Questing for a Dream, page 26
Nadie swallowed and waited for his offer.
“I think the most important thing is to get you dried out. Get you into an addictions program so you can kick the booze and the pills and get clean. If you will cooperate with us, I’ll get you into a program. If you complete the program, the charges will go away.”
“I’m not an addict!”
“I saw you at the club,” he reminded her. “You were so wasted you could barely walk. You may be naive, but you’re not clean and sober.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Cole was the officer who took her to the rehab center. Nadie shifted anxiously and glanced sideways at him. It was impossible for her to see past the pierced, semi-punk, kid’s face to the serious cop hidden beneath the mask. He played his role so well that even knowing it was a facade, she couldn’t see past it.
“You okay?” Cole queried, glancing over at her.
Nadie swallowed and nodded. “Yeah. I’m fine.”
“You must be nervous, huh?”
“Sorta. I don’t want to be stuck in a place all surrounded by addicts and alcoholics. I’m not like that.”
“Are you telling me you’re not craving a drink or a fix right now?”
He was too close to being right. Nadie had just been thinking about how a drink, a pill, or even an inhalant would help calm her down and make it easier to go through with it.
“I’m not an addict,” she repeated.
“You didn’t answer my question.”
Nadie continued to ignore it. “What’s going to happen to Charlotte? Is she going to rehab too?”
“She’s going to be incarcerated. Why, you’d rather go with her?”
“No. But… she didn’t do anything that bad. I don’t understand it.”
“She’s dealing drugs. What’s not to understand?”
“Not that much. Just a few pills. And she’s not pushing them; it’s just people who wanted to buy in the first place. They’ll go somewhere else if she’s not there. She’s not out trying to get kids hooked.”
“First of all, what makes you so sure? And second, why would it matter? She’s still dealing in a restricted substance. We have to stop the flow of drugs somehow.”
Nadie looked out the window. She was struck again by how big the city was. They had been driving for half an hour, and there was no sign they were getting to the end of the city.
“What’s this place like?”
“Sort of like a hospital. You’re not locked in your room during the day. There are group sessions and individual counseling you’re expected to participate in. I don’t know how much time they spend on life skills or career planning, but you can expect some of that too.”
“Career planning? I don’t have any career.”
“That’s sort of the point. You need to have a plan when you get out. Not just hitting the streets and looking for another fix.”
“What am I supposed to do? No one hires kids. Especially homeless Native kids.” She threw him a glance. “Everyone thinks we’re just drunks and junkies. Now they’ll have proof.”
“You think your prospects are any better if you still are a drunk and a junkie?”
He just didn’t get it. Nadie was tired of being discriminated against. Being Nehiyaw didn’t make her a drunk. Going out with a friend one night and having a bit too much to drink once didn’t make her a drunk. But people like him would always assume she was. No one would give her a chance.
They pulled up in front of a building that looked like a doctor’s clinic or old people’s home. Nadie’s stomach was hurting and her chest was tight. She licked her dry lips, looking at the building, and then looking at Cole.
“This is it,” Cole confirmed. “Ready?”
Nadie ground her teeth, but couldn’t find any reason to object. It wasn’t like she could persuade him to take her back to the shelter instead, just letting her off with a stern warning.
“Yeah. I’m ready.”
He got out of the car and went around to her door to open it. Nadie was in handcuffs and felt conspicuous being escorted up the sidewalk into the treatment center. Her heart was pounding hard in her chest. Inside, there was a little reception area with a big desk in the center and two small tubular chairs off to the side. Cole walked Nadie up to the reception desk holding onto her arm. He showed the receptionist a badge and gave her the paperwork he had brought with him. Nadie looked at the heavy metal doors that separated the reception area from the rest of the center. Even though the reception area was in cheerful pastel tones and looked like it could be a doctor’s or vet’s office, it was obvious that once she went through those doors, she wasn’t coming back out.
Nadie was shown to a waiting room where she was to sit down and wait for her intake interview. Nadie obediently settled herself into an uncomfortable plastic chair and the woman who had shown her in left. Nadie sat staring at the wall. There was a bulletin board covered with notices, inspirational quotes, and little motivational posters. She had read them all and the director’s door still hadn’t opened. The hall door opened and another girl walked in. Older than Nadie. Long, brown hair. Maybe Hispanic or part Indigenous. She looked at Nadie for a minute and sat down on the chair next to her.
“Intake?” she asked.
Nadie took a minute to process the inquiry, then nodded. “Yeah. You?”
The girl wore a blue uniform that made her look a little like a janitor at the library in town. She sighed; a long, tired sound. “Disciplinary.”
“Oh.” Nadie didn’t like the sound of that. She didn’t ask any further questions, afraid that would be offensive.
“Dr. Burton,” the girl said, nodding toward the director’s door. “We call him the human lie detector. You may as well tell him the truth, no matter how bad it is, because he’ll always know if you’re lying to him.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“Seriously. Don’t even try.”
Nadie nodded. The director’s door opened and a man with a round, balding head and glasses showed a young man out. He looked at the two girls.
“Lorry?”
