He smiled. “How cheesy would it sound if I told you that God believes in you?”
For what seemed like the first time since I’d landed in this dump, I smiled. “Pretty cheesy.”
“For a lot of beginners, their Higher Power is the group itself—it’s the other people working toward the same goal, supporting your sobriety.”
I pointed out the window at a guy I’d glimpsed from the waiting room. He had pierced ears and a tattooed neck, and wore a baseball cap pulled low over his brow. His sweatshirt hung midway down his thighs, his jeans sagged off his hips, and his enormous, unlaced basketball shoes looked big as boats. “Does he get to be my Higher Power?”
Nicholas followed my finger. “Maybe not him specifically.” He squeezed my shoulder. “Lunchtime,” he said. “Hang in there. I know this part is hard. Just try to keep an open mind. Try to listen.”
I nodded as if I was listening, as if I believed every word he’d told me, and walked back across the campus, taking care to stay on the women’s path. Inside Residential, all the women were lined up again, in front of a window from which a small, plump, dark-skinned woman with bobbed black hair and big, round glasses was dispensing medications.
“Boy, did you miss all the fun,” said Mary. “We had to figure out a way to get the horse to jump over a puddle.”
“Fucking bullshit,” Aubrey muttered. “How is leading around a horse on a rope supposed to help me not shoot dope?”
“You are a poet!” said Mary. “I bet you didn’t know it!”
Aubrey snorted, then gazed down balefully at her mud-caked feet. “These fucking boots are ruined.” In front of the window, a woman gulped her pills, then opened her mouth wide and waggled her tongue at the nurse.
“How desperate do you have to be,” I wondered, “to convince someone to save their saliva-coated pill for you?”
“Just wait,” Aubrey said. “When you’ve only slept for two hours a night six days in a row, you’ll give anything for that pill.” She banged a boot heel against the wall, sending a shower of flaked dirt onto the carpet.
“Aubrey F., that’s a demerit,” called the teenage boy behind the desk. I wondered what it meant, and made a mental note to find out later. Aubrey rolled her eyes and, when he turned back to the desk, shot him the finger. Mary giggled as the cafeteria doors swung open, releasing the smell of detergent and deep fryer, and we filed in for lunch.
TWENTY
“So listen,” said Aubrey, after we’d gathered our chicken fingers, Tater Tots, and canned corn and taken a seat at one of the long cafeteria tables. “Do you think . . .” She twirled a lock of hair around her finger.
“No,” Mary said immediately. She was cutting her chicken fingers into cubes, dipping each cube into ranch dressing, and then popping them in her mouth, one after another.
“But he’s in rehab, too!” Aubrey stabbed an entire chicken strip, doused it in ketchup, and held it aloft on her fork as she nibbled. “If I think he’s not gonna stay sober, doesn’t that mean that I’m not gonna make it, either?”
“I’m not saying you can’t give him a chance,” said Mary. “Remember what they said back in the Cold War? ‘Trust but verify’?”
Aubrey dunked her chicken back into the ketchup slick. “Like I remember the Cold War.”
Mary turned to me, the light glinting off her glasses as the chain swung against her bosom. “Aubrey’s boyfriend is in rehab, too. She’s trying to decide whether to see him again when she’s done here.” Over the younger woman’s head, Mary mouthed the words Bad idea.
I looked at Aubrey’s bruised arms. “This would be the guy who did that to you?”
Aubrey gave a shamefaced nod.
“Oh, Aubrey. Why would you even think of going back to someone who hurt you like that?”
She mumbled something I couldn’t hear.
“What?”
She raised her head. “We’ve got a kid,” she said defiantly. “A little boy.” She flipped her white plastic binder so I could see a snapshot of a toddler centered in the plastic cover, a beaming toddler with fine blond hair and two bottom teeth and a slick of drool on his ruddy red chin.
I felt my heart clench. This child, who couldn’t possibly be a day over eighteen, had a baby? She’d had a baby with a drug addict who beat her?
Mary reached for her hands across the table. “What kind of life is that for Cody?” she asked. “Do you want him to grow up thinking that men push women around? Choke them? Hit them?”
