November 8th: The Truth of the Matter

Lily’s last day began at six in the morning. I woke up to the sound of her retching. I thought about going back to bed, but I decided her final hours with us were worth rising for.

I got out of bed and pulled on socks, then padded down the hallway, yawning. I knocked on the bathroom door. "It’s Colin."

Lily grunted. I took that as permission to go in. I opened the door and took a seat on the counter, staring at her back and trying not to look at the toilet bowl.

My sister looked up and wiped her mouth with her sleeve. "Jesus got a Last Supper, I get this bullshit." She grimaced.

I couldn’t help but laugh. Only my sister would think to say something like that. "Eh, suck it up," I got in before Lily bent over the bowl again.

We sat in silence – silence meaning without conversation in this case, since Lily’s periodic vomiting certainly wasn’t silent – for at least a half an hour before Lily stood on wobbly legs, clutching at the walls, and stumbled to the sink. She turned on the tap and splashed water onto her face, then, sopping wet, looked up at me and grinned weakly. "Starting Tuesday I’ll have morning sickness and withdrawals at the same time. Just imagine the possibilities."
I laughed, flinging open the door, and stopped dead in my tracks.

"Lily Theresa?" In sixteen years, I had never heard my mother sound quite so shocked and hurt.


We had a lot of explaining to do, that became obvious within a few seconds at the kitchen table. The realization was helped along by our mother’s cliche proclamation of, "You’ve got a lot of explaining to do."

So Lily explained, and for the first time, I heard the whole story.

When Lily had left almost two years before, she’d been angry. Angry at our family, for making her go, and angry at herself for letting us know enough about her habits to make us think we had to send her away. She vowed at that point that she was going to get ten times worse in Idaho, where our grandparents lived, and they’d be forced to send her back.

Her plan didn’t work quite the way she’d anticipated. She did get worse, though not all that much. She got into crack and Ecstacy, a few steps further along than her former pot-smoking, and was heavy into the club scene for awhile. "My fake ID almost broke from being used so much," she cracked at one point, but her smile faded when she looked at Mom. Anyway, she had gone off with any stranger who wanted her at that point, and had no idea what happened half the time. She hardly ever went to school and was constantly in trouble for truancy until she started going out with a doctor’s son, after which point the school would attest to her developing numerous stomach ailments that kept her from her studies.

Lily says she felt bad about using her "boyfriend", who she explained was hardly even a boyfriend because she slept with about half the town, but at that point she was too far in to care. She said this boy had lots of money, which she borrowed freely to spend on her growing drug use. Which made her feel doubly bad, but not bad enough to stop.

At one of the parties she attended, she ran into another girl, Renee. Or at least she called herself Renee, though Lily wasn’t quite sure that was a real name because she always seemed to have to think before she responded, which seemed strange. Anyhow, Renee took Lily into the bedroom at a party with a few other people, and they sat around on the bed and floor talking and passing around a joint. They all got bored pretty quickly, Lily said, and she barely even feeling high off the joint, which seemed mild compared to what she’d become used to. So when one guy, who called himself Scott, and seemed to be Renee’s boyfriend, pulled out a couple needles and some junk, she’d been all for it.

Some of the other people at in the room had been wary of the drug. One said his brother had died using it, and had left the room immediately. But everyone else stayed, though a couple of them seemed a little nervous. Some people pulled out their own needles, which surprised Lily – she hadn’t known anyone walked around with needles in their pockets. When she asked Renee later, she said people only took them to hardcore parties, and kept them at home the rest of the time. Anyway, Lily had taken a needle that Scott offered her, a little frightened by the comment that the guy had made earlier, about his brother’s death, but ready to try anything.

She said it was the most amazing thing she’d never experienced. The high had crept up on her and then it was on full force, eating away slowly at her senses. "It was like if you turned acid inside out," she described, as if we would know what that was like. "Because acid knocks you off your feet, powerful hallucinations, big and bright and loud. Heroin was different. Not the opposite exactly, but it was strong in a really mellowed way, like you knew you were higher than you’d ever been but it wasn’t nearly as obvious." She said that after awhile everyone in the room was too buzzed to sit around and talk anymore, and they left to wander around the party aimlessly.

