All Fall Down: A Novel (29 page)

“What’s your damage?” asked the girl next to me. She was in her twenties, broad-shouldered and solid, with no makeup on her pale skin and long brown hair piled on top of her head in a messy bun. She wore gray sweatpants and an Eagles jersey and a nametag that read
LENA.

“Excuse me?”

“Your stuff. Your drug of choice,” she explained in a flat, nasal voice, as Mary sat down across from me.

“Pills. But I don’t really . . . I mean, I don’t think that I’m . . .” I shut my mouth and tried again. “I’m not actually planning on staying. I don’t think this is the right place for me.”

The Eagles-jersey girl and Mary both gave me knowing smiles. “That’s what I said,” Mary told us. With her blue eyes and white curls, her rounded hips and sagging bosom, she looked like Mrs. Claus. Possibly like Mrs. Claus after a rough weekend, during which she’d discovered naughty pictures of the elves on Santa’s hard drive. “I used to put my gin in a water bottle. Because that was
classy.
” A Boston accent turned the word to
clah-see.
I sipped my tea as the other girls and women nodded. “So I came down here with my bottle of Dasani, thinking I had everyone fooled.”

“I wasn’t fooling anyone,” said Lena. “I came straight from the hospital. They Narcanned me.”

“Excuse me?” I asked.

“I OD’d. I almost died. They had to give me Narcan—it’s a shot that, like, brings you back to life. I woke up and ripped the IVs out of my arm and, like, ran out the door. I had my stash in my bra,” she said.

“Ah.”
Stash in bra,
I thought. Add that to the list of things I
didn’t do and did not completely understand. Was
stash
different from
works?

“But they caught me—of course.” Lena used her hands when she talked, big, broad, sweeping motions. When she wasn’t gesturing, she was smoothing her ponytail like a pet. “I was in jail for six weeks, and then I was on work release, but I fucked that up and got loaded, and my PO busted me . . .” PO. Work release. Jail. Gin in water bottles. Drinking before the third hour of the
Today
show. I looked around, again noting the doors, wondering what would really happen if I just got up, collected my purse and duffel bag, and walked out. Of course, I didn’t know exactly where I was. That was a problem. Nor did I have any money—I remembered that they’d taken my wallet and my phone when they’d taken my bag. I rested my throbbing temples in my palms and forced myself to breathe slowly, trying to keep that jumping-out-of-my-skin feeling at bay.

A buzzer sounded. The girls and women stood, trays in hand, and marched to a stainless steel window cut into the wall. I picked up my own empty tray and got in line, depositing my silverware in a bin full of detergent, pushing my mug through the slot, from which a plastic-gloved, hair-netted dishwasher grabbed it. “Come on,” said Aubrey, and I followed the crowd out the door.

A
t nine o’clock that morning, I was sitting on a couch covered in a shiny and decidedly unnatural fabric in a room called the Ladies’ Lounge, and a thumb-shaped, red-faced man was yelling at me.

“All addicts are selfish,” he said. He was, like the famed little teapot, short and stout. His cheap acrylic sweater was a red that matched his face. His blue slacks bunched alarmingly at his crotch, the cuffs so short they displayed his argyle socks and an expanse of hairy white shin. His tassled loafers were scuffed. On his sweater was pinned a nametag reading
DARNTON.
He looked at us accusingly. There were three of us in orientation: me, and Aubrey, and Mary, who’d been crying quietly since she’d walked through the door.

“All addicts are selfish,” Darnton repeated, and raised his caterpillar-thick eyebrows, daring us to disagree. When no one did, he opened the blue-covered paperback in his hand and began reading. I wondered idly whether he was starting where he’d left off with the last group; whether he just worked his way right through
The Big Book
, regardless of who was listening. “The first requirement is that we be convinced that any life run on self-will can hardly be a success.” I blinked. My hands hurt and
were trembling. My head was still throbbing. I wanted to lie down, curled beneath a blanket, soothed and calmed by my pills.

“Why are you here?” Darnton asked Aubrey.

She shrugged. “ ’Cause my parents found my works.”

“Do you want to stop using?”

Another shrug. “I guess.”

“You guess,” Darnton repeated, his voice rich with sarcasm. Was mocking addicts really an effective way to get them to change? Before I could come to any conclusions, Darnton turned on Mary. “How about you?”

