Crystal Lies - Melody Carlson [63]
He looked up now. “Why?”
“Why?” I was taken aback by his nonchalant response. Wasn’t it obvious? We were talking about needles!
“Why do you think using needles makes it more serious?”
“Well, I don’t know for sure.” I was getting that blurry feeling now, like Jacob was going to muddy the waters again. “It just seems pretty serious to me,” I finally said.
“The needles are safe,” he assured me.
“The needles are safe?” I studied him, wondering how this messed-up kid could actually be my child. Had aliens kidnapped him, taken him to the mother ship to perform a lobotomy, then returned him when no one was looking?
He nodded. “Yeah, I don’t, like, reuse them or anything. And I’m very careful about everything. I sterilize stuff and make sure—”
“Wait,” I told him. “Wait a minute. You think that injecting yourself with…with… What do you inject yourself with anyway?”
He sighed.
“Jacob, please, I need you to tell me. It’s not as if I’m a policeman. I’m your mother, for heavens sake. I love and care about you more than anyone else on the planet. If you can’t trust me, you can’t trust anyone.”
He nodded. “Meth,” he said in a quiet voice.
“Crystal meth?”
He nodded again.
“As in methamphetamines?”
Again, the nod.
“As in the drug that people manufacture out of fertilizer and chemicals?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“You’re shooting that into your body?” I tried to suppress the hysteria I felt rising in my voice. I tried not to imagine the little boy I’d worked so hard to care for and protect and how I’d fretted and worried about him when he’d caught the latest flu bug. How could this child of mine have been shooting chemicals and fertilizer substances into his flesh?
“What’d you think I was using?” He laughed then, but it was a sad, hollow laugh. “It’s not like I have a lot of money, you know. Pump monkeys don’t get paid a whole lot. And Daddy Big Bucks isn’t being too generous with me these days. Crystal meth is the poor man’s cocaine, you know.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Well, now you do.”
Fresh tears slipped down my cheeks.
“Oh, crud, don’t start crying again, Mom.” He stood up and started pacing. “It doesn’t help anything when you get all upset. In fact, it just makes me want to go out and get some more—”
“I’m not getting all upset,” I said quickly and wiped my wet face. I took a deep breath and sat up straighten I wasn’t about to give him any excuse to go out and get high. Not that I thought he wasn’t already high. Whether he was on his way up or down, I had no idea, but I knew something about him was not right.
“Look, Mom.” He sat back down on the chair. Then leaning forward, he looked intently at me. “It’s not like I’m hurting anyone. It’s my own thing. It makes me cope with life better, you know? I mean it’s like my medical treatment. I can function when I have it. Without it…” He looked down at his hands. “Well, I’d rather be dead.”
I thought about this. In a way it was a somewhat convincing argument. I’d heard about addicts that “self-medicate.” Maybe that was what was going on here. Maybe I should just let it go at that, go back to bed, and deal with this crazy thing in the morning. But then, I reminded myself, I wasn’t exactly thinking clearly at the moment. “But what if the crystal meth kills you?” I asked.
He laughed. “No one ever dies from meth.”
“How do you know that?” I asked. “I read something in the paper almost every week about somebody overdosing or dying as a result of drugs.” Okay, maybe that was an exaggeration, but I knew I’d read a few stories. And they had chilled me to my soul.
“Well, it’s probably not crystal meth.”
“But how do you know that?” My voice was getting loud again. “Because I would know, that’s all.”
“Do you even read the newspaper?” I challenged him. “Do you watch the news? What do you really know about this crud you’ve been shooting into yourself, Jacob?