PART 2
I sat down on my own porch steps.
My mother had been picking up opioid prescriptions in my name for over a year. Not for herself. For Lorrie.
Ms. Toussaint sat down next to me.
“I’m going to make some calls,” she said. “But you need to make one too. To the police.”
I took the drug test that afternoon at a lab across town. Hair and urine. Clean. Both of them.
The ER pulled their security footage from that Tuesday. The patient on the stretcher had a scar through her left eyebrow.
The CPS case against me was closed in nine days.
The police case was just beginning.
The detective found the doctor first. A clinic in a strip mall that had been writing pain prescriptions for cash. My mother had walked in fourteen months earlier, said she was there for her daughter, and handed them my driver’s license.
Lorrie came to the appointment. She told them she was me.
Every month, the clinic wrote a prescription. Every month, my mother picked it up and gave the pills to Lorrie.
“I was keeping her safe,” my mother told the detective. “If she had pills from a doctor, she wouldn’t buy them on the street.”
But Lorrie had bought fentanyl on the street anyway. That’s what nearly killed her last Tuesday.
And when the ambulance came, my mother had given the paramedics my name. My card.
So my sister’s overdose would be on my record instead of hers.
My mother was charged with identity theft and prescription fraud. So was Lorrie. The clinic’s doctor lost his license.
I had to spend six months cleaning up my medical records. Every pharmacy. Every insurance claim. Every database.
My school principal stood by me the entire time. “I’ve watched you with those kids for eight years,” she said. “I knew it wasn’t you.”
My mother pleaded guilty and got probation. She lost the right to ever see my children unsupervised.
Lorrie was given a choice by the judge. Jail, or a year in a locked residential treatment program.
She chose treatment.
In March, she wrote me a letter. The first one in years. It was short.
“I’m sorry I used your face. I’ve been using it my whole life. When I didn’t like mine, I pretended I was you. The good one. I don’t want to pretend anymore. I’m 112 days clean.”
I wrote back.
“You don’t have to be me. You just have to be you. Sober.”
She’s 241 days clean now.
Last Sunday, she called. Sawyer answered.
“Aunt Lorrie, you sound like Mommy!”
Lorrie laughed. For the first time in years, it sounded like her.
THE END.
