All Fall Down: A Novel (26 page)

Curled on my side, I rocked and rocked. Faintly, as if I were listening through a paper tube, I could hear my mother’s voice, her questions and answers.
Opiate addiction . . .
.
Suboxone . . .
.
Precipitated withdrawal . . .
.
Which facility would you recommend?

“No rehab!” I moaned, and grabbed at my mother’s sleeve.

“Yes, rehab,” she said, and pulled herself away. She wasn’t falling apart or weeping. There were no snail tracks of mascara on her cheeks, no trembling hands or whimpered complaints about how she could not go on. It was funny, I thought. All it took for my mother to actually be a mother was a little withdrawal. “You’re sick, honey. You’re sick, but I’m going to help you get better.”

I shut my eyes. Later I remembered voices in the bedroom, a stethoscope against my chest, my mother’s voice, then Dave’s, reciting from the Penny Lane invoice a list of what I’d been taking, how many, and for how long.
We see a lot of this,
someone—a paramedic—had said. More than you’d expect. Happens to the nicest people.
The nicest people,
I thought. That was me. Then they lifted me onto a gurney, and I felt the sting of a needle in my arm, and when I opened my eyes again I was in a hospital bed, feeling as if every bone in my body had been smashed, then clumsily reset.

“Where am I? What happened?” I whispered. Dave stood there in a Blind Melon T-shirt and jeans, looking at me. I hurt all over. My body felt like a skinned knee, flayed and bloody, like a single, stinging nerve ending . . . and I was more ashamed than I had ever been in my life. I couldn’t deal with this. Not now. Not until someone gave me something for the pain.

“You’re in the hospital. You had something called precipitated withdrawal.” Dave had come to the doorway, but had not taken a single step inside the room, like he’d committed to stopping by, but not staying, at a party whose guests he had no interest in knowing. “It’s what happens when you’ve been taking lots of opiates for a long time, and then something kicks them off your system.”

“FYI, it’s not a lot of fun,” I whispered. Dave didn’t smile.

“There’re two days left of school.” Dave was doing his reasonable, just-the-facts thing, the one I recognized from telephone conversations with his editor. “Your mom and I can manage Ellie. Then she can do day camp at Stonefield.”

“My mom can barely manage herself,” I said.

“You need to go somewhere,” he said.

“You mean rehab.” Dave did not deny it. “Look,” I said, into the silence. “Obviously, buying pills online was a bad idea. I know I was taking way more than I should have. I’m under a lot of stress. I’ve been making some bad decisions. But look, it’s been . . .” I looked around for a clock, then took my best guess. “What, twenty-four hours since I had anything, right?” Without waiting for him to confirm, I plowed on. “So I should be fine. Maybe I just need some rest. Fluids. Then I can come home, and I’ll be okay. I just won’t take any more pills.”

Could I do it? I wondered, even as I made my case. Maybe, twenty-four hours later, I’d be physically free, but I knew that if I was home alone I’d be on the computer or the phone, getting more.

You’re an addict.

No I’m not.

You can’t stop.

Yes I can.

And in that moment, in that bed, what I’d done, what I’d
let myself become, hit me hard. I had endangered my daughter. Janet’s boys. Myself. Even though no one had gotten hurt—
yet,
my mind whispered;
no one has gotten hurt yet
—the truth was that if I kept going this way, Ellie might grow up with an absence far worse than what I endured. She would have the same hole in her heart that I had, the same questions that tormented me—why wasn’t I good enough for my own mother to love?

“It’s just twenty-eight days,” Dave said.

“What about my dad?” I managed. “What about Ellie?”

“Your father’s in a safe place. Your mom can take care of herself, and I can take care of Eloise.”

“And what if I don’t go?”

Dave didn’t answer. He just looked at me steadily. “I hope you’ll do the right thing,” he finally said. “Because I need to do whatever it takes to make sure that Ellie is safe.”

