by Lyz Mancini
The man was nodding out, one unlaced sneaker caught at an angle on the frame of a beat-up Chevy Camry, its door pushed wide on its hinges like a starving mouth. His eyes widened as he suddenly pitched forward, clutching a shabby blue worker’s hat to his head, before his movements slowed again. His eyelids lowered like automatic blinds in the parking lot of Home Depot.
I held my breath as I stared at him from the driver’s seat of my own vehicle, having already purchased the gardening shears and rubber bands I’d come for. Breath caught in my throat, and I counted heartbeats as I stared to see if he was moving. His head bobbed as if in still water, his eyes cast downward. Maybe he was scrolling on his phone, caught in the moment by an urgent text. But I didn’t think so. I’d gotten pretty good at knowing when someone was high.
My mouth caught open, on the precipice of calling out to him. Are you okay? No. Excuse me, sir, are you okay? I could approach him, but what if he lashed out? What if an employee saw and made him leave, driving out into heavy traffic in this condition? What if he was fine?
I waited three minutes, maybe five. His head was bobbing. He was okay. Alive. It wasn’t my business. I would go home.
I stared at his car for a few moments—unclear bumper stickers, a rusted tailpipe. He looked young but could have been forty; it’s so hard to tell. I drove the fifteen minutes back to my house in silence, dozens of thoughts racing past me, my hands slick on the wheel.
When my husband came home soon after me, I was busy cutting up T-shirts to dye them that weekend with flowers from our forest—a lighthearted yet involved hobby my therapist insisted I take up so I could stop fearing everyone’s death. It was going well. I couldn’t stop thinking of the man in the Home Depot parking lot. I told my husband, my voice cracking as I wielded the scissors.
“I think I’m going to go back,” I said. I put down the scissors. My stomach growled. My husband had picked up dinner.
“Really?”
“Yeah. I think . . . yeah. I’m just going to go back and see if he’s okay.”
Does the word “okay” just mean “not dead?” I wondered.
“Is this because . . .,” my husband asked.
“Yes, of course.”
“Do you want me to . . .”
“Nope.”
I grabbed my keys, a small Ziploc bag that held two doses of Narcan I kept in my dresser and headed back out.
Eight months ago, days before Christmas, my little sister died. It wasn’t an overdose exactly but cardiac arrest brought on by a heart condition connected to a long history of opiate abuse. She also had opiates in her system. She’d been left alone in a dark room for too long, ignored by someone she possibly thought cared about her. I wouldn’t know. He’s never apologized. But it was one of many overdoses, some in rooms and some in cars. Some floating in a thick fog because I never learned the details.
Two weeks prior to the man in the Home Depot parking lot, my other little sister overdosed and survived. She was given Narcan or “naloxone,” a medication given nasally that can reverse an overdose, sent to the hospital, and then sent straight home afterward. The National Institute on Drug Abuse puts the annual overdose fatality rate at 106,000. That doesn’t count the almosts. That doesn’t count the gasps of breath that might happen in the driver’s seat sitting in the parking lot of Home Depot.
I prayed the car would be gone when I drove back into the same spot I inhabited an hour ago, but it was still there, one of few in the lot as the summer sun set. Same stickers, same rust, same place. This time, the door was closed and it appeared empty. Okay, I thought. He’s fine. He’s shopping. I held the bag of Narcan in my hand, turning it over and over. They had been given out at one of my Nar-Anon meetings, a twelve-step group for friends and families of addicts. You’re addicted to the addict was the common refrain. I was working on my own recovery. How is that going? I wondered as I left my car, the sky a breathtaking swirl of setting pastels, to find the man inside the store.
What if I was meant to be here? I wondered. What if I was meant to see him, truly see him, and do this? I never go to Home Depot, definitely not on a Wednesday evening of all times. I’ve never had a hobby. This is my only hobby, and the only time I’ve gone to Home Depot on a on a weeknight, and all because my therapist told me to. Because she knows what my brain does, how it spirals outward into forever, into all of the what-ifs. What if I’m meant to save this man, only me? What if I save this man and in some parallel dimension or reality, I saved my sister too? Maybe she could see me and know, she would know, that I wished I’d been in that room. That I would have held her and told her how much I loved her and how I wasn’t mad, didn’t blame her, and I would save her if I could.
