A few days ago I thought I could write some semi-good news about my sister, however as of last night this tale took another tragic twist. Since the last time I wrote about this, both my sister & her boyfriend Jason were released from jail after only serving a month sentence. The prisons are so overcrowded that they didn't have room for two "minor" drug offenders. For a while, Jason and my niece Zoey were living with Jason's mother Cleo, while my sister was staying with her father. This only lasted for about a month when Chris, my sisters father, kicked her out. There was a week were I didn't know where Nicole was and I constantly worried about her safety as the weather had gotten colder.
At Thanksgiving I found out that Nicole had moved back in with Cleo. This news surprized me greatly as I was under the impression that Cleo had had it with my sister. My mother told me that Cleo had recently been diagnosed with colon cancer and had decided to give Nicole one more chance as she needed help around the house.Since she was back at Cleo's house, Nicole was able to have access to a computer and I knew she had contacted my brother Ryan a few times via email. Given it was almost exactly a year since we had last spoken to each other and reports from my mother that she was doing better, I decided it was time to reach out to her.
My email to her wasn't that different from the last one I sent to her after that horrible phone call last year. "I'm still angry with you for what you did but I love you and miss you" is pretty much the gist of what I wrote. She wrote back to me almost a week later with an email that did show some positive signs she was doing better... but it still cut me into pieces. I was in tears within seconds of reading the email and could barely see the computer screen. Each time I try to talk about it or read it again, my emotions overwhelm me and I can feel the tears threatening to return. While things between Nicole and I are in a very bad shape, up until last night I had foolishly begun to hope that she was doing better. It was clear from the wording of her email that she was working through some of her issues and I even believed her when she said she was going to NA meetings.
Last night however I found out that her & Jason were kicked out of Cleo's home again. Cleo had warned both of them that if any of the medications she need to recover from her colon surgery were missing, even a single pill, that she would kick them out. She discovered at least 24 pills missing from one of her prescriptions. So they left, taking my 5 year old niece with them. Cleo offered to let Zoey stay so that she could continue to go to school, and have some resemblance of stability in her life, but my sister wouldn't be parted from her. No one knows where they are now. They both don't have jobs and with their criminal records its seems unlikely they'll get one. If it was just Nicole & Jason that were missing, I won't be as concerned as I am now but since Zoey is with them I am. Mom seems confident that Nicole will eventually contact her and doesn't want to do anything drastic like filling out a missing persons report. Cleo told my mother that she has been & will keep contacting Zoeys school to make sure that she's at least getting to school.
I can't help but beat myself up a bit for letting myself believe (yet again) that things were getting better with Nicole. After all the years of getting bad news that she was using drugs again, I thought I had lost that naivete. It was only a small glimmer of hope as I was (and still) don't trust my sister to be honest with me. Yet that small glimmer was there. In her email to me Nicole had shown some signs she was confronting her addiction and I let part of me cling to that hope. We don't know for sure if it was Jason, her or both of them that were stealing Cleos prescriptions, but I believe it was her.
Sometimes I doubt my decision to reach out to her again. Part of the reason I had estranged myself from her to was to protect myself from getting hurt. Getting her email was extremely painful and now I have the worry about her and Zoey safety also on my mind. This morning I woke up hours before my alarm, unable to sleep as I worried about them. Are they safe? Are they warm? Is Nicole going to end up in jail again? At times like this I wish I believed in the gods more or at least had my mother believe that everything was going to be alright. Though praying has lately felt like an empty task, I still found myself praying this morning to whatever gods may be out there for their safety... and that my sister will at least contact my mother soon.
The Bonesetter's Daughter by Amy Tan
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