She didn’t go into too much detail about that night, but she did say that she slept with at least six men, and felt up a couple of girls besides. "God, I couldn’t get enough. Not of sex, just of feeling. Feeling everything. I wanted to touch everything, because everything felt so different, and new, and awesome. Sometimes on other drugs I’d been so horny I couldn’t see straight, but this wasn’t like that. This was just wanting to experience, and feeling everything so completely and fully. It was amazing, but it was scary, because I wasn’t sure people were meant to be so wrapped up in just being."

Lily stopped for a minute at that point, staring down at the table and tracing the wood grain. Mom looked about ready to cry, but she was holding in her tears pretty well for the moment. Finally Lily began again, saying how she returned to another party the next night, where she’d heard Renee would be. Within a few days she was following Renee around like some "stupid puppy", never more than five steps behind her. Over the next six months she honed her skills at finding smack, going wherever she knew it would be. She found out that Renee wasn’t the only one in the fairly small town, there were others too, lots of others. She never went to school anymore, and never went home, just passed out at whatever house the party was in, woke up groggily and hid if she had to, even if it meant a long night in the neighbors’ bushes, and then took off for the next party that evening.

She went on like that for a year. That was when people stopped being so generous with their heroin and started telling her to get her own. She didn’t have any money, and her "boyfriend" was out of money, or at least sick enough of giving his life savings to her to pretend he was out of money. So three months before she came home, she started turning tricks in Boise.

"God, that was terrible," she said, sniffing. "That was the damn worst thing I’d ever had to do. But you made a lot of money damn quick. I charged maybe fifty for a blow, a hundred for a fuck. Some girls down the street would do you twenty for whatever, but guys said I was pretty enough that they’d pay the extra. Plus they said I was a good fuck, knew what I was doing." She bit her lip, crying freely now, and wiped her nose on her sleeve. "It’s awful, being reduced to that. A good fuck. Like that’s all I can do right. It was funny, because I kept thinking over and over how I wasn’t even good enough for my own father anymore, but I was good enough for all these men in minivans who probably had kids of their own. And then I couldn’t think of that anymore, because imagining that Dad was anything like those men made me feel worse than I ever did in the worst of bad trips."

She said it was sometime in the first couple of weeks that she got pregnant. "I didn’t know for a long time, because I’d dried up from all the shit that was going on, I don’t know if the drugs did it or if it was just me. I found out in a clinic to get tested for HIV, when the asked me if I wanted a pregnancy test too I said sure, why not. I wish I’d said no, though I’m sure I’d know by now. When I got my test results the first thing I did was call April. And I guess that’s how I got here."

All of us were crying by that point. We must have been a strange sight, three people sitting, sobbing, around the table, staring at the clock as it ticked its way to seven seventeen and beyond. It was ten minutes before Mom finally spoke, and when she did it was in a soft, hushed tone.

"So the baby... Is it damaged?"

Lily looked at her miserably, her pasty face wearing a sad expression. "Or something like it. The doctors say it’s almost definitely addicted. Not even an almost, really, I just say that to make myself feel better. But yeah, it’s a junkie like its mother... They don’t know about other damage. There’s supposed to be some test for that, but I haven’t been to a doctor since I broke up with Robbie – the doctor’s son – two weeks before I left Idaho."

Mom stared at her sadly. I knew what she was thinking, or at least part of it. She was thinking, "Two and half months into being a mother, and Lily’s already killing my first grandchild." She was thinking, "I can’t believe I sent her away. I can’t believe I sent her into that. I can’t believe we were so stupid, to think that she would get better there." She was thinking, "My baby is wasting away in front of me, and I can’t help her." She was thinking, "I wish I hadn’t heard her this morning. I wish I hadn’t asked." She was thinking, "If this girl were not of my own flesh and blood, I would hate her now for everything she’s done to me."

She was thinking, "This is what I’ve brought into the world."

Or at least that’s what I imagined she was thinking, but it might not have been, because the first thing she said when she stood up at seven twenty one that last morning of Lily’s stay at home was, "Colin, have you studied for your chemistry test tomorrow?"

It was strange, to think that the world hadn’t stopped all chemistry tests to take into a account my world falling apart.