All Fall Down: A Novel

by Jennifer Weiner

  That thought should have been enough to keep me occupied. When we first fell in love, we had a fantastic sex life. We were spontaneous, but we would also plan elaborate surprises for each other, scavenger hunts and carefully thought-out gifts and getaways. Even when we didn’t have a lot of money, we had always managed to delight each other on special occasions and, sometimes, just on regular Friday nights.

  For our first anniversary, I’d done an Alice in Wonderland–style adventure. I had propped a stoppered glass vial filled with Dave’s favorite Scotch on the kitchen table, with a card reading DRINK ME and an arrow pointing down the hallway. A trail of roses led to the bedroom. After contemplating and rejecting the idea of lying on the bed naked, except for some cute lace panties with a card reading EAT ME affixed to the waistband, I’d instead left those words on a card with a single chocolate-dipped strawberry beside it. On the flip side of the EAT ME card was another clue, telling Dave to go “where I like to get wet.” This led him to the Lombard Swim Club, where we’d splurged on a membership for the summer. The girl behind the desk had given him an Amazing Race–style envelope with a handmade crossword puzzle, which had sent him to the Boathouse Row Bar in the Rittenhouse Hotel, where I’d been waiting with cocktails and a reservation at a restored Victorian bed-and-breakfast in Avalon down on the Jersey Shore, where we would run in a race together the next morning.

  Maybe I should plan something like that again, I thought as I swung the car onto our street. True, I hadn’t been running much these days, but it wasn’t as if I’d been sitting around doing absolutely nothing. (You run after drugs, my mind whispered. You run to the bank. You run to the pharmacy. I told it to shut up.) A few weeks of training and I’d be able to run at least the better part of a 5K. I’d find a race somewhere pretty, not too far away, get Doreen to take Eloise for the night or maybe even the weekend, buy a bottle of good Champagne for when we were through . . .

  A blue Lexus was parked in our driveway, with Pennsylvania plates and an Obama bumper sticker. Hmm. I grabbed my purse, got out of my car, and walked in through the garage, hearing the sound of singing coming from the kitchen. Ellie was standing on a chair, performing what I recognized as her Legally Blonde medley. “ ‘Honey, whatcha crying at? You’re not losin’ him to that.’ ”

  “A star is born,” Dave said to a woman sitting at the table. Ellie was in full Ellie gear, with a tutu around her waist and a tiara on her head, a fake feather boa wrapped around her neck, and my high heels on her feet. Dave was wearing jeans and a Rutgers T-shirt, his hair still wet from the shower. The woman at the table looked as comfortable as if she lived there . . . or as if Dave had called some casting agency and asked for a slightly younger, significantly hotter version of me. Her jeans were crisp, dark, and low-rise, tucked into knee-high leather riding boots. Her fuchsia T-shirt had just enough Lycra for it to hug her torso in a flattering line, with a boatneck showing off her collarbones and pale, freckled skin. Her blonde hair was drawn into a sleek ponytail that looked casual but must have taken at least twenty minutes of fussing and a few different products to achieve, and she wore subtle makeup—light foundation, a little tinted lipgloss, mascara and pencil to darken her brows and her lashes. L. McIntyre, I presumed.

  “Hello,” I said, and dropped my purse on the counter. I rested my left hand on Dave’s shoulder, wedding and engagement bands on proud display, and extended my right. “I’m Allison.”

  “Lindsay is a work friend of Daddy’s,” Ellie explained.

  “She came by to drop off some documents,” Dave added. I thought I could feel him flushing.

  “Wasn’t that nice,” I said. “Do you live out this way?”

  “Old City,” L. answered. “I’m Lindsay McIntyre.” She had one of those cool, limp handshakes, with no grip at all. I moved her fingers up and down once, then let go.

  “Dave, can you come give me a hand for a moment?” My voice was sugar-cookie sweet. His expression was unreadable as he followed me through the kitchen and into the mudroom.

  “What is going on here?” I hissed. “You’re bringing your girlfriend over for playdates?”

  He raked his fingers through his damp hair. “Allison, she isn’t my girlfriend. I’m married. You don’t get to have girlfriends if you’re married.”

  “Glad we’re on the same page with that. So what is she doing in my house?”

