The House in the Pines(2)

Dan was Max from Where the Wild Things Are. It had been difficult to find a gray onesie large enough to fit his hearty frame, let alone one that was ethically produced, but Dan had started looking well in advance. Then he’d sewn a furry tail onto its seat and made himself a crown of recycled gold card stock.

The two of them looked like opposites in a lot of ways; she was petite and surprisingly athletic-looking for someone who’d never played sports, while he was tall and looked like he loved to eat, which he did. He was blue-eyed and fair with a short chestnut beard and glasses, while she was olive-skinned and ethnically ambiguous. People had always guessed that she was Indian, Turkish, Mexican, or Armenian. She was, in fact, half Guatemalan, a quarter Irish, and a quarter Italian. Thick black hair and high Mayan cheekbones met the round chin and upturned nose of the Irish on her face. She and Dan might have looked like opposites, but if you looked closely, you’d see that there was something in each of their postures—a slight leaning down on his part toward her, and an upward tilt to her stance as if to meet him halfway. They looked happy. And she looked drunk—not quite sloppy, but close.

She took out a bottle of gin from the freezer. White vapor swirled from its neck as she twisted off the cap and filled the tiny glass up to the brim, raised it—Cheers!—to their mugging faces, and made herself a promise: Tomorrow morning, she would tell Dan the reason that she hadn’t been herself these past few days, the reason she couldn’t sleep or eat. She would tell him she was going through Klonopin withdrawal.

The problem was that Dan didn’t know Maya had been taking Klonopin in the first place. When they met, she had already been taking it every night for sleep. No huge deal—once upon a time, she’d even had a prescription—why mention any of this to someone she was dating?

Prior to Dan, she hadn’t dated anyone for longer than a month. But then one month with Dan stretched into three, and before she knew it, two and a half years had passed.

How to explain why she’d waited so long? Or why she was on it in the first place?

And what would Dan think if he knew that the pills came not from a pharmacy but from her friend Wendy?

Maya had rationalized her dependence in so many ways, telling herself it wasn’t a lie, just an omission; that she kept the pills in an aspirin bottle in her purse for convenience, not to hide them. All along, she had planned to quit, and then, she assured herself, once her habit was safely in the past, she would tell him.

But now she had run out of the little yellow pills, and Wendy, a friend from college, wasn’t returning her calls. Maya had tried a dozen times, texting, emailing, and finally calling. The two had remained close for a few years after graduation, largely because they’d both stayed near BU and both liked to party. They rarely saw each other during the day but drank together several nights a week. But now that Maya had cut down on drinking, they saw each other less and less; looking back, she realized their monthly brunches had become literally transactional: fifty dollars for ninety milligrams of Klonopin.

Could this be why Wendy wasn’t returning her calls?

As Maya’s withdrawal got worse—insomnia, the fiery feeling in her brain, the sense of crawling ants on her skin—she wondered if Wendy had known just how hellish it would be.

Maya hadn’t known. The psychiatrist who’d prescribed it to her seven years ago, Dr. Barry, hadn’t said anything about addiction. He’d told her the pills would help her sleep, which they had—but only for a time. As the months passed, she’d needed more and more to achieve the same results, and Dr. Barry was always happy to oblige, upping her dosage with a flick of his pen—right up until Maya graduated college and lost her insurance. Once she could no longer pay for her sessions, she found herself cut off, and only then did she realize that she couldn’t sleep anymore without pills.

Luckily for her, Wendy also had a prescription and didn’t much trust the mental health establishment. She didn’t take any of the meds her doctor prescribed, preferring to sell them or trade them for other drugs. Maya had been buying her Klonopin from Wendy for the past three years, ever since she graduated college. Telling herself all along that she would quit. She hadn’t expected going off to be easy, but the severity caught her off guard, and Googling her symptoms hadn’t helped. Insomnia, anxiety, tremors, muscle spasms, paranoia, agitation—she could handle those. What scared her was the possibility of hallucinations.

It took all her will to recap the gin and return it to the freezer. She went to the bathroom and took a swig of NyQuil, wincing as the syrup went down. Her reflection winced back at her, ghostly in the light spilling through the high frosted window. Her skin was pale and clammy, her eye sockets like craters. Withdrawal had taken her hunger, and Maya saw that she was losing weight, the bones of her cheeks and collarbones more pronounced. She forced herself to unclench her jaw.

In the living room, she sank into the couch and peeled off her sweaty flannel shirt. She turned on the reading lamp and tried to lose herself in a book, a mystery she’d been enjoying up until now, but found herself reading the same paragraph over and over. The quiet felt loud. Soon the street outside would ring with the voices of commuters to the Green Line, people getting into cars parked along the curb and doors slamming.

She heard footsteps and turned to see Dan emerging from the darkness of the hall. He looked half asleep, hair sticking up from his pillow. He’d been up late, studying for his third-year law school exams.