Rock Angel (Rock Angel Series Book 1) (50 page)

After a while she had to take two pills a day, eighty milligrams, to maintain the flat, murky haze. When she got up to three tablets a day, though, the effect of the ’done changed. It made her high. For the first time in months, she was up instead of down, feeling good instead of feeling suicidal or, at best, not feeling anything. The world felt right to her, finally, like she could go through this and come out the other side stronger and wiser.

But the well-being came with a price. She’d eaten deeply into her take-homes and she’d be fucked, just fucked, if she ran out. She tried reducing, but the withdrawal set in. The thirty milligrams she was supposed to be taking did nothing now and she couldn’t get more from the clinic, not until her prescription warranted it. She’d forgotten, somehow, what she was: a junkie with an addict’s tolerance.

She called Jeff. “I need something,” she told him, after an exchange of pleasantries. “Can you help me?”

“Sure,” he said without a trace of judgment. “Are you looking for ’done or dope?”

Methadone or heroin. He knew her preferences, of course. “’Done.”

“Okay,” he said. “I’m leaving on a tour tomorrow, but I can set something up before I go. Just one thing, Shan. I’d prefer it if Quinn didn’t know. I’m pretty sure he’d fire me if he did.”

“We’re on the same page then.” She tried to laugh, but it came out sounding like a sob. “What I do is none of his business. You know we’re separated, right?”

“Yes, I do,” Jeff said. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” she replied. “Just hook me up.”

“All right. Let me make a few calls.”

Jeff called back inside of an hour. He had someone—did she want it delivered? Absolutely not. Shan stuffed her hair under a baseball cap so she wouldn’t be recognized and drove to North Hollywood to meet her new connection, Big Black, who in fact was an average-sized white guy. She began meeting him every few days to pick up methadone. It helped for a time, but before long her mind was turning to something she knew was a surefire cure for whatever ailed.

A little piece of rock. A thin trail of smoke. One hit and all the pain…it would float away. She had a standing order with Big Black by then and, the next time she saw him, she changed it from ’done to H.

She was very careful. Oda was around constantly, watching her with those eyes. She had her own quarters in the guest house, but for a while she’d been sleeping in one of the spare bedrooms in the main building. Shan didn’t comment, glad to have a responsible adult in the house for Angie.

When she thought about it, which she tried not to do, she was shocked by how quickly it had happened. All that work, nearly four years of being clean—gone, like the whiff of smoke that rose off the foil after she applied the flame. She couldn’t believe she was back here, and so fast. She’d slipped, true…was that all it took?

But she knew it was. She’d known it all along, really. No one knew about slips better than she did but, regardless of what she knew, she was right back in the abyss: living for the next fix, planning her day around dosing, arranging her life based on the waxing and waning of the drug in her bloodstream.

In a way it was comforting, the systematic, hour-to-hour orchestration of her time. Without it, she’d still be foundering in a sea of pain and pointlessness. The H was stable, a predictable entity in the formless blob of her existence. It gave her structure and a focus, like funeral arrangements after a death.

She wasn’t inclined to stop but, even if she was, she couldn’t go to a clinic. She’d test dirty and the stakes were so high now. What if they called social services? And what about Quinn? If he found out she’d relapsed, he’d take Angie in a second; she knew he would. So she kept managing it, dosing just enough during the day to keep the withdrawal away. Her bedroom was redolent with the scent of incense, triggering an olfactory déjà vu of her old room in SoHo.

The nights were still bad, laden with knife-in-the-chest regrets. She ruminated about the love she’d lost, the music she wasn’t making, the beautiful daughter whose care she now left largely to Oda, afraid to sully her with the same hands that boiled heroin. Just the thing, H, to numb the pain and the shame and the paralyzing fear of what the fuck she was supposed to do with the rest of her life.

That fear was always there, insidious as a percolating malignancy. Every morning when she woke, the jones was accompanied by remorse that cursed her for being a lame-ass junkie who’d had more good fortune than any ten people deserved and blown every bit of it.

