All Fall Down: A Novel

by Jennifer Weiner

  “Eventually, it turned me into someone I didn’t recognize,” Shannon told the room, in her quiet, cultured voice. “You know that part in The Big Book where it talks about the real alcoholic?” Shannon flipped open her own blue-covered paperback and read. “ ‘Here is the fellow who has been puzzling you, especially in his lack of control. He does absurd, incredible, tragic things while drinking.’ Or, if you’re in the rooms”—“the rooms,” I’d learned, was a shorthand term for AA meetings—“you’ll hear someone talking about how they paid for their seat, and ‘paid’ stands for ‘pitiful acts of incomprehensible destruction.’ ”

  Shannon sucked in a breath and scrubbed her hands along her thighs. “That was me. I did things that were incomprehensible. I stole from my parents. I stole from my great-aunt, who was dying. I went to visit her and stole jewelry right out of her bedroom, and medication from her bedside table.”

  In my folding chair, I felt my body flush, remembering the pills I’d taken from my dad. Shannon continued, her voice a monotone. “I slept with guys who could give me heroin. I sold everything I had—artwork my friends had made for me, jewelry I’d inherited—for drugs.” Her lips curved into a bitter smile. “You know how they say an alcoholic will steal your wallet, but an addict will steal your wallet, then lie about it and help you look for it the next day? I can’t tell you the lies I told, or the stuff I stole, or the things I did to myself in my active addiction. And you know the scariest part?” Her voice was rising. “After everything I’ve done, everything I’ve been through, I don’t know if I can stop. I don’t know if I want to. I’m not even sure that when I get out of here I’m not going to be right back on that corner. Because nothing ever—ever—made me feel as good as heroin did. And I’m not sure I want to live the whole rest of my life without that feeling.”

  The entire room seemed to sigh. I found that I was nodding in spite of myself. I looked around, waiting for a counselor who would say “One day at a time,” or tell us to “play the tape” of how our pleasures had turned on us, or remind Shannon it wasn’t for the rest of her life, just right now, this minute, this hour, this day, that she had friends, that there were people who loved her and wanted her to get well . . . but there were never any counselors in Share. Nobody here but us chickies, Mary had said when I’d asked her.

  “The last time I went home, there was one navy-blue dress in my closet, and a pair of shoes. My parents had gotten rid of the rest of my stuff—my desk, my books, my clothes, all the posters I used to have on the walls. There was just that one dress. My mom told me, ‘That’s the dress we’re going to bury you in.’ ”

  Nobody spoke. Shannon rubbed her palms on her jeans again, then looked up. Her shoulder-length hair was in a ponytail, and if it wasn’t for her pockmarked complexion and the deep circles beneath her tear-reddened eyes, you would have no way of guessing that she was a junkie. She looked like any other young woman, dressed down, like she could be a teacher or a bank teller or a web designer. Just like me. And now she was trapped. The thing that had once been a pleasure, a treat, was now a necessity, as vital as air and water. I don’t know if I can stop. I don’t know if I want to. Just like me . . . because, honestly, I wasn’t sure I could stop. And I knew what all of that meant: that I wasn’t just a lady who’d taken a few too many pills and developed a pesky little physical dependence. It meant I was an addict—the same as Mary and her DUI, and Aubrey and her six trips through rehab, and Marissa, who’d lost her front tooth and custody of her kid after she and her boyfriend had gotten into a fistfight over the last bag of dope.

  Hello, I’m Allison, and I’m an addict.

  I shook my head. It wasn’t true. I wasn’t an addict. I was just . . . it was only . . . Aubrey was staring at me. “You okay?” she asked. Her eyes were wide and clear, rimmed with sparkly silver liner and heavily mascara’d lashes. The bruises on her arms had started to fade. She was still way too thin, but she looked better.

