Jennifer Weiner - All Fall Down - A Novel

“Ma’am?” After what felt like another five minutes’ worth of wrangling—debit or credit? Cash back? Tens or twenties?—I gave Ellie the little bag with the candle and the moisturizer and slung the bigger one over my shoulder, along with my purse, and the two of us walked onto South Street. I’d drop her off with Dave, then go to the five-thirty meeting of what had become my home group, the AA meeting I attended every week. He’d grill the turkey, I’d make rice and asparagus to go with it when I got back, and the three of us would share dinner together before Ellie and I went home.

No big changes for the first year was what they told us at Meadowcrest, but Dave and I had had to downsize, moving to modest apartments in the city and putting the big house on the market, especially after it became clear that my job, at least for the first little while, would be staying sober, with blogging a very distant second. I had struggled with it mightily, complaining to Bernice that there was no box on the tax return that read “not taking pills.”

“I hate that this is what I do,” I told her and the other seven members of my outpatient group, the one I attended four mornings a week, two hours at a time. I was desperate for my world to return to the way it had been before I’d gone to rehab, before I’d started with the pills. “I want my life back. Does anyone else get that?” Fabulous Gregory had nodded. Brian had grunted. Jeannie had shrugged and said that her pre-sobriety life hadn’t been all that great.

“Tell us what you mean,” Bernice prompted.

“I mean,” I said, “I wake up. I take Ellie to school. I get some exercise. I come here for two hours. I go to AA meetings for another hour or two, and I don’t take pills, and I don’t take pills, and I don’t take pills.” I raised my hands, empty palms held open to the ceiling. “And that’s it. God, can you imagine if I had a college reunion coming up? ‘What are you up to these days, Allison?’ ‘Well, I don’t take pills.’ ‘And . . . that’s it?’ ‘Yeah, it’s pretty much a full-time gig.’ ”

“Why you so worried ’bout what other people gonna think?” Bernice could switch in and out of ghetto vernacular—or what she referred to as “the colorful patois of my youth”—with ease. When she was talking to me, she’d alternate between her brassiest round-the-way tones and her most overeducated and multisyllabic. “You really worried about what the tax man’s gonna think? Or some made-up person at some college reunion you don’t even have coming up?”

“I don’t know,” I muttered. “I just feel useless.”

“Useless,” said Bernice, “is better than using. And if you use . . .”

“You die,” the group chanted. I hung my head. I still wasn’t entirely convinced this was true, but I’d heard it enough, and seen enough evidence, to at least be open to the possibility. There would be no one more pill or just one drink for me. That way lay madness . . . or jails, institutions, and death, as the Basic Text liked to say.

The night of Ellie’s birthday party, when I’d gone back to Meadowcrest, I was humbled. More than that, I was scared. In that moment, in the bathroom, I’d seen a version of my life unfolding, a path where I faked and glad-handed my way through the rest of the twenty-eight days, and then went home and picked up my addiction right where I’d put it down. Soon, of course, the pills would get too expensive, and, probably, I’d be making less money, assuming I’d be able to work at all. Maybe it would take years, maybe just months, but, eventually, I would do what all the women I’d met had done, and trade the pricy Vicodin and Percocet and Oxy for heroin, which gave you twice the high at a quarter of the cost. I pictured myself dropping Ellie off at Stonefield in the morning, then driving my Prius to the Badlands, where even a straight white lady like me could buy whatever she wanted. Philadelphia Magazine had done a special report on the city’s ten worst drug corners and, of course, I had firsthand recommendations from the various Ashleys and Brittanys. And maybe I’d get away with it, for a little while. Or maybe I’d get into a car accident with a thousand dollars’ worth of H stuffed in my bra, like one of the Meadowcrest girls. Or I’d get arrested, dragged off to jail, and left to kick on a concrete floor with nothing but Tylenol 3, like an Amber had told us all about.

Dave would divorce me—that part, of course, was nonnegotiable. Worse, I would lose Ellie. In a few years’ time . . . well. You know how they say you never see any baby pigeons? I remembered Lena asking in group one day. You know what else you never see’s an old lady heroin addict. Or, Shannon had added, one with kids.

Back in my room, my Big Book was still open on my desk and my clothes were still in the dresser. “Ohmygod, where were you?” Aubrey demanded as she stormed into my bedroom, followed by Lena, who was still wearing the mascara mustache she’d donned to appear in our play. “We were so worried,” said Mary. She twisted her eyeglass chain. “The RCs wouldn’t tell us anything, but they were all on their walkie-talkies, and they made us all sit in the lounge and watch 28 Days again. They thought you ran away!”

“I did,” I confessed. Sitting cross-legged on my bed, the expectant faces of the women who’d become my friends around me, I couldn’t remember ever feeling so scared. Admitting you had a problem was the first step—everyone knew that—but admitting you had a problem also left you open to the possibility that maybe you couldn’t fix it. “I got Dave to pick me up, and I went to Ellie’s birthday party, and we dropped her off at her friend’s house, and I was in the bathroom, and I looked in the medicine cabinet, and I was thinking, Please let there be something in here, and then . . .” Shannon took my hand in hers.

“What is wrong with me?” I cried. “What’s wrong with me that I can be at my daughter’s birthday party, having a perfectly nice time, and the only thing I can think about is where am I going to get pills?”

Lena made a face. Mary patted my shoulder. But it was little Aubrey who spoke up. “What’s wrong with you is what’s wrong with all of us,” she said. “We’re sick people . . .”

“. . . getting better,” the room chorused.

Nicholas wanted me to stay at Meadowcrest for ninety days. Horrified at the thought of being away from Ellie for so long, I’d bargained him down to sixty. I threw myself into the work, the meetings, the lectures, the role-playing assignments, the making of posters, the writing of book reports, knowing that I was safe at Meadowcrest. I couldn’t get pills, even if I wanted them. The world would be a different story.

A week before my discharge, Dave came to a family session. I was so nervous that I hadn’t been able to eat anything the day before. “What’s the worst thing that could happen?” Kirsten asked me, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell her. The worst thing was that he’d show up with papers, or a lawyer’s name; that he’d tell me he didn’t know if he’d ever be able to trust me again and that he didn’t want to stay married. I’d gone into the meeting prepared for that, so it was actually a relief when Dave sat there, stone-faced, and ran down the list of my lies, my failings, my fuckups and betrayals—the money I’d blown on pills, the way I’d put my job, my health, and my safety at risk, and worst of all, the way I’d put Ellie in danger. “It’s the lying,” he’d said, in a soft, toneless voice. “That’s what I can’t get over. She had this whole secret life. I don’t even know who she is anymore.”

I didn’t even try to defend myself, to point out the ways he’d let me down and made it hard to tell him the truth about how I was feeling. I’d been warned about what was known in the AA rooms as cross-talk. I couldn’t argue, or bring up L. McIntyre, or talk about how he used marathon training as an excuse to literally run away from his wife and his daughter. I couldn’t do anything but sit there and stare at my hands and try not to cry when Kirsten asked if he thought our marriage was irreparably damaged and listen to him sigh and then, slowly, say, “I don’t know.”