John nodded, and I felt my eyebrows lift.
He seemed a little embarrassed, though I wasn’t sure if it was due to my surprise or the idea of talking to someone. “I don’t know how to sort through my feelings about all of this. I think some family therapy could be a good thing for all of us—Landon too.” He lifted the bar stool off his bench and moved it to the side of the garage, out of the way. Then he faced me and crossed his arms over his chest in a protective-type stance. “The idea of getting some help gives me hope.”
I nodded, the lump in my throat too thick for the words to get around. Hope would be nice.
Half an hour later we were getting ready for bed together—in our room—when I tested the waters between us with another topic. “Why haven’t you told the police where she is?”
“I don’t know where she is,” John said before pulling his T-shirt over his head. He put it in the hamper, then sat on the edge of the bed, removed his socks, and left them in the middle of the floor.
“You know I’m paying for a hotel room. You could find out where she is through the credit card company.”
He walked into the closet while I climbed into bed, pulled my knees up, and waited for an answer. When he came out, I took a breath before offering a possible solution. “Maybe you’re not as ready to send her to jail as you say you are.” I was still clutching at the idea of rehab. I’d be willing to work extra hours to pay for it, and it might be just what she needed. I’d looked into a few programs, though, and knew I couldn’t invest in something that expensive without John’s agreement.
“Or maybe I’m nervous about going around you for something so big.” He crossed to the bathroom but paused with his hand on the doorframe, drumming his fingers before looking at me. “I don’t want to choose between my daughter and my marriage.”
My eyes fell closed, and my forehead fell onto my knees. It was all so ugly. I had to hold on to the hope John had talked about in the garage and the truth Aunt Ruby had spoken of this evening. I had to believe there were still good things to be had out there. I only wished it didn’t feel like I had to put Keisha on the altar for it.
Chapter 34
The next morning I told John that I still needed some time—one more chance to help Keisha. If nothing else, her being sober when she turned herself in would help her have a clear head through that process and maybe keep her from having to face withdrawal in jail. He was disappointed, and I feared he was going to give me an ultimatum, but instead he surprised me by asking me to commit to go to Landon’s games on Saturday; it was a doubleheader in Orange, which meant it would take most of the day. I agreed, and we didn’t talk about Keisha again.
I took Keisha to two NA meetings that week, and after walking back to her hotel room after the second one, I told her that we couldn’t keep doing this forever. I had planned to tell her about the warrants, but when the moment came, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I worried she would think I was behind them. It was so hard to let go.
“I’m doing better,” Keisha said. “It’s been so great having time to myself, ya know, to think things through. And the meetings help so much, and you’ve just been wonderful.” She smiled at me from her too-thin face, and I wanted so much to believe her. “You’re helping me get better, Shan. You’re the only one.”
It was all so confusing. Maybe I was helping her—I wanted to believe I was—but then my conversation with John from Monday night came back and it felt like he was right. I didn’t know what to do, so I focused on spending more time at home, which was feeling more comfortable, and pulling back with Keisha, which I hoped would help her stand on her own two feet. Each time I was with her, I talked about why she needed to be well, and we reviewed the steps she needed to take toward that. She claimed to be on step four of the twelve steps of Narcotics Anonymous—taking inventory of herself—but I knew she was still using.
I was almost home from having taken her some dinner Friday night when my cell phone rang, startling me. I pulled to the curb quickly, earning a honk from the car behind me. Moments before putting my phone to my ear, however, I saw that the call was from Tori, not Keisha or some law enforcement agency that would be giving me bad news. I lived in dread of that call.
“Hi, Tori,” I said, taking a minute to put my Bluetooth in my ear before easing back into the street. I hoped I didn’t sound too surprised. I hadn’t talked to her since she’d brought me that pill to identify. That had been weeks ago.
“Hi,” she said. “I hope it’s okay that I’m calling.”
“It’s totally fine,” I said, trying to sound even. “What’s up?”
“It’s Ilana,” she said. “I’m sorry I keep pulling you into this, but I just don’t know who else to talk to.”
I’d never talked to Aunt Ruby about her prescription and cringed a little. Had Ilana taken Ruby’s Percocet again? I hadn’t spent two minutes thinking about Ilana’s situation after the last conversation I’d had with Tori about it. “It’s fine,” I assured her. “What’s happened?”
“Well, I tripped over this dolly at work on Monday—totally lame, right? I know; anyway, we have a nurse practitioner at the studio all the time, and he looked at it, told me to ice it, and then gave me a prescription, handwritten and all that.”
“Okay?” I said, making sure she knew I was listening even though I had yet to see the relevance of this information.
“So, on Wednesday, I took Ilana to lunch. I’ve been texting with her a little, and she finally agreed to get together, so we went out to lunch, and in the course of conversation, I talked about the fall and the silly doctor giving me pain meds for my dumb injury. She got all intense, you know, and asked me what I’d been given. I told her I hadn’t needed it, but she kept pushing. I finally said it was for Lortab and she, well, she asked me for some.”
“Oh dear,” I said. That wasn’t good at all. I had reached my house and pulled into the driveway, but I stayed in the car. “Did you give her any?”
