Tucker has been on his feet so long that his calves are swollen, so distended that his black sweatpants are pulled tightly against them. He’s squinting into the bright sunlight outside a food pantry in East Charleston, standing on the curb as he speaks to Danni Dineen, who’s leaning against a parked car.
He speaks in tumbling stanzas of holler poetry, repeating phrases, the Appalachia in his voice doing little to fill his vacant tone. “I banged two lines of ice last night,” he tells us almost immediately, “I’m tired of being lonely.” He’s been awake for a few days, walking the streets of Charleston, West Virginia, by himself.
Danni watches Tucker, nodding occasionally, listening to the words he has spent days muttering to nobody. After a few minutes she cuts him off. “Here’s the deal,” she says. Her tone is blunt without being callous, her words measured but firm. She tells Tucker that she has a bed ready for him, in long-term drug treatment, and if he wants to go, all he needs to do is say the word.
Danni has a small bag slung across her chest and her bleached dreadlocks are tied back behind her head. Intricate tattoos creep like ivy across her hands and arms. She has a small anarchy “A” tattooed next to her left eye. Danni doesn’t talk much about her tattoos, remnants of a previous life, though other people certainly do. She treats the compliments and questions with a sort of wry humility, a lack of sentimentality that doesn’t seem to cross the line into regret.
She has known Tucker since he was a kid, and has several times gotten him into short-term drug-detox and rehabilitation programs. Tucker has done well in these programs, responding to the structures and lessons of recovery. But thirty days goes by fast, and on the other side, all that has awaited Tucker are the things that put him in rehab to begin with.
“I ain’t have nothing but the cold hard concrete.” Tucker repeats this confession several times.
He is twenty-four years old, stocky, with short blonde hair already receding at his temples. He’s wearing a shirt he shoplifted the week before, in preparation for a job interview.
Tucker grew up in foster care and has been living on the streets since he turned eighteen. He has a litany of “mental health issues” that, due to confidentiality concerns (Tucker is not his real name), Danni did not elaborate on. She did tell me that his issues are exacerbated by substance abuse and the wide range of hardships that we as a society have labeled “homelessness.”
But maybe long-term treatment would be different. These programs can last for a year, sometimes even more, much longer than a four-week detox. Maybe more time, more structure, more support, could help Tucker find the stability that’s eluded him his whole life.
It doesn’t take long for Tucker to respond to Danni’s proposition.
“I wanna go change my life, Danni.”
It is difficult for me to see, with his eyes narrowed against the mid-day glare, if Tucker is looking at Danni when he says this. It is even more difficult to tell, across the chasm of drugs and circumstance that stretches between him and me, if Tucker means what he says.
For Danni, it doesn’t matter. She’ll help him regardless.
I came to West Virginia looking for harm. After months of interviewing healthcare professionals and government officials, filing Freedom of Information Requests, and investigating arcane government spending practices, I wanted to put a human face to the damage of the addiction crisis. So, I sought out those who work to keep the damage at bay, those who resist the crisis’ overwhelming destruction.
The truth about this work, the work of keeping people alive so they might one day begin to recover, is that it is work in the face of relentless failure. The problem is too great, the drugs too potent, the misery too abject. Even if every expert policy prescription was enacted tomorrow, the problem might never disappear, it is that deeply rooted.
Thus, in many ways, the harm caused by the crisis is everywhere. It’s in books and movies and Netflix shows. It’s in political speeches and advertisements and campaigns for free Narcan and Fentanyl test strips. It’s in newspaper articles and cable news, endless reporting on death and drugs and the resulting desperation. The harm is visible on street-corners with cardboard signs or tent cities in downtowns. The harm is in our lives, in the memories of friends and family who have been battered or stolen by the invisible hand of the opioid epidemic.
In few places is this harm more evident than in the towns and counties of West Virginia.
The devastation has seeped into the bedrock, coloring the landscape like chemical runoff. Spend a few hours driving through the hills and valleys of Boone County and you will see burnt out trailers and abandoned buildings standing like wretched monuments, reminders of what was stolen from this place.
