Cassidy had never been a good sleeper, but events of the past few months had ramped up her problem to the point where she some—
times went an entire night without sleep. It had started when her old boyfriend, Rick, turned jealous and then abusive. After a while, it hadn't felt safe to sleep beside him. And even when he wasn't with her, she worried that he might jolt her awake with a drunken, threatening phone call, or even come creeping into her condo in the middle of the night. Things only got worse when she, Allison, and Nicole had confronted a murder suspect--a confrontation that had ended with the killer dead on the floor and Nic with a bullet through her shoulder. When Cassidy closed her eyes at night, she still saw the blood.
After the shooting, she turned into an ultramarathon insomniac, awake for as long as forty-five hours at a stretch. Nights became endless. She paced her condo, watched TV, flipped through magazines, listened to talk radio, and surfed the Internet. Whenever she tried to sleep, her thoughts raced. She thought about Rick, about how he had hurt her. About her parents and how they had always found her lacking. She thought about stories she wanted to cover, and hadn't. She also thought about Jenna, who was everything Cassidy had once been. Now Cassidy was ten years older than the station's intern--and she was sure that it showed.
And always, always, Cassidy did the math. If she went to sleep in the next ten minutes, then she would get five hours of sleep. But it wouldn't be long until she had to recalculate. The most she would get would be four hours, or three. Worrying about not sleeping kept her from sleeping. By the time it got down to two hours, she would be whimpering, beating her pillow, begging the universe for relief.
Cassidy tried all the remedies in the women's magazines. Go to bed at the same time each night. People who suggested that obviously didn't work in the 24/7 world of the news business. Try a glass of warm milk. It tasted gross and had no effect. Melatonin, valerian, kava kava, Tylenol PM. She still lay staring at the ceiling. Sometimes a glass or two of wine helped for a short while, but she would wake up after an hour and not be able to get back to sleep.
One evening she complained to Jim over dinner. "I can't sleep anymore. Sometimes I'm awake all night."
"You need to get your doctor to prescribe you some of these." Jim took a bottle from his pants pocket.
"What is it?"
"Somulex." He shook a white, oval pill into her palm. "Here. Take this tonight and see if it helps."
Did it ever.
That night, as soon as Cassidy's head hit the pillow, her breathing slowed and softened. It was a deep, nearly dreamless sleep. She couldn't remember sleeping like that since she was a kid.
And people noticed even after a single night.
"You look different," Jenna said the next day, giving her a long, considering look. "Did you change your hair?"
That afternoon, Cassidy called her doctor and got her own prescription. "I can't sleep," she told him. "I'm very stressed-out after everything that's happened. Please, please can you give me a prescription for Somulex?"
It wasn't any harder than that. Cassidy got twenty pills. The label said they were for "occasional sleeplessness." At first, she broke the pills in half and only took them on Sunday nights, the hardest ones.
But if it looked like a big story might break the next day, or she had an important meeting or an event after work and needed to look good--well, there were the pills to help. Over the phone, the doctor had mumbled something about how they could be addictive, but Cassidy decided it was better to have a little addiction and be well rested and alert. Better to be attractive than ugly and exhausted.
It wasn't long before she needed to take a pill every night. If she tried to skip one, she found herself wide-awake. She would lie and watch the glowing green numbers on her alarm clock slowly move forward-3 a. M., 4 a. M., 5 a. M. Finally she would break down and take a pill, even if she only got an hour or two of sleep before her alarm sounded. And some nights she needed more than one.
What was supposed to be a monthly supply of Somulex was gone in under three weeks. When her doctor wouldn't renew her prescription early, Cassidy found a second doctor and had him call in her prescription to a different pharmacy.
The one thing her doctor had lectured her about was the danger of mixing Somulex with alcohol. "If you combine the two, they can depress the nervous system. Maybe even to the point of your body forgetting to breathe."
Cassidy had heeded his warning for a while. But she was working so hard. She needed to unwind. And only a glass or two of red wine allowed her to do that.
Someday she would quit. When her life calmed down.
Now Cassidy stood in the kitchen and felt herself shaking. She had defied death today, but she had also stood in a dead man's apartment and walked home in a dead man's shoes. Five minutes ago she had swallowed a dead man's pill.