She rubbed her forehead, looking stressed. “Finkel sent me down.”
He studied her for another long moment. His scrutiny made Nadie uncomfortable and she wasn’t even the one being stared at. Lorry gazed down at the floor, getting red. Finally, the director nodded. He turned his gaze to Nadie.
“Come in, please, Miss Nehiyaw.”
She followed him into the office and he shut the door. Nadie sat in the chair across from his desk. The room was bare and plain. He had some diplomas or certificates on the wall and a fake green plant on top of his long-drawered filing cabinet, and no other personal touches that she could see. The fake plant made Nadie miss the outdoors. Even though she had just arrived and didn’t usually like to spend a lot of time outside. And even though it was winter and all of the leafy plants were dead or hibernating. She sighed and twisted her fingers together, trying to get settled in the uncomfortable surroundings.
“Welcome to our facility, Miss Nehiyaw. I hope you will benefit from our programs. Now…” he spread several papers in front of him. Nadie couldn’t read them from where she was, but assumed they were records of her arrest that the police had copied and sent over with Cole. Dr. Burton’s eyes moved from one page to the next, reading and analyzing. “There isn’t a lot of information here when you get right down to it,” he said. “You were arrested for drug trafficking?”
“My friend gave me two pills. That’s all I had. And I didn’t ask for them or buy them, she just gave them to me and she wouldn’t take them back when I tried to give them to her.”
His eyes were intense. Even if Lorry hadn’t warned Nadie about his unusual abilities, his gaze would have made her uncomfortable. It felt like they burned into her soul. Nadie looked down, avoiding looking at him. He didn’t interrogate her any further on whether what she said was the truth. If Lorry was right about his abilities, then he knew she had told him the truth.
“Is that the first time you have had drugs in your possession?”
“Uh… no. But that doesn’t make me a drug dealer.”
“I didn’t ask you if you were a drug dealer.”
Nadie shrugged and continued to stare down at a knot hole on the desk in front of her.
“Have you taken drugs in the past?”
She couldn’t help chewing on her nail. It was a long time since she had done that last. When she was a child, her nails were always bitten down to the quick, even bleeding. She had overcome the compulsive behavior by sheer willpower. But now she couldn’t help herself. Nadie pulled her thumb away from her mouth and wound her fingers together to keep herself from biting them any more.
“Yes,” she admitted.
He made a note on his scratch pad. His writing was too messy for Nadie to decode, especially upside-down and from that distance.
“Have you taken any today?”
“No.”
“Have you taken anything today?”
“No.”
His eyes bored into her. Nadie didn’t even have to look up to know that he was doing it. She swallowed. She could feel his eyes. “A Tylenol. Couple cups of coffee. That’s all. Unless you want to count the gooey cinnamon bun I was eating before they arrested me.”
“Sometimes I wonder if those ought to be a controlled substance,” Dr. Burton said, with a smile in his voice and a rumble of laughter. He patted his slightly rounded belly. “Once you start…”
“Yeah,” Nadie agreed.
“No other pills today of any kind?”
“No.”
“Alcohol? Mouthwash? Cough syrup? Anything with alcohol in it?”
“No. Nothing.”
He wrote another note on his pad. Nadie wondered what he had seen in her face that he thought was worthy of a note. Did he think she was lying and had been drinking earlier in the day?
“How about inhalants?”
Nadie made a wide shrugging gesture that she intended for him to read as denial. But he didn’t move on to the next question. Nadie glanced up at his face. His blue eyes, perfectly centered in his round glasses, stared steadily back at her. Nadie looked down again. She waited for him to either challenge her or move on. He picked up his pen and wrote something down and continued to wait. Nadie’s chest hurt. Why couldn’t he just move on?
“No,” Nadie said. Her voice cracked like a teenage boy’s. She cleared her throat and repeated it firmly. “No, nothing.”
Dr. Burton took a deep breath in and let it out slowly, trickling the air in an exhalation that went on, and on, and on.
“I don’t like to be lied to, Miss Nehiyaw. Tonya. Why don’t we go back and try that one again? Have you used any inhalants today?”
“No… I mean… not on purpose. I mean… you use things all the time that smell and maybe make you light-headed. Nail polish. Markers. Cleaners…”
He wrote it down. “This is a difficult one for you.”
“I’m not an addict.”
“I didn’t ask you that.”
“I cleaned the whiteboard for Cammy today. With the cleaning fluid. And I wrote out the new schedule. With the markers.”
“And did you get high?”
“Just light-headed.” Cammy had come along part way through the job and cracked the window open. Nadie hadn’t appreciated the gesture.
“And nail polish?” Dr. Burton looked down at Nadie’s hands. Her nails were freshly painted a dark red she had borrowed from one of the other girls. “I find it interesting you don’t wear any makeup or take care to look well-groomed, but you’re wearing nail polish.”
“I’m living in a shelter. I hardly have any clothes. Or makeup or anything else.”
“But you have nail polish.”
“I just borrowed it from one of the others. To make my nails look nice.”
She caught herself before chewing on her thumbnail, forcing herself to put her hands back down, away from her face.
