Leigh felt her throat work.
“I couldn’t imagine ever being capable of hurting somebody like that,” he continued. “But when I recognized Reggie in the parking lot, and then I realized the threat to Maddy—I couldn’t see. I was blind with rage. I was going to kill him, Leigh. You knew that I was going to murder him.”
Leigh pressed together her lips.
“I don’t understand everything you told me about what happened,” Walter said. “But I understand that.”
Leigh studied her sweet, kind husband. In the light of the dashboard, the streaks of sweat and blood across his face took on a purple hue. She had done this to him. She had put their daughter in danger. She had turned her husband into a raving lunatic. She had to fix this, and she had to do it now.
She told Walter, “I need to find Callie. She has a right to know what’s happened. What’s going to happen.”
Walter asked, “What’s going to happen?”
“I’m going to do what I should’ve done three days ago,” Leigh told him. “I’m going to turn myself in.”
18
Callie stood in front of the locked drug cabinet in Dr. Jerry’s clinic. She had abandoned Sidney’s convertible BMW across two parking spaces outside. Driving was harder than the last time she had stolen a car. There had been lots of stops and starts, beginning in Andrew’s garage where she’d scraped off the right side of the BMW trying to get out. In the driveway, the back end had clipped his watchtower mailbox. The rims had bitten into several curbs as she’d miscalculated turns.
That the car had survived her stay inside the shooting gallery off Stewart Avenue was a testament to heroin’s stupification. She had taken Sidney’s wallet and phone inside to trade, but no one had stripped off the car’s expensive tires. No one had broken the windows and ripped out the radio. They were either too high to formulate a plan or too desperate to wait for the chop shop to send a runner.
Callie, on the other hand, had been mournfully aware. Her methadone tapering regimen had not been rewarded the same way it had been so many times before. She’d been expecting the rapturous rush of euphoria with her first taste, but her body had cycled through the heroin so fast that she had chased the high along an eternal loop of despair. The sudden seconds of sickness as the liquid pushed in, the five short minutes of bliss, the heaviness that lasted for less than an hour before her brain told her she needed more more more.
This was called tolerance, or sensitization, which was defined as the body requiring a higher dose of the drug in order to achieve the same response. Predictably, the mu receptors played a big role in tolerance. Repeated exposure to opiates dampened the analgesic effect, and no matter how many new mus your body created, those mus were going to inherit the memories of the mus that came before.
Tolerance was incidentally why addicts started cross-mixing drugs, adding in fentanyl or Oxy or benzos or, in most cases, shooting themselves up with so much shit that they ended up laughing with Kurt Cobain about how his daughter was now older than he’d been on the day he’d rested that shotgun beneath his chin. Maybe he would softly sing the Neil Young passage he quoted in his suicide note—
It’s better to burn out than to fade away.
Callie stared at the drug cabinet, trying to summon her rage. Andrew in the stadium tunnel. Sidney writhing on the closet floor. The disgusting video of Callie and Buddy playing on the television. Maddy running across the bright green field, no cares in the world because she was cherished and loved and she would always feel that way.
The first key slid into the lock. Then the second key. Then the cabinet was open. With an expert’s light touch, Callie traced her fingers along the vials. Methadone, ketamine, fentanyl, buprenorphine. On any other day, she would be shoving as many vials as she could into her pockets. Now, she left them alone and found the lidocaine. She started to close the cabinet, but her mind rushed to stop her. Several vials of pentobarbital were lined up along the bottom shelf. The liquid was blue, like the color of glass cleaner. The containers were larger than the others, almost three times the size. She selected one, then locked the doors.
Instead of going into a treatment room, she went to the front lobby. The plate-glass windows gave an overview past the burglar bars and into the parking lot. The streetlights had been busted out, but Callie could clearly see Sidney’s shiny convertible. Nothing else was in the lot except for a stray rat making its way toward the Dumpster. The barbershop was closed. Dr. Jerry was probably at home reading sonnets to Meowma Cass, the bottle-fed kitten. Callie wanted to tell herself that coming here was a good idea, but after a lifetime of rash decisions, she found herself absent her usual disregard for any and all consequences.