All Fall Down: A Novel (43 page)

Ellie and I walked Bingo around the block, Bingo trotting briskly, Ellie clutching the leash with two hands. “Say goodbye,” Ellie instructed the dog. Bingo was docile as I scooped her up and placed her in her crate, even as Ellie begged me to let the dog ride in her lap. She didn’t make a sound the entire ride home. Once we were back in Philadelphia, we walked her around the neighborhood, letting her sniff the trees and hydrants. She ignored other dogs, hiding, trembling, behind my legs when they got close enough to try to sniff her. “She is SHY,” said Ellie, who didn’t seem to mind, as long as Bingo let her put the little tinsel collar she’d crafted around her neck, and hold the leash while they walked.

“Do you think we should try to find a better name for her?” I asked.

Ellie considered as we approached our front door. Finally, she shook her head. “I think she is a Bingo,” she decided, and I told Ellie that I thought she was right.

At home, Bingo sniffed her dish full of kibble, had a few laps of water, then wormed underneath my bed, in spite of Ellie’s importuning and threats to drag her out into the open. “Let’s just leave her be.” Ellie had gotten into her pajamas, and we read
Squids Will Be Squids
and
A Big Guy Took My Ball
before I kissed her good night and tucked her into her bed. As tempting as it was to let Ellie sleep with me every night, I’d heard enough lectures about boundaries to know that I needed to put them in place (plus, she hadn’t had an accident in months, but I didn’t want to take chances with my new mattress). She was my daughter, not my friend, or my comfort, or my confidante . . . and so, as much as I would have liked the feeling of another warm body in my bed, or the sweet smile she wore when she woke up (in the handful of seconds before remembering that the world and most of the people in it displeased her), I made sure she at least began each night in her own room.

So it was just me in the bedroom when Bingo inched her way out from underneath the bed and peered up at me. Her tail drooped. Her expression seemed despondent. I wondered if she missed her pups, or if she even remembered she’d had them—I knew so little about dogs!

“What is it?” I asked, putting down
A Woman’s Guide to the Twelve Steps.

Silence.

“Do you want to go out?” I guessed.

Nothing. I took her downstairs, clipped her to her leash, walked her down the steps, and stood at the edge of the sidewalk while she did her business. Upstairs, instead of going back underneath the bed, she stood at the edge and looked at me.

“Oh, okay,” I said, and patted the mattress. Before the second word was out of my mouth, Bingo had hopped nimbly onto
the bed and was settling down against me, folding herself into the space behind my bent knees as I lay curled up on my side.

“You’re going to sleep there?” No answer. I pulled the comforter up over both of us and closed my eyes.
Thank you, God, for Bingo. Thank you for Ellie. Thank you for such beautiful weather. Thank you for helping me not take pills today.
It wasn’t much of a prayer, but it was the best I could do.

• • •

Each year since we’d moved to Haverford, I’d hosted a Chanukah Happening (on the invitations, I’d spell it Chappening). Dozens of kids, parents, colleagues, and relatives and friends would fill our house, some bearing gifts for Ellie, or boxes of chocolates, or, more likely, bottles of wine. I would serve roast chickens, a giant green salad, and a table full of desserts the guests had brought. In the living room, kids would spin dreidels, and guests would be participating in the latke cook-off in the kitchen. We’d have straight potato pancakes, sweet-potato latkes, latkes with zucchini and shreds of carrots, latkes made with flour or potato starch or, once, tapioca. Barry would contribute
sufganiyot,
the sweet filled doughnuts that were also traditional Chanukah fare, and, for weeks, the kitchen would smell like a deep fryer and my hair and skin would feel lightly coated with grease.

There would be beer and wine at those parties . . . and, as the crowd got bigger and the preparations more elaborate, I’d taken more and more pills to get myself through it, to deal with the tension of whether Dave was helping me or even talking to me, pills to cope with my mom, who would show up with an eight-pound brisket and demand the use of an oven.

This year, my Chanukah Happening was limited to four people: me and Ellie, Dave and my mom. And Bingo, of course, who sat on the floor, eyes bright, tail wagging, watching the
proceedings avidly, hoping that someone would drop something. Dave, I noticed, would discreetly slip her scraps, which meant that Bingo followed him around like a balloon that had been tethered to his ankle.

