The Nature of Disappearing

by Kimi Cunningham Grant

Miraculously, they make it to the truck. She drives him back through the curves and dips of Route 15, to a clinic in Silver City. They helicopter him to the nearest hospital, where a surgeon pieces Tyler’s leg back together with titanium plates and screws. No infection, another miracle. The surgeon assures her she has saved his life. She doesn’t know then, nine months into her relationship with Tyler, that he started on painkillers when he was sixteen, a “gift” from a buddy, at the time just another fix for him. She doesn’t know that he overdosed at seventeen, was in rehab at eighteen, then also at twenty, and at twenty-one. That oxycodone has always been his drug of choice. That there, deep in the Gila Wilderness, she has reignited the addiction that held him in its claws for years before she met him.