Nana rolled his eyes and stomped off, and my mother sighed a heavy sigh.

I was afraid of death and of pain. I was afraid of old people. When my mother came home from Mrs. Palmer’s house, I wouldn’t go near her until after she had taken a shower, washed off whatever it was I worried was clinging to her skin. When she smelled like my mother again, I would go to her, sit beside her and listen to her talk about Mrs. Palmer’s decline as though I were gathering before a campfire waiting for the woman holding a flashlight to her face to tell ghost stories.

Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there! If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me. My mother would read me the Scriptures that she had read to Mrs. Palmer, and this one in particular always stood out. To this day, it brings tears to my eyes. You are not alone, it says, and that is a comfort, not to the dying, but to those of us who are terrified of being left behind.

    Because really, it wasn’t Mrs. Palmer’s death that I was afraid of; that wasn’t the reason my mother had started trying to teach us about the sound and the relief of pain. I was scared for Nana. Scared of Nana and the death rattle that none of us wanted to acknowledge we were listening for. I have seen people who suffer from addiction and the family and friends who love them in various places and at various points in my life. I’ve seen them sitting on stoops and on park benches. I’ve been with them in the lobbies of rehab centers. And the thing that always strikes me is how there is always someone in the room who is listening for the sound, waiting for the arrival of that rasping rattle, knowing that it will come. Eventually, it will come. The Scriptures my mother read were as much for us as they were for Mrs. Palmer. My mother and I wanted blessed assurance because Nana couldn’t offer us assurances of any kind.

* * *

—

I don’t know how she did it, but my mother convinced Nana to accompany us to the First Assemblies one Sunday. He was still detoxing, too weak to protest. The three of us walked into the sanctuary, but we didn’t take our regular seats. We sat in the back with Nana at the aisle so that he could get up and head to the bathroom if he needed to. He looked better than he had in days. I knew this because I couldn’t stop looking at him.

“Jesus, Gifty,” he’d say whenever he caught me staring at him for those long stretches, drinking him in. It was like my gaze hurt him, which should have been enough to get me to leave him alone, but I couldn’t make myself look away. I felt like I was watching some major natural event—newly hatched sea turtles heading toward the lip of the ocean, bears coming out of hibernation. I was waiting for Nana to emerge, new, reborn.

In the church I grew up in, people cared about rebirth. For months on end, all across the South, all over the world, revival tents are erected. Preachers stand at pulpits promising people that they can rise from the ashes of their lives. “Revival fire fall,” I used to sing along with the choir, jubilantly asking that God raze everything to the ground. I stole glances at Nana at the end of our pew, and I thought, Surely the fire has fallen?

    “Nana?” Ryan Green said as he entered the sanctuary. He clapped Nana on the shoulder, and Nana shrank from his touch. “When are you getting back out on the court?” he asked. “I mean, it’s great to see you in church and everything, but church ain’t where we need you.” He laughed to himself.

“I’ll be back soon,” Nana said. “My ankle’s healing up.”

Ryan looked at him skeptically. “Like I said, we’re getting killed without you. Prayer ain’t helping the guys we got out there playing now. I’d be happy to help you out if there’s anything you need in order to get you back on the court.”

My mother shot Ryan a killing look. “You don’t talk to my son,” she said.

“Hey, I’m sorry, Mrs.—”

“Get away from us,” she said, so loud this time that a few people in the pew in front of us turned.

“I didn’t mean any disrespect, ma’am,” Ryan said, amused.

When he left, Nana leaned against the edge of the pew. My mother put her hand on his shoulder, and he shrugged it away.

32

    Dear God,

At church today, Bethany said her mom doesn’t want her coming over to our house after service anymore. I told Buzz, but he didn’t care.

I knew without asking that my mother expected us to keep Nana’s addiction close to the chest, and the secret ate away at me like moths in cloth. I wished for a priest, a confessional booth, but finally I just settled for my friend Bethany. The Sunday after I confessed, she told me she wasn’t allowed to play with me anymore, and suddenly, I knew: addiction was catching, shameful. I didn’t talk about Nana’s addiction again until college, when one of my lab mates asked me how I knew so much about the side effects of heroin. When I told her about Nana, she said, “This would make such a good TED Talk.” I laughed but she kept going. “Seriously, Gifty, you’re amazing. You’re like taking the pain from losing your brother and you’re turning it into this incredible research that might actually help people like him one day.” I laughed a little more, tried to shrug her off.

    If only I were so noble. If only I even felt so noble. The truth is there were times when my mother and I had been driving all over Huntsville for hours searching for Nana, times when I saw him strung out in front of the carp-filled pond at Big Spring Park when I would think, God, I wish it was cancer, not for his sake but for mine. Not because the nature of his suffering would change significantly but because the nature of my suffering would. I would have a better story than the one I had. I would have a better answer to the questions “Where’s Nana? What happened to Nana?”

Nana is the reason I began this work, but not in a wholesome, made–for–TED Talk kind of way. Instead, this science was a way for me to challenge myself, to do something truly hard, and in so doing to work through all of my misunderstandings about his addiction and all of my shame. Because I still have so much shame. I’m full to the brim with it; I’m spilling over. I can look at my data again and again. I can look at scan after scan of drug-addicted brains shot through with holes, Swiss-cheesed, atrophied, irreparable. I can watch that blue light flash through the brain of a mouse and note the behavioral changes that take place because of it, and know how many years of difficult, arduous science went into those tiny changes, and still, still, think, Why didn’t Nana stop? Why didn’t he get better for us? For me?

* * *

—

He was on a bender the day we found him sprawled out in Big Spring Park. On the grass, spread out like that, he’d looked like an offering. To whom, for what, I couldn’t say. He’d been sober for maybe a couple of weeks, but then he didn’t come home one night, and we knew. One night turned into two, turned into three. My mother and I couldn’t sleep for waiting. As the two of us drove around looking for him, I thought about how tired Nana must have been, tired of our mother washing him in the bathtub like he’d reverted to his original state, tired of all the nothing in a bad way. I don’t know who he scored from after our doctor stopped writing him prescriptions, but it must have been easy enough that day in the park because he was gone, just gone.

    My mother wanted me to help her get him in the car. She hoisted him up by the armpits and I grabbed his legs but I kept dropping them, and then I would start crying and she would yell at me.

The thing I will never forget is that people were watching us do all of this. It was the middle of a workday and there were people out in that park drinking coffee, taking their smoke breaks, and no one lifted a finger. They just watched us with some curiosity. We were three black people in distress. Nothing to see.

By the time we got Nana in the car, I was doing that snuffling non-cry cry of children who’ve been told to stop crying. I couldn’t stop crying. I was sitting in the back with Nana’s head in my lap and I was certain that he was dead, and I was too scared to tell my mother because I knew I would get in trouble for even hinting at his death, and so I just sat there, snuffling, with a dead man on my lap.

Nana wasn’t dead. We got him to the house and he woke up, but in that zombie-like way that people who got a little too high wake up. He didn’t know where he was. My mother pushed him and he stumbled backward.