Behind the administration building I found a little garden, overgrown with weeds, the borders of the flower beds ragged, squirrels chittering in the dogwood tree, a splintery wooden bench in its center. I sat on the bench, staring numbly straight ahead. I felt like I’d been looking at one of those optical illusions. Examine it one way you’d see a beautiful young woman, the smooth lines of her chin and cheeks, the ripe curls of her hair. Then you’d blink or tilt your head and realize you were seeing a withered crone, her nose a tumorous hump, the young girl’s hat really the old woman’s rat’s nest of hair. The world I had once known did not exist, had never existed. Instead of the Tale of the Childlike Mom, the Distant Dad, and the Love They Shared, I had, instead, to consider the Story of the Drunk Mother, the Dad Who Could Never Trust Her, and the daughter who was an endless source of worry for both of them.

Had I known? On some level, I must have at least guessed. All those afternoon naps in her bedroom with the shades drawn . . . and yet she’d emerge every morning in her tennis whites or her golf clothes to drink a little glass of orange juice (wheatgrass juice in the 1990s) and go off to her game. There was that ever-present tumbler full of wine and seltzer . . . but I never saw her take a sip of anything stronger. She smoked, but so did plenty of moms back then. She didn’t drive, but that didn’t seem worse than other parents’ idiosyncracies: Dorothy Feld’s mother had weighed three hundred pounds until she got her stomach stapled; Kurt Dessange’s dad wore a toupee that looked like it was made out of spray-painted pine needles.

“All those years,” I said out loud. Years of lying, years of hiding. Years of her knowing she wasn’t living right, that she wasn’t the mother or the wife she could have been. Years of loneliness, because those kinds of secrets you couldn’t tell, not to your own mother or sister or your very best girlfriend. I don’t love my husband. I’m having an affair. Sometimes I can’t stand my children. I could imagine saying these things, but I’m a secret alcoholic? I drove drunk with my daughter in the car? I want to stop and can’t? Who could tell another soul things like that? Who would react with anything other than horror?

You’re only as sick as your secrets. Another little slogan I’d picked up. Not to mention that whole fearless and searching moral inventory, where you’d list all your faults and then tell someone else exactly what you’d done wrong. “That sounds horrible,” I’d told Wanda at the desk, after she’d finished her whispered recap of the previous night’s Bachelor episode. “No, no,” she’d said, with a kind of crazy glow in her eye, “it’s the most liberating thing you can imagine! It makes you free!”

“Free,” I croaked. My mom had never been free. She’d lived her whole life under the yoke of her secrets, with a man who probably desperately wanted her to get better but didn’t know how to fix her, or how to help. So what were my chances? Where did that leave me? Was it possible that I wasn’t really an addict, that I could take pills, just more carefully than I’d taken them before? Or was it like everyone in here said, that the only path the pills would put me on would end in jails, institutions, and death? Half-measures availed us nothing, said The Big Book. We stood at the turning point. Well, here I was. Which way would I turn?

One afternoon on our honeymoon in Mexico, Dave and I had gone fishing. It had been one of those perfect days: not too hot, with a crisp breeze, the sun glinting off the waves’ surfaces, and the fish shoving one another out of the way for the privilege of swallowing our hooks. We’d caught half a dozen striped bass in just four hours on the water. Then, while we’d sat back (with beers, I remembered, and the tortas I’d bought in a little panadería on the street), the mate had set up a table and two twenty-gallon buckets of water near the back of the boat and expertly gutted each fish, stroking the blade down the center of their bellies and deftly sliding out their guts. I felt like that now, like someone had sliced me open and dumped out my insides, then stitched me back together and set me on my feet.

“So how’d it go?” Lena asked at lunch, which was manicotti, limp noodles and rubbery cheese in a meat sauce that made you sorry for the cows that had given up their lives to enter the food chain. Just the smell turned my stomach. I’d made myself a cup of tea and sat, shivering, in my customary spot between Aubrey and Mary.