“Of course not. I hadn’t even filled the prescription. I told her that and then added that I wouldn’t have given them to her even if I had filled it—you’re not supposed to share prescriptions. It was kind of awkward to say all that, but I wanted to make a point.”
“No, it’s good that you set a boundary.” And wasn’t I the queen of boundaries.
“I’m glad you think I handled it right,” Tori said. “But then yesterday I went to throw the prescription note away—since I wasn’t going to use it. I looked for it and couldn’t find it. I mean, I don’t want to jump to conclusions—in fact, I feel horrible that I am jumping to conclusions—but I haven’t seen the prescription since that lunch with Ilana.”
“Was she alone with your purse after you told her you wouldn’t give her the meds?”
“Yeah, she was.”
I let out a breath, fully flipped into pharmacist mode. I shifted the car into reverse. “Can you text me your full name and birth date? I’m going to head over to the pharmacy and look it up. If she filled it, or even tried to fill it, it will show up under your name.”
“Really?” Tori said. “You’d do that?”
“Isn’t that why you called me?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, sounding embarrassed. “I just needed to talk to someone about it who could tell me if I was overreacting. I’m not so organized that I couldn’t have lost the prescription or something.”
“It will take me a few minutes to check it out, and then we’ll know for sure. Just send me that info, and I’ll let you know what I find.”
“Okay, thanks so much.”
Lucy was just starting to close up at the Fountain Valley store when I arrived and explained that I needed the computer. “Okay,” she said easily, relinquishing it for me.
I logged into the Controlled Substance Database, then typed in Tori’s full name and date of birth. I hit enter and held my breath, hoping the search would come up as unfilled.
It didn’t. I let out an audible moan. The pr
escription had been filled at a pharmacy in Irvine Wednesday afternoon—a Walgreen’s pharmacy, which was a big relief for me. It meant I had cause to do more checking; I was already pushing boundaries to have looked in the first place, but having the script filled by one of the pharmacies I sometimes filled in at was a good cushion for me in case anyone asked me about it later on.
“Everything okay?” Lucy asked.
I looked up at her. “Yeah, it’s fine.” Pharmacists were supposed to catch things like someone picking up a prescription made out in the wrong name, but it didn’t always work that way—hence the epidemic of prescription fraud and black-market sales. I went back to the computer and tried to remember Ilana’s last name so I could look up her history. For the life of me I couldn’t remember her last name—I wasn’t even sure I’d ever been told her last name. But I was pretty sure her husband was an ER doctor at Pacific Hospital in Long Beach—she’d mentioned it at one of our book club meetings, and I remembered it because I’d interned there in school. I called over there and talked to the unit clerk, asking about the different doctors there under the guise of trying to read a signature. When she said “Goldstein,” I was sure that was him.
“Do you happen to know if he has a wife by the name of Ilana?”
“Yes, he does. . . . Uh, is everything okay?”
“Yep, just verifying some information, thanks.”
It took me another half hour, and Facebook—which I could access on my phone—before I had what I needed to run Ilana through the database. Again I held my breath when I hit enter, hoping my suspicions would be wrong. A few seconds later, however, I stared at the evidence on the screen. She’d been seeing two different doctors, both of whom were prescribing her pain killers. That in and of itself wasn’t all that alarming, but one was also giving her Xanax and Soma, and she wasn’t using her insurance for most of her meds, which would prevent her from getting refills in advance. She’d received a few hundred pills in the last few months.
Though the CSD was a good program, it wasn’t perfect, and Ilana’s doctors—who should be the ones doing this background work—were obviously not checking the database before they gave her prescriptions. Many doctors just didn’t have time, and Ilana was a doctor’s wife and a polished and professional woman; she would seem low-risk to them. That she’d stolen a prescription in addition to all her other scripts took things to a new level. Ilana had a serious problem.
I went further into the system and looked at the signature log. I couldn’t tell right away it wasn’t Tori’s signature, so I pulled up an old prescription Tori had signed for within the Walgreen’s system. Upon comparison I could see that Ilana hadn’t even attempted to sign Tori’s name; she’d signed her own, probably saying she was picking it up for Tori.
To be doubly sure, I could confirm Ilana having signed for the prescription via closed-circuit video recordings, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to take that step because it would alert other people to my concerns. I had an obligation because of my position, and yet I felt an obligation to Tori and Ilana too. I hoped I was choosing the right balance, but I felt sick to my stomach all the same. I knew pharmacists who had had their licenses put on probation because of things like this. I was walking a very thin line.
I thanked Lucy, who had put off closing down for an additional fifteen minutes in order for me to finish my investigating, then went to the parking lot and called Tori. I couldn’t tell her anything about Ilana’s history, or that I knew Ilana had signed for the prescription, only that her lost prescription had been filled.
“I can’t believe this,” Tori said, sounding angrier than I expected. “She stole my prescription. She is in deep, isn’t she?”
“I can’t get into details.”
“It’s obvious,” Tori said. “Why else steal from me if she weren’t desperate? So what do I do now—call the police?”
