The first: Mario put the pill in his mouth and the coating turned to jelly. He rubbed it off on his white shirt. Forever we’d be walking around with streaks of Easter-pale on our shirts, baby pink, orange, green. There is something so childlike about this life, ours.

Mario toyed with the pill. He shaved it down—took a hose clamp he’d stolen from an auto store, used it like a cheese grater. The Oxy turned to dust. Mario racked up a line. I knew how to sniff—not that different from the coke, I figured—but this was different, different texture, different taste in the back of my throat. Mario told me not to tilt my head back. And then: I turned to dust. I turned to sitting by the ocean wrapped in towels or sinking into cotton candy clouds, or warm rain washing clean, or holding Mario’s hand, soft and slippery, maybe velvet, maybe maple syrup. No, a guest bathroom. Let me explain.

A memory: Hurricane Andrew, 1992. We crouched into the only room with no windows, the hallway guest bathroom. I don’t think I’d ever been confined in a space so small with my parents. This was before my father’s drinking had gotten as bad as it did, before my mother had lost layers of herself until she was emotionally weightless, onionskin.

Back then there was something like TV love still. Back then there was me, small and shaking each time I heard a crash, a Category 5 wind whip to crush a car beneath a palm, to blow a roof into the night, send a balcony rail sailing. But I wasn’t afraid. Mom smelled like soap, like clean. A candle flickered on the bathroom sink; we’d lost power already. She wore a black nightgown with red flowers, and I thought her the very definition of beauty, womanhood, future me, the person emulated in every game of dress-up.

Dad stoic, patting me on the back. I was so used to seeing him in scrubs or a suit, and plaid pajama pants felt like a sign I’d crossed into a more intimate space, that we’d be a closer family that night. The bathtub was stopped up and filled with water that sparkled in the candlelight. I could see us reflected when I looked up at the bathroom mirror, and I wondered what others saw when they looked at my family. We looked close.

At one point the wind picked up outside and we heard the loud snap of a branch and my parents both hugged me, together. Heroin would take me there. Heroin would be the only time traveler I’d meet in this life. So safe in that warm bubble, that eye of the storm. Everything raging outside, and me, warm and embraced. What does it say about a person when she doesn’t want one of the deadliest hurricanes in Florida history to end?