All Fall Down: A Novel

ONE

Do you generally use alcohol or drugs more than once a week?

I hesitated with my hand over the page. I’d picked up the magazine to read the “How to Dress Right for Your Shape” story advertised on the cover, but it had opened to a quiz that asked “Has Your Drinking or Drug Use Become a Problem?” and something had made me stop. Maybe it was the black-and-white photograph of a woman in profile, bending sadly over her wineglass, or maybe the statistic beside it that said that prescription painkiller overdose was now the leading cause of accidental death of women in America, surpassing even car crashes. I had a pen in my hand—I’d been using it to fill out the stack of forms for Eloise’s five-year-old well-child checkup—and, almost without thinking, I made an X in the box for “Yes.”

I crossed my legs and looked around Dr. McCarthy’s waiting area, suddenly worried that someone had seen what I’d written. Of course, no one was paying any attention to my little corner of the couch. Sleet ticked at the panes of the oversized windows; a radiator clunked in the corner. The lamplit room, on the third floor of an office building at the corner of Ninth and Chestnut, with a volunteer in a striped pinny at a knee-high table reading Amelia Bedelia to kids sitting in miniature chairs, felt cozy, a respite from the miserable winter weather. Three years ago my husband, Dave, my daughter, and I had moved out of Center City and into a house in Haverford that I refused to call a McMansion, even though that’s exactly what it was, but I loved Ellie’s pediatrician so much that I’d never even tried to find a suburban replacement. So here we were, more than half a year late for Ellie’s checkup, in the office where I’d been taking her since she was just a week old. We’d parked in the lot on Ninth Street and trekked through the February slush to get here, Ellie stepping delicately over the piles of crusted, dirty snow and the ankle-deep, icy puddles at the corners, complaining that her feet were getting wet and her socks were getting splashy. I’d lured her on with the promise of a treat at Federal Donuts when her checkup was over.

Ellie tugged at my sleeve. “How much longer?”

“Honey, I really can’t say. The doctors need to take care of the sick kids first, and you, Miss Lucky, are not sick.”

She stuck out her lower lip in a cartoonish pout. “It isn’t FAIR. We made an APPOINTMENT.”

“True. But remember when you had that bad sore throat? Dr. McCarthy saw you right away. Even before the kids who had appointments.”

She narrowed her eyes and nibbled at her lip before dropping her voice to a stage whisper that was slightly more hushed than your average yell. “I am having an idea. Maybe we could tell the nurse lady that I have a sore throat now!”

I shook my head. “Nah, we don’t lie. Bad karma.”

Ellie considered this. “I hate karmel.” She smoothed her skirt and wandered off toward the toy basket. I recrossed my legs and checked out the crowd.

The room was predictably full. There were first-time mothers from Queen Village and Society Hill, who wore their babies wrapped in yards of organic cotton hand-dyed and woven by indigenous Peruvian craftswomen who were paid a living wage. The moms from the Section 8 housing pushed secondhand strollers and fed their infants from plastic bottles, as opposed to ostentatiously breast-feeding or slipping the baby a few ounces of organic formula in a BPA-free bottle with a silicone-free nipple hidden under a prettily patterned, adorably named nursing cover-up (I’d worn one called the Hooter Hider).

On the days when you use drugs or alcohol, do you usually have three drinks/doses or more?

Define “dose.” One Percocet, from the bottle I got after I had my wisdom teeth pulled? Two Vicodin, prescribed for a herniated disc I suffered in a step class at the gym? I’d never taken more than two of anything, except the day after my father had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and my mother had set up a temporary fortress in our guest room. Could three pills count as a single dose? I decided not to answer.

Do you use drugs or alcohol to “unwind” or “relax”?

Hello. That’s what they’re there for. And was that so bad, really? How many times had I heard my husband say “I need to go for a run,” or my best friend, Janet, say “I need a glass of wine”? What I did was no different. It was, actually, better. A run was time-consuming and sweaty and hard on the joints, and wine could stain.

“Mommy?”

“Hang on, sweetie,” I said, as my iPhone rang in my purse. “Just one minute.”

“You ALWAYS say that. You ALWAYS say just one minute and it ALWAYS takes you for HOURS.”

“Shh,” I whispered, before hurrying toward the door, where I could keep an eye on her while I talked. “Hi, Sarah.”

“Allison,” said Sarah, in the gruff, all-business tone that surprised people, given her petite frame, sleek black bob, and freckled button nose. “Did the fact-checker call?”

“Not today.” The Wall Street Journal was in the midst of its every-six-months rediscovery that women were online. They were doing a piece on women who blog, and Ladiesroom.com, the website that I wrote for and Sarah ran, was to be featured. I was alternately giddy at the thought of how the publicity would raise Ladiesroom’s profile and nauseous at the notion of my picture in print.

“She just read my quotes back to me,” said Sarah. “They sounded great. I’ve really got a good feeling about this!”

“Me too,” I lied. I was optimistic about the piece . . . at least some of the time.

“Mom-MEE.”

My daughter was standing about six inches from my face, brown eyes brimming, lower lip quivering. “Gotta go,” I told Sarah. “We’re at the doctor’s.”

“Oh, God. Is everything okay?”

“As okay as it ever is!” I said, striving to inject good cheer into my tone before I slipped the phone back into my purse. Sarah, technically my boss, was twenty-seven and childless. She knew I was a mother—that was, after all, why she’d hired me, to give readers live, from-the-trenches reports on married-with-children life. But I tried to be a model employee, always available to talk through edits or help brainstorm a headline, even if Ellie was with me. I also tried to be a model mother, making Ellie feel like she was the center of my universe, that I was entirely present for her, even when I was on the phone, debating, say, the use of “strident” versus “emphatic,” or arguing about which picture of Hillary Clinton to use to illustrate another will-she-or-won’t-she-run story. It was a lot of juggling and quick switching and keeping my smile in place. “Sorry, honey. What do you need?”

“I’m FIRSTY,” she said, in the same tone of voice an old-school Broadway actress might use to announce her imminent demise.

I pointed at the water fountain on the other side of the room. “Look, there’s a water fountain!”

“But that is where the SICK kids are.” A tear rolled down my daughter’s pillowy cheek.

“Ellie. Don’t be such a drama queen. Just go get a drink. You’ll be fine.”

“Can I check what is in your purse?” she wheedled. Before I could answer, she’d plunged both hands into my bag and deftly removed my bottle of Vitaminwater.

“Ellie, that’s—” Before I got the word “Mommy’s” out of my mouth, she’d twisted off the cap and started gulping.

Our eyes met. Mine were undoubtedly beseeching, hers sparkled with mischief and satisfaction. I considered my options. I could punish her, tell her no screens and no SpongeBob tonight, then endure—and force everyone else in the room to endure—the inevitable screaming meltdown. I could ignore what she’d done, reinforcing the notion that bad behavior got her exactly what she wanted. I could take her outside and talk to her there, but then the receptionist would, of course, call us when we were in the hall, which meant I’d get the pleasure of a tantrum on top of another half-hour wait.

“We will discuss this in the car. Do you understand me?” I maintained the steady eye contact that the latest parenting book I’d read had recommended, my body language and tone letting her know that I was in charge, and hoped the other mothers weren’t taking in this scene and laughing. Ellie took another defiant swig, then let a mouthful of zero-calorie lemon-flavored drink dribble back into the bottle, which she handed back to me.

“Ellie! Backwash!”

She giggled. “Here, Mommy, you can have the rest,” she said, and skipped across the waiting room with my iPhone flashing in her hand. Lately she’d become addicted to a game called Style Queen, the object of which was to earn points to purchase accessories and makeup for a cartoon avatar who was all long hair and high heels. The more accessories you won for your avatar—shoes, hats, scarves, a makeup kit—the more levels of the game you could access. With each level, Ellie had explained to me, with many heaved sighs and eye rolls, you could get a new boyfriend.

“What about jobs?” I had asked. “Does Style Queen work? To get money for all that makeup, and her skirts and everything?”

Ellie frowned, then raised her chubby thumb and two fingers. “She can be an actress or a model or a singer.” Before I could ask follow-up questions, or try to use this as a teachable moment in which I would emphasize the importance of education and hard work and remind her that the way you looked was never ever the most important thing about you, my daughter had dashed off, leaving me to contemplate how we’d gone from The Feminine Mystique and Free to Be . . . You and Me to this in just one generation.

The magazine was still open to the quiz on the couch beside me. I grabbed it, bending my head to avoid the scrutiny of the übermommy two seats down whose adorable newborn was cradled against her body in a pristine Moby Wrap; the one who was not wearing linty black leggings from Target and whose eyebrows had enjoyed the recent attention of tweezers.

Do you sometimes take more than the amount prescribed? Yes. Not always, but sometimes. I’d take one pill and then, ten or fifteen or twenty minutes later, if I wasn’t feeling the lift, the slow unwinding of the tight girdle of muscles around my neck and shoulders I’d expected, I’d take another.

Have you gotten intoxicated on alcohol or drugs more than two times in the past year? (You’re intoxicated if you use so much that you can’t function safely or normally or if other people think that you can’t function safely or normally.)

