Spoons and Needles

Spoons and Needles

Spoons

And

Needles

by

Jennifer Cannon

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2019 by Jennifer Cannon

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of quotations in a book review. For more information, contact jennifer_cannon@gmail.com.

Cover design by Belle Goodson

ISBN ebook: 978-0-359-94454-5

ISBN print: 978-0-359-96266-2

Prologue

Heather

It’s strange looking down at your own body. I can see that I’m convulsing, but I can’t feel it. I’m just … detached.

The police officer that was the first person on scene started CPR until the EMS could get there. He pulled my naked body out of the bathtub and laid me on the floor.

I can hear him yelling at me while he’s doing compressions.

Breath, dammit Heather! Don’t you dare quit on me.

Officer Pat sort of knows me. He’s been around for a good part of my addiction. He’s arrested me several times and tried to help me. He gave me information about rehab centers and support groups.

Who could afford the rehab centers though? I kept telling him that. They’re expensive, and public ones have such a waiting list.

I tried to go to a support group for a while; but they kept talking about God. There’s too much I don’t understand about God.

Why did God let me get this way? Why does he let some people suffer and let some people walk through life a little easier?

I didn’t mean to let Officer Pat down. He really tried to be my friend. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone. I just wanted to feel normal, to feel good.

When the EMTs get there, they take over compressions. Two of the EMTs load me onto a stretcher and rush me to the squad. They squeeze Narcan up my nose. It doesn’t work.

My heart rate is gone... It’s not their fault. They’ve done everything they were supposed to.

At the hospital, they pronounce me DOA, and call time of death.

Officer Pat has followed the squad and I see him walk away and brush tears from his eyes when the doctor makes the call.

He couldn’t save me. It wasn’t his fault.

I watch one of the EMT’s go over and put his hand on Officer Pat’s back. They all tried. It wasn’t even the first time I’ve rode flashing lights to the ER.

They’ve saved me before. This time, it was just too late. Maybe it’s better that way. Now I don’t have to fight anymore. I don’t have to hurt anyone I love anymore.

I hope they remember me before the addiction took over. I hope they remember that I was a good person once.

Jesse

I was only about five when my mom died. I don’t remember a lot about her.

I remember watching my grandma cry. She came in, sat on my bed and hugged me and told me my mommy is an angel now.

Other than that, there was a lot of fighting.

When everyone thought I went to bed, I snuck around the corner and heard Grandpa telling her not to waste her god damn tears.

Heather made her choice. She kept sticking that needle into her arm. She knew what she was doing to us and was too selfish to care! He spat angrily.

I heard Grandma crying. Where did I go wrong as a Mom? Maybe if I had asked more questions, paid more attention, I could have stopped this. I just always thought she was our perfect good girl.

Grandpa slammed the door as he stormed outside in disgust … cutting off whatever else Grandma was going to say.

At the funeral there were lots of tears, but Grandpa … he never cried. He was just angry.

I heard him tell someone, All of Heather’s useless fucking friends were here too …

Every fucking one of them should be sitting in jail, he said.

Once in a while Grandma would try to talk to him, to tell him that heroin is an addiction and they needed help, not jail time.

Grandma, well, she wasn’t really strong though. I don’t know if she ever had fight in her, but she just seemed defeated.

Every time she would start to cry again, I would just go up and hug her. I didn’t want her to be sad.

The truth is, I don’t remember a lot about my mom.

Maybe it’s wrong that I’m still not really sad thinking about her. Maybe it’s wrong that I still don’t really wonder.

People watch you more though when your mom dies of a heroin overdose. They blame the parents and watch the kids for signs that I’m a bad seed too.

If I don’t turn in homework in school, I can feel the teacher’s eyes on me trying to size me up. If I’m with a group of rowdy friends at the mall, I can hear adults ask, Aren’t you Heather’s daughter? and the tsking sound they make when I say yes.

I’m not a bad kid, just because my mom was an addict. I’m not going to be a bad kid too.

My dad visits once in a while. He’s an addict too, but he’s in recovery. He has been for a long time, but I don’t live with him because Grandma said they don’t trust him.

Addicts can go back to being addicts whenever a bad day hits them, she always says.

So instead, I see my dad every couple of weekends and whenever he comes to pick me up, he purposely wears short sleeve t-shirts, to show he doesn’t have track marks on his arm.

I always see grandma looking at his arm. Dad sees it too, but he’s afraid she’ll try to take me away from him, so he just placates her.

In truth, dad will talk to me about some pretty adult stuff. He says Grandma will never forgive him. He says he loved my mom very much.

He says that I’m becoming a woman. I’m almost 13 now, so he says it’s important I hear these things and understand things like relationships and addictions. He doesn’t want me to be angry at my mom for abandoning me, because that way lies madness.

I don’t know if I understand exactly what that means, but I think he’s trying to say that If I’m angry at mom then he’s scared I’ll start doing bad things, like drinking, just because I’m a teenager and I’m supposed to be pissed at the world and experimenting anyway.

Dad says that addicts aren’t bad people. They do bad things because they can’t help themselves, and that he has worked really hard to change.

The sad thing is, there’s a lot of a kids like me. There’s like this whole generation of kids whose parents overdosed.

They talk about it sometimes on the radio, and on the news. They say that because of the opioid epidemic, these kids need homes, foster parents, they need you.

I love my grandma, and I don’t really miss my mom because I never got to know her, but sometimes I wish I had a mom, ANY mom.

The girls at school get to do cool things with their moms, like dress shopping.

When I want to go dress shopping, I can see grandma watching me, wondering if this is the beginning. She is always going to blame herself.