A tremor ran through me at the mention of the police. Keisha was part of my reaction, but my bending of professional boundaries would certainly be questioned if the police were brought in. “That might be taking it too far.”
“Why? Isn’t it illegal for her to have done that? I mean, she had to pose as me, right? I don’t know how she even got it filled. Aren’t there supposed to be all kinds of safeguards in place to keep people from doing that?”
“There are lots of safeguards, but nothing’s perfect.” I kept to myself the fact that, as a doctor’s wife, she may have gotten more leeway from a pharmacist she might know socially or through her husband. “Calling the police is opening up a whole can of worms though.”
“No, stealing my prescription is opening up a whole can of worms. You think I should do nothing?”
“I didn’t say that,” I said, but I had thought it. Was this really our business? But to not do anything wasn’t right either. “We don’t know for sure that she did this.”
“Yes, we do,” Tori said. “She took my prescription, and I’m taking that seriously. I’ve watched too many talented people in my industry flush away their lives for drugs and too many people turn a blind eye because they didn’t want to kick up dust. I want to kick up so much dust about this that she never, ever dares do anything like this again.”
The power and confidence behind Tori’s words was shocking, and so different from my approach. I’d wanted to be soft and gentle and helpful; Tori was ready to have Ilana handcuffed.
“I mean, you see this stuff too, right? In your work, you’ve got to deal with junkies.”
“Ilana’s not a junkie,” I said, and yet a voice in my head said, But Keisha is. Out loud, I continued. “Junkies use street drugs; Ilana is showing some serious drug-seeking patterns—it’s different.”
“Well, whatever the title, she needs to face the music for it.”
“Tori, you just have to think this through. We don’t know her very well, and her husband is a doctor. Prescription fraud is a felony; she’d face fines and jail time. It would follow her for the rest of her life.”
“So you want me to do nothing?” Tori said again.
“No,” I said, shaking my head even though she couldn’t see me. “That’s not what I’m saying.” I paused and raised a hand to my forehead. “Can we just sleep on this? It’s not going to change by tomorrow, and maybe if we can take a few hours to think it through, we can come up with the right approach.”
Tori was quiet for a few seconds, but she finally agreed to call me tomorrow afternoon, and I returned home to John and Landon and two of his friends who were spending the night. I told John about Tori’s phone call. He listened and then asked what I was going to do. I told him I wasn’t sure, and though I could tell he had a lot he wanted to say, he didn’t. Instead he gave me a kiss on the forehead and said he was going to bed.
It was only nine thirty, but I spent the rest of the night cleaning out the cupboards in the laundry room, thinking over everything that had happened. I was more objective about Keisha than I felt I’d been before in other evaluations, and yet I hadn’t come to any conclusions by the time the cupboards were organized and the trash was taken out. I had told her something had to change, but I wasn’t sure what I could do to make that change happen. I wondered how long John would wait before he told the police where to find her. I wondered if that wasn’t the best option, because then I wouldn’t have to feel guilty for making the call myself. But would I resent him for it? And didn’t I want Keisha to be well before she had to face responsibility?
The next morning I made pancakes for breakfast—I couldn’t remember the last time I’d done that—and Landon and his friends ate every last one of them. It was a good thing I’d promised John I would go to the games because his assistant coach had a family emergency just half an hour before we left and I spent the game helping on the sidelines and keeping the boys pumped up. It was invigorating not only to be a part of the game but to be working with John and seeing how much Landon enjoyed having me there. It helped me realize just how much I’d missed these last months, and yet I was
n’t seeing Keisha today and couldn’t stop thinking about her. She texted me between the first and second game—we’d taken the team to Arby’s for lunch—and asked if I could bring her a hamburger.
I texted back that I was at Landon’s game in Orange. She didn’t respond, and it sat like a weight in my stomach to think that she was mad at me. Tori called a few minutes before the next game started. I let the call go to voice mail, then texted her that I’d call her when I was home. She responded that would be fine.
We won the second game, which meant John treated the team to ice cream. I ate my hot fudge sundae while trying to ignore the pit in my stomach. I hadn’t talked to Keisha all day; I hadn’t seen her. Had she been able to get something to eat when I couldn’t bring her a hamburger? Did she feel abandoned? They were all thoughts I’d had before, and yet these ones had one different aspect—each time I thought them, a secondary thought came to mind that spending one day with my family should not be making me feel so much guilt.
“You okay?” John asked, sliding onto the bench next to me.
“I’m fine,” I said, giving him a forced smile. He didn’t call me out, which was good since I felt very fragile. I really hoped Keisha wasn’t angry with me. I was all she had right now.
At home, I called Tori back.
“So, what do you think we should do?” Tori asked after we’d said hello to one another.
I took a breath and pushed everything else away so that I could focus on Ilana’s situation. “I think we should talk to her.”
Tori was quiet for a moment and when she spoke again, her bravado from last night was lacking. “Really? We barely know her.”
“I know,” I said, flipping into my professional mode. “But the most important thing is for her to get help, right? Isn’t your ultimate goal for her to get better?”
“Well, of course it is,” Tori said. “I’m just a little . . . uncomfortable with the idea of talking to her. What are we going to say?”
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