Panic was blooming inside me, pushing the air out of my lungs, as I sorted out what that could mean. I imagined Dave moving out, and taking Ellie with him. I pictured my husband in his good navy blue suit, standing in front of a judge, all the evidence—the envelopes from Penny Lane, bank statements and receipts, copies of all the prescriptions I’d accumulated from all the different doctors.
Your honor, my wife is not capable of caring for a small child.
Or, worse, what if I came home from the hospital and found that the locks had been changed?

“Allison. Be reasonable.” His voice was as gentle as it had been on the phone the day we’d moved my dad to Eastwood. “Is this how you want to live your life? Is this the kind of mom you want to be?”

I opened my mouth to tell him, once again, that things were all right, that they were almost entirely okay; that yes, obviously, there’d been some slips, that things had gotten out of hand, but they were by no means completely off the rails or—what was the
word they kept using in that meeting?—unmanageable. My life was not unmanageable. I could manage it just fine.

But before I could say that, I thought about how I’d been spending my days. Waking up in the morning, my very first thoughts were not of my daughter or my husband, not of my job or my friends or my plans for the day, but of how many pills I had left, and whether it was enough, and how I was going to get more. The time I spent chasing them, the energy, the money, the mental resources . . . and the truth was, at that point I was barely feeling the euphoria they’d once provided. A year ago, one or two Vicodin could make me feel great. These days, four or five Oxys—the medicine they gave to cancer patients, for God’s sake, cancer patients who were dying—were barely enough to get me feeling normal. Was this how I wanted to live?

But how could I leave? How could I walk away from everything—my home, my work, my father, my daughter? There was no way. I could just go home and fix this on my own. I could do better. I could get it under control, cut back, be more reasonable. Except, even as I began to outline a plan in my head, I was suspecting a different truth. My “off” switch was broken, possibly forever. Having just one pill felt about as likely as taking just one breath.

I looked up at my husband. “I suppose you’ve already found a place to ship me?”

He nodded. “It’s in New Jersey. It’s very highly rated. And my insurance will pay for twenty-eight days.”

Twenty-eight days,
I thought.
I could do anything for twenty-eight days.

“Okay,” I said quietly, thinking,
This has to end somehow, somewhere, and maybe this is as good an ending as any.
“Okay.”

W
hen I was a girl, every summer my parents and I would spend a week in Avalon, at the Jersey Shore. Every summer we’d rented the same little cottage a block away from the beach and set up camp there. Now that I was a mother myself, I would have called it a relocation instead of a vacation, but back then it was like being transported to the land of fairy tales. Every day I’d swim in the ocean, and at night I’d fall asleep listening to the sound of the waves through my open window instead of the hum of our house’s central air, looking at the little bedroom that was mine by the glow of moonlight on water instead of my Snow White night-light. The last night, we’d go to the boardwalk in Wildwood, gorge ourselves on sweet grilled sausages and cotton candy, play the carnival games, ride the Ferris wheel and the roller coaster.

In the mornings, we’d eat cold cereal and toast, then pack up a cooler of sodas and snacks and walk the single block between our cottage and the beach. My mother would spread out a pink-and-white-striped blanket; my father would rock the stem of our umbrella back and forth, digging it into the sand, and then swoop me into his arms and carry me, screeching with half-pretend terror, out into the waves.

Every year, I was allowed to buy a single souvenir. The summer I was eight years old, I’d saved a few dollars of tooth fairy and allowance money, augmented by the quarters I’d cadged from the sofa cushions and the dollar bills from the lint filter in the dryer. My plan was to go to the store by myself, buy a pair of Jersey Shore snow globes, and give them to my parents for Chanukah.

I waited until my mother was dozing, facedown on her beach towel, her back and legs gleaming with Hawaiian Tropic lotion, and my dad was settled into his folding chair with the
Examiner
before I took my shovel and pail as camouflage and walked down the beach, toward a spot where, beneath the disinterested gaze of a teenage babysitter, a half-dozen kids were at work making sand mermaids, with long, wavy strands of seaweed merhair and seashell bikinis. “Stay where we can see you,” my father called as I walked off, and I told him that I would. I waited until he’d opened the Business section before double-checking to make sure I had my change purse and walking from the beach to the sidewalk, then to the corner, looking both ways before I crossed the street.

