Kit Writes

The oldest sister sits alone.

Or maybe not. Maybe she is accompanied by a friend, or by a “friend,” or maybe she is accompanied only by a beer and the sprawl of cocaine before her. She doesn’t know that the cocaine is laced with fentanyl. She doesn’t know (or does she?) that this will be her last time doing drugs.

No one really knows the last time. When she had tried to kill herself with copious amounts of heroin years prior, she thought that would be the last time. And then she lived. And for years after, that remained the last time still.

This night, she decides it isn’t.

She has done this before. Perhaps she’s calm. But it’s been a while since she’s done it, so perhaps she isn’t. Perhaps she’s nervous, or hysterical, or maybe she’s second-guessing herself.

Maybe she glances at her phone idly and wonders if she should call someone instead.

Maybe she takes a second to linger on the thoughts of those she’s leaving behind, her loved ones. Maybe she takes a moment to whisper apologies to the air – I’m sorry, Ma.

Or perhaps, without hesitation, she dives in.

It will be a long stretch of hours before anyone knows.

They find her on her bathtub floor, the shower running, drowning her over and over again.

Her face is purple, bile bubbling from her mouth. Nobody knows how long she lies there, alone, dead. Her last contact with anyone is from 12am the previous night – her boyfriend finds her around 7pm the next day. He runs from the room, horrified by the sight, and calls the police.Don’t tell her loved ones, the police instruct to her boyfriend. We’ll do that.

She is 28 years old, and she is dead.

It will be two hours before her family knows. Two hours where her younger sister paces

the aisles at her work, snapchatting her older sister about a possible UTI, only briefly questioning

when it remains unopened an hour later. She listens to music and stocks the shelves, counting down

the minutes until 10pm. Oblivious.

The family discovers the older sister’s passing through a loud police knock at 9pm.

The police have knocked on this family’s door before.

She’s overdosed, they’d said, years prior. Multiple times. There were times when the family had thought the oldest daughter would never escape her drug cravings, feared that she was hopeless

– and then, through her own willpower and grit, she had remained clean for six years (had the cravings ever even stopped?)

This time, the police coldly say, she’s dead.

Her mother screams and screams and screams, heart-broken sobs that are only briefly interrupted by a dazed mantra of this isn’t real, this can’t be real.

In a few minutes, the younger sister is home. She is lucky she works so close to her house because after receiving the text at work, she drives blinded by tears and shrieks into the night: Why would you do this? She doesn’t yet know the cause of death – none of them do. Even then, they have their assumptions.

*

After years of escaping almost death, death in itself is surreal. Wrong. They all suspect(hope) that the hospital will call and say this is a misunderstanding. That it wasn’t her, that she’s breathing, that she was brought back. The hospitals have been wrong before, when they claimed one overdose would most likely leave her either dead or brain damaged. Instead, she lived, brain undamaged, and went to rehab and school and nannied.

At the funeral, her younger sister speaks. Her fingers shake and she forces herself to push through labored breathing, through the ache of losing someone she’d idolized and forcing herself to give the older sister this one, final gift. Her fingers tremble and she wants to scream more than anything, wants to grab the urn and toss it, wants to slam it against the earth again and again, until it breaks open and unrecognizable remains spill onto the earth. What the fuck happened? she wants to yell, because they still aren’t completely sure, and not knowing tears at her core.

She does none of these things – she reads her practiced words.

When she finishes, she thanks everyone who gives their condolences and appraises her speech. In the car on the way home, she rips up the funeral speech, unable to look at it any longer. She rips it into halves, then fourths, then eights, until she can’t recognize or make sense of the words.

She goes home that night and stares at the ceiling and rereads their last conversation, the texts her sister sent her, again and again.

You’ll learn soon that only family is real, her older sister had texted her two days before her death. I love you. Just so you know.

I can’t tell you it gets better. You just survive if you want. Find what you love and do everything you can to do it.

I’ve always hated myself. Always. That’s why I’m there for everyone else.

I can’t rebuild my life without a new brain and new blood.

