Released

  “Dr. Baynor won’t be in until nine o’clock,” the chick at the desk informed me. She eyed me up and down, and I realized I wasn’t even wearing a shirt—just some drawstring pants and my boots. “His office hours are posted on—”

  “Where’s his office?” I asked.

  “Are you a patient of Dr. Baynor?”

  “Yeah,” I said as I tilted my head and turned sideways. “Want to see the scar?”

  She ignored my comment but did at least tell me where his office was. I found my way to an elevator and then down the hall to a door with his name on it. I knocked just in case, but no one answered. I twisted the knob and found it unlocked.

  The inside of Dr. Baynor’s office looked more like a study or a den in someone’s house than anything else. There was a big wooden desk and a couple of plush chairs on the near side of it and some matching end tables. The desk chair was tall, leather, and presidential looking. The walls were covered in books, and my first thought was that Tria would love it.

  “Fuck me,” I muttered as I dropped down in one of the plush chairs and leaned my head back. I closed my eyes and tried to ignore the creepy-crawly feeling invading my skin or think about how if I just ran back home really quick to shoot up, I could probably be back here by the time Dr. Baynor came in. This shit would all be a lot easier if I did that first.

  I might have gone, too, but my head was still pounding, and every time I moved, I felt nauseated. There was that little voice in my head again, reminding me that if I had been binging for a few days, I would have made myself get up and go back for more.

  It occurred to me that I hadn’t really eaten anything since breakfast before I went to the gym that day. I wasn’t even sure how many days ago that had been. Three? Four? Fuck, it could have been a week for all I knew.

  “You look like shit.” Dr. Baynor’s voice came from my side, startling me. As I looked up at him, his eyes softened. “You fucked up, didn’t you?”

  “Big time,” I replied.

  “She left?”

  I could only nod.

  “Dare I ask what you did?”

  “She’s…um…she’s pregnant.” I shuffled my feet around on the floor a little. “It’s not like we weren’t careful or anything—there were bad pills, I guess.”

  I dropped my head into my hands and felt a wave of dizziness wash over me. I swallowed a couple of times to keep myself from puking.

  “There was a recall,” he confirmed.

  “It doesn’t matter how it happened,” I said. “It happened.”

  “When did she tell you?” he asked. He leaned back in his desk chair and tapped his fingers rhythmically on the arms.

  “Um…a few days ago, I guess,” I said, realizing I had no fucking idea what day it was or how long ago she had told me. “I got home from working out on Monday, which is when the clinic called her. She’d already taken a test.”

  Maybe it was the most recent Monday; maybe it wasn’t. He didn’t seem to be making any big deal out of it, at least. I stopped and let out a long breath.

  “How did you react?” he asked, and I let out a short, harsh laugh.

  “I wanted her to get rid of it,” I admitted.

  “I’m going to assume your presence here indicates she didn’t agree with that approach.”

  “She said she was going to have it,” I told him.

  “And what did you say?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “I left.” After a moment of silence, I glanced up to see his jaw set and his look grim. I licked my dry lips. “I just walked out.”

  “What have you been doing since then?”

  “I…uh…I got arrested for assault,” I told him, “but they dropped the charges. I wrecked my apartment, but it’s not like there’s anyone there who cares. I bought some smack, but I only used it once. I didn’t bang the second needle.”

  The lie came so easily.

  “Is this your way of telling me it could be worse?” he asked.

  I rubbed at the back of my head as I glanced up at him a little sheepishly.

  “Maybe?” I cleared my throat, rubbed at my eyes, and sat up a little straighter. “I fucked up.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed, “you did. “Are you clean now?”

  I rubbed the spot on my inner arm.

  “Last night,” I said, and my throat and chest seized up on me. “I think. I only did the one dose—really. I was going to do another one when I woke up, but I came here instead.”

  He stood up and came around the desk, grabbed my wrist, and then flipped my arm over to look at the bruises from the multiple punctures. His fingers covered my wrist, and he looked at his watch for a few seconds. He flashed one of those lights in my eyes and generally checked me out. Without a word, he grabbed an alcohol swab and cleaned off the spot on my inner arm.

  “You dosed a hell of a lot more than once.” His eyes bore into me.

  “I guess it’s been a few days.” My stomach lurched a little. “I’m not really sure how many.”

  “You still have the stuff at your apartment?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Dr. Baynor picked up the phone and told whoever was on the other end to cancel his appointments or move them all to another doctor. He grabbed his keys out of his jacket pocket and motioned toward the door.

  “Let’s go.”

  He did, in fact, drive a Lexus, and I warned him about parking it in my neighborhood, but he didn’t seem to give a shit. There were a couple of teens in the parking lot behind the apartment, and he told them he’d give them each fifty bucks if his car was untouched when he came back out. The two kids shrugged, agreed, and sat down on the curb near where he had parked.

  As soon as we walked into the place, Baynor glanced around, saw the shit on the table, and immediately went for it. He grabbed the magazine with the mostly crushed rock in the middle of it, picked it up carefully, and moved over to the sink. He was way too quick for me to make any comment before he washed it down, soaking the paper in the process, which I guessed was the idea.

