All Fall Down: A Novel (30 page)

“Allison? I’m Michelle. I understand that there’s a problem?” Her voice was high and singsongy. She sounded a lot like Miss Katie, who taught kindergarten at Stonefield.

I followed her into a closet-sized office dominated by a desk. A fan clipped to the doorframe pushed the air around, along with the smell of microwaved pizza. The Twelve Steps hung on
the wall. Michelle settled herself into her chair, which squeaked in protest. “Why don’t you tell me what’s going on?”

I explained it all: the heroin addicts at breakfast, the condescending little man at orientation, how I understood that I was having problems managing my medication—“but not, you know, rehab-level problems.”

Michelle turned to her computer, tapped briefly on the keyboard, and then turned to stare at me with her bulgy eyes. “You were taking six hundred milligrams of OxyContin a day?”

I shrugged, trying not to squirm. “Only on really bad days. Normally it wasn’t that many,” I lied.

She picked up a cheap plastic pen and tapped it against her desk. “My guess, Allison, is that the pills were a way for you to self-medicate. To remove yourself from painful situations without actually going anywhere.”

It sounded reasonable, but I wouldn’t let myself nod or give any other indication that she might be right.

“So I think . . .” She raised a hand, as if I’d tried to interrupt her. “No, just hear me out. I think that you really do need to be here.”

“Maybe I do need help,” I said. “But I don’t think this is the place for me. No offense, but I think I’m here because my husband thought I’d change my mind before he got me in the car. I bet he found this place in five minutes on the Internet. I didn’t leave him time for lots of research. And I think there are probably places that might be a better fit. Where the”—I searched for an institutional-sounding word—“population might be more like me.”

An alarmed expression flitted across Michelle’s face. It was quickly replaced by the tranquil look she’d been wearing since our conversation began. “Why do you feel that way?”

“Well, for starters, I’m old enough to be most of the other girls’ mother.”

“That’s not true,” she said. “There are quite a few women your age or older.”

“I’ll give you ‘a few,’ but not ‘quite a few,’ ” I said. “Unless you’re hiding them somewhere. Besides, these girls were doing street drugs.”

“And you weren’t?”

I shook my head. “No. I had prescriptions.” Except for the ones I ordered online, but never mind that.

“Do you think that makes you different from the rest of the ladies here?”

I hesitated, sensing a trap. “Yes,” I finally said. “I do think I’m different.”

“Do you think you’re better?” I didn’t answer. “
I
think,” said Michelle, “that what I’m hearing is your disease talking. You know, addiction is the only disease that tells you that you don’t have a disease.”

“I’m not sure I actually believe that addiction is a disease,” said, but Michelle was on a roll.

“Your
disease
is telling you that you don’t belong here. Your
disease
is saying that you didn’t even have a problem, or that if you did, it wasn’t that bad. Your
disease
is saying, ‘I can handle this. I’ll do it on my own. I can cut back. I don’t need the Twelve Steps, and I definitely don’t need rehab.’ ” I was quiet. This, of course, was exactly what I’d been thinking.

“But your best thinking is what got you here. Think about that for a minute.” This, of course, was exactly what Darnton had told me. Another trite slogan, one they probably recited to every patient who was giving them trouble.

“I’d like to speak to my husband and my mom. I need to know how my daughter is doing.”

“Your counselor can help you to arrange that.”

“But I don’t have a counselor!” I closed my mouth. I was shouting again. “Look, you don’t understand,” I said, and knotted my fingers together so my hands would stop shaking. “I didn’t have time to make any arrangements for my daughter or my mom. My father just moved into an assisted-living facility, and my mom moved in with us.”

“Well, then,” said Michelle, with a simper, “it sounds like your husband will have plenty of help at home.”

Under other circumstances, I would have laughed. “If my mother was a normal person, that would be true,” I told her. “But my mother’s basically another child. She doesn’t drive, and even if she did, she doesn’t know Ellie’s schedule, and Ellie won’t be her priority. She’ll be worried about my dad.” I was getting overwhelmed just thinking about the mess I’d left behind, the assignments I hadn’t completed, the comments I hadn’t approved, the dentist’s appointment I hadn’t made for Ellie, the checkup that I’d postponed for myself, the visit from the roofers that I’d never gotten around to scheduling. “I can’t stay here,” I told Michelle. “It’s impossible. There are too many things I need to take care of.”

