Hurting People
For three hours the woman remained in our three aisle Health Beauty Aids section — digging through vitamin bargain bins and stalking up aisles she had thoroughly perused only moments before; and for three hours I piddled around that area — dusting and rearranging shelves — watching her. She was probably only five years older than I: around 28 or 29, but she had the deep, rattling cough of someone half a century ahead and medical light-years behind this. Whenever she did cough, which was often, her slight body jackknifed, causing her lank, dirty-blond hair to flutter around her hollowed cheeks and her unfocused brown eyes to water.
Her eyes gave it away even more than her erratic behavior. Her eyes were what told me she was suffering from far more than the effects of a late-summer cold. A few years ago, I had come to recognize that look in the eyes of someone I dearly loved (and still love), and I knew there were drugs pervading her system just as I knew then that there were drugs pervading his.
After wiping down and rearranging everything in those aisles that could be arranged, I finally walked over and asked this woman if she needed help. She draped her body over her cart, coughed a lung up into her hands, rested her hands back on the cart, then looked at me through bleary, bloodshot eyes.
“I’m sick, is all,” she rasped. “I’m bad sick. I’m prolly dying.”
Taking a reactionary step back, I asked, “Have you been to the doctor?”
She mumbled, “Yeah,” and made a loose gesture toward her nasal passages. “He said I gotta let it run its course.”
“Well…” I glanced around, suddenly desperate for escape. “I hope you get to feeling better soon.”
“Thanks,” the woman whispered and attempted to smile, revealing rotten teeth.
“You’re welcome,” I curtly replied and walked off, feeling like my Christian duty had been fulfilled.
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An hour later I was in the miscellaneous section when I saw her cart with its acne medicine, stretch mark cream, and contact solutions parked outside the single-occupancy bathroom. I waited and waited for her to come out. It must’ve been 20 minutes before I went to find my husband, for I honestly feared she had OD’d in our store’s bathroom. Randy (my husband) came up and knocked on the bathroom door. The woman mumbled something unintelligible, and two minutes later she flushed and came stumbling out.
Randy asked her some of the same questions I’d asked earlier.
Digging into her purse for a cigarette she had enough courtesy, even on a high, not to light, she said, “I’m just waiting on my (insert expletive here) ride. My (insert expletive here) boyfriend took all my money ’cause he had to get his (insert expletive here) tire fixed.” Her jumpy movements suddenly ceasing, she looked at Randy for the first time in the conversation and asked, “But they ain’t no tire changing places open on a Sunday–is there?”
My husband smiled, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Well, you see…this is actually Monday,” he explained.
“Oh, oh.” She nodded like this made all the sense in the world.
“Do you have somebody you can call?” he asked.
“I been trying and trying but nobody answers,” she said. “I’ve been looking like a (insert expletive here) idiot — digging through everything this (insert expletive here) store’s got — waiting on them to get me.”
“You’re welcome to stay ’til they get here,” Randy said. “That’s fine.” And then he and I left to go back into our busy Smart Shopper world.
But 30 minutes later it was obvious this woman either had no one to call, or whoever it was was also too strung out to remember they had someone to pick up. After abandoning her cart with the HBA products still inside it, she pushed open the door and headed out into the searing August sun. Biting my lip, I put down my price gun and followed out after her.
“Can I take you somewhere?” I called.
The woman turned, shielded her troubled gaze with one hand, and flicked a cigarette butt with the other. “Can you? Please? I got diarrhea like terrible,” she said. I was shocked to hear the desperation in her voice.
Going back inside, I enrolled the help of my sister-in-law, Joanne, grabbed my running Mace (for I didn’t know where we would be going or who was actually riding with us), and we walked out into the parking lot where the woman stood, patiently waiting.
“You want me to put this out?” she asked, gesturing to the cigarette while spewing two streams of smoke.
“We’ll just leave the windows down,” Joanne said.
In Joanne’s car I told the woman to sit in the passenger seat, not out of kindness toward her, but so that I could more easily watch her movements.
During our short journey, I stared at the back of the woman’s head: at her unwashed hair, her crudely tattooed shoulder, her fraying, soiled bra strap. What kind of life does she live? I wondered. How’d she ever get to this point?
“Take a left here,” the woman said, shaking me from my thoughts with the motioning of her stringy right arm. My sister-in-law switched on her blinker, and we drove down Sevier Street. I knew immediately where we were heading. The Drug House: a place that has wreaked havoc on that street and the ones tributarying from it. I suppose the local cops think it is easier to monitor one house than to disperse the people in it to the four winds, scattering them and their seeds of substance abuse throughout the county and beyond.
Still, I was so filled with anger and shock as — sure enough — the woman said, “Right here, on the left,” that I could only watch as she gathered her shaky frame from the car and asked me, “You wanna sit up front?”
I just shook my head, too overwhelmed for words.
As she closed the door behind her, I was filled with a sudden desperation. No time left to pray with her, I instead just feebly called, “God bless you,” and waved. I waved when what I really should’ve done was whisked her away from that horrid place and those hurting people who hurt people inhabiting it.
In response to me, the woman smiled weakly and pushed a lock of hair behind her rhinestone-studded ear. She then waved, too — with a cupped hand — like this was just one big beauty pageant and she, the Fairest of the Fair.
Only when we pulled away from The Drug House did I rest my head back against the car seat, think of my loved one who’s three years free from this death cycle of substance abuse and pain, thank the Lord from the bottom of my heart for it, and cry and cry.