Lost At Sea

by Erica Boyce

  It took a half hour for him to appear in the doorway and nod at her. By then, Chloe and Amanda were sitting down with her and gossiping about who would be prom queen. When Lacey stood, Chloe followed her gaze toward Matt and sighed loudly.

  “Seriously?” Amanda said. “Why are you even with that guy?” She heard their voices dip into a whisper as she walked away, but she didn’t care. This time, she really didn’t.

  As soon as they’d closed the car doors, the words slipped out of her. “I think I bombed the AP exams.”

  He raised his eyebrows. He’d raked the hair off his forehead with some hair gel, even though they both knew they weren’t going to be doing any dancing. It was cute. “Really?” he said.

  She nodded down into her lap. The exams had all been held the week before, day after day of bubble sheets. She wound up staring at the test booklets for too long. When she finally opened them, instead of formulas and explanations slotting neatly into place, she found nothing at all. She could barely bring herself to pick up the pencil and guess the answers.

  “It doesn’t matter, anyway,” she said. “Not like they can stop me from graduating just because I got all ones.”

  He brushed his knuckles over his mouth. “Come here,” he said, holding his arms open. She climbed over his lap, a stitch in her dress snapping as she angled her legs to avoid the steering wheel. Perched on top of him, her head grazed the car roof, and she wished she were so much smaller.

  “I’m sure you did fine,” he said into her collarbone. “You’re so smart, Lace. It’s one of the things I love about you.”

  She turned her face toward the window and rested her cheek on the top of his head. Felt the stiffened locks of hair scratch against her chin and tucked the words into a pocket of her memory for later, when she would surely need them.

  They stayed like that for what felt like hours with the stereo on low while a weak rain began to fall. Amanda and Chloe would be furious when they came out—the drizzle would ruin their hair and their shoes. Maybe, if she were lucky, it would make them forget she’d disappeared.

  An old song came on the radio for ’90s week. In it, the singer kept listing off all the things she’d gotten wrong about the man she loved. It was maybe the saddest song Lacey had ever heard. She reached over to the stereo and flicked it off during the second chorus before tumbling back into the passenger’s seat. “All right,” she said, gathering her hair into a ponytail at the nape of her neck. “You got it?”

  * * *

  One day that summer, when they met in the beach parking lot, all the color had leached out of Matt’s face. For a second, she wondered if he’d started without her. But when he turned to face her, his eyes were bloodshot. He’d been crying.

  “Nick died,” he said before she could ask.

  Everything felt too hot and bright, the pavement radiating through her thin rubber flip-flops, the sunlight bouncing off the cars around them and right onto her face.

  “They found him in his room,” Matt continued. “His mom found him. This morning.”

  Lacey crouched down. Her bad knee sang with it. He sat down next to her, straight on the asphalt. The heat became too much to bear, and then they sat a few minutes more. Penance. He dropped his head into his hands.

  “We have to quit,” he said to the ground. And then, finally, he looked at her. “It’s too much. We have to.”

  She nodded, yes. Of course they did. Of course they would. Even though she could already hear the beetle skittering back. It was too much.

  * * *

  It only took one day for it to get bad. Really bad, much worse than the first time she ran out of pills. As soon as she got back from the beach, she told her mom she wasn’t feeling well and went up to her room. She knew it’d be better if whatever was coming happened behind the closed door of her bedroom. Her mom came in and out with Gatorade and cool compresses. Lacey tried to smile at her each time, but the truth was, she wasn’t sure when her mom was actually there and when she was just imagining it.

  Dawn took forever to come the next morning, breaking through the knots of pain massed at the end of her every nerve. She stumbled into the bathroom. She lay on the floor and silently begged the tiles to be colder, colder. She wanted nothing more than to get out of her skin, to get the hell out of it, and “You did this to yourself,” the beetle sneered. She thought she might be sobbing. She couldn’t tell.

  Her mom opened the door. Whatever she saw made her sink to her knees. She laid her palm on Lacey’s forehead and flinched.

