Jennifer Weiner - All Fall Down: A Novel

I tasted the word “miracle.” More God stuff. But whatever. Just waking up every morning and thinking that my life would be all right without pills, that I could manage work and my parents and Ellie . . . that would be enough.

“Allison W.?” A khaki-bot teenager stood in the doorway. “Michelle wants to see you.”

“Go on,” said Bernice.

“See you tomorrow?” I asked hopefully.

She shook her head. “I was gonna wait until the end of group to tell y’all, but today’s my last day here.”

Unhappy murmurs rippled through the circle. I sank back in my seat, stunned and angry. I finally had a therapist, a therapist I liked, and she was leaving after my first session? “Where are you going?” asked Shannon.

“I’ll be doing outpatient, over in Cherry Hill.” She smiled. “So I might see some of you on the other side.”

“Wait,” I protested. “You can’t leave! I just got here!”

She gave me another smile, although this one seemed more professional than kind. Of course she couldn’t let herself get attached to women she would know for only four weeks, or, in my case, forty-five minutes. “I’m sure they’ll find someone great to replace me.”

There didn’t seem to be time to discuss it. So I shuffled down the hallway behind the recovery coach, yawning enormously. The night before, I’d dropped off at ten and woken up just after midnight, wide-awake and drenched in sweat. I’d taken a shower, put on fresh clothes, and put myself back to bed, trying to get some more sleep, but it hadn’t happened. My thoughts chased one another until I was so frantic and sad that I was sobbing into my pillow, thinking about getting divorced, and what it would do to Ellie, and what single motherhood would do to me. “Can’t you give me Ambien?” I’d asked the desk drone after four hours of that misery. “I have a prescription.”

“Ambien? In here?” the RC on duty, the one everyone called Ninja Noreen for her habit of sneaking into bedrooms and shining her flashlight directly into their eyes during the hourly bed checks, actually snorted at the thought.

“Okay, then something that’s approved for in here.”

“Most alcoholics and opiate users have disrupted sleep. We don’t believe in sleep aids. You’re going to just have to ride this out. Eventually, your body’s clock will reset itself.” They gave me melatonin, a natural sleep aid, which didn’t do a thing, and a CD of ocean sounds to listen to, which was just as ineffective. I was starting to feel like I was going crazy . . . and nobody seemed to care. Dear Ellie, I would write in the middle of another sleepless night, with my notebook on my lap and a towel next to me to wipe away the sweat and the inevitable tears. I miss you so much. I can’t wait to see you. Are you making lots of treats with Grandma? Are you playing lots of Monopoly and Sorry? I would write to her about baking and board games, telling her, over and over, that I missed her and I loved her, all the while wondering how this had happened, trying to find an answer to the only question that mattered: How does a suburban lady who’s pushing middle age end up in rehab? How did this happen to me?

“I understand you have a television appearance scheduled for Thursday?” Michelle began.

“That’s right.” I’d made an appointment with Michelle to discuss a visit to Newsmakers on Nine, even though I was was half hoping she would tell me I couldn’t do it. I felt so exhausted and on edge that I wasn’t sure I’d make any sense on the air. I also looked lousy. My skin was pale, my face felt drawn, my lips, even my eyelids, were chapped and peeling, and there were huge dark circles under my eyes and a good inch of dark roots showing at the crown of my dyed-and-highlighted head. If I’d harbored thoughts of emerging from rehab tanned and rested and ready to take on the world, those notions had quickly been dispelled. I wouldn’t be all right in twenty-eight days, or six months, or even a year. On my last day of orientation they’d shown us a video called The Brain Disease of Addiction, from which I’d learned that I could look forward to a year to eighteen months of no sleep and mood swings and depression and generally feeling awful. How could I live through that? I was sure the video wasn’t meant to discourage, but I was also sure I wasn’t the only woman who came out of it thinking, Eighteen months? That won’t be happening. Sobriety’s not for me.

“Well, Allison, the team’s been discussing it, and here is what we can offer.” Michelle picked up a pen between two pudgy fingers. “Being out on your own would most likely be too stressful for you at this stage of your recovery.” I felt myself exhale. “However, we can have a sober coach accompany you to the program.”

I held up my hand. “Excuse me? A sober coach?” I thought those were jokes, invented by the tabloids and stand-up comedians.

She nodded. “Someone who can make sure there’s no opportunity for a slip.”

“Who would this sober coach be? And what kind of training would a sober coach have?”

Michelle’s jowls flushed. “Obviously, Allison, we would send you with someone who has a lot of good clean time under her belt.”

“But not a therapist,” I surmised. “Look, some of the RCs are terrific, but some of them might as well be stocking shelves at Wawa for all they care. And none of them have degrees. In anything.”

Michelle plowed on. “We can arrange transportation to the show and have a sober coach accompany you and then bring you back here.”

“Would this cost anything extra?” I knew, from hearing other girls talk, that Meadowcrest cost a thousand dollars a day, and anything extra, from a thirty-minute massage to a family session, cost extra.

“The cost would come to . . .” She scanned the sheet of paper. “Three thousand dollars.”

I stared at her, too shocked to laugh. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

“There’s no need for profanity,” Michelle said primly.

“Three thousand fucking dollars? Yes, there fucking is!”

Michelle gave me a smile as fake as a porn star’s chest. “Why don’t you think about it, Allison?”

I sighed. “I’ll need to call my editor to cancel.”

