What hole are you trying to fill? By Kim McVicker

Lee Coursey CC



What hole are you trying to fill?


   “Nicole just called, she’s coming,” my mom reports over the phone.
   “Coming where?” I asked.
   “To your house, today, for Thanksgiving,” mom said.  
   The kitchen was collapsing in on me, I couldn’t breathe, the smell of turkey roasting no longer seemed pleasant.  I stepped outside, the bitter cold a better place for me, space to find air.  My heart was racing.
   “I didn’t invite her,” I said.
   “Don’t be silly, she doesn’t need to be invited, she’s your daughter,” my mom, always with blinders on to reality.
   No, no, no.  I don’t want this, the drama, the friction.  I stomp back into the house, slamming my phone down, God damnit I say to no one.  My hands are shaking and I’m displaying outsized anger, wanting to ensure my husband realizes this is not my doing.  As upset as I am, he’s going to be angry too and I’m preparing to bear the weight of that on my shoulders.  I want it to be clear, I didn’t invite this madness to our holiday meal.
   Nicole or Nel as she’s renamed herself, is “that person” of the family.  The one who sucks the air out of a room, a gravitational force, pulling us into her wobbly orbit.  Everyone else placed on the backburner, their needs and wants secondary.  How do families do this if they have multiple children and one of those children is “that person”?  Are the others just always shortchanged, do they grow accustomed to fending for themselves, learning to accept being set aside as attention pivots again and again, away from them?  I’ve often wondered if there are families who’ve found some artful way of dealing with this as I don’t believe we did.
   Nel had long struggled with bipolar disorder and fought against taking her medication.  It’s extremely hard to dictate someone take medication on any regular schedule if the person is also battling heroin addiction.  Throw in her fondness for meth when the mood struck and who knows what shit show we’d be in store for.  We were all forced to live in Crazytown, and Nel was the mayor.  Who knew where she might be on any given day?  She disappeared and reappeared when we least expected.
   Everything revolved around Nel: who will take her to her psychologist appointment, her psychiatrist appointment, who can drive her to the methadone clinic today?  Nel needs food, she needs cigarettes, she demands money.  No money for Nel was the rule I enforced across the family.  Nel is not to be given money for any reason.
   Foolishly, I thought I’d outwitted her, giving her gift cards instead, ordering her an Uber to get to the store.  I didn’t realize she was selling the gift cards and damaging my Uber passenger rating by asking the driver to take her multiple places in pursuit of buying drugs, sloppily eating from a can of SpaghettiOs in the backseat of their car.  I learned of the SpaghettiOs from her.  She was offended that they were offended and called to tell me her driver was an asshole.  I would tip the Uber drivers excessively, my attempt to make peace for what they’d suffered through.
   I often enlisted my younger sister to help.  She became my personal assistant; her primary responsibility was to take care of Nel.  My husband would pepper me with questions, why was I giving my car to my sister rather than trading it in.  Or when was my sister going to return to work, post maternity leave?  He didn’t understand the effort involved in dealing with Nel.  I didn’t want him to understand, he would have been angry knowing how we all twisted ourselves in knots, working to appease Nel, keep her safe.  My sister needed a reliable car, she needed a car to ensure she could continue taking care of my mess, the mess of Nel.
   My sister didn’t need a job, she had this job I’d given her.  Did she want this job?  I don’t know.  Everyone in a family takes on various roles.  I’d long been the caretaker but as time went on, as I advanced in my career, wining, and dining across the country, having much greater financial resources than the rest of the family, I was able to outsource my responsibilities.  Rather than dealing with Nel’s needs myself, I shifted to opening my checkbook.  Can you run and get Nel cigarettes, a unicorn, a kazoo, I’d ask.  Can you pick her up outside ABC gas station, she’s lurking behind the dumpster and needs a ride home?  The demands varied and came with no warning.  I didn’t want my sister to get a job.  What would that have done to this unspoken and informal agreement we had?