  “Have you been puking?” her mom said. She glanced into the toilet. Then, before Lacey could answer, “That’s it. I’m calling the doctor.”

  No. No no no no. No doctor. He would know. He would know everything. “Go away,” Lacey growled, not knowing if she meant it for her mom or for the things churning through her body. She didn’t think it mattered much.

  Maureen sat back on her heels and pursed her lips. The beetle screamed at Lacey to look at the hurt she’d put into her mom’s eyes. “Fine,” Maureen said, “but only so I can call the hospital.”

  Lacey stared at the grout edging the base of the tub. It was gray with dirt and dust. She knew what she had to do.

  She pulled herself to standing and staggered to her bedroom window. The garage roof formed a ledge under it—she used to climb out onto it at night sometimes for the sheer terror of imagining what her mom would do if she found her there. From there, it was only a drop of six feet or so to the ground. She launched herself out the window and rolled. The gutter was a brief wet squelch of old leaves against her back before she fell. The ground was harder than she expected. Her knee wailed. “Good for nothing, good for nothing, good for nothing,” the beetle said. She paused for a second to see if her mom had heard the fall. No signs of life from the house. Her mom must still be on the phone with the doctor.

  Matt’s house was a few blocks away, but it might’ve been miles. She made it to the nearest corner before it all brought her down. The sun was heavy on her head. She pulled her phone out of her pocket and texted Matt and told him where she was. Help.

  By the time she saw him coming, gray-skinned and dripping with sweat, she was curled on her side on the edge of someone’s lawn. She panted unevenly and squeezed her knee. She hoped no one would walk by and see her there, but mostly, she didn’t care. She needed this to end. Her skin felt stretched beyond all capacity. The grass itched and scraped against her cheek. Matt bent down close, and she could breathe again.

  “What happened? Are you okay?” he said.

  “Not…really.”

  He pulled her to her feet with a heave and held her by the elbow as she steadied herself. His eyes were bloodshot, and his hands twitched. He reached his arms out, and she buried her face in his neck. They felt each other shake.

  “Please,” she wanted to whisper, like she did that first time.

  She didn’t have to.

  “Fuck this,” he murmured as her knees buckled again. He hoisted her up against his shoulder, and they told each other they would try again. Later. When they were ready for it.

  * * *

  The sliding doors of the clinic sucked shut behind Lacey, sealing her in with the sickly scent of industrial cleaner. The bulletin board in the front hall was labelled “Client Success Stories”—they were called clients, not patients. As if that was supposed to empower them. As if that were the issue. The same exact postcards had been tacked to the cork since her first day here. They hadn’t added a single one.

  They had, however, changed the poster by the check-in window. It used to have a girl with a toothy smile and a high ponytail, with “HOPE” written above her face in big yellow letters and “is my drug of choice” written below it. One day, during free time, when the receptionist was on her bathroom break, she and Tammy Grey had snuck over to the poster with a thick Sharpie. And Tammy, with her dark, empty ey
es, had laughed as she’d crossed out “HOPE” and replaced it with “METH.”

  Tammy’d only lasted a couple of weeks before her insurance wouldn’t pay anymore. Lacey heard a rumor that she’d relapsed and died. Now, there was a photo of a nondescript field hanging where the poster once was. The receptionist didn’t look up when she signed in and slid her driver’s license through the slot in the window, and Lacey wondered if she somehow knew what she and Tammy had done. A vandal as well as an addict.

  Lacey smiled brightly at the top of the receptionist’s head. The door next to the window buzzed as the woman pressed a button to unlock it. Lacey straightened her shoulders and opened it.

  The halls were lined with construction paper posters covered with pictures and letters cut out of magazines. Visioning exercises. They’d done them in group once. Lacey’s had a picture of a man who looked just like Matt, only more filled out and a few years older. Already, though, this was a new batch. She didn’t know where they’d put the ones her group made. Probably threw them out.