This was a tricky one. With painkillers, you did not slur or get sloppy. Your child would not come home from school and find Mommy passed out in a puddle of her own vomit (or anyone else’s). A couple of Vicodin and I could function just fine. The worst things that had happened were the few times Dave had accused me of being out of it. “Are you okay?” he’d ask, squinting at my face like we’d just met, or apologizing for being so boring that I couldn’t muster five minutes of attention to hear about his day as a City Hall reporter at the Philadelphia Examiner. Never mind that his anecdotes tended to be long and specific and depend on the listener’s deep interest in the inner workings of Philadelphia’s government. Some days, I had that interest. Other days, all I wanted was peace, quiet, and an episode of Love It or List It. But I’d been occasionally bored and disinterested even before my use of Vicodin and Percocet had ramped up, over the past two years, from a once-in-a-while thing to a few-days-a-week thing to a more-days-than-not thing. It wasn’t as if one single catastrophe had turned me into a daily pill popper as much as the accumulated stress of a mostly successful, extremely busy life. Ellie had been born, then I’d quit my job, then we’d moved to the suburbs, leaving my neighborhood and friends behind, and then my dad had been diagnosed. Not one thing, but dozens of them, piling up against one another until the pills became less a luxury than a necessity for getting myself through the day and falling asleep at night.

I checked “No” as Ellie skipped back over. “Mommy, is it almost our turn? This is taking for HOURS.”

I reached into my purse. “You can watch Les Miz,” I said. She handed me the phone and had the iPad out of my hands before I could blink.

“That’s so cute,” said the mother who’d just joined me on the couch. “She watches musicals? God, my two, if it’s not animated, forget it.”

I let myself bask in the all-too-rare praise: Ellie’s passion for Broadway musicals was one of the things I loved best about her, because I loved musicals, too. When she was little, and tormented by colic and eczema, and she hardly ever slept, I would drive around in my little blue Honda, with Ellie strapped into her car seat and cast recordings from Guys and Dolls and Rent and West Side Story and Urinetown playing. “Ocher!” she’d yelled from the backseat when she was about two years old. “I WANT THE OCHER!” It had taken me ten minutes to figure out that she was trying to say “overture,” and I’d told the story for years. Isn’t she funny. Isn’t she precocious. Isn’t she sweet, people would say . . . until Ellie turned four, then five, and she was funny and precocious and sweet but also increasingly temperamental, as moody as a diva with killer PMS. Sensitive was what Dr. McCarthy told us.

Extremely sensitive, said Dr. Singh, the therapist we’d taken her to visit after her preschool teacher reported that Ellie spent recess sitting in a corner of the playground with her fingers plugged into her ears, clearly pained by the shouts and clatter of her classmates. “Too loud!” she’d protest, wincing as we got close to a playground. “Too messy!” she’d whine when I’d try to lure her outdoors, into a game of catch or hide-and-seek, or ply her with finger paints and fresh pads of paper. Movies “made too much noise,” sunshine was “too bright,” foods that were not apples, string cheese, or plain white bread, toasted and buttered and minus its crust, were rejected for “tasting angry,” and glue and glitter gave her “itchy fingers.” For Eloise Larson Weiss, the world was a painful, scary, sticky place where the volume was always turned up to eleven. Dave and I had read all the books, from The Highly Sensitive Child to Raising Your Spirited Child. We’d learned about how to avoid overstimulation, how to help Ellie through transitions, how to talk to her teachers about making accommodations for her. We’d done our best to reframe our thinking, to recognize that Ellie was suffering and not just making trouble, but it was hard. Instead of remembering that Ellie was wired differently than other kids, that she cried and threw tantrums because she was uncomfortable or anxious or stressed, I sometimes found myself thinking of her as just bratty, or going out of her way to be difficult.

The woman beside me nodded at her son, who seemed to be about eight. He had a Band-Aid on his forehead, and he was making loud rumbling noises as he hunched over a handheld video game. “A little girl would have been so nice. I’ve got to bribe Braden to get him in the tub.”

“Oh, that’s not just a boy thing. Ellie won’t go near a tub unless it’s got one of those bath bombs. Which are eight bucks a pop.”

The woman pursed her lips. I felt my face heat up. Eight-dollar bath bombs were an indulgence for a grown-up. For a five-year-old, they were ridiculous, especially given that our mortgage payments in Haverford were so much higher than they’d been in Philadelphia, and that instead of a raise last year, Dave and everyone else at the Examiner had gotten a two-week unpaid furlough. When we’d filed our taxes the year before, we’d both been surprised—and, in Dave’s case, mortified—to learn that I was earning more with my blog than he was as a reporter. This, of course, had not been part of our plan. Dave was supposed to be the successful one . . . and, up until recently, he had been.

Three years ago, Dave had written a series about inner-city poverty, about kids who got their only balanced meals at school and parents who found it less expensive to stay at home, on welfare, than to look for work; about social services stretched too thin and heroic teachers and volunteers trying to turn kids’ lives around. The series had won prizes and the attention of a few literary agents, one of whom had gotten him a book deal and a hefty advance. Dave had taken the chunk of money he’d received when he’d signed the contract and driven off to Haverford, a town he’d fallen in love with when the newspaper’s food critic had taken him there one night for dinner. Haverford was lovely, with leafy trees and manicured lawns. The schools were excellent, the commute was reasonable, and it all fit into my husband’s vision of what our lives would one day be.

Unfortunately, Dave didn’t discuss this vision with me until one giddy afternoon when he’d hired a Realtor, found a house, and made an offer. Then, and only then, did he usher me to the car and drive me out past the airport, off the highway, and into the center of town. The sun had been setting, gilding the trees and rooftops, and the crisp autumnal air was full of the sounds of children playing a rowdy game of tag. When he pulled up in front of a Colonial-style house with a FOR SALE sign on the lawn, I could hear the voices of children playing in the cul-de-sac, and smell barbecuing steaks. “You’ll love it,” he’d said, racing me through the kitchen (gleaming, all stainless steel appliances, granite countertops, and tile floors), past the mudroom and the powder room, up the stairs to the master bedroom. There we had kissed and kissed until the Realtor cleared his throat twice, then knocked on the door and told us we needed to respond to the seller’s offer within the hour.

“Yes?” Dave asked. His eyes were shining; his whole face was lit up. I’d never seen him so boyish, or so happy, and it would have been heartless to tell him anything except what he wanted to hear.

“Yes.”

I hadn’t thought it through. There wasn’t time. I didn’t realize that I was signing up not just for a new house and a new town but, really, for an entirely new life, one where, with Dave’s encouragement, I’d be home with a baby instead of joining him on the train every morning, heading into the city to work. Dave wanted me to be more like his own mother, who’d gladly given up her career as a lawyer when the first of her three boys was born, swapping briefs and depositions for carpools and class-mom duties. He wanted a traditional stay-at-home mother, a wife who’d do the shopping and the cooking, who’d be available to sign for packages and pick up the dry cleaning and, generally, make his life not only possible but easy. The problem was, he’d never told me what he wanted, which meant I never got to think about whether it was what I wanted, too.

Maybe it would have worked if the world hadn’t decided it had no great use for newspapers . . . or if the blog I wrote as a hobby hadn’t become a job, turning our financial arrangement on its head, so that I became the primary breadwinner and Dave’s salary ended up going for extras like private school and vacations and summer camp. Maybe our lives would have gone more smoothly if I hadn’t found the house so big, so daunting, if it didn’t carry, at least to my nose, the whiff of bad luck. “The sellers are very motivated,” our agent told me, and Dave and I quickly figured out why: the husband, a political consultant, had been arrested for embezzling campaign contributions, which he used to fund his gambling habit . . . and, Examiner readers eventually learned, his mistress.

Dave and I had both grown up in decent-sized places in the suburbs, but the Haverford house had rooms upon rooms, some of which seemed to have no discernible function. There was a kitchen, and then beside it a smaller, second kitchen, with a sink and a granite island, that the Realtor ID’d as a butler’s pantry. “We don’t have a butler,” I told Dave. “And if we did, I wouldn’t give him his own pantry!” The main kitchen was big enough to eat in, with a dining room adjoining it, plus a living room, a den, and a home office with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Upstairs there were no fewer than five bedrooms and five full bathrooms. There was the master suite, and something called a “princess suite” that came with its own dressing room. The basement was partially finished, with space for a home gym, and out back a screened-in porch overlooked the gentle slope of the lawn.

“Can we afford this?” I’d asked. It turned out, between Dave’s advance and the embezzler’s desperation, that we could. We could buy it, but we couldn’t fill it. Every piece of furniture we owned, including the folding card table I’d used as a desk and the futon from Dave’s college dorm, barely filled a quarter of the space, and it all looked wrong. The table that had fit perfectly in our Philadelphia row house was dwarfed by the soaring ceilings and spaciousness of the Haverford dining room. The love seat where we’d snuggled in Center City became dollhouse-sized in the burbs. Our queen-sized bed looked like a crouton floating in a giant bowl of soup in the master bedroom, and our combined wardrobes barely filled a third of the shelves and hanging space in the spacious walk-in closet.

