“What do you mean, what does it mean?” She could feel a bubble of anger beginning to grow in her. The rage at being asked to explain her complicated thoughts and feelings, mostly because she didn’t know how to explain them. “It means I am safe from idiots and hurt and disappointment and any number of things.”
He nodded.
Oh, she was going to find something sharp and rip this beanbag into pieces. “I’m not a people person, Micah. I haven’t been since...” She cut herself off before she said too much.
“Since the pandemic? A lot of people found it hard to reenter society after so much isolation.”
“Not that.”
“Then what? Because I see how you don’t make eye contact easily. Your posture is that of someone who is afraid to move because they’re sitting on a bed of nails. And you don’t want to know about the possibilities here, much less consider them. If it were me and I had a month off work completely paid for, and all I had to do was explore some options to make myself a better person, I’d be all over it. But you seem anxious about what you might find.”
Nailed it. And she didn’t know if this was intentional, but he was making it clear that she would not be able to escape her current reality either physically or spiritually. She looked down at her teacup and the string of the tea bag floating serenely on the surface, oblivious to how cold the water had gone.Try.
“Once, when I was a kid, I saw an old, beat-up dog at a gas station. He just sort of appeared while my dad was getting gas.” She pictured the golden dog, one ear half gone, scars on hisbody, a foot that didn’t land right. “There were two kids who were trying to get him to come with them. ‘Come on,’ they said, ‘you can live with us.’ They were holding out a hot dog to entice him. The dog got closer and closer, and when he got close enough, one of the kids tried to grab him by his scruff,” she said, gesturing to the back of her neck. “But the dog snatched the hot dog and broke free. He trotted back into the woods, his nose and tail high, like he was proud of himself.”
“That’s really sad,” Micah said.
Lorna blinked. “Sad? No, you don’t get it. It was liberating. That dog didn’t need anyone. He didn’t need two kids who were going to betray him like that. He didn’t need a house or a family. He needed food, and once he got it, he was perfectly fine on his own. Fewer entanglements. Fewer disappointments. No one to mistreat him. That’s where I am. That’s how I stay safe.”
Micah said nothing for a moment. “But you do know that dogs are pack animals, and a lot of those that get rescued at gas stations may start out reluctant, but then find they really like having people around. That dog might have had a cushy life if the kids had caught him, instead of the hard life of a street dog, all alone with no one to lean on.”
Something roiled lightly in her chest. She shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe life with those kids would have been worse.” She shifted on her beanbag. This was getting too, too close to the door of her bomb shelter. “So anyway, you want to know how Lorna Lott got here. It started a long time ago.”
Micah leaned forward. “How long ago?”
“Thirty-five years? More? And my sister was...” She clamped her mouth shut. Why was Kristen the first thing, the first person, she mentioned?
“An addict,” Micah said.
Lorna eyed him warily.
“Your sister was an addict,” he said calmly. “That must have been very difficult for you and your family. Can you tell me how it affected you?”
“Why do you even want to know?” The heat or her ire was beginning to build. “Anyway, I doubt you have the next year free,” she added flippantly. But she recognized what she was doing and groaned. She held up a hand. “I’m sorry,” she said wearily. “I don’t know why I can’t seem to take a beat before I speak. I get so angry out of nowhere. Honestly, Micah, I can’t even begin to list the many ways her addiction affected me without feeling the rage, you know? If you read addiction literature, it will tell you that using drugs affects your relationships, your work, and every aspect of your life. But it never tells you how your addiction casts a long shadow and wraps like a rope around the necks of everyone else in your life.”
“That sounds suffocating,” Micah said.
“Suffocating, enraging. Kristen’s drug use made it impossible for me to have friends. When they came over, she was high or just weird. And try being the sister of the girl who got arrested on school grounds not once, but twice. Just imagine all the fighting at home about the drug use and the arrests and her just disappearing, sometimes for a few hours, sometimes for a few days. Even when you move out as an adult, it doesn’t end. You end up missing work because of some crisis or doctor’s appointment or some big worry.” She paused, considering how often her mother had worried over Kristen’s whereabouts.
“I can’t imagine,” Micah said.
“You couldn’t possibly unless you lived it,” she said flatly. “I hope you never do. I have never been free of Kristen. I could never just carry on with my life without waiting for loads of shoes to drop, because they always dropped, usually when I wasleast expecting it. I could never just accept who she was. I kept getting angrier.”
And then everyone was gone. Nana. Her mother. Her sister. Her dad, if he ever really counted. She shook her head. She’d said enough.
Micah didn’t seem surprised or disgusted by her confession. “An addict in the family takes up a lot of time and attention and emotional energy.”
“Yep,” Lorna said, and put aside her teacup. “It made me invisible in my family.”
“How young were you when the trouble began?”
She looked at the window, at the way the leaves on the tree just outside moved on the fall breeze. The same way the trees used to move outside the window of Nana’s house. “Six. That’s the first time I can remember her using something, anyway. It was during a trip to the beach. She was only ten.”
And just like that, the story of her life came tumbling out before she could stop herself. She talked about how her family, who she thought had known happiness early on, became increasingly ruled by her sister’s addiction issues through the years. How she had always loved Kristen, still did, or at least she thought she did, or maybe she told herself she did, and really, she wasn’t even sure if she did. But she had once considered her the best of big sisters. And now she didn’t want to be near her. She talked about how long she had begged and hoped for Kristen to change, and how she still had trouble accepting that this was Kristen’s life.
She told Micah that she believed Kristen’s struggles ruined her parents’ marriage and stole so many moments—moments that Lorna could never get back.
She told him about her grandmother’s house, where she and Kristen and her mother went to live after her parents’ divorce,that place of so much childhood happiness. How she thought they would be so happy there, and how they were for a while, and how she loved that house. But when her grandmother died, her mother sold it to pay for Kristen’s longest stint in treatment. And when her mother got sick with cancer, Lorna had to care-take on top of a full-time job because Kristen couldn’t be trusted to follow through on doctor’s appointments, or not to steal her mother’s pain pills, or money from her purse. She told Micah that two relationships she’d had with men had crumbled under the weight of caring for her mother and her sister.