She nodded. “So many of us women feel like we’re the ones holding up the world. Like it’s all going to fall down without us.”

“I can’t speak for anyone else, but in my case, that’s actually true,” I offered. Michelle appeared not to hear.

“Acceptance is hard,” she said.

I frowned. “Acceptance of what?”

“Why don’t you tell me, Allison? What are you having a hard time accepting?”

I tried not to roll my eyes. “For starters, that you won’t let me talk to my daughter and explain why I’m not home. I don’t think that’s an unreasonable request. Please,” I said. Maybe it was
withdrawal, the exhaustion of what my body had been through over the past few days, but I was too tired and too sad to keep arguing. “I just want to talk to someone at my home.”

Michelle swiped her mouse back and forth, peered at her computer screen, and then spent a minute typing. “The head of our counseling department has an opening at noon. His name is Nicholas.”

“Thank you. I appreciate your help.” There. I could be reasonable, I could be polite . . . and I was feeling encouraged.

“For now, though, I need you to go join your group.”

“Thank you,” I said again, thinking that I was on my way. It had taken me three hours to orchestrate even the promise of a phone call home. By day’s end, I was confident I’d be able to talk my way out of here and get myself home.

I
walked out the door and onto the sidewalk. The fresh air felt good on my face after the recirculated staleness I’d been breathing inside. I was halfway across the lawn before I heard someone yelling. “Hey,” he called. “You can’t walk there! Hey!”

I turned and saw a young man in khakis. “That’s the men’s path.”

I looked around to make sure he was talking to me, then down at what seemed to be gender-neutral pavement. “Excuse me?”

“Men and women have to walk on separate paths. Yours is here.” He pointed. I shrugged and started across the grass. “No!” he hollered. “You have to go back and start at the beginning! No walking across the grass!”

I stopped and stared at him. “Is this like Simon Says?”

“ ‘Half-measures availed us nothing!’ ”

“Excuse me?”

“From
The Big Book.
You can’t take shortcuts.”

Whatever. I went back to the door, got on the proper path, and found Aubrey and Mary standing in the middle of a fenced-in oval, staring uneasily at a big horse with a brown coat and a sandy mane, which was ignoring them as it nibbled on a
clump of grass. I waved at them, then ducked through the fence and was crossing the muddy ground when a woman in a cowboy hat held up her hand.

“I think you missed the entrance.”

Shit. I sighed, went back through the fence, walked the long way around the ring, and pushed open the gate. “What’s up?”

The woman in the cowboy hat didn’t answer. Aubrey, whose glittery eyeshadow and high-heeled boots looked strange in the June sunshine, said, “We’re supposed to put this on that.”
This
was a tangle of leather straps and metal buckles.
That
was the horse.

“Why?”

“This is equine therapy,” Mary explained.

“How’s it supposed to help us?”

“Well, I’m not exactly sure, dear.”

Aubrey handed me the straps and buckles. It was some kind of harness. At least that was my best guess. My experience with horses was limited to taking Ellie on pony rides at the zoo. “Excuse me,” I asked the woman in the cowboy hat. “Can you tell me what the point of this is?”

She didn’t answer. “I don’t think they’re allowed to talk to us,” Mary said.

“This is ridiculous,” I muttered. Aubrey shifted from foot to foot, rubbing her arms with her palms. “Do you have any idea what this has to do with anything?”

Aubrey shrugged, shaking her head. “Maybe it’s about working as a team? Or building confidence or something? I don’t know. Half the shit in rehab doesn’t have anything to do with anything, and the other half’s so boring you could die. Just wait till Ed McGreavey does the ‘Find Your Purpose’ lecture.”

“You didn’t like that?” Mary asked. “Oh, I’ve heard that it’s very inspiring.”

Aubrey began finger-combing her hair. “Yeah, I thought so, too, like, the first time I heard it. But after you’ve heard it, like, three or four times, and you’ve seen Big Ed cry at the exact same part . . .”

“When he talks about how his brother broke his leg when they were heli-skiing?”

“You know it.”

I looked at the harness, then looked at the horse. “So we just have to get the harness on the horse somehow?”