Overwhelmed, out of a job, and with a baby to care for, I’d wander the rooms, making lists of what we needed. I’d buy stacks of magazines, clip pictures, or browse Pinterest, making boards of sofas I loved, dining-room tables I thought could work, pretty wallpaper, and gorgeous rugs. I would go to the paint store and come home with strips of colors; I’d download computer programs that let me move furniture around imaginary rooms. But when it came time to actually buy something—the dining-room table we obviously needed, beds for the empty guest rooms, towels to stock the shelves in the guest bathrooms—I would go into vapor lock. I’d never considered myself indecisive or suffered from fear of commitment, but somehow the thought That bed you are buying will be your bed for the rest of your life would make me hang up the phone or close the laptop before I could even get the first digits of my card number out.

Four months after Dave had signed his advance, another book came out, this one based on a series that had run in one of the New York City papers, about a homeless little girl and the constellation of grown-ups—parents, teachers, caseworkers, politicians—who touched her life. The series had gotten over a million clicks, but the book failed to attract more than a thousand readers its first month on sale. Dave’s publisher had gotten nervous—if a book about the poor in New York City didn’t sell, what were the prospects for a book about the poor in Philadelphia? They’d exercised their option to kill the contract. Dave didn’t have to give back the money they’d paid him on signing, but there would be no more cash forthcoming. His agent had tried but had been unable to get another publisher to pick up the project. Poverty just wasn’t sexy. Not with so many readers struggling to manage their own finances and hang on to their own jobs.

Dave’s agent had encouraged him to capitalize on the momentum and come up with another idea—“They all love your voice!” she’d said—but, so far, Dave was holding on to the notion that he could find a way to get paid for the writing he’d already done, instead of having to start all over again. So he’d stayed at the paper, and when Sarah had approached me about publishing my blog on her website, saying yes was the obvious choice. Once I started working, I had no more time to fuss with furniture. Just finding clean clothes in the morning and something for us all to eat at night was challenge enough. So the house stayed empty, unfinished, with wires sticking out from walls because I hadn’t picked lighting fixtures, and three empty bedrooms with their walls painted an unassuming beige. In the absence of dressers and armoires, we kept our clothes in laundry baskets and Tupperware bins, and, in addition to the couch and the love seat, there were folding canvas camp chairs in the living room, a temporary measure that had now lasted more than two years—about as long as Dave’s bad mood.

I remembered the sulk that had followed the Examiner’s edict that every story run online with a button next to the byline so that readers could “Like” the reporter on Facebook.

“It’s not even asking them to like the stories,” he’d complained. “It’s asking them to like me.” He hadn’t even smiled when I’d said, “Well, I like you,” and embraced him, sliding my hands from his shoulder blades down to the small of his back, then cupping his bottom and kissing his cheek. Ellie was engrossed in an episode of Yo Gabba Gabba!; the chicken had another thirty minutes in the oven. “Want to take a shower?” I’d whispered. Two years ago, he’d have had my clothes off and the water on in under a minute. That night, he’d just sighed and asked, “Do you have any idea how degrading it is to be treated like a product?”

It wasn’t as though I couldn’t sympathize. I’d worked at the Examiner myself, as a web designer, before Ellie was born. I believed in newspapers’ mission, the importance of their role as a watchdog, holding the powerful accountable, comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. But it wasn’t my fault that newspapers in general and the Examiner in particular were failing. I hadn’t changed the world so that everything was available online immediately if not sooner, and not even our grandparents waited for the morning paper to tell them what was what. I hadn’t rearranged things so that “if it bleeds, it leads” had become almost quaint. These days, the Examiner’s home page featured photographs of the Hot Singles Mingle party that desperate editors had thrown, or of the Critical Mass Naked Nine, where participants had biked, nude, down ten miles of Broad Street (coverage of that event, with the pictures artfully blurred, had become the most-read story of the year, easily topping coverage both of the election and of the corrupt city councilman who’d been arrested for tax fraud after a six-hour standoff that ended after he’d climbed to the top of City Hall and threatened to jump unless he was provided with a plane, a million dollars in unmarked bills, and two dozen cannoli from Potito’s). “A ‘Like’ button is not the end of the world,” I’d said, after it became clear that a sexy shower was not in my future. Then I’d gone back to my iPad, and he’d gone back to watching the game . . . except when I looked up I found him scowling at me as if I’d just tossed my device at his head.

“What?” I asked, startled.

“Nothing,” he said. Then he jumped up from the sofa, rolled his shoulders, shook out his arms, and cracked a few knuckles, loudly, like he was getting ready to enter a boxing ring. “It’s nothing.”

I’d tried to talk to him about what was wrong, hoping he’d realize that, as the one who’d gotten us into this mess—or at least this big house, this big life, with the snooty private-school parents and the shocking property-tax bills—he had an obligation to help figure out how we were going to make it work. Over breakfast the week after the “Like” button rant, while Ellie dawdled at the sink, washing and rewashing her hands until every trace of syrup was gone, I’d quietly suggested couples therapy, telling him that lots of my friends were going (lie, but I did know at least one couple who had gone), and adding that the combined stress of a new town, a sensitive child, and a wife who’d gone from working twenty hours a week to what was supposed to be forty but was closer to sixty would put any couple on edge. His lip had curled. “You think I’m crazy?”

“Of course you’re not crazy,” I’d whispered back. “But it’s been crazy for both of us, and I just think . . .”

He got up from the table and stood there for a moment in his blue nylon running shorts and a T-shirt from a 10K he’d completed last fall. Dave was tall, broad-shouldered, and slim-hipped, with thick black hair, deep-set brown eyes, and a receding hairline he disguised by wearing baseball caps whenever he could. When we’d first started dating we would walk holding hands, and I’d try to catch glimpses of the two of us reflected in windows or bus-shelter glass, knowing how good we looked together. Dave was quiet, brooding, with a kind of stillness that made me want nothing more than to hear him laugh, and a goofy sense of humor you’d never guess he had just by looking at him. Still waters run deep, I’d thought. Later, I learned that silence did not necessarily guarantee depth. If you interrupted my husband in the middle of one of his quiet times, asked him what he was thinking about, and got him to tell you, some of the time the answer would concern the latest scandal at City Hall, or his attempts to confirm rumors about a congressional aide who’d forged his boss’s signature. Other times, the answer would involve his ongoing attempt to rank his five favorite 76ers.

Still, there was no one I wanted to be with more than Dave. He knew me better than anyone, knew what kind of movies I liked, my favorite dishes at my favorite restaurants, how my mood could instantly be improved by the presence of a Le Bus brownie or a rerun of Face/Off on cable. Dave would talk me into jogging, knowing how good I’d feel when I was done, or he’d take Ellie out for doughnuts on a Saturday morning, letting me sleep until ten after a late night working.

He could be considerate, loving, and sweet. The morning I suggested therapy, he was none of those things. He went stalking down to the basement without a word of farewell. A minute later, the treadmill whirred to life. Dave was training for his first marathon, a goal I’d encouraged before I realized that the long runs each weekend meant I wouldn’t see him for four or five hours at a time on a Saturday or Sunday, and would have the pleasure of Ellie all to myself. While the treadmill churned away in the basement, I got to my feet, sighing, as the weight of the day settled around my shoulders.

“Ellie,” I said. Ellie was still standing at the sink, dreamily rubbing liquid soap into her hands. “You need to clear your plate and your glass.”

“But they’re too HEAVY! And the plate is all STICKY! And maybe it will DROP!” she complained, still in her Ariel nightgown, dragging her bare feet along the terra-cotta tiled floor until finally I snapped, “Ellie, just give me the plate and stop making such a production!”

Inevitably, she’d started to cry, dashing upstairs to her room, leaving soapy handprints along the banister. I loaded the dishwasher, wiped down the counters, and swept the kitchen floor. I put the milk and juice and butter back in the fridge and the flour and sugar back in the pantry. Then, before I went to Ellie to apologize and tell her that we should both try to use our inside voices, I’d taken a pill, my second Vicodin since I’d gotten up. The day had stretched endlessly before me—weepy daughter, angry husband, piles of laundry, messy bedroom, a blog post to write, and probably dozens of angry commenters lined up to tell me I was a no-talent hack and a fat, stupid whore. I need this, I thought, letting the bitterness dissolve on my tongue. It had been, I remembered, not even nine a.m.

Have you ever felt like you should cut down on your drinking or drug use?

Feeling suddenly queasy, I lifted my head and looked around the waiting room again to see if anyone had noticed that I was taking this quiz seriously. Did I think about cutting down? Sure. Sometimes. More and more often I had the nagging feeling that things were getting out of control. Then I’d think, Oh, please. I had prescriptions for everything I took (and if Doctor A didn’t know what Doctor B was giving me, well, that wasn’t necessarily a problem—if it was, pharmacies would be set up to flag it, right?). The pills helped me manage everything I needed to manage.

Have other people criticized your drinking or drug use, or been annoyed by it?

I checked “No,” fast and emphatically, trying not to think about how nobody criticized my use because nobody knew about it. Dave knew I had a prescription for Vicodin—he’d been there the night I’d come hobbling home from the gym—but he had no idea how many times I’d gotten that prescription refilled, telling my doctor that I was doing my physical-therapy-prescribed exercises religiously (I wasn’t), but that I still needed something for the pain. Dave didn’t know how easy it was, if you were a woman with health insurance and an education, a woman who spoke and dressed and presented herself a certain way. Good manners and good grammar, in addition to an MRI that showed bulging discs or an x-ray with impacted molars, could get you pretty much anything you wanted. With refills. Pain was impossible to see, hard to quantify, and I knew the words to use, the gestures to make, how to sit and stand as if every breath was agony. It was my little secret, and I intended to keep it that way.

