Jacquie was out of the room before the audience even started its hesitant, obligatory clapping. As she ran, her name badge jangled around her neck, sliced at her chin. When she got to her room, she closed the door with her back and slid down, collapsed and sobbed against it. She pressed her eyes into her knees and bursts of purple, black, green, and pink splotches bloomed there, behind her eyes, then slowly formed into images, then memories. She saw the big hole first. Then her daughter’s emaciated body. There were little red and pink holes up and down both her arms. Her skin was white, blue, and yellow, with green veins. Jacquie was there to identify the body. The body was her daughter’s body, had been the little body she carried for just six months. She’d watched the doctors put needles in her arm then, there in the incubator, back when all she’d wanted in a way she’d never wanted anything before was for her new baby girl to live. The coroner looked at Jacquie, pen and clipboard in hand. She spent a long time staring somewhere between the body and the clipboard trying not to scream, trying not to scan up to see her daughter’s face. The big hole. The shot between the eyes. Like a third eye, or an empty third-eye socket. The trickster spider, Veho, her mom used to tell her and Opal about, he was always stealing eyes to see better. Veho was the white man who came and made the old world watch with his eyes. Look. See here, the way it’s gonna be is, first you’re gonna give me all your land, then your attention, until you forget how to give it. Until your eyes are drained and you can’t see behind you and there’s nothing ahead, and the needle, the bottle, or the pipe is the only thing in sight that makes any sense. In her car, Jacquie slammed the bottoms of her fists into the steering wheel until she couldn’t anymore. She broke her pinkie on the wheel.
That was thirteen years ago. She’d been sober six months then. The longest since she’d started drinking. But after that she drove straight to the liquor store, spent the next six years stomaching a fifth of whiskey a night. She drove an AC Transit bus, the 57 line, in and out of Oakland six days a week. Drank herself into a manageable oblivion every night. Woke up every day to work. One day she fell asleep at the wheel and crashed her bus into a telephone pole. After a month in residential treatment, she left Oakland. She still doesn’t know, doesn’t remember how she got to Albuquerque. At some point she got a job as a receptionist at an Indian Health Clinic funded by Indian Health Service, then eventually, without ever achieving any significant sobriety, became a certified substance abuse counselor through an online course her work paid for.
There in her hotel room, down against the hotel-room door, she remembered all the pictures Opal had emailed her over the years of the boys, which she’d refused to look at. She stood up and walked to her laptop on the desk. In her Gmail account she searched Opal’s name. She opened each email with the paper-clip icon. She followed them through the years. Birthdays and first bikes and pictures they’d drawn. There were little video clips of them fighting in the kitchen and sleeping in their bunk beds, all in one room. The three of them crowded around a computer screen, that screen glow on their faces. There was one picture that broke her heart. The three of them lined up in front of Opal. Opal with her static, sober, stoic stare. She looked at Jacquie through all the years and all that they’d been through. Come get them, they’re yours, Opal’s face said. The youngest one was half smiling like one of his brothers had just punched him in the arm but Opal had told them all they better smile for the picture. The middle one looked like he was either pretending to or actually was holding up what looked like a gang sign with his fingers across his chest, smiling a big smile. He looked the most like Jacquie’s daughter Jamie. The oldest one didn’t smile. He looked like Opal. He looked like Jacquie and Opal’s mom, Vicky.
Jacquie wanted to go to them. She wanted a drink. She wanted to drink. She needed a meeting. Earlier she’d seen that the AA meeting for the conference would be on the second floor at seven thirty every night. There were always meetings at conferences, it being a mental-health/substance-abuse-prevention-based conference, full of people like her, who had gotten into the field because they’d been through it and hoped to find meaning in their careers helping other people not make the same mistakes they had. When she went to wipe sweat from her face with her sleeve, she realized the air conditioner had been turned off. She went to the AC unit and turned the cold air on high. She fell asleep waiting to cool down.
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