All Fall Down: A Novel

by Jennifer Weiner

  “Why are you here?” Darnton asked Aubrey.

  She shrugged. “ ’Cause my parents found my works.”

  “Do you want to stop using?”

  Another shrug. “I guess.”

  “You guess,” Darnton repeated, his voice rich with sarcasm. Was mocking addicts really an effective way to get them to change? Before I could come to any conclusions, Darnton turned on Mary. “How about you?”

  “I was drinking too much,” she whispered in a quavering voice. “I did terrible things.”

  Darnton appeared just as interested in Mary’s self-flagellation as he did in Aubrey’s nonchalance. “And you?”

  I forced myself to sit up straight. “I was taking painkillers.”

  “And you were taking painkillers because . . ?” the thumb persisted.

  “Because I was in pain,” I said. Duh. Never mind that the pain was spiritual instead of physical. The thumb did not need to know that. I turned my eyes toward the wall, where two posters were hanging. STEP ONE, I read. We admitted that we were powerless over alcohol and that our lives had become unmanageable, then tuned back into the jerky little man lecturing us about our “character defects,” hectoring us about what he kept calling “the brain disease of addiction,” a disease that, he claimed, was rooted in self-centeredness.

  “If anything, I was using the pills because I was trying to do too much for other people,” I interrupted. “My father’s got Alzheimer’s, so I’ve been helping him and my mother. I take care of my daughter. And I write for a women’s website.”

  Darnton’s eyebrows were practically at his hairline . . . or where his hairline must have been at some point. “Oh, a writer,” he said. He probably thought I was lying. Given my scratched hands, my pallor, my ratty hair and attire, my vague smell of puke—and, of course, the fact that I was in rehab—I couldn’t blame him.

  “Yes, I’m a writer,” I said. “And my life was not unmanageable. Everyone else’s life was unmanageable.”

  The thumb opened his book again and kept reading. “Selfishness—self-centeredness! That, we think, is the root of our trouble. Driven by a hundred forms of fear, self-delusion, self-seeking, and self-pity—”

  “I volunteered,” I said, hearing my voice quiver. I swallowed hard. No way was I going to cry in front of this hectoring little jerk. “I ran my house. I took care of my daughter. I took care of my parents. I helped out at my daughter’s school . . .”

  He lifted his eyebrows again. “Doing everything, were we?”

  “So either I’m selfish or I’m a martyr?”

  The man shrugged. “Your best thinking got you here. Think about that.” He returned to his reading. “The alcoholic is an extreme example of self-will run riot, though he usually doesn’t think so.” He paused to give me a significant look.

  “I’m not a ‘he,’ ” I said. I’d been acquainted with The Big Book for only twenty minutes, but I could already tell that it needed a gender update.

  “Above everything, we alcoholics must be rid of this selfishness. We must, or it kills us!” He set the book down and looked us over. Aubrey appeared to be asleep, and Mary was crying quietly into her hands.

  “You think your life is fine,” he said to me. Better than yours, I thought unkindly, imagining the existence that went with his outfit—a vinyl-sided house in some unremarkable suburb, a ten-year-old shoebox of a car with spent shocks, waiting for his tax refund to arrive so he could pay down the interest on his credit card. A little man with a little mind and a handful of slogans he’d repeat, no matter who was in the room with him or what their problems were.

  “I bet when you go home, and you’re looking at things with sober eyes, you’re going to think differently.” When I didn’t answer, he said, “Before I got sober, I’d been building shelves in my kitchen. I thought they were beautiful. I thought I really knew what I was doing. When I came home, I saw that those shelves were a disaster. They were crooked. The cabinet doors didn’t shut. I’d kicked a hole in the wall when I got frustrated.”

  “Sorry to hear that,” I said, even though I wasn’t. I couldn’t have cared less about this man with his bad haircut and cheap clothes. Besides, my house looked fine. No holes in my walls, no crooked cabinets. I had Henry the handyman on speed dial.

  “You were taking care of your parents,” said the little man.

  “My father has early-stage Alzheimer’s.”