   Make no mistake, I was a generous employer.  Each trip to get Nel groceries or take her shopping came with the direction that my sister must also get anything she and her family needed.  Extra money transferred to my sister “just because”, hazard pay.  This created a guilty undertow, at least for me.  Did she feel obligated to do whatever I asked of her because I provided comforts and luxuries she otherwise couldn’t afford?  Was I taking advantage of her, asking her to do these things for me?  It left me with sadness and diminished the pleasure of gifting her a surprise weekend getaway or tickets for a show.  I would have done that regardless.  But our unspoken agreement made everything seem as if it came with a price tag.
   Outsourcing the tasks didn’t outsource the pain.  My anxiety was invisible, hidden, while inside I felt like an overinflated balloon.  I had the sensation that the slightest touch might cause me to pop.  I kept my phone set to silent because the sound of it ringing caused distress.  So often it would be Nel, calling over and over, demanding something of me.  If I refused her, she would threaten to kill herself.  Just as bad was when my silent phone was truly silent.  Why hadn’t she called I would worry, is she dead?
   Even when she wasn’t present, she still controlled our days.  Have you heard from her?  Where is she? were the text exchanges across the family.  So much so that at one point, having gotten her yet another new phone and new number, I’d run out of ways to “name” her in my contacts so noted her as Hershey.
   Nothing was safe with Nel.  Clothes were “lost”, phones were “lost”, cars wrecked.  She needed new bed sheets she insisted, all of hers lost.  How does a person lose all their bed sheets, I questioned, struggling to find logic where none existed.  My ex-husband’s new Keurig disappeared, along with many of his spoons.  He removed all the spoons from his house, absent one, thinking that would stop her.  I have no doubt she likely used this lonely spoon to both eat her cereal and cook her drugs.
   Each morning I’d drink my coffee and peruse the local jail website.  Not fearful that she’d been arrested but rather hoping that was so.  The only relief any of us had from the constant dread was when she was incarcerated.
   “I wish jail was like a library and we could check you out for the day and return you,” I told her.
   “Fuck that,” she said.”
   “You seem to like it when you’re there.  If you could smoke, would you mind living there all the time,” I asked.
   Surprisingly, she agreed she wouldn’t mind living in jail, if allowed to smoke.  She had such trouble navigating life that I believe there was some truth in her answer.
   Always, always I was searching for a way to fix Nel, to occupy her time when she’s roaming free.  I enrolled her in glass blowing classes, cooking classes, bought her a new easel and paints, and a new piano keyboard.
   This poem will move her, drive her to change.  This terrible tale of someone who overdosed and died, this will scare her straight.
   Once she said, “I know what you’re doing, telling me every time someone dies and it’s not working.  It does the opposite.  Every day is so hard, so very, very hard and when I hear these stories it makes me think, what’s the point?  Why fight this every day if in the end, I’m still going to return to that and die anyway, why fight it?”
   I had never heard such anguish in her voice, she was in jail at the time, and sounded as if she was in physical pain as she shared that with me.  I started seeking stories of hope, positive tales to inspire her.  See, you can fight through and come out on the other side, happily surviving, I wanted her to believe.
   We did rehab, over and over.  Inpatient, outpatient, in-state and out of state rehab centers.  I was fortunate that she was still on my insurance, and I was able to write those big checks so many rehab facilities require.  What happens, I wondered, to those who didn’t have that luxury?  It didn’t matter, she always walked out.  Always.
   How is she going to survive, where is she going to live?  Nobody wanted her to live with them, nobody wanted that turmoil in their space, syringes tumbling out of her purse as she professed to be clean.  A commune, I thought!  Not to do drugs, but maybe she could find peace and acceptance in a different environment.  Get clean and live in harmony, working the land, growing some vegetables.  I searched online for hours, trying to see if such a place existed.  I contemplated at times offering businesses money to hire her.  Hire her, help her build her self-esteem and feel valuable.  Secretly, I will pay you, reimburse her salary, I contemplated proposing.  Never did I go so far, but given the right circumstances, I believe I would have.