“Eloise Weiss?” I looked up. A nurse stood in the doorway with Ellie’s chart in his hands.

Startled, I half jumped to my feet, and felt my back give a warning twinge, as if to remind me how I’d gotten into this mess. I wanted a pill. I’d had only one, that morning, six hours ago, and I wanted something, a dam against the rising anxiety about whether my marriage was foundering and if I was a good parent and when I’d find the time to finish the blog post that was due at six o’clock. I wanted to feel good, centered and calm and happy, able to appreciate what I had—my sunny kitchen, with orchids blooming on the windowsill; Ellie’s bedroom, for which I’d finally found the perfect pink chandelier. I wanted to slip into my medicated bubble, where I was safe, where I was happy, where nothing could hurt me. As soon as this is over, I told myself, and imagined sitting behind the wheel once the doctor had let us go and swallowing a white oval-shaped pill while Ellie fussed with her seat belt. With that picture firmly in mind, I reached out my hand for my daughter.

“No shots,” she said, her lower lip already starting to tremble.

“I don’t think so.”

“No SHOTS! You SAID! You PROMISED!” Heads turned in judgment, mothers probably thinking, Thank God mine’s not like that. Ellie crossed her arms over her chest and stood there, forty-three pounds of fury in a flowered Hanna Andersson dress, matching socks and cardigan, and zip-up leopard-print high-top sneakers. Her fine brown hair hung in braided pigtails, tied with purple elastic bands, and she had a stretchy flowered headband wrapped, hippie-style, around her forehead.

The nurse gave me a smile that was both sympathetic and weary, as I half walked, half dragged my daughter off to the scales and blood-pressure cuffs. Eloise whined and balked and winced as she was weighed and measured. The nurse took her blood pressure and temperature. Then the two of us were left to wait in an exam room. “Put this on,” the nurse said, handing Ellie a cotton gown. Ellie pinched the gown between two fingertips. “It will ITCH,” she said, and started to cry.

“Come on,” I said, taking the gown, with its rough texture and offending tags, in my hand. “I bet if you just get your dress off, you’ll be okay.”

Still sniffling, Ellie bent gracefully at the waist—she’d gotten her ease in the physical world from her father, who ran and ice-skated and, unlike me, did not inhabit a universe where the furniture seemed to reposition itself just so I could trip over or bang into it. I watched as she eased each zipper on her high-tops down, slid her foot out of her right shoe, pulled off her pink sock, and laid it carefully on top of the sneaker. Off came the left shoe. Off came the left sock. I sat down in the plastic chair as Ellie moved on to her cardigan. I had never mistreated her while under the influence. I’d never yelled (well, not scary-yelling), or been rough, or told her that she needed to put on her goddamn clothes this century, because we couldn’t be late for school again, because I couldn’t sit through another lecture about Your Responsibilities to Stonefield: A Learning Community (calling it just a “school,” I supposed, would have failed to justify its outrageous tuition). It was the opposite. The pills calmed me down. They gave me a sense of peace. When I swallowed them, I felt like I could accomplish anything, whether it was writing a post about the rising costs of fertility treatments or getting my daughter to school on time.

“Mom-MEE.” I looked at Ellie. Glory be, she’d gotten all the way down to her Disney Princess underpants. I held open the gown. She made a face. “Just try it,” I said. Finally, with the hauteur of a high-fashion model being forced to don polyester, she slipped her arms through the sleeves and permitted me to knot the ties in the back while she pinched the fabric between her fingertips, holding it ostentatiously away from her body, making sure the tag wouldn’t touch her. She retrieved my iPad and cued up Les Miz. I went back to my quiz. Have you ever used more than you could afford? Hardly. My doctors would write me prescriptions. My copay was fifteen dollars a bottle. But it was true that the bottles were no longer lasting as long as they were supposed to, and I spent what was beginning to feel like a lot of time figuring out how many pills I had left and which doctor I hadn’t called in a while and whether the pharmacist was looking at me strangely because I was picking up Vicodin two or three times a week.

Have you ever planned not to use that day but done it anyway?

Yes. I had thought about stopping. I had tried, a few times, and managed, for a few days . . . but during the last few not-today days, it was as if my brain and body had disconnected at some critical juncture. I’d be standing in my closet, in my T-shirt or the workout clothes I’d put on in the hope that wearing them would make me more inclined to exercise, thinking No, while watching my body from the outside, watching my hands uncap the bottle, watching my fingers select a pill.

Have you ever not been able to stop when you planned to?

“Mommy?” Ellie sat on the examining table, legs crossed, gown spread neatly in her lap. “Are you mad?” she asked. Her lower lip was quivering. She looked like she was on the verge of tears. Then again, Eloise frequently appeared to be on the verge of tears. When she was a baby, a slammed car door or the telephone ringing could jolt her out of her nap and into a full-fledged shrieking meltdown. In her stroller, she’d cringe at street noises; a telephone ringing, a taxi honking. Even the unexpected rustling of tree branches overhead could make her flinch.

“No, honey. Why?”

“Your face looks all scrunchy.”

I made myself smile. I held out my arms and, after a moment’s hesitation, Ellie hopped off the table and sat on my lap, folding her upper body against mine. I breathed in her little-girl smell—a bit like cotton candy, like graham crackers and library books—and pressed my cheek against her soft hair, thinking that even though she was high-strung and thin-skinned, Ellie was also smart and funny and undeniably lovely, and that I would do whatever I could to maximize her chances of being happy. I wouldn’t be like my own mother, a circa 1978 party girl who hadn’t realized that the party was over, a woman who’d slapped three coats of quick-drying lacquer over herself at twenty-six—teased hair, cat-eye black liquid liner, a slick, lipglossed pout, and splashes of Giorgio perfume—and gotten so involved in her tennis group, her morning walk buddies, her mah-jongg ladies, her husband and his health that she had little time for, or interest in, her only child. I knew my mother loved me—at least, she said so—but when I was a girl at the dinner table, or out in the driveway, where I’d amuse myself by hitting a tennis ball against the side of the garage, my mother would look up from her inspection of her fingernails or her People magazine and gaze at me as if I were a guest at a hotel who should have checked out weeks before and was somehow, inexplicably, still hanging around.

When I was almost eight years old, my parents asked me what I wanted for my birthday. I’d been thinking about it for weeks and I knew exactly how to answer. I wanted my mother, who was usually asleep when I left for school, to take me out to breakfast at Peterman’s, the local diner that sat in the center of a traffic circle at the intersection of two busy highways in Cherry Hill. Everyone went there: it was where kids would get ice cream cones after school, where families would go for a dinner of charcoal-grilled burgers for Dad and dry tuna on iceberg lettuce for Mom and a platter of chicken wings, onion rings, and French fries with ranch and honey-mustard dipping sauces for the kids. One of my classmates, Kelly Goldring, had breakfast there with her mother every Wednesday. “She calls it Girls’ Day,” Kelly recounted at a Girl Scout meeting, taking care to roll her eyes to show how dopey she found the weekly breakfasts, but I could tell from her tone, and how she looked when she talked about splitting the Hungry Lady special with her mom and still having home fries left over to take in her lunch, that the breakfasts were just what Mrs. Goldring intended—special. I imagined Kelly and her mom in one of the booths for two. Mrs. Goldring would be in a dress and high heels, with a floppy silk bow tie around her neck, and Kelly, who usually wore jeans and a T-shirt, would wear a skirt that showed off her scabby knees. I pictured the waitress, hip cocked, pad in hand, asking “What can I get you gals?” As I imagined my own trip to the diner, my mother would order a fruit cup, and I’d get eggs and bacon. The eggs would be fluffy, the bacon would be crisp, and my mother, fortified by fruit and strong coffee, would ask about my teacher, my classes, and my Girl Scout troop and actually listen to my answers.

That was what I wanted: not a new bike or an Atari, not cassettes of Sting or Genesis, not Trixie Belden books. Just breakfast with my mom; the two of us, in a booth, alone for the forty-five minutes it would take us to eat the breakfast special.

I should have suspected that things wouldn’t go the way I’d hoped when my mother came down to the kitchen the morning of my birthday looking wan with one eye made up and mascaraed, and the other pale and untouched. “Come on,” she’d said, her Philadelphia accent thicker than normal, her voice raspy. Her hand trembled as she reached for her keys, and she winced when I opened the door to make sure the cab was waiting out front. I rarely saw my mom out of bed before nine, and I never saw her without her makeup completely applied. That morning her face was pale, and she seemed a little shaky, as if the sunshine on her skin was painful and the floor was rolling underneath her feet.

This, I reasoned, had to do with the Accident, the one my mother had gotten into when I was four years old. I didn’t know many details—only that she had been driving, that it had been raining, and that she’d hit a slick patch on the road and actually flipped the car over. She’d spent six weeks away, first in the hospital, having metal pins put into her shoulder, then in a rehab place. She still had scars—a faint slash on her left cheek, surgical incisions on her upper arm. Then there were what my father portentously referred to as “the scars you can’t see.” My mom had never driven since that night. She would jump at the sound of a slammed door or a car backfiring; she couldn’t watch car chases or car crashes in the movies or on TV. A few times a month, she’d skip her tennis game and I’d come home from school to find her up in her bedroom with the lights down low, suffering from a migraine.