The word “epidemic” is not an accurate one, not for this, Dr. Lyn O’Connell, the Associate Director of Addiction Sciences at Marshall Health, the largest healthcare provider in the tri-state region, told me. Epidemic suggests that opioids flooded West Virginia of their own accord, a sort of cosmic accident or act of God, disconnected from the patterns or cycles that have shaped this region. Dr. O’Connell says this isn’t the case. The pills and their intravenous cousins were merely the most recent chapter in a long history of Appalachia being “pillaged for resources, manpower and finances,” she told me. This history is what made West Virginia so vulnerable to the opiate wildfire that was sparked by the Sackler’s and fueled by the pharma cartels that followed them. “The trees were ripe for kindling,” she said.
The villains, individuals and corporations who did their best to loot this region, stripping its valuables and leaving it to rust, have been documented by journalists, historians and advocates. These accounts detail not only their crimes, but the governments that failed to stop them, turning blind eyes to the pillaging, or criminalizing the victims rather than the perpetrators.
These stories give way to debates about what still needs to be done, which programs help and which harm, which policies are essential and which should be left behind. These conversations are critical, and yet, they can overlook a crucial truth.
The crushing magnitude of the crisis, its ubiquity and power, is more formidable than most of us can imagine. Jan Rader, who directs the Mayor’s Council on Public Health and Drug Control Policy in Huntington, told me that the days of adults getting hooked on prescription painkillers are long gone. Now, she says they are seeing children who were raised in broken homes, who’s parents have disappeared into drugs or been imprisoned by the policies meant to combat them. These children, often raised by grand-parents or great-grand-parents, are young people who’ve only known addiction, who get hooked on drugs and don’t have a normal to return to. This is a “third or fourth generation problem,” she said.
This is not to say that things can’t get better. In some places, like Huntington, overdoses have been declining over the past several years, even as they continue to rise statewide. Still, the intractable reality of the addiction crisis is often overlooked, and with it, the resilience of the individuals who battle these overwhelming odds.
I came to West Virginia looking for harm. I found resilience, the kind that keeps people alive, the kind that seems nearly miraculous, and the kind that is often overlooked.
…
I first meet Danni Dineen on a cold January morning in West Charleston. I had driven West along the Kanawha River, snow not so much falling as lingering beneath the gray sky, and arrived at the CARE office at 9 a.m. It’s a low, brick, mostly-empty office-building between a gas station and Dan’s Auto Repair shop. The front door is locked when I arrive, and I watch Danni smile apologetically through the glass as she opens it for me.
“Sorry about that,” she says, “we are on the West Side.”
Danni runs the Quick Response Team for the city of Charleston. QRT’s, as they are often referred, are groups of EMTs and recovery specialists that follow up on drug-related 911 calls and overdose reports, offering access to addiction treatment, basic services and Narcan, the overdose reversal drug.
QRT’s have existed for roughly a decade, first created in Ohio in response to rising opioid overdose deaths. The first team in West Virginia started, with the help of Jan Rader, in the city of Huntington in 2017. Charleston started its own quick response team in 2019, and it is run out of the CARE office.
The CARE office, funded by the city of Charleston as well as various state and federal grants, works to help the city’s most vulnerable populations. Though the acronym stands for “Coordinated Addiction Response Effort,” the office also works to aid unhoused communities and people struggling with mental health issues.
Danni’s work is all consuming, “draining” is the word she uses, mentally and physically. She tells me that when she feels run down by the job, she looks at a map on her wall where she tracks Charleston overdoses with push-pins. “Each one of those pins is a life, someone who needs my help,” she tells me. It’s a rehearsed line, one I would later find in a local news interview she gave a year before, and one that she would repeat to me in later conversations. However, as she said it to me that morning, she had tears in her eyes.
