Nairobi Dreaming - Complete!

Chapter 24: Memories and Voicemail

The message I listen to over and over again is from Kay's father. I met him once, when Kay and I graduated from teacher's college. He was a small man, less than 5 ft 6 with shoulders hunched inward in a way that made him seem even smaller. His suit was old and I could tell he was aware of it. He tugged at it constantly, tried to stand to conceal the faded patches, the missing button.

The dress Kay wore that day was expensive, a present from him.

I wondered what he had sacrificed to buy it and wondered if Kay realized he had made a trade off. She lavished attention on my parents in their effortlessly chic outfits. She stood far enough away from her father that you might wonder if they were related.

His message to me goes like this:

"I want you thank you for being Kay's friend for so long. She always spoke so highly of you and I need you to know.... She took some medication. Mixed up her medication. Took too much of it. She is gone from this world, my beautiful girl. My beautiful, laughing, wonderful girl. We found her the next day. I do not believe she is gone yet but I am calling because you should be at the funeral. And I need to thank you for being her friend and I need to ask.. Was I a bad father? Do you know what I did?"

At this point his voice totally cracks, it breaks. He sobs into the phone. Recovers himself. Mumbles the funeral details and hangs up.

The way he says "my beautiful girl" and "was I a bad father" kill me. I hear his voice soar, elevated via happy memories, some image he has of her in his mind and then crash and splinter.

I do not think for a second that she mixed up her medication. I know that for a long time he did not want to acknowledge that she was bipolar.That he deflected, that he minimized. He seemed to think that mental health challenges were for white people, not for Asians. That there was something self indulgent and shameful about admitting you were struggling emotionally.

I suspect it is drugs.

And when I start to reach out to the other people who contacted me it is confirmed. These people are a mix of acquaintances and friends from the past, a reminder of the many places in which our lives overlapped. One of them is Liz who is close with a friend of Kay's and who heard it was Fentyanl.

Abigail knows it is Fentanyl as well.

We speak on the phone for nearly an hour and I am not sure how the time passes. Her thin, strained voice feels familiar and warm even though I still associate it with all the shit she did and said. But she knew Kay. She was there the last time I saw her. Somehow that is worth something.

She was also there with Kay's father shortly after they found Kay and she held him as he cried. I have trouble imagining Abigail doing this. She seems too angular, too broken herself to act as a comforting support but this is what she says she did.

We keep saying fentanyl over and over again. Sometimes it is in the context of a sentence but sometimes one of us will just say it, unbelieving. I start to say things about the opioid crisis. I have stats that I located, that I read until I knew them by heart. But Abigail isn't interested. She does not self soothe the way I do.

She mentions that Kay's mother was unable to accompany her father, that she stayed at home, locked up in her room crying. She also mentions that Kay's older brother is missing and at first the information passes over me. I interpret his absence as some kind of reaction to his sister's death, like her mother's withdrawal but after I hang up I realize it might be the other way around. I think, was this why she needed money?

I rack my memory and realize I don't know enough about Kay's brother. He is older than her. He used to hit her a lot when they were kids, more than seemed normal for a sibling. He only dates blonde white chicks. He was a doctor. The one time I met him he seemed like a self absorbed shit-head. The kind of guy prone to saying stuff like: "That bitch is so fat" and "I can't go dancing without cocaine."