  “Your house?” Dave repeated. Underneath the TV makeup, I felt my cheeks get hot.

  “Our house. Why is she in our house, at our kitchen table, singing show tunes with our daughter?”

  “She’s doing exactly what I said. She was dropping off some information I needed for a story I’m working on. It’s part of the election series,” he added, his tone suggesting I was supposed to know what that was. Since I didn’t, I said, “And she just decided to hang out and do a number?”

  “She and Ellie seemed to be getting along.”

  How nice for you, I wanted to say, that you can audition my replacement before I’m even gone. Cut it out, I told myself. Maybe this was completely innocent. Maybe the pills were making me paranoid.

  My phone buzzed in my purse. Sarah, terse as ever, was texting me. ETA? she’d written. Shit.

  “I need to write something. Can you keep Ellie amused for an hour?”

  “I actually need to get to the office. I’ve had her all morning,” he said.

  While I was goofing off, I thought. Instead, I walked wordlessly into the kitchen, where Ellie was wrapping up her finale.

  “I should get going,” L. said, after Ellie, who’d moved on to The Sound of Music, hit the last notes of “So Long, Farewell.” She got to her feet, straightening her shirt and giving her hair a pat. It was astonishing, really. A few subtle changes in features and hair color and she could have been me, ten years ago.

  “Can we go to the zoo?” Ellie wheedled after L. and Dave had departed.

  “I’m sorry, honey. Mommy has to blog.” On the couch, my laptop open, Ellie bribed into compliance with a bag of jelly beans and the remote control, I thought of what Lindsay McIntyre had seen when she stopped by. The kitchen, at least, had furniture. There was a cheerful jumble of family pictures on the refrigerator. One wall had been painted with blackboard paint and turned into a calendar, with “Clay Club” and “Daddy’s 10K” and “Stonefield Pajama Party” written in colorful chalk. There were apples in a yellow-and-blue ceramic bowl, the orchid that I hadn’t managed to kill in a clay pot on the windowsill. You would never see my kitchen and guess how many milligrams of narcotics I required to drag myself through the day. You would never look at my living room and know how much I’d cried reading comments on one of my blog posts, or looking at the online banking site and fretting about the increased frequency with which I was moving money to my secret account or the widening gap between what I put in each month and Dave’s contributions. You’d check out the big house with its princess suite, the princess herself, her brown hair for once neatly combed, and imagine that we had a happy life. Nothing to see here, you would think. Everything is fine.

  NINE

  In all my years of working at the Examiner and then for Ladiesroom, I’d never had anything come close to going viral. When I’d organized the slide show of nude cyclists that ran with the paper’s coverage of Philadelphia’s annual Naked Critical Mass ride, the pictures had gotten a tremendous number of hits, but that had all been local attention. Nothing I’d done, and certainly nothing I’d said, had ever gained national traction. Maybe it was a slow news week, or maybe it had to do with prudish, hypocritical America’s fascination with anything related to women and sex, but by Sunday night the “vibrator in every purse” sound bite was racking up hits on YouTube (I’d smartened up enough to know not to watch the clip or even glance at the comments). On Monday morning, a nationally syndicated conservative radio host spent ten minutes frothing into his microphone, incensed at the notion that the writers and editors of Ladiesroom—“a pack of pornography purveyors,” as he put
it—wanted the government to equip innocent teenage girls with vibrators. Where he got the idea that we were asking for government money, I wasn’t sure, but I welcomed the attention. Every hyperbolic, spittle-flecked “THIS is what liberals WANT!” harangue got Ladiesroom.com another ten thousand hits. More hits meant more attention, and more money. Money: Our corporate masters offered a generous bonus for pieces that topped fifty thousand views. I stuck the cash directly into my Naughty Account, knowing I’d need drugs to get through the backlash, the inevitable dissection of my looks and politics and sex life, or lack of same. I was planning on cutting back . . . just not now. There was even a bit on The Daily Show, with Jon Stewart smirking as he repeated my line: “A chicken in every pot and a vibrator in every purse! Just make sure you don’t get them mixed up,” he said as the screen behind him showed a picture of a Hitachi Magic Wand in a Dutch oven. My inbox overflowed with e-mailed condemnations and praise, which I quickly gave up trying to answer. A “thank you for reading my work” would suffice, whether the reader was telling me that I was a genius and a hero and an inspiration to girls everywhere, or a fat ugly whore bent on making men obsolete.

  I tried to distract myself by writing something new. “A Mother’s Guide to the Online World” was the idea I’d been playing with, a series of tips and how-tos for protecting girls on the Internet and in real life. Nothing scared me more than the idea of Ellie as a teenager, among peers who accepted as normal things like girls texting topless shots of themselves to boys they liked, or boys filming sexual activity and then making the video available to their buddies. She was too young for even the most preliminary conversation—only six months ago I’d stumbled through a speech about where babies came from—but I thought if I could come up with a list of what to do and what to say, maybe I’d be prepared for when she was eight or nine or ten or twelve and the conversation was no longer theoretical.

  “Mommy, come visit with me!” Ellie would say, banging on my locked bedroom door in the days and weeks after my TV debut.

  “Mommy’s working right now,” I would call back, telepathically begging her babysitter to come upstairs and whisk her away. Katrina, bless her heart, meant well, but she would usually come with some elaborate craft or cooking project that would take a while to arrange, leaving Ellie free to wander the house, or bang on my door, while her sitter laid out pages of origami paper or baked gingerbread for a gingerbread house.

  Dave, meanwhile, had gone back to being tight-lipped and silent, his face unreadable and his body rigid as he passed me in the kitchen or the halls. I was afraid to try to grill him about L. McIntyre. I wanted to know the truth . . . but I suspected that the truth would burst my opiated bubble, revealing the unhappy realities that even four or five Oxys couldn’t mask—that my marriage was a sham, that my happiness was an illusion, that even though the pieces were in place and everything seemed okay, underneath the veneer of good looks and good manners, the three of us were falling apart.

  Or, at least, I was.

  Two weekends after my television triumph, the guilt got to me. I woke up early, chewed up sixty milligrams of OxyContin, took a shower, and announced, over a breakfast I’d cooked myself, that I was putting everything on hold and taking Ellie on a girls’ day outing.

  “Great,” Dave said. He even managed to smile. Ten minutes after I’d made my announcement, he had his running shoes in his hand, his high-tech lap-and-pace-counting watch on his wrist, and his body covered in various wicking and cooling fabrics made from recycled bamboo. “Bye,” he called, closing the door behind him. Ellie gave me a syrup-sticky smile. “Can we go to my museum? And the Shake Shack? And the zoo? And to sing-along Sound of Music?”

  “Sing-along Sound of Music was a special treat. How about you pick two of the other things?” I said pleasantly. Meanwhile, I was performing a mental inventory of how many little blue Oxys I had left, and how I’d space them out to get me through until noon the next day, when my next batch would come in the mail. You’re taking too many, a voice in my head scolded. I stacked dishes in the sink, then rinsed them and put them in the dishwasher, and told the voice to shut up. How much money did you spend last month? the voice persisted. Four thousand dollars? Five? I can afford it, I thought uneasily, shoving aside the memory of the petty cash I’d borrowed, or how worried I was that Dave would take a hard look at our joint checking account. As long as I stay on top of things, as long as I’m careful, I’ll be fine.

  After lengthy deliberations, Ellie decided on the zoo, and burgers for lunch. For two hours, we admired the elephants, held our noses in the monkey house, screamed “Ew!” at the naked mole rats, and sat on a bench eating soft-serve pretzels in the sunshine. I let her have everything she wanted—a pedal through the pond on the swan boats, a pony ride, and a trip on the miniature train that circled the zoo. She got her face painted to look like a leopard (a pink-and-white-spotted leopard) and bought friendship bracelets and a souvenir keychain and widened her eyes in disbelief when, at the Shake Shack, I said she could have both cheese fries and a milkshake, when usually I made her choose one or the other.

  The cashier gave Ellie a buzzer—by far, one of the highlights of the Shack. “It’ll go off when your food’s ready.”

  “I KNOW it! I KNOW it will!” Using two hands, Ellie carried the buzzer to our table and set it reverently in the center after cleaning the surface with an antibacterial wipe from my purse. “Now, don’t freak out,” she instructed the buzzer.

  “Okay. I won’t. I won’t freak out,” I answered, in character as Wa, which is what we’d named the Shake Shack’s buzzers, for the wah-wah-wah sound they made.

  “Just be CALM, Wa,” she said, giggling.

  “I’m gonna. I-I’m gonna be calm,” I stammered, in Wa’s trembling, not-at-all-calm voice.

  “Just say, ‘Your food is ready,’ in a NORMAL voice. Don’t LOSE YOUR BUSINESS,” Ellie said, her eyes sparkling with mirth.

  “I got it. I got it. No freaking out. No losing my business. No . . .” Ellie was already starting to giggle as the buzzer lit up and started to hum. “WA! WA! WA! Yourfoodisready!” I said. “Wa! Wa! WAWAWAI’MFREAKINGOUTHEREWA!”

  “Wa, calm down! It’s just a burger!” Ellie gave the buzzer an affectionate pat as I continued to narrate its breakdown. An older woman sitting at the counter watched the proceedings. On our way back with our tray, she tapped my shoulder.

  “Excuse me. I just want to say how much I’m enjoying watching you and your daughter.”

  “Oh, thank you!” I said, touched almost to tears.

  “So many parents, you see them on their phones, barely looking at their kids. You’re giving your daughter memories she’ll have forever.”

  Now I was tearing up, thinking about what the woman would never see—the times I had been on my phone or my laptop or napping when Ellie wanted my company.

  “That’s really nice of you to say,” I said, just as—irony!—my phone rang. I gave the woman an apologetic smile. “Hello? Mom?”

  For a minute, all I could hear was the sound of her crying. “He f-f-fell . . . out of bed . . . I tried to pick him up and then he p-p-pushed me . . .”

  I sat down in my chair. “Okay, Mom. Take a deep breath. Is Daddy there?”

  “He left! He ran away!” Another burst of sobbing. “I tried to stop him, but he pushed me down and he ran out the door. He’s got bare feet, or maybe just his slippers. I couldn’t s-s-stop him . . .”

  “Okay.” My head spun. Ellie, for once, was sitting quietly, maybe appreciating the seriousness of the situation, staring at me wide-eyed over the lid of her milkshake. “Do you know where he went?”

  “No,” she sobbed. “By the time I got to the door he was gone.”

  “Okay. I think you need to get off the phone with me and call the police.”

  “What do I say?” she wailed.

  “Tell them what you told me. Tell them that Daddy has Alzheimer’s, and that he was confused and that he’s . . .” Run away from home? W
andered off? Gone for a walk in his bare feet? “Just tell them what happened. I’m in Center City, I’m going to put Ellie in the car right now. We’ll be there as soon as we can.” Even as I was talking, I was packing up my purse, handing Ellie a wipe for her face, rummaging for my parking stub and a twenty-dollar bill.

  “Good luck,” the woman who’d praised my parenting said as I hustled Ellie out the door, across the street, into the car, and, as fast as I could legally manage it, over the Ben Franklin Bridge and into New Jersey.

  There were three police cars at my parents’ house when I arrived, one in the driveway and another two parked at the curb in front of the house. On my way over, I’d had a two-minute conversation with Dave, telling him what had happened.

  “What can I do?” he’d asked, and I’d found myself almost in tears, melting at the kindness in his voice.

  “Just sit tight . . . Actually, you know what? Can you call . . .” What was the woman’s name? I pulled to the side of the road and rummaged through my wallet until I found the business card I’d tucked in there for this very moment. “Kathleen Young. She’s at Eastwood—you know, the assisted-living place out here?”

  “Kathleen Young,” Dave said, and repeated the phone number after I read it.

  “If she’s not working on the weekend, ask for whoever’s handling intake. I went there a few weeks ago, just to check it out, so they know me, and they’ll at least know my dad’s name and his situation. If you tell them what’s going on, maybe they’ll have a bed for him, or they’ll be able to find us someplace that does.”

  “Got it,” said Dave. “Call when you can.”

  I parked on the street behind one of the cruisers, grabbed Ellie, and raced into the house. My mother was on the couch with an officer in uniform on each side of her. My father, in sweatpants, his bare feet grimy and one big toe bleeding, was sitting in an armchair, his face completely blank. He was missing his glasses, and his hair hadn’t been combed.