  At this time of day, everyone would be in group. Lacey’s footsteps echoed down the hallway. The first day she came here, it felt like going to a new school. She held a sheet of paper with a schedule packed with group sessions and individual sessions, each meal typed out: blueberry pancakes, chicken nuggets, taco night. The schedule soothed her.

  That was before she found out that “groups” meant sitting in a circle with a bunch of other scraggly teenagers who didn’t want to say much of anything, and “individuals” meant sitting in Mr. Cole’s office while he stared tiredly at her and sighed, waiting for her to talk. One day, after her fifth shrug, he’d tossed his pen onto his desk and said, “You’re lucky to be here in a nice, clean facility like this. Lucky your insurance covers what it does.”

  She’d picked at the sleeve of her sweatshirt while her cheeks burned. How many times had she heard about how lucky she was? Usually, it was after people learned she’d been adopted. They raised their eyebrows and smiled at Maureen, who was always just out of earshot for these conversations. They all loved Maureen. “Well, lucky you!” they said. She wondered what alternatives they were picturing for her. An orphanage? A life ferried from one foster home to another? They’d all heard the stories. The beetle always added the afterthought, “Ungrateful. Undeserving. Too much to lose.”

  Eventually, the clinic had transferred her to Ms. Bray, who didn’t mind doing most of the talking. She came to the door marked “Ms. Bray” and knocked.

  “Come on in, Lacey-Girl,” Ms. Bray sang. She had nicknames for all the clients, “Sweetheart” and “Bud” and “Bruiser,” like she worked at a day care and not a rehab. All the other kids made fun of her behind her back, but Lacey kind of liked it. She was the only one whose nickname actually included her real name, and it made her feel sort of special.

  She sat in the chair while Ms. Bray spun around from the computer and pushed her glasses up onto her forehead. She had the beginnings of wrinkles around her eyes that deepened when she smiled, like she did now as she nudged a chocolate cruller on a paper plate toward Lacey. The other thing Ms. Bray was known for was asking each of her clients what their favorite snack was and then having one on hand for every outpatient session. “I’m not saying I’m bribing you to come back to your next appointment,” she said the first time she had a doughnut ready for Lacey, “but I’m kind of doing that.”

  Lacey breathed in the smell of cocoa and sugar as she bit into the cruller. Its coat of icing crackled under her teeth. It wasn’t quite as good as her mom’s homemade jelly-filled, but then, nothing would be.

  “So. How are we doing this week?” Ms. Bray finally asked.

  “All right.”

  Ms. Bray tilted her head to one side. Her bangs broke free from her glasses. “Having trouble sleeping?”

  Lacey knotted her fingers together and hitched one shoulder up. It wasn’t quite a shrug, she told herself. She took another bite of the doughnut so she wouldn’t have to answer out loud.

  “I figured you would.” Ms. Bray leaned forward, elbows on her knees. “It’s called post-acute withdrawal syndrome. PAWS, they say. Like on a dog. Cute, right?” She raised an eyebrow to let Lacey in on the joke.

  “PAWS,” Lacey repeated, because she knew Ms. Bray was waiting for it.

  “It’s a real bitch for a while, let me tell you. Think you’re all recovered and then the cravings come back, even worse than before, like that.” She snapped her fingers. “Happens in ninety percent of opiate addiction cases. As long as you don’t start using again, you should make it out the other side just fine, okay?”

  Lacey nodded, though it was unclear how she was supposed to get to the other side of this sucking black pool. Her hands twitched.

  A knock came at the door, and one of the other counselors poked his head around it. “Hey, Patty,” he said over Lacey’s head. “We’re heading out to grab some pizza. You want anything?”

  “Uh, no,” Ms. Bray said. The irritation was plain on her face. “All set.”

  The counselor nodded at Lacey and was gone.

  “Sorry about that,” Ms. Bray said. “Usually, we don’t interrupt each other’s sessions, but, you know. Pizza.” She widened her eyes, and Lacey smirked. Ms. Bray propped her chin on one hand. “How’s things with your mom?”

