suburbs were dying from it. Now they were, and that pained him equally, he told me. “I was absolutely dead wrong.”
*
I thought of Tess Henry, the young mom I met in late 2015. The daughter of a local surgeon and a hospital nurse (they divorced when she was ten), Tess had grown up in multiple homes—one in the nicest section of Roanoke, with mountain-biking trails and the Blue Ridge Parkway abutting her backyard, the other on secluded Bald Head Island, North Carolina, accessible only via ferry.
Tess was a high school track and basketball standout, an honor-roll kid who would go on to study French at Virginia Tech and the University of North Carolina–Asheville, though she didn’t complete a degree. Among the things she loved to do before she fell into a raging, $200-a-day heroin habit were writing poetry, painting, reading, and singing to her dog, a black rescue mutt named Koda. (The two were particularly happy when Tess belted out the words to Train’s “Hey, Soul Sister” in the car.) Her favorite author in the world was David Sedaris; she’d run into him once in a local coffee shop after a reading, she told me, and he was so, soooo unbelievably nice.
Of Patricia Mehrmann’s four kids, Tess was the quietest, the one who voluntarily walked the dogs with her on the beach. Patricia emailed me a beach picture of the family Labrador, Charlie, and a ten-year-old Tess, all freckles and a toothy smile, with both arms wrapped around the dog. They liked to head out early at low tide to look for beach treasures. “She was the queen sand-dollar finder,” Patricia said.
But Tess struggled with anxiety from a young age, her relatives told me, recalling a panic attack she had as a young teenager on the way home to Roanoke from the beach. (“She thought she was dying,” Patricia remembered. “She was throwing up and calling me from the back seat of the car.”) At her private Catholic primary school, where students wore blue and khaki uniforms, Tess was stressed that her shoes weren’t right.
Tess was twenty-six when we met, a waitress-turned-heroin-addict. With a ruddy complexion and auburn hair, she wore leggings with long sweaters and liked to apply makeup cat-eye style, at the edges of her eyes, which were luminous and shifted color from brown to green depending on the light. She had consorted with most of the Hidden Valley crowd mentioned in this book, working not as a runner or mule but as a lower-level “middleman,” as she called herself. She did worse than that, too.
*
Perhaps she was genetically predisposed to addiction, her mom theorized; there were alcoholic relatives on both sides of the family. Tess’s older sister had been in recovery for five-plus years and was a devoted member of Alcoholics Anonymous. Perhaps, during Tess’s college experimentation phase, it was the twenty-five Lortab pills a friend gave her, left over from a wisdom-tooth extraction, that set her up for the ultimate fall. Tess knew only that her daily compulsion for opioids began in 2012, the same way four out of five heroin addicts come to the drugs: through prescribed opioids. For Tess, a routine visit to an urgent-care center for bronchitis ended with two thirty-day opioid prescriptions, one for cough syrup with codeine and the other for hydrocodone for sore-throat pain.
“When I ran out, I started looking for them on my own, through dealers,” first through the drug-dealing boyfriend of a fellow waitress at the restaurant where they worked, Tess said. Asked how she had known what to do, she told me she Googled it. “Because I was sick. Jittery. Diarrhea. All of it. I looked up my symptoms and what I’d been taking, and I realized, holy crap, I’m probably addicted.”
She could get anything she wanted from her dealer. In the beginning, she snorted five pills a day, usually Dilaudid, Roxicodone, Lortab, or Opana. Then, several months into the routine, almost overnight, the pill supply dried up. Tess blamed it on the DEA’s reclassification of hydrocodone-based drugs into a more restrictive category. “That made it harder for my dealer to get pills,” she said.
In October 2014, hydrocodone-based painkillers such as Vicodin and Lortab were changed from Schedule III drugs to Schedule II, the same category as OxyContin. Regulations now limited doctors to prescription intervals of thirty days or less, with no refills permitted, and patients who needed more had to visit their doctors for a new prescription, as opposed to having it automatically called in to