Substance Use Disorder

Substance use disorder in the novel is not a single, isolated affliction: it appears in Grace McCall’s dependence on prescription medication and later substance use, and in Janae Morrison’s cocaine use and attempts to stop. Jensen Brick McCall’s early exposure to Grace’s addiction makes him wary of drugs, while his later response to Janae’s relapse shows that recognizing danger does not make another person’s recovery simple. Across these lives, substances become ways of coping with pain, but also threaten health, trust, and the possibility of a shared future.

Origins and Early Exposure

Grace’s addiction develops after her husband Rick leaves, describing her choice to raise Jensen as an embarrassment. Jensen notices her withdrawing to her room and repeatedly going to the pharmacy for prescriptions. At breakfast, she takes ten pills with a glass of wine before leaving for work. She is addicted to Vicodin and Percocet, and Jensen sometimes finds her passed out on the couch. He is only nine when he begins caring for her, bringing her tea and toast; the reversal places a child in the role of caretaker as the adult who once rescued him becomes increasingly vulnerable.

Grace eventually loses her hospital job. Her substance use also includes smoking what Jensen calls water: a cigarette dipped in embalming fluid, sometimes laced with PCP. When he asks why she smokes it, she says she wants to forget her wrongdoings. Jensen later learns that her guilt is connected to the babies she helped leave to die after botched abortions, though she had saved him. The novel thus places her addiction beside a history of moral injury and grief without presenting that history as an excuse or a cure. Jensen says Grace died of a drug overdose; the account identifies the cause of death but does not specify which substance was involved.

Janae’s Cocaine Use and the Relapse Cycle

Janae Morrison’s drug use first appears as an effort to fit in: she says she smoked marijuana with girls from school, but avoided harder drugs because she had seen what they did to people and did not want to become a zombie. She places the beginning of that pattern before she met Robert Walters. Later, after a painful call from her mother, that earlier distinction between occasional use and drugs she considered dangerous breaks down. At a Texas bus depot, Janae finds cocaine in an envelope in her purse and snorts it in the restroom. She describes the sting in her nostrils and the light, relaxed feeling that follows. The scene makes the relapse concrete: it happens alone, in a public restroom, amid the emotional strain of her family and the absence of calls from Robert.

Jensen Brick McCall asks Janae directly whether she got high or cut herself in the depot bathroom. She admits that she did, rather than lying to him, and confirms that her mother’s call prompted the episode. Jensen responds with anger and concern, telling her not to use drugs whenever someone hurts her feelings. When Janae insists that she is not an addict and can stop, he challenges the claim by defining addiction through the inability to stop willingly. His warning draws on his own childhood experience of Grace McCall’s drug use and on what he witnessed drugs do to people; it is not simply a moral rebuke, but an attempt to make Janae recognize the pattern before it worsens.

The recurrence becomes more severe after Janae sees a local news report about Elizabeth Mourning-Walters killing Robert. Hearing Elizabeth say that Robert had destroyed her life, Janae turns the revelation inward: she feels like a home wrecker, worries about what Robert may have given her, and dwells on the fact that she had considered their sexual encounters safe because they used condoms. She gnaws at her nails, cuts her legs and thighs, and wants cocaine badly as a means of escape. She showers despite the cuts stinging, dresses in a blue sundress to hide the scars, and refuses to answer her family’s calls or respond to Jensen’s knocks because she does not want his lecture. The episode links cocaine craving and self-harm as parallel responses to pain, while showing how shame and withdrawal keep support at a distance.

Janae’s path toward help begins with the need to feel safe from judgment. When Inya offers assistance, Janae says she does not want to be criticized or judged; Inya’s invitation leaves the choice with Janae rather than treating help as something she can be forced to accept. Later, Inya challenges Janae’s belief that she is bad energy and asks her to repeat that she is not. These encounters counter the self-condemnation that follows her use and relapse, though the narrative does not present recovery as immediate or effortless. By the later family gathering, Janae is Jensen’s wife and the mother of their daughter, Grace Pearl McCall; that ending establishes a shared future, not a claim that love alone erased her addiction or the work of recovery.

Naming Addiction and the Limits of Control

The novel gives the term addiction different degrees of certainty. Grace McCall’s dependence on Vicodin and Percocet is stated directly, and Jensen Brick McCall connects her death to a drug overdose. Janae Morrison, by contrast, resists the label after using cocaine, insisting that she can stop. Jensen argues that inability to stop willingly is the measure that matters, but the account does not provide a formal diagnosis for Janae. That distinction keeps the episode grounded in conflict over how to understand her behavior: she sees a lapse she can control, while Jensen recognizes a danger shaped by what he has already witnessed.

Neither character’s substance use is presented as a complete explanation of who they are. Grace’s addiction exists alongside the care she gave Jensen and the guilt that burdened her; Janae’s use is entwined with grief, shame, and self-harm, but does not exhaust her identity or determine the ending of her life. By placing those experiences beside one another without making them identical, the narrative treats addiction as a grave pattern of coping and harm rather than a fixed moral character. Jensen’s vigilance is informed by childhood exposure, yet his concern cannot itself make another person stop; the story leaves recovery as a difficult process of recognition and help-seeking, not a consequence guaranteed by love or warning.

Memory, Guilt, and the Limits of Escape

Grace McCall’s description of smoking water as a way to forget her wrongdoings acquires a sharper meaning when Jensen learns what those wrongdoings involved: the babies’ cries haunted her in dreams and lingered in her ears while she was awake. Her substance use is thus set against memories that intoxication could not quiet. The contrast is especially stark because she had saved Jensen, yet could not undo the deaths connected to her work; the novel presents her attempt to escape that guilt as part of her addiction’s context, not as a resolution to it.