Aftershock Read online

  Forgery. She said the word in her head and let herself fully, consciously admit to herself what she intended to do. Wondered: Had she really come to this point? Did she, in fact, have a problem? No. Well, maybe. But we all have problems, and some are bigger than others.

  She had meant to go to some out-of-the way drugstore in a less affluent neighbourhood of Toronto where she imagined illegal prescriptions might slip by regularly. But when she hit her first exit for downtown, it was already five to ten, her stomach cramps were intensifying and her joint pain seemed to be empire-building, colonizing elbows, knees, wrists. She craved the solace of her private ensuite bathroom, so she drove straight to her office, sweating through every intersection.

  There was a pharmacy on the ground floor of her office tower where she had been many times, and she hoped that, because they knew her, they wouldn’t look too closely at the scrip. She sat in the rental car in the underground garage and practised a few times in a notebook before taking the wad of blank prescription sheets and doing her best imitation of Rod’s illegible scrawl. Took her empty pill bottle up to the pharmacy.

  The pharmacist, an affable young guy named Po, who had filled this very scrip many times, squinted at it and gave her a puzzled look, and she nearly panicked. She pulled out the empty bottle, tried not to let her hand shake as she handed it to him.

  I know, his writing’s impossible. It’s just a refill of this one.

  When Po read the label, nodded and said, You got it, fifteen minutes, Jules gushed inwardly with relief.

  In the elevator up to her tenth-floor office, she leaned against dark leather, eyes closed to the sepia-toned mirrors.

  Sometimes it threw her a little, when the elevator door opened and she was confronted by the sweeping mahogany reception desk, the lushly carpeted corporate hallway receding behind it. Closed oak doors, expensive abstract art. It was quiet, muffled. Sterile. There was nothing messy here, no place for actual bodies. This was where she tracked numbers, applied algorithms, extracted information and compiled it into tidy charts and graphs. That the numbers represented people, their likes and dislikes, habits and relationships, reactions, patterns and preferences, was an abstraction she deliberately ignored. But today it struck her how unlikely it was that she worked here, doing this, being this person. It was a long way from the one-bedroom apartment she’d shared with her mother for sixteen years. The convenience store open twenty-four hours, buses stopping out front all night, the building peeling and cracking inside and out, stained in ageless grime. Their apartment stale with smoke and soured by the active volcanoes of dishes and laundry, the pungent hormonal smell of under-washed sheets. And her mother, a stagnant body of sadness, cleaning offices by night and drinking on the couch by day, passing out to Days of Our Lives. Jules would come home from school and wake her up, feed her dinner and send her back to work. Cleaning offices much like these.

  She felt nauseous.

  The receptionist flagged her down on her way by. She had hoped to slip into her office unnoticed and was holding herself together until she could get behind her closed door. But this secretary was new and young: nervous and vigilant. She called her Ms. Wright, said good morning and held out a meticulously aligned and stapled pile of pink message slips. Which was ridiculous. They were a knowledge management firm. Data miners. Everything they did was computer-based. To even have a receptionist was sheer pretense, in her eyes. But the message slips were particularly redundant. There would be voice mail on her phone from whoever called, a log of the callers who hadn’t left messages and probably an email from Amy or Annie or whatever her name was—she was really very new—repeating same. Quite possibly whoever had called would have emailed her as well. It all amounted, in Jules’s opinion, to too much communication.

  She grabbed the slips from Annie or Amy and tried to make it look as though the jerky movement of her hand was due to gruffness and rushing, not the uncontrollable whole-body shaking of possible opiate withdrawal.

  She forced herself to walk down the hall with aggression in her step. If Annie/Amy spread the word, as she inevitably would, that Jules was in a bad mood, everyone was more likely to stay away. She closed the door with a solid clunk, leaned back against it, disassembling.

  She glanced at the messages—three of them, almost identical, all from her ex-husband: “Mr. Wright called at . . .”: 9:05, 9:22 and 9:46 a.m. Nine in the morning here was one in the morning in Christchurch. She recalled Chloe’s sullen email from . . . Saturday, wasn’t it? Plane didn’t crash. So that was something. But the message slips were inert and unforthcoming. She shoved them in her pocket.

