She comes back more times after that, and Lorna usually takesher in, just like Mom used to do. And Lorna hates herself for it just like she hated Mom for it. But she can’t turn her back on her sister. She asks her dad for help, but he says he is tapped out.
“Tapped out of what?” Lorna asks. He hasn’t offered emotional or financial support that she’s aware of.
“Money,” he says. “You think her jail fines and treatment stints are free? And I don’t like the idea of her around my kids.”
Lorna bristles at his characterization of his daughters as “his” kids. What does that make her and Kristen?
Lorna feels like she is on a hamster wheel. At Deb’s suggestion, she starts another round of therapy, following up on the round she did after college. She attends groups for families of addicts. They talk a lot about the importance of setting firm boundaries with addicts and holding them. “You must protect your well-being and your health,” the instructor insists. But no one in the group can really do it, Lorna included. She sets boundaries, and Kristen pushes past them. Lorna lets her because she is all Kristen has.
She begins to collect Precious Moments figurines, little porcelain glimpses of lives and the people she wishes they were. She gets a dog, Agnes, a cute rescue corgi, so she is not alone in this terrible battle with drugs. She feels rage every time Kristen comes around, and then guilt every time she leaves. Kristen gets odd jobs, then gets fired. She meets shady new characters, then disappears for days on end. She always has a phone—how do so many addicts who cannot support themselves have phones?
Sometimes after Kristen has been on a bender, she will swear again she is going to stay sober, that she hates being high all the time. She forgets that at times she has said she wants to be high all the time. It doesn’t matter—she never keeps her promise. Never.
Lorna reaches her breaking point when Kristen steals moneyfrom her purse and some Precious Moments figurines. Worse, when she leaves with the money and the figurines, she leaves the door open for Agnes to escape. When Lorna comes home from work, she quickly pieces together what happened. She is frantic. Hysterical, even, that she has lost Agnes. It takes her almost thirty-six hours to track down Agnes and reunite with her. When she does, she collapses with grief and anxiety.
Kristen never hits rock bottom, but Lorna finally does.
The next time Kristen comes around, Lorna has changed the locks and tells her she is no longer welcome. That Lorna can’t have Kristen’s chaos in her life anymore. She has set her boundary, and she is holding to it.
Kristen doesn’t believe her at first, but when she understands Lorna will not allow her to crash in her house and steal from her, she loses control. She calls Lorna every name she can think of. She says she hates her, she’s always hated her, and she hopes she dies. Lorna watches her sister walk to the street with no place to go. She looks broken, but Lorna is too.
A week goes by before the police contact Lorna with their Jane Doe. Lorna calls Dad, who flies immediately to Austin. Kristen, they say, has overdosed on something that was laced with fentanyl. She is lucky, they say, that it didn’t kill her.
Kristen is not lucky. Lorna wishes she would have died, because Kristen has suffered irreversible brain damage. She is now in a residential facility in Florida.
The guilt and grief Lorna holds are unbearable. She tries to move on. She moves to Nana’s house. She attends more therapy, takes antidepressants, tries anything there is to soothe a hurt like this, and nothing works. Nothing but her bomb shelter. She closes herself off and away so that her rage with life and the cards she was dealt festers until she almost loses her job.
She wishes she hadn’t run out of compassion for Kristen, butshe only had so much. She thinks only a deity could have the amount of compassion required to deal with a loved one who is a hardcore addict. She wishes her life could be different, that she could be happy. Happy like she and her whole family were early on, once upon a time.
They were happy, weren’t they?
Weren’t they?
Chapter 36Lorna Now
Lorna sat on the floor of her apartment with a glass of wine and Aggie snoozing on the couch behind her. The stacks of pink and white envelopes were in front of her, and she was casually pondering the difference in the size of the stacks. There were far more white letters than pink. She pushed the white ones to the side—she knew what they said.
But she hadn’t read the pink ones. She was going to do that tonight. She was preparing for her trip to Florida, and she knew that Kristen’s life there would be detailed in those letters.
Earlier that day, she’d called her dad for the first time in months.
“Lorna?” he’d said, his voice full of surprise. “I can’t believe it’s you. I didn’t think I would ever speak to you again. Is everything okay?”
Lorna had to think about that. “It’s getting better. I’m calling because there is something I need to do, and I thought you’d want to know.”
“Uh-oh,” he said. “I don’t like the sound of that.”
“I need to come see Kristen.”
Her words were met with a very long pause. Lorna could feel the tension radiating through the phone. “Really?” he said at last, his voice flat. “Why now?”
“Because I’m working on letting go of the past. And I need to forgive her. And I need her to forgive me.”
Dad snorted derisively. “You know she can’t do that.”
“I know she can’t talk,” Lorna said.
“She’s not all there, Lolo. I don’t know what you think, but she’s just a shell at this point.”