“It only happens when he’s high,” Aubrey protested.
“But you told us he’s high all the time,” Mary said.
“Well, but maybe if he goes to rehab and takes it seriously this time . . .”
“Who’s got the baby now?” I asked.
“Justin’s mom. That’s who we were living with. Me and Justin and Cody.”
A recovery coach—I’d learned that’s what the khaki-clad teenagers who seemed to be running Meadowcrest were called—tapped Aubrey’s shoulder. “They need you in Detox,” he said. Aubrey cleared her tray. We watched her go.
“I’ll pray for her,” Mary said, and touched the gold cross around her neck before returning to her chicken. “Not that I’m judging,” she said, “but I’m not sure Aubrey has the equipment she needs to make better choices.”
Another recovery coach, a girl with elfin features and delicate, pointed ears exposed by a cropped haircut, tapped my shoulder. “Allison W.? There’s a phone free, if you want to make your call.”
I hurried out of the cafeteria, clutching the card Nicholas had given me, the bright, coppery taste of pennies and fear in my mouth as I dialed.
“Hi, Mom. It’s Allison.”
“Oh, Allie . . .” She sounded—big surprise—like she was going to cry. “Hold on,” she said, before the sobs could start. “Ellie’s been wanting to talk to you.”
I waited, sweating, my heart beating too hard, my lips creased into a smile, thinking that if I looked happy, even fake-happy, I would sound happy, too. Finally, I heard heavy breathing in my ear.
“Mommy? Daddy says you are in the HOSPITAL!”
My insides seemed to collapse at the sound of her voice, everything under my skin turning to dust. Keep it together, I told myself. At least “hospital” was better than “rehab,” even if it wasn’t as good as “business trip,” which was what I’d been hoping for. “Hi, honey. I’m in a kind of hospital. It’s a kind of place where mommies go to rest and get better.”
“Why do you need to REST? You sleep all the TIME. You are always taking a NAP and I have to be QUIET.” She paused, and then her voice was grave. “Are you sick?”
“Not sick like that time you had an earache, or when Daddy had the flu. It’s a different kind of sick. So I’m just going to stay here until I’m all better and the doctors say I can come home.”
“How many days?” Ellie demanded.
“I’m not sure, El. But I’m going to try very hard to be there for your party, and I’ll be able to talk to you on the phone, and I can send you letters.”
“Can you send me a present? Or some candy or a pop?”
I smiled. Maybe it was good that she didn’t seem shattered—or, really, fazed in the slightest. Or maybe this was just her typical compensation, the way she’d try to make my father, and Hank, and now me, feel better about our screwups.
My job, I decided, was not to scare her. Let her think Mommy had some version of an earache or the flu, something that wasn’t fatal and that the doctors knew how to fix.
“What dress are you wearing?” I asked.
“New Maxi.” New Maxi was a pink-and-white-patterned maxi dress, not to be confused with Old Maxi, which I’d bought her at the Gap last summer. “Grandma does NOT make my dresses FIGHT. She says they’re supposed to all get along. But I ask you, where’s the fun in THAT?” Ellie demanded.
I smiled and made a noise somewhere between laughter and a sob, then sneezed three times in a row. “Not much fun at all, really.�
�
“But she said we could get a pedicure. AND that I could get a JEWEL on my toes.”
“Well, aren’t you lucky?”
“Grandma is AWESOME,” Ellie said . . . which was news to me. “And she let me have noodles for two nights!” The recovery coach tapped my shoulder and, when I looked up, pointed at her watch.
“I love you and I miss you,” I said. “You are my favorite.”
“I KNOW I am,” she trumpeted. “I KNOW I am your favorite!”
“Is Daddy there?” I asked.
Ellie sounded indignant. “Daddy is at WORK. It’s the middle of the DAYTIME.”
“I will call you when I can, and I’m going to write you a letter as soon as we say goodbye. Listen to Grandma and Daddy, and eat your growing foods, and make your bed in the morning, and floss your teeth.”
“I have to go now. Sam & Cat is on!” There was a thump, the muffled sound of voices, and then my mom was on the line.
