All Fall Down: A Novel (38 page)

“Better than what?” I muttered.
Better than you?
I thought. I was pretty sure I’d achieved that particular goal already.

“Think about it,” she suggested in a sugary-sweet tone, and sent me off to Share, where I listened to a thirty-eight-year-old mother of two named Dice describe her descent from high-school cheerleader to crackhead. She’d arrived at Meadowcrest after her parents told her they could no longer care for her boys (twelve and nine), and would be putting them in foster care unless she got her act together.

I would never,
I thought, as Dice described leaving her boys home alone or, worse, with strangers while she wandered the streets to cop. Her hands, with the nails bitten short and bloody, trembled as she worked to extract pictures of her sons from underneath the plastic lining of her binder. “That’s Dominic Junior, my little Nicky, and that’s Christopher. He eats so much I can’t even believe it. Like, mixin’ bowls full of cereal, gallons of milk . . . I tell him we should just get a cow, let him suck on that, ’stead of using all our money on milk . . .”

Had she ever been like me and Janet, with a husband and a house, a car in the garage and money in the bank? Had she ever had a chance at that kind of life?

“Allison?”

I glanced up. Gabrielle, she of the pink lanyard and officious-bank-lady look, was staring at me. So, I noticed, were the rest of the eighteen girls and women in the circle. “Allison, are you ready to share?”

“Um.” I closed my notebook, then drummed my fingertips
on its cover. I had known this day was coming, but, of course, they never told you exactly when it would be your turn. I sat up straight, remembering how every Share began. “Well. Let’s see. I was born in New Jersey, in 1974. I think I tried liquor for the first time at someone’s bat mitzvah, when I was twelve or thirteen. We were sneaking glasses off the grown-ups’ table. I had maybe a sip, and I hated the way it tasted, and that was that until I was sixteen. Um.” I tilted my body back in my chair, looked up at the ceiling and noticed, without surprise, that it was stained. Everything in this place was worn and dirty, frayed and patched, like we didn’t deserve anything better. “I got drunk at a party when I was sixteen. Vodka and peach schnapps, which was a thing back then. I hated the way it made me feel, and I didn’t drink again until college . . . and even then, it was, like, a beer. Or maybe I’d have a few puffs of a joint.”

“You’re kidding,” said a new girl whose name I didn’t know. I could have gotten defensive, but instead, I just shrugged.

“Yeah, I know it sounds ridiculous, but it’s the truth. I didn’t like booze, I didn’t like pot, and I didn’t really try anything else because there wasn’t much else around . . . oh, wait, I did do mushrooms one time, but they made me puke, so forget that.” I shuddered. “I hate throwing up.”

“Don’t do heroin,” said Lena, and everyone else laughed.

“So, flash forward, I’m thirty-four, I’m married, I have a kid, I throw my back out at my gym, and my doctor gives me Vicodin.” I breathed, remembering. “And it was like that scene in
The Wizard of Oz
where everything goes from black-and-white to color. It was like that was the way the world was meant to feel.” I could feel my body reacting to the memory, the blood rising to the surface of my skin, my heartbeat quickening. “I was calm, I was happy, I felt like I could get more things accomplished. I started writing these blog posts, and they really took off. The
pills made me brave enough to write with all those people reading. They made me patient enough to put up with my daughter, who is gorgeous and smart but can be a handful. They made me who I was supposed to be. I know that’s not what I’m supposed to say in here,” I said, before anyone could chide me for romanticizing my use or failing to “play the tape,” “but I also know that we’re supposed to be honest. And that’s the God’s honest truth. I loved the way I felt when I was on pills.”

“So what happened?” Gabrielle prompted.

I sighed. “I just started taking too many of them. More pills, different kinds, stronger medications, and then, eventually, I wasn’t taking them to feel good, I was taking them just to feel normal. I was napping all the time, and I was impatient with my daughter. I wasn’t myself. I took money from a petty cash account at work and moved it into my personal account. It wasn’t exactly embezzlement, but it wasn’t exactly something I was supposed to be doing. And . . .” Here came the hard part. “I tried to drive while I was impaired. One of the teachers saw what was going on and took my keys away. Then my husband found out what was going on and . . .” I shrugged. By now, my look of contrition was so well-rehearsed that it felt almost natural on my face. “Here I am. Just another sick person trying to get better.”