It was when she spent time with Angie—when she held her and kissed her and cuddled her—that was when she hated herself the most. She’d look down at her, her perfect little girl with her own face and Quinn’s eyes, and be filled with shame by the love she saw there. There was a soundtrack in her head now, a constant looping chorus of castigation and self-loathing:
not good enough, never good enough, bad mother, bad wife, bad person, weak, stupid, worthless junkie…

One Thursday night in September, Oda tapped at her bedroom door just as Shan was beginning her nightly dose. She jumped, startling Sugaree who was napping on the dog bed beside their California king. Just hers now, Shan supposed, as she stuffed the foil and tooter in the drawer of the nightstand. “What is it, Oda?”

Oda pushed the door open. She looked drawn, her brown skin ashy, without its usual robust bloom. She’d had some dental work that day and it looked like she was feeling some pain. “I need to run to the pharmacy before they close,” she said. “I don’t like using pain killers, but Tylenol just isn’t touching this. I’ll only be a half hour or so—will you be okay?”

“Of course. Go ahead.” Shan blinked to clear the fuzziness from her eyes.

“You sure?” Oda looked at the stick of incense burning in the wooden holder. “I can put Angie in the car seat, take her with me.”

A shimmer of annoyance penetrated her H-induced well-being. “I can take care of my daughter for half an hour, Oda. Just go.
Go,”
she emphasized, as Oda hesitated again.

After Oda left, Shan lit a candle, then retrieved the foil and tooter from the nightstand. She cut a chunk off the rock, dropped it on the foil, and held it over the flame.

It seemed like seconds later that Oda was shaking her. “Shan, wake up!
Wake up!
”

She floundered out of the H-induced fugue, crawled her way back to consciousness.

And smelled the smoke.

She’d knocked over the candle, somehow. It had rolled off the nightstand, onto Sugaree’s cushion, now a smoldering pile emitting puffs of foul-smelling smoke. She could hear her dog whining under the bed.

Shan ran for water. By the time she made it back to the bedroom, Oda had beaten out the burgeoning flames with a blanket. Underneath, the hardwood floor bore a roundish black scar.

“The smoke alarm should have gone off,” Oda said. Sugaree, unharmed, sniffed dubiously at the remains of her bed. “We should have it checked.”

Shan was silent. She knew why it hadn’t gone off. She’d pulled the battery, afraid that the smoke from the candle and the incense and the H would set it off.

“I’m not going to nag you, or yell at you, or try and persuade you,” Oda told her, after they’d cleaned up the mess and opened the balcony doors to let in some air. “I know it won’t do any good. You let me know when you’re ready for some help.” Then she went to bed and Sugaree followed, leaving Shan alone in the toxic-smelling room, her guilt and shame even more cloying than the fumes.

She went to her nightstand and retrieved the rock of heroin. Then she went onto the balcony and threw it as far as she could out into the water.

A few hours later, she was a sweating, shaking mess. She had a little ’done left from her last prescription, but it was like a breath mint now. She searched through her drawer, found a sliver of rock. She lit more incense to camouflage the smell, then smoked it. It wasn’t enough, so she scraped bits of foil, searched through her pockets and drawers, hoping to scavenge enough for a real hit.

She used her mobile to call Big Black, got his voice mail, and left an urgent message. Then she crawled around the bedroom floor, finding and examining little bits of crud, praying to find just a pinprick of heroin.

In the nursery, Angie began to cry.

The sound sliced through Shan like a white-hot knife. She clenched, rolled into a ball, squeezed her eyes shut. She heard Oda go into the nursery and make soothing noises. Still, Angie squalled. The sound lanced through Shan, assaulting her nerves like molten lava.

Shut up.
She pressed her hands against her eyes, hurting herself.
Shut up, before I give you something to fucking cry about.

Oh, Jesus!

She cried out herself then, in horror, and covered her eyes again to block the image that suddenly materialized. But she still saw it, the burning ember, felt its heat coming toward her, waited for the bite as it branded her flesh.

When she began to scream, she was even louder than Angie.

A sound caused Quinn to lift his head from between the thighs of the frequent flyer spread across his bed.

There it was again. A knock, at three o’clock in the morning? He pushed aside the other blonde, the one that was sucking his cock, so he could go see what was up.

He saw them through the peephole, Shan and Angie, right outside his door.
What the fuck?
He retrieved his jeans, pulled them on, and opened it. “What’s wrong?”

