I readjusted my grasp on my change purse, gave the metal rack a final spin, and was heading off to find the snow globes when a man grabbed me by the shoulder and spun me around.
“Did you see?” he demanded. I blinked up at him. He wore a baseball shirt with the buttons open over his bare chest, cutoff denim shorts, and leather sandals. His eyes looked wild and his teeth were stained brown, and the smell of liquor coming off of him was so thick it was almost visible, like the cloud surrounding Pig-Pen in the Peanuts comic strip. As I stared, the man shook my shoulder again. “Did you see?”
I shook my head. I hadn’t seen anything, but even if I had, I would have denied it. There was something wrong with this man; even a little kid like me could tell. I couldn’t remember ever being so scared. Worse than the waves of liquor smell that rolled off him was the feeling of not-rightness. His pupils were too big; his hand was holding me way too hard. A squeak escaped my lips as tears spilled onto my cheeks. I wished I’d never come here, never snuck away from my parents. I wished they would come rescue me, right this minute. As we stood there, with his fingers still curled into the flesh of my shoulder, a woman, barefoot in a bikini top and a short denim skirt, with the kind of bleached-blonde hair my mother would have dismissed with a curled lip and the word “cheap,” came around the corner. She had a red plastic shopping basket over one forearm, empty except for a canister of Pringles, and a tattoo of what looked like a heart visible above the bra cup of her swimsuit.
“You’re scaring her, Kenny,” the woman said, and knelt down beside me. She had a southern accent and a sweet, high voice, but she, too, smelled like booze when she breathed. “What’s your name, pretty girl? You want some fudge?”
“No, thank you,” I whispered, as wild-eyed Kenny repeated, in a droning whine, “She saw us.”
“She didn’t see a thing.” The woman’s eyes looked like spinning pinwheels, her pupils tiny pinpricks of black in the blue of her irises. “How about a lollipop, pretty little miss?”
“I have to go now,” I whispered, and ran past them, out the door. I knew which way the beach was—there was only one street to cross, then I’d be there—but, somehow, I must have gone the wrong way, because when I stopped running I couldn’t see the water, and the street was completely unfamiliar. BAR AND GRILLE, read one sign. I heard the sound of an American flag, hanging at the corner, snapping in the breeze. There were people on the street, but not tourists, not people like me and my parents, in swimsuits and sun hats, carrying coolers and portable radios and folding chairs. All I saw were a few men dressed like Kenny, men with dark glasses and bent heads and a palpable aura of strangeness, of off-ness, around them, going in and out of the BAR AND GRILLE. I stood on the corner in my pink rubber flip-flops and my white terry-cloth cover-up. I’d dropped my change purse at some point during my flight.
Eventually, a man in a blue bathing suit, with a coating of white zinc on his nose, found me standing on the street corner, crying. “Little girl, are you lost?” I’d told him my name and that I lived in Cherry Hill but was staying in Avalon, and he’d walked me back to the beach, just two blocks away, where I found my parents at the lifeguard station. “Where did you go?” my mother asked, her voice shaking as she scooped me into her arms. My father gave me a lecture about staying where I could see them and not ever, ever scaring my mother like that. “You know how sensitive she is,” he’d said, and I’d nodded, crying wordlessly, meaning to explain that I’d wanted to go shopping, to get presents, to surprise them, but I never caught my breath enough to form the words, and they never asked where I’d gone, or why. They’d taken me back to the blanket and given me lemonade. My sobs tapered off into hiccups, and, eventually, I’d fallen asleep in the wedge of shade under our umbrella, and had to be woken up so they could walk me back to the cottage for lunch. By the afternoon, I’d all but forgotten about my adventure . . . but as I got older, I’d remembered, and I would spend hours trying to figure out what the couple, he with the baseball shirt, she with the shopping basket and the southern accent, had been doing that they’d worried I had seen. Had they robbed the place? Shoplifted a bottle? Were they paranoid because of something they’d smoked or swallowed, jumping at shadows, scaring little girls for no reason? I never knew . . . but the sense of that morning had never left me, the idea that everything could change with just one wrong turn. There was a parallel universe that ran alongside the normal world, and if you went through the wrong door, or turned left instead of right, ran up the street instead of down it, you could accidentally push the curtain aside and end up in that other place, where everything was different and everything was wrong.