“Are you all right?” asked Shannon.

“Clearly, she isn’t,” said Mary. “Just look at the poor girl!” She squeezed my shoulders. “Honey, what’s wrong?”

“What did they say?” asked Aubrey. “Were you, like, molested by an uncle or something?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said Mary.

“Well, it happens,” I heard Aubrey reply.

“Not that,” I said, in a voice I barely recognized as my own. “It turns out that my mother’s an alcoholic.” I took a breath. “It explains a lot.”

“You didn’t know?” asked Lena.

“I feel pretty stupid,” I admitted.

“Hey,” said Lena, “addicts lie.”

I nodded, wondering what that said about my mother, and what it said about me. She’d lied, but I’d never noticed, never tried to figure it out. I thought of that day I’d gotten lost in Avalon when I was little, how the streets and the store and the sidewalks and the sand had all looked different, completely different, like they belonged in a world I couldn’t even imagine, and how the walls between this world and that one were so thin. One slip, one misplaced foot, one secret out in the open and you’d go crashing through the boundaries and find yourself in that other, unimagined world where everything was different, where everything was wrong. I made myself drink my tea, and a glass of water, and follow the group out onto the Meadowcrest lawn, where we sat in a circle and listened to a man with a flowing gray beard and a woman young enough to be his daughter who was probably his girlfriend bang on African drums and tell us that music had the power to heal. Eventually, I opened my notebook again, flipping through pages of jokes and songs that would get me to my daughter. Eyes on the prize, I told myself, and bent my head and began to write.

TWENTY-SIX

Three days after I came up with the concept of a talent show at our table, we had more skits and songs than we could use. The entire women’s campus had caught talent-show fever. Girls who hadn’t been interested in anything but reconnecting with their boyfriends or their dealers were busy writing lyrics or scraping together costumes or finding props for The Sound of Rehab.

As we walked to Share, two girls, Amanda and Samantha, were performing a version of a Run-D.M.C. rap called “My Addiction,” instead of “My Adidas.” “My addiction walked through high-school doors and danced all over coliseum floors . . . spent all my dough just blowing trees . . . we made a mean team, my addiction and me.” I was learning all kinds of new words and phrases. “Blowing trees,” I learned, was smoking marijuana. “On my grind” meant working. “So, when I’m at my desk, writing a blog post, that means I’m on my grind?” I asked, and both Amanda and Samantha started laughing and said, “Nah, it’s a little different than that,” but they wouldn’t tell me how.

We were almost at the art therapy room when Michelle popped her head out of her office. “Allison W., can I see you for a moment?”

I rolled my eyes, left the group, and took a seat on the opposite side of her desk. “Allison,” she began, “I understand there’s a talent show in the works.”

I shrugged, saying nothing.

“You know,” Michelle continued, “that any activities have to be approved by staff.”

“Oh, sure,” I said. Then I resumed my silence. Michelle stared at me for a moment. Then she reached into a folder and pulled out a script that, judging from the coffee stains, looked as if it had been retrieved from a cafeteria garbage can. “ ‘How do you solve a problem like an RC,’ ” she read, in a tuneless, cheerless voice. “ ‘How do you make them understand your world? How do you make them stay . . . and listen to what you’d say . . . when they look at you like you’re a human—’ ”

“You know,” I interrupted, “it really sounds much better when you sing it.” I sat up straight and demonstrated. “Many a thing you know you’d like to tell them. Many a thing you’d hope they’d understand . . . Low bottoms and low IQs . . . they’re low on empathy, too . . . with nary a prayer of ever getting canned.” I bent my head to hide my smile. “You see?”

“Allison, I admire your team spirit. But you are not permitted to perform skits and songs that make fun of the staff members.”

“Why?” I asked. “I mean, of course, assuming that there is a talent show.” I arranged my face into an approximation of confusion. “And why do you think I’m the one in charge?”