  She made her way to her bathroom and dry-heaved the breakfast she hadn’t eaten, then sat on the toilet and emptied her guts out that way. Splashed cold water on her face, went back into her office and lay down on her couch, the cool smoothness of the green leather soothing under her cheek.

  The phone on her desk rang. She wondered if it was David again. She knew she should answer it, but she just couldn’t.

  Instead, she shivered with fever as she contemplated the effort it would take to draw the blinds on her half wall of window, the dazzling blue sky that filled it from her low-angled perspective. It seemed like her worst days were always the sunniest ones.

  The day Lizzie died: the phone call from Maureen.

  She’d stared out her window as she listened, watching a summer-jobber with his bucket and pole scrubbing down the Sir John A. Macdonald statue in the park below, going down and up and down the arms, like he was giving a toddler a bath, while Maureen’s voice quavered and stammered and snivelled, you’d think it was her child who’d just stopped breathing.

  There was a knock at her door. Go away, Amy, I’m busy. The words dry in her throat. But the door opened.

  Actually, I think her name is Ashley. Drew, filling her doorway. You look like shit.

  He strode across to the chair beside her, lowered himself into it. Today he wore an enormous pink suit and lavender tie. Jules turned onto her back and put an arm over her eyes so she wouldn’t have to look at it.

  Rod says I’m in withdrawal. I think I have the flu.

  Get the fuck out. Drew was in frat boy mode, probably had a partners’ meeting at lunch and had started early. This is from the Oxy?

  It’s horrible.

  Jeezus. How much did he have you on?

  You can’t blame Rod.

  Like hell I can’t.

  No, really, I was . . . upping the dose, I guess. He didn’t know.

  But he does now?

  He does now.

  Her cellphone buzzed, across the room on her desk. Drew reached behind him and grabbed it, glanced at it as he handed it over.

  He’s not giving you more, is he?

  It said Bay St. Drugs on the screen.

  Jules shook her head as she answered. It was Po, affability stretched thin. Ms. Wright, I can’t fill this. You can’t bring this to me. Each word spoken like a drum hit, short and sharp.

  What’s the matter, Po? But she knew, of course. She sat up, wincing.

  I only caught you because they’re pulling it off market, right? I stopped restocking it. So I called Dr. Scott, see what he wants me to do, maybe switch to the OxyNEO—but he didn’t write this! It’s not— You can’t bring me this, I could lose my licence—

  Po’s voice had risen, frantic and pinched. I’m supposed to call the police.

  Jules pressed her thumb into the bridge of her nose, thinking: Fuck.

  Dr. Scott told me not to, but Ms. Wright, I think I have to. I gotta cover my own ass, right?

  Don’t worry, Po. Just rip it up, okay? Void it.

  That’s what Dr. Scott said.

  Jules held her breath for the long pause, awaiting Po’s judgment.

  Okay, Ms. Wright. You’re really lucky, okay? This time. But don’t come here anymore. I can’t have this, right? Dr. Scott’s real angry too—

  I bet he is.

  —he said you were—

 
I’m sorry, Po. You have a good day, alright? Jules hung up on him.

  The email icon on her phone had a red number on it: twenty-two messages. She tapped it and glanced at the list of headings. Mostly progress updates from the project managers she supervised. A couple from clients that didn’t seem urgent and could easily be off-loaded to said project managers. And one from David. She wished he would just fucking deal with it. Whatever it was.

  Drew was now sprawled back in the armchair, his jowls spilling over his pink-and-lavender neckline, making him look like a giant worried cupcake.

  Problem?

  She lay back down and closed her eyes. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt this sick. There was no way she could get any work done today. She wanted Drew to go away and let her nap.

  Don’t take this the wrong way, but did you need something?

  Drew waited a long moment before answering, she could sense him assessing her condition, trying to determine how worried he should be. He knew Jules had chronic injuries, that she had physio once a week or more, that she often had to take pretty heavy pain medication. But as a PR exec who partied like an intern, he probably ingested more substances than she did. So he wasn’t really in a position to judge. He’d come to work with hangovers that looked worse than this.