That was how I felt, waking up that first morning in a single bed in a small, dingy room at Meadowcrest. “Oh, shit, not here,” I’d said when Dave had pulled off the road and I’d seen the signs that read MEADOWCREST: PUTTING FAMILIES FIRST. There were at least half a dozen billboards with the same slogan along I-95 on the way from Center City to the airport, with a picture of a white guy with a superhero’s jawline holding a beaming toddler in his arms. Dave and I had joked about it, wondering if the guy had been told he’d be posing for an ad for beer or Cialis, and the ribbing his buddies must have given him when he’d turned out to be the face of addiction.
Tight-lipped, without smiling, Dave had said, “They had a bed.”
“I want to go to Malibu. Seriously. If I’m going to do this, I might as well do it right.” I still felt awful—sick and weak and nauseous, and gutted from the shame—but I had lifted my chin, trying to look imperious with my ratty hair and my dirty clothes and Ellie’s Princess Jasmine fleece blanket wrapped around my shoulders. “Take me to the place where Liza Minnelli’s on the board of directors.”
Dave said nothing to me as he pulled the car up to the guard’s stand. “Allison Weiss. She’s checking in.”
“I’m checking in!” I sang, trying to remember the lyrics of the Simpsons rehab anthem. “No more pot or Demerol. No more drugs or alcohol! No more stinking fun at all . . !” I glanced sideways, wondering if Dave remembered how, when we’d started dating, we’d call each other and watch The Simpsons together, him in his apartment, me in mine, and how we’d speculate, during commercials, about whether the severely nerdy bow-tied weather guy on the NBC station got laid nonstop.
He parked the car, took my duffel bag out of the backseat, and walked me inside, where a woman behind a receptionist’s desk led us to the comfortable, well-appointed waiting room, with leather couches and baskets of hundred-calorie snack packs and a wide-screen TV.
They’d been showing Jeopardy! The categories were World History, English Literature, Ends in “Y,” Famous Faces, and—ha—Potent Potables. Curled on the couch in my Jasmine blanket, I answered every question right. “Do I really need to be here?” I’d asked Dave.
“Yes, Allie,” said Dave, sounding distant and tired. “You do.” I could see wrinkles at the corners of his eyes and a few grayish patches in the beard that had grown in since that morning, and the cuff of one pant leg was tucked into his sock. How must these last few days have been for him? I wondered, before deciding it was better not to think about it.
I’d tried to tell him that I felt much better, that, clearly, I’d had some kind of bad reaction to Suboxone, but now I was fine and, as Jeopardy! indicated, clearheaded, that it would be all right for him to take me home, and I remembered him not-too-gently removing (prying might have been a better word) my fingers from his forearms and delivering me into the care of a short, bald male nurse who’d hummed Lady Gaga’s “The Edge of Glory” while he’d taken my blood and medical history, before handing me a plastic pee cup and directing me to the bathroom. “Gotta pat you down,” he’d said when I came out, handing me a robe and telling me to take everything off. “And we’re gonna do the old squat-and-cough.” I stared at him until I realized he was serious. Then, shaking my head in disbelief, I squatted. And coughed.
Once my exam was done, I’d joined Dave in a cubicle, where a
young woman with doughy features and too much blue eyeliner sat behind a computer and asked me embarrassing questions. When I didn’t answer, or couldn’t, Dave stepped in. “I think she’s been abusing painkillers for about a year,” he’d said, and, “Yes, she has prescriptions, but she’s also been buying things online,” and, finally, most terrifyingly, “Yes, I’ll pay out of pocket for what insurance doesn’t cover.” I’d grabbed his sleeve again and leaned close, whispering, “Dave . . .”
