That hateful September, and it was not yet a year since she began shooting heroin. She called me from the emergency room. “I’m okay,” she said, “but I have to stay here. I have a blood clot in my arm.” I rushed there. At this point there had been three detoxs in the past months and now this.

The night I first found out, about the heroin, her friends had told me; it was February, and I drove to that house where I was told I might find her. I got her to come outside and I broke down in the street, screaming and crying and begging her: “Please come home and let me hold you one last time.” I had just found out and I knew I’d lose her. She came home and we had an intervention in the living room. Her beloved Frankie was there, her girlfriend, Kelly, and my husband and me, but it was more like a wake, even with her sitting there. I couldn’t believe what I said to Frankie! I said, “Thank you for loving her.” I didn’t mean thank you for caring enough about her to be sitting here devastated with me. I meant, thank you for loving her for the last seven years…as if she were dead.

We were all sitting there crying when I got the most bizarre thought: I would set a date and then make phone calls and send out invitations to everyone who knew and cared about Maria. I’d have everyone over and light lots of candles. We would form a circle of love around her and pray for her, talk to her…and beat the shit out of her if necessary. She was sitting with Kelly. I sat between my husband and Frankie on another couch. I asked her to show me her arm and she finally rolled up her left sleeve. When I saw the black and blue from puncturing the veins my heart slipped out and left through the window.

I got her to the family doctor the next day and he gave her some medication to help her sleep and detox at home. He said she would have a rough three days. That first night she slept at Frankie’s and he kept watch over her all night. The second night she stayed in her own bed. I sat by her all night crying…watching her slip in and out of sleep; watching her slip away. She was so cold she had tremors. I thought of Kim Novak in The Man with the Golden Arm. No matter what I did we couldn’t get her warm. I cried and kept saying, “Mommy’s right here.” At one point she whispered, “Do you want to get candy?” She was incoherent. I asked, “What?” She said, “Let’s go!” I asked, “Where?” She said, “To the concession stand!” Then she muttered, “Get him to put in a pool.” When you see your own child like that you just can’t believe she brought all this on by herself. Somehow this was all my fault. I failed her somehow. I had to be the one who did this.

But it was September now and she spent six nights in the hospital with a blood clot from injecting herself. They gave her some methadone. They told her she had damaged her heart and this had to stop. The night they released her I was waiting for her call so I could pick her up, but she never called; someone else had picked her up. I waited all night to hear from her; waited all night to give her the medication she needed to thin her blood from the blood clot. She came home at six in the morning. I was done! I told her to get out because if she was going to lead the street life under my roof she had to get out.

Somehow we got through October. She’d sneak in to shower or sleep. She’d call. I’d hear from her. I wouldn’t. I barely got through the days and never made it through the nights. This was the deal: “Don’t come home until you’re ready to go to rehab; it’s your only chance.” She stole the car. We called the police. Then I came home one day to find my window box broken and the shrubs trampled. She had broken into the house and stolen what she could along with a piece of my jewelry. We called the police. I went looking for her myself and found her walking on the street. She wouldn’t get in the car but she asked me for fifty cents. She also told me she had gotten a meal one day at the soup kitchen: the same soup kitchen where my husband and I volunteered for the holidays several years before. I knew the police would pick her up and they did. We wouldn’t press any charges…just as long as she detoxed and went to rehab. The police drove her straight to the hospital, and from there she was to go to a crisis center in Yonkers and wait for a bed in rehab.

We were at the train station in Mamaroneck…all I remember was November and the train station in Mamaroneck…getting her bags out of the car and her hugging me and telling me, “I’m gonna do it this time, Mom, I really am.” I looked at all the normal carefree people waiting for the train…people with fortunate uncomplicated lives. The train station…Mamaroneck…holding her.

She did call me from the crisis center but she got kicked out immediately: she had already used as soon as she got out of the hospital: her fifth detox for the year. She was back on the street now, calling and sometimes coming home to sleep. I remembered what a counselor said to me after her first detox. She said she didn’t think the dope really had its hooks in Maria yet, and she had a really good chance of staying clean; it had its hooks in me…and I wasn’t sleeping at all.