Memoirs Aren't Fairytales (20 page)

“This is very common, you know,” she said. “A lot of women have a change of heart right before the abortion.”

I hated that word.

“And they turn into wonderful mothers,” she said.

I put my shirt on and thanked her. I paid the seventy-five dollar doctor fee at the desk and took the train home.

I sat on our couch again with my feet on the coffee table. Sunshine still wasn't home yet. My stomach gurgled, shooting gas into my chest. That was the baby, I thought. Kicking the heroin out of its little body like I was going to.

I'd never had a reason to quit dope before. And now the reason was in my belly. That little bean-shaped blob was going to grow into something special. A good student, maybe even a journalist or a doctor. And when my baby got old enough, I'd share my story and how I got clean when I found out I was pregnant.

“Mommy quit heroin because of you,” I'd say. “I loved you so much and didn't want to hurt you.”

I rubbed my palm across my stomach.

“Where are we going to live now?” I asked my belly. “Should we move home to grandma and grandpa's house?”

I didn't want to live in Maine, but living with Sunshine wouldn't be good for the baby or me. I needed to eat healthy and drink lots of water. At least that was what the printouts said, the ones the secretary at the clinic gave me.

I could move in with Claire. She ate three meals a day. And maybe I could get a part-time job to help her with groceries and rent. I had twenty-five weeks to plan until the baby was born.

The dope I'd bought that morning was on the coffee table by my feet, staring at me. I'd shot five bags before going to the clinic, and I had five left. That was enough for a good nod. My last nod. And then I was going to be a mother. There was a new feeling inside me that I'd never felt before. A feeling that was stronger than the love I had for heroin.

The five wax-paper packets with their stamped emblems—a skull and crossbones—were lined up on the table. I opened each one slowly and dumped the powder onto a spoon. The spoon was caked with resin, all black and dirty. I took the orange cap off the rig and filled the syringe. My foot was bruised and the tattooed fireworks were spotted with needle marks. In the middle of the inked Boston skyline, there was an open hole and a bump under my skin. The rig stabbed one of the buildings. I drew blood into the chamber and emptied it into my vein.

In my nod, I was sitting in the park with my daughter on my lap. She had blue eyes like me, and her brown curly hair was in pigtails. She had pink pouting lips and tiny ears with pierced lobes. She was talking and laughing, and bouncing. I understood what she was saying even though she had a hard time pronouncing her r's and th's.

She touched my face with her little hand. “Nose,” she said, touching my nose. “Lips,” she said and moved her fingers down to my mouth. “Tummy,” she said and patted my stomach.

“Yes, baby,” I said. “You came from mommy's tummy.”

“Wet mama, diaper full.”

I felt her butt and it was wet. She must have leaked through her diaper. My pants were wet too. Not wet, but soaked and it didn't look like pee. It was thick and bloody.

I stood her up and turned her around. Her butt was covered in blood, and my hands and shirt were too.

My eyes shot open from the nod, and I looked down. I didn't see anything on the front of my jeans, but my underwear felt wet. I went into the bathroom and pulled down my pants. My underwear was covered in blood, and when I sat on the toilet, something came out of me, something tissue-like with clots of blood.

I reached for my cell phone and called the clinic. I told the secretary what was happening and she told me to go the ER.

“This is normal, right? My last period or something?” I asked.

“No, Ms. Brown, I'm afraid it's not normal. It sounds like you had a miscarriage.”

That wasn't possible. In my heroin dream, I saw my baby. She was there in my arms and she called me “Mama.” I was going to be a mother.

“I was wrong, there's not that much blood and…”

But there was a lot of blood. The toilet bowl was stained red.

“The doctor will check you out and perform a D&C if need be.”

“What's that?” I asked.

I heard her say words—cervix and uterus and vacuuming—and I hung up the phone.

I got in the shower to clean myself off. Blood ran down my legs and into the tub and swirled around the drain and turned pink as it mixed with the water. Pink for my little girl.

There was three hundred and twenty-five dollars in my wallet. I'd stop at Richard's before going to the hospital and spend it all on heroin. I'd get high and forget this ever happened. And if Richard asked about the abortion, I'd tell him I had it this morning.