  Two things. Came to see if you had fun on Friday.

  Subtle, she said. But if she’d felt better, she would have smiled. Instead, she draped her arm back across her eyes. Great dinner. Farzan seems nice.

  Another long silence. Then:

  That’s it?

  Alright, alright. I didn’t hate him. But it doesn’t really matter, does it?

  She didn’t want to talk about Declan. It was such a small thing, but it had played in her mind off and on all weekend, between bouts of sickness and mandatory naps, how she had come to the point of manoeuvring her hand closer to his like a lovesick teenager. One moment she couldn’t have said she wanted that to happen; the next, made it happen. She wasn’t ready to unearth, out loud, the ambiguity of her actions, or her emotions. So she told him:

  Stupid kid in a hatchback side-swiped me on the way home Saturday.

  Holy shit! For real?

  Oh yes.

  What— Are you okay?

  Peachy. Car’s in the shop, though. She sat up, clenched her teeth against the rush of wooziness. It’s also possible I broke up with Rod.

  Whoa. Because of Declan?

  Don’t be ridiculous.

  She opened her laptop on the coffee table, followed the bookmark to the medical website she relied on for self-assessing new aches and pains. She did a search on “opiate withdrawal,” found a list of symptoms.

  Sweating, shaking, nausea, aching and cramping. Check. But seizures and convulsions? Surely it wouldn’t get that bad. She closed her computer, laid herself gently back down on the couch.

  Oh, sweetie. You want me to call him?

  It’s just the flu, she said. She’d forgotten Declan was a doctor.

  Drew dialed his phone.

  Jules would never know how that conversation went. Dry heaves sent her scrambling for the bathroom. When she emerged a few minutes later, Drew was writing something on a Post-it Note on her desk.

  He’ll see you on his lunch. One o’clock, at his clinic. He moved towards the door, a fuchsia silk ocean liner on fast-forward. I have to get to the partners’ meeting.

  I have to see him? He can’t just call in a scrip somewhere?

  ’Fraid not. But he’s very good, Jules. Number and address are on your desk. Oh, and the second thing was that analytics report, but I’m guessing you didn’t get to it?

  Oh shit.

  She sank back onto the couch. A condo developer had hired them to track the next best areas for twenty-five- to forty-four-year-olds who enjoyed indoor sports and would pay nine dollars for a latte, were likely to have one but unlikely to have two children in the next ten years and disliked gardening but loved small dogs. She had the data ready but had to synthesize it, make it presentation-ready.

  I’m so sorry. I was in bed all weekend. Think I did something to my neck in the accident.

  Shit happens. I know Raj is keen to see it, but I’ll buy you some time. Wednesday, okay?

  IT WAS ELEVEN fifteen when Drew left. Jules spent the next hour trying to convince herself she was feeling better rather than worse. When it didn’t work, she dug in her jacket pocket for more sheets from Rod’s prescription pad and came across the pink message slips from David.

  She sighed in annoyance and shoved them back in, worked instead on a new and improved forged Oxy prescription. When she was fairly satisfied, she hunched her shoulders and scowled to project a carapace of hostility as she marched down the hall towards the reception desk. On her way by, she handed Ashley the Post-it with Declan’s number on it. No way she could see him like this.

  I have an appointment with this guy at one, cancel it for me, please and thank you.

  And she kept going, right into the open elevator.

  SHE FIGURED THE Parkdale pharmacy would be much easier. For one thing, she now had the drug right: she’d done a blanket search for OxyNEO and found its spec sheet with available dosages on the manufacturer’s website.

  For another thing, it was Parkdale, a neighbourhood, if you could call it that, notorious for its poverty, its crackheads, its former mental patients. Not so different from Hamilton’s north end, where she’d grown up. Surely a well-dressed, middle-aged white woman like herself would fly well under the radar as a risk for passing illegal prescriptions.