He’d pulled his arm away and given me a look that could only be called cold. “You need to get yourself together,” he’d said. “If not for your own sake, then for Ellie’s.”
So here I was. I looked around, running my hands down my body. My jeans felt greasy; the waistband had slipped down my hips, the way it did when I’d worn them for too long without a wash. My clogs, resting by the side of the bed, were stained with something I didn’t want to examine too closely. My T-shirt smelled bad, and there was a smear of the same offensive something on its sleeve. I had clean clothes in the duffel Dave had packed, but I’d last seen it on the other side of the receptionist’s desk. “We’ll just hang on to it up here until one of the staffers has time to search it, ’kay?” she’d said.
“Good morning, Meadowcrest!” a voice blared from the ceiling. I bolted upright with my heart thudding in my chest. I still felt weak, and sick, and I ached all over. I wasn’t sure whether that was related to precipitated withdrawal, or how much was the result of the phenobarbital they were giving me to get me through the worst of the lingering withdrawal symptoms.
“It is now seven a.m.,” said the ceiling. “Ladies, please head down to get your morning meds. Breakfast will begin at seven-thirty. Gentlemen, you’ll eat at eight o’clock. Room inspections will commence at nine. Riiiiiise and shiiiine!”
I collapsed on my back. My head hit the pillow with a crackling sound. Investigation revealed that both the pillow and the mattress were thin, sad-looking affairs encased in crinkly, stained plastic. Lovely.
Swinging my feet onto the floor, I took my first good look at my room: a narrow, cell-like space with a bed, a desk, a scarred wooden wardrobe, and a tattered poster reading ONE DAY AT A TIME stuck to the wall with a scrap of Scotch tape. My duffel bag, which now had a construction-paper label bearing the words ALLISON W. and SEARCHED attached to one strap with a garbage bag twist-tie, sat on the floor beside me.
I took one shuffling step, then two, then crossed the room to the door, where a man in a khaki uniform was pushing a mop. “Excuse me,” I said.
He looked at me blankly.
“Is there someone here I can talk to?”
The blank look continued.
“I’m not supposed to be here,” I said, enunciating each word clearly. “I need to talk to someone so I can go home.”
The man—a janitor, I guessed—shrugged and cocked his thumb toward the opposite end of the hall. There was a desk with no one behind it. A few people—teenagers, mostly—were milling in the hall, wearing pajama bottoms and slippers and sweatshirts, making quiet conversation. I stood there until they saw me. “Excuse me,” I said. “Is there anyone who works here who can help me?”
“They come in at eight o’clock,” said one of the shufflers in slippers. I went back to my room, where, for lack of anything better to do, I unzipped the duffel bag and inspected its contents. Dave hadn’t even let me go home from the hospital long enough to pack. He was probably worried that I’d use the opportunity to run, when all I wanted to do was say goodbye to Ellie and my mom. A look in the mirror in my hospital room had convinced me to wait. If Ellie had seen me looking so sick, she’d probably have been even more worried. I hoped Dave would tell her I’d gone away on a last-minute trip to New York.
I made the bed, smoothing the thin, pilled brown comforter before I started going through the bag. There were six pairs of tennis socks, two pairs of lace panties that I had bought before Eloise’s birth and not tried to squeeze myself into since, a single sports bra, a pair of jeans, two long-sleeved T-shirts, and a pair of black velvet leggings that I recognized as the bottom half of a long-ago Catwoman Halloween costume. I stopped rummaging after that. It was just too depressing. Why had Dave packed, and not Janet or even my mom? Was there anything like a toothbrush and deodorant in here? How had he managed to pack everything I’d needed that weekend when Ellie was a newborn, but get it so wrong this time?
Maybe he was scared, I thought. Five years ago, he’d been packing for a romantic retreat, a family honeymoon by the beach. This time, he’d been shipping a drug addict to rehab. Big difference.
Someone was knocking on the other side of my bathroom door. “Come in,” I called. My voice was weak and croaky. A girl who didn’t look much older than fourteen stuck her head into my room and looked around.