Danni is not from West Virginia. She grew up in Farmington, Maine, a small town in the southern part of the state. She was the second youngest of seven children. “Steeped in addiction” is how she described her family. Her childhood was populated with raucous parties, fist-fights and drug deals.
Danni described an early memory of sitting at the kitchen table for breakfast when her father sprang up from his seat and sprinted out the back door. Danni and her sisters watched through the window as their father disappeared into the tree-line behind their house, police dogs and DEA agents pursuing him. “I knew from a young age that the shit my family was doing was not fucking normal,” she recalled.
At thirteen, desperate for a different life, Danni bought a bus ticket to Florida. She left Maine with “three dollars… and a bag of fucking potato chips,” and spent three days on that bus before she reached Florida. Danni says she still has “potato chip PTSD” from trying to make that bag last the whole trip, nibbling at the corners, taking ten minutes to eat a single chip. Eventually, she arrived at her eldest sister’s apartment, whom she had not seen since her infancy, and asked if she could stay.
Danni did well in Florida, becoming the first person in her family to graduate high school, go to college, and eventually join the military. Throughout her young adulthood she experimented with drugs, managing to “walk this tight line” between experimentation and addiction. It wasn’t until she returned home from the military that she began to slip. Her mother died of an overdose shortly after Danni’s return, her older sister overdosed soon after, and was placed on life support. Danni’s youngest sister, who had followed her into the military, returned home to help care for her siblings, only to die of an overdose herself while on leave. It was in the shadow of these losses that Danni succumbed to “full on addiction.”
Danni is used to sharing her story, to “recovering out loud.” She speaks about her unthinkable traumas with a matter-of-fact tone and moments of genuine humor. She isn’t shy in enumerating her various criminal charges and relapses along her path to sobriety. She tells her story with a palpable sense of gratitude, even hope, but with no attempt to smooth its edges.
Danni tells me that, when she was using, she could always spot a “newbie” because they would panic when someone overdosed. “Relax,” Danni would say, “their lips aren’t even blue yet.” She recalls how she would get her fix first, before giving Narcan to whomever needed it. It was only recently that Danni administered Narcan for the first time sober. She said she was so terrified that her hands couldn’t stop shaking.
Danni was given Narcan twenty-three times before getting sober on March 11, 2021.
Driving through Charleston with Danni is like taking a guided tour of a city nobody is supposed to see. Shotgun houses, overgrown yards, homeless shelters, tents beneath underpasses, food pantries, and abandoned buildings. Danni maneuvers through these desolate spaces with confidence, refusing to blink at what others choose to ignore. Sometimes, following behind her, it can feel like a warped version of the famous tracking shot from Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas. Danni moves like Henry Hill through the Cabana club, greeting people by name and handing out tips, except instead of hundred-dollar bills, Danni hands out water-bottles, bus passes, and Narcan.
Driving around the city, she makes a quick U-turn, pulling up beside a man with a large backpack, demanding to know why he isn’t at the treatment center she had booked for him the week before. She sees a woman asleep in the doorway of a building, and calls her name until she wakes up, just to make sure she’s still alive. She stops by a “bando,” calling out a greeting into the darkness and checks beneath a tarp to make sure there are no bodies beneath it. As I hold my breath to avoid the smell, she leaves two boxes of Narcan in the abandoned shack.
Danni operates with a palpable humility. There is no ego in her movements, no white-knight syndrome at play. “I could relapse tomorrow,” she says to me with striking nonchalance, while explaining the necessity and risk of “peer led” programs. Danni’s empathy is more than attitude or demeanor, it is reflected in her willingness to help even those who have lost hope of changing.
Many of the addresses we visit while I ride along with Danni are empty or incorrect. This doesn’t seem to bother her, she hangs her card on the doorknob, and leaves a box or two of Narcan on the porch.
Eventually, we find someone. Danni knocks on the back door of a house and a man emerges, with a patchy beard and a baseball cap. Danni introduces herself, and asks about the “incident” that happened at this address the day before. The man nods, his eyes unfocused, not looking at Danni as wariness begins to darken his pupils.