“I was drinking too much,” she whispered in a quavering voice. “I did terrible things.”

Darnton appeared just as interested in Mary’s self-flagellation as he did in Aubrey’s nonchalance. “And you?”

I forced myself to sit up straight. “I was taking painkillers.”

“And you were taking painkillers because . . ?” the thumb persisted.

“Because I was in pain,” I said. Duh. Never mind that the pain was spiritual instead of physical. The thumb did not need to know that. I turned my eyes toward the wall, where two posters were hanging.
STEP ONE
, I read.
We admitted that we were powerless over alcohol and that our lives had become unmanageable
, then tuned back into the jerky little man lecturing us about our “character defects,” hectoring us about what he kept calling “the brain disease of addiction,” a disease that, he claimed, was rooted in self-centeredness.

“If anything, I was using the pills because I was trying to do too much for other people,” I interrupted. “My father’s got Alzheimer’s, so I’ve been helping him and my mother. I take care of my daughter. And I write for a women’s website.”

Darnton’s eyebrows were practically at his hairline . . . or where his hairline must have been at some point. “Oh, a writer,”
he said. He probably thought I was lying. Given my scratched hands, my pallor, my ratty hair and attire, my vague smell of puke—and, of course, the fact that I was in rehab—I couldn’t blame him.

“Yes, I’m a writer,” I said. “And my life was not unmanageable. Everyone else’s life was unmanageable.”

The thumb opened his book again and kept reading. “Selfishness—self-centeredness! That, we think, is the root of our trouble. Driven by a hundred forms of fear, self-delusion, self-seeking, and self-pity—”

“I volunteered,” I said, hearing my voice quiver. I swallowed hard. No way was I going to cry in front of this hectoring little jerk. “I ran my house. I took care of my daughter. I took care of my parents. I helped out at my daughter’s school . . .”

He lifted his eyebrows again. “Doing everything, were we?”

“So either I’m selfish or I’m a martyr?”

The man shrugged. “Your best thinking got you here. Think about that.” He returned to his reading. “The alcoholic is an extreme example of self-will run riot, though he usually doesn’t think so.” He paused to give me a significant look.

“I’m not a ‘he,’ ” I said. I’d been acquainted with
The Big Book
for only twenty minutes, but I could already tell that it needed a gender update.

“Above everything, we alcoholics must be rid of this selfishness. We must, or it kills us!” He set the book down and looked us over. Aubrey appeared to be asleep, and Mary was crying quietly into her hands.

“You think your life is fine,” he said to me.
Better than yours,
I thought unkindly, imagining the existence that went with his outfit—a vinyl-sided house in some unremarkable suburb, a ten-year-old shoebox of a car with spent shocks, waiting for his tax
refund to arrive so he could pay down the interest on his credit card. A little man with a little mind and a handful of slogans he’d repeat, no matter who was in the room with him or what their problems were.

“I bet when you go home, and you’re looking at things with sober eyes, you’re going to think differently.” When I didn’t answer, he said, “Before I got sober, I’d been building shelves in my kitchen. I thought they were beautiful. I thought I really knew what I was doing. When I came home, I saw that those shelves were a disaster. They were crooked. The cabinet doors didn’t shut. I’d kicked a hole in the wall when I got frustrated.”

“Sorry to hear that,” I said, even though I wasn’t. I couldn’t have cared less about this man with his bad haircut and cheap clothes. Besides, my house looked fine. No holes in my walls, no crooked cabinets. I had Henry the handyman on speed dial.

“You were taking care of your parents,” said the little man.

“My father has early-stage Alzheimer’s.”

Mary finally stopped crying long enough to look up. “Me, too! I mean, not me. My husband.”

Darnton lifted a hand, silencing Mary. “And your daughter,” the little man continued.

“My daughter. My business. My husband. My house.”

“Did you ever think that you were . . .”—he hooked his fingers into scare quotes—“ ‘helping’ all those people so you could control them?”

Suddenly I was so tired I could barely speak, and I was craving a pill so badly I could cry. How was I going to live the rest of my life, in a world overrun with idiots like this one, without the promise of any comfort at the end of the day? “I was helping them because they needed help.”

“I’m selfish,” said Aubrey, in a whisper. Her heavily shadowed
eyelids were cast down, and she worried a cuticle as she spoke. “I stole from my parents. I stole from my grandma.”