It wasn't a lie. My baby was dead. But I'd killed her. I'd given myself an abortion.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Over the years, most of my heroin dreams had been action-filled. I'd dreamt about being in planes and helicopters, flying like a bird, swimming in the ocean, and running through fields of flowers. In all of them, I'd always been alone. That was except for a few, like the one where Sunshine and I had been at Willy Wonka's factory, or when I had been with my baby girl, and the one I was having now. I was sitting in the back of a raft, floating down a river. And in front of me sat several people, men and women, even a child, but I didn't recognize them.

Woods surrounded both sides of the river, and the sun was shining above. It was my favorite time of year. The air was crisp, and the leaves were different shades of reds, oranges, and yellows.

Water splashed into my mouth, tasting sweet like candy.

Waves rocked the boat. The raft weaved from side to side to avoid hitting the boulders that stuck out of the water.

My bangs flew into my face, and my lifejacket fit snugly around my stomach.

We came to a pool of water with mountains of rock on three sides. The raft pulled up to a wooden dock. The child stepped onto the dock first, and the women followed, and then the men. I was last. I reached for the handle bar on the dock, and one of the women slapped my hand. She pushed the raft and I drifted away from them.

The boat came to a dead stop in the middle of the pool. The water was calm. There weren't any oars.

“Help,” I yelled to the people on the dock. “Throw me a rope.”

Claire appeared on the dock. Somehow, she was alone and everyone else was gone. Then my parents and Michael showed up and stood behind her. By Claire's side were Sunshine, Richard, Eric, Renee, Que and Raul. Tim's dreadlocks poked Eric's face, and Frankie's pot belly squeezed in between Sunshine and Claire.

“Claire,” I shouted. “Come get me.”

They all put their hands in the air and waved. And then they disappeared.

I put my hands over my head, getting ready to dive and swim to the dock. Just then, the waves returned, and the current moved the boat. The wall of rock opened into a tunnel, and the raft floated through.

At the end of the tunnel, I saw it. The peak of an enormous waterfall. The boat stopped at the tip of the drop and teetered along its edge. Would the raft make the drop? Would I?

I wanted to jump off the edge, glide through the air and feel the water spray over my face.

I moved to the front of the boat, bent my knees, and took a deep breath. My throat was tight. And suddenly, it was hard to breathe.

From somewhere up above, I heard my name.

“Nicole, Nicole,” a woman said. Her voice was familiar. “Open your eyes.”

A fish jumped out of the water and stared at me. It was yellow and blue, and its fin was pointy like a shark.

I heard her voice again.

“Nicole, baby, we love you,” she said.

Something hard was in my mouth. I looked down and didn't see anything except water. But I could feel it when I touched my lips. It was a long tube.

I tugged on it, and the tube loosened and moved.

“Nicole, no,” the woman said. “Michael, call a nurse.”

I yanked on the tube again.

The raft rocked back and forth over the ledge.

Hands touched mine and they tried to pry my fingers off the tube.

I gagged as the tube came up and out of my mouth.

The raft and river disappeared, and all I saw was darkness. Was the dream over?

Were my eyes open? I touched my lids and they were closed, so I opened them.

The light was blinding.

A needle was in my wrist, attached to another tube that ran along my arm and into a machine. A blanket was pulled up to my stomach. And from my stomach to my chest was a white and blue, dotted—shirt?

Four sets of eyes looked down at me. Mom and Dad. Michael and Claire.

My throat was so dry. “Where am I?” I asked and coughed.

“Mass General,” Mom said.

“Is that a town?” I asked.

“No, honey,” Mom said. “Mass General is a hospital in Boston.”

A hospital? Had I been hit by the train? Motorcycle? Car? Did I still have my legs? I reached down and touched my thighs. Legs were still there and both arms too.

“You overdosed, Nicole,” Claire said.

I overdosed? But that was impossible. I knew how much to shoot and how much my body could handle, and Richard didn't sell junk that was laced or cut. Though I'd been shooting a lot more since the abortion—that was what I called it anyway. Six bags, six or seven or eight times a day for the last six months. I used more than Sunshine, and she was a vet.