“We share the bathroom and you gotta keep it clean and everything off the floor,” she said. “Or else we’ll both get demerits.”
Demerits? “Okay,” I said, and forced myself to stand on legs that felt as though something large and angry had been chewing on them all night long.
“I’m going to brush my teeth. Do you need to use the bathroom?”
I shook my head, although I wasn’t sure what I needed, other than my pills. I cast a sideways glance at my purse. Maybe there was a stash I’d missed, or even some dust in the Altoids tin that could help.
“I’m Allison,” I said.
“Hi,” said the girl as she followed my gaze. “Forget it,” she said. “They search everything that comes in.” She had shimmering blonde hair hanging to the small of her back, a small, foxy face, pale eyes, and vivid purple bruises running up and down her bare arms.
“I’m Aubrey,” she said, and tugged at the strap of her tank top. She was dressed like she was ready to go clubbing, or at least the way I imagined girls on their way to clubs would dress. Her jeans were tight enough to preclude circulation, her black boots had high heels, her top was made of some thin silvery fabric, which she had matched with silver eye shadow and, if I wasn’t mistaken, false eyelashes that were also dusted with glitter.
“Listen,” I said, trying not to sound as desperate as I felt. “Who do I talk to about getting out of here?”
Aubrey snickered.
“No, seriously. I think this is a mistake.”
“Sure,” said Aubrey, in the same indulgent tone I used to jolly Eloise out of her bad moods.
“Please. There must be, like, a counselor, or a supervisor. Someone I can talk to.”
“Yeah, you’d think so,” Aubrey said. “For what this place costs, there should be. But there’s nobody, like, official, until lunchtime. Hey, it could be worse,” she said, after seeing the look on my face. “My last place, there were, like, six girls to a room, in bunk beds. At least here you’ve got your own space. So why are you here?” she asked.
“Because my husband’s an asshole,” I said.
She smiled, then quickly pressed her lips together, covering her discolored teeth. “You better not let the RCs hear you say that,” she said. “They’ll say you’re in denial. That until you’re ready to admit you have a problem, you won’t ever get better.”
“What if I don’t have a problem?”
She lifted her narrow shoulders in a shrug. “I dunno. Honestly, I’ve never seen anyone in rehab who didn’t have a problem. And I’ve been in rehab a lot.”
Yay, you, I thought.
“What were you taking?” she asked. When I didn’t answer, she said, “C’mon, you must have been taking something.”
“Oh. Um. Painkillers. Prescription painkillers.” The “prescription” suddenly struck me as important, a way of announcing to this girl that I wasn’t scoring crack on the streets, that I might be a junkie, but I was a reputable junkie.
“Percs?” she asked, smoothing her hair. “Vics? Oxys?”
“All of the above,” I said ruefully.
“Yeah. That’s how I started.” She looked over my shoulder, out the window, which revealed
an unlovely view of a waterlogged field. “You know how it goes. One day you’re snorting a Perc before history class, the next day you’re down in Kensington, and some guy named D-Block is sticking a needle in your arm.”
“Ah,” I said. Meanwhile, I was thinking, D-Block? There was no D-Block in my story. Or Kensington. Or needles.
“You court-stipulated?” she asked, without much interest. She’d moved on from her hair and the window and was now checking her eye makeup in a mirror she’d pulled out of her pocket.
I shook my head.
“Did you fail a random?”
I tried to make sense of the question. “I don’t know what that means.”
“Like, a random drug test at work. A lot of the older ladies are here for that.” She gave me a look that was not unsympathetic. “No offense.”
“Oh, none taken.” I wasn’t sure whether her “no offense” applied to my age or to the assumption that I’d gotten in trouble at work. “No, I work for myself, so no drug tests or anything.”
“Lose your license? DUI?”
I shook my head. “How about you?” I said, like we’d just been introduced at a cocktail party and she’d just tapped the conversational ball over to my side of the net. “Are you working, or in school?”
“I waitressed.” It took her a minute to remember how conversation happened. “What do you do?”
All Fall Down: A Novel Page 21