The morning of my birthday, my mother slid into the backseat beside me. I could smell Giorgio perfume and toothpaste and, underneath that, the stale smell of sleep.

The cab pulled up in front of the restaurant. My mother reached into the pocket of her jacket and handed me a ten-dollar bill. “That’s enough, right?” I stared, openmouthed, at the money. My mom looked puzzled, her penciled-in eyebrows drawn together.

“I thought you’d eat with me,” I finally said.

“Oh!” Before she turned her head toward the window, I caught an expression of surprise and, I thought, of shame on her face. “Oh, honey. I’m so sorry. When you said ‘I want you to take me to Peterman’s,’ I thought . . .” She waved one hand as if shooing away the idea that a daughter would want to share a birthday breakfast with her mom. “Since I knew I’d be getting up early, I set up a doubles game.” She looked at her watch. “I have to run and get changed . . . Mitzie and Ellen are probably there already.”

“Oh, that’s okay,” I said. Already I could feel tears pricking the backs of my eyelids, burning my throat, but I knew better than to cry. Don’t upset your mother, my father would say.

“Is ten dollars enough?”

How was I supposed to know? I had no idea . . . but I nodded anyhow. “Have a good day, then. Happy birthday!” She gave me a kiss and a cheery little wave before I got out of the cab and closed the door gently behind me.

I hadn’t braved the restaurant. It wasn’t Wednesday, but I could still imagine sitting at the counter and seeing Kelly and her mom in a booth. I didn’t even know whether an eight-year-old could be in a restaurant and order by herself—I could read the menu, of course, but I was too shy to talk to a waitress, and shaky about the mechanics of asking for a check and leaving a tip. I went to the bakery counter instead, where I ordered by pointing at the case—two glazed doughnuts, two chocolate, a jelly, and a Boston cream. There was a path through the woods that led from downtown to my school, and in those days a kid—even a girl—could walk through the woods alone, without her parents worrying that she’d get kidnapped or molested. I walked underneath the shade, kicking pine needles and gobbling my breakfast, devouring the doughnuts in huge, breathless mouthfuls, cramming down my sadness, trying to remember what my mom had said—that she loved me—instead of the way she’d made me feel. By Language Arts, I was sick to my stomach, and my mother had to take a cab to come get me. In the nurse’s office, still in her tennis whites, she’d been impatient, rolling her eyes as I checked my backpack for my books, but in the backseat of the taxi her pout had vanished, and she looked almost kind.

She had on a tennis skirt and a blue nylon warmup jacket with white stripes. Her legs were tan and her thighs barely spread out as she sat, whereas my legs, in black tights underneath my best red-and-green kilt, were probably blobbed out all over the seat.

“I guess breakfast didn’t agree with you,” she said. She reached into her tote bag for her thermos and a towel, giving me a sip and then gently wiping my forehead, then my mouth.

In Ellie’s doctor’s office, I sighed, remembering how special I’d felt that my mother had shared her special blue thermos, how I’d never have dreamed of grabbing it out of her bag, let alone backwashing, when Ellie’s doctor came striding into the room.

“Hello, Miss Eloise!” Dr. McCarthy wore a blue linen shirt that matched his eyes, white pants, and a pressed white doctor’s coat with his name stitched on it in blue. Ellie sprang out of my arms and stood, trembling, at the doorway, poised for escape. I gathered her up and set her onto the crinkly white paper on the table, ignoring my back’s protests. The doctor, with a closely trimmed white goatee and a stethoscope looped rakishly around his neck, walked over to the table and gravely offered Ellie his hand.

“Eloise,” he said. “How is the Plaza?”

She giggled, pressing one hand against her mouth to protect her single loose tooth. Now that she had a handsome man’s attention, she was all sweetness and cheer as she sat on the edge of the examination table, legs crossed, poised enough to be on Meet the Press. “We went for tea for my birthday.”

“Did you now?” While they chatted about her birthday tea, the white gloves she’d worn, the turtle she had, of course, named Skipperdee, and how her computer game was “very sophisticating,” he maneuvered deftly through the exam, peering into her eyes and ears, listening to her chest and lungs, checking her reflexes.

“So, Miss Ellie,” he said. “Anything bothering you?”

She tapped her forefinger against her lips. “Hmm.”

“Any trouble sleeping? Or using the bathroom?”

She shook her head.

“How about food? Are you getting lots of good, healthy stuff?”

She brightened. “I like cucumber sandwiches!”

“Who doesn’t like a good cucumber sandwich?” He turned to me, beaming. “She’s perfect, Allison. I vote you keep her.” Then he lowered his voice and took my arm. “Let’s talk outside for just a minute.”

My heart stuttered. Had he seen the quiz I’d been working on? Had I done, or said, something to give myself away?

I handed Ellie the iPad and walked out into the hallway as a young woman, one of the medical students who assisted in the office, stepped in to keep an eye on the patient. “Do you like Broadway musicals?” I heard my daughter ask, as Dr. McCarthy steered me toward the window at the end of the hallway.

“I just wanted to hear how you were doing. Any questions? Any concerns?”

I tried to keep from making too much noise as I exhaled the breath I’d been holding. Maybe I’d picked Dr. McCarthy for shallow reasons—he was the first pediatrician we’d met with who hadn’t called me “Mom”—but he’d turned out to be a perfect choice. He listened when I talked, he never rushed me out of his office or dismissed any of my ridiculous new-parent questions as silly, and he provided a necessary balance between me, who was prone to panic, and Dave, who was the kind of guy who’d wrap duct tape around a broken leg and call it a job.

Dr. McCarthy put Ellie’s folder down on top of the radiator. “How’s the eczema?”

“We’re still using the cream, and we’re seeing Dr. Howard again next month.” Skin conditions, I’d learned, were one of the treats that went along with the sensitive child—that, and food allergies.

“And is school okay?” He paged through Ellie’s chart. “How was the adjustment from preschool to kindergarten?”

I grimaced, remembering the first day of school and Ellie clinging to my leg, weeping as if I were sending her into exile instead of a six-hour day at the highly regarded (and very expensive) Stonefield: A Learning Community. (In my head, I carried out an invisible rebellion by thinking of it as just the Stonefield School.) “She had a rough few weeks to start with. She’s doing fine now . . .” “Fine” was, perhaps, an exaggeration, but at least Ellie wasn’t weeping and doing her barnacle leg-lock at every drop-off. “She’s reading, which is great.”

He looked at her chart again. “How about the bad dreams?”

“They’ve gotten better. She still doesn’t like loud noises.” Or movies in theaters, or any place—like the paint-your-own-pottery shop or the library at storytime—where more than two or three people might be talking at once. I sighed. “It’s like she feels everything more than other kids.”

“And maybe she does,” he replied. “Like I said, though, most kids do grow out of it. By the time she’s ten she’ll be begging you for drum lessons.”

“It’s so hard,” I said. Then I shut my mouth. I hated how I sounded when I complained about Ellie, knowing that there were women who wanted to get pregnant and couldn’t, that there were children in the world with real, serious problems that went far beyond reacting badly to loud noises and the occasional rash. There were single mothers, women with far less money and far fewer resources than I had. Who was I, with my big house and my great job, to complain about anything?

Dr. McCarthy put his hand on my forearm and looked at me with such kindness that I found myself, absurdly, almost crying.

“So tell me. What are you doing to take care of yourself?”

I thought for a split second about lying, giving him some story about actually attending yoga classes instead of just paying for them, or how I was taking Pilates, when, in fact, all I had was a gift certificate from two birthdays ago languishing in my dresser drawer. Instead I said, “Nothing, really. There just isn’t time.”

He adjusted his stethoscope. “You’ve got to make time. It’s important. You know how they tell you on planes, in case of an emergency, the adults should put their oxygen masks on first? You’re not going to be any good to anyone if you’re not taking care of yourself.” His blue eyes, behind his glasses, looked so gentle, and his posture was relaxed, as if he had nowhere to go and nothing more pressing to do than stand there all afternoon and listen to my silly first-world problems. “Do you want to talk to someone?” I didn’t answer. I didn’t want to talk to someone. I wanted to talk to him. I wanted to go to his office—it was small but cozy, with cluttered bookshelves, and a desk stacked high with charts, and a comfortably worn leather couch against the wall. He’d offer me a seat and a cup of tea, and ask me what was wrong, what was really wrong, and I would tell him: about Dave, about Ellie, about my dad, about my mom. About the pills. I’d tuck myself under a blanket and take a nap while the volunteers kept Ellie amused in the waiting room and Dr. McCarthy came up with a plan for how to fix me.

Instead, I swallowed hard. “I’m okay,” I said, in a slightly hoarse voice, and I gave him a smile, the same one I’d given my mother on my way out of the taxi on my eighth birthday.

“Are you sure? I know how hard this part can be. Even if you can find twenty minutes a day to go for a walk, or just sit quietly . . .”

