What she did care about was when the pill mill shut down and Dr. Redding lost his license and came under indictment. There were two months of full-on panic when she was rationing her stash, scraping together money to buy from some of the dealers in town. Later, she’d learn the term “junky luck,” which perfectly described what happened to her. Dr. Redding gets shut down and Hailey walks back into her life with a proposition.
“I’m getting married,” she told her.
“Congratulations.” They had this exchange in La Paloma, New Canaan’s most mediocre Mexican. “To who.” Not that it mattered. The last thing she wanted to do was catch up with a childhood chum. She’d crushed one of her last pills that morning.
“Eric. Frye.”
“That black kid? Wasn’t he a little weirdo?”
“We reconnected. He’s actually a great guy.”
“What happened to Eaton?”
“We broke up. A while ago now.” She looked sick that Kaylyn had forgotten this fascinating piece of trivia about her dating life. Like a goddamn breakup with Danny Eaton was any kind of monument in time.
“Okay. Cool. Congrats, Kowalczyk.” She sipped a Corona and thought of choking this girl on Curt Moretti’s dick. The memory brought her a lot of satisfaction.
“I’m pregnant,” Hailey said. “And also, we’re just in a tough spot right now. Both Eric and I have so much student debt, and he’s substitute teaching, and that’s like—you know, he might as well be working for free.”
“Yeah, it’s hard times. They’re calling it the Great Recession, if you don’t catch the news.”
“Well. So.” She fidgeted with a fork. “What I wanted to ask you is. I work at the retirement home.”
“I know. My grandma died in there, remember?”
The waiter arrived with their meals. Hailey left hers untouched.
“What I want to know is—I have access to a lot of stuff. Like a lot of different prescriptions. I know a couple of the nurses already do it.”
Junky luck.
For three years, this worked about as brilliantly as one could hope. Hailey made some money while Kaylyn got her fix and a modest income. She could stay in her fog undisturbed, passing the days watching television, drinking nights away in the bars, walking the railroad tracks out over the Cattawa so that she felt like she was traveling to distant lands, like she didn’t miss anyone or regret anything. Like all the awful things she was responsible for were the faraway memories of another woman.
Then in 2011, not long after Ben overdosed, Kowalczyk pulled the plug on their operation. A girl had been caught stealing prescription pills at Eastern Star, and she was going to jail. “Eric and I are doing well. He’s working, we don’t need this anymore.”
“You don’t understand,” said Kaylyn. “These people I’m working with, you can’t just walk away from it.”
“I don’t have a choice, Kay. I’ve got a daughter—I’m not going to jail for fencing prescriptions for a few extra bucks. I’m sorry.” Kowalczyk had gotten so fat. Kaylyn hated the bloated look of her face, like she’d just had her wisdom teeth out.
What Kaylyn failed to mention was that she actually owed the Flood brothers a bit of money. She’d been holding on to more of their supply but taking the payments with promises to supply the rest of the pills later. Instead of paying these local dealers back, Kaylyn instead kept buying more from them on the false pretense that her supply would return. So she was good for it. Owing a bit of money became owing a lot of money. She went smurfing in drugstores to try to pay it down, but there was only so much pseudoephedrine you could get away with purchasing at the few locations she could walk to. Then these guys cut her off. That’s when she started catching rides down to Columbus where heroin cost as much as a six-pack. She snorted it, smoked it, promised herself she’d never inject it, and within a few months was shooting it between her toes.
Amos Flood, who she’d known since Elmwood Elementary, came to her, and very apologetically put it to her like this: “We need you to do us a favor. It’ll be later this year, maybe summer. You do this, all your debt’s forgiven. You don’t, well—you gotta think about if anyone would even miss you.”
She was to make a trip to New Orleans to pick up a package. On top of that, she hitchhiked to Planned Parenthood in Mansfield to have something checked and found out she was pregnant.
Coming down from the fix she’d allowed herself in an Arby’s bathroom—slumped against the grimy tile, all terrors forgotten, all nightmares vanquished—she realized she had nowhere to go. She couldn’t go back to where she’d been staying. The father of her child had kicked her out because she was dragging him back into this life. Her own mother wouldn’t let her through the front door even if she were bleeding to death on the lawn.
She found herself ringing the doorbell at Hailey Frye’s. When she answered, Kaylyn could see into the warm light of the dining room, where Eric (bearded, so much older than she remembered him, but still with a boy’s cheeks and the same wide, freckled nose) and a dark-haired, light-skinned little girl peered at her with curiosity. The kid demanded to know who it was.
“It’s Aunt Kay,” Hailey told her. “Hold on.” She stepped outside and closed the door, regarded her with crossed arms: I’ll listen to you, but I won’t let you near my family.
“I’m in so much trouble, Hailey.” Kaylyn started crying. She told her story with snot pouring out of her nose. She spilled everything except for what Amos Flood was asking of her.
Hailey went back inside to get her car keys. She came out with a piece of fried chicken and made Kaylyn eat it while they sat in her car. When Kaylyn finished the chicken, Hailey wrapped the bones in a napkin and held them on her lap.
“It seems like you think you have no choices, Kay, but you really only have one. You get clean.”
Kaylyn held her mouth in her hand. She’d never wanted to kill herself before, but she thought about it then. She definitely had enough junk left to OD. She could hike out to the Brew or Jericho Lake and put it straight into the pit of her elbow.
“I’ll drive you right now,” said Hailey. “I know a treatment place in Columbus. I’ll help pay for it and you can stay there as long as you need. That’s your only option. Then we can talk about what you want to do about the baby. Who knows, maybe that little gal will save you. Maybe she’ll give you a reason to make up for everything.”
Kaylyn wept harder. When Hailey guessed at the sex, she saw, vividly, what a daughter of hers might look like.
“There’s no way I’ll make it,” she said. “There’s absolutely, one hundred percent no way.”
Hailey pulled her into her arms, rested her chin on Kaylyn’s head. Her friend’s body was warm and soft, a mother’s body. “Of course you will.”
“Why are you doing this?” Kaylyn demanded, wanting to strangle her. “I’ve never done anything for you. I’ve never been anything but a fucking monster to anyone.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” said Hailey. “You had the only Teddy Ruxpin on Rainrock Road, and you let me play with him all the time.”
She didn’t find this funny.
“I can’t take back what I did. Not now. I’ve lost myself.”
Hailey pulled back, looked at her with a severity, but also a kind of demented humor, a Look at where we find ourselves in this grand cosmic joke sort of face. She took Kaylyn’s gaunt cheeks in warm, moist hands. “It’s never too late to start over. You and I know that.”
“Why?” Kaylyn pleaded. “Why do you keep helping me?”