“How . . . how are you doing?”
“As well as I can, I guess.”
“Don’t worry about anything. Everything here is going well.”
“Really?” I’d braced myself for a litany of complaints, bracketed by When will you be home? and laced with plenty of implied How could yous, but my mother sounded . . . cheerful? Could that be?
“You just take care of yourself. Everything’s under control. We’ve got . . .” There was a brief pause. “Let’s see, gymnastics today, is that right?”
“TUMBLING!” Ellie shouted in the background.
“And then Sadie’s birthday party on Saturday, and Chloe’s birthday party on Sunday . . .”
“I have presents for them in the downstairs closet.”
“Yes. We found them, and we made cards. You just take care of yourself . . .” Almost imperceptibly, I heard her voice thicken. “We’ll see you when we can.”
“Thanks, Mom. Thanks for everything.” I hung up the phone and sat there, teary-eyed and sneezing, as the recovery coach tapped my shoulder and, on the other side of the desk, a guy with tears tattooed on his cheeks shouted for Seroquel.
“You know, there’s a seven-day blackout,” said Miss Timex. “You won’t be talking to anybody again until that’s over.”
I didn’t answer. I’d already decided that the khaki brigade wasn’t worth wasting my breath on. Nicholas would be my go-to guy.
“You need to join your group,” she told me as I walked past the desk.
“Nicholas said I could lie down if I wanted.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Are you not feeling well?”
“I feel awful,” I said, and followed her as, sighing heavily, she walked me down the hall and unlocked the room where I’d woken up that morning.
I hung the handful of items that needed hangers in the gouged and battered freestanding wardrobe. Then I pulled a sheet of paper from the notebook I’d been issued and wrote Ellie a note. What do you call a grasshopper with a broken leg? Unhoppy! I love you and miss you and will see you soon. I drew a heart, a dozen X’s and O’s, then wrote MOM.
After I’d emptied my duffel bag, I went through my purse. My plan had been to curl up with a novel and try to make the time go by, but my e-reader, like my wallet and phone, was gone. I marched back out to the desk.
“Nothing but recovery-related reading,” said Wanda, my People magazine–loving friend. She looked left and right before mouthing the word Sorry.
“Is there a library?”
“You can buy approved reading materials in the gift shop. But it’s only open on Monday, Tuesday, and Friday mornings, and I think maybe Sunday afternoons.”
That figured. I remembered a New York Times story about rehabs from a few years ago. Most of them were private businesses, some were run by families, and all of them were for-profit . . . and the profits they turned were jaw-dropping. It wasn’t enough that they were milking patients and insurance companies for upwards of a thousand dollars a day so we could eat crappy cafeteria food, sleep in rooms that made Harry Potter’s under-the-staircase setup look like a Four Seasons suite, and be lectured about our selfishness by old men in polyester. We also had to pay what were undoubtedly inflated prices for recovery-related literature.
“You can read The Big Book,” she said, and handed me a copy of a squat paperback with a dark-blue cover. No words, no title on the cover, just the embossed AA logo.
I carried it back to my room, lay on the bed, and began reading, starting at the beginning, then flipping randomly. The Big Book was first published in 1939, and it didn’t take me long to realize that it was in desperate need of an update. The prose was windy, the sentences convoluted, the slang hopelessly dated (I snickered at a reference to “whoopee parties,” whatever those were). Worse, the working assumption, in spite of a footnote stating otherwise, seemed to be that all boozers were men. There was a blog post in that, for sure; maybe a whole series of them. If the Twelve Steps were the order of the day, and they were still geared toward middle-class, middle-aged white guys, how were women (not to mention non-white people, or gay people) expected to get better?
I kept reading. From what I could tell, in order to get sober the AA way, you had to have some kind of spiritual awakening . . . or, as the gassy prose of “The Doctor’s Opinion” put it, “one feels that something more than human power is needed to produce the essential psychic change.” So you got sober by finding God. And if you weren’t a believer? I flipped to the chapter called “We Agnostics,” and found that AA preached that if you didn’t believe, you were lying to yourself, “for deep down in every man, woman, and child is the fundamental idea of God. It may be obscured by calamity, by pomp, by worship of other things, but in some form or other it is always there.”
