treat, even with MAT. In an ideal world, Joey would have gone from Vivitrol, which lasts about a month, directly to rehab, with the shot providing a bridge to fight her cravings, Cheri said.
Jamie worried, too, telling Joey’s dad, “I don’t know what makes her think she can do it now when she couldn’t do it before. We’re just doing the same old thing here.” Her dad pointed out that Joey had never had much tolerance for pain. “She felt she couldn’t get off anything unless she was on something else, but that’s what a lot of drug addicts do; it’s the addictive personality,” Danny Gilbert said. “I think it’s asinine to tell a drug addict you’ve got to be clean before you can come to my facility.” (In the treatment center’s defense, it couldn’t afford to have medical staff on hand to supervise detox and/or medications, Jamie said.)
Joey had two halves of a Suboxone pill left. She was trying to stretch them out, self-weaning in preparation for rehab. The next day, Danny Gilbert was traveling in northern Virginia with his wife when he took a frantic call from Joey. She and her boyfriend had had another fight, and she felt her resolve slipping.
“Daddy, I don’t want to die!” she told him. They argued on the phone.
A few hours later, she texted her father:
I just left goodwill, can you please transfer $4 so I can get a pack of cigarettes please?
Eight minutes later he texted Joey back:
Say what you want but everyone loves you…we want you back!!!! Get Cigarettes but get your life back, not more BS.
The next morning, Cheri phoned Jamie but had a hard time choking out the news: Joey had lain inside a Roanoke County house for almost eight hours before 911 was called. Police were investigating, but the so-called friends she was using with had cleaned up the scene, fearing prosecution, after Joey passed out. She died of an overdose of illicit methadone on March 26, 2017, the nineteenth lethal overdose in the Roanoke County suburbs so far that year. She was twenty-seven years old.
“She fought hard against the demon of addiction and God has delivered her to a place of unconditional love, laughter and no more pain,” her mother wrote in her obituary. “Watch over us, Jo, and smile down on us until we can hold you in our arms again.”
*
Two days later, the moms of the Hidden Valley fraternity of users—only a few of their sons and daughters now among the living—took their seats among the memorial service pews. Patricia wept, marveling at how much the Gilbert family loved their troubled daughter. Even with all the sorrow she’d caused them, they had tried so hard to keep her safe.
“I was thinking to myself, ‘If this was Tess, how would you feel right now, family?’” She firmly believed that Tess still had the potential to recover, to become a loving mother to her son. Patricia was still showing her grandson family pictures, coaching him to say “Mama” when she pointed to Tess. But new custody issues were emerging that Patricia kept secret from Tess—and she knew that Tess could die before they were resolved. She had already chosen the spot where she would sprinkle her daughter’s ashes if it came to that: at a confluence of the Cape Fear River and the ocean where they had loved walking the dogs and searching for sand dollars, not far from the family’s old beach house.
*
Six weeks later, Patricia intercepted a Facebook message between a Las Vegas drug dealer and Tess, now communicating through her rehab roommate’s phone.
She was still at the facility the next day, when Patricia fired off a letter expressing her disappointment to her daughter. “If she fails, she is on her own,” she told me.
It was Mother’s Day 2017. Tess wished Patricia a happy one, via text. “I love you,” Tess wrote. “But this [is] bullshit all of it,” especially being away from her son.
“I’m going to [find] a way home,” she said.
She signed the text to her mother ominously, using her street name: Sweet T.
United States Penitentiary, Hazelton, Bruceton Mills, West Virginia
Chapter Twelve
“Brother, Wrong or Right”
In The Odyssey, Homer described a drug that would “lull all pain and anger and bring forgetfulness of every sorrow.” A Victorian poet said taking opium felt as if his soul was “being rubbed down with silk.”
In Virginia’s coalfields, a long-addicted OxyContin user spoke in hyperbolic terms about the first time she crossed paths with the molecule, back