  “I’m fine,” I whispered, even as a shudder wracked my shoulders. My skin bristled with goose bumps. My stomach lurched. I hadn’t let myself think much about the future, or anything besides getting through each day, keeping my head down, not attracting attention, doing what was necessary until I could go home. All this time, I’d been telling myself I wasn’t an addict, that I didn’t need to be here, and that as soon as I could I’d go home and go back to my pills, only I’d be more careful. Now every question I’d been asked, every slogan they’d repeated, every phrase I’d glimpsed on a poster or heard in passing was coming at me, like dozens of poison-tipped arrows ripping through the sky. Who is an addict? began the chapter of the same name in the Narcotics Anonymous Basic Text. Most of us do not have to think twice about this question. We know! Our whole life and thinking was centered in drugs in one form or another—the getting and using and finding ways and means to get more. We lived to use and used to live.

  That wasn’t me, I thought, as Shannon pulled a crumpled sheet of paper out of her back pocket, a list like the one they made all of us write, a list of what we had that was good in our lives besides drugs. “My parents still love me,” she read in a quivering voice that made her sound like she was twelve instead of thirty. “I can still write, I think. I’m not HIV-positive. I don’t have hep C.”

  I shuddered. Not me, I thought again . . . but the words from the Basic Text wouldn’t stop playing. Very simply, an addict is a man or woman whose life is controlled by drugs. We are people in the grip of a continuing and progressive illness whose ends are always the same: jails, institutions, and death. I shook my head, so hard that Aubrey and Mary both looked up. No. Not me. Not me.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Rehab time, it turned out, was like dog years. Every hour felt like a day. The weekdays were bad, but Saturdays and Sundays were almost impossible. The handful of counselors went home, along with the more senior and experienced recovery coaches, leaving the youngest and greenest to tend the farm. The inmates were running the asylum, in some cases almost literally. One of the RCs casually confided that, not six months prior, she, too, had been a Meadowcrest patient.

  On Saturday and Sunday, our hours were filled with busywork and bullshit activities that seemed to have nothing to do with recovery and everything to do with keeping a bunch of junkies occupied. By Sunday, I was sitting through my tenth—or was it my twelfth?—Share, so inured to the recitations of abuse, neglect, and damage that I’d started subbing in my favorite fictional characters. Hi, my name is Daenerys Targaryen, and I’m an addict (Hi, Dany!). I guess you could say it all started when my brother married me off to Khal Drogo, a vicious Dothraki warlord, when I was just thirteen. I started drinking after my husband killed my brother by pouring molten gold on his head. For a while, it was social. I’d have a drink before dinner with my bloodriders, maybe two if we’d had a rough day, but after Mirri Maz Duur murdered my husband, it turned into an all-day-long thing . . . After Share came Meditation, where we’d spread yoga mats on the cafeteria floor and spend forty minutes dozing to the sounds of Enya on one of the RCs’ iPods, and Activity, which mostly consisted of pickup basketball games for the guys and walking around the track for the ladies, and Free Time, where we could play board games or read The Big Book or write letters home. I had bought a bunch of cards at the gift shop, and on Sunday had spent an hour writing notes to Ellie and to Janet. “Greetings from rehab!” I’d begun, hoping Janet would get the joke, imagining that at some unspecified point in the future, we would be able to laugh about this.

  I had spent twenty minutes gnawing on my pen cap, trying to decide what I could possibly say to my mother, or to Dave. I’d finally settled on a few generic lines for both of them. Thank you for taking care of Ellie. I’m doing much better. Miss you. See you soon.

  That left me with the rest of the afternoon to kill. I’d eaten a salad for lunch, then gone outside with Aubrey and Shannon. There was a volleyball net, but the guys had taken over the court, and we weren’t allowed to use the ropes course. “So
me insurance thing,” Aubrey had explained as we walked around the track and she pointed out the rusted zipline and the storage shed where, two summers ago, one of the girls from the women’s residential program had gotten in trouble for having sex with one of the men.

  “I can’t even imagine wanting to have sex in here,” I said. Aubrey moaned, rolled her eyes, and launched into a familiar monologue about how bad she missed Justin and, specifically, the things Justin would do to her. “I think it’s, like, closing back up,” she said, and I told her I was pretty sure that was medically impossible, then sneezed, one, two, three times in a row, so hard it was almost painful. Shannon grinned at me.

  “You’re dope-sneezing!”

  “What?”

  Aubrey lowered her voice. “When you do a lot of downers, your systems all slow down. Like, were you really constipated?”

  I tried to remember and couldn’t.