   When she was in jail, or prison, our relationship was revived.  We had calls, emails, in-person, and video visits.  Sometimes I would carry my laptop around, to give her a glimpse of the world.  Take me outside, she would request, and so I did, twirling and spinning around with the laptop to give her a view of the grass and trees.  This was primarily an ask when she was in jail as they had no outside yard.  Only a small room masquerading as a yard, where it took fifty two loops around to equal a mile.  The inmates would hold a deck of cards, placing one card down as they completed each loop to keep track of their distance traveled.
   In prison, they were able to go outside.  There were benches throughout the prison yard and Nel would often meet her friends there, they called it the bus stop.  
   She was jovial and lighthearted when incarcerated.  She thrived within the structure, the razor wire not protecting the world from her but rather, protecting her from herself.  She would give reviews of the food, such as: “they served meatballs with white cheese and cranberries in them, it felt like I was eating someone’s Christmas mistake” or “I was highly disappointed, I give it one star and shall not return”.
   At times, her and her fellow inmates got the better of me.  One of her favorite stories to recount was when another inmate had caught a glimpse of me on the video monitor and asked what was wrong with me.
   She was mad at the question, responded “nothing is wrong with my mom!”
   “But your mom’s neck, why is she in a neck brace?” they questioned.
   She was laughing as she was telling me this, stopped to catch her breath.  “That’s not a neck brace, it’s her turtleneck, my mom still wears turtlenecks!”
   Nel thought that was so funny, proving her long-held suspicion that I was the only person who would dare do something so fashion-backwards as wear a turtleneck.
   The times she was not being released from jail but instead given a one-way ticket to prison, she would designate someone to pick up her things.  These things, carefully inventoried by the jail staff upon her arrest.  Nel always made a big deal of this, concerned we would fail to get her things.  Did she imagine she’d had more, not realizing how little there was?  I found it sad, driving to the jail to collect her belongings.  Not sad she was going to prison, but sad to see someone’s life reduced to such few things, laminated to a piece of poster board: one nickel and two pennies, choker-style necklace, a cell phone with cracked screen.  Her clothes would be in a vacuum-sealed bag and often instead of shoes, there would be slippers.
   “What are you doing,” I recall asking, “to be arrested wearing slippers?”
   Her response was that slippers must be bad luck.
   “Maybe it’s your life choices rather than the slippers causing the problem,” I said.
   I would cut the bag of clothes open.  The weeks - sometimes months - of being sealed in the plastic bag exacerbated the stink they’d likely carried upon her arrival in jail.  I’d look at the clothes, trying to determine if they had some special meaning to her.  Should I wash them or throw them away, I’d wonder.
   Even with our frequent contact, there was a gap, a need to fill an emptiness when she wasn’t around.  As much as it was a relief, it left so much space.  What to do with this space that isn’t being consumed by her?  I went through various absurdities to fill the emptiness I sat alone with, when she wasn’t around: earrings, a strange fixation this earring stage.  I shopped constantly for earrings; cheap earrings, expensive earrings and then one day I stopped buying them and never wore earrings again.  Online shopping consumed me.  I bought shoes handmade by a cobbler in Israel, a moss ball “pet” wearing a cowboy hat, of course!  A heart-shaped inflatable pool, a denim jacket with Motherfucker embroidered across the back, buttons embossed with “Mom always liked you best”, YES!  I NEED these things.  Boxes arrived on my step daily, these unnecessary purchases that fulfilled me.  When not buying things, I would spend hours in the kitchen, making blueberry muffins, brownies, cakes, eggnog cinnamon rolls, cupcakes decorated to look like little football fields, deviled eggs that looked like pineapples, a cheeseball hedgehog, a watermelon carved into a turtle.
   Once, during a visit with Nel in prison she was poking at me about all my purchases, my incessant baking.  “What hole are you trying to fill?” she asked.
   “You,” I responded.
   “I’m a human, not a hole,” said Nel.
   Why did I feel such emptiness when she was absent?  She was a problem, yes.  Once she was doing a “find your epitaph” thing online and hers generated: Here lies Nel, she was a bit of a situation.  She found that comical, fitting to what she was.  In her moments of clarity, she was aware of her impact, the havoc caused.
