I Can Still Hear Her Laughing

He said I was to blame.

If only I had opened the door and let her in, he would say, then maybe she would still be alive today.

Yes, it was my fault she died, he said.

Her knock on the door and my refusal to let her in was what set him off that night.  My head was bashed into the wall three times because I would not let her in.

My legs buckled beneath me when he told me the news that she had died.  A mere nine months after he bashed my head into the wall.

She escaped from the Sunflower House the night she came knocking on our door.  I knew she was a fugitive, having violated her probation once again to go to drug and alcohol treatment.  I knew she would come knocking on our door.  But this time I would not let her in.

He said that maybe she would have found the strength to get clean and sober if I had just taken her in that night.  If I had just been her friend.  But I knew she had given up once again to get clean and sober simply by walking out that door that warm day in August.

I could not believe that she was really gone.  That the drugs had finally killed her.  They found her on someone's couch, all the life finally sucked out of her.  I could not stop shaking knowing it had finally happened.  A black cloud had followed her from Arkansas to the Santa Cruz Mountains, and no matter how many times she tried to get clean and sober, she always went back to the drugs and alcohol that ended up killing her.

So I was not to blame.

And I had been her friend.

I was a friend of A.A. and N.A., having never touched drugs and alcohol in my life, but I still had compassion for her and for all the struggles in her life.  I was part of her clean and sober world, a world that held such hope for a better day.

I used to visit her at her job in Los Gatos.  Drove over Highway 17 just to keep her company one night.  She got to bring her baby to work, and so I hung out with her and her young daughter and brought them dinner.

I remember helping her move all her household belongings out of her storage unit before they auctioned them off for default in payment.  We had a garage sale together that weekend.  And I remember giving her a lovely pink swan to have something pretty in her room that she rented from the man who claimed to be my boyfriend.  I wondered later what became of that pink swan.

I sat beside her at meetings each time she came back to the program.  I watched her as she went in and out of the program and recognized how frustrated her sponsor had become.  We worried each time she "went out."

And now she was gone. 

She had finally escaped once and for all.

The black cloud had finally lifted.

My head has long since healed from the night I did not let her in the knotty pine door that separated our two completely different worlds.

The memories remain.  But I try not to dwell on the night of August 22, 2003.

Because in my heart, I can still hear her laughing.  She had such a contagious laugh. 

I can still see the two of us driving on Highway 9.  Dinners at Don Quixote's. 

She was so full of life. 



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