He picked himself up, grabbed my hand, and kept running.
My world became a frenzy of living. Too much, all the time.
Otto was broken but beautiful. When he said, I love you, I believed him.
He was a trust fund baby. We lived in one of his parents’ investment houses and painted the walls every colour of the rainbow. Just because.
Mere months later, we slid into heroin addiction. We were like children playing the game What’s the Time Mr Wolf? blindfolded and at the edge of a cliff. I didn’t understand then that heroin was the wolf and I couldn’t recognise what had happened to us. Because we weren’t like those images of addicts scoring hits in back alleys.
Otto and I got fat. No one thinks of heroin addicts being fat, but we were. As fat as only addicts with money can be. Between shooting up and smoking pot and eating takeout, we imagined ourselves as heroes of some never-ending action movie. But in reality, we spent most of our time slumped on the couch.
Other people moved into the house. When you have money and heroin, you have lots of friends.
Crazy things happened without warning or reason. A fire would start somewhere, and we’d all have an in-depth discussion about who was responsible for it before anyone took action. People I’d never seen before would suddenly appear in one of the bathrooms or bedrooms, casually brushing their teeth or casually having sex. I got pregnant, and it just seemed one more thing that jumped out at us from the field where crazy things lived. It all went on and on until the night a couple wearing superhero costumes jumped from our balcony onto a pavilion below, tearing a great big hole in it. One of the superheroes died.
The police came that night. Otto’s parents flew in from Barbados, seeming more dismayed at the state of the house than the splattered superhero. All of our great friends fled, washing their hands of any association with us.
Otto had his trust fund stopped, and we were turfed out of the house.
We rented a little bedsit apartment for a while. Things got nasty between Otto and me. I can’t remember why we turned on each other, but suddenly we were spewing toxic venom onto each other with impunity.
Still, we couldn’t let each other go.
Me getting pregnant and then finding blood in my underwear prompted us to clean ourselves up and get healthy and kick the drugs. We rented a better place. An endless cycle of trying and failing over years. I did kick the drugs. Otto didn’t.
In the aftermath, my psych would claim that Otto and I were addicted to each other, and she was right. We’d each injected ourselves into the other’s bloodstream.
It had only ended when Otto decided that the pain inside himself could only be ended by killing himself. He said that every action needs a reaction of equal force to stop it. I didn’t know the source of his pain—he’d never told me about his childhood, and I never did get a chance to hear it. He drove away one night in a black mood and died in a crash.
My psych’s analysis of my love affair with Otto was filled with doom and gloom. She was wrong. It might have been doomed, but it wasn’t all bad. My own analysis was like a sieve that continually sifted the relationship from year to year until what was left was a fine, velvety powder.
I still had Otto’s ashes. His parents hadn’t wanted them. I imagined the urn now, tucked away in the attic where James had never seen it, filled with Otto’s velvety, intoxicating powder.
God, what was I thinking? Velvety powder? I was going nuts, going crazy, here alone desperately searching for my daughter.
But I couldn’t stop thinking about Otto.
I blamed Ruby and Vonda.
These days, I had everything a person could want.
Yet everything felt hollow.
16. Gray
WILLOW AND LILLY CHARGED INTO OUR house as soon as I opened the front door. They ran from room to room, as though they’d been gone for years and not just overnight at Marla’s.
They tore about before making their final selection of toys—Willow with her iPad, Lilly with her collection of toy dinosaurs and dolls. I knew they’d been expecting to see their mother. Even the cat was prowling around expectantly. Things were different and upside-down. Evie was always here. I was the one who disappeared each day and headed off to work.
I stood in the kitchen, holding the bench top at arm’s length, letting my head drop and inhaling slowly.
What was actually going on here?
In the past few months, Evie had been through peaks and valleys. Over-the-top happy and then just as quickly so down I’d suggest she see a doctor. Sometimes, I’d sensed she was secretive, which had hurt because she’d always been so open with me. Evie used to tell me everything, in so much detail my head would spin. But ever since she got the restaurant job in the city, she’d held back.