“Good girl,” he’d say, sneaking Bingo a bit of chicken skin, then tipping his chair back and sighing. I had radically reduced the guest list, but I’d kept the menu the same: roast chicken stuffed with herbs and lemon and garlic, a salad dressed with pomegranate-seed vinaigrette, potato latkes, and a store-bought dessert—cream puffs from Whole Foods and chocolate sauce that Ellie and I had made together.

“She has a JAUNTY WALK,” said Ellie, imitating Bingo’s brisk stride down the street. “And at night she sleeps CURLED IN A CRULLER in Mommy’s bed.”

“I bet Mom likes that,” he said. His eyes didn’t meet mine.
I would like you better,
I thought at him.

“Hey, El, let’s show Daddy how we clear the table.”

“Daddy knows that I can do that.” She pouted, but she got up and carefully, using two hands, carried every plate and platter from the table to the sink.

We played Sorry! after dinner—oh, irony! I tried to breathe through my discomfort, the restlessness, tried to sit with my feelings, like Bernice advised, and ignore the questions running laps in my brain.
Will he stay? Or at least come and kiss me? Does he love me a little? Is there anything left at all?

Dave stayed as I coaxed Ellie into, then out of, her tub, combing and braiding her hair, getting her into her pajamas and reading her
This Is Not My Hat.
After I closed her bedroom door, Bingo bounded down the hallway to assume her position, curled on top of my pillow. Her tail thumped against the comforter as she watched us with her bright brown eyes.

“B-I-N-G-O,” Dave sang. We were in the narrow hallway,
practically touching. “You seem well.” He reached out, took a strand of my hair between his fingers, and tucked it, tenderly, behind my ear. Then his body was right up against mine, his chest warm and firm, shoulders solid in my hands. “I know they said no changes for the first year, but we’ve both done this a bunch of times already . . .”

I laughed, walking backward, as he maneuvered me onto the bed . . . and, later, I cried when, with my head on his chest and our bare legs entwined, he got choked up as he said, “Allison, there was never anybody else. It was always only you.”

“I promise . . .” I started to say. I wanted to promise him that I’d never hurt him again, never go off the rails, never give him cause to worry again . . . but those were promises I couldn’t make. One minute, one hour, one day at a time. “I never stopped loving you,” I said . . . and that was the absolute truth.

We didn’t move back in together. Part of me wanted it desperately, and part of me worried that we were disrupting Ellie’s stable environment—some mornings Dave was in bed with me, some mornings he was at his own place, and some nights Ellie stayed there with him—but she seemed to be thriving, to be growing out of the awful yelling and stubbornness.

As for Dave and me, I often thought that we were, as coaches and sportswriters liked to say, in a rebuilding year. Not married, exactly, but not un-married. It was almost as though we were courting each other again, slowly revealing ourselves to each other. My mom or our sitter, Katrina, would come for the night, and we’d go to a concert, or out to dinner, or we’d take Bingo to the dog park where, on warm spring nights, they showed old movies, projecting the picture against a bedsheet strung between two pine trees.

“Ellie’s getting big,” Dave said on one of those nights. I’d been looking at the picnics other people had packed: fried
chicken and biscuits and canned peaches; egg-salad sandwiches on thick-sliced whole-wheat bread; chunks of pineapple and strawberries in a fruit salad . . . and wine. Beer. Sweating thermoses of cocktails, lemon drops and Pimm’s cups.

“She is,” I had agreed. Every day she looked a little taller, her hair longer, or she’d bust out some new bit of vocabulary or surprisingly apt observation about the world. Sometimes at night she’d cry that her legs hurt.
Growing pains,
Dr. McCarthy had told us.

Sometimes I felt like I was having them, too. It made me think of something else I’d heard in a meeting, about how Alcoholics Anonymous can help people with their feelings. “And it’s true,” the speaker had said. He had a jovial grin underneath his walrus mustache. “I feel anger better, I feel sadness better, I feel disappointment better . . .”