   Her craziness was intoxicating, the source of every family “remember when…” story.
   She talked to strangers, complimenting their clothes or hairstyle, she told me she wanted to “bring back kindness”.  She couldn’t live without music, always with a Bluetooth speaker glued to her side, carrying a hula hoop, wearing whatever struck her fancy as outrageous as it might be - or whatever she was able to scrounge from her hamper that wasn’t completely covered in animal hair.
   The police and prison guards embraced her.  Finding her somewhere she wasn’t allowed to be, the police would roll up in their patrol car and gently chide her, saying Nicole, you know you can’t be here.  On hearing she was on her way back to jail, the guards held a lunch tray for her, concerned she might be hungry when she arrived.  She was always agreeable and polite, never failing to warn the officers searching her bag to be careful.  There were syringes and she had hepatitis she would alert them.
   She asked my husband to find her a big stick, one she could sand smooth and paint, to use as a walking stick, fancying herself a modern-day hobo.  Children liked her, confusing her with one of their own.  Asked to picture red, she wouldn’t envision an apple, she’d conjure a scent, what she felt red smelled like.  Asked to picture a year, she wouldn’t see a calendar.  She’d visualize an oval, each segment of the “egg”, as she referred to it, being of unequal shape.  The size of each segment being determined by how long each month felt to her.  The months could vary year to year, but always, June was the longest, always the largest segment of the “egg”.
   She believed she was a star seed, not of this earth.  At times, she even convinced me this was so.  She exuded a warmth and freedom that belied the turmoil bubbling below the surface.
   That Thanksgiving in question, she behaved amazingly well.  Engaged with everyone, my fears of our crispy roasted bird being chucked on the floor in a fit of rage unfounded.  What I didn’t know until later was that she’d shot up on the way to our house, was in a comfortable state, at least for a bit.  Shortly after we’d eaten, she was getting fidgety, buried in her phone, anxious to get a ride to her dad’s, working to score her next fix.
   I was happy she’d been there, one of the few holidays she’d spent with us in years, generally being in jail or prison or otherwise lost in the wind.  My husband commented later about how pleasant she’d been.
   “She was high,” I said, “she shot up right before she got dropped off.”
   In later years, this Thanksgiving memory sometimes came up as we struggled with what to do with Nel, how to keep her safe, but also comfortable.  We had no idea what it felt like to be her, what turmoil she struggled with daily, trying to stay clean but spending each day doing so in misery.
   “Is there a way we could allow her what she needs, while not too much,” my husband pondered.  “Set her up somewhere to live peacefully, safe, but not at risk of overdosing.”
   “No way, absolutely not.”  I’d had a similar reaction when he’d contemplated giving her clean syringes.  He’s a type 1 diabetic, syringes plentiful at our house.  Over time, I changed my perspective on this idea of clean needles, but never did he supply them to her.  Besides, it was too late at that point, she already had hepatitis.  Even as early as it was with her hepatitis, she was already challenged with problems, liver enzymes skyrocketing at times, things we wouldn’t have expected until much later in the progression of the disease.
   Neither of us was in favor of, nor condoning, her ongoing heroin use.  We were trying to fix what was out of our control with no DIY manual to refer to.  Struggling to repair a bleeding wound with bits of tape and string, threats and bargains and an occasional sprinkle of glittery hope.  We wanted Nel to take away Nel’s pain and most of all, we wanted her to live.
   We failed.  We never found a magic cure and I’m still spending my days trying to fill that hole.  

​

Kim McVicker is a life-long resident of Iowa but has no cows, chickens nor any farming experience.  She worked for decades in the financial services industry, which is as dull as it sounds.  Mother of one, now gone, she finds solace in writing about her experiences with her daughter, even the ugly memories.  When not reading, writing, or listening to NPR, she enjoys letting her granddaughters squish mud, fingerpaint and otherwise make whatever messes bring them joy.  Her other pieces have been published in a folder labeled Writing on her desktop as well as in HerStry and forthcoming in BackChannels and Pithead Chapel.  She lives in Des Moines, IA with her delightful, patient and mess-hating husband David.

---