Don’t Let Me Go(88)

“What was she taking? What did you find?”

“Oxy, mostly. A little hydrocodone.”

“I’m not familiar.”

“Thank God. Don’t familiarize yourself. Very heavy-duty painkillers. Big abuse potential. Oxycontin is the stuff they call hillbilly heroin. It’ll string you out fast for a legal prescription medication.”

“Oh, she has it legally?”

“No, she doesn’t. But doctors give it, anyway. They just mostly know better than to give it to her. No, she’s getting this on the street. If I knew where, that’d be helpful. But I don’t. Could be anywhere. It’s not exactly what you’d call a rare commodity.”

They sat in silence for a long moment. Too long, by Billy’s internal clock.

“Grace thinks Rayleen will be able to get her right back again if the county takes her away,” Billy said dully.

“Somebody ought to tell her the damn truth, then. Once she’s in the system, she’s gone. Oh, her mom could get her back. But she’d have to prove she was clean over a long haul. At least a year, most likely. It’s not a speedy process. Girl deserves to know the truth. It’s her future. Maybe not right now, though, because maybe we still got a shot. But if we know they’re coming for her, she ought to know what she’s getting into.”

“So you think we still have a chance,” Billy said, reaching into that figurative pool of stinking garbage, and grabbing the one treasure worth salvaging.

Yolanda twisted her long hair around one finger. A nervous habit, maybe.

“I got one little trick up my sleeve. I got five vacation days to draw on. So I’m gonna be here on the day this county lady is supposed to come back, plus two days on either side. I’m gonna be sitting down there making sure she’s clean.”

“That’s great!” Billy piped, startling himself with his own volume.

“Eh,” Yolanda said. “It’s weaker than you think. I can’t sit on her if she tries to go out and buy. I can try to talk her out of it, but I can’t tie her up. Not legally. Alls I can do is hope she’d be too ashamed to do that right in front of me. Plus it’s got another weak spot. Well, a couple, actually. First off, the county lady said she’d give it another month. But maybe she means twenty-six days or maybe she means thirty-five days. You never know with them, and that’s on purpose, I’m sure. She didn’t exactly help us out by making an appointment. But let’s say she shows up right in that nice little window when I’m with Eileen. So she’s all clean, and that’s good, and nobody throws Grace in the system. Great, right? You think the county’s gonna leave it at that? You think this lady’s too stupid to know an addict might be clean one day and loaded the next? You think this is the first she ever met one? No, she’ll be back to check. Regular. So all this effort, and I don’t really know what we’re getting. Just maybe a few more weeks. Unless Eileen gets her ass back in the program and sticks, this is all for nothing. Unless she gets with it again, there’s really only one way this can go.”

Billy sat still for a long time, just breathing. He held a question in there somewhere, struggling its way up through his roiling middle, but he couldn’t yet gather the strength to ask it.

“Sorry,” Yolanda said, and rose to leave.

“Wait,” Billy said. “I just want to ask you one more thing. What are the odds? I mean, not in this specific case, because obviously nobody knows that, but what I meant was…what are the odds in general, do you think? What percentage of addicts really get clean and stay that way? Do you know?”

Yolanda paused a minute with her hand on the door.

“Bout three in a hundred,” she said.

Then she let herself out.

? ? ?

It was nearly two in the morning, though Billy didn’t know its place in clock time until later, after he was awake.

At the very bottom of a dream cycle, he stood uncertainly and looked about himself, seeing nothing but wings on every side. Wide, white, richly feathered. And absolutely still.

It unnerved him, that they should be so still. He felt taunted.

“Flap!” he screamed at the wings, when he could no longer bear the suspense.

The wings remained still.

Billy lost his temper with them.

“Flap, damn you! You know you want to! You know you’re going to! Get it the hell over with and flap already!”

The wings continued to hang in motionless suspension. But something made a rapping noise.

“Billy!” the wings said, distantly.

No. It wasn’t the wings speaking at all. It was Grace.

Billy opened his eyes. He lay still a moment, staring at the cracked off-white plaster of his ceiling in the dim light, trying to clear his head and return from the dream.

“Billy!”

This time he knew. It was clearly not a dream in any way. It was Grace’s hissing voice, a loud stage whisper through his door.

He tied on his robe and stumbled his way to the door to let her in.

“What are you doing up?” he asked, looking down at her.

She stood on the cold hardwood of the hallway, wearing a new-looking blue nightshirt and shifting from one bare foot to the other.

“What’s wrong?” she asked. “Why were you shouting?”

“Oh. Was I? It was nothing. Just a bad dream. You can go back to bed now. Everything’s fine.”