For a minute, there was silence, as the ladies contemplated my boring, bare-bones, drama-free tale. Everyone had something better—an overdose, an arrest, an intervention full of tears and accusations. The previous week one of the women, a fifth-grade teacher who’d also bought pills online, had talked about being blackmailed. The person she bought from spent an afternoon on Google, figured out where she worked and to whom she was married, and then e-mailed her to say that if she didn’t pay first five hundred, then a thousand, then three thousand dollars, he’d tell her husband and her boss—and maybe even
the local paper—just what she’d been up to. It had gone on for months. Linda had drained her savings account and dipped into her twelve-year-old daughter’s college fund before trying to kill herself. Luckily, it hadn’t worked, and now she was here . . . and as for the guy who’d tortured her, Linda said with a sad smile that her counselor had helped her fill out a form on the DEA’s website. “I have no idea if they caught him,” she’d said. “Probably he’s still out there, shaking down other housewives.”

I remembered feeling almost dizzy with relief that nothing like that had ever happened to me. Now, with dozens of puzzled and accusatory faces staring at me, I almost wished something more catastrophic had landed me at Meadowcrest.

“That’s it?” an Ashley or a Brittany murmured. I wondered if I should have talked about learning that my mom was an alcoholic . . . but where could I have fit that in?

“Hey, look, I’m sorry I don’t have some big, dramatic story about almost dying, or almost killing someone, or getting in a car crash . . .”

“It’s not that.” I’d expected Gabrielle to be the one to push me for more details, more emotion, just more in general, but instead it was shiny-haired, tiny-voiced Aubrey, all scrunched up in the seat on my left, who was calling me out. “It’s like you’re telling your story, only it sounds like it happened to someone else.” She squirmed as I looked at her, but she didn’t back down. “Were you sad about it? When it was happening?”

“Of course I was sad!” I snapped. “God. Do you think I’d be here if I wasn’t sad?”

“But you don’t sound sad.” Now one of the Brittanys had taken up the attack, only she didn’t sound angry as much as puzzled. “You just sound, like, okay, this happened, then that happened, and then I started taking Percocet, and then I started taking Oxy . . .”

I wanted to say that progression was a central part of every other girl’s story—first the booze, then the pills, then the powder, then the needle. So why was I being criticized for giving a version of the same tale everyone told?

“What about when your daughter would want you to play with her, and you’d tell her to go away?” Finally, Mary had decided to join the conversation. “How do you feel about that?”

“I feel incredibly ashamed. I hate myself for not being there for her.” I mustered up all the sincerity I could—the hurt look, the shaky voice, the defeated posture acknowledging I’d committed the ultimate female transgression, the Sin of Bad Motherhood. “I feel awful about what I did. That’s why I’m here. So I won’t ever have to do those things again.”

This announcement was met with unexpected silence. Aubrey fidgeted in her seat; an Amber retied her shoelaces. Gabrielle flipped to a fresh page in her notebook. Finally, she said, “I guess maybe Allison’s story sounds different to us because she wasn’t using for very long.” She looked at me. “What was it, six months?”

“About that.” Six months was as long as I’d been buying pills online. My actual abuse—or, if not abuse, the length of time my use had been problematic—was closer to two years.

“For most of us, there was that big wake-up call,” Mary continued. “I got a DUI. Aubrey got arrested. People lost their relationships, or had their kids taken away. But just because Allison’s got a high bottom . . .”

“Thank you,” I murmured. High bottom. Was there a lovelier phrase in the English language?

“It doesn’t mean she didn’t have a bottom. Or that she’s not in trouble. Or that she doesn’t need our help.”

“Thank you,” I said again. As the next Share began—this one from a twenty-eight-year-old heroin addict from New Mexico
who’d come to New Jersey as part of some kind of rehab exchange program—I returned my attention to the new lyrics to “One Day More.” “One more day, then I’m in rehab . . . Gonna get drunk off my ass . . . I’ll buy ev’ry pill and take it . . . plus Champagne and speed and grass.” Would Melanie be able to pull off the role of Liesl, the besotted sixteen-going-on-seventeen-year-old, who we’d decided would be in love with crystal meth instead of Rolfe the Nazi messenger boy? I looked around the circle, realizing that I’d never know. If everything went the way I’d planned, I’d be in the car with Dave when the first song began. I felt a surprising amount of regret, as I looked at Mary, and Aubrey, and Shannon, and realized I’d never hear how their stories turned out.
Ellie,
I told myself sternly. Ellie was the one who mattered.

