All Fall Down: A Novel (25 page)

“I don’t know what you need. But I know you’re taking more of those pills than you should be. I’m worried about you . . . and, quite frankly, I’m worried about you taking care of Ellie.”

I thought I’d been scared before, that day at Stonefield, when Mrs. Dale hadn’t let me drive. I was wrong. That wasn’t anything. This was real fear. This was true terror. And the best defense was a good offense. My father used to say that all the time. I drew myself up straight, grateful that I was wearing makeup, that I’d washed my hair that morning, that my clothes were clean. “Are you suggesting that I’m an unfit mother?”

Dave shook his head. “I’m saying that I’m worried about you, and I’m worried about Ellie when she’s with you. You need to take this seriously, Allison. People die from what you’re doing.”

“Okay! So fine! I’ll quit!” I made a show of extracting a bottle
of Vicodin from my purse, uncapping it, and pouring the pills down the drain. I had a small secret stash, of course—a mints tin stuffed in my purse, a dozen Oxys in the bottom of my tampon box, a few Percocet in the glove compartment.

I turned on my heel and made what might have been a grand exit if my hip hadn’t caught the side of the table. I stumbled, and would have fallen if I hadn’t grabbed the wall. Dave was right behind me, holding my gaze, glaring at me, with no trace of goodwill or humor or love in his expression.

“I don’t want to have to spy on you,” he said. “But I will do whatever I have to do to keep Ellie safe.”

“Ellie,” I said, with all the dignity I could muster, “is perfectly safe. I would never, ever do anything to put her at risk.” Except, of course, the thing I’d done a few days ago.

“If you want help, I am here for you.”

I rolled my eyes. “Great. See if you can send me to the place the guy from
Friends
went. They have Pilates.”

“Allison.”

“I promise,”
I roared, before he could get off another adult-sounding, well-meaning warning. “I promise I promise I promise.” And I kept my promise all the way up the stairs, down the hall, and into the bathroom, where I fished pills out of the tampon box where I’d hidden them, and swallowed them, one, two, three.

I
was too upset to sleep that night. I sat in the living room with my laptop, pounding out a blog post called “Husbands Just Don’t Understand,” while Ronnie slept in the guest bedroom and Dave snored away down the hall. I burned through work I’d been putting off, spending ninety minutes engaging with the comments section and coming up with story ideas for one of the magazines that had been e-mailing in the wake of my “vibrator in every purse” comment. Every time I felt my brain edging toward the words
Dave knows what I’ve been doing
or
I’m going to lose my family
or even just
I want to stop and I can’t,
I would march myself into the bathroom and take another pill. By six a.m., I was wild-eyed, smelling of acrid sweat, feeling both sluggish and frantic. And, somehow, the unthinkable had happened. I was out of pills.

“Can you take Ellie to school?” I rasped through the bathroom door. Rats’ teeth of panic were nibbling at my heart. Dave sounded disgustingly collected.

“Sure. No problem.”

I went to the computer and logged on to Penny Lane, to make sure I hadn’t placed an order and then forgotten about it. No. There was only the stuff that Dave had intercepted. Prior to
that was an order for sixty pills that had arrived two days ago, and every last one of them was gone. I stared at the screen, feeling my jaw drop as I did the math. Thirty pills in less than a day and a half? That couldn’t be right. Except I could remember the package arriving, and how fast I’d gotten the envelope open and transferred the pills into my mints tin, how before I’d even gotten inside the house I had four of those babies inside me.

“Fuck,” I whispered. I went to the bedroom and began to go through my usual hiding places: my tampon box, the second drawer of my bedside table, the zippered pockets inside the different purses I’d used that month. There was nothing. I couldn’t even find a piece of a broken pill to tide me over. Everything was gone.

I sat down on the bed, heart thumping, palms and temples greasy with cold sweat. I picked up my phone and scrolled through the names of my doctors.
Called her last week . . .
.
called him on Monday . . .
.
haven’t called her in so long she’ll probably ask questions about why I need painkillers now.

Think,
I told myself fiercely as I heard the garage door open and the car pull out of the driveway. Maybe there was stuff left in my father’s medicine cabinet . . . except I knew that there wasn’t. I’d cleared it all out before the Realtor had come for a final walkthrough. Did my mom have anything? And did I want to risk trying to get her out of the house so I could check?

