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Rayanne’s manager at the lamp factory had said Rayanne definitely knew Robbie Fontenot. He had seen them interacting at work. To what extent that was a personal relationship or just workmates talking, he didn’t know. He said Rayanne was friendly with the male employees.Friendlyin italics. Friendly as in inappropriate. Friendly as in drumming up customers for her night job.
That reminded Annie of the condoms in Robbie Fontenot’s nightstand, and she cringed a bit at the thought.
She pulled into the driveway behind Rayanne’s piece-of-shit, falling-apart red Chevy Malibu, which looked like a homeless person was living in it. She glanced in the windows on her way to thehouse. The car was full of garbage and cast-off clothes. The front passenger window was broken and repaired with duct tape. The side mirror had come off. At least no one would bother stealing it, Annie thought.
She climbed the stairs to the tiny front porch and knocked on the door. No one came. At midday, there was no guarantee Rayanne was even up. She had no job to go to. B’Lynn had seen a visitor leaving her house at one-something in the morning. There was a good chance she’d spent the night getting high in celebration of not spending the night in jail.
She knocked again and looked around while she waited. Kitty-corner across the street, a heavyset elderly Black man was sitting on his porch in his dingy undershirt drinking a beer, his white hair standing straight up on his head like vintage Don King.
“Damn it, Rayanne,” Annie muttered, knocking a third time.
Losing patience, she pulled the warped old screen door open and tried the interior door. It wasn’t locked.
“Rayanne?” she called, cracking the door open. “It’s Annie Broussard. Are you home?”
The silence that answered her raised the hair on the back of her neck. There she was again, walking into who-knew-what. Her heart beat a little faster.
“Rayanne?” she called again as she went into the house.
The front room looked the same as it had the day before. The smell was as bad as or worse than the day before, having added notes of weed smoke over the amalgam of cigarettes, rodent, and sour garbage.
Cockroaches scattered in all directions as she passed the filthy kitchen. Annie’s skin crawled. How people lived like this never failed to amaze her.
“Rayanne?”
The termdead silencekept playing through her mind, over and over. Her heart beat a little harder.
“No, no, no,” she muttered as she made her way down the hall,that sense of foreboding rising like a tide inside her. “Rayanne? Shit!”
The girl lay on the floor of the bedroom, half tangled in a bedsheet, still wearing her faded red Fuck Your Feelings T-shirt, naked from the waist down.
“Shit!”
Annie dropped to the floor beside the body and felt for a pulse. It was weak and thready, hard to feel with trembling fingers. She was barely breathing. Annie lifted an eyelid to see the pupil constricted to a pinpoint.
“Rayanne!” she shouted, shaking the unconscious girl. No response. She rubbed her knuckles hard against the girl’s sternum. Still no response. “Rayanne, wake up!”
Her body was limp and cold as Annie rolled her onto her side. She had vomited at some point, a trail of puke already crusting at one corner of her mouth and down her chin.
“Don’t you die on me!” Annie yelled, scrambling to her feet.
She fumbled with her phone as she ran down the hall and out the front door, dialing 911.
“This is Detective Broussard with the sheriff’s office,” she said breathlessly, running to her vehicle. “I need an ambulance ASAP at 2-1-7 Opelousas in Bayou Breaux for a probable opioid overdose. Subject is unconscious with a weak pulse and shallow breathing.”
She yanked open the passenger-side door and popped the glove compartment, raking through the contents, scrambling to find the blister pack containing the Narcan plunger. Two tumbled out onto the floor. She grabbed them both and ran back to the house.
“Don’t you die on me, Rayanne!” she shouted again, ripping the package open.
She dropped to her knees beside the girl and rolled her onto her back again, noting that Rayanne’s lips had taken on a slight blue tint as the drug she’d taken suppressed her instinct to keep breathing. Annie tilted her head back, shoved the nozzle of the spray container up one nostril, and depressed the plunger.
This was the part where in the movies the overdosed person always came instantly awake, sat bolt upright, and started talking as if they hadn’t been seconds from death. Rayanne Tillis did not sit bolt upright. She did not open her eyes. She did not suddenly take in a gasping gulp of oxygen.
Annie turned her onto her side and shoved some of the rumpled bedsheet up under her head, her own heart going a hundred miles an hour as she watched for the Narcan to kick in. Two to five minutes, the manufacturer claimed. Two minutes seemed like an eternity.
“Come on, Rayanne, you gotta wake up for me.”
She stuck two fingers into the girl’s mouth to clear away anything that might obstruct her airway, then used an edge of the sheet to try to wipe away the crusty remains of vomit from Rayanne’s lips. She turned her onto her back again to begin mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, managing a dozen or so breaths before pulling away and gagging on the taste of vomit.
