The story ended, as I remember it, with the cops pulling you naked from the bushes. It was Florida and so, I imagine, warm, even humid. But also, Florida, and so crawling with lizards and bugs, covered in grass so coarse I wouldn’t sit on it fully clothed, grass that makes me itch just to look at it.

The road was long and straight and lined with fallow fields, all of it now masked in white. I’d thought your Jeep, in four-wheel, could handle a little off-roading. I hadn’t counted on the ditch, dug for drainage or irrigation, and now no amount of pushing could move us. We’d tried the old trick with the floormats. We’d tried to dig ourselves out with your skis. It hadn’t worked, except to sober us up.

What I can offer of your truth is patchy. I don’t know, for instance, if this was rock bottom or whether things got even worse from here. I do know that it was around this time, maybe because of those bushes, that you lost custody of your children, the two you had already given birth to, not the four you had yet to conceive.

We met playing soccer sometime in middle school, but we weren’t friends until 9th grade, weren’t inseparable until 10th. If we were the cool kids in the years that followed, we never knew it, even if the girls swooned over you, Homecoming King, Duke of the Snowball Dance. You were handsome and modest and ambitionless. Everyone liked you. Even your ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend, the dreaded Steve, didn’t want to kick your ass for long.

I know that your father was riding on horseback when a tree branch entered his brain through his eye, killing him instantaneously. I know that he was buried on that mountain, his version of events along with him. I know that you were still in diapers and that, some say, your mother moved on before the dirt had settled on his grave. I know she later became pious, scattering icons throughout your Clearwater home.

Your allure, I think, began with your unplaceable face. Brazilian maybe? Filipino? In fact your father had the Dutchest last name I’ve ever heard—it meant “Old Windmill”—but your mother had been adopted sometime after the Korean War, under whatever duress. As far as I could tell, she didn’t care to remember, and it wasn’t something you discussed. If you, as we didn’t then say, were a person of color, I would never have known it. Your difference wasn’t voiced. And it didn’t seem to register. Or else you actively suppressed it. I remember well enough the Vietnamese kid who suffered through years of mangled pronunciations and the giggles they evoked. He later changed his name to Tyler.

I know that you never had a chance, and that chance was all you had. The chance that this or that man wouldn’t fuck you over, wouldn’t abandon you as you had been practically at birth. The chance that your father, looking out from a picture frame, might not have judged too harshly the choices you made, the choices forced upon you. I know that throughout your childhood you were treated like a porcelain doll. From a distance, you seem to have shattered like one.

Your father, a large, passive man who looked a little like Jerry Garcia, worked third shift at the chemical plant and so slept during the day. We had to be quiet when he was home and were sometimes scolded when we weren’t. Your mother, two feet shorter than your father, was a loan officer. I rarely saw her. Your sister, a few years younger than us, likewise made herself scarce until one day, at seventeen, she came home pregnant.

What I don’t know is whether you see these facts as causes, whether you understand your life as effect. Because I only knew you as a child, because I only know you now as a rumor, I guess at what I’ve heard. At your guilt, and at mine.

Small town Michigan in the mid-nineties: FM radio and big budget movies. Nirvana provided the hardest edges to our lives, but we preferred Pink Floyd and their guitarist, David Gilmour, whose live solos on “Comfortably Numb” were, for us, something like the height of achievement. We smoked our share of pot, usually acquired by our wealthy friend Ryan, who kept his supply buried in the woods behind his family’s McMansion. He never showed us where.

In the single photo of us I’m able to find, I’m standing stiffly in the center of the frame, staring straight at the camera with my left arm mechanically positioned around your shoulder. Your right arm curves around my waist, and your body leans into mine. I’m not quite twenty-two. You’re maybe eighteen. It’s night and the lights around the fountain burn squiggly marks into the negative. Dark palms loom behind us. Your hair is red and long and curly, and you’re about a head shorter, just over five feet. Your black tank top slings low, and your shoulders are covered with an unzipped hoody. You’re smiling brightly, your head inclined toward my shoulder.

We were Ryan’s good friends, his father told us, sitting us down in the living room, which is why he had called us there, without Ryan’s knowledge, in the hope that we might exert some influence over a life that was, from his parents’ perspective, spiraling out of control. It was only the typical disaffection, mingled with an apathy we shared without showing it. We didn’t think Ryan had a drug problem, we said, but we also had no idea how his father might get through to him. We weren’t exactly reachable ourselves.

What I’ve heard is that your mother and stepfather, not long after they took custody of your first two sons, broke off contact out of concern for their safety. You may or may not have gone to jail or rehab or a shelter at this point, but I seem to remember that the children’s father got busted for trafficking, as did his mother. I want to say she was a nurse, he a medical assistant, and that they stole the pills they sold. I’ve heard that your parents later adopted the boys, who were then raised as you were in that very Catholic house.

Because we lived in the long shadow of the lake, it sometimes seemed that something ancient and visceral loomed over our lives, or else lurked just beyond them: the boundary one couldn’t cross, the line that divided our navigable world from the primordial abyss into which each summer without fail some handful of children would fall, many of them our age, lost in a capsized boat or else swallowed up at the end of the pier. All roads led to the lake, but all lives ended in abstraction. What were those drowned boys to us? Their deaths were their own.

For several years after that there was nothing. Then one day I heard that you had moved to Wisconsin with the soon-to-be father of the rest of your children. We became friendly online, and I was surprised to learn, reading your rants, that you had been swept up in an insane, unquenchable anger. Your flames may have been fanned, but your life was already on fire. I’ll admit I didn’t want to understand, didn’t want to dirty my hands in your mess. In most ways, I still don’t.