Forty minutes after Dave’s departure, still in my pajama bottoms and the Wonder Woman T-shirt I’d worn while I worked, I sat on the examination table of a strip-mall clinic where a cab had dropped me off, talking to a doctor with a heavy accent and bags under his eyes.

“You hurt the back when?”

“Two years ago.” I was shivering, sweating, and having a hard
time keeping my legs still. My knees wanted to kick, my feet wanted to tap, my body itched all over, and my fingers wanted to dig into my skin and start clawing.
Withdrawal,
I thought bleakly. A loop of every movie I’d ever seen in which a junkie kicked his or her habit had set itself on “repeat” in my mind. I was terrified of the agony I suspected was awaiting me . . . and I was furious at myself, furious that I’d let this happen, not stayed on top of what I had and what I needed. All those weeks—months, even—of promising myself I’d cut back, just not today, when in fact my use had increased and increased, my tolerance building until I needed four, or five, or even six little blue OxyContin to feel the transporting euphoria that a single Vicodin had once given me . . . and now here I was with nothing.

“You take how much of the painkiller?”

“I don’t know. A lot. Maybe ten pills a day,” I lied.

“Of the thirty milligrams?”

“Yes.” Ten was a good day, and Oxys weren’t the only thing I was taking, but never mind. He’d give me something—I didn’t even care what. Then I’d get on top of this. I’d slow my roll, start being prudent. No more pills first thing in the morning, no more pills in the middle of the night. Three or four days—a week, tops—and I’d have this under control.

“Every day, you take them?”

I nodded, launching into the story I’d already told the intake nurse. “And, like I said, I’m going to see my regular doctor, only she’s out sick, and I’m leaving for vacation this afternoon, and if you could just give me maybe ten pills, just so I can get through the plane trip . . .”

He leaned back against the exam room’s sink, taking me in. His name was Dr. Desgupta, and his eyes, behind heavy brown plastic frames, were not unkind.

“Every day, you’re taking these pills,” he said again.

I bent my head and prayed.
Please, God, just let him give me enough to get through the day and I’ll stop, I’ll get help, I’ll do something, I swear I will.

“And is it because the back hurts? Or is it because you need them, because you are getting sick without them?”

I didn’t answer. I wrapped my arms around myself and concentrated, as hard as I could, on not throwing up. “Sick,” I finally said. “I’ve never tried to stop, and I think . . . I mean, I’m not feeling so great already.”

“There is medication. Suboxone.” I lifted my head. “An opiate agonist-antagonist. It blocks your receptors, so you can’t take the heroin, or the Vicodin, or the OxyContin. Whatever narcotic you were taking. But it gives you some opiate, too. Not enough so you get, you know, the high, but enough that you feel okay.”

I nodded. This sounded like an acceptable solution. I could take this Suboxone stuff and stop hurting, and then take a day to sort myself out. I’d get more pills, either online or from doctors, enough so that this would never happen again. I would contact a lawyer, and a child psychologist, which Ellie would undoubtedly require. I would taper myself off the pills, maybe try more of those meetings, or get myself a therapist, or start running again. But all I wanted, at that moment, was something to take, something to swallow or smoke or snort. Something that would ease my panic, slow my heartbeat, let me feel okay again.

“Here.” Dr. Desgupta had finally pulled out his prescription pad. “I will write for seven days. The medicine is a film; you dissolve it under your tongue.” He ripped off the page. I snatched it out of his hand. “How long ago was last dose of OxyContin?”

I tried to remember what time it had been when I’d chewed
up the last of my pills, and tried not to remember licking the inside of the jewelry box where I’d found the final two Vicodin. If you were ever wondering whether you had a problem or not, the taste of jewelry-box felt was answer enough. “Four in the morning?”

He looked at the clock, calculating. He had big brown eyes, a bald head with a few strands of black hair carefully arranged on top, and a soft, accented voice. “Take first one at noon. You should be started in the withdrawal by then. Feeling like you have the flu. Sweaty, hands shaking . . . you feel like that, you take first one.”

“Thank you,” I said faintly, and was up and out of the chair, the prescription in one hand and my cell phone in the other, before he could tell me goodbye.