Grandpa left about a year after Mom died. He said he couldn’t take grandma always feeling bad when it wasn’t her fault and it wasn’t her fault.

Your mom was just fucking selfish, he says. She didn’t care what we did for her. We gave her everything.

Sometimes I feel like the adults in my life are all one giant puzzle. I keep trying to piece together what happened. I try to piece together what went wrong and how it started.

I think if I can put the puzzle together completely, then maybe I can avoid making the same mistakes. Sometimes … I wonder though.

Johnie

Most of my life is divided into the before and after.

Before I fell in love with Heather, after I fell in love with her.

Before we had a kid, after we had a kid.

Before we did drugs, after Heather’s overdose.

I still say it every day. I am Johnie. I am a heroin addict.

I don’t always say it in the program anymore, but I still wake up every morning and say it in front of my mirror. I keep track of the days I have been sober.

I have to face myself every single day. I have to look in the mirror and know the part I played in Heather’s death. I have to face that I hurt the people I love.

Heather and I were high school sweethearts.

We met in junior high.

I used to watch her bouncing brown hair when she practiced for the cheerleading team.

She had these green eyes with these incredibly long lashes.

She was always smiling in the hallway as she walked by. The smile was never directed towards me, but it made me want to know what was always making her smile. It was like she had secrets that she could have shared with the world.

In our freshman year, we started sharing a few classes together. She was smart, and always seemed to know the answers. Maybe that’s what some of that smile was about.

The first time I ever talked to her was after class while complaining about a homework assignment our English teacher gave us.

I wasn’t good in school. It wasn’t that I was stupid, I just hated sitting still and there were so many things I could be doing.

When I was younger, the teacher and docs had said I had A.D.H.D. and had put me on this medicine. I hated it though. I couldn’t think about what I wanted to build or draw what I wanted to build.

The medicine made me super focused. But that super focus took away my creativity.

So, when I started having a choice, I stopped taking it. I

I was better at working with my hands. I could fix things, but I couldn’t sit in class and understand what part of a sentence what part of grammar was. I didn’t figure I was gonna use any of that stuff in the real world anyway.

I was never going to go to college and always knew I’d go work in a shop or factory. But this assignment gave me the perfect chance to try and talk to her. It gave me the perfect reason to ask her a question.

I asked her if she could help me with this stupid assignment.

She turned that million watt smile on me and said Sure, I can help you at the library right after cheerleading today. Is that Okay?

That smile felt like sunshine warming my skin. I knew then, before I’d spent any real time with her that I loved her.

It took about a week of those assignments before she threw her hands up in the air in frustration cause I just didn’t get the idea of prepositions and clauses.

The expression on her face, even though it was directed at me. She was such a short little thing. She scrunched for nose and forehead together when she was mad. And the gesture of throwing her hands up in the air like she had just given up.

I didn’t want her to give up, not on me. So, before her arms came back down, I swooped in and gave her a kiss.

She was sort of stunned. I wasn’t sure if she was going to hit me or not. It was awkward and silly. I had kissed other girls, ‘cause that’s what guys are supposed to do. Before though, I had always been sure of myself, this time I just took a chance. I wasn’t sure it was going to work out well for me.

When I kissed her, she took a step back and really looked at me and then this little bit of mischief appeared in her smile. I had never seen that before.

Johnie, for every A you get in class, I’ll give you a kiss,

I got a lot of A’s after that.

By prom of senior year, we were inseparable.

We had plans and goals. We knew we’d get married and have babies. I’d open a shop to work on cars and she could go to school and teach English. We’d have a family, one girl and one boy. We had the perfect all-American dream.

We didn’t think we’d turn into addicts. I didn’t know one day I’d bury her and would barely get to see our daughter.

We lived in a small town in the middle of Ohio, population 10,000. Our graduating class had 50 people. Small towns don’t have problems like that. Small towns are better than the crime-ridden cities, right?

Heather’s parents are upper middle class, upstanding citizens of this town, or they used to be considered that way. Heroin junkies don’t come from that, right?

Addicts are supposed to come from broken, inner city poor homes.

At least, that’s what we thought.

Judith

For 24 years I gave my everything to Heather. I had this bright rambunctious daughter who I loved more than anything. I got pregnant with her my senior year and me and Phil got married.

I never once regretted having her so young. I never once missed out on the things that other people say they miss out on when they have babies young.

I never wanted to party, or travel. I was just content in my small little world.

When Heather was born, I would sneak into her room just to hear her breathing.

I couldn’t believe this delicate and precious little bundle came from me. It was overwhelming to think that I was responsible for this writhing little human being.

The first time she got sick, I called the pediatrician panicking.

She was running a fever of 100 degrees and was so fussy. He got her in to see him, but then explained that there were always going to be slight childhood illnesses.

He knew I was a new young mom and was scared.

When Heather started school, I made sure I was always involved in her school. I was a PTA mom.

I always felt bad for the working moms who didn’t have time for field trips and homemade cookies for the class.

Those moms would always rush in looking frazzled after they had come from work, carrying sweet treats hastily picked up from a local bakery.

It wasn’t that I thought I was better than them; I just got to spend more time being involved with my daughter.

I was lucky. Heather made friends easily, she was active, and grades came easily to her.

It was those green eyes, I tell ya.

When she was trying to concentrate, or wanted something, you could see her scrunch her forehead to her nose and be determined.

When she was five, she was determined to ride her bike with no training wheels. Of course, she waited until I had to go into the house and then decided to leave the fenced in yard and try it on the sidewalk all by herself.

That was her first scar.

I heard the screaming and came running just in time to see the blood gushing from her knee.

By then I had learned not to panic though. I got her all cleaned up so I