Before I Let You Go(35)

“I know you’re a doctor and all, but I know that much better than you do,” she tells me. “Remember when I was at your place on Wilder Street? You dragged me to the methadone clinic yourself before work each day and you watched me take it—I didn’t miss a dose. And then you’d go to work, and I’d score. It gave me no rush, no buzz . . . I did it out of pure, unbreakable habit. I need the rush, so even if I know I’m physically incapable of feeling it, I’ll still chase it as long as there’s breath in my body. Remember that job I had doing web content for the accountants near our house? And I quit after a week? I didn’t quit. I got fired because I took money from the pretty cash for a hit. The best you can hope for from me is that I’ll hide the cravings, because I’ll never beat them.”

“Why are you telling me this, Annie? Is it to shock me, or because you want help?”

“Neither,” she says, and her shoulders slump and she seems to shrink away to nothing in an instant. She gives a heavy, lengthy sigh, then she looks at me and her eyes are glistening with tears. “I guess I just want you to understand. They can chain me to this bed, they can give me methadone, God—they could sedate me out cold. And on some level, I’ll still be thinking of scoring. Before anything else—life or death for me or even my baby—I’ll always be thinking of scoring. That’s who I am now.”

“That is not who you are,” I say flatly. “I don’t ever want to hear you say that again. You can get well—I know you can. You love this baby, Annie. I’ve seen it in your eyes. It’s the only reason you called me at all.”

“I do. I love it so much, it terrifies me,” she admits, and her voice cracks and her face contorts. “I’m so scared I’m going to fuck all of this up.”

“You are not,” I tell her firmly, and I reach into the bag of baby clothes and I withdraw a handful. “Enough of this talk—we’re going to fix this, all of it, bit by bit, piece by piece, we’re going to put your life back together. But this weekend, you and I are going to reconnect—we’re going to put the past two years behind us, and we’re going to have some fun. Starting right now. Look at these booties, Annie. Look at them.” I thrust them toward her, and when she doesn’t reach for them, I toss them onto her belly. They are tiny—I got the premature baby size in everything because we know her baby is very small—and these booties look like they were made for a doll. Annie reaches down with shaking fingers and slips her forefinger under the tie that holds the shoes together. She gives a teary laugh.

“They’re so small.”

“In a few weeks, we’re going to slip those onto the feet of a baby. A baby. Can you imagine its little toes, all snug and warm in there? God, it’s going to be so adorable . . .”

I dump the handful of clothes onto the bed beside Annie’s thighs, and she hesitantly begins to riffle through them. All of the clothes I bought are white or yellow or green, except a single pink-and-blue outfit.

“Do you remember the doll we had at Winterton?” she asks me, and I frown at her and shake my head.

“Doll?”

“Never mind,” she says, and she leans forward suddenly and places her hand over mine. I look at her in surprise, and she squeezes hard and whispers, “Thank you, Lexie.”

Our eyes lock. This mess of a woman is what’s left of my baby sister. She looks twenty years older than she is, and I’ve never understood how it came to this, and maybe I never will.

I love her anyway. Near or far, broken or whole, I love my sister more than anything else in the world, and somehow, no matter what she does or what comes between us, I always will. There is no off switch to the love between sisters; no way to pause it, no way to destroy it. Even when I pushed her away two years ago, I did it only because I thought it was the best thing I could do for her at the time.

Oh, what I wouldn’t give to make her life whole. What I wouldn’t give to see her thriving and healthy and functional. What I wouldn’t give to see her at peace.

If only there was a way to free up all of that beautiful mental energy that she expends thinking constantly about that fucking high. She could change the world with the potential wasting away in that mind—that wild imagination, that crisp creativity. Annie Vidler was never meant to become this disaster. She should have been a poet or a novelist or a philosopher or a journalist, and instead of sitting by her bedside now lamenting the world she inhabits, I should have been watching her win awards and enjoy a life of space to create.

It’s too much and it’s too heartbreaking. I wrestle my thoughts back to the present, and I point to the cinnamon bun that Annie is holding.

“Eat it,” I tell her after I clear my throat. “We’re going to play Monopoly.”

We weren’t allowed to play board games in the community—someone had decreed them as worldly at some point—but in the years before, Annie and I played all of the time. I usually threw the game for Annie because if I didn’t, she didn’t stand a chance of winning. She had this terrible habit of buying every property she landed on—no strategy, always relied on luck.

Typical Annie.

I had a strategy for Monopoly, one honed over years of games with Dad after Annie went to bed. Dad played an ad hoc game much like Annie—and I never got tired of the way he would throw his hands up in surrender and grumble about losing, but there was a gleam in his eye, as if he secretly loved losing to me.