“What about you?” the man asked Mary.

“I don’t think I was,” she said hesitantly. “My drinking didn’t get bad until after my daughter had her babies. She had triplets, because of the in vitro, so I’d drive from Maryland to Long Island once a week, and spend three days with her, and then drive down to New Jersey for the weekends to help my son. He’s single, and he only sees his two on the weekends. That’s why I drank, I think. I’d be so wound up after all that driving, and the kids, that I just couldn’t turn myself off. So I’d have a gin and tonic—that was what my husband and I always drank, gin and tonics—and when that didn’t do it, I’d have two, and then . . .” Tears spilled over the reddened rims of her eyes. “I got a DUI,” she whispered. One hand wandered to the hem of her sweatshirt and tugged at it as she spoke. “I rear-ended someone with my grandbabies in the car. I wasn’t planning on driving, but my son got stuck at work, and I was the only one who could get the kids. I should have said no, made up some reason why I couldn’t drive them, but I was so ashamed. So ashamed,” she repeated, then started to cry again.

Great,
I thought.
An angry thumb, a drunk granny, and a thief.
What was wrong with this picture? The fact that I was in it.

“Excuse me,” I said politely, and walked to the door.

Darnton glared at me. “Orientation’s until ten-fifteen. Then you have Equine.”

“Equine? Yeah, no,” I said. “I need to speak to someone now.” I exited the room. Margo, the woman from the breakfast hour, had been replaced by another young woman in the same outfit. This one had a mustache, faint but discernible.
The Big Book
was open on her computer keyboard. Underneath it, I could see
People
magazine—“
The Bachelor
’s Women Tell All!”

“Oh my God,” I said. “I’m going to miss the Fantasy Suites.”

The woman flashed a quick smile. She wore a pin, instead of a nametag on a lanyard around her neck, which read
WANDA.
“Yeah, sorry. No TV for you guys, just recovery-related movies.”

“How will I live,” I wondered, “if I don’t know whether he picks Kelly S. or Kelly D.?” As I spoke, I remembered all the episodes I’d watched with Ellie snuggled on the bed beside me, a bowl of popcorn between us, her head on my shoulder as she slipped into sleep. Normal. (Sort of.) Happy. God, what had happened to take me away from that and bring me here?

The woman lowered her voice. “Can you actually tell them apart?”

“One’s a hairdresser, and the other one’s a former NBA dancer,” I said.

“Okay, but they look exactly the same.”

“All the women on that show look exactly the same.” I could talk about this forever and had, in fact, written several well-received blog posts on the homogeneity of
The Bachelor
’s ladies.

“Tell you what,” said the woman. “I can’t sneak in a DVD. But I’ll tell you who got roses.”

“Deal,” I said, feeling incrementally relieved that not everyone in this place was a monster. Just then, a new Meadowcrest employee cruised into view. Wanda shoved her
People
magazine out of sight, as the new woman—middle-aged, blonde hair in a bob, tired blue eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses—looked me over.

“Hi there,” I said, sounding professional and polite. “Can you help me find my counselor?”

“Who is it?”

“Well, I’m hoping you can help me with that. I actually don’t have a name yet. I just finished orientation.” As far as I was concerned, that was true.

“Normally, you aren’t assigned a counselor until your third or fourth day.”

“Can I use the phone?”

“If you just came, you’re on your seven-day blackout. You need to get permission to use the phone from your counselor.”

“But you just told me I don’t have a counselor.” This conversation was beginning to feel like a tired Abbott and Costello routine.

“Then,” said the woman, her voice smug, “you’ll just have to be patient, won’t you?”

“I don’t think you understand,” I said. “This is a mistake. I don’t need to be in rehab. I’m not a drug addict. I was taking painkillers that were prescribed to me by a doctor. Now I’m fine, and I want to go home.”

“You can sign yourself out AMA—that’s ‘against medical advice’—but your counselor needs to sign your paperwork.”

“But I don’t have a counselor!”

She stared at me for a minute. I stared right back, my feet planted firmly.

“Hold on,” she finally grumbled. Bending over the telephone, she muttered something I couldn’t catch. A minute later, a very large woman with lank brown hair, pale skin, and pale, bulging eyes came waddling around the corner. Her khaki pants swished with each step; her lanyard flapped and flopped against the lolloping rolls of her flesh.