The heroin took over, coming for her in waves—not the euphoria, but the slow release of her body finally giving in to the inevitable.
The pungent vinegar smell. The larger than usual portion. The Rohypnol in the water. The fentanyl she had taken from Dr. Jerry’s drug locker and chopped into the off-white powder.
Andrew Tenant wasn’t the only person who wasn’t going to walk out that door.
First her muscles unwrapped themselves from their tight knots. Then her joints stopped aching, her neck stopped hurting, her body let go of the pain it had been holding on to for so many years that Callie had stopped counting. Her breathing was no longer labored. Her lungs no longer needed air. Her heartbeat was like a slow clock counting down the seconds left in her life.
Callie stared up at the ceiling, her eyes fixed like an owl’s. She didn’t think about the hundreds of times she had stared up at this same ceiling from the couch. She thought about her brilliant sister, and Leigh’s wonderful husband, and their beautiful girl running down the soccer field. She thought about Dr. Jerry and Binx and even Phil until finally, inevitably, Callie thought about Kurt Cobain.
He wasn’t waiting for her anymore. He was here, talking to Mama Cass and Jimi Hendrix, laughing with Jim Morrison and Amy Winehouse and Janis Joplin and River Phoenix.
They all noticed Callie at the same time. They rushed over, reaching out their hands, helping her stand.
She felt light in her body, suddenly made of feathers. She looked down at the floor and watched it turn into soft clouds. Her head went back and she was looking up at the bright blue sky. Callie looked left and then right and then behind her. There were kindly horses and plump canines and clever cats and then Janis gave her a bottle and Jimi passed her a joint and Kurt offered to read her some of his poetry, and, for the first time in her life, Callie knew that she belonged.
EPILOGUE
Leigh sat in a folding chair beside Walter. The cemetery was quiet but for a few birds chirping in the tree over the grave. They watched Callie’s pastel-yellow casket being lowered into the ground. There were no creaks and groans from the pulleys. Her sister had weighed ninety-five pounds by the time she’d arrived at the medical examiner’s office. The autopsy report revealed a body that had been ravaged by long-term drug abuse and illness. Callie’s liver and kidneys were diseased. Her lungs were only working at half-capacity. She had been dosed with a lethal cocktail of narcotics and poisons.
Heroin, fentanyl, Rohypnol, strychnine, methadone, baking soda, laundry powder.
None of the findings were all that surprising. Neither was the revelation that only Callie’s fingerprints were on the spoon, candle, and bag of powder. Andrew’s prints joined hers on the syringe in Callie’s leg, but Callie’s fingerprints alone were on the lethal dose of pentobarbital she had jacked directly into Andrew’s heart.
For years, Leigh had convinced herself that she would feel a guilty kind of relieved when Callie finally died, but now what she felt was an overwhelming sadness. Her eternal nightmare that there would be a late-night phone call, a knock at the door, a detective asking her to identify her sister’s body, had not come to pass.
There had only been Callie lying on a filthy stack of mattresses in the house that her soul had not left since she was fourteen years old.
At least Leigh had been with her sister at the end. Leigh was standing inside Andrew ’s empty mansion when she’d realized that Callie had played her. The drive from Brookhaven was a blur. The first thing Leigh could recall was tripping over Sidney’s body in the carport. She had completely missed Walter lying in the hallway because her full attention had been directed toward the two bodies on top of a pile of mattresses where the ugly orange couch used to be.
Andrew was lying across Callie. A large, spent syringe was sticking out of his back. Leigh had pushed him off her sister. She had grabbed Callie’s hand. Her skin had felt chilled. The heat was already leaving her frail body. Leigh had ignored the needle sticking out of her sister’s thigh and listened to the slow, dwindling sounds of Callie’s breath.
At first, twenty seconds passed between the rise and fall of her chest. Then thirty seconds. Then forty-five. Then nothing but a long, low sigh, as Callie finally let go.
“Good morning, friends.” Dr. Jerry walked to the foot of Callie’s grave. His mask had leaping kittens across the front, though Leigh wasn’t sure if he had worn it for Callie or if it was just something he had lying around.
He opened a slim book. “I’d like to read a poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning.”