“You ever think about treatment?” Danni asks, her voice softer than usual, like a teacher addressing a quiet child. She allows the question to linger as the man shifts on his feet, eventually mumbling, “yeah.” There’s weight to this confession, a tired awareness of truth that has not evolved into anything more than recognition. He isn’t lying, and though he’s clearly uncomfortable, these aren’t the words of a man trying to push someone out the door. “Yeah,” she responds gently.
Danni produces her card and two boxes of Narcan. She tells the man that it wasn’t too long ago that she was out here too, “took me eighteen years to get it right,” she says. The man nods, already retreating back inside the house. Danni presses the card and the Narcan into his hands and he takes them silently. The door is almost closed as Danni issues her final words.
“Don’t use alone.”
There is a conventional wisdom in the recovery community, that you can’t talk someone into getting sober. That choice needs to come from within. This is a difficult truth, especially for people like Danni. It means that most of her work is keeping people alive long enough for them to find their way out of the dark. For every person, like Tucker, who she connects to treatment, there are countless others who refuse it. Danni spends her days holding doors open and watching people walk by.
During my day with Danni, we respond to an active overdose. We beat the ambulance to the scene, so Vaughn, the EMT who rode with us, goes upstairs, while Danni and I wait on the porch. Eventually, the inhabitants come downstairs; a skinny guy with a stringy red beard, a wide-eyed woman with dyed blonde hair, a tall, quiet man who appears to be her husband. They are all jumpy and scared, smoking cigarettes and pacing as the other EMTs arrive. They speak quickly, full of half-baked stories about their friend who, as they speak, is being helped downstairs by Vaughn and the other medics. They say he’s an airbnb guest, that he has asthma, that he got hot while walking upstairs. He sits on the ledge of the porch, heavyset, wearing a yankees cap, nodding along as they speak. He doesn’t want to go to the hospital, “refused treatment” is what the medics say.
It doesn’t matter that they are high. It doesn’t matter that they are lying to the cops about why they had Narcaned their friend, or that they are lying to us about what they had been doing upstairs.
Danni simply tells them that they have done the right thing. She gives them her card, another box of Narcan, and even calls the tall husband an Uber on the CARE account because he says he’s late to work.
…
The Bo-Mar Drop-In-Center is situated in Ripley, a small city of around 3,000 people in the mostly rural county of Jackson, West Virginia. Between 2006 and 2019, almost 19 million prescription pain pills were poured into Jackson County, according to an investigation by the Washington Post. The Fruth Pharmacy in Ripley alone received over 3.5 million pills over that time, narrowly edging out the Wal-Mart pharmacy, also in Ripley, for the most pills in the county.
Bo-Mar’s website says that the Drop-In Center is there to “provide assistance, referral services and coordinate activities.” In addition, it says that the center “offers educational and recreational opportunities with a primary focus on peer supported recovery for anyone struggling with addictive diseases and /or co-occuring (sic) mental health disorders.”
If this description sounds overly broad, it’s because it is. Bo-Mar opened in 2010 as a location for Twelve Step meetings. It still rents space to both Narcotics and Alcoholics Anonymous, who hold daily meetings at the center. Over the years, the center has evolved, seeking to provide what it can for the people who are most in need in Jackson County. Bo-Mar offers free meals, showers and laundry services. It gives out Narcan and offers access to drug treatment.
Speaking about Bo-Mar as an institution is slightly misleading, because for the last several years, the only employee at the center has been Donna Coleman. She is the one that makes the meals, runs the events, and spends hours on the phone trying to find open treatment beds for those who need them.
I first met Donna, after speaking on the phone, at the drop-in center, a two-story building, painted mint green, with a large white porch. A faded American flag hangs out front and a bright blue mini-library box sits at the edge of the well-kept lawn.
Donna is sitting on the porch railing when I arrive. We shake hands.
