The previous winter, fentanyl-laced heroin called “Theraflu” led to a rash of overdoses. Close to thirty people died in a week. Recovering addicts spoke in meetings about how they wanted to go out and shoot the dope that was killing everyone. Newspapers ran stories of kids dying and think pieces on the heroin crisis. The stories mentioned the initial flood of prescription drugs, the government regulations and resulting rise in prices. Suburban kids who’d gotten hooked on Grandma’s cancer meds started going to the North Side for $10 bags of dope rather than shell out $80 a pill for Oxycontin. In 2006, the killer heroin was called “Get High or Die Trying.” The same thing happened then.
I ask a buddy of mine, a recovering addict, about fentanyl and heroin. “Fentanyl is a painkiller, like twenty times stronger than morphine. A lot of heroin is cut with it,” he tells me, “but if the cut isn’t right, you can get a bag that’s mostly fentanyl. If that happens, when you shoot it, you’ll probably die.”
I never shot heroin. I drank. At my worst, I might black out after three drinks or twenty. I had auditory hallucinations. I drank in the morning. I shook. I puked. I fought. I treated everyone in my life like garbage, and lost almost everything. But I played it all up as part of being a writer. Great effort I put into living like some kind of Kerouac wannabe, so I could write about all the wild shit I did. Toward the end, I barely left my apartment. I barely wrote.
OCTOBER–NOVEMBER 2009
Jane moved out of her grandmother’s house and into an apartment with her friend Lisa in Perrysville.
Lisa and Jane’s apartment is one-bedroom. There are two dogs. Smells like weed and piss.
Fridge is full of crab legs and German chocolate cake.
Stopped by Jane’s apartment after work, around eleven, with table scraps for the dogs. No one was there. Jane’s phone went straight to voicemail.
* * *
My lawyer files an emergency motion to remove Gracie from the apartment in Perrysville. Gracie stays with me until Jane moves in with her mom, and we start sharing custody again.
DECEMBER 2009
Jane is hospitalized after crashing her car at 3:00 A.M. Gracie was home sleeping. Her mother didn’t know Jane had left.
Jane’s mother lives in Evan’s City, a small town in Butler County. Both The Crazies and Night of the Living Dead were filmed there. About a week after the car accident, I head up for Gracie’s Christmas pageant. I step into the church basement, holding the puzzle I wrapped in the parking lot. Inside, I see Jane with a bag of frozen vegetables pressed against her cheek, sitting at a card table, drinking cider from a straw. I sit across from her, and she takes away the bag. One eye won’t open, the other is dark red. Blue stitches cross her face like rivers.
Jane says, “I fell asleep at the wheel.” She adjusts the bag. “I could have died.”
I pick at the cracked tabletop under the blinking Christmas lights. There’s a row of staples behind her ear, down along her jawline. I ask what happened.
“I was at a meeting,” she says. “We went for coffee after.”
“And you fell asleep at the wheel.”
Jane sets down the bag and raises her voice. “Why are you being so mean?”
The room goes quiet. I fight the urge to go out for a smoke and instead shuffle over to the tree and put the puzzle with the other gifts. Everyone eases back into conversations about the Steelers.
I grab a coffee and head upstairs for the pageant.
The camera on my phone won’t work, so I try to commit it to memory: my two-year-old daughter with a tinfoil halo, wisps of hair in her eyes. Her voice is soft, almost hoarse. “Joseph,” she says, “we’ve got good news.”
Two pews over, Jane starts crying, says, “They grow up so fast.” Her family consoles her. They all take pictures.
For the finale, the class sings “Jingle Bells.”
Coffee and cookies afterward while Santa passes out gifts.
A woman from the church gives Jane a ham.
Still wearing her halo, Gracie hovers at my knees. The rings under her eyes are as dark as mine. “Mommy hurt her face, but she’ll be better soon,” she says. “Me and Gram prayed while she was at the doctor.”
I pull her shoulder close to my hip.
“Daddy, I don’t like Santa.”
“I don’t either.”
“Hold me.”
I lift Gracie up, she grabs my neck, and I watch her mother.
By Easter she’ll be bloated and strung-out. But right now she’s as thin as the branches scraping against the stained glass. Jane pulls the bag from her face, and a circle of parents step back when she shows off her scars. That sky-blue thread holding everything together.
SUMMER 2014
In the meeting room, I sit in the corner by the door so I can leave if anyone starts talking about Jesus. The lights are dim. Next to me there’s a pile of donated clothes on a folding table. I stare at the holes in the lace of a skimpy nightgown, while someone shares about gratitude or God, or maybe triggers.
As the hour passes I hear stories: a stolen car traded for $20 worth of heroin. Gold teeth pulled out with pliers to pay for crack that turned out to be fake. Months spent in a condemned house in McKees Rocks, high on meth, torturing a dog chained up in the basement. Kicking dope in the back of a van. Copping psych meds in Shadyside when the insurance runs out.
In the opposite corner of the room, by the literature rack, there’s a new girl chewing on her shirt sleeve. She fidgets in her chair and stares at the chipped tile floor. The preppy kid
