I watch her from my counter right across from the shoes. She always makes it a point to come to my counter even when she doesn’t buy something. But she is forgetful and often buys the same product she bought a day before or returns something she already has. She apologizes so often I begin to call her Mrs. Sorry to myself.
I see the woman during the holiday season, after Mario loses his job. I see her the week one of the clinic doctors catches Mario slipping pills into his shoe. He paces the whole week, yelling and throwing things. He knows he won’t be arrested, because the authorities are already starting to crack down on some of the clinics, inspectors and whatnot, all political he says, which means nothing to me but to him means he won’t be arrested because the clinic won’t call the cops.
But still. He’ll become a patient now, he’ll need to pay for the bottles and doctor shop, just like everybody else. The profit margin smaller. I ask my mother for a little more money so we can invest it, and she asks for what and I say I need new clothes, for work. And I tell Mario I am getting money from my mother, thinking that will make him feel better, one less problem, one way I make things better, and it does a little.
He hugs me and tells me I am the best thing to ever happen to him and it’s so hard for me to let go of that warm cologne embrace, needing this, wanting this so bad.
But the woman: she is back with her husband and they browse the shoes and she does not come to my counter. She just passes by and we make eye contact. We both smile at the same time.
I don’t know when the twenties become forties. I barely notice when the forties become eighties. I do remember my first. Pale pink in my hand, like a tutu, like the one I wore to my dance recital in second grade. Or like the houses in my subdivision, or guava juice from a can, or dusk when the sky eats the sun and traffic stalls and I don’t make it home until pink turns to red, red turns to black.
The first: Mario put the pill in his mouth and the coating turned to jelly. He rubbed it off on his white shirt. Forever we’d be walking around with streaks of Easter-pale on our shirts, baby pink, orange, green. There is something so childlike about this life, ours.
Mario toyed with the pill. He shaved it down—took a hose clamp he’d stolen from an auto store, used it like a cheese grater. The Oxy turned to dust. Mario racked up a line. I knew how to sniff—not that different from the coke, I figured—but this was different, different texture, different taste in the back of my throat. Mario told me not to tilt my head back. And then: I turned to dust. I turned to sitting by the ocean wrapped in towels or sinking into cotton candy clouds, or warm rain washing clean, or holding Mario’s hand, soft and slippery, maybe velvet, maybe maple syrup. No, a guest bathroom. Let me explain.
A memory: Hurricane Andrew, 1992. We crouched into the only room with no windows, the hallway guest bathroom. I don’t think I’d ever been confined in a space so small with my parents. This was before my father’s drinking had gotten as bad as it did, before my mother had lost layers of herself until she was emotionally weightless, onionskin.
Back then there was something like TV love still. Back then there was me, small and shaking each time I heard a crash, a Category 5 wind whip to crush a car beneath a palm, to blow a roof into the night, send a balcony rail sailing. But I wasn’t afraid. Mom smelled like soap, like clean. A candle flickered on the bathroom sink; we’d lost power already. She wore a black nightgown with red flowers, and I thought her the very definition of beauty, womanhood, future me, the person emulated in every game of dress-up.
Dad stoic, patting me on the back. I was so used to seeing him in scrubs or a suit, and plaid pajama pants felt like a sign I’d crossed into a more intimate space, that we’d be a closer family that night. The bathtub was stopped up and filled with water that sparkled in the candlelight. I could see us reflected when I looked up at the bathroom mirror, and I wondered what others saw when they looked at my family. We looked close.
At one point the wind picked up outside and we heard the loud snap of a branch and my parents both hugged me, together. Heroin would take me there. Heroin would be the only time traveler I’d meet in this life. So safe in that warm bubble, that eye of the storm. Everything raging outside, and me, warm and embraced. What does it say about a person when she doesn’t want one of the deadliest hurricanes in Florida history to end?
But I’ll never recover that first time. Or that bathroom. I’ll rack up lines and swear I’ll never mainline, trying to recover that first high. Then buy rigs pretending I’m a diabetes patient needing insulin. Skin-pop, needle into the skin but not hitting a vein, not yet. Share a rig with Mario. I’ll run out of money and the clinics will shutter and the country will catch on and my mother will catch on and the pills will dry up completely so Mario will buy from his boy for way cheaper for that first high. I’ll even knowingly buy pandas or heroin stepped on with fentanyl because anything anything anything. To recover that first high. Nobody telling me it