  Mary finally stopped crying long enough to look up. “Me, too! I mean, not me. My husband.”

  Darnton lifted a hand, silencing Mary. “And your daughter,” the little man continued.

  “My daughter. My business. My husband. My house.”

  “Did you ever think that you were . . .”—he hooked his fingers into scare quotes—“ ‘helping’ all those people so you could control them?”

  Suddenly I was so tired I could barely speak, and I was craving a pill so badly I could cry. How was I going to live the rest of my life, in a world overrun with idiots like this one, without the promise of any comfort at the end of the day? “I was helping them because they needed help.”

  “I’m selfish,” said Aubrey, in a whisper. Her heavily shadowed eyelids were cast down, and she worried a cuticle as she spoke. “I stole from my parents. I stole from my grandma.”

  “What about you?” the man asked Mary.

  “I don’t think I was,” she said hesitantly. “My drinking didn’t get bad until after my daughter had her babies. She had triplets, because of the in vitro, so I’d drive from Maryland to Long Island once a week, and spend three days with her, and then drive down to New Jersey for the weekends to help my son. He’s single, and he only sees his two on the weekends. That’s why I drank, I think. I’d be so wound up after all that driving, and the kids, that I just couldn’t turn myself off. So I’d have a gin and tonic—that was what my husband and I always drank, gin and tonics—and when that didn’t do it, I’d have two, and then . . .” Tears spilled over the reddened rims of her eyes. “I got a DUI,” she whispered. One hand wandered to the hem of her sweatshirt and tugged at it as she spoke. “I rear-ended someone with my grandbabies in the car. I wasn’t planning on driving, but my son got stuck at work, and I was the only one who could get the kids. I should have said no, made up some reason why I couldn’t drive them, but I was so ashamed. So ashamed,” she repeated, then started to cry again.

  Great, I thought. An angry thumb, a drunk granny, and a thief. What was wrong with this picture? The fact that I was in it.

  “Excuse me,” I said politely, and walked to the door.

  Darnton glared at me. “Orientation’s until ten-fifteen. Then you have Equine.”

  “Equine? Yeah, no,” I said. “I need to speak to someone now.” I exited the room. Margo, the woman from the breakfast hour, had been replaced by another young woman in the same outfit. This one had a mustache, faint but discernible. The Big Book was open on her computer keyboard. Underneath it, I could see People magazine—“The Bachelor’s Women Tell All!”

  “Oh my God,” I said. “I’m going to miss the Fantasy Suites.”

  The woman flashed a quick smile. She wore a pin, instead of a nametag on a lanyard around her neck, which read WANDA. “Yeah, sorry. No TV for you guys, just recovery-related movies.”

  “How will I live,” I wondered, “if I don’t know whether he picks Kelly S. or Kelly D.?” As I spoke, I remembered all the episodes I’d watched with Ellie snuggled on the bed beside me, a bowl of popcorn between us, her head on my shoulder as she slipped into sleep. Normal. (Sort of.) Happy. God, what had happened to take me away from that and bring me here?

  The woman lowered her voice. “Can you actually tell them apart?”

  “One’s a hairdresser, and the other one’s a former NBA dancer,” I said.

  “Okay, but they look exactly the same.”

  “All the women on that show look exactly the same.” I could talk about this forever and had, in fact, written several well-received blog posts on t
he homogeneity of The Bachelor’s ladies.

  “Tell you what,” said the woman. “I can’t sneak in a DVD. But I’ll tell you who got roses.”

  “Deal,” I said, feeling incrementally relieved that not everyone in this place was a monster. Just then, a new Meadowcrest employee cruised into view. Wanda shoved her People magazine out of sight, as the new woman—middle-aged, blonde hair in a bob, tired blue eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses—looked me over.

  “Hi there,” I said, sounding professional and polite. “Can you help me find my counselor?”

  “Who is it?”

  “Well, I’m hoping you can help me with that. I actually don’t have a name yet. I just finished orientation.” As far as I was concerned, that was true.

  “Normally, you aren’t assigned a counselor until your third or fourth day.”

  “Can I use the phone?”

