After losing parents to overdoses, three children confront an American epidemic
Orphaned by opium
THE midmorning sun came in through the curtains, and Zaine Pulliam awoke to the debris of a weekend party. There were blankets strewn across the floor and halffinished plates of food on the couch. Zaine, 17, picked his way around a sleeping teenager and walked into the kitchen, where his grandmother was already drinking coffee. “Look at you,” she said. “Long night?”
Madie Clark had allowed her three grandchildren to host a sleepover for friends the night before, and it had begun with pizza, Sunkist and board games. But eventually she had gone to bed, and now she could see a few beer cans and nicotine vaporisers scattered around the house. On the other side of the wall, in the bathroom, it sounded like a teenager was throwing up.
“You were being good last night, right?” she asked Zaine. “Nobody was driving? Nobody was acting stupid?”
“Of course not,” he said. “We were fine. Everything was fine.”
She looked at him and rolled her eyes. “Yeah, OK, Bubby,” she said. “I trust you. But you’re walking right up to that line.”
Nearly everyone in Zaine’s life had been anxiously monitoring that line for the past year and a half, ever since both of his parents died of heroin overdoses in April 2015. His parents had become two of the record 33,091 people to die of opioid overdoses that year in a national crisis that has been worst of all in rural West Virginia, where health officials estimate that overdose rates are now eight to 10 times higher than the national average. Middle-aged white men in this part of the country have lost a full year of life expectancy during the past two decades. Middle-aged white women have lost more than two years. The opiate epidemic has essentially wiped out an entire generation of health advances, and now West Virginia has begun to focus more of its resources on prevention and preservation among the next generation entering into the void.
These children are sometimes referred to by health officials here as opiate orphans, and three of the most recent ones live in a small house in South Charleston: Zoie, 10, who believed that her parents had died in their sleep; Arianna, 13, who was just starting to wear her mother’s old makeup; and Zaine, 17, who had been the one to discover his parents that morning on their bedroom floor, and whose grades had begun to drop ever since.
Now Zaine started to clean up the house, carrying plates from the living room into the kitchen. Every wall was decorated with pictures of his parents, Austin and Amanda. They had started dating during their freshman year of high school and stayed together for nearly 20 years, spending most of that time in this house. Their clothes were in the closet, and their old fish tank was still in the living room. Zaine dumped some fish food into the tank, and his grandmother tapped her hand against the glass to make sure a fish was alive. “Wake up, buddy,” she said.
Madie, 53, had retired from her maintenance job at the public schools and moved into the house to help take care of the children after the overdoses. “Mah-maw,” they called her, and she told salty jokes, cooked their breakfast and slept in Zoie’s bedroom when the girl had nightmares.
But, on some nights, it was Madie who couldn’t sleep, when neither her doctor-prescribed antidepressants nor her occasional swallows of Fireball whiskey could quiet her grief or her rising anxiety. She had once struggled with addiction herself before getting clean. She had raised a daughter who had become an addict. Now she was responsible for three more children in a place where that same disease had officially been classified as a “widespread, progressive and fatal epidemic”.
“What’s to keep these kids from getting over on me?” she sometimes wondered. “How do I know they won’t go the wrong way?”
Now one of Zaine’s friends was calling his phone. He answered and spoke in a whisper. He hugged Madie, told her he loved her and then said he needed to go. “Go where?” she asked. “I’ll be back,” he said. He started walking towards the door and grabbed her car keys.
“Don’t you take my car,” she said.
“Love you,” he said, as he got into her car. “When will you be back?” “So many questions,” he said, and then he smiled and waved to her as he drove away.
‘The place that saved my life’
The most pressing question of all in the days after the overdoses was one that so many people here had begun to ask: What would happen to the kids? How could a generation of children in West Virginia overcome two decades of decay and despair?
The Kanawha Family Court, which lately had dealt with addiction and its impacts in about 80 percent of its cases, had begun considering some of the options available to the Pulliam children soon after the death of their parents. There was a great-aunt with whom the children had sometimes stayed during the summer, but she was already letting a few recovering addicts live in her basement. There was a grandfather in Georgia who thought he could help, so the court had sent the children to go for a trial visit, but they had gotten homesick and returned within the week.
So eventually it was decided that the best place for the Pulliams was where they had always been: in West Virginia, where overdoses were continuing to rise; and in Kanawha County, which had more overdoses than anywhere else in the state; and in a three-bedroom house where two of those overdoses had happened in the back room. Madie had moved into her daughter’s old bed. The Pulliam children’s other grandmother had become their legal guardian, paying their bills and inviting Zaine to live with her during the school week.
Theirs was a big, loyal family that had persevered for five generations in West Virginia. Seemingly every relative wanted to help, and each had a different idea of what the children might need. Maybe more toys and video games to provide distraction. Maybe occasional drug tests for Zaine to make sure he stayed clean. Maybe a strict 11pm curfew. Maybe therapy and counselling. Maybe more hugs and constant affection. Maybe weekend hunting trips. Maybe a military-style boarding academy across the state. Maybe helping to spread information about the danger of addiction, and so now one of Zaine’s relatives was pulling up to the house and telling him to get dressed.
“I want you to see the place that saved my life,” said Scott Hudson. He was taking Zaine to a weekly meeting of about 100 addicts at a rehab facility in Huntington, an hour down the highway. “These guys have stories you should hear, and they should hear from you, too,” Scott said.
“That’s good if somehow I can help them, but it’s not like I need to be scared straight,” Zaine said. “I’ve already seen what happens. I would never put a needle in my arm.”
“I know, buddy,” Scott said. “That’s exactly what I said. That’s what everyone says.”
They drove to Huntington down a winding road known to some locals as the heroin highway, passing chemical plants and coal towns where opioid pain pills had first become popular as a salve for workers enduring long days in the mines. But, during the past decade alone, 65,000 of those mining jobs had disappeared, and now there was so much more poverty, pain and hopelessness to chase away. Drug companies had bom-