“Cole, you almost died,” Michael said.

What happened to the raft? I wanted to be back on the raft, teetering along the edge of the waterfall. Anything would be better than the looks on their faces.

I closed my eyes.

When I woke up, there was a tray in front of me with apple juice, water, broth, pudding, and Jell-O.

Mom took a spoon off the tray. She scooped up a cube of Jell-O and held the spoon up to my mouth.

I wasn't hungry.

“It'll give you strength,” she said.

My eyes shut, I couldn't keep them open.

A man in a white jacket was standing next to me. He was reading the machines behind my bed and writing on a chart.

“You're awake,” he said.

I wasn't sure what I was.

He asked if I wanted to talk in private and I said yes. He turned around and said something to Michael and my parents and waited for them to leave before he spoke.

“You're a medical miracle, Nicole,” he said. “With all the damage you've done to your body, I don't know how you're alive right now.”

He said on Tuesday evening I'd been admitted to the hospital and had gone into cardiac and respiratory arrest from the heroin I'd injected.

“What's today?” I asked.

“Saturday.”

I'd been asleep for four days? I didn't even feel dope sick, which was strange. I thought.

He said I had grand mal seizures throughout the first night, and my organs began to shut down, so I was put on a ventilator.

“Your body is weak, but it'll repair itself as long as you stop using heroin,” he said. “If you don't, I'm afraid the damage will be progressive and eventually fatal.”

He had gray hair and wore glasses, and had probably been a doctor for longer than I'd been alive. It wasn't that I didn't believe what he said. I saw the damage when I looked in the mirror. I just didn't care.

“In addition, you're malnourished, dehydrated, and your teeth are decaying from regurgitating the acid in your stomach,” he said.

I touched the back of my mouth with my tongue and felt the hole where my molar used to be.

“Do you vomit regularly, unintentionally or self-induced?”

“I'm not bulimic,” I said.

He wrote something down in the chart. “A side effect of longterm heroin use is vomiting.”

The queasiness and lightheaded feeling had stopped after the abortion, but the puking hadn't.

He asked if I had any other questions, and I asked when I could go home. He said in a couple of days.

“You were given another chance,” he said.

I moved my hand to my chest, a couple inches from my heart. The bullet hole had healed, but it had left a scar.

He walked to the door and turned around. His hand went in the air and his finger pointed at me. “I don't want to ever see you in my ER again,” he said and left the room.

Claire came in a few minutes later. I was glad to see her and not my parents. She sat on the bed and put my hand on her leg, covering it with hers. “I thought I'd lost you forever,” she said.

“I'm still here.”

But not for much longer. Tomorrow morning, I was going to leave the hospital regardless of what the doctor said. I wanted a shot with a new rig and seven bags in the chamber.

“If I hadn't gone to your room to check on you, you wouldn't be here,” she said.

Was I supposed to thank her for saving my life? Did I want to be saved? I was tired, I knew that much. Tired of panhandling, tired of boosting, tired of turning tricks, tired of being short on cash, and tired of going to Richard's.

I was tired of thinking about how I'd murdered my baby.

Was I tired of using? I was tired of chasing that first high—the one in Que's bedroom and the one in the McDonald's bathroom. No matter how many bags I shot, I was never going to catch it.

“How would you feel if you came into my room and found me on the floor, convulsing, with foam coming out of my mouth?” she asked.

She touched my forehead, brushing the hair off my face. Her fingers glided down to my cheeks, and I thought of all the boils and whiteheads her fingertips were caressing.

She cupped my chin in her palm. “I really want you to think about that and consider how I felt when I found you,” she said. “You wouldn't do that to me again, would you?”

And then she left my room.

Outside the door, I heard my mom say, “Did you tell her how you found her on the floor, foaming at the mouth?”

There was silence.

“Do you think it scared her into going to rehab?” Dad asked.

More silence.

“Thanks for everything you've done, Claire,” Mom said. “You saved our daughter's life.”

My parents and Michael came into my room, and I pretended to be asleep. Their breathing was loud, and their feet squeaked when they walked towards me.