Free A Door in the River by Inger Ash Wolfe

smashed against the wall inside the darkened room and she heard a high-pitched cry and the sound of paper being torn. She stood in the doorway with her gun out in front of her. “Don’t move! I
will
shoot!”
    Now there was silence, and she could smell the scent of ammonia. She kept her gun out in front of herself, reached to the side of the door, along the wall, and flipped the light switch. A cloud of white feathers was settling on the floor in front of her. Standing on a pedestal at a height of four feet was a dumbstruck white cockatoo in a cage. It was huddling in the farthest corner looking like it was having a heart attack, its yellow comb plastered down tight to its skull. Hazel stood down and holstered her weapon. “Good god,” she said, and the bird’s black eyes leapt in its head in terrified misery. It spread its wings: a slow, helpless movement, and then closed them up against its body in aneffort to get as small as possible. The paper at the bottom of its cage was torn into ragged strips.
    “It’s okay,” said Hazel, breathing deliberately, slowing her heartbeat down. She began looking around the room with more focus now and saw that it had been turned upside down. Books and paper were scattered everywhere. “Just a little misunderstanding. I won’t harm you, birdie.” The creature opened its beak in a wide, tremulous movement, as if to squawk, but no sound came out. There was a puddle on the floor at the base of the pedestal and she noticed the bird had upended its little tin cup of water that normally hung from the bars. She approached the cage and gently unlatched the little door, speaking softly to the mutely squawking bird the whole time. She took the tin cup out, closed the cage, and retreated into the hall.
    The bathroom was through the master bedroom, which was empty and silent with bare bedside tables beside the perfectly made bed. A couple of the drawers were standing open. She looked inside them briefly, but if anything was missing from them, she couldn’t tell. She filled the bird’s water from the sink. It was the least she could do. She stood and looked at herself in the mirror. Her pupils were tiny, and Hazel stood for a moment studying herself. Was her face thinner now than it had been before the summer? One of the side effects of Percocet addiction is edema and she’d gotten used to the sight of loose flesh in her cheeks and along her chinline. Now it was gone. It had been threeand a half months since she’d had a painkiller and now she could see her face again. A simple physiological change, but it hit her like a revelation. Even more than the cessation of withdrawal symptoms and the return of normal, bearable pain, this spoke to her complete escape from addiction. She was looking in the mirror and seeing her actual self again.
    But this wasn’t the place for a revelation. She corrected her drift and opened the medicine cabinet door and looked in on the hair products and razors, and on the top shelf there was an array of orange pill bottles. One of the pill vials contained a whole whack of OxyContins. Someone’d had an enthusiastic GP. She looked at the label, but the pills had been transferred from some other bottle: the label on this one was for Tylenol 3. She imagined that Henry Wiest had been no stranger to pain. She was sure there were still at least thirty pills in the bottle, but it was impossible to know when they’d been poured in here. Even so, thirty didn’t sound like a problem. She’d get a month’s worth, easy, every time Pass wrote her a prescription for her back. There was also a tiny ziplock bag of pot behind a can of shaving cream. Four small buds inside, maybe an eighth. More people smoked pot casually than you could imagine and it was less suspicious than the Oxys. Westmuir was overrun with pot, increasingly potent varieties, too, but there was no violence over it and the most harm stoned people ever did was rewatchJim Carrey movies. If Henry Wiest had