Heroine(42)

I’ve already slept most of the daylight away, and the shower boiled away any residual sleepiness. It’s a wet spring day, the kind where you curl up in your bed with earbuds and a laptop, find something to sling on Netflix and commit to being lazy. That’s what normal teenagers would do, anyway. I end up cruising the obituaries again, but this time I’m in the archives.

I know Edith’s last name from her mailbox—Holmbach—and that her husband was named Bob. I find him on the second try—forgetting that Bob is short for Robert—and learn that he died at the age of forty-five, from an aneurysm.

“Oh, Edith,” I say quietly, scrolling past the list of surviving family members, her son and grandchildren still alive at the time. Edith had chosen to publish their wedding picture alongside the obit.

She looks young, confident, happy. Her face is unlined and her hair magnificently large, everything about her broadcasting that she’s on her way up. She doesn’t suspect that all she’s going to do in life is cross the river, trade West Virginia for Ohio, and sell prescription pills to teenagers to supplement her income and—I think—her family.

Bob, too, seems to think things are going to turn out okay. He looks proud, both in the woman he’s married and who he himself is. I recognize the suit he’s wearing, having been pressed up against it when it was Luther inside those powder-blue sleeves. I minimize the screen quickly, a bubble in my throat that refuses to either rise or pop, all my happiness of the morning evaporated.

I’ve used that man’s towels. Shit, I’ve used his toilet. Neither of the people in this picture have any business knowing me, and I’ve got no claim on their lives, or any reason to read about his death. I pull the browser back up, ready to erase my history and hopefully this morbid curiosity along with it, but accidentally refresh the page instead, and recognize a name in the new obits.

Betsy Vellon.

I know for a fact that one of the lines that went up my nose last night was courtesy of Betsy, and that whatever Edith’s legal prescription is, it’s more than likely all in her bloodstream a few days after she gets it filled. There’s no way she can keep up with her own habit and supply the rest of us.

Jesus, habit. I just said that word like it fits one of us, or all of us.

I want to close the browser window, close my eyes, not look at anything else, but there are more names today. The recently dead stare me down, and I can’t not see them, or the words printed next to their pictures, in stark black and white. Some of the obituaries stick to the euphemisms—suddenly, unexpectedly, tragically—but more are using stark language, not open to interpretation. Addiction. Opioids. Heroin.

I snap the laptop shut, fear spiking adrenaline in my veins. I call Josie, who answers on the first ring.

“Hey, baby doll, nobody calls anymore. Text me if—”

“Betsy Vellon’s dead,” I interrupt her.

There’s a pause, followed by what I think is the sound of her shifting around in bed, where she probably went as soon as she got home. “Wait—who?”

“Betsy Vellon,” I say, more slowly, realizing that her speech is slow and she might have kept last night’s party going into today.

“Do we, like, know her or something?”

“Betsy Vellon,” I say again, though the words apparently don’t carry the same weight with her as they do with me. “Edith’s friend? One of the people she gets the . . .” I drop my voice, aware that my volume has risen with every repetition of Betsy’s name. I crack my door and peek into the hallway, but Mom’s door is still closed.

“The Oxy?” Josie supplies. “Shit.”

“Yeah,” I say.

“You know what this means, right?”

The truth is, I don’t—other than the fact that me, Edith, Josie, Luther, and Derrick have all been cut off.

“It means Edes is going to drag me to another fucking funeral.”

I count out what I’ve got left from Ronald Wagner. It’s not much. Five 80s, which will only get me through a couple days, and that’s only if I decrease my dosage. I slide the pills back into the bottle, my body crashing after the rush from seeing Betsy’s name. I’m tired, and overwhelmed, my emotions going someplace that not even the memory of Josie’s laugh or Luther’s arm can follow. I’ve almost drifted off into something I’d forgotten existed—a natural sleep—when Mom knocks on the door.

“Late night?” she asks. She’s perky and smiling, thrilled that I have friends.

“Yeah,” I say.

“Don’t forget you’ve got dinner with your dad and Devra and your baby brother tonight.”

Baby brother. I’m suddenly angry at the phrase, all my anxiety and fear coupling together to lash out at the idea of him.

“He’s not actually my brother,” I snap. “I mean, I don’t even know what to call him. My half adopted brother? And what’s Dad if he’s not married to you and we’re not actually related? What’s Devra? My adopted dad’s second wife?”

Mom’s face is going hard, the way it does right before she’s either going to start crying or start yelling. I have no idea which one to expect, but I keep going, all my frustration finding a target in my family, or the closest version of that I have.

“Why do you have to pretend to be so happy for him?”