Twenty minutes. It didn’t sound like much. Not until I started thinking about work, and how time-consuming writing five blog posts a week turned out to be, and how on top of my paying job I’d volunteered to redesign the website for Stonefield’s annual silent auction. There were the mortgage payments, which still felt like an astonishing sum to part with each month, and the Examiner, where it was rumored there’d be another round of layoffs soon. There was the laundry that never got folded, the workouts that went undone, the organic vegetables that would rot and liquefy in the fridge because, after eight hours at my desk and another two hours of being screamed at by my daughter because she couldn’t find the one specific teddy bear she wanted among the half-dozen teddy bears she owned, I couldn’t handle finding a recipe and preparing a meal and washing the dishes when I was done. We lived on grab-and-heat meals from Wegmans, Chinese takeout, frozen pizzas, and, if I was feeling particularly guilty on a Sunday afternoon, some kind of casserole, for which I’d double the recipe and freeze a batch.

Dr. McCarthy tucked Ellie’s folder under his arm and looked down at the magazine in my hand. “Are you reading one of those ‘How to Be Better in Bed’ things?” he asked. I gave a weak smile and closed the magazine so he couldn’t see what I was really reading. This was craziness. I didn’t have a problem. I couldn’t.

He glanced over my head, at the clock on the wall. From behind the exam-room door, I could hear Ellie and the medical student singing “Castle on a Cloud.” “Nobody shouts or talks too loud . . . Not in my castle on a cloud.”

I gave him another smile. He gave my arm a final squeeze. “Take care of yourself,” he said, and then he was gone.

I pushed the magazine into the depths of my purse. I got Ellie into her clothes, smoothing out the seam of her socks, buttoning her dress, re-braiding her hair. I held her hand when we crossed the street, paid for parking, and then, before I drove southwest to Federal Donuts for the hot chocolate I’d promised my daughter, I reached for the Altoids tin in my purse.

No, I thought, and remembered the quiz. Have you ever planned not to use that day but done it anyway? What excuse did I have for taking pills?

Maybe my mother had been cold and inattentive . . . but it had been the 1970s, before “parent” became a verb, when mothers routinely stuck their toddlers in playpens while they mixed themselves a martini or lit a Virginia Slim. So I had a big house in the burbs. Wasn’t that what every woman was supposed to want? I had a job I was good at, a job I liked, even if it felt sometimes like the stress was unbearable; I had a lovely daughter, and, really, was being a little sensitive such a big deal? I was fine, I thought. Everything was fine. But even as I was thinking it, my fingers were opening the little box, locating the chalky white oval, and delivering it, like Communion, to the waiting space beneath my tongue. I heard the pill cracking between my teeth as I chewed, winced as the familiar bitterness flooded my mouth, and imagined as I started the car that I could feel the chemical sweetness untying my knotted muscles, slowing my heartbeat, silencing the endless monkey-chatter of my mind, letting my lungs expand enough for a deep breath.

At the corner of Sixth and Chestnut, I saw a woman on the sidewalk. Her face was red. Her feet bulged out of laceless sneakers, and there was a paper cup in her hands. Puckered lips worked against toothless gums. Her hands were dirty and swollen, her body wrapped in layers of sweaters and topped with a stained down coat. Behind her stood a shopping cart filled with trash bags. A little dog was perched on the topmost bag, curled up in a threadbare blue sweater.

Ellie slowly read each word of her sign out loud. “ ‘Homeless. Need help. God bless.’ Mommy, what is ‘homeless’?”

“It means she doesn’t have a place to live.” I was glad Dave wasn’t in the car. I could imagine his response: It means she doesn’t want to work to take care of herself, and thinks it’s someone else’s job to pay for what she needs. I’d known my husband was more conservative than I was when I married him, but, in the ten years since, it seemed like he’d decided that anything that went wrong in his life or anyone else’s was the liberals’ fault.

Ellie considered this. “Maybe she could live in our guest room.”

I bit back my immediate reply, which was, No, honey, your daddy lives there. That had been true for at least the past six weeks. Maybe longer. I didn’t want to think about it. Instead I said, “She probably needs a special kind of help, not just a place to stay.”

“What kind of help?”

Blessedly, the light turned green. I pulled into traffic and drove to the doughnut shop, feeling the glow of the narcotic envelop me and hold me tight. Leaving the shop, I caught a glimpse of myself in the window, and compared what I saw—a white woman of medium height, in a tan camel-hair trench coat, new-this-season walnut leather riding boots, straightened hair lying smoothly over her shoulders—with the woman on the corner. A little makeup, I thought, in the expansive, embracing manner I tended to think in when I had a pill or two in me, and I could even be pretty. And even if I wasn’t, I thought, as I drove us back home, as Ellie sang along to Carly Rae Jepsen and the city where I’d been so happy slipped away in my rearview mirror, I was a world away from the woman we’d seen. That woman—she was what addiction looked like. Not me. Not me.

TWO

My alarm cheeped at six-fifteen. Without opening my eyes, I crab-walked my hand across the bedside table, located my throbbing phone, and swiped it into silence. Then I held still, flat on my back, listening to Ellie snore beside me as I fought the same mental battle I fought every morning: Exercise or sleep?

I should exercise, I told myself. The day after Ellie’s doctor’s appointment the fact-checker had called me and said the story about Ladiesroom would show up today on the Wall Street Journal’s website, and would be in the printed paper tomorrow. I’d told Dave it was coming, but we’d barely discussed it. I didn’t want him to think I was bragging, or that I was drawing a distinction between us—Dave, who wrote stories, and me, who had somehow become one of the written-about. Dave hadn’t noticed my nerves, how I’d picked at my dinner and been awake most of the night, worrying that the picture would be terrible and that the world, and everyone I knew in it, would wake up and bear witness to precisely how many chins I actually had.

Lying underneath the down comforter, I touched my hips, feeling the spread, then moved my hands up to the jiggly flesh of my belly. My waistline had been the only thing that kept me from resembling a teapot in profile, but, unfortunately, it had never really reappeared in the months, then years, after Ellie’s birth. I’d always told myself that I’d get around to losing the baby weight when things calmed down, but that had never happened, and the baby was now almost six.

I could see Ellie’s eyes moving underneath her lavender eyelids, and then Dave, with his pillow in his hands, dressed in pajamas that he wore buttoned to his chin, creeping into the room. Quickly, I shut my eyes so he’d think I was still asleep and we wouldn’t have to talk. It had been like this for longer than I liked to think about—every night he’d sleep in the guest room, and every morning he’d come tiptoeing back to the marital bed, the reverse of a teenage boy sneaking out through his beloved’s window. The idea was that when Ellie woke up and came to greet us, she’d see a happy couple, not two people who communicated mostly through texts about picking up milk and putting out the recycling. The good news was, Ellie generally showed up in the middle of the night, half-asleep and not in a position to notice anything.

Dave settled himself on the far side of the bed, arranging his pillows just so. I turned on my side, remembering how it had been when we’d first moved in together, how his first act after waking would be to spoon me, his chest tight against my back, his legs cupping mine, how he’d scratch his deliciously stubbled cheeks against the back of my neck and whisper that it couldn’t be morning, it was still early, we didn’t have to move, not yet. These days, he was more likely to open his eyes and fling himself, facedown, to the carpet for a quick set of planks and pushups before his run.

I opened my eyes and considered the clothes I’d left folded on the dresser: Lululemon yoga pants and an Athleta tank top in a pretty shade of pink, with my sneakers and a running bra and a pristine pair of white ankle socks beside them. All good, except I’d laid out the shoes and the clothes on Sunday night, and it was now Thursday morning, and all I’d done with the cute outfit was admire it from the safe remove of my bed.

Five more minutes, I decided, then reached for my cell phone, scanning my e-mail. As usual, Sarah had been up for hours. “pos col?” she’d asked—Sarah-ese for “possible column”—in a message sent an hour earlier that linked to the Twitter feed of a prominent comic-book creator. When asked how to write strong female characters, he’d answered, “Be sure not to give them weenies.” “So transwomen are out?” one of his followers had shot back, touching off a lengthy debate about biology and genitals and who qualified as female. Among her “pos col” contenders, Sarah had also included an update on the trial of the celebrity chef being sued by her (male) assistant for sexual harassment, and a profile of the showrunner of an Emmy Award–winning soap opera.

I considered clicking over to the Journal, but decided to wait. The story probably wasn’t up yet. I’d get in a workout—maybe thirty minutes on the treadmill, instead of the forty-five I’d been shooting for, but still, better than nothing—and then, with endorphins pumping through my body, giving me a lovely post-exercise high, I’d read the story. And look at the picture. If it was terrible, I’d use it as motivation. I’d print it out, tape it to the refrigerator and to the treadmill. It would be my “Before” shot. All the moms in the carpool lane would tell me how fantastic I looked, how together I had it, after three months, or six months, or however long it took me to lose twenty pounds and maybe get some Botox.

Eloise muttered in her sleep, then rolled over and opened her eyes.

“Good morning, beautiful,” I said.

She yawned, eyelashes fluttering, arms stretching over her head. “Mommy, there’s somefing I need to tell you.”

“What’s that?” Maybe I wasn’t objective, but Ellie was a gorgeous child. She had light-brown hair that curled in glossy ringlets, big brown eyes that tipped up at the corners and gave her a playful, secretive look, and the kind of porcelain skin that is the exclusive property of infants and children. A perfectly symmetrical spray of freckles ornamented her nose, her lips were naturally pink and curved into a Cupid’s bow, and she already showed signs of inheriting my husband’s lanky, long-limbed frame.

My daughter was delicious in the morning, I thought, as she nuzzled up next to me, and I kissed her cheek.

