Elin Hilderbrand - Winter Storms

From Stowe, it’s up to Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom to spend the night in St. Johnsbury. From there, they’ll go to Franconia Notch State Park, where they’ll ride the Cannon Mountain Aerial Tramway for the ultimate in foliage viewing. They’ll end with a night in charming Portsmouth, New Hampshire, a town Kelley thinks is possibly the best-kept secret in America. He has arranged for a couple’s massage in front of the fire, for them to go apple-picking, on a hayride, out to dinners at fine country inns where bottles of champagne will be chilled and waiting on the tables, and for a personal yoga instructor in Stowe and then again in Portsmouth. He has made a mix of Mitzi’s favorite songs to play on the drive, and he’s packing up pumpkin muffins and his famous snack mix (secret ingredient: Bugles!) in case they get hungry on the road.

He prints out their itinerary on creamy paper and presents it to Mitzi one night before bed.

“Don’t say anything until you’ve read it through,” Kelley says. He fears Mitzi’s knee-jerk reaction will be to say no, they can’t go, what if they miss news about Bart, what if Bart comes home and neither of them is there? Irrational arguments born out of her very real pain.

Mitzi does as he asks and reads the itinerary. When she looks up at him, her eyes are shining with tears.

“You went through all this trouble for me?” she says.

“For us,” he says.

“It looks wonderful,” she says. “I can’t wait.”

She goes to outpatient drug treatment at Patrick’s insistence and although Jennifer protests initially, she also feels relieved-when caught red-handed by Patrick and Kevin in Norah’s driveway, she had worried that Patrick would ship her off to Hazelden or Betty Ford. Jennifer had also been concerned about Norah. Were Patrick and Kevin going to call the police? Patrick told her not to worry about Norah, to worry only about herself and getting out of the grip of drugs.

Yes, okay. Jennifer has excelled at everything her entire life and she decides she’s going to excel at rehab. She goes through the lectures and the therapy, but it’s harder than anyone can imagine. Jennifer feels like her body hates her. She can’t keep food down; she can’t sleep; she can’t wake up. She shakes, she sweats, she feels ugh, she feels ick.

Patrick is a champion at the beginning. He is the person Jennifer was when Patrick first went to prison-steadfast, supportive, kind. He checks in with her every few hours; he picks up the slack with the kids. But after a few weeks, he seems to believe the problem is solved, the war won. Jennifer is off drugs; her therapy decreases from every day to twice a week to once a week. She pees in a cup; she is pronounced clean.

Patrick is busy trying to get his hedge fund up and running. He has sixteen million dollars from investors, all of them people he has worked with in the past who continue to believe him capable of big things. He would like to double or triple that amount. It’s not easy convincing new investors that he’s legit, but he’s persistent in presenting his business plan and a list of personal references. He’s working out of his and Jennifer’s home office, and he requires absolute silence; he seems resentful that Jennifer is also running a business out of that office-a successful business, she might add-and that she has fabric samples and Pantones lying around everywhere. Jennifer is basically forced to move her operation to the formal dining room-they never use it anyway, but she resents being ousted. Patrick yells at the children when they get home from school. He bans the PlayStation 4. Barrett and Pierce both complain to Jennifer. They start spending the afternoons at their friends’ houses.

Jennifer says to Patrick, “You’re alienating your own children.”

Patrick gives her an incredulous look. “Do you or do you not want money? I have to start from scratch here. I’d like to build something quality, and that takes both time and concentration. I can’t focus when the boys are stealing cars and killing zombies a floor above me, I’m sorry.”

Jennifer’s drug counselor, Sable, a lovely, refined woman in her midfifties, strongly encourages Jennifer to give up all mind-altering substances, including alcohol. But Jennifer can’t, she simply can’t give up her wine. “I’m not an alcoholic,” she tells Sable.

Sable gives her a steady look. Sable has shared bits and pieces of her own history. When she was a slender young woman in her twenties, she worked for a drug dealer on the Canadian border. She kept guns under her bed and had a refrigerator full of money.

“They told me I would be okay as long as I didn’t start using,” Sable said. “And they were right. Once I started using, I sank like a stone.”

Now, Sable says, “Alcohol impairs our judgment. My main fear is you drink, you get hooked back on pills.”

“That won’t happen,” Jennifer assures her.

But one Friday night after a particularly trying week, Jennifer pours herself a second glass of wine, then a third, then a fourth. The boys are out at sleepovers and Jennifer has made veal chops with blue cheese mashed potatoes and a lavish spinach salad for herself and Patrick-but at eight o’clock, Patrick is still locked in “their” office, working.

After her fifth glass of wine, Jennifer pounds on the office door. Patrick opens it. He’s on the phone but she doesn’t care.

“Hang up!” she screams. “Hang! Up!”

What follows is the worst fight of their sixteen-year union. Everything comes out. Jennifer hates what Patrick did, hates the besmirching of their family name, hates that all the parents at the kids’ schools look at her and the kids askance. People say they don’t judge, but of course they do judge. They think Patrick is a cheater and a fraud and that Jennifer is guilty by association. Then it’s Patrick’s turn to retaliate: He can’t believe Jennifer let herself fall prey to the allure of pharmaceuticals. It’s so predictable! he says. He doesn’t understand how she could lose control that way when she was in charge of their children!

“Don’t you dare,” Jennifer says. “Don’t you dare imply that my parenting was in any way compromised.”

“Wasn’t it?” Patrick asks. “Be truthful with me. Be truthful with yourself. Did you ever drive the children while you were high?”

Jennifer fish-mouths. She wants to be indignant, wants to say she would never, ever have done such a thing-but she can’t lie. There were some moments when she parented while high. She got lost driving home from one of Pierce’s away lacrosse games and ended up in Revere. Revere, of all places! While on oxy, she lost her temper with Barrett, used some atrocious language, had an accident in the kitchen. While on Ativan, she fell asleep reading to Jaime more times than she could count, sometimes not even making it through a single page.

She starts to cry. “I failed you,” she says.

“No,” Patrick says. “I failed you. Your addiction to oxy and Ativan is my fault.”

As much as Jennifer would like to hand Patrick the blame, she won’t. “I’m an adult,” she says. “Taking the pills was my decision. Seeking out more-from Norah-was my decision. A decision I made again and again.”

They are no longer angry. Now, they are sad. Patrick opens his arms; Jennifer crawls into them. They make love, possibly the fiercest, most passionate love of their marriage, and Jennifer thinks that maybe, just maybe, everything is going to be all right.

Later, they eat the blue cheese mashed potatoes out of the pot while standing in front of the stove. Patrick gnaws on a veal chop while Jennifer attacks the spinach salad.