Long Bright River(23)

It felt, to me, like a slap.

I remember, with clarity, the first time I found pills in that space. There were perhaps six of them, small and blue, contained in a small Ziploc bag. Incredibly, I recall holding them up and feeling a certain amount of relief that they seemed to be professionally made, imprinted with two neat letters on one side and with a number on the other, well formed and sincere-looking. When I asked Kacey about them, she was reassuring: they were something like extra-strength Tylenol, she told me. Very safe. A boy named Albie had a father who had a prescription for them. A lot of fathers in our neighborhood did: they were construction workers, or ex-longshoremen, or laborers of other kinds who had used their bodies hard all their lives, had ground bones and twisted muscles into painful nubs and knots. It was the year 2000. OxyContin was a four-year-old medication, doled out liberally by doctors, received gratefully by patients. It was purported to be less addictive than prior generations of opioid medication—and therefore nobody knew, yet, to be afraid. Why do you even want it? I remember asking Kacey, and she said, I don’t know. For fun.

What she didn’t tell me was that they were snorting it.

The other activity Kacey was getting into, at this time, was sex. This I found out secondhand, from a cruel tenth-grader I overheard bragging about it to his friends. When I confronted my sister, Kacey simply shrugged it off, saying nonchalantly that he was telling the truth.

At that time, I had never even been kissed.

The two of us pulled farther and farther away from one another. Without her, my loneliness became outrageous, a low hum, an extra limb, a tin can that dragged behind me wherever I went. I missed Kacey, missed her presence in the house. Selfishly, I also missed the efforts Kacey made to draw me out socially. To bring me to parties. To invite me along with her to friends’ houses. Mickey was just saying, Kacey used to begin, when we were younger, and then would accredit to me some witticism or observation that she had actually come up with herself. Now, when Kacey saw me at school, she just nodded. More often, she wasn’t at school at all.

On several occasions, I hopefully placed messages for my sister in our hiding place. I knew it was childish, even as I did it, and yet I persisted. Small notes containing anecdotes about my day, about Gee, about some other member of our family who had done something or other I found amusing or annoying enough to recount. I longed for her to notice me, to come back, to reverse her course and return to the childhood activities we had once enjoyed together.

But each time, the note I left for her went unreturned.



* * *



—

The only occasions, in those days, on which Kacey seemed truly to notice me were when I spoke of Officer Cleare.

Kacey didn’t like him.

He’s full of himself, was how she phrased it, or sometimes she called him stuck-up, but I knew even then that her real criticism of him was darker, that my sister sensed something in him that she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, name.

Ew, Kacey said when I talked about him, or anything he liked, which I did with some frequency. In fact, I began so many sentences with Officer Cleare said that finally Gee and Kacey eliminated the phrase from my vocabulary by mimicking me so mercilessly that I became self-conscious. My fascination with him prompted, for my sister and me, a brief role reversal. For once in our lives, it seemed to me that it was Kacey who was concerned about me, and not the other way around.





The first time Kacey overdosed, at sixteen, in that house full of strangers in Kensington, it was Officer Cleare to whom I turned for help and advice.

It was the summer between my junior and senior years of high school. I was seventeen years old at that time, and by then he and I had become very close. Our conversations had expanded: in addition to making recommendations to me and instructing me in various ways, he now also confided in me about problems he himself had faced as a child, problems he was facing in the department, colleagues who were causing him trouble, problems he had with his family. His mother, he feared, had developed a drinking problem after his father died, and she had recently fallen and broken her hip. His sister was a busybody who was always advising him about his life. I listened carefully, nodding, mainly staying quiet. I hadn’t, yet, told him much about my own family. I still preferred listening to talking. Unlike Gee, he seemed to like how serious I was, how thoughtful. He complimented me frequently on my intelligence, on how observant I was, how sharp.

I had recently graduated from being an unpaid member of the PAL’s teen program to a paid counselor in the organization’s summer program for neighborhood kids—which made me, I told myself, an equal to the officers, in certain ways, anyhow. Along with a dozen other employees, I shepherded day-campers from room to room, planning activities, coaching them half-heartedly in sports that I myself didn’t know much about. Really, though, I used the time to talk to Officer Cleare.

The day after the episode in question, I was distraught. I wandered through the PAL building, pale and abstracted, uncertain whether I should be there at all. Maybe, I thought, I should be at home with Kacey, who was in very serious trouble with Gee, and who was probably in withdrawal.

I was standing in the largest room at the PAL, my arms crossed around myself, lost in thought, when I saw Officer Cleare looking at me across a dozen cafeteria tables. There was enforced silence that afternoon because of too many behavioral infractions, and everyone had been instructed to read or draw quietly.