He doesn’t want to go to another funeral.
Nah’s hand floats to her stomach. I can see my sister retreating to wherever she goes when she thinks about the clinic.
“It helped last time, when you did the outpatient program,” I tell her. “People often have to go more than once. When I was doing research—”
“I don’t want to hear about your goddamn research, Mae!”
“Hannah, you have a serious addiction,” Aunt Nora says. “You’ve already been in detox and outpatient group therapy this year alone. On top of that, you’ve suffered enormous trauma losing your parents, and the move, not to mention—”
She stops, uncertain, and Hannah stares at me.
“You told them about the clinic?”
“I had to, Nah. The secrets aren’t helping.”
“That wasn’t your story to tell. Mom and Dad said that all of this was my story to tell!”
“When they were HERE,” I yell. Then I remember that I have to be calm under pressure. I take a breath. “They said that because they knew and they could help. But now they’re gone, and Aunt Nora and Uncle Tony have their job.”
Aunt Nora’s face softens. “Honey, your parents were right not to gossip about you. But they also had to hold a lot on their own, and I’m not sure that was such a good thing. Your mom especially, what with everything we all know now about your father. If she’d told me about this earlier, about everything you were dealing with, I could have helped.”
I burst into tears. All of it coming up, like the wave: the truth about Dad and how hurt Mom must have been, her holding so much inside her, and Nah being so sick and me loving Ben but being too scared to tell him, and not going to Annapolis.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
I don’t know what I’m apologizing for. I don’t think it matters.
Nate wraps his arms around me, then pulls me onto his lap like I’m a little girl and it’s embarrassing but nice to cry into a T-shirt that says STRING THEORY with an illustration of a cat tangled up in a ball of yarn.
I can hear Hannah crying, too, but I don’t look.
“Good, Buzz. Let all that shit out,” he murmurs.
It does feel good. Like someone released a pressure valve I didn’t know I had. I wish I could cry more. I see why people do it now.
“Mae,” Hannah says. “I … I’m sorry. I am. I really am.”
I look up at her. She’s a little blurry.
“Then let us help you,” I say.
“The doctors at the ER recommended Hannah do an intensive inpatient program,” Aunt Nora says. “There’s one out in Belmont. But we’ll do the detox first and the outpatient program at Boston Children’s. If that goes well, then the inpatient rehab won’t be necessary—other than detox, Hannah will be home with us each night.”
“It’s Thanksgiving in three days,” Nah says. “Can’t I do all this after?”
She doesn’t say: our first without them.
Aunt Nora’s eyes well up. “Sweetie, we want you to have a lot more Thanksgivings. That’s why we’re doing this. You know we can’t wait on the detox.”
“What exactly … How does this detox thing work?” Nate asks.
Uncle Tony tries to explain, because Nah has gone silent, into herself. Every now and then, one of her legs kicks out, an involuntary spasm. I read about this—it’s where the phrase kicking the habit comes from. Nah has done detox before, but she refused to ever talk about it with me. Just said it was worse than death.
But we know better now. Nothing can be worse than that.
Uncle Tony tells Nate the things I read about online. Detox is basically three or four days of Nah battling her own body. Like a knock-down, drag-out under her skin. Either she kicks the habit, or the habit kicks her.
“I don’t need that,” Nah insists. “The pills just help me feel normal. I don’t even get high anymore when I take them, not really. If I can just get some Suboxone to taper off—”
“The fact they make you feel normal means you’re addicted,” Aunt Nora says.
It’s true. The more opiates you have in your system, the more dependent the brain gets on those chemicals, and the opiates begin to have a normalizing effect.
“You heard what the doctor said: This can cause brain damage, Hannah,” Uncle Tony says. “A stroke. Heart and cognitive defects. You don’t get that Suboxa stuff, whatever it’s called, until you’ve detoxed. It won’t work otherwise, the doctor said that. We have to get you back to normal before you—”
My sister explodes.
“There IS NO GETTING BACK TO NORMAL. My parents are dead. There is no normal, not ever again. So don’t fucking sit there and tell me that I’m gonna go to detox or rehab or whatever and then everything will be great, because it won’t.”
Uncle Tony goes red in the face, but Aunt Nora puts a hand on his arm and I think he literally bites his tongue. I bet he’s drawn blood.
I stand and cross the room. Sit down next to her. “The pills won’t bring them back,” I say. “I know sometimes they help you forget how bad it is—but isn’t everything worse, when the pill wears off? Worse than before you took them?”
Her eyes fill. “You don’t understand.”
I stare at her. “How can you say that, Nah? I lost them, too.”
“But you don’t know what it’s like to be me,” she says. Great, big fat tears roll down her face. “You have a future, a life. I have nothing. I’m probably not even going to graduate. I have lost everything. Everything in less than a year.”
“You have me,” I say. “You will always have me.”
“I won’t. You’ll be gone by July first.”
She remembered. The exact date that Plebe Summer begins. I didn’t think she was ever really listening when I talked about school stuff, but she was.
“I told you, I’m not going,” I say. “There are tons of schools here. You have me. Always.”
For just a second, her eyes soften a bit, but then she sets her chin. Stubborn. “Mae, you knew my boyfriend was cheating on me, and you didn’t tell me. I get you thought you were helping me, but you weren’t. And now I can’t trust you. So what makes you think I’ll want to spend another second under any roof with you once we graduate?”
This is her addiction talking. I know that. But what if it’s not? What if I gave up Annapolis for nothing?
“Enough. Enough of this.” Aunt Nora’s voice is trembling. “Do you know what I would give to have my sister back? To be sitting on that couch with her?”
She kneels on the rug in front of us, her hair a mess of black tangles. Nah looks like a carbon copy of Mom, almost, but Aunt Nora looks like her, too.
“My sister is dead.”
This woman in front of me: This is how I would be, if I lost Nah.
“I have to remind myself of this every morning when I wake up,” she says, “because I forget. I wake up and I think, I have to tell Lila I had the most awful dream about her. This horrible wave, and I was searching in the rubble, looking and looking … and then I remember.”