It was clear something was. Shan was flushed and wild-eyed, her hair soaked with sweat and clinging to her forehead in snaky strands. “I need you,” she whispered. She was holding their daughter tight. Too tight. Angie was squirming, making mewling sounds of protest. “
She
needs you. Please, Q.”

“Wait.” He shut the door. “Leave,” he said to the two women tangled together on the bed. He searched for their names, couldn’t remember. “Sorry, but leave. Now.”

A few minutes later he pushed both of them out into the hall, half dressed and still protesting. Shan’s mouth curled into a grimace. She moved to the side to let them pass, averting her eyes until they boarded the elevator and disappeared.

Quinn grimaced himself. “Sorry about that.”

She didn’t reply, just stepped forward to place Angie in his arms, cupping the little face between her hands to kiss her over and over. “I love you, Angel-Abby,” she murmured, kissing her once more before stepping away. “Take care of her, Quinn.”

Quinn was suddenly scared. “What is it?” he asked. “What’s happened?”

She looked up at him and he saw it all, the pinned, glassy eyes, the tremors, the sweat beading her forehead. “I’m using again. I don’t want her anywhere near me.” Her face broke as she turned away.

“Shan, wait.” He took a step toward her, reached to touch her. “What can I do?”

“You’ve done enough.” She backed away like he was a poisonous snake. “All you can do is make it worse. I’m falling apart. I’m a fucking mess, Quinn, and it’s because of you.”

At her words, something inside him coiled up and died. “Let me help. Please. I’ll do anything you want. Anything you need.”

“Take care of her,” she said, “but stay the fuck away from me. Just leave me alone, Quinn.”

“I can’t leave you alone,” he said helplessly. “Not when you’re in trouble. I don’t know how to do that.”

A movement down the hall caught his eye. It was Oda, waiting by the elevator. “I may be in trouble,” Shan said, “but I’m not alone.” She took a step closer, kissed Angie once more, then vanished into the elevator. She didn’t look back.

Shan instructed Oda to drive her to a rehab randomly selected from the phone book, but Oda insisted on taking her to some holistic treatment center in the San Gabriel Mountains, more than an hour from Mission Cove. Shan was in no condition to argue.

The place, Mountainside, was beautiful and came with a whole slew of New Age remedies: acupuncture, Reiki, massage, macrobiotics—all the trends, all the fads, but its luxurious, spa-style trappings and peaceful, wooded grounds couldn’t conceal the condition of its occupants, recovering addicts in one or another stage of detox.

Shan barely noticed the sylvan surroundings. When she checked in she’d been adamant that she didn’t want methadone, so they treated her with a cocktail of other drugs to get her through the initial withdrawal. None of them did much and, after a couple of excruciating days of shakes, cramps, spasms, and utter misery, they stuck her in a sweat lodge where she was instructed to sit and sweat and let the drug residues leak out of her body, along with the metabolites that triggered cravings.

Still, it was torturous. She endured days, then weeks of clawing and scratching at herself, kicking, feeling like her muscles and sinews and nerves were going to burst right through her skin. Then one morning she woke up and it was over. She looked in the mirror, into her own eyes, and realized that she was drug free for the first time in five years.

Her stomach settled, her vision cleared, and now they plied her with vitamins, herbal supplements, electrolyte drinks, and a macrobiotic diet that didn’t taste half bad, now that she could keep it down. They wanted her to exercise, too, another way to stave off cravings. She had her choice of yoga, qigong, or tai chi, followed by a massage. She obeyed, though all of that did little to stem the craving that dug at her with white-hot pincers, to quiet the little voice whispering that all she needed was H, just a little bit of H and all this agony would vaporize. She started going for long hikes, trying to outrun the voice. That did help, a little, but the trails around Mountainside were a lot like the ones near the old canyon house and it felt wrong, somehow, to be hiking them without Sugaree.

Then the talking started. Drug and alcohol classes. Drug and alcohol counseling. Drug and alcohol group therapy. Twelve-step meetings. Not much variety, but she went and listened, reciting her own story when prompted, the oft-repeated phrases coming back like the foreign-language dialogues she’d had to memorize in high school. She had a new bottom now, nearly burning the house down over her eleven-month-old daughter’s head, and welcomed the scourge of shame she experienced every time she told it.