  “If you just came, you’re on your seven-day blackout. You need to get permission to use the phone from your counselor.”

  “But you just told me I don’t have a counselor.” This conversation was beginning to feel like a tired Abbott and Costello routine.

  “Then,” said the woman, her voice smug, “you’ll just have to be patient, won’t you?”

  “I don’t think you understand,” I said. “This is a mistake. I don’t need to be in rehab. I’m not a drug addict. I was taking painkillers that were prescribed to me by a doctor. Now I’m fine, and I want to go home.”

  “You can sign yourself out AMA—that’s ‘against medical advice’—but your counselor needs to sign your paperwork.”

  “But I don’t have a counselor!”

  She stared at me for a minute. I stared right back, my feet planted firmly.

  “Hold on,” she finally grumbled. Bending over the telephone, she muttered something I couldn’t catch. A minute later, a very large woman with lank brown hair, pale skin, and pale, bulging eyes came waddling around the corner. Her khaki pants swished with each step; her lanyard flapped and flopped against the lolloping rolls of her flesh.

  “Allison? I’m Michelle. I understand that there’s a problem?” Her voice was high and singsongy. She sounded a lot like Miss Katie, who taught kindergarten at Stonefield.

  I followed her into a closet-sized office dominated by a desk. A fan clipped to the doorframe pushed the air around, along with the smell of microwaved pizza. The Twelve Steps hung on the wall. Michelle settled herself into her chair, which squeaked in protest. “Why don’t you tell me what’s going on?”

  I explained it all: the heroin addicts at breakfast, the condescending little man at orientation, how I understood that I was having problems managing my medication—“but not, you know, rehab-level problems.”

  Michelle turned to her computer, tapped briefly on the keyboard, and then turned to stare at me with her bulgy eyes. “You were taking six hundred milligrams of OxyContin a day?”

  I shrugged, trying not to squirm. “Only on really bad days. Normally it wasn’t that many,” I lied.

  She picked up a cheap plastic pen and tapped it against her desk. “My guess, Allison, is that the pills were a way for you to self-medicate. To remove yourself from painful situations without actually going anywhere.”

  It sounded reasonable, but I wouldn’t let myself nod or give any other indication that she might be right.

  “So I think . . .” She raised a hand, as if I’d tried to interrupt her. “No, just hear me out. I think that you really do need to be here.”

  “Maybe I do need help,” I said. “But I don’t think this is the place for me. No offense, but I think I’m here because my husband thought I’d change my mind before he got me in the car. I bet he found this place in five minutes on the Internet. I didn’t leave him time for lots of research. And I think there are probably places that might be a better fit. Where the”—I searched for an institutional-sounding word—“population might be more like me.”

  An alarmed expression flitted across Michelle’s face. It was quickly replaced by the tranquil look she’d been wearing since our conversation began. “Why do you feel that way?”

  “Well, for starters, I’m old enough to be most of the other girls’ mother.”

  “That’s not true,” she said. “There are quite a few women your age or older.”

  “I’ll give you ‘a few,’ but not ‘quite a few,’ ” I said. “Unless you’re hiding them somewhere. Besides, these girls were doing street drugs.”

  “And you weren’t?”

  I shook my head. “No. I had prescriptions.” Except for the ones I ordered online, but never mind that.

  “Do you think that makes you different from the rest of the ladies here?”

  I hesitated, sensing a trap. “Yes,” I finally said. “I do think I’m different.”

  “Do you think you’re better?” I didn’t answer. “I think,” said Michelle, “that what I’m hearing is your disease talking. You know, addiction is the only disease that tells you that you don’t have a disease.”

  “I’m not sure I actually believe that addiction is a disease,” said, but Michelle was on a roll.

  “Your disease is telling you that you don’t belong here. Your disease is saying that you didn’t even have a problem, or that if you did, it wasn’t that bad. Your disease is saying, ‘I can handle this. I’ll do it on my own. I can cut back. I don’t need the Twelve Steps, and I definitely don’t need rehab.’ ” I was quiet. This, of course, was exactly what I’d been thinking.

