Now, she ran through the mantra that had helped her get through the day: No one was watching her. No one had taken photos of her through the plate-glass windows that fronted the vet clinic. No camera-strangling man from the boarded-up house was waiting for her back at Phil’s.
Reggie.
Callie should use the name of Andrew’s private detective, at least in her head. She should also tell Leigh about him, maybe turn it into a funny story about Phil streaking across the road with her baseball bat and scaring the shit out of him, but the thought of texting her sister, of giving her a point of return contact, felt burdensome.
As much as Callie enjoyed having Leigh back in her life, there was always the downside of seeing her own miserable existence through her sister’s eyes. Was Callie eating enough? Was she doing too much dope? Why was she so thin? Why was she breathing so hard? Was she in trouble again? Did she need money? Was this too much money? Where had she been all day?
Well, after I unleashed Mom on my stalker, I sneaked out through the backyard, caught the bus, then I trafficked narcotics on Stewart Avenue, then I passed the proceeds on to Dr. Jerry, then I went to a tanning salon so I could shoot up in the privacy of a small, windowless space instead of going home to my depressing childhood bedroom where a telephoto lens could capture me jamming a needle into my leg again.
Callie rubbed her thigh. A painful bump pressed back against her fingers. She could feel the heat of an abscess festering inside her femoral vein.
Technically, methadone was designed to pass through the digestive system. The take-home syringes they used at the clinic were needle-less because owners were incapable of helping their pets maintain a healthy weight; very few of them were going to jam a needle into their beloved fluff.
Oral medications took longer to hit the system, which was why the usual burst of euphoria was delayed. Injecting it directly into your veins was shitifyingly stupid. The oral suspension contained glycerin and flavoring and coloring and sorbitol, all of which easily broke down in your stomach. Pushing it into your bloodstream could result in particles traveling straight into your lungs and heart or a clog developing at the site of the injection, which resulted in the very type of nasty abscess Callie could feel growing under her fingertips.
Stupid junkie.
The only thing Callie could do was wait for it to get large enough to drain and steal some antibiotics from the drug locker. Then she could steal some more methadone and inject more methadone and get another abscess that had to be drained because what was her life if not a series of drastically bad choices?
The issue was that most IV drug users weren’t only addicted to the drug. They were addicted to the process of shooting the drug. It was called a needle fixation, and Callie was so fixated on the needle that even now, her fingertips pressing at what was likely to become a raging infection, all she could think about was how good it would feel when the needle pierced the abscess on its way into her femoral vein again.
Why this made her think of Leigh again was something for her biographers to decipher. Callie tightened her fingers around the phone in her hand. She should call her sister. She should let her know that she was okay.
But, was she really okay?
Callie had made the mistake of looking at her entire naked self in the mirror inside the tanning salon. In the blue glow of the ultraviolet bulbs, her ribs had stood out like whalebone on a corset. She could see the joint in her elbows where the radius and ulna plugged into the humerus. Her hips looked as if someone had clipped her legs to a clothes hanger meant for trousers. There were red, purple, and blue tracks on her arms, belly, legs. Broken needle tips that had been surgically removed. Old abscesses. The new one starting in her leg. Scars she had made, scars that had been made upon her. A pinkish bump in her neck where the Grady doctors had inserted a central line directly into her jugular in order to deliver the medications to treat her Covid.
Callie reached up and lightly traced her finger along the tiny scar. She had been severely dehydrated when Leigh had brought her to the emergency room. Her kidneys and liver were shutting down. Her veins were blown from almost two decades of abuse. Callie was generally a master at blocking out most of the unpleasant moments of her life, but she could easily recall shivering uncontrollably in the hospital bed, breathing through the tube shoved down her throat, and the spacesuit-clad nurse gasping at the state of Callie’s ravaged body when she’d come to change the sheets.
There were all kinds of postings on the Covid message boards about what it felt like to be intubated, alone, isolated in the ICU while the world raged on, mindless to your suffering and in some cases denying that it even existed. Most people talked about ghostly visits from long-dead relatives or getting maddening songs like “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” stuck inside their heads, but, for Callie, it was one moment that had stayed with her for almost the entire two weeks—