The younger stares at this message for a long time, hot shame and self-hatred coursing over her.

Each text is worse than the last and she curses herself for thinking that they had just been having a deep conversation while each a bit drunk. Reading through them with her new knowledge, they feel sickening.

She should have seen it. It was right there in front of her, a clear cry of help me, and she hadn’t realized – the younger had been too drunk and involved in her own struggles with addiction that she had missed the signs.

In the months that follow, the younger sees it in everyone’s eyes. She catches every weary gaze, every glance of concern. People watch her with that same worry – are you next?

*

For the first few months following the loss, there is a constant support system.

And then, all at once, there isn’t.

For the first few months, they gather and share stories and cry.

And then, all at once, they don’t.

She was so worried about you, her boyfriend tells the younger.

The older sister’s friends: We’ve heard so much about you – some of it’s sad. Please feel free to reach out if you need anything.

Instead of reaching out, the younger mulls over those words, this idea that her sister had died worried about her. She scoffs and remembers years prior, when even in the clutches of active, heavy drug addiction, her older sister had advocated for getting the younger therapy. In hindsight, it might’ve been another method of deflecting.

Or maybe, much like others in their family, the older recognized herself in her sister and feared it.

*

As the younger sister, I didn’t realize how much of you that you saw in me in our later years.

Victoria. Despite a six-year age gap, we shared addiction and sadness. As I got older, I learned to understand your pain of years prior. While as a child, I often blamed you for the hectic state of our house, I grew into an adult who understood you, needed you. I turned to you for advice, wisdom, guidance. At twenty, I became the person I never wanted to be (an addict, drinking to the point of blackout, seizures, hospital trips) and you, years into sobriety, became the one person who understood me.

nderstood me.

In my senior year of college, I wrote a paper dedicated to you (I’ve always been writing about you), and you cried when you read it. When it won an award, and I told you, you said, smugly, “My life is award-winning.”

It was.

Not because of the drugs, but because of you, of the person that you were.

You nannied for a baby with down syndrome, devoting copious hours outside of work to his care, and hoped to work with more special needs children; you would drive hours to help a friend, no matter how far away they were or how close you were to them; you were always available to talk when needed.

On one occasion, I called you drunk and crying at a friend’s house, and you bought me an Uber to your place. When I arrived, you held me close, rocked me as I sobbed, and watched me with an understanding sorrow.

You were infinitely stronger than myself, so when the façade slipped, when you were drunk and parts of the sadness seeped through, I feared it. On the last thanksgiving before you passed, you snuck Fireball into our grandmother’s house. We went upstairs, where you reached into your coat pocket and said, grinning, guess what I’ve got, and pulled out the bottle, inviting me to have some.

I accepted, confused on why you’d brought it, but not willing to turn down the chance to get drunk. You had told me once before, I’m not an alcoholic, I’m addicted to heroin, to justify your drinking, but in that moment, I considered those words again and concluded that they had been excuses – that you, like me, were addicted to not being sober.

We drank fast and quick, descended the stairs, and mingled amongst our family, drinking wine to cover the cinnamon scent.

After your death, your boyfriend informed us that on that night, you went to his family party after, where you guys fought. Once home, you purposely sliced your wrist on a kitchen appliance.

Back then, when I drove you to get the surgery and stitches required for your wound, you told different variations of its origin every time.

I think back to those moments with shame – your lies should have been obvious. I should have known you well enough to realize that every time your wrist was cut it had been self-inflicted.

I’ve learned that thinking is torture, that the gift of hindsight is a curse. I spent the months after the funeral drowning in that hindsight, choking myself again and again with midnight sobs.

How foolish to think, it should’ve been me. How selfish to continue acting recklessly because, why should I have to feel fine because everybody needs me to? I tried to hide my addiction, and when I moved two hours away, our mother told me, you have to be okay, and I agreed because I hoped I could hide it.Was that what you had thought too? Had you convinced yourself that you were completely alone, that if you hid it, no one would be the wiser?

I know what she wants me to do, I said in your funeral speech. She would want me to recreate all the good parts of her. She wants me to succeed.