  He picked up the needle and examined it.

  “Was this new at least?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “It was wrapped.”

  “So you aren’t completely stupid,” he said, “just mostly stupid.”

  He shoved the capped needle and tubing into a paper bag, which he rolled up and shoved into his pocket. His other hand reached into the other pocket where he pulled out his wallet and dropped a couple hundred on the table.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “I’m buying your drugs,” he told me. “I’m guessing at the street price of that much, as well as how much you used already.”

  He was actually pretty accurate.

  “Do I need to admit you to the hospital?” he asked.

  “I’m not really jonesin’,” I told him. Another easy lie. “I just…I don’t want to think.”

  I leaned heavily against the wall between the kitchen and the living room. I tried not to think of how much I liked holding Tria against it, but memories of our first kiss came back to me. The night of my cousin’s wedding followed right after.

  “What do you want now, Liam?” Dr. Baynor asked.

  “Tria,” I said without hesitation.

  “What are you willing to do to get her?” he asked.

  “I can’t…I can’t think about this shit,” I told him.

  “What shit?” he asked.

  “Any of it.”

  “Having a child?”

  “Fuck,” I muttered. “I definitely can’t think about that.”

  “Which is why she left,” he pointed out.

  I just shrugged. My chest was tightening up, and breathing was becoming more difficult.

  “Have you talked to her since then?”

  “I don’t know where she is,” I admitted. “She took all her stuff, but I don’t know where she went.”

  “Friend’s house?”

 
“She knows some kids from her classes,” I said. “There’s a girl named Elissa who did some projects with Tria, but I think she lives in the dorm on campus. I don’t even know her last name, but I could probably find that chick, I guess.”

  “Then what?” he asked me.

  “Um…” I furrowed my brow when I looked at him. “Tell her I fucked up?”

  Dr. Baynor leaned forward and dropped his arms over the back of the kitchen chair.

  “Yeah? And then what?”

  I just stared at him.

  “That’s what I thought,” he said. He sighed and stood up straight again. “Liam, let me ask you something. Pretend for a second you’re Tria. You just found out you were going to have an unexpected baby. The father completely freaks out on you and doesn’t even tell you why, then abandons you. Tell me now—in her shoes—would you take you back because you admitted to fucking up?”

  I made my way to the couch, rested my elbow on the armrest, dropped my head into my palm, and found myself nervously chewing on the pad of my thumb. I felt like I was choking or that my lungs weren’t working right.

  Ultimately, I wasn’t sure what to say.

  “Liam,” Dr. Baynor said with a softened voice, “let me ask you something else, okay?”

  He waited until I cleared my throat and nodded before continuing.

  “Do you love her?”

  I gripped my hands into fists and leaned forward over my knees. I couldn’t sit still, and it felt like his eyes were crawling around on my skin. I wanted to come up with an answer, but I didn’t know what to say.

  “I…I want her back,” I finally told him, “but I know I don’t deserve it.”

  “Because of what you did when she told you she was pregnant?”

  “That’s one reason,” I confirmed. “But fuck, doc—I don’t have anything to offer her. We live in the slums in a crappy apartment. I fight at a bar for cash, and for the most part, I’m an asshole.”

  “You didn’t always live like this.” He glanced around the room as he moved over to sit next to me.

  “I’m not talking about that shit,” I said. “I have nothing to do with my family.”

  “I noticed,” he replied with a nod. “That is the one reason why I might agree with you.”

  “Agree with me?”

  “That you don’t deserve her,” he said. “You could, but at the moment, you won’t deal with yourself. I saw enough of Tria to know she deserves someone who is willing to take on his own demons. You left a life of luxury to live in one of the worst areas of town. You’ve turned to some pretty serious drugs instead of coping with what happened to you. Does she even know why you chose this life?”

  I shook my head once, and the doctor blew a quick breath out his nose.

  “This all comes down to whatever it is you’re hiding from everyone, doesn’t it? This is all about why you went ballistic on your mother and why Tria’s pregnancy put you over the edge, isn’t it?”

  I realized I was rocking back and forth, and my hands were balled into fists again. I really, really needed to hit something, but the only viable target was the doctor next to me. Despite knowing I needed his help, I was still sorely tempted.

  I didn’t answer him. I didn’t even look at him again.

  “You are going to have to tell her, Liam,” Dr. Baynor told me. “If you want to fix this, fix yourself and get her back, you are going to have to man up and tell her everything you are hiding inside. Then you are going to have to agree to get help in order to get over it. It’s going to be hard, too. It’ll be the second hardest thing you’ll ever do in your life, but it has to be done. It’s the only way you are going to be able to prove to her that you can do the hardest thing in your life.”

  Confused by his words, I looked back at him again and tried to figure out what angle he was trying with me now. I couldn’t tell anything from his expression, though, so I was forced to ask.

  “The hardest?”

  He leaned back on the couch, placed his hands behind his head, and stared pointedly at me before speaking again.