  “And probably you, like, never sneezed at all when you were on dope,” Aubrey continued. “So now, you’re Sneezy!”

  “Good to know,” I said. Already, I could hear the way living around all these young women had changed my vocabulary. It’s a clip, they’d say when they meant it was a situation, or It’s about to go off when trouble was starting. Aubrey and a few of her friends had started calling me A-Dub. Occasionally, I would make them laugh by saying something in my best middle-aged-white-lady vocabulary and voice, and then throw my fingers in the air and say, straight-faced, “I’m gangsta.” It was like suddenly having a pack of little sisters. Drug-addicted, lying, stealing, occasionally homeless, swapping-sex-for-money little sisters, but sisters nevertheless. When I was growing up I had begged my parents for a sister, imagining a cute little Cabbage Patch Kid that lived and breathed, that I could dress up and teach to swim and ride a bike. No sibling had been forthcoming. My requests had been met with pained smiles from my mother and a strangely stern talking-to from my dad. You’re hurting your mother’s feelings, he told me in a voice that had made me cry. I had been maybe eight or nine years old. I wondered if there’d been some kind of medical issue, a reason why I was an only child that went beyond my mother’s selfishness or the way raising me seemed not like a fulfillment but like an interruption.

  I walked, and wondered what Ellie was doing on this sunny, sweet-scented morning. Was someone making her pancakes and letting her sprinkle chocolate chips onto each one? Was my mother reminding her to brush her teeth, because sometimes she’d just put water on the toothbrush and lie? Were her friends asking where I’d gone, and did she know what to tell them?

  On Monday, I finally met with my therapist. She was a middle-aged black woman who wore a jewel-toned pantsuit, sensible heels, glasses, and a highlighted bob that could have been a wig. There were six of us in Bernice’s group: me, Aubrey, Shannon, Mary, Lena, and the other Oxy addict, Marissa, who had a daughter Eloise’s age. Lena was gay, and flirtatious: night after night during the in-house AA or NA meetings, I’d watch the various Ashleys and Brittanys fight over who got to sit in her lap. Lena would unbraid their hair and whisper into their ears; she’d plant delicate kisses along their cheeks while the RCs pretended not to notice.

  “Miz Lena,” said Bernice, flipping through a clipboard. We’d already signed in, rating our moods on a scale of one to ten. We had circled the cartoon face that best represented our current emotional state, and rated the chances, on a one-to-ten scale, of using again if we were sent home that day. I answered honestly. My mood was a one. My emotional state was a frowny-face. If I went home that day, the chances that I would use were one hundred percent. Under the question “Are you experiencing any medical issues?” I wrote about my insomnia—just as Aubrey had predicted, they’d cut off my Trazodone and I was down to two hours of sleep a night. I mentioned the night sweats that soaked my shirts, my lack of appetite, and the way my hair was coming out in handfuls. I checked “yes” for anxiety and depression, “no” for a question about whether I had “kudos or callouts” for other residents. Then I remembered that whoever was reading these forms would decide whether I could attend my television appearance, and Ellie’s birthday party, and that I hadn’t provided the answers of a sane, sober woman happily on her way to a drug-free life. I hastily revised my responses, upgrading my mood and downgrading the chances that I’d use again, rewriting and erasing until Bernice collected the forms.

  Lena yanked at the strings of her hooded sweatshirt. “Whatever they said,” she began, in her low, raspy voice, “it’s a total exaggeration.”

  Bernice raised an eyebrow. “How do you know ‘they’ were saying anything about you? What do you think you did wrong?”

  More squirming and string-yanking. “I guess maybe I wasn’t so respectful during the AA meeting last night.”

  I rolled my eyes. Lena had sat in the back row with an Ashley in her lap as the speaker detailed his rock bottom, which involved leaping from the twelfth-story balcony of his New York City apartment to a neighboring balcony because he was pretty sure his neighbor had left her door unlocked and he wanted to see if she had any goodies in her bathroom cabinet. “I didn’t even care that I could have fallen and died,” he said. “I just wanted something so bad.”

  Bernice turned to me. “New girl. Allison. What are you here for?”

  “Pills.” I should have saved time and just put it on my nametag. ALLISON W.—PILLS.

  “Huh. What’d you think of Miss Lena’s performance last night?”