“What is it, sweetie?” I whispered.

“I peed in the bed,” Ellie whispered back.

“Oh, Christ.” Dave rolled himself onto the floor and leapt to his feet, with his hair sticking up in tufts on his head and the head of his penis wagging through the slit of his pajama bottoms as he examined himself for dampness.

“Dave!” I hissed, and jerked my chin toward the offending area. He tucked himself into his pajamas and stalked off toward the bathroom, while I pushed myself out of bed (twenty minutes on the treadmill? I’d still have time for that, right?) and yanked back the duvet. Ellie lay in a slowly widening stain. Her nightgown was soaked. So were the sheets underneath it, and probably the bed underneath that. I’d been meaning to find a waterproof mattress cover, but, like most of my well-intentioned domestic chores, it had been postponed and postponed again and eventually forgotten.

“Oh, God,” I breathed.

“I’m SORRY!” Ellie wailed, and began to cry.

“It’s okay, baby. Don’t worry. These things happen.” About once a week, I thought. “Ugh,” I groaned before I could stop myself. I knew you weren’t supposed to embarrass kids for having accidents. I’d read a million child-care books when I was pregnant, which was a good thing, because I barely had a spare ten seconds to read my horoscope now that I had a child, and I knew that shaming them over bodily functions was a bad idea, but seriously?

I scooped her into my arms, ignoring the clammy wetness and the smell. I wished that I’d kept her in overnight diapers, but Ellie would lift her nose and say, “Those are for BABIES,” every time I’d offered. “Honey, can you strip the bed?” I called, just as I heard the sound of the shower turning on. Of course, I thought. Because letting me wash her off in our bathroom would make it too easy, and helping with the mess would have been too kind. I carried her down the hall.

“NO! NO SHOWER! DON’T WANNA!”

“Ellie,” I said, looking her in the eye, “we have to get you clean.”

“USE WIPIES!”

Wipies were not going to cut it, I thought as I unstuck her nightgown from her belly and tugged it off over her head, then peeled off her underwear and left them in a crumpled heap on the bathroom floor. Ellie looked at them and started to cry harder. “Princess Jasmine is ALL WET!”

“It’s okay, sweetie. We’ll put her in the washing machine, and she’ll be good as new.”

Ellie was unconsoled. “I PEED ON PRINCESS JASMINE!” she sobbed. Never mind that she’d also probably soaked our mattress. Our expensive, less-than-a-year-old, pillowtop mattress.

I cannot take this. The thought rose in my head. It was instantly chased by a second thought. I know what would make it better.

“Stay right here, honey,” I said, and trotted back to the bedroom. I yanked back the top sheet, the fitted sheet, and the mattress pad. Sure enough, the mattress was soaked . . . and, before I knew it, the bottle was in my hands. Take one pill every four to six hours as needed for pain. I popped the lid, shook one pill into my hand, debated for a moment, then added a second, noticing as I did that the bottle was getting light. I’d taken one at five o’clock the night before, after Ellie had thrown a fit because the TiVo had deleted her favorite episode of Team Umizoomi, and then another one at midnight, when I couldn’t fall asleep.

In the bathroom, I scooped a mouthful of water from the sink and swallowed. Immediately, even before the pills were down my throat, I felt a sense of calm come over me, a certainty that I could handle this crisis and whatever others emerged before seven a.m. All will be well, the pills sang as they descended. All will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.

“Here we go,” I said to Ellie. I pulled off my own evening finery—an XXL T-shirt from Franklin & Marshall College and a pair of cotton Hanes Her Way boy shorts, which I’d bought because they covered more real estate than briefs or bikinis. Maybe I could count this as a workout, I thought as I lifted my shrieking daughter and stepped under the spray.

“Too hot! TOO HOT!” Ellie flailed her arms. One fist clipped me underneath my eye. I yelped, then gripped her arms tightly.

“Hold still,” I said. With one hand, I kept her immobilized. With the other, I reached for the Princess body wash, wishing I’d added a third pill, wondering if I would have a chance to see the article before I had to take Ellie to school.

Dave stuck his head into the bathroom. “Did you pick up the dry cleaning?” he yelled over the drumming of the water. I could picture his face, the tightness around his mouth, the expression of disappointment he’d have in place even before I disappointed him.

“Oh, shit.”

Ellie blinked at me through the water. “Mommy, that’s a bad word.”

“Mommy knows.” I raised my voice. “Honey, I’m sorry.”

He didn’t sigh or complain, even though I knew he wanted to do both. “I guess I’ll get it. Do you want me to pick you up for tonight?” he asked, in a tone of exaggerated patience and goodwill.

“What’s tonight?” The second the words were out of my mouth, I remembered what “tonight” was—Dave’s birthday dinner. I’d made reservations at his favorite restaurant, invited two other couples, picked out and picked up the wine, and ordered the fancy heart monitor he’d asked for, and wrapped it myself.

“It’s Daddy’s birthday,” Ellie said pertly.

“I know that, honey.” I raised my voice so Dave could hear. “I’m sorry. Senior moment.” I was six months older than Dave. In better, pre-baby times, we’d joked about it. He’d call me his “old lady,” or install a flashlight app on my phone so I could read the menu in dimly lit restaurants. Lately, though, the jokes had taken on an unpleasant edge. “I can meet you at Cochon.”

“Fine.” He didn’t exactly slam the bathroom door, but he wasn’t particularly gentle when he closed it, either. I sighed, flipped open the body wash—pink and sparkly, with a cloying scent somewhere between apple blossom and air freshener—and squirted a handful into my palm. I washed Ellie’s hair and body, trying to ignore her kicks and shrieks of “THAT HURTS!” and “IT TICKLES!” and “NOW YOU GOT IT IN MY EYES!” and then washed myself off. I bundled her into a towel, wrapped another towel around my midsection, then scooped her sodden clothes and the soaked bath mat off the floor and tossed them toward the washing machine on my way to Ellie’s bedroom.

I gave Ellie a fresh pair of panties and dumped detergent into the machine. When I turned around, Ellie was still naked, her belly sticking out adorably, frowning at the panties.

“These are not Princess Jasmine.”

“I know, honey. They’re . . .” I squinted at the underwear. “Meredith? From Brave?”

“Not Mere-DITH, Meri-DA.”

“Right. Her.”

“Meridas are for Fridays!”

“Well, you’re going to have to wear Merida today. Or else you can try . . .” I pawed through the laundry basket, producing a pair with a grinning cartoon monkey on the back. “Who is this? Paul Frank?”

“I HATE Paul Frank. Only BOYS like Paul Frank.”

“Ellie. We’re late. Pick one.”

She chewed her thumbnail thoughtfully, before extending her index finger at the first pair. “Eenie . . . meenie . . . miney . . . moe.”

“We don’t have time for this.”

“Catch . . . a . . . tiger . . . by . . . the . . . toe.”

“Ellie.” I bent down so I could look her in the eye. “I didn’t want to tell you this, because I didn’t want to scare you, but the truth is, there is actually a very dangerous monster living in your closet, and he only eats girls without underpants.”

She smiled indulgently. “You are FIBBING.”

“Maybe I am,” I said, tightening my towel, “and maybe I’m not. But if I were you, I’d put on my underwear.”

Back in my bedroom, the wet sheets and comforter were still on the floor. Sighing, I picked them up, ran them to the laundry room, and tried to pull up the Journal on my phone. It was seven o’clock, which gave me thirty minutes to get myself and Ellie dressed, fed, and out the door, and no time at all for a workout. I pulled on my panties and a bra, a pair of leggings, and a dress that was basically an oversized long-sleeved gray tee shirt, and went back to Ellie’s room.

She stared at me, gimlet-eyed, hip cocked, a bored supermodel in a pair of panties with a monkey on the butt. I took the requisite three dresses out of her closet, holding their hangers as I made each one speak. “Hi, Ellie,” I said in my squeaky pretending-to-be-a-dress voice as I wiggled one of the choices in front of her. “I am beautiful purple!”

“Well, I have a tutu!” I squeaked next, shoving the second dress in front of the first one.

“But I am the favorite!” I said, in the persona of dress number three, a yellow-and-orange tie-dyed number that I’d picked up at a craft fair in Vermont, where Dave and I had gone for Columbus Day weekend two Octobers ago. We’d run a race together—well, Dave had run the 10K, and I’d started off the 5K at an ambitious trot, which had slowed to a stroll, the better to enjoy the foliage and the smell of smoke in the air. When no one was looking. I’d tucked ten dollars into my running bra, and when I was sure I was the last person in the race I’d stopped at a stand and bought a cider doughnut. We’d spent the night in a gorgeous old inn, and slept in a four-poster bed set so far off the floor that there was a miniature set of stairs on each side. Dinner had been in a restaurant built in a former gristmill, at a table overlooking a stream—roast duck in a dark cherry sauce, a bottle of red wine so rich and smooth that even I, who enjoyed things like piña coladas, knew it was something special. There’d been cream puffs with chocolate sauce and glasses of port for dessert. The innkeepers had lit a fire in the fireplace in our bedroom, and left out a box of chocolates and a bottle of Champagne. I remember climbing into that high bed, and Dave saying, “Let’s do it like we’re Pilgrims.”

“What’s that mean?”

