Dopesick by Beth Macy

Author:Beth Macy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2018-08-06T16:00:00+00:00

I thought of Tess Henry, the young mom I met in late 2015. The daughter of a local surgeon and a hospital nurse (they divorced when she was ten), Tess had grown up in multiple homes—one in the nicest section of Roanoke, with mountain-biking trails and the Blue Ridge Parkway abutting her backyard, the other on secluded Bald Head Island, North Carolina, accessible only via ferry.

Tess was a high school track and basketball standout, an honor-roll kid who would go on to study French at Virginia Tech and the University of North Carolina–Asheville, though she didn’t complete a degree. Among the things she loved to do before she fell into a raging, $200-a-day heroin habit were writing poetry, painting, reading, and singing to her dog, a black rescue mutt named Koda. (The two were particularly happy when Tess belted out the words to Train’s “Hey, Soul Sister” in the car.) Her favorite author in the world was David Sedaris; she’d run into him once in a local coffee shop after a reading, she told me, and he was so, soooo unbelievably nice.

Of Patricia Mehrmann’s four kids, Tess was the quietest, the one who voluntarily walked the dogs with her on the beach. Patricia emailed me a beach picture of the family Labrador, Charlie, and a ten-year-old Tess, all freckles and a toothy smile, with both arms wrapped around the dog. They liked to head out early at low tide to look for beach treasures. “She was the queen sand-dollar finder,” Patricia said.

But Tess struggled with anxiety from a young age, her relatives told me, recalling a panic attack she had as a young teenager on the way home to Roanoke from the beach. (“She thought she was dying,” Patricia remembered. “She was throwing up and calling me from the back seat of the car.”) At her private Catholic primary school, where students wore blue and khaki uniforms, Tess was stressed that her shoes weren’t right.

Tess was twenty-six when we met, a waitress-turned-heroin-addict. With a ruddy complexion and auburn hair, she wore leggings with long sweaters and liked to apply makeup cat-eye style, at the edges of her eyes, which were luminous and shifted color from brown to green depending on the light. She had consorted with most of the Hidden Valley crowd mentioned in this book, working not as a runner or mule but as a lower-level “middleman,” as she called herself. She did worse than that, too.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.