When she first got the Oxys—after she had Maddie, by C-section, drugs that made her teeth chatter—they told her to stay ahead of the pain. She was a child, seventeen, and maybe no one cared she was so young now that she was a mother. Maddie’s father was a rich kid, Quinn’s age, in town with family friends from Chicago for the summer; Mary had screamed and yelled at the mention of an abortion, even as she’d spent all those years saying what an awful drain having Quinn had been on her. The pills were the closest Quinn could get to breathing, sitting quiet and a little less afraid. They were expensive, though, and she’d just moved out of her mother’s house for the first time; she had a job waiting tables that gave her three weeks’ leave. Her mother was a town away but too busy to help. She came over one or two nights the months that Quinn was about to not make rent and needed to pick up an extra shift.

Eventually, Quinn put Maddie in day care and took mostly day shifts, which meant less money. Maddie was so small still, squirming, chirping, not yet rolling over. Quinn felt sad and afraid each time she passed Maddie off to the klatch of women who cared for her while Quinn worked, who offered only formulaic summaries of when Maddie napped, how many bottles she’d been fed. The day care, too, cost too much. Maddie was still waking up a few times a night, needing to be walked back and forth from the kitchen to the bed, sleeping only when she was settled in against Quinn’s skin. Quinn was exhausted, broke, and worried. A friend at work suggested heroin, because, she told her, it was the least expensive way this friend had found to get a break. This friend turned out, unsurprisingly, to be fucking the guy who sold Quinn her first hit of heroin, but by the time Quinn found that out she’d already felt the warm and quiet rush of it, and the woman hadn’t lied about how cheap it was.

Still, Quinn only ever shot up to stay steady. She was a good and present mother. She rejected the idea that one could not be lots of things at the same time. Her own mother had never touched a drug in her life, went to church on Sundays, didn’t drink or smoke. She was all those things and also—Quinn hadn’t lied to Maddie—she wasn’t very nice. She cleaned houses for rich people; she cleaned the houses of all the people who came to town in summer, who hired Quinn’s mom to stock their fridges in advance, to empty out their houses once they’d gone back to their lives.