  I sighed. I didn’t want to get on Lena’s bad side. From what I’d heard, she could be vindictive. She’d let a girl drop to the art therapy room floor during trust falls after the girl had ratted out one of Lena’s friends for sneaking in loose cigarettes in her Bumpit.

  “Come on,” said Bernice. “This is a program of total honesty.”

  “I think Lena could have been a little more respectful.”

  Lena pulled her sweatshirt hood up over her head and muttered something.

  “What was that?” asked Bernice. “Share with the group, please.”

  “I said you’d treat this like a joke, too, if you’d been through it five times.”

  Five times. When I’d first arrived I’d been shocked to hear numbers like that. Now it just made me sad. Repeat offenders, I had learned, were the rule, not the exception. If you were an addict, there was rehab, and if rehab didn’t work, there was more rehab. Some of the rehabs were different—one girl, a Xanax addict, had been through aversion therapy, where she’d get a shock while looking at a picture of her drug of choice—but most of them were the same. They followed the Twelve Steps; they relied on a Higher Power to bring the “still sick and suffering” to sobriety; they were programs of total abstinence, which meant you could never have so much as a sip of beer or a glass of wine, even if your problem had been prescription pills or crack cocaine. If rehab didn’t work, they’d send you back again . . . and I was learning that rehab hardly ever took the first time, and that most of the women had been through the process more than once.

  Bernice was staring at me, her eyes sharp behind the thick lenses of her glasses. She looked like someone they’d cast as a mom in a TV commercial, the one who’d have to be convinced that the heat-and-eat spaghetti sauce was as good as what her own mother used to make. “How’d you feel, watching Miss Lena at the meeting last night? No. Scratch that. Let’s back up. How do you feel about being here in general?”

  I shrugged. “Fine, I guess.”

  The group groaned . . . then, as I watched in astonishment, everyone stood and did ten jumping jacks.

  “You can’t say ‘fine.’ Or ‘good,’ ” Marissa explained. “Bernie thinks they’re meaningless.”

  “Tell me how you really feel,” said Bernice.

  “Okay. Um. Well. I knew I needed help.” After nearly a week in here, I knew that was Rehab 101. You had to start by admitting you had a problem, or they’d badger you and break you down, pushing and pushing until you blurted the worst thing you’d ever done in the worst moment of what
they insisted you call your active addiction.

  “How come?” she asked, tilting her head, watching me closely. “You get a DUI? Fail a drug test?”

  “No, no, nothing like that.” I swallowed hard, knowing what was coming, as Bernice looked down at her notes.

  “Says here you got in some trouble at your daughter’s school.”

  “That’s right.” No point in lying. “I went to pick up my daughter and my friend’s kids at their school, and I’d had some pills. I thought I was fine—” Aubrey nudged me, whispering, “No ‘fine’s.” “Sorry. I thought I was okay to drive,” I amended. “I know what I can handle, when I’m okay and when I’m not—but my friend and I had been drinking, and even though I’d only had one glass . . .”

  “On top of the painkillers,” Bernice said.

  I nodded. “Right. Wine and painkillers. The teacher in charge of the carpool line took my keys away.”

  “So you signed yourself in?”

  “Um.” I swallowed hard, wondering, again, exactly what these people knew, and how much I’d told them when I’d arrived. “I—my husband and I—there was . . . I guess I’d call it kind of an intervention. He found out what I was doing, and he told me I needed to get some help, and I agreed.”

  Bernice looked at my file again. “Walk us through exactly what happened before you came here.”

  I cringed at the memories—the sickness of withdrawal, the doc-in-the-box, the ill-fated Suboxone, Ellie finding me in bed, sick and covered in vomit. Ellie seeing me on my hands and knees, ass in the air, face pressed into the carpet, desperate for one more crumb of Oxy.

  “Allison?” Bernice was looking at me. Her expression was not unkind. “Little secret. Whatever you did, whatever you’re remembering that’s making you look like you just ate a lemon, believe me. Believe me. Someone in here’s done worse, or seen worse.”

  I shook my head. I couldn’t speak. What kind of mother would let herself get so out of control, fall down so far, that her daughter would witness such a scene? I sat there, breathing, until I was able to speak again.