  “But your best thinking is what got you here. Think about that for a minute.” This, of course, was exactly what Darnton had told me. Another trite slogan, one they probably recited to every patient who was giving them trouble.

  “I’d like to speak to my husband and my mom. I need to know how my daughter is doing.”

  “Your counselor can help you to arrange that.”

  “But I don’t have a counselor!” I closed my mouth. I was shouting again. “Look, you don’t understand,” I said, and knotted my fingers together so my hands would stop shaking. “I didn’t have time to make any arrangements for my daughter or my mom. My father just moved into an assisted-living facility, and my mom moved in with us.”

  “Well, then,” said Michelle, with a simper, “it sounds like your husband will have plenty of help at home.”

  Under other circumstances, I would have laughed. “If my mother was a normal person, that would be true,” I told her. “But my mother’s basically another child. She doesn’t drive, and even if she did, she doesn’t know Ellie’s schedule, and Ellie won’t be her priority. She’ll be worried about my dad.” I was getting overwhelmed just thinking about the mess I’d left behind, the assignments I hadn’t completed, the comments I hadn’t approved, the dentist’s appointment I hadn’t made for Ellie, the checkup that I’d postponed for myself, the visit from the roofers that I’d never gotten around to scheduling. “I can’t stay here,” I told Michelle. “It’s impossible. There are too many things I need to take care of.”

  She nodded. “So many of us women feel like we’re the ones holding up the world. Like it’s all going to fall down without us.”

  “I can’t speak for anyone else, but in my case, that’s actually true,” I offered. Michelle appeared not to hear.

  “Acceptance is hard,” she said.

  I frowned. “Acceptance of what?”

  “Why don’t you tell me, Allison? What are you having a hard time accepting?”

  I tried not to roll my eyes. “For starters, that you won’t let me talk to my daughter and explain why I’m not home. I don’t think that’s an unreasonable request. Please,” I said. Maybe it was withdrawal, the exhaustion of what my body had been through over the past few days, but I was too tired and too sad to keep arguing. “I just want to talk to someone at my home.”

  Michelle swiped her mouse back and forth, peered at her computer screen, and then spent a minute typing. “The head of our counseling department has an opening at noon. His
name is Nicholas.”

  “Thank you. I appreciate your help.” There. I could be reasonable, I could be polite . . . and I was feeling encouraged.

  “For now, though, I need you to go join your group.”

  “Thank you,” I said again, thinking that I was on my way. It had taken me three hours to orchestrate even the promise of a phone call home. By day’s end, I was confident I’d be able to talk my way out of here and get myself home.

  NINETEEN

  I walked out the door and onto the sidewalk. The fresh air felt good on my face after the recirculated staleness I’d been breathing inside. I was halfway across the lawn before I heard someone yelling. “Hey,” he called. “You can’t walk there! Hey!”

  I turned and saw a young man in khakis. “That’s the men’s path.”

  I looked around to make sure he was talking to me, then down at what seemed to be gender-neutral pavement. “Excuse me?”

  “Men and women have to walk on separate paths. Yours is here.” He pointed. I shrugged and started across the grass. “No!” he hollered. “You have to go back and start at the beginning! No walking across the grass!”

  I stopped and stared at him. “Is this like Simon Says?”

  “ ‘Half-measures availed us nothing!’ ”

  “Excuse me?”

  “From The Big Book. You can’t take shortcuts.”

  Whatever. I went back to the door, got on the proper path, and found Aubrey and Mary standing in the middle of a fenced-in oval, staring uneasily at a big horse with a brown coat and a sandy mane, which was ignoring them as it nibbled on a clump of grass. I waved at them, then ducked through the fence and was crossing the muddy ground when a woman in a cowboy hat held up her hand.

  “I think you missed the entrance.”

  Shit. I sighed, went back through the fence, walked the long way around the ring, and pushed open the gate. “What’s up?”

  The woman in the cowboy hat didn’t answer. Aubrey, whose glittery eyeshadow and high-heeled boots looked strange in the June sunshine, said, “We’re supposed to put this on that.” This was a tangle of leather straps and metal buckles. That was the horse.