“Allison, I’m not going to get into that with you. What I need you to understand—”

I cut her off before she could finish. “What I need you to understand is that, to misquote Alexander Haig, I’m not in charge here. I’ve got nothing to do with anything. I’m just some poor, stupid pill-head who can’t figure out how many sessions with her therapist it takes to get a day pass.”

Michelle narrowed her eyes, causing them to practically vanish into her doughy face. “Let me ask you something, Allison. Do you want to get better?”

“Better than what?” I muttered. Better than you? I thought. I was pretty sure I’d achieved that particular goal already.

“Think about it,” she suggested in a sugary-sweet tone, and sent me off to Share, where I listened to a thirty-eight-year-old mother of two named Dice describe her descent from high-school cheerleader to crackhead. She’d arrived at Meadowcrest after her parents told her they could no longer care for her boys (twelve and nine), and would be putting them in foster care unless she got her act together.

I would never, I thought, as Dice described leaving her boys home alone or, worse, with strangers while she wandered the streets to cop. Her hands, with the nails bitten short and bloody, trembled as she worked to extract pictures of her sons from underneath the plastic lining of her binder. “That’s Dominic Junior, my little Nicky, and that’s Christopher. He eats so much I can’t even believe it. Like, mixin’ bowls full of cereal, gallons of milk . . . I tell him we should just get a cow, let him suck on that, ’stead of using all our money on milk . . .”

Had she ever been like me and Janet, with a husband and a house, a car in the garage and money in the bank? Had she ever had a chance at that kind of life?

“Allison?”

I glanced up. Gabrielle, she of the pink lanyard and officious-bank-lady look, was staring at me. So, I noticed, were the rest of the eighteen girls and women in the circle. “Allison, are you ready to share?”

“Um.” I closed my notebook, then drummed my fingertips on its cover. I had known this day was coming, but, of course, they never told you exactly when it would be your turn. I sat up straight, remembering how every Share began. “Well. Let’s see. I was born in New Jersey, in 1974. I think I tried liquor for the first time at someone’s bat mitzvah, when I was twelve or thirteen. We were sneaking glasses off the grown-ups’ table. I had maybe a sip, and I hated the way it tasted, and that was that until I was sixteen. Um.” I tilted my body back in my chair, looked up at the ceiling and noticed, without surprise, that it was stained. Everything in this place was worn and dirty, frayed and patched, like we didn’t deserve anything better. “I got drunk at a party when I was sixteen. Vodka and peach schnapps, which was a thing back then. I hated the way it made me feel, and I didn’t drink again until college . . . and even then, it was, like, a beer. Or maybe I’d have a few puffs of a joint.”

“You’re kidding,” said a new girl whose name I didn’t know. I could have gotten defensive, but instead, I just shrugged.

“Yeah, I know it sounds ridiculous, but it’s the truth. I didn’t like booze, I didn’t like pot, and I didn’t really try anything else because there wasn’t much else around . . . oh, wait, I did do mushrooms one time, but they made me puke, so forget that.” I shuddered. “I hate throwing up.”

“Don’t do heroin,” said Lena, and everyone else laughed.

“So, flash forward, I’m thirty-four, I’m married, I have a kid, I throw my back out at my gym, and my doctor gives me Vicodin.” I breathed, remembering. “And it was like that scene in The Wizard of Oz where everything goes from black-and-white to color. It was like that was the way the world was meant to feel.” I could feel my body reacting to the memory, the blood rising to the surface of my skin, my heartbeat quickening. “I was calm, I was happy, I felt like I could get more things accomplished. I started writing these blog posts, and they really took off. The pills made me brave enough to write with all those people reading. They made me patient enough to put up with my daughter, who is gorgeous and smart but can be a handful. They made me who I was supposed to be. I know that’s not what I’m supposed to say in here,” I said, before anyone could chide me for romanticizing my use or failing to “play the tape,” “but I also know that we’re supposed to be honest. And that’s the God’s honest truth. I loved the way I felt when I was on pills.”