I see her nearly every day. I know the contours of her body, the curve of her hips. She has bruises on her arms and a few scratches that look fresh. It makes me question whether she’s lying about whatever happened with her car. If it were an isolated incident, I might not be too worried, passing her reaction off as embarrassment, but there are too many other things piled on top of that sundae for me not to be concerned.
I carefully slip a pillow between me and Teagan and slide out of bed. I grab my phone and wait a full minute, watching her back rise and fall, before I pad across the loft to the bathroom. I close the door with a quiet click and turn the lock before I open the medicine cabinet. I’ve looked in here a few times in the months I’ve slept over, noted her prescriptions and the random over-the-counter medication. None of it seemed like a red flag, mostly allergy meds and painkillers. I took an ibuprofen once because I’d stupidly missed a nail and hammered my finger. It was throbbing pretty good. That was probably a month ago.
Since then the cabinet has been filled with a slew of bottles. What I do next is something I’m not particularly proud of. I’ve already looked up her prescriptions. One is for attention deficit, which I already knew from talking to Dillion. Teagan has never mentioned it to me, but then maybe she doesn’t feel she needs to. There are two other prescriptions. The Valium is for anxiety and says take as needed. There’s also a warning about driving and drowsiness. The third prescription is a sleep aid and is the one she always takes before bed. But there are other prescription bottles in here. One is a painkiller that belongs to her dad and is two years old.
On top of the prescriptions are a bunch of over-the-counter medications, some herbal, some not. There are bottles of NyQuil and other over-the-counter products that cause drowsiness, and there are also over-the-counter sleep aids. Those seem like a bad idea for someone already taking prescription sleeping pills. And then there are the caffeine pills. Those, combined with the energy drinks and her constant coffee habit, aren’t a good sign. This is a recipe for crashing and burning.
And I can’t believe I haven’t put it together until now. I want to be wrong, but I worry I’m right.
I’m afraid of the possibility that she might reach for something stronger when the pills she’s taking stop doing their job. I count the pills in the antianxiety prescription. It was filled a little more than two weeks ago and is already missing most of its contents and is supposed to be a use-as-needed medication. It has one refill left on it. Which means she’s taking these often, on top of all the other things.
I take a seat on the edge of the bathtub and drag a hand down my face. I can’t ignore this. It’s more than a few red flags. It’s verging on an entire minefield waiting to go off.
Teagan has always been very open about the fact that she takes medication, that she has trouble sleeping. In a lot of ways, she normalized the behavior until I accepted that she was comfortable with me and wasn’t ashamed that she sought medical treatment to help her manage her mental health.
After Devon died, I took over-the-counter sleep aids for a while. And for a short time they worked. But this seems bigger. Much bigger. And possibly more serious. She has an arsenal of medication that she takes regularly. And she’s drinking on top of that. I don’t even know how much or how often. I don’t think there has ever been a night that she’s been with me that she hasn’t taken something or multiple somethings.
I drop my head in my hands.
What if I’m in love with an addict?
I may not be an addict, but I know what it’s like to fall down that rabbit hole, from when I numbed the pain of losing Devon with alcohol. Though I didn’t have an addiction, it was still hard for me to change my habits. Alcohol trumped everything else, including the people I cared about. I couldn’t see past myself to what I was doing to the people I loved and who loved me. I saw a therapist to help me get back on track and quit drinking altogether.
I don’t want this to be Teagan’s road. I want to help her see that we’re all here for her. That whatever is going on, we can get through this.
I don’t get much sleep after that. And I call John first thing in the morning and ask if it’s okay for me to come in a couple of hours later than usual, with a promise that I’ll make up the time. He tells me not to worry about it, since I routinely pull ten-hour days.
Before anyone else gets up, I take another look at her car and discover that there are more than a few scratches. There are a bunch of dents, and the undercarriage looks like it’s been dragged over rocks. Which means she definitely lied and was in an accident. Possibly as early as Wednesday.
Teagan’s alarm goes off at seven thirty and continues to beep for a full three minutes until she finally reaches for her phone, slapping blindly at it until she gets it to stop. I’m sitting on the edge of her bed, dressed for work, all the medication from her bathroom sitting in a pile on her comforter.
Yesterday’s conversation with my mom was hard, but I have a feeling that this is going to be a lot different. I don’t want this to be the problem that it is.
As upset as I am about the lie she fed me about what happened with her car, I’m more worried about how she’s going to react when I confront her about her stash of medication. Teagan is a pleaser. She thrives on being needed and winning people’s approval. She’s carefully crafted this reality and made the pills part of her everyday life. If I threaten to take that away from her, there are going to be consequences. Ones I might not like.
I stroke her cheek and bend to press my lips to her forehead. She makes a noise and rolls over, curling into my leg. The weight that lifted yesterday settles in my gut.
“Babe, you need to wake up. We need to talk.”
She blinks once, twice, and her eyes roll up and flutter shut again.
I swallow down the anxiety. An image of Devon pops like a bubble in my head. How his skin had turned gray blue. How his eyes had frozen open, staring blankly at the sky. How he hadn’t even realized that he was hypothermic, or maybe he had and it had been too late, muscles seized, unable to get up and come inside, voice lost in the cold night.
Because we drank too much.
Because I passed out on the couch.
Waking up one morning and finding Teagan like that from an overdose could be a real possibility if she’s combining the wrong things. It’s a reality that I don’t ever want to face. And it solidifies my resolve.
I give her shoulder a gentle shake, but all she does is groan. “Teagan, I need you to wake up.” I have no idea how much medication is floating around in her system. And that scares the hell out of me.
It takes me a full five minutes, and I finally resort to spritzing her with the spray bottle she uses to water her cactus to wake her up.
She scrubs a hand over her face. “What the hell?” She blinks a bunch of times and sits up. Her eyes are sunken. She looks exhausted and confused. “What are you doing? What time is it?”
“It’s seven forty.”
She frowns and glances at the clock. “Shouldn’t you be at work?”
“Yeah, but we need to talk.”
That seems to put her on alert. “Did something happen?”
I motion to the pile of boxes strewn all over her comforter. Some of the labels are from Chicago, but the majority are from the local pharmacy, or the one in the neighboring town.