That’s all you’ve ever wanted. Even when it feels like I can’t, I keep pushing, hoping that some part of you is able to see me trying to keep those parts of you alive, so you can eventually be proud.

You reached out to people, kept in touch, initiated relationships and bonds. You were easier to talk to than anyone, completely open about your past and failings. You weren’t ashamed of your experiences because you knew they made you stronger and wiser, a brutally-experienced young woman, kinder than most.

There were people I couldn’t understand, people that I cast judgment on, and you would always offer a different viewpoint. You were well aware of something that is obvious and yet mostly ignored by those around us – that every person is their own entity with their own story, their own jumble of situations that plops them into the next one, and if they happen to be plopped onto the street, unlucky in life and unable to afford rent or a sandwich or anything that might help escape, then they might have the pleasure of running into you and feeling enamored and grateful for your outgoing, energetic light, and your boisterous laugh. They might experience going to Sky Zone with you, because they told you they had nothing and so you gave them not only a meal, but an experience of joy. When you part ways later, they don’t know you will die at the age of 28, but they know you are too young to feel so comfortable and trusting around someone who could easily kill you. But you have a way of reading people, and you are not killed by this homeless stranger who laughs and trods off with the box of cigarettes you bought them, smoking one and saying, “We need more people like you around!” not because it would fill their pockets, but simply because it was true.

What does heroin feel like? I asked you once.

It’s the best feeling in the world, you answered. I couldn’t get those words out of my head. If it was the best feeling in the world, would you one day return to it? How did you keep yourself from falling back into that trap? I never tried heroin because I feared dying or becoming overly anxious, but you didn’t have those fears – if life became too hard, would you give back into heroin?

That might’ve made sense. If you had died of a heroin overdose, it might not be so confusing or frustrating. There are so many questions concerning the fact that it was cocaine, a drug you never particularly leaned to, and the fact that you had so much of it. The police told us, if she bought this much, she was probably planning on using it again, so it’s unlikely that she wastrying to kill herself. But why would you buy cocaine to use alone? Was there someone with you, someone who dropped you in the shower and left, scared that your death would get them in trouble?

Had someone abandoned you? It wouldn’t be the first time – you were once found shoved behind a public bathroom at the park. It was three thirteen-year-olds that found you – they were in my grade, and recognized my dad. The next day, they all came up and apologized to me at school.

I bit the inside of my cheek and strained myself in an attempt to keep it together, unwilling to cry and unwilling to admit that I had spent the night previous listening to you sob through the walls when they told you that you were going to rehab.

Years later, when you were clean, the guy who had abandoned you messaged you as a part of his Narcotics Anonymous steps. He admitted to dumping you behind the bathroom, scared that you were dead and that he would be in more trouble if anyone knew he’d been with you. You forgave him. It was something you would never do, you said, but you forgave him. He left you to die and you forgave him. My brain still can’t wrap around it. Even when you were hard into using drugs, you called the police when a friend overdosed.

The fact that you used cocaine is less confusing than everyone else. When I got the text at work, Victoria’s passed away – come home, I couldn’t believe it. I assumed you killed yourself. You had attempted multiple times before. Years prior, I would have assumed drugs instantly, but you were six years clean, and I got too comfortable.

In the piece I wrote for you, I had an entire section dedicated to the things I learned through your addiction. One of them was that I would never get comfortable, that I had learned there would always be the chance that you could return to using, and there was nothing I could do aside from enjoy what we had together. I wrote that I had to accept that you could go back to drugs, and yet, I didn’t. When we went through your things before we received the autopsy results, I found it stored and packed away: a baggie full of capsules, a card, and a rolled up bill. Even still, I stared at it, unwilling to believe.

Sea monkeys? I thought at first, imagining your collection. Vitamins? I tried to convince myself.

We turned it over to the police. Cocaine, laced with fentanyl, the same stuff that they would later reveal as your ultimate demise. Your bank records showed that you took out $300 that weekend.

It added up, and yet, part of me still rejects.

