
“Why, Karen?”
She told me everything.
She told me about the pills after her knee surgery. About how they made her feel, for the first time since Mom died, like the world wasn’t crushing her. She said it was like somebody had finally taken a heavy coat off her shoulders.
When the prescription ran out, she called the surgeon’s office and asked for more. They gave her one refill. Then they said no.
She bought them from a guy at the community college for a while. Then he got arrested. Then she found the telehealth website.
“They wanted an insurance card and a name,” she said, staring at the blanket. “I couldn’t use my name. My name was already in the system from the surgery. They’d see I’d had them before. They’d flag me.”
“So you used mine.”
“You were fifteen,” she whispered. “You’d never had anything. You were clean. Nobody would look.”
“I didn’t think about it,” she said. “I swear to God, I didn’t think about what it meant. I just needed them. You don’t understand what it’s like when you need them. It’s like your whole body is screaming.”
She took a long breath.
“Then the pharmacy called. On Sunday. I heard Dad on the phone. I heard him say your name and prescription, and I knew. I knew it was over. I knew he was going to figure it out.”
“So you got there first.”
She nodded. Tears were dripping off her chin.
“I thought if I told him first,” she said, “if I said I found them in your bag, then when he looked into it, he’d think it was you. He’d ground you. Take your phone. Make you go to some counselor. You’d be in trouble for a couple of months, and you’d be okay, because you’re always okay. You’re the good one.” Her voice cracked in half. “I never thought he’d throw you out. I never, never thought that.”
“But when he did,” I said, “you didn’t say anything.”
She was quiet for a long time.
“I was going to,” she said finally. “After the door closed. I stood there in the hallway. I said, Dad. And he turned around and looked at me. And he said, Not now, Karen. Go to bed.”
She pressed her sleeves against her eyes.
“And I went,” she said. “I went upstairs and I took two of them and I lay down on my bed and I let the floating come. And I thought, she’ll go to the Hendersons’. She’ll go to a neighbor. She’ll be back in an hour.”
She looked at me. Her face was wet and red and swollen.
“I was floating,” she said. “While you were dying on the side of the road. I was lying on my bed, floating.”
I didn’t know what to say. There isn’t anything to say to that.
I looked at my sister. My sister who used to braid my hair so tight it made my eyes water. My sister who let me sleep in her bed during thunderstorms. Who stood at Mom’s funeral with her arms crossed and never cried.
I realized, looking at her, that she hadn’t stopped being that sister. She’d just been drowning. For three years. Right in front of us. And nobody had seen it, because Dad was drowning too, and I was too busy being good.
“Karen,” I said. “Are you still taking them?”
She looked down.
“Officer Daniels took the bottle,” she said. “I haven’t had any in four days. I’m so sick. I’ve been throwing up. I can’t sleep. My legs won’t stop moving.”
“Then you need help.”
“I know.”
“Real help, Karen. A doctor. A program.”
“I know.” She nodded and nodded. “There’s a place. The drug court thing. Officer Daniels told me about it. It’s ninety days in a residential program in Dayton, and then outpatient, and if I finish, they drop the felony.”
“Are you going to go?”
She looked up at me. For the first time since she walked in, she looked me straight in the eye.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m going on Monday.”
Chapter Eight: Aunt Diane
My mother’s younger sister, Diane, drove in from Columbus that night.
I hadn’t seen her in almost two years. Not since Mom’s second anniversary, when she and Dad had a fight in the driveway about something I wasn’t allowed to hear, and she drove off without saying goodbye.
She came through the door of my room at nine-thirty at night like a hurricane in a puffy coat. She was a high school vice principal, short and fierce, with Mom’s same green eyes and Mom’s same laugh.
She took one look at me and burst into tears.
“Oh, Bean,” she said. “Oh, my Bean.”
Nobody had called me Bean since Mom died. Mom gave me that name when I was a baby because I was so small. Aunt Diane was the only other person who ever used it.
She sat down on the edge of my bed and held my bandaged hands very, very carefully in hers. She held them like they were made of glass.
“Mrs. Bell called me,” she said, after she’d stopped crying. “From Children’s Services. They need a safe place for you to go when you get out of here. I said I’d take you.”
“Take me?”
“To Columbus. To my house. For a while.” She looked at me. “If you want. Nobody’s going to make you.”
“What about Dad?”
Her face changed. She looked toward the hallway. Toward the waiting room, where my father was probably sitting, staring at the wall.
“Your father,” she said carefully, “is going to have to show a judge that he can keep you safe. That’s how it works now. There’s going to be a hearing. They call it a dependency hearing. A judge will decide where you live while all this gets sorted out.”
“A judge,” I repeated.
“You’ll get your own lawyer,” she said. “A guardian ad litem. Somebody whose whole job is to speak for you. Just you.”