There is quiet appraisal in Donna’s gaze, a gentle detachment, as if she is studying you from a distance. She wears rounded glasses and her eyes are warm without being soft. She speaks deliberately, unafraid of silence.
“I didn’t realize y’all already had spring out here,” I say, a feeble attempt at folksy charm. She barely cracks a pitying half-smile, but she’ll repeat the phrase to the various characters who appear in her office, her smile widening with each retelling. By the end of the day, she’ll ask me to repeat it rather than say it herself, the corners of her eyes crinkling before I even begin to speak.
The center feels home-like, with windows in each room and a wooden staircase that creaks. I follow Donna into her office. There are two desks back against the wall, one in each corner. Donna’s is closest to the door, I realize later that her chair is perfectly situated so that no one can walk into the center without Donna seeing them. Her desk is surrounded by shelves filled with books and binders. Behind her is a large photo collage of former clients. A poster of the Twelve Steps hangs on the wall beside her.
I settle down on the low, thin, couch opposite the desks. Above me is a TV screen with live footage from the security cameras that occupy nearly every area of the building.
Donna tells me she’s been on the phone all day for a client who’s been using Xanax for fourteen years. He’s insured through Medicare, and few addiction treatment facilities in West Virginia will accept his coverage. Complicating matters, withdrawal from Benzodiazepines (such as Xanax) is one of the few drug withdrawals that can actually kill you. Because of this, many treatment centers won’t accept patients for benzo detox, deeming it too risky.
Donna had spent the last three days on the phone with every treatment center she could think of, trying to find somewhere to put her client. Miraculously, this morning, she found him a bed. She passed along the treatment facility’s number immediately, telling her client to call them as soon as possible, and then follow up with her. He said he would, but that was hours ago, and she still hadn’t heard back from him.
“That’s why I keep checking my phone,” she says.
Donna gives me a tour, and as she leads me to the kitchen I realize, for the first time, that we aren’t alone.
Sitting, half hidden, in the corner is a young man I’ll call Cheyanne. Donna reacts to him with a welcoming indifference, as if his presence is so normal that it requires no explanation.
Cheyanne is in his early twenties, blonde hair buzzed close to his head. He has tattoos, a spider-web visible on his knee, or maybe it was his elbow, and black ink dotted across his face, unfolding like a constellation around glassy, bloodshot eyes. He wears a baggy shirt and skate shoes, the color of New York City snow, their laces tattered, tongues pulled out. His arms are wrapped around his torso, fingers gripping his upper arms. He doesn’t look at us when we enter, his eyes fixed on something I can’t see.
I catch these details through a cursory glance, not wanting to look too closely. I could pretend this was out of some sort of decorum, but the truth is I’m afraid, scared to insert myself into his world, worried that if I look too long, I might start to feel the cold that envelops him.
The kitchen smells like grease, the remnants of the cheese-steak Donna made for Cheyanne when he arrived, and as we turn back toward her office I look at Cheyanne again. This time, he reacts to us, our movement entering into his field of awareness. I give him a nod, mumbling “how’s it going,” a question so absurd I hope that Donna didn’t hear it. Cheyanne doesn’t quite meet my eye, dropping his head at my words, acknowledging their presence as well as my own.
Back in her office, I ask Donna about him, if he’s a regular client or someone new. “He just showed up,” she says, like someone describing an injured bird appearing at a backyard feeder. She says he rode his bicycle here, from his sister’s house. Donna thinks she knows the sister, thinks she spent some time in jail with her, if she’s right Donna says it’s a long way to go on his little BMX bike. “I used to babysit for him,” Donna adds, “but I don’t think he recognized me.”
Donna hadn’t asked Cheyanne what he was on —though by the way he’s been nodding she has a pretty good idea—she just asked if he was hungry, and made him a sandwich when he said yes. Donna will let him sit there all day, checking periodically to make sure he’s still breathing. Maybe he’ll come back tomorrow, or maybe he won’t.