He gathered me into his arms, kissed my forehead, then each cheek, then my lips, slowly and lingeringly. “You lie there and don’t make any noise, like you’re just trying to endure it.”

“So, the usual.”

“Oh, you,” he said, flashing his white teeth in a grin, sliding his hand up the white lace-trimmed nightgown that I’d bought for the occasion. We made love, and then slept for fourteen hours, our longest stretch since Ellie had joined us, and then we ordered room-service waffles and sausage for breakfast, and made love again. We spent the rest of the day walking around the quaint little town, holding hands, buying maple candies and painted wooden birdhouse.

This had been before the Examiner’s first layoffs, before everyone who’d been eligible for the buyout had been persuaded—or, in some cases, strongly encouraged—to take the money and go. Now, instead of three reporters covering City Hall, there was just one, just Dave. Instead of leaving the house at nine, he left at eight, then seven-thirty, and I rarely saw him home before eight o’clock at night. On weekends he’d be either hunched over his computer or pounding out miles around Kelly Drive. When we were first married, we’d had sex three or four times a week. Post-baby, that dwindled to three or four times a month . . . and that was a good month. Sometimes it felt as if I’d gone to the hospital, given birth, then lifted my head five years later to find that my husband and I were barely speaking, and that sex with him was at the very end of a very long to-do list, instead of something that I actively wanted and missed.

Part of me thought this was normal. Certainly I’d read and overheard plenty about post-baby bed death. I knew that the passion of the early years didn’t last over the length of the union, but lately I’d started to wonder: If we weren’t talking, what was he not telling me? And who might he be talking to? The truth was, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answers, or his secrets, any more than I wanted him to know mine.

“Mommy? Oh, Mommmm-eeee.” Ellie was wiggling her fingers in front of my face, then trying hard and, so far, without success, to snap them.

“Sorry,” I said.

She pointed at the dresses. “Make them fight!”

“Pick me!” I squeaked, shaking one of the dresses so it looked like it was having a seizure. “No, me!” Using both of my hands and skills that would have impressed a puppeteer, I maneuvered the dresses, making them wrestle and punch. Finally, Ellie pointed at the tie-dyed dress. “I will wear she to school this morning, and she”—an imperious nod toward the purple one—“when I get home for my snack.”

“In your face! IN YOUR FACE!” I chanted, making the winning dress taunt the other two as the losers hung their hanger heads. I found red tights and located one of Ellie’s favored lace-up leopard-print high-top sneakers under her bed, and the other one in the bathroom. “Wait here,” I said, and trotted into the bedroom for my shoes. It was 7:18. I pulled my wet hair away from my face and secured it with a plastic clip, grabbed my phone, and clicked on the link that read—ugh—LETTING IT ALL HANG OUT, IN CYBERSPACE: A NEW GENERATION OF WOMEN WRITERS SHARE (AND SHARE) ON THE INTERNET.

Typical, I thought, and shook my head. It was an old reporter’s trick—call your subject and say, “I’m so interested in what you do!” Of course, “interested in” could mean anything from “impressed with” to “disgusted by.” Judging from that headline, I strongly suspected the latter.

“Breakfast!” I called. Ellie slouched down the stairs in slow motion, like she was dragging herself through reduced Nutella. I grabbed a box of Whole Foods’ pricy, organic version of Honey Nut Cheerios from the pantry, and scooped coffee into the filter. The phone began to buzz against my breast.

“Hello?”

“Did you just call?” Janet asked.

“Nope. I must have boob-dialed you.”

“I feel so special,” she said. “Did you see the story?”

“Just the headline.”

“Well, the article’s adorable, and the picture looks great.”

“Really?” Part of me felt relieved. Another part knew that Janet would tell me I looked cute even if the picture made me look like a manatee in a dress.

“Yeah, it’s . . . CONOR, PUT THAT DOWN!” I winced, poured water into the coffeemaker, and shook cereal into Ellie’s preferred Disney Princess bowl.

Ellie pouted. “I WANT FROOT LOOPS!”

Of course she did. Needless to say, I’d never fed her a Froot Loop in my life—all of her food was low in fat, high in fiber, hormone-free, made with whole grains and without high-fructose corn syrup, with, of course, its name correctly spelled. Dave’s mother, the Indomitable Doreen, had hosted her for a weekend, during which Ellie had discovered the wonders of highly processed sugary breakfast treats. “I only gave it to her once!” Doreen had told me, her voice laced with indignation, even though I’d asked in my least confrontational tone and hastened to reassure her that it was no big deal. Clearly, once had been enough.

“I’ll send you the link!” Janet said. I slid the coffeepot out from underneath the filter and replaced it with my aluminum travel mug. “Let me know if you need me to—DYLAN, WHERE’S YOUR JACKET?”

“I’ll see you tonight,” I said. Janet had three kids, five-year-old twins Dylan and Conor and a nine-going-on-nineteen-year-old daughter named Maya, whose pretty face seemed frozen in a sneer and who already regarded her mother as a hopeless embarrassment. Janet and I had met in the Haverford Reserve park when Ellie was two and I was still attempting (when we could still afford for me to attempt) the life of a nonworking stay-at-home mom. I’d gone to the park to kill the half hour between Little People’s Music and Tumblin’ Tots. Janet was standing in front of a bench with her hands over her eyes, a short, medium-sized woman with light-brown hair in a ponytail, Dansko clogs, and a gorgeous belted white cashmere coat that I correctly identified as a relic of her life as a career lady (no mother of small children would ever buy anything white). “Okay, ready?” she’d called.

Her boys nodded. They were dressed identically, in blue jeans and red-and-blue-striped shirts. Over a glass of wine, the first time we met for drinks, Janet told me that the boys shared a single wardrobe. After her third glass, she confided that she was convinced she’d mixed them up on the way home from the hospital, and that the boy she and Barry were calling Dylan was actually Conor, and vice versa.

“One . . . two . . . three . . .” she began. The boys had dashed away and hid as Janet counted slowly to twenty. When they were gone, she’d looked around, sat down on the bench, and picked up her latte and an issue of The New Yorker. I watched for a minute, waiting until she’d turned a page. Then I cleared my throat.

“Um . . . aren’t you going to look for them?”

“Well, sure. Eventually.” She closed her magazine and looked at me. She had a heart-shaped face, olive skin, and a friendly expression. She wasn’t beautiful—her eyes were a little too close together, her nose too big for her face—but she had a welcoming look, the kind of expression that invited conversation. She smiled as she watched me finish daubing Ellie’s cheeks with sunscreen, then start swabbing the bench with a sterilizing wipe.

“Your first?” Janet asked.

“However did you guess?” My stroller was parked in front of me. Hanging from the handlebars were recycled-plastic tote bags filled with fruits and vegetables that I would cook and cut up for the nutritious lunch Ellie would eat two bites of, then push around her plate. Tubes of sunscreen and Purell were tucked into the stroller’s mesh pocket, along with BPA-free containers of snacks and juice, and a copy of The Happiest Toddler on the Block—which I already suspected my daughter would never be—stuck out from the top of my pink-and-green paisley silk Petunia Pickle Bottom diaper bag.

“All that effort,” Janet said, and shook her head. “I did all of that with my first. Sunscreen, hand sanitizer, organic everything, baby playgroup . . .”

I nodded. Ellie and I were enrolled in a playgroup that met at the JCC one afternoon each week. Eight moms sat in a circle, complaining, while our kids splashed in the sink, and played with clay and blocks, and dumped oats and eggs and honey into a bowl, which they’d stir with eight plastic spoons while singing “Do You Know the Muffin Man”—or “Do You Know the Muffin Lady,” because God forbid the program send the message that girls could not be perfectly adequate and professionally compensated makers of tasty baked treats. For this fun, we paid a hundred bucks a session. What did moms who lacked the cash do? Suffer silently? Watch soap operas? Drink?

“Tumbling class?” Janet asked.

“Check.” Ellie and I attended once a week.

“Music Together?” She was smiling, a wide, slightly lopsided grin. I liked her for her teeth—a little too big, crooked on the bottom. Most of the women I met in the various groups and lessons and Teeny Yogini classes had blindingly white veneers or teeth that had been bleached an irradiated white so bright it was almost blue. My theory was that, having given up high-powered jobs to become mothers in their thirties, they now divided all the time and energy that would have gone to their careers between their children and their appearance. I’d gotten the first part of the mandate, quitting my job at the Examiner at Dave’s urging and making sure that Ellie’s every waking hour was full of enriching activities, her meals were wholesome, and her screen time was restricted, and reading to her for one half hour for every ten minutes I let her play on my iPad.

As for my looks, I kept up with my hair color, mostly because I’d started turning gray when I was thirty. However, my closet was not filled with the flattering, expensive, classic garments that the other mommies at Mommy and Me wore. Nor did I have the requisite taut and flab-free body to carry those pricy ensembles. I was always meaning to go to Pilates or CrossFit or Baby Boot Camp, so I could quit slopping around in Old Navy yoga pants or one of the super-forgiving sweater dresses I’d found on clearance at Ann Taylor to go with the inevitable Dansko clogs, the clumsy, clown-sized footwear of the hard-charging stay-at-home suburban mom.

“Since I’m coming clean, we also do Art Experience,” I confessed.

“What a cutie,” she said, bending down to inspect Ellie, who gave her a sunny grin, the kind of smