All Fall Down: A Novel

by Jennifer Weiner

  “Yes.” Ten was a good day, and Oxys weren’t the only thing I was taking, but never mind. He’d give me something—I didn’t even care what. Then I’d get on top of this. I’d slow my roll, start being prudent. No more pills first thing in the morning, no more pills in the middle of the night. Three or four days—a week, tops—and I’d have this under control.

  “Every day, you take them?”

  I nodded, launching into the story I’d already told the intake nurse. “And, like I said, I’m going to see my regular doctor, only she’s out sick, and I’m leaving for vacation this afternoon, and if you could just give me maybe ten pills, just so I can get through the plane trip . . .”

  He leaned back against the exam room’s sink, taking me in. His name was Dr. Desgupta, and his eyes, behind heavy brown plastic frames, were not unkind.

  “Every day, you’re taking these pills,” he said again.

  I bent my head and prayed. Please, God, just let him give me enough to get through the day and I’ll stop, I’ll get help, I’ll do something, I swear I will.

  “And is it because the back hurts? Or is it because you need them, because you are getting sick without them?”

  I didn’t answer. I wrapped my arms around myself and concentrated, as hard as I could, on not throwing up. “Sick,” I finally said. “I’ve never tried to stop, and I think . . . I mean, I’m not feeling so great already.”

  “There is medication. Suboxone.” I lifted my head. “An opiate agonist-antagonist. It blocks your receptors, so you can’t take the heroin, or the Vicodin, or the OxyContin. Whatever narcotic you were taking. But it gives you some opiate, too. Not enough so you get, you know, the high, but enough that you feel okay.”

  I nodded. This sounded like an acceptable solution. I could take this Suboxone stuff and stop hurting, and then take a day to sort myself out. I’d get more pills, either online or from doctors, enough so that this would never happen again. I would contact a lawyer, and a child psychologist, which Ellie would undoubtedly require. I would taper myself off the pills, maybe try more of those meetings, or get myself a therapist, or start running again. But all I wanted, at that moment, was something to take, something to swallow or smoke or snort. Something that would ease my panic, slow my heartbeat, let me feel okay again.

  “Here.” Dr. Desgupta had finally pulled out his prescription pad. “I will write for seven days. The medicine is a film; you dissolve it under your tongue.” He ripped off the page. I snatched it out of his hand. “How long ago was last dose of OxyContin?”

  I tried to remember what time it had been when I’d chewed up the last of my pills, and tried not to remember licking the inside of the jewelry box where I’d found the final two Vicodin. If you were ever wondering whether you had a problem or not, the taste of jewelry-box felt was answer enough. “Four in the morning?”

  He looked at the clock, calculating. He had big brown eyes, a bald head with a few strands of black hair carefully arranged on top, and a soft, accented voice. “Take first one at noon. You should be started in the withdrawal by then. Feeling like you have the flu. Sweaty, hands shaking . . . you feel like that, you take first one.”

  “Thank you,” I said faintly, and was up and out of the chair, the prescription in one hand and my cell phone in the other, before he could tell me goodbye.

  • • •

  I could remember the rest of the day only in snatches. I remembered my cab ride from the doc-in-a-box to the drive-through lane of the pharmacy. The flu, the doctor had told me . . . except this was to the flu like a pack of rabid pit bulls was to a Chihuahua. I was running with foul-smelling sweat and shaking so hard that my teeth were chattering. My skin was covered in goose pimples; whatever I’d eaten the day before churned unhappily in my belly. I remembered the pharmacist telling me that the medicine wasn’t covered by my insurance without prior approval, and insisting, over and over, that I didn’t care, that it didn’t matter, that I’d pay out of pocket and worry about reimbursement later.

  Back at home, I speed-read the instructions, then tore open one of the packets and let the yellow film dissolve into sour slime under my tongue. I locked the bedroom door and lay on my bed, where I endured six hours of the worst hell I could imagine. My entire body twitched and burned. My legs kicked and flailed uncontrollably. I couldn’t hold still, couldn’t get comfortable. My skin felt like it was host to hundreds of thousands of fiery ants wearing boots made of poison-tipped needles. I scratched and clawed, but I couldn’t make them go away. The first time I threw up, I made it to the toilet, and, from there, I managed to send my mother and Dave a text explaining that I was sick and that, between the two of them, they’d have to handle Ellie and her obligations. The second time, I made it to the sink. The third time, I couldn’t even make it out of bed. I was freezing cold, so I’d tried to get under the covers, but the kicking—kicking! I was actually kicking!—had disarranged everything, had loosened the fitted sheets and the mattress cover. I writhed on the bed, trying to moan into the pillow, praying that the Suboxone would start its work, that I’d feel better, that Ellie wouldn’t see or hear this.

  My mother knocked at the door. “Allison? Allison, are you okay?”

  “Flu,” I called back, in a voice that didn’t sound like mine. I’d gotten myself wrapped in a blanket and was sitting, hunched over and moaning, in the old glider chair I’d used to nurse Ellie. I was burning up, my hair glued to my cheeks in matted clumps, making high, whining noises. I moaned and rocked, moaned and rocked, as the minutes dragged by. At six o’clock I couldn’t stand it any longer. I found the phone, crawled into bed, and managed to dial the clinic and tell the receptionist that it was an emergency and that I needed Dr. Desgupta.

  “Yes, hello?” he answered.

  I told him my name. My voice was a high, wavering whisper. I didn’t sound like myself; I sounded like Ellie when she woke up sick in the middle of the night. “There’s something wrong . . . I’m really sick . . .”

  “You are having the nausea and the diarrhea?”

  “Yes,” I whispered. I was crying, on top of everything else. “I’m cold . . . I can’t stop shaking . . . everything hurts . . . I feel like I’m going to die . . .”

  “Twenty-four hours,” he said calmly. “The Suboxone is kicking the opiates off your receptors. But in a day or two you will be well again.”

  A day or two? I wasn’t sure I could take another twenty minutes of this agony. “I can’t do this,” I said. My voice was sounding less like human conversation than like a cat’s yowl. “Please, you have to help me . . . I think I need to go to a hospital . . .”

  “I am thinking,” the doctor said calmly, “that maybe you need to be in a rehab bed.” He trilled the “r” of “rehab,” making it sound like something wonderful and exotic.

  “No rehab,” I said. “I’m not an addict. Please. I’m not. I’m just really, really sick.”

  “You go to one of these places, they will help you,” he explained. “There is no need to stay for the twenty-eight days unless you like. But you need to be watched until you are well.”

  Rehab. I started crying even harder, because I suspected that he was right. Maybe I didn’t need rehab, but I needed to be somewhere with nurses and doctors and medicine and machines. The pain was intolerable. I could barely speak; I couldn’t keep my legs still. I actually wanted to die. Death would be an improvement over this.

  The doorknob turned. Shaking and sick, I felt the weight of Ellie’s body as she crawled beside me. “Mommy?” she whispered. With her tiny hands she patted my hair, then my forehead. “Mommy, do you need true love’s kiss?”

  I made some noise, thinking that I’d never hated myself as much as I did at that moment. Then my mother was there. “Oh my God.” Somehow, she kept her voice calm as she said, “Ellie, go to your room. Let me help your mommy.”

  I opened my eye. “Mom.” She bent down and hugged me hard. I whispered Dr. Desgupta’s name, then handed her the phone, and shut my e
yes again as I heard her say, “Yes, I’m Allison Weiss’s mother, and she’s very, very ill.”

  Curled on my side, I rocked and rocked. Faintly, as if I were listening through a paper tube, I could hear my mother’s voice, her questions and answers. Opiate addiction . . .. Suboxone . . .. Precipitated withdrawal . . .. Which facility would you recommend?

  “No rehab!” I moaned, and grabbed at my mother’s sleeve.

  “Yes, rehab,” she said, and pulled herself away. She wasn’t falling apart or weeping. There were no snail tracks of mascara on her cheeks, no trembling hands or whimpered complaints about how she could not go on. It was funny, I thought. All it took for my mother to actually be a mother was a little withdrawal. “You’re sick, honey. You’re sick, but I’m going to help you get better.”

  I shut my eyes. Later I remembered voices in the bedroom, a stethoscope against my chest, my mother’s voice, then Dave’s, reciting from the Penny Lane invoice a list of what I’d been taking, how many, and for how long. We see a lot of this, someone—a paramedic—had said. More than you’d expect. Happens to the nicest people. The nicest people, I thought. That was me. Then they lifted me onto a gurney, and I felt the sting of a needle in my arm, and when I opened my eyes again I was in a hospital bed, feeling as if every bone in my body had been smashed, then clumsily reset.

  “Where am I? What happened?” I whispered. Dave stood there in a Blind Melon T-shirt and jeans, looking at me. I hurt all over. My body felt like a skinned knee, flayed and bloody, like a single, stinging nerve ending . . . and I was more ashamed than I had ever been in my life. I couldn’t deal with this. Not now. Not until someone gave me something for the pain.

  “You’re in the hospital. You had something called precipitated withdrawal.” Dave had come to the doorway, but had not taken a single step inside the room, like he’d committed to stopping by, but not staying, at a party whose guests he had no interest in knowing. “It’s what happens when you’ve been taking lots of opiates for a long time, and then something kicks them off your system.”

  “FYI, it’s not a lot of fun,” I whispered. Dave didn’t smile.

  “There’re two days left of school.” Dave was doing his reasonable, just-the-facts thing, the one I recognized from telephone conversations with his editor. “Your mom and I can manage Ellie. Then she can do day camp at Stonefield.”

  “My mom can barely manage herself,” I said.

  “You need to go somewhere,” he said.

  “You mean rehab.” Dave did not deny it. “Look,” I said, into the silence. “Obviously, buying pills online was a bad idea. I know I was taking way more than I should have. I’m under a lot of stress. I’ve been making some bad decisions. But look, it’s been . . .” I looked around for a clock, then took my best guess. “What, twenty-four hours since I had anything, right?” Without waiting for him to confirm, I plowed on. “So I should be fine. Maybe I just need some rest. Fluids. Then I can come home, and I’ll be okay. I just won’t take any more pills.”

  Could I do it? I wondered, even as I made my case. Maybe, twenty-four hours later, I’d be physically free, but I knew that if I was home alone I’d be on the computer or the phone, getting more.

  You’re an addict.

  No I’m not.

  You can’t stop.

  Yes I can.

  And in that moment, in that bed, what I’d done, what I’d let myself become, hit me hard. I had endangered my daughter. Janet’s boys. Myself. Even though no one had gotten hurt—yet, my mind whispered; no one has gotten hurt yet—the truth was that if I kept going this way, Ellie might grow up with an absence far worse than what I endured. She would have the same hole in her heart that I had, the same questions that tormented me—why wasn’t I good enough for my own mother to love?

  “It’s just twenty-eight days,” Dave said.

  “What about my dad?” I managed. “What about Ellie?”

  “Your father’s in a safe place. Your mom can take care of herself, and I can take care of Eloise.”

  “And what if I don’t go?”

  Dave didn’t answer. He just looked at me steadily. “I hope you’ll do the right thing,” he finally said. “Because I need to do whatever it takes to make sure that Ellie is safe.”

  Panic was blooming inside me, pushing the air out of my lungs, as I sorted out what that could mean. I imagined Dave moving out, and taking Ellie with him. I pictured my husband in his good navy blue suit, standing in front of a judge, all the evidence—the envelopes from Penny Lane, bank statements and receipts, copies of all the prescriptions I’d accumulated from all the different doctors. Your honor, my wife is not capable of caring for a small child. Or, worse, what if I came home from the hospital and found that the locks had been changed?

  “Allison. Be reasonable.” His voice was as gentle as it had been on the phone the day we’d moved my dad to Eastwood. “Is this how you want to live your life? Is this the kind of mom you want to be?”

  I opened my mouth to tell him, once again, that things were all right, that they were almost entirely okay; that yes, obviously, there’d been some slips, that things had gotten out of hand, but they were by no means completely off the rails or—what was the word they kept using in that meeting?—unmanageable. My life was not unmanageable. I could manage it just fine.

  But before I could say that, I thought about how I’d been spending my days. Waking up in the morning, my very first thoughts were not of my daughter or my husband, not of my job or my friends or my plans for the day, but of how many pills I had left, and whether it was enough, and how I was going to get more. The time I spent chasing them, the energy, the money, the mental resources . . . and the truth was, at that point I was barely feeling the euphoria they’d once provided. A year ago, one or two Vicodin could make me feel great. These days, four or five Oxys—the medicine they gave to cancer patients, for God’s sake, cancer patients who were dying—were barely enough to get me feeling normal. Was this how I wanted to live?

  But how could I leave? How could I walk away from everything—my home, my work, my father, my daughter? There was no way. I could just go home and fix this on my own. I could do better. I could get it under control, cut back, be more reasonable. Except, even as I began to outline a plan in my head, I was suspecting a different truth. My “off” switch was broken, possibly forever. Having just one pill felt about as likely as taking just one breath.

  I looked up at my husband. “I suppose you’ve already found a place to ship me?”

  He nodded. “It’s in New Jersey. It’s very highly rated. And my insurance will pay for twenty-eight days.”

  Twenty-eight days, I thought. I could do anything for twenty-eight days.

  “Okay,” I said quietly, thinking, This has to end somehow, somewhere, and maybe this is as good an ending as any. “Okay.”

  PART THREE

  Checking In

  SIXTEEN

  When I was a girl, every summer my parents and I would spend a week in Avalon, at the Jersey Shore. Every summer we’d rented the same little cottage a block away from the beach and set up camp there. Now that I was a mother myself, I would have called it a relocation instead of a vacation, but back then it was like being transported to the land of fairy tales. Every day I’d swim in the ocean, and at night I’d fall asleep listening to the sound of the waves through my open window instead of the hum of our house’s central air, looking at the little bedroom that was mine by the glow of moonlight on water instead of my Snow White night-light. The last night, we’d go to the boardwalk in Wildwood, gorge ourselves on sweet grilled sausages and cotton candy, play the carnival games, ride the Ferris wheel and the roller coaster.

  In the mornings, we’d eat cold cereal and toast, then pack up a cooler of sodas and snacks and walk the single block between our cottage and the beach. My mother would spread out a pink-and-white-striped blanket; my father would rock the stem of our umbrella back and forth, digging it into the sand, and then swoop me into his arms
and carry me, screeching with half-pretend terror, out into the waves.

  Every year, I was allowed to buy a single souvenir. The summer I was eight years old, I’d saved a few dollars of tooth fairy and allowance money, augmented by the quarters I’d cadged from the sofa cushions and the dollar bills from the lint filter in the dryer. My plan was to go to the store by myself, buy a pair of Jersey Shore snow globes, and give them to my parents for Chanukah.

  I waited until my mother was dozing, facedown on her beach towel, her back and legs gleaming with Hawaiian Tropic lotion, and my dad was settled into his folding chair with the Examiner before I took my shovel and pail as camouflage and walked down the beach, toward a spot where, beneath the disinterested gaze of a teenage babysitter, a half-dozen kids were at work making sand mermaids, with long, wavy strands of seaweed merhair and seashell bikinis. “Stay where we can see you,” my father called as I walked off, and I told him that I would. I waited until he’d opened the Business section before double-checking to make sure I had my change purse and walking from the beach to the sidewalk, then to the corner, looking both ways before I crossed the street.

  The store where we shopped every year was a high-ceilinged, barnlike room where the sunshine streamed in through skylights. It was full of bins of lacquered seashells and preserved starfish, penny candy and wrapped pieces of taffy. Behind a glass case were glossy slabs of fudge and caramel-dipped apples. Next to the cash register were racks of postcards, some featuring pretty girls in bikinis, with “See the Sights at the Jersey Shore” written underneath them. That morning, though, it was cloudy outside, and the store looked dim and empty. The cash register was abandoned; there weren’t any teenage clerks in their red pinnies, restocking shelves or telling shoppers where they could find inflatable floats or swim diapers. Instead of a sparkling treasure trove, the merchandise—marked-down T-shirts, foam beer cozies, “Jersey Shore” shot glasses, skimpy beach towels—looked dingy and cheap. The postcard rack squeaked when I spun it, and I noticed a card I hadn’t seen before. It had a picture of a very heavy woman in a red one-piece bathing suit not unlike my own. “The Jersey Shore’s Good, but the Food Is Great!” read the words printed over the sand. I stared, not quite understanding the joke but knowing that the woman in the bathing suit was the brunt of it, and wondering under what circumstances she’d posed for the picture. Had she just been lying there, sunning herself, when a man with a camera came by and tricked her, saying, You’re so pretty, let me take your picture? Or had she been aware the picture was going to be used for a joke? And if that was the case, why had she allowed it, knowing that people would laugh at her?