For two years I believed my baby sister was nothing but a pill chaser. I’m the big sister. I’m the one who was supposed to know better. And I sat right there at my own kitchen table and told our mama she was right to stop picking up the phone.

I need to tell you the whole thing, start to finish, because I still can hardly believe what I let happen to her.

Wendy is eight years younger than me. Growing up she was the dramatic one, bless her heart. A splinter was a tragedy. She’d stub her toe and be laid out on the couch all afternoon like she’d been shot. We teased her something awful. “Wendy’s dying again,” our daddy used to say, and she’d laugh right along with the rest of us. So you have to understand the picture I had stuck in my head. My little sister, always making a big show out of nothing.

I think about Thanksgiving three years back a lot now. She set the turkey platter down too hard and said her arms ached too much to carry it. I told her to quit being lazy and help your mother. She just gave me this look and rubbed her wrists and didn’t say another word. I didn’t think one thing about it. Go figure. That was the first crack and I walked right past it.

It got worse from there. She’d call and say her whole body hurt. “It’s everywhere, Carol. All the time.” I’d tell her to take a warm bath and get some rest, honey. Then came the first ER trip. Three in the morning, she drove herself, shaking so bad she could barely hold the wheel. They handed her two Tylenol and a paper to sign and sent her home before the sun was even up. I figured that was the end of it.

But it wasn’t the end of it. It kept happening. Twice in one month, then three times. Same story every time. She’d show up at three or four in the morning begging somebody to help her, and they’d send her right back out the door with nothing. One night she called me crying from the parking lot. “They wrote something in my chart and I saw it,” she said. I asked her what. “Drug-seeking.” And I’ll be honest with you, a little ugly part of me thought, well, maybe those doctors know something I don’t.

That’s the part I can’t take back. Mind you, the staff knew her by name by then. Eleven visits in two years. Eleven. When a nurse knows your sister on sight and gives a little eye roll when she walks in, you start believing the same story they’re all telling. Mom believed it first. She stopped answering Wendy’s calls altogether. “She needs to hit bottom,” Mom said to me one Sunday, plain as anything. And God help me, I nodded. I said, “You’re right, Mama.”