  “Be a father.”

  My whole body went cold. I stood dumbly next to the couch as Baynor pulled a hypodermic needle out of his medical bag and gave me an injection.

  “Methadone?”

  “No,” he said, “just B12.”

  Baynor pulled out a cell phone and walked into the kitchen. I could hear him speaking softly but couldn’t make out the words. After a few minutes, he came out with a large cup of water.

  “Drink it all.”

  I took the cup and drank a little. He glared at me until I finished it all.

  “I’m tempted to take you in and give you IV fluids. I need a better idea of how long you’ve been on the shit.”

  “What day is it?”

  “Sunday,” Dr. Baynor informed me. “I checked with the gym, and you were last there on Monday—six days ago. How long were you really strung out?”

  “I spent Monday night in the holding cell,” I recalled. “Bought the smack Tuesday night.”

  “I checked the police reports,” Baynor told me. “That was three weeks ago. You were high for a lot more than four days. You came into the hospital about five this morning. You bought a lot more than that one rock, so don’t bullshit me.”

  Baynor and I dug around in my apartment to discover all the cash I thought I had was gone. I should have had about a hundred and fifty left for rent, even with the rocks I remember buying. When Baynor went digging around, he found more needles in the trash in the bathroom.

  “Why don’t I remember any of it?” I asked.

  “What do you remember?”

  “After I figured out she left, I just wrecked shit and then went to the guy with the drugs. Other than that, I remember being high.”

  “That will happen,” Baynor said with a nod.

  “What will?”

  “Losing time, losing yourself,” he said. “Between your post-traumatic reactions and the drugs, you were too far inside yourself to know what was going on around you. I assume that happened to you in the past when you were using regularly?”

  “Yeah,” I said as I remembered. “I just didn’t have anywhere to be, so I didn’t give a shit.”

  We talked for most of the morning, and Baynor took me down to the deli and made me eat a sandwich and potato salad. My stomach wasn’t happy about it, but at least it stayed down. After a quick trip to the grocery store to make sure there was enough for me to eat for the next couple of days, he brought me back home and told me to come back to his office on Tuesday—sooner if I needed it.

  Before he left, Baynor handed me a card with the name and phone number of a counselor who would apparently give me a few free sessions. My first inclination had been to throw the little card in the trash while he was still standing in the apartment, but I had shoved it into my pocket instead.

  My only priority now was to find Tria. Now that my head was clearer, I found Elissa’s number by the phone and called her. She had seen Tria in class but had no idea Tria wasn’t living with me anymore. She sounded concerned enough that I didn’t think she was lying to cover for Tria or anything. I thought I might go to campus tomorrow to see if I could spot her.

  As I plopped the phone back down, Dr. Baynor’s words floated in and out of my head. I didn’t want to think about anything he had told me, but there was also a part of me that realized some of the shit he said might be right. The one piece that I kept coming back to was the word if. If I wanted her back. If I wanted to fix this. For whatever reason, he had more hope than I did.

  I wanted more smack.

  I wanted her back more, though.

  Having her back meant having her back and pregnant.

  I ran to the bathroom and relieved myself of lunch.

  I fiddled with the card in the bottom of my pocket as I thought about the faith Dr. Baynor had in me. It made me wonder if there wasn’t some slim possibility I could do something to make all this right again. I knew there was
a lot more to think about, more than I was even capable of at the moment, but the first bit—talking to Tria and telling her what an ass I was—I had to do that before I could even begin to accomplish anything else.

  It would all have been a lot easier if I could shoot up once more, though. Baynor had decided to confiscate my cash though he said I could have any of it I needed—just let him know. I agreed to it. I would have agreed to almost anything if it would bring her back.

  If I couldn’t find her at Hoffman, I had no idea where to look next.

  I grabbed a pack of cigarettes and went through the bedroom and out the window. Krazy Katie was out there, of course, but I didn’t say anything to her. I leaned back against the bricks and lit up, finally allowing myself to glance over at Krazy Katie. She was actually looking at me for once, and I could only figure her look was her version of the death glare.

  “What’s your problem?” I asked, but she didn’t respond. She did keep looking at me, which was giving me the creeps.

  I smoked half my cigarette with her giving me the stink-eye before I turned on her again.

  “Would you cut that shit out? What the fuck did I ever do to you?”

  With that, Krazy Katie turned her head away from me, reached back behind her legs to push herself up to a standing position, and then turned her whole body in my direction. She took a few steps forward until she was right in front of me, then reached up and slapped me across the face.

  I just stood there, stunned.

  Krazy Katie turned around slowly, sat back down, and then glared back at me with a look that shot a very clear message. She knew. She knew Tria had left me. Hell, she probably even knew why. I dropped down next to her on the fire escape floor and lit another cigarette.

  “I don’t know what to do,” I said to her, wondering how crazy it was for me to be confiding in a crazy person. “At this point, she can have whatever the fuck she wants—even a baby. I’d do anything right now just to get her to come back, but I have no idea where she is.”

  “Needs training,” Krazy Katie said.