So my choices were God and nothing. I shut the book, feeling frustrated. A few minutes later, Aubrey stuck her head through my doorway. “We need to go to Share.”
I consulted my binder and made my way to the art therapy room. Three round tables had been pushed to the walls and two dozen folding chairs were arranged in a semicircle, with women seated in most of them. I took a seat between Mary and Aubrey.
“Good afternoon, Meadowcrest!” called the middle-aged woman sitting behind a desk at the center of the semicircle. A moderator, I figured, except she wasn’t wearing khaki. Her laminated nametag hung on a pink cord, instead of a plain black one. Her name, according to her tag, was Gabrielle.
“Good afternoon!” the group called back.
“Is this anyone’s first community meeting?”
After Mary looked at me pointedly, I raised my hand. “Hi, I’m Allison.” When this was met with silence, I muttered, “Pills.”
“Hi, Allison!” the room chorused.
“Welcome,” said Gabrielle, who then began reading from the binder. “Here at Meadowcrest, we are a community.” Just like Stonefield, I thought. And probably just as expensive. “Is there any feedback?” Silence. “Responses to yesterday’s kudos and callouts?” More silence. “Okay, then. Today we’re going to hear from Aubrey. Aubrey, are you ready to share?”
Aubrey crossed her skinny legs, tucked stray locks of dyed hair behind her small ears, and licked her lips. “Hi, um, I’m Aubrey, and I’m an addict.”
“Hi, Aubrey!”
She lifted one little hand in a half wave. “Hi. Um, okay. So I was born in Philadelphia in 1994 . . .”
Oh, God. In 1994 I’d been in college.
“My parents were both alcoholics,” Aubrey continued, twirling a strand of blonde hair around one finger. “They split up when I was two, and I lived with my mom and my stepdad.” She took a deep breath, pulling her knees to her chest. “I guess the first time he started abusing me, I was five. I remember he came into my bed, and at first he was just snuggling me. I liked that part. He said I was his special girl, and that he loved me more than he loved Mommy, that I was prettier, only we couldn’t tell Mommy; it had to be our secret.”
I started to cry as Aubrey went into the details of what
happened for the first time the year she turned six, and kept happening until she was fourteen and moved out of the house and in with a boyfriend of her own, who was twenty-two and living in his parents’ basement. How at first pot and vodka made the pain of what was happening go away, and how pills were even better, and how heroin was even better than that.
By the time Aubrey moved from snorting dope to shooting it, I was crying so hard it felt like something had ruptured inside me. Tears sheeted my face as her boyfriend turned abusive, as she moved in with her estranged father, who stole her money and her drugs, as she got pregnant and delivered an addicted baby when she was only seventeen.
Lurid and awful as it was, Aubrey’s story turned out to be dismayingly typical as my week crawled by. During every “Share” session, twice each day, a woman would talk about how her addiction had happened. Typically, the stories involved abuse, neglect, unplanned pregnancies, dropping out of school, and running away from home. There were boyfriends who hit; there were parents who looked the other way. Instead of being the exception, rape and molestation were the rule.
My mom’s new husband. My sister’s boyfriend. The babysitter (female). The big boy with the swimming pool who lived at the end of our street. I listened, crying, knowing how badly these girls had been damaged, and how pathetic my own story sounded. What would happen when it was my turn to share? Could I say that the stress of motherhood, writing blog posts, coping with a faltering marriage, and aging parents, parents who maybe weren’t the greatest but had never hit me and certainly had never molested me, had driven me to pills? They’d laugh at me. I would laugh at me.
On my third day at Meadowcrest, a woman named Shannon told her story. Shannon was different from the other girls. She was older, for one thing, almost thirty as opposed to half-past teenager, and she was educated—she talked about her college graduation, and made a reference to graduate school. She’d lived in Brooklyn, had wanted to be a writer, had loved pills in college and had discovered, in the real world, that heroin was cheaper and could make her feel even better.
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