Life on life’s terms. It was an absolute bitch. There was no more tuning out or glossing over, no more using opiates as spackle to fill in the cracks and broken bits. It was all there, raw and unlovely: the little sighs and groans Dave made, seemingly without hearing them, when he ate his cereal or made the bed; the way Ellie had to be reminded, sometimes more than twice, to flush the toilet after she used it; the glistening ovals of mucus that lined the city sidewalk. Some nights, I missed my father and regretted my mother’s half-assed, mostly absent-minded parenting, and there was no pill to help with it. Some nights I couldn’t sleep . . . so I would lie in my bed, alone or with Dave, and stare up into the darkness and try not to beat myself up.
We will not regret the past, nor wish to shut the door on it,
The Big Book said . . . so I would try to be grateful that I’d stopped when I had instead of berating myself for letting things get as bad as they’d gotten. I had learned what I’d needed to learn, and I knew now
that I was, however flawed and imperfect, however broken, undeniably a grown-up.

• • •

Then, one day, my cell phone rang, and I heard a familiar voice on the other end.

“It’s a blast from your past!” said the voice, before dissolving into sniffles.

“Aubrey!” I hadn’t heard from her since she’d left Meadowcrest. Mary and I e-mailed, and Shannon and I met for coffee once a month. Lena and Marissa had both disappeared, whether back into addiction or into new lives in recovery, I couldn’t guess. I worried about them sometimes, but Aubrey was the one I worried about most. I’d text or call her every so often, but I had never heard back. A dozen times I’d started to type her name into Google, and a dozen times I’d made myself stop.
If she wants me to know how she’s doing, she’ll get in touch. Otherwise it’s snooping,
I decided. Now, here she was, her voice quivering, and me clutching the phone, realizing only in that moment that I’d half believed she was dead.

“How are you?”

“I’m . . .” She gave her familiar little laugh. “I’m not so good, actually.”

By now, I knew what questions to ask. Better still, I knew how to just be quiet and listen. “What’s going on?”

“I’ve been using for . . . oh, God, months now. I was doing good at first. Then Justin started coming around his mom’s house, where I was staying with Cody . . .”

I turned away so that Ellie, engrossed in an episode of
Sam & Cat,
wouldn’t see my face. Justin. The fucking no-good boyfriend.

“And, you know, he made it sound like it was going to be
all different this time. Like we’d keep it under control. And I thought I could, you know, because I’d been clean for a while.” She started to cry. I got the rest of the story in disjointed bursts—she’d gotten kicked out of her boyfriend’s parents’ house, then her mother had taken Cody and refused to let Aubrey see him until she got clean. She described couch-surfing, spending two weeks in a shelter, and then, finally, asked the question I knew was coming: “Can I crash with you for a little while?” Her voice was tiny, barely a whisper. “I could help out . . . babysit . . . I’m good with kids . . . I wouldn’t ask, except I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

Oh, Aubrey,
I thought. Aubrey, who was still more or less a kid herself.
Boundaries,
I told myself, even though I wanted nothing more than to tell her to come, to tell her that the trundle bed had fresh sheets, that Ellie would be delighted to meet her, that I would help her get well. Except I couldn’t. I knew my own limits, knew how close I was to my own relapse. “I can’t do that,” I said. “But I can take you to a meeting. I can hook you up with Bernice. I can help you find a place to stay.”

“You sound good,” she said. Was she high? I couldn’t tell. “I’m glad. I knew you’d do good when you got out of there.”

“Aubrey, listen to me. There’s a five-thirty meeting today at Fourth and Pine. That’s my home group. They’re really nice. They’d love to meet you. You come there, and I will meet you, and I’m going to call Bernice, and we’ll find you a place.”

“Ooo-kay.” Definitely slurry.

“Five-thirty. Fourth and Pine.” I made her say it back to me twice. Then I hung up the phone, and texted her the address, just to be sure, and started pacing, watching the door, waiting for my mother to show up for her regular Tuesday visit. Normally she was there at five at the latest, and I’d have time to grab a coffee if
I wanted one before the meeting began, but that night, of course, she was running late.

“Mommy, stop WALKING,” said Ellie . . . and then, in an unprecedented move, she actually turned the TV off without being asked or prompted, and looked at me. “What are you so WORRYING about?”

“I’m not worrying,” I said automatically.

“Then why are you WALKING and WALKING?” She looked at me carefully, eyes narrowed, hair gathered in a ponytail that hung halfway down her back, pants displaying a good inch of her ankles. I’d need to go shopping again.

“I guess maybe I am a little worried.” I sat down by the window, and Bingo sprang into my lap, wriggling around until her belly was exposed for a scratch. When Ronnie finally strolled into view I grabbed my bag and half trotted past Ellie.