  “The same,” Lacey said, biting at a hangnail. “She doesn’t really trust me anymore. Keeps her wallet locked up. Not that I blame her.”

  It was embarrassing—her biggest problem was a mom who worried too much. At mealtimes when she was a resident, the kids at her table would crumple paper napkins in their fists and talk about parents who shot up right alongside them. Lacey was the only one who had someone there at every visiting hour. She knew the others noticed; they watched her carefully in group.

  At their first family session with Ms. Bray, her mom sat in the folding chair and ran the strap of her purse back and forth between her fingers. “I don’t get it,” Maureen said. “I did everything I could. I gave her everything I could. I thought things were great. What more could I have done?” She shot a scared-looking glance at Lacey.

  Lacey could tell she was worried she’d said too much. Her face was red. Lacey stared at the worn-thin pile of the carpet. The shame nearly buried her.

  “Maureen—can I call you Maureen?” Ms. Bray said, then continued without waiting for an answer. “It’s important to understand that addiction can catch anyone, from any walk of life. We don’t really know why it chooses who it does. There’s no one reason.” She folded her hands on her desk and leaned into them so her cleavage poked up over the edge of her shirt. “What Lacey needs right now is your understanding and support. She cannot recover from this disease on her own.”

  Lacey had wanted to yell at Ms. Bray then and tell her that her mom didn’t need to be scolded. It wasn’t possible for her mom to be any more supportive than she already was. Her mom was right. She’d had everything and just pissed it away. She couldn’t be trusted.

  “It’s normal for parents to have an adjustment period, to have to learn to trust again,” Ms. Bray said now. “She’ll come back to you, though. Don’t give up on her.”

  Ms. Bray stared at Lacey until she said, “Okay.”

  Ms. Bray leaned back and folded her arms, feet propped up on the trash can. She was wearing old black combat boots with lumps where her big toes were. “It makes you anxious, huh? Your mom not being happy.”

  Lacey almost smiled. “Anxious” was an understatement. Anxiety could not be enough to explain why her throat tightened at home or why her back hurt all the time.

  “That’s a recurrent problem with you. Did the guided meditation help last time? Want to try that again?”

  Lacey said sure. She closed her eyes and waited.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Maureen was starting to see her breath. She turned the key in the ignition and crank
ed the heat again. On and off, on and off. She didn’t like to think about what it was doing to the environment, but she also didn’t want to freeze to death in the hour her daughter spent in outpatient treatment every week. She could’ve waited inside; she knew there were chairs at the reception desk. She didn’t want to go in there anymore, though. Not if she could help it.

  She studied the building. So much institutional brick surrounding Lacey’s life. The adoption agency, the high school, and now this. Lacey was supposed to escape to Brown. That was where she belonged.

  When Maureen first registered Lacey at the clinic, she felt about six inches tall. She’d gone home and taken to Lacey’s bedroom door with a drill she found in their garage, disassembling the hinges until the door fell to the floor with a gratifying bang. And she began.

  First, the drawers. She found a strip of condoms tucked under Lacey’s T-shirts from sleepaway camp. So at least she’d done the sex talk right. God only knew who Lacey was using them with, though. She shuddered and shoved them back into place. The only other thing she found was an old locking jewelry box lying forgotten in one of the drawers. Maureen’s own aunt had given it to her years ago. “A girl like you needs a place to keep her secrets,” she’d said with significance as Lacey tore the wrapping paper. Maureen was about to ask her aunt what exactly she was talking about when Lacey cooed obligingly and threw her arms around her great-aunt’s stout waist. Such a good girl.

  She wedged the rusty latch open, but it was empty inside, nothing but dusty pink felt. Not even the locket she’d given Lacey at her graduation. She winced now at how corny it was. Lacey never even wore it. Not that it mattered. She kicked the box back into place and turned around, hands on her hips. According to the woman who’d done Lacey’s intake, the bed was a pretty common hiding place. “Addicted teenagers aren’t exactly reaching new creative heights,” the woman had said in a bored voice.