Donna’s office feels like that of a high school guidance counselor, endlessly populated by disparate characters united by geography and experience. Marty comes most mornings for the coffee, in his leather jacket and cowboy boots, and usually gets on Donna’s nerves. A woman stops by to drop off AA literature and share a new tattoo on her wrist. A young blonde woman arrives, she also has a new tattoo, but it isn’t finished. Two years ago she showed up at Bo-mar after getting kicked out of a drug treatment center. Donna put her to work in the flower beds outside and she kept coming back. Now she’s the NA chapter treasurer, here to settle the rent. Birdman stops by and, toting his oxygen tank, drags a vacuum around the first floor in exchange for a few Walmart gift cards. Outside, he finishes a cigarette from one of the ash-trays, laughing about the bar he used to work at and crying about the doctors who saved his life. A woman arrives, fresh from housing court, demanding Donna hand over a cigarette that she doesn’t have. She has long blonde hair and a folder stuffed with loose sheets of paper. She tells Donna the kind of story a child concocts when walking home with a detention slip. Donna gives her advice she won’t follow. “Don’t be up to anything,” Donna says. The woman responds with a noise, somewhere between a scoff and sigh.
I ask Donna how many people she is currently taking care of. I fumble with the wording of the question, unsure of what verb I should use to describe what I’ve seen. She smiles, “how many people am I mothering?” she offers with a chuckle. I nod. “About fifteen, give or take.”
Donna was born in a small town in Lincoln County, West Virginia. Her mom drank, and when she was fifteen, Donna went to live with her father and his new wife in Kentucky. Her father worked on oil rigs and would leave home for work for long periods. She said she had an “unspoken agreement” with her new stepmom, not the best thing for a young woman learning how to get in trouble. A year later, she moved back in with her mother, who had moved to Ripley. “It was the biggest place I’d ever lived,” she said.
Donna isn’t shy about her history with drugs. At one point she refers to herself as “an intravenous drug user.” Later, she’ll tell me that she was “strung out on meth for a lotta years.” “Because I got high alone in my bathroom, I thought I wasn’t hurting anybody,” she said, “it took me a long time to realize that wasn’t the case.”
Eventually, like Danni, Donna ended up incarcerated. “I went to jail on a Friday,” she said, “and when I got out on Sunday my sister picked me up and took me to an NA meeting the next day.” That meeting was here, at the Bo-Mar Center, and Donna’s been coming back ever since. She’s been sober since 2016.
She tells me this story while sitting on the porch, Birdman’s vacuum still roaring inside, and tears start to fill her eyes. I ask her what she’s feeling. “I feel thankful I’m in a place to give back to a community I took so much from,” she says.
The drop-in-center is funded by an $80,000 a year grant from the West Virginia Department of Health. Donna is the only employee, though she recently started to get part-time help from a young woman who works at a nearby drug treatment center. On the day I visited Donna, the Jackson County Commission announced a plan to spend over $300,000 on a new shooting range for the police department. The money for the range would come from the county’s newly received opioid settlement funds, money paid to West Virginia by the pharmaceutical companies that delivered opioids to the Fruth Pharmacy.
Near the end of the day, a man arrives, who I’ll call Tim.
He’s slight, with watery-blue eyes and a deeply lined face. He pushes dark sunglasses atop his mulleted head and rests one of his black cowboy boots atop his knee. He speaks in a mischievous whisper, the shadow of a boy who might have sat in the back of class and amused himself with doodles of the teacher.
I’ll wonder later if Tim is in love with Donna. The tenderness with which he speaks to her, the way he relishes her laugh, how he is warmed by her attention; it isn’t hard to imagine. I can tell Donna loves him too, though maybe not in the way he hopes.
Tim’s father is dead. He died a few days before, I don’t ask how many, but he isn’t in the ground yet. Tim tells Donna that he’s angry, though his voice is still soft. Tim says his brother won’t let Tim borrow his car, even though Tim needs it to get to a doctor’s appointment. Tim is so angry, he says, that he doesn’t want to attend his father’s funeral, to punish his brother.