  But driving over, she realized condo-fication was in full swing there. It was kind of like seeing her past and present worlds overlaid on each other. Tidy, stylish signs of new “hip” restaurants, called things like Slaughterhouse Five and Yes, hung between older ones, hand-markered, chipped and misspelled, for places like Happy Noodel and Budget Super Saving Discount. Shiny windows showcased vintage clothes between exhaust-encrusted storefronts that sold knock-off electronics and shoes, or were blocked out completely with plywood. Like Hamilton’s north end, this had long been a community of immigrant families, the number of places For Rent, For Lease or For Sale demonstrating the current pace of change.

  Chloe didn’t know how good she had it, didn’t understand where Jules had come from or how hard she’d worked to leave it behind. How close she sometimes felt to the precipice that would lead her back there. Back here.

  A battered grey sign that might once have been white read Marky’s Drugs in uneven black letters. The window below the sign was barred, and behind the bars was an awkward display of bedpans and a cheap mobility walker. A couple of rough-looking men were hanging around out front. They spat on the sidewalk, drank from a paper bag they passed between them. Eyed her with what she read as hostility mixed with covetousness as she parked the rental at the curb and approached the pharmacy door.

  Inside was a starkly lit arrangement of three short and understocked aisles. Jules walked past an assortment of laxatives, diapers and the most basic of painkillers on her way to the phone booth–sized prescription counter at the back.

  The pharmacist darted her eyes around suspiciously as she took Jules’s prescription, and Jules looked behind her. A couple of teenagers were lingering in the centre aisle between a huge rack of condoms and a slightly smaller one of pregnancy tests. She idly wondered which interested them, and sent a silent thanks to the universe for making her daughter a lesbian.

  Hey, you buying something?

  The pharmacist had Jules’s scrip in her hand but hadn’t taken her eyes off the teens.

  Hurry, she’ll kick us out, said the girl, who was probably Chloe’s age, way too skinny, with shoulder-length blond dreadlocks.

  The boy, whose jeans were filthy and full of holes, squared his stance, pre-emptively insolent. We gotta right to shop. In-spect the merch, yo. His lower lip was pierced by two silver hoops that made it look like he had fangs.

  The pharmacist, who couldn’t have been ov
er thirty, flattened her lips into a tight line, kept glancing at the teens as she entered Jules’s name and address into her amber-screened computer. She disappeared behind the high counter with its bulletproof glass panels to find the prepackaged vial of thirty tabs of OxyNEO that Jules had prescribed herself.

  Jules waited in a chair with a backrest strapped to it and tried to relax. Breathing in, breathing out, in and out, in and out, breathing through the nausea and the aching and the sweating. Moments, she told herself, in moments she could take a pill and start to feel normal again. Her neck was so bad she worried she’d injured yet another disc. But if she could just have something to cope with the pain, then she could get herself to a doctor or someone to take a look at it. Not Rod or Declan. Maybe a clinic.

  The teenagers came back around the condom aisle, and Jules watched as the young woman shoved a couple deep-purple boxes under her shirt. The boy grabbed a couple light-blue ones, shoved them into the front of his jeans. He had walked to the door, keeping an eye on the backroom while he waited for his girlfriend, who grabbed a couple boxes from the rack of pregnancy tests—and who saw Jules watching and glared back at her defiantly. She kept glaring as she backed away down the aisle towards her partner in crime. Jules could see over her shoulder as she approached the door.

  And at the same moment that it occurred to Jules that the pharmacist was taking far too long to retrieve a prepackaged prescription, she saw the blue shadow of a uniform darken the doorway behind the boyfriend.

  Concussion.

  Sensations garbled, blue-and-whiteness, light curving into bubbles, deep gargling in my ears, the oddly calm awareness of breathing water, liquid inside my body inside liquid and then, a second or minutes later, choking over the sand, coughing and sputtering, my head roaring in pain, Lee rubbing my back and yelling down the beach, her face stricken grey. One of the Australians tearing towards us across the sand, somehow he had gauze, bandages.

  And then they were putting me into the Australian’s car, taking me to an emergency room where a matronly nurse shaved the hair behind my left ear—there wasn’t much to begin with—and a dark-black doctor with gleaming white teeth said, Concussion, and put in five stitches under flickering fluorescent lights as my body vibrated with elated relief that this was the worst that could happen.