*

The night that you died, the night our mother screamed and wailed and repeated, this can’t be real, this isn’t happening, my baby, your boyfriend called us.

He called to tell us that he had been the one to find you in the shower and, my mind blanking as he continued, he went on to describe the way he’d found you: Her face was purple, something was coming out of her mouth, black stuff. He ignored our mother’s brokenhearted cries of, I don’t want to hear this.

I didn’t want to hear it either. I didn’t realize that I didn’t want to hear it until after, when I stared at the ceiling and couldn’t get that description out of my head. But it felt worse for my mom, who had just found out an hour prior that one of her children had died, and then had to hear the dehumanizing, morbid way in which she’d been found. It wasn’t a graceful death. It was raw, terrible, disgusting.

I felt so angry at him for telling us that, for making us hear and imagine it.

I try to be forgiving and understanding, as you would be. It’s rough, sometimes. You once said your forgiveness ended at someone who wronged your family – I felt, in some ways, that hehad wronged you, and then wronged our mother in the ways he handled the events following your death. I understood that he had stumbled in on something that none of us even wanted to picture, that it was most likely scarring for him to find you like that.

I try to understand.

*

A few months after you died, our 21-year-old family cat (your cat) passed away. I held her through death and hoped that you were there, perhaps on the other side of what divides us, to make it easier for her.

A month or so after she died, your other cat died. She was only around 6 years old. I wondered if she had trouble adjusting after you were gone (she was a very anxious cat, prone to hiding and only trusting you. Your boyfriend couldn’t take care of her in the way you could and didn’t connect with her in the same way you had.) When she died, my chest ached.

I’d been there to pick her up with you when you first got her. I had a fond memory of that time, of sneaking her in because, I’ll tell Ben about her later, so he can’t say no, of petting her through the car ride and attempting to soothe her anxieties over the 2-hour drive. I remember you rolling your eyes and laughing as I told you over and over that you really shouldn’t be adopting a cat without letting your boyfriend know.

He can’t say no once she’s here. Besides, he’ll love her.

I sat hollowly when your boyfriend told us about her death. Then again when her 2 cats died shortly after.

Our mom cried. She said, Victoria’s collecting her cats. I hugged my cat extra hard that night, tears seeping onto him.

*

The younger sister thinks that worse than the hindsight of it all is the unknown. Nobody thinks it was on purpose, they say. She didn’t know it was laced. It wasn’t like before – she wasn’t trying to kill herself.

The younger sister thinks that logically it shouldn’t matter. Whether death was intentional or not, the results were the same. Either way, this wasn’t a death of pure accident. There were known risks, and death was a strong, acknowledged possibility.

Any time the older sister had resorted to drugs, she hadn’t cared if she died.

Still, the unknowns are suffocating. Was someone else there? Had they abandoned her after

realizing she’d overdosed? Why cocaine when heroin had always been her drug of choice? Why did she buy so much? She’d mentioned once that her hangover cure was laying with the shower water pouring over her – had she dragged herself to the shower because she felt sick?

Did she feel pain? Had she realized in a panic that she was dying? Did she regret it? In the seconds between life and death, did she glimpse her father, her grandparents, and all her friends that had died similarly? Were they waiting for her on the other side? Or did she face a dark emptiness that seemed like serenity in comparison to the years of living in her own head?

Her sister will never know. It shouldn’t matter. And yet, the possibilities are haunting. They resurface every night, a twisted mantra of questions that persist through all forms of distraction.

When the younger sister is feeling particularly numb, she listens to the voicemails. Calls that she missed for whatever reason, messages that she never deleted.

She’s drawn to one in particular. In it, the older talks in an exaggerated British accent (a stupid thing they had done together) and laughs to herself. There’s something peppy and familiar about it all, but it’s the last line that resonates.

Have a great night and I will talk to you soon!A deep breath. The younger wonders about the possibilities, but not of her sister’s death – rather, of the afterlife. Of that potential reunion of souls.

She hopes, closes her eyes and whispers those last words to herself.

I will talk to you soon!