• • •

I could remember the rest of the day only in snatches. I remembered my cab ride from the doc-in-a-box to the drive-through lane of the pharmacy.
The flu,
the doctor had told me . . . except this was to the flu like a pack of rabid pit bulls was to a Chihuahua. I was running with foul-smelling sweat and shaking so hard that my teeth were chattering. My skin was covered in goose pimples; whatever I’d eaten the day before churned unhappily in my belly. I remembered the pharmacist telling me that the medicine wasn’t covered by my insurance without prior approval, and insisting, over and over, that I didn’t care, that it didn’t matter, that I’d pay out of pocket and worry about reimbursement later.

Back at home, I speed-read the instructions, then tore open one of the packets and let the yellow film dissolve into sour slime under my tongue. I locked the bedroom door and lay on my bed, where I endured six hours of the worst hell I could imagine. My
entire body twitched and burned. My legs kicked and flailed uncontrollably. I couldn’t hold still, couldn’t get comfortable. My skin felt like it was host to hundreds of thousands of fiery ants wearing boots made of poison-tipped needles. I scratched and clawed, but I couldn’t make them go away. The first time I threw up, I made it to the toilet, and, from there, I managed to send my mother and Dave a text explaining that I was sick and that, between the two of them, they’d have to handle Ellie and her obligations. The second time, I made it to the sink. The third time, I couldn’t even make it out of bed. I was freezing cold, so I’d tried to get under the covers, but the kicking—kicking! I was actually kicking!—had disarranged everything, had loosened the fitted sheets and the mattress cover. I writhed on the bed, trying to moan into the pillow, praying that the Suboxone would start its work, that I’d feel better, that Ellie wouldn’t see or hear this.

My mother knocked at the door. “Allison? Allison, are you okay?”

“Flu,” I called back, in a voice that didn’t sound like mine. I’d gotten myself wrapped in a blanket and was sitting, hunched over and moaning, in the old glider chair I’d used to nurse Ellie. I was burning up, my hair glued to my cheeks in matted clumps, making high, whining noises. I moaned and rocked, moaned and rocked, as the minutes dragged by. At six o’clock I couldn’t stand it any longer. I found the phone, crawled into bed, and managed to dial the clinic and tell the receptionist that it was an emergency and that I needed Dr. Desgupta.

“Yes, hello?” he answered.

I told him my name. My voice was a high, wavering whisper. I didn’t sound like myself; I sounded like Ellie when she woke up sick in the middle of the night. “There’s something wrong . . . I’m really sick . . .”

“You are having the nausea and the diarrhea?”

“Yes,” I whispered. I was crying, on top of everything else. “I’m cold . . . I can’t stop shaking . . . everything hurts . . . I feel like I’m going to die . . .”

“Twenty-four hours,” he said calmly. “The Suboxone is kicking the opiates off your receptors. But in a day or two you will be well again.”

A day or two? I wasn’t sure I could take another twenty minutes of this agony. “I can’t do this,” I said. My voice was sounding less like human conversation than like a cat’s yowl. “Please, you have to help me . . . I think I need to go to a hospital . . .”

“I am thinking,” the doctor said calmly, “that maybe you need to be in a rehab bed.” He trilled the “r” of “rehab,” making it sound like something wonderful and exotic.

“No rehab,” I said. “I’m not an addict. Please. I’m not. I’m just really, really sick.”

“You go to one of these places, they will help you,” he explained. “There is no need to stay for the twenty-eight days unless you like. But you need to be watched until you are well.”

Rehab.
I started crying even harder, because I suspected that he was right. Maybe I didn’t need rehab, but I needed to be somewhere with nurses and doctors and medicine and machines. The pain was intolerable. I could barely speak; I couldn’t keep my legs still. I actually wanted to die. Death would be an improvement over this.

The doorknob turned. Shaking and sick, I felt the weight of Ellie’s body as she crawled beside me. “Mommy?” she whispered. With her tiny hands she patted my hair, then my forehead. “Mommy, do you need true love’s kiss?”

I made some noise, thinking that I’d never hated myself as much as I did at that moment. Then my mother was there. “Oh my God.” Somehow, she kept her voice calm as she said, “Ellie, go to your room. Let me help your mommy.”

I opened my eye. “Mom.” She bent down and hugged me hard. I whispered Dr. Desgupta’s name, then handed her the phone, and shut my eyes again as I heard her say, “Yes, I’m Allison Weiss’s mother, and she’s very, very ill.”