Callie had taken several photos of Buddy’s attic set-up, but Leigh knew exactly what it looked like before her sister had even come down. The RCA cable connected to the camera on one end and the VCR on the other. You pressed a button on the camera, then you pressed record on the VCR and everything backed up. What Callie’s photos had done was trigger a long-lost memory of Leigh finding the remote control in Buddy’s pants pocket. She had flung it across the floor so hard that the battery compartment had cracked open.
Buddy had not walked around all day with the remote in his pocket. He had deliberately put it in there, the same way he had deliberately hidden the mini-cassette from the bar camera in the box of Black & Milds. The fact that he had pressed record on the camera hidden over the kitchen table before the fight broke out with Callie was what the legal world called premeditation. The only reason Buddy Waleski had started the camera was because he had known when he followed Callie into the kitchen that he was going to hurt her.
And now his son had it all on tape.
Leigh mentally reviewed the many things that Andrew Tenant had not done with the recording: He had not gone to the police. He had not shown it to Cole Bradley. He had not confronted Leigh with the evidence. He had not told anyone who could do anything about it.
What he had done was use the information to force Leigh into doing something she did not want to do. She had taken Tammy Karlsen’s medical chart off the conference room table. She had read the therapy notes. She had formed, at least in her head, a way to use the information to bring Tammy to her knees.
For now, Leigh’s only crime was receiving stolen property. The charge was mitigated by the fact that she was Andrew’s lawyer and hadn’t advised him to steal it, or done anything criminal with it herself, and for that matter, how did she know it was stolen? Anyone with a printer could make a file folder look official. Anyone with a chunk of free time could generate the roughly 138 pages front-and-back that constituted summaries from over sixty alleged therapy sessions.
Leigh glanced over at her purse as she waited for the light to change. The folder was sticking out of the top. There was a shape to the notes inside, almost like a novel. The crushing pain of Tammy’s early sessions, the gradual opening up where she confessed the horror and shame of what had happened to her in high school. The stumbles on the way to getting her drinking, her cutting, her bulimia, all under control. The failed attempts at reconciliation. The slow understanding that she could not change her past, but she could try to shape her future.
What the chart mostly revealed was that Tammy Karlsen was smart and insightful and funny and driven—but all Leigh could think while she read through to the last pages was, why couldn’t her sister do this?
The intellectual part of Leigh understood the science of addiction. She also knew that two-thirds of Oxy abusers were stupid kids experimenting with drugs, not pain patients who got hooked. But even within that group of pain patients, fewer than ten percent became addicted. Roughly four to six percent transitioned to heroin. More than sixty percent matured out of their addiction or went through what was called natural recovery, where they got tired of being addicts and found a way to quit—one-third of them without treatment. As for treatment, in-patient rehab was a statistical failure, and Nar-Anon was more miss than hit. Methadone and Suboxone were the best-studied maintenance medications, but doctors who prescribed medication-assisted treatment were so heavily regulated that they couldn’t help more than one hundred patients in their first year and no more than 275 thereafter.
Meanwhile, around 130 Americans died of an overdose every single day.
Callie knew these facts better than anybody, but nothing about them had ever compelled her to quit. At least not for a meaningful amount of time. Over the past twenty years, she had created her own fantasy world to live in, where everything unpleasant or troubling was blurred out by opioids or willful denial. It was like her emotional maturation had stopped the second she’d swallowed that first Oxycontin. Callie had surrounded herself with animals who would not hurt her, books set in the past so that she knew everything turned out okay, and people who would never really know her. Callie did not Netflix and chill. She had left no digital footprint. She had purposefully kept herself a stranger to the modern world. Walter once said if you only understood pop cultural references from before 2003, then you understood Callie.
The car’s GPS told Leigh to take a left at the next light. She swerved into the turning lane. She waved her hand over her shoulder at the driver who’d wanted to get there first. Then she ignored him as he flipped her off and started screaming.