Donna tells him, firmly, that this is a mistake, “like drinking poison and expecting someone else to die.” Tim is unmoved, and so Donna enters problem-solving mode. Tim needs a car? Tim needs a ride? She’ll get him one.
In moments Donna is on the phone, wielding the line like a Golden Age Hollywood producer putting together a picture. Pretty soon she’s on with the Day Report Center, an alternative to incarceration offered to non-violent offenders. Essentially, it’s where Tim (and countless others) go to pee in a cup.
Tim is recovering from a recent eye surgery, the doctor’s appointment (I take it) is a follow up on that procedure. Donna pauses as the woman on the phone asks her a question before repeating it aloud to Tim; after the surgery, was he prescribed anything?
I am entirely oblivious to the significance of this question. I’m too new to this world, too busy jotting down my shorthand description of Tim (“light eyes, mustache, cowboy boots.”)
“They gave me eye-drops,” says Tim, and Donna relays this into the phone.
“Do you have them with you?” She asks, “can I see them?”
Tim digs into the pockets of his jeans, producing a small bottle and passing it over to Donna. She reads the label into the phone and passes it back to Tim. Donna’s face doesn’t change as she listens to the women on the other end of the line.
There are a few moments of silence after Donna hangs up. Then, she asks Tim why he’s so angry at his brother. Tim doesn’t respond. She asks him why he’s sitting in her office. Again, he is quiet.
“Have you got high recently?”
The question takes me by surprise. It feels abrupt, even random. I’ve put nothing together.
I take, from Tim’s silence, that he is similarly taken aback by the question, though I suppose, he must have expected it, at least more than I did.
“Yeah,” he whispers, as if he hopes Donna won’t hear. She doesn’t react. No sign of disappointment or shake of her head. She doesn’t move, her warm eyes fixed on Tim, her forehead furrowed slightly in an attempt to dull the interrogation that is now inevitable.
“When?”
Tim lifts his hand to his head, fumbling for his sunglasses, and knocking them onto the floor. He scrambles to replace them on his head and Donna exhales a laugh, as if to signal to Tim that he’s not in trouble.
“It’s okay, you can look at me, you don’t need to put the glasses on.”
Tim stands, mumbling something about the sun in his eyes. He moves behind the other desk, the one in the corner opposite Donna’s.
“That’s Tim’s chair,” Donna smiles at me, “he doesn’t like it when the new girl uses it.” Tim keeps his eyes down, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. “She’s loud,” he says, the edge of a smile in his voice but then he’s silent again.
“So, when did you get high?” Donna asks the question matter-of-factly.
“Let me think,” says Tim, pretending to do math in his head, or maybe he really can’t remember.
“Saturday,” he whispers, after a long pause.
“At Brandon’s?” Donna asks. Tim shakes his head, still not looking directly at her. “He’s in jail,” he says. Another pause.
“Why?” The softness of Donna’s question, the earnestness, identifies it as a question about Tim and not Brandon.
It was a friend, says Tim, a friend who talked him into it. Donna doesn’t respond to this, she’s heard it before, and it doesn’t matter if it’s true.
“I hit the bubble three good times probably,” he says, unburdening himself quietly, as if specifics might somehow soften the truth. “And last night,” he admits, “I just wanted to get numb.”
This is why Tim is here, not because of his brother or his car or even his father. Tim is here to confess.
“I understand,” Donna nods. “Did you buy dope?” She asks. Tim doesn’t respond, shifting in his chair in place of speech. “Do you still have dope?” He’s silent once again, but silence is answer enough.
“It wasn’t the eye drops,” Tim whispers quietly, more to himself than Donna or me, and finally I start to understand.
Tim had gone to the day-report center on Monday and pissed in a cup. When Donna called them, they asked if Tim was prescribed any medications after his surgery because his urine had tested positive for drugs. It wasn’t the eye-drops.
By the time I catch up, Donna and Tim have moved on.