A few years later, after smoking some powerful hash in Amsterdam, Ryan, a confirmed atheist, would fail to talk you back from whatever psychological ledge you were staring out from, but which would eventually open onto a Jesus we couldn’t share.

I heard, in the years that followed, that the new man turned out not to be much better than the old one, possibly abusive and chronically underemployed. No one seems to know whether you were clean in Wisconsin, or whether the man was, but the rumor mill suspects that you weren’t, that the second father’s family stepped in.

I don’t know, more than twenty years later, what we saw in each other, but I know that in time, maybe beginning in that ditch, we had seen enough of it. You would become a version of the town you would never leave. I’d become the version that fled. Every so often in the years that followed we would get together, more firmly those things the other rejected. In my thirties, your name became little more than the answer to a security question: Who was your first best friend?

I heard that after your fourth child was born, half of a fraternal pair whose sister miscarried, your spleen changed focus. Vaccines injured your child, you claimed. The medical mafia, as you called them, was only out for profit. In long posts riddled with typos you called yourself a “Warrior Mom” and changed your screen name to “Novax.” Your posts are sad, but not for the reasons you think. What I see, when I read them, is a flailing woman. What I see mostly is the flailing.

Our senior year you were benched out of spite. Our coach was maybe the first person who just didn’t like you, even if you were the best among us, capable of things with your feet that made them seem like powerful hands. It was only on the field that you could assert yourself, however. Off of it you were your father’s child, never able or willing to force or sweet talk your way back on. We hadn’t, for our part, rallied around you as we should have, hadn’t made you the centerpiece you could have been, or were.

I heard that, back in Florida, you gave birth to a fifth child, but that something went wrong, a congenital defect. I heard that you were in and out of the hospital and trying to crowdsource funds for treatment. I learn, reading your appeals now, months later, that you have not vaccinated the new child. You say this with pride as you beg for the dollars that will pay for his medicine. I know the irony is lost on you, and I think, uncharitably: how can someone be so bad at living?

The farmer greeted us with a revolver, partly hidden behind his robe. We could use his cordless, he said, and then he disappeared behind the door, leaving us to wait on his stoop. The driver, when he came, didn’t say a word. Just pulled us out with his wrecker and handed me the bill. How much of his job, I wonder now, was pulling drunks from ditches in the middle of the night.

Throughout the years I haven’t seen you, I’ve heard about your evictions. About your near-constant appeals for money. I’ve heard that your mother has warned everyone against giving any. Because she believes, I’ve also heard, that her only child is a lost cause, a bottomless hole that neither care nor money can fill.

One winter night a couple years later two sisters wrapped their car around a tree. Back in middle school, the younger one and I had kissed each other sloppy in the halls and been asked by a teacher to stop. I didn’t see much of her after that year, but her death brought back the night I was so certain we’d have sex that I was caught stealing condoms in the Walgreen’s at the mall. We weren’t bad kids, I told the manager, my hands shaking, begging him not to call my parents. I’d happily pay. She spent that night either puking or hiding from me in the bathroom. Later, I threw the condoms away. I certainly didn’t love her, never even really knew her, but when she died I felt her extinguishment, how it wasn’t my own.

Seen at a distance, an epidemic becomes almost uselessly abstract—numbers, names, maps, deaths—but up close, it’s a missing exit, an absent door. A glass slider you slip through only to realize the house is surrounded, and that what you thought was an escape was only a reprieve.

As a small child, I was nearly swept away by the lake’s undertow. A strong swimmer retrieved my raft and dragged me ashore. I’ve since been pulled back more than once from the same abyss in different forms. Sometimes it has seemed remarkable to me that anyone survives to adulthood. Sometimes, recalling certain moments, it’s chilling that I have.

Was it a sex party, I wonder now, a porn shoot? Were you doing it for drugs, or had the children’s father, who had gotten you hooked in the first place, put you up to it? Why did you run naked into the night if not to escape from yourself, from the form your life had taken in the moments when the officers entered, scattering the group, your life as the consequences it brought?

You later found fortune of a more tangible sort: the single daughter of a man with a string of houses along the lake. You were engaged for a year, then five, six, more. You’ve still never married as far as I know, never had children. You raise expensive spaniels instead. She was valedictorian the year we graduated, but she opted against college, as you did after a couple of years. She hadn’t needed to work and, soon, neither did you.

I know I couldn’t have kept you from swallowing or snorting or shooting your first pill, but sometimes I wonder if I could have offered you an alternative to your second. I wonder if we, your father’s family, could have made another life possible for you, the kind of life we’ve been privileged, to a person, to live. Instead, it seems to me now that you were sacrificed on the altar of our small successes, and that we can’t go back in time to reclaim you. We listen, from a distance, to the reverberations.

Seen in the headlights, the snow stretched uniformly in all directions, a mat of white divided by the well-worn troughs on each side of the road, the only visible markings of any kind. I had wanted to believe the landscape was flat and continuous, that boundaries were only habits, ruts in more ways than one. Or I had wanted to be proven wrong, shown my place, the costs of straying from it. I’m not sure that’s a lesson I ever learned. You may have learned it too well.

I wonder if you will ever forgive us, your father’s family. Because the closer I look at the photo, the more it seems that you are clinging to me as though to something you had thought lost. Something briefly rediscovered that you would immediately lose once more. At what point, however, is there nothing left to recover?

We were lucky there were no trees in that field, lucky that the lakeshore was not only miles away but so frozen we couldn’t have jumped off the pier if we tried. That you and I could have become those sisters gives me pause even now, not because we’d be dead but because I’d have been responsible. I’m glad I didn’t kill us. And I’m sorry, all these years later, that I almost did.

For more information about this piece, see this issue's legend.