The store where we shopped every year was a high-ceilinged, barnlike room where the sunshine streamed in through skylights. It was full of bins of lacquered seashells and preserved starfish, penny candy and wrapped pieces of taffy. Behind a glass case were glossy slabs of fudge and caramel-dipped apples. Next to the cash register were racks of postcards, some featuring pretty girls in bikinis, with “See the Sights at the Jersey Shore” written underneath them. That morning, though, it was cloudy outside, and the store looked dim and empty. The cash register was abandoned; there weren’t any teenage clerks in their red pinnies, restocking shelves or telling shoppers where they could find inflatable floats or swim diapers. Instead of a sparkling treasure
trove, the merchandise—marked-down T-shirts, foam beer cozies, “Jersey Shore” shot glasses, skimpy beach towels—looked dingy and cheap. The postcard rack squeaked when I spun it, and I noticed a card I hadn’t seen before. It had a picture of a very heavy woman in a red one-piece bathing suit not unlike my own. “The Jersey Shore’s Good, but the Food Is Great!” read the words printed over the sand. I stared, not quite understanding the joke but knowing that the woman in the bathing suit was the brunt of it, and wondering under what circumstances she’d posed for the picture. Had she just been lying there, sunning herself, when a man with a camera came by and tricked her, saying,
You’re so pretty, let me take your picture
? Or had she been aware the picture was going to be used for a joke? And if that was the case, why had she allowed it, knowing that people would laugh at her?

I readjusted my grasp on my change purse, gave the metal rack a final spin, and was heading off to find the snow globes when a man grabbed me by the shoulder and spun me around.

“Did you see?” he demanded. I blinked up at him. He wore a baseball shirt with the buttons open over his bare chest, cutoff denim shorts, and leather sandals. His eyes looked wild and his teeth were stained brown, and the smell of liquor coming off of him was so thick it was almost visible, like the cloud surrounding Pig-Pen in the
Peanuts
comic strip. As I stared, the man shook my shoulder again. “Did you see?”

I shook my head. I hadn’t seen anything, but even if I had, I would have denied it. There was something wrong with this man; even a little kid like me could tell. I couldn’t remember ever being so scared. Worse than the waves of liquor smell that rolled off him was the feeling of not-rightness. His pupils were too big; his hand was holding me way too hard. A squeak escaped my lips as tears spilled onto my cheeks. I wished I’d never come here, never snuck away from my parents. I wished they would
come rescue me, right this minute. As we stood there, with his fingers still curled into the flesh of my shoulder, a woman, barefoot in a bikini top and a short denim skirt, with the kind of bleached-blonde hair my mother would have dismissed with a curled lip and the word “cheap,” came around the corner. She had a red plastic shopping basket over one forearm, empty except for a canister of Pringles, and a tattoo of what looked like a heart visible above the bra cup of her swimsuit.

“You’re scaring her, Kenny,” the woman said, and knelt down beside me. She had a southern accent and a sweet, high voice, but she, too, smelled like booze when she breathed. “What’s your name, pretty girl? You want some fudge?”

“No, thank you,” I whispered, as wild-eyed Kenny repeated, in a droning whine, “She saw us.”

“She didn’t see a thing.” The woman’s eyes looked like spinning pinwheels, her pupils tiny pinpricks of black in the blue of her irises. “How about a lollipop, pretty little miss?”

“I have to go now,” I whispered, and ran past them, out the door. I knew which way the beach was—there was only one street to cross, then I’d be there—but, somehow, I must have gone the wrong way, because when I stopped running I couldn’t see the water, and the street was completely unfamiliar.
BAR AND GRILLE
, read one sign. I heard the sound of an American flag, hanging at the corner, snapping in the breeze. There were people on the street, but not tourists, not people like me and my parents, in swimsuits and sun hats, carrying coolers and portable radios and folding chairs. All I saw were a few men dressed like Kenny, men with dark glasses and bent heads and a palpable aura of strangeness, of
off-ness,
around them, going in and out of the
BAR AND GRILLE.
I stood on the corner in my pink rubber flip-flops and my white terry-cloth cover-up. I’d dropped my change purse at some point during my flight.