“Are you eligible for phone passes?”

I had no idea. “Of course I am.”

Michelle scribbled out a pass.

“Just so you know,” I said, “my daughter’s birthday party is on Saturday. I am going to be there.”

Even before I’d finished saying “birthday party,” Michelle was shaking her head.

“I’m sorry, Allison, but the rules are, you need to have had at least six sessions with your counselor before you’re eligible for a day pass. By this Saturday, you’ll only have had three.”

“But that’s not my fault! You guys didn’t even assign me a counselor until I’d been here almost a week!”

Michelle pursed her lips into a simper. “As you know, Allison, we’ve been having some staffing issues.”

“Then don’t you think you need to adjust the rules to reflect that? You can’t require someone to have a certain number of sessions, and then have so few counselors on staff that it’s impossible to hit that number. And I’ve done everything else!” My hands were shaking as I fumbled for the evidence. “Look, here’s my time line of addiction.” I pulled it out of my binder and brandished it in her face. Michelle gave it a skeptical look.

“That’s it, Allison? Just one page?”

“I didn’t use anything until I was in my thirties. Sorry. Late bloomer. But look . . .” I pointed at the page. “I’ve attended every Share and all the in-house AA meetings since I’ve been here. I went to a guest lecture on Sunday, and I’m volunteering in the soup kitchen on Wednesday.” And wouldn’t that be fun. “Listen,” I said, realizing that my speeches were getting me nowhere. “It’s my daughter. She’s turning six. She isn’t going to understand why I can’t be there.”

“Children are more resilient than we give them credit for. I bet your daughter will surprise you.” Michelle looked pleased when she’d shot down my TV appearance. Now she looked positively delighted, as if she could barely contain her glee. I could imagine my hands wrapping around her flabby neck, my fingers sinking into the folds of flesh as I squeezed. I made myself stop, and take a breath, and refocus.

“Michelle. Please. I’m asking you as a mother. As a fellow human being. Please don’t punish my daughter because I’m an addict. Please let me go to her party.”

“The rules are the rules, Allison, and you didn’t do what you needed to in order to get your pass.”

“But you didn’t give me a chance! Aren’t you listening to me? Because of your staffing issues there was absolutely no way I could have met your requirements.”

“I understand that I’m hearing your disease talking. I’m hearing it say, ‘I want what I want, and I want it right now.’ Which is how addicts live their lives. Everything has to be now, now, now.” I was shaking my head, trying to protest, but Michelle kept talking. “We think there’s always going to be someone there to clean up our messes, cover for us, call the boss or the professor, make excuses.”

“I never asked anyone to cover for me. I cleaned up my own messes. I never . . .” Oh, this was impossible. Didn’t she understand that I wasn’t one of those addicts who slept all day and got high all night? Didn’t she realize that, far from making my life unmanageable, the pills were the only thing that gave me even a prayer of a shot at managing?

Michelle kept talking. “In sobriety, we don’t make excuses, and we don’t make other people cover for us. We live life on life’s terms. We take responsibility for our own actions, and our own failures. This was your failure, Allison, and you need to own it.”

Tears were spilling down my cheeks. I’d heard the phrase “seeing red” all my life but never known it was a thing that really happened. As I sat there, a red shadow had descended over my world. My heart thumped in my ears, as loud as one of those person-sized drums you see in marching bands. It took everything I had not to lunge across the desk and hit her.

“I am going to my daughter’s party. I told her I’d be there, and I’m going.”

“Allison—”

“No. We’re done chatting. We’re through.”

Still shaking with rage, I got up, closed the door, went back to my room, and lay on my bed. Okay, I told myself. Think. Maybe I could sneak out the night before the party, climb out of my bedroom window and start walking. Only where? I wasn’t sure where I was, how far away from Philadelphia, whether there were buses or trains. Even if I waited until daylight, I wouldn’t know where to go, or even how long it would take to get there.

I rolled from side to side and wondered what Ellie was doing. When we’d bought the Haverford house, we’d made only one improvement: in Ellie’s room, instead of the standard double-hung windows, I’d had the contractor install a deep, cushioned window seat with built-in bookshelves on either side. It had turned out even better than I’d hoped. The cushions were detachable, and the lid of the seat lifted up for storage. Since Ellie had been too little to read, we’d repurposed the seat as a stage, hanging gold-tassled curtains that Ellie could open with a flourish, building a ticket box out of a shoebox and construction paper and glitter. At night, Ellie’s collection of Beanie Babies and stuffed bears would perform a Broadway revue, singing everything from expurgated selections from The Book of Mormon and Urinetown to Bye Bye Birdie and The Sound of Music . . .

I sat up straight, remembering The Sound of Music. Hadn’t that musical featured a talent show—a show within a show—and hadn’t the von Trapps used the show as cover when they made their escape?

There were talent shows in rehab. I knew that from the Sandra-Bullock-gets-sober film, 28 Days, which they’d shown us. Could that be the answer? Suggest a show, come up with an act, convince Dave that I’d gotten a day pass . . . well. I’d figure out the specifics later, but for now, I could at least see a glimmer of possibility.

The next day at breakfast, I brought it up, as casually as I could. “You guys all know The Sound of Music, right?”

Blank looks from around the table. “Is it like American Idol?” ventured one of the Ashleys.

“No. Well, actually, you know what? There is a talent competition. See, there’s this big family, and the mother has died, so the father hires a governess.”