That night they turned the phones on, so that the women who were off the seven-day blackout could have their regular twice-a-week ten-minute phone call home. “Where am I picking you up?” asked Dave, who’d swallowed my story about having a day pass without a single question.

“You can just wait in the parking lot. I think I remember what the car looks like.”

I waited for a laugh that did not come. “When do you need to be back?” He sounded like he was scheduling a dentist’s appointment, not a reunion with his wife.

“Eight.” Actually, I wasn’t planning on coming back at all. I would attend Ellie’s party, then ask Dave to take me for an early dinner, during which I would convince him that I’d gotten everything I could out of my rehab experience and was ready to come home. “Is Ellie excited?”

“She is. She and your mom have been making cupcakes, and paper chains.”

“Paper chains?” I hadn’t heard of such a thing since I was
Ellie’s age myself, and, certainly, they hadn’t been a feature of any of the birthday parties I’d attended with her.

“Yup. We decided to have the party here instead of BouncyTime. It’s always too loud there. She gets overwhelmed. And, after Jayden’s party . . .” He let his voice trail off, too polite to remind me of the disaster Jayden’s party had become.

“Okay,” I said slowly. I was surprised that nobody had asked me, or even told me, before making this change, but my main concern was that the party was a success, and that Ellie was happy. “So did you hire a magician? That petting zoo that Chloe had? And what about favors?” Lately, the trend was for kids to burn CDs of their own party-music mixes, and hand them out in the goody bags.

“I think there’s just going to be games.”

“Games?” I wondered if he meant something like laser tag.

“Party games. Charades, and pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. Like that. Your mother’s really the one running the show, and it sounds like it’s under control.”

Charades? Paper chains and homemade cupcakes? I wasn’t sure anything was under control . . . but I tried to sound cheerful as I said, “See you Saturday.”

This will work,
I told myself as I got ready for bed that night. As always, I was thinking of Ellie. What had she done that day? What dress had she worn? Had she eaten her dinner, or snuck it into the toilet, the way I’d caught her doing the week before I left? Were there kids she knew at the Stonefield camp? Did she like the counselors? How was my mother handling life without my dad? And what about Dave?

I couldn’t bring myself to ask him the big questions:
Do you still love me? What do you tell yourself about why I’m in here? Will we still be married when I’m out?

I refused to let myself think about it. Instead, I brushed my teeth, put on what I knew would be the first of at least two sets of pajamas (I was still waking up at midnight, or one in the morning, having completely sweated through the first pair), and, feeling clumsy and strange, got down on my knees.

“Are you there, God?” I began. “It’s me, Allison. Thank you for the beautiful sunshine today. Thank you for the inspiration about the talent show. Thank you . . .” At this part, my voice got clogged with tears. “Thank you for keeping Ellie safe. For not letting me hurt her. Thank you for another day of not using.” That last part struck me as completely ridiculous—how could I possibly use, even if I wanted to, in a place like this? I said it anyhow. Then I worked myself back upright, stretched, and climbed into bed.

At ten o’clock, the lights went out. For a moment, I lay in the darkness. Then Aubrey called, from the other bedroom, “Good night, Allison.”

“Good night, Aubrey,” I called back.

“Good night, Mary,” Shannon said.

“Good night, Shannon,” said Mary.

“Good night, Ashley.”

“Which one?”

Giggles, then, “Ashley C.”

“Good night, Marissa.”

I remembered what Nicholas had told me, about how sometimes beginners substituted the group for God.

“Good night, Ashley D.”

“Good night, Lena.”

Could you call this love, or a Higher Power? All of us working toward the same goal, helping one another as best we could?
Something that’s bigger than you, and something that’s kind and forgiving,
I’d heard one of the meeting leaders say.
That’s all your Higher Power has to be.
So could this be it?

I wasn’t sure. I shut my eyes, rolled onto my side, and slipped into what had become my standard two hours’ worth of sleep, followed by five hours of lying awake, sweating and crying in my narrow bed, waiting for the flashlight’s glare to shine through the slit of a window, wondering how I’d gotten here and what my life would be like when I got out.