“And did you get high?”
“No.”
“And tonight, when you decided to take the nail polish off again, would you get high on the acetone?”
Nadie rubbed the glossy nail polish with her thumb. There was a hard knot in her stomach. He was the human lie detector. He knew.
“Maybe.”
He nodded and wrote a note to himself.
After Dr. Burton was done with Nadie, he pressed a button on the underside of his desk, which called an attendant into his office. Nadie was shown to her new room.
It was a small, bare cell almost as small as the baby room. There was a bed and a tiny set of drawers in a side table and a rod to hang clothing on. No closet. Nowhere, she realized, that anything could be hidden.
“You are to stay here,” the woman who had escorted her to her room advised. “Someone will come and get you when your counselor is ready for you.”
“Isn’t Dr. Burton my counselor?”
“No. He oversees all of the operations at the center. He doesn’t have the time to do counseling as well. Your counselor will be Jeremy.”
“Okay.”
“Just take a break and stay in here. He’ll come and get you when he’s ready.”
“Okay,” Nadie repeated, a little more loudly.
The woman scowled at her. “Don’t you raise your voice to me. I’m in charge here.”
Exasperated, Nadie looked down at her hands and said nothing further, waiting for her escort to leave.
Jeremy, Nadie was surprised to discover, was an Indigenous man who looked to be in his thirties. He looked tired.
“Tonya Nehiyaw?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I’m Jeremy. Come with me and we’ll get started.”
Her papers had now apparently been given a home in a file jacket. She caught a glimpse of Dr. Burton’s spiky handwriting on one of the pages as Jeremy perused it. The room he took her to was green. It housed only a wobbly table and four chairs. She sat in one and Jeremy sat down opposite her.
“Long day?” he asked her, stifling a yawn of his own.
“Yeah. Long and… stressful. Tiring. Weird.”
“I’m sure it’s been very unsettling. Why don’t we start off with your questions? What do you want to know?”
“How long do I have to be here?”
“Our inpatient program is thirty days. After that, you’re going to need outpatient counseling, some sort of support group like AA or NA, and long-term follow-up. An addiction takes more than a day or two to take root, and it takes longer to kick the habit permanently.”
“Thirty days,” Nadie repeated. That was the part she cared about. She knew she didn’t need any of the other stuff. She wasn’t an alcoholic or a drug addict. The inpatient period was all she cared about. “And after I’m done that, then the police wipe my record.”
Jeremy nodded and folded his hands. “That’s right. But you’re still going to need continuing support if you’re going to remain sober.”
“I’m sober right now. I can stay that way.”
“Good to hear it. Other questions?”
“The shelter… will they keep my room for me? They won’t toss my stuff and make me start over, will they?”
She was painfully aware how little she had. It didn’t seem fair that she kept losing everything.
“They’ll be informed of your circumstances. You won’t be the first kid they’ve had go into rehab.”
“This program… do I have to believe in your god and everything?”
Jeremy raised his brows. “My god? No. You can believe whatever you want.”
“Because I don’t know if I believe any of that.”
“We’ll help you through it.”
Nadie nodded.
“Any more questions?”
“No… not yet.”
“Okay. We’ll start you on step one tomorrow. For now, I just want to explore your addiction and who Tonya Nehiyaw really is.”
Nadie shifted uncomfortably at that.
“Do you have something you want to tell me about yourself?”
Nadie opened her mouth to answer, and he held up a hand.
“Not about what you aren’t. About what you are. Tell me about Tonya.”
“I don’t know. Nothing special.”
“Everyone is something special. What makes you unique? What is it that makes you yourself?”
Nadie considered what to tell him.
There was a supper, but Nadie was so tired and stressed out from the day that she had no appetite. She could barely look at food without feeling sick. So when the nurse or aide came around to pick up Nadie’s dishes, she found everything still full.
“You need to eat something,” she growled, not taking the tray Nadie held out to her.
“I’m not hungry. I’ll have something tomorrow.”
“You need to eat this.”
“No. I can’t. Tomorrow I will. It looks really good,” she offered. “I just don’t feel well right now.”
“Any symptoms need to be reported and logged. It’s better if you just eat it and save us the time. I’m going to go around and collect the other trays and then I’ll come back to you. Then you had better have eaten something.”
Nadie looked down at the dinner again after the woman was gone. Normally she’d be happy with any food she didn’t have to make herself. A warm meal she didn’t have to slave over the stove for was something special. But the whipped potatoes, green peas, and nondescript meat and gravy looked fake. She couldn’t explain it. They just looked unappetizing.
Nadie did what she used to do when she was a little girl. She pushed the food around so there was a big empty spot in the middle. She hid the peas under the potatoes so it looked like they were all gone. And she cut up the meat and heaped it into a pile and hid some under the potatoes so it would look like she’d eaten about half of the dinner. She took one bite of each thing, and she smeared a little gravy in the corner of her mouth and on the front of her shirt.
When the aide came around again, she looked down at the plate. “You still barely touched anything,” she accused, not fooled by Nadie’s creative rearrangement of the food. “Now I have to fill out an assessment form.”