“And,” said Aubrey, “we have to be touching each other while we do it.”

“Huh?”

“Like a conga line,” Mary explained, and put her hands on my hips.

“Okay.” With Mary holding my hips and Aubrey holding hers, we inched across the ring and approached the horse. It lifted its head and gave us the equine equivalent of a raspberry. Aubrey squealed, and Mary flinched backward.

“He’s more afraid of us than we are of him,” I said. I found a vaguely loop-shaped opening in the complicated mess of straps and pushed it over the horse’s head. Then I tied the remaining dangling straps in a bow. “There. Done.”

Mary was frowning. “That doesn’t look right.”

“They said it had to be on. They didn’t say it had to be pretty.” I pulled on the straps. The horse didn’t move. I yanked harder. “Come on, you.” Finally, reluctantly, the horse lifted one foot, then another.

“It’s moving!” Aubrey cheered.

“We did it!” Mary cried. The stone-faced woman in the cowboy hat said nothing as she watched our progress. We were almost done with our second lap when a golf cart zipped up to the fence and a kid in khakis called my name. “Allison W.?”

I handed the reins to Mary and caught a ride in the cart, which dropped me at a single-story building that looked like it was made of wood but turned out to be covered in vinyl siding. The couch in the waiting room looked like leather, but wasn’t, and the Twelve Steps framed and hung on the wall were simplified:
I Can’t,
read Step One.
God Can,
said Step Two.
Let Him,
Step Three advised.
God again,
I thought, and collapsed onto the couch. The God thing was going to be a problem. I’d been raised Jewish, with a vague notion of God as a wrathful old guy with a long white beard who was big on testing and tormenting His followers: casting Adam and Eve out of the garden, punishing poor Job, drowning Egyptian soldiers. Was that God—a God I wasn’t even sure I believed in—actually supposed to keep me from taking too much OxyContin? Especially when He let kindergartners get shot in their classrooms and young mothers die of cancer and millions of people suffer and die because of their skin color or religion?

There were no magazines I recognized in the waiting area, just battered copies of something called
Grapevine,
which appeared to be a cross between
True Confessions
and
MAD,
only for drunks. In the hallway outside, I saw a constant flow of people, men and women, alone and in groups, slouchy dudes with shifty eyes, pretty girls in jeans so tight I wondered if they were actually leggings with pockets painted on. Finally, a door flew open and a willowy African-American man in a linen suit smiled at me.

“Allison W.?”

I nodded, getting to my feet and breathing deeply as another wave of dizziness swept over my body.

“Come on in.”

His office was by far the nicest place I’d seen at Meadowcrest. There was a plush Oriental rug on the floor. The walls were
painted a pretty celery green, the carved and polished wooden desk looked like a genuine antique, and the chair behind it was leather. The obligatory copy of the Twelve Steps hung on the wall—did they buy them in bulk?—but at least his had a pretty gold-leaf frame.

Nicholas took my hand. “It’s nice to meet you,” he said. Maybe it was the way he actually appeared to be seeing me when he looked my way, or maybe it was that my gaydar was pinging, but Nicholas reminded me of Dr. McCarthy in Philadelphia. Dr. McCarthy, in whose office I’d taken that quiz, Dr. McCarthy, who’d asked me so kindly what I was doing to take care of myself. How different would things be if I’d told him then what was going on, or even if I’d just stopped it all right there, before I’d learned about ordering pills on the Internet?

I took the chair on the other side of his desk and looked at a picture in a silver frame. There was Nicholas and an older white guy, both of them in tuxedoes, each with one hand on the shoulder of a pretty dark-haired girl in what looked like a flower girl’s dress.

He saw me looking. “Our wedding,” he said.

“Is that your daughter? She’s beautiful.”

“My goddaughter, Gia,” he said. “You’ve got a little girl, right?” There was, no surprise, a folder open on his desk, with my name typed on the tab.

“Eloise,” I said, feeling my heart beating, hearing her name catch in my throat.

“From the book?”

“From the book,” I confirmed.
Ellie,
I thought, remembering her funny, imperious gestures, the way she would yell every fifth word, or complain that whatever I was doing was taking for HOURS, or come home crying because “everyone else in kindergarten has loosed a tooth but me.”