“I’ve quit so many times,” Tim whispers.
“One of these days it’s gonna stick,” Donna responds. I know she believes it, she has to. Donna tells him there is a big NA meeting in Parkersburg on Saturday. She’s going, along with several others from their group, and she tells him to come along. Tim nods slowly but says nothing.
“Oh shit.” Donna gets up. She hasn’t checked on Cheyanne in nearly an hour. She hurries from the room, leaving me alone with Tim. I cast around wildly for something to say, some word of wisdom or insightful question. I have nothing, awed to silence by Tim’s stalwart existence. He pays me no mind.
“So what’s your plan,” Donna asks, settling back in her chair. Evidently Cheyanne is fine. “You gonna go back to that same place?”
“Hell no,” Tim says feebly. It’s the fastest response he’s given, and Donna doesn’t buy it.
“You just saying that?” Tim shakes his head again, “I want to lose my mind right now,” he says.
There’s another pause.
“What do you wanna be when you grow up?” Donna asks, leaning back in her chair. Tim smiles, “shut your mouth Tim,” he says and Donna laughs, throwing her head back. Tim glances up at her, and smiles.
Donna tells him to call her next time he wants to get high. She tells him to come to the drop-in center tomorrow at 9am. “Get up, don’t be up,” she says. He nods.
…
Days later, as I was leaving West Virginia, I realized that I never saw Donna get a call from her Xanax patient. I figured he might have called after I left for Charleston, but I know it’s just as likely that he didn’t. I also know that, even if he did make it to treatment, he might only last a day, or a week, before leaving or getting kicked out. I know that even if he finishes the program, if he gets clean and begins recovery, that in a month, or a year or ten years, he might relapse, and that first dose, after so long, might kill him.
I will follow up with Donna months later, asking about the Xanax patient, wondering if he ever made it into detox. Donna will tell me that he did, but that once he got out of detox, he didn’t get into long-term treatment. “The same insurance that paid for his prescription for 12+ years, wouldn’t pay for his detox or treatment,” Donna will say in an email, “the system failed him.” He died about two months later.
Donna, like Danni, is often drained by her unceasing work. Donna told me that sometimes, when she leaves the drop-in-center, she goes home, sits on her couch, and “just stares into the void.”
Sitting in the airport, leaving West Virginia, I found myself doing the same. I wondered how long Donna, and Danni, and the thousands of people like them, could continue to hold open doors. I wondered, when faced with this kind of loss and uncertainty, how long we could expect Danni and Donna to hold the delicate line that kept so many alive, that gave so many a chance at recovery?
I wondered what, if anything, would be enough for their resilience to hold?
I flipped through my pocket-notebook and stopped at a page of quickly scrawled notes from a previous morning.
I had returned to the drop-in-center, briefly, before driving back to Charleston. I reclaimed my couch from the day before, chatting with Donna and her new co-worker, and as we sat there, Donna told me a story; how one morning, a few years after she got sober, her car wouldn’t start. Donna remembered talking to her brother, panicking that she had no way to get to work, and she recalled how he had simply, wordlessly, thrown her his keys. She said she could still remember that feeling, the sensation of being trusted again, after so many years.
We sat in silence with her memory for a moment, and then Tim appeared. He stood in the doorway of Donna’s office, still in his cowboy boots, drinking a Java-flavored Monster energy drink. I watched as Donna smiled at Tim and as he smiled back at her, and neither of them said anything.
I realized that, in that moment, they had hope.
Hope is why Danni left Narcan on front porches and in abandoned homes. Hope is why Donna made Cheyanne a sandwich and checked his breathing every hour. Hope is why Danni put Tucker in an Uber, sending him to treatment, without asking if he meant what he said. Hope is why Donna told Tim to return to the drop-in-center, and hope is why Tim did exactly as she asked.
If hope can do all that, then maybe it will be enough.
Adlai Coleman is a writer and freelance journalist based in Portland, Oregon.