My hands were shaking as I paced the aisles. Would I recognize the slump of his back? Would he be passed out on a pile of white pine? Too many times I’d watched a sister nod out at a dinner table, restaurant, or bathroom stall. Was she high or just wearing too much mascara? Was she leaving the house so late for a cigarette or a fix? The micromanaging, the inability to let go, is the hardest part. Especially because now I knew the other side—what it felt like to lose her. He had family, friends probably, people who would cry when they learned he overdosed in a Home Depot. Had they visited him in rehab? Did their bodies tense every time their phone rang with an unknown number? Did they live every moment for the future, holding their breath, their youth speeding by, gritting their teeth hoping that he would be okay?
Does okay just mean not dead?
People who knew him ten years ago would post about him. There would be a funeral. It would be hell for a long time. But not if I found him. Not if I helped.
There he was, I was pretty sure, bent over, looking at the lightbulbs. The shabby hat, the movements as if through water. There were so many lightbulbs. He was thin, his skin sallow. Faded tattoos. Yes, that was him.
I texted a friend. Want to know this truly unhinged thing I’m doing right now? I played it off like it was quirky, but I was sobbing. The tears streamed down my face as I avoided glances.
I walked up and down every aisle as he did, poking his fingers into the screws and past the bathtubs, the mulch. He seemed pretty together, actually. Upright, engaged. Maybe he was fine, maybe I’d imagined all of it. Maybe he’d shot up or smoked something and this was the jolt, the energy, the mania. Maybe he would die someday from his vice but not today, not in Home Depot while a strange woman stalked him.
You’re a psycho, you’re unwell, go home, I told myself. Go eat dinner, make a note to tell this story in therapy next week.
I bought nothing this time and went back outside to my car. I started it. A podcast began to blast, people laughing. I shut it off. I kept the AC running. I could see his car in my side-view mirror. I would just wait until he made it out okay. I needed to see him get into the car. I just needed that.
The man in the hat with the bad posture and lightbulbs rolled his cart out after twenty-two minutes. I stared at him while he ambled over past the car and to a truck behind it. My heart sank. It wasn’t him. Every man with rough hands and an old car had that kind of hat.
Are you okay? my husband texted. Please be careful.
Where was the guy? He’d seemed too big to crawl up and go to sleep in the back, but maybe? Maybe if I just casually walked by and peered in . . .
An employee rolled a stack of carts past me, shooting me an inquisitive look. How many people killed time in this parking lot? People with secrets or those less than eager to return home. Which was I? I was a stalker. A stalker who had lost her subject.
I ground my palms against the wheel, unsure what to do next. Did I wait? Did I approach the car, demand to know who it belonged to? Where was the line where concerned citizen turned to crazy person?
One of the hardest realities twelve-step programs attempt to teach you is that you can’t control your loved one. You can show them support and compassion, but you can’t force them to get clean. You just can’t. Everything has been said, every action has been done. It’s up to them. But what about moments like these, strangers who can step in and help them live just one more day? Like the story of the dying clam being thrown back into the water. Or was it a starfish? It would matter to just this one.
Eventually the sun set and my tears were all gone. The car was still there, but so were lots of cars. He could work there, for Christ’s sake. I could have imagined the whole thing. It was time to go home.
My husband held my hand while I ate our dinner, as I cried through episodes of something flippant. Was he okay? Was she not okay? Because she was dead? Or did she feel peace now finally, after decades of torture? For whatever reason, why were some people’s journeys to get clean, and some weren’t? What about my other sister? Would she be okay?
The next morning, I got in my car again. I had errands but also a purpose. It will be the last time, I promised. I drove to Home Depot. The car was gone.
I didn’t feel anything as I stared at his empty spot. He could have gone home. He could have been found dead and his family picked up his car. He could be passed out in the bushes somewhere and maybe somebody had it towed. We have to live with not knowing things sometimes. We also have to live with how excruciating that can feel.
There were probably a lot of strangers who helped my sister in small ways. Bits of cash, a clean bed, a watchful eye. There were also a lot of people who hurt her. I hoped she could feel the love and the worry, that wherever she was now, she was fully herself. Not a melancholy husk in a car with her eyes slowly closing, not a figment of my fear. I hoped she was free.
I left the parking lot of Home Depot and let out a breath I had been holding since she took her last. I had to buy groceries, go to the gym, go to work, and go to bed. I had to get up and do it again and again and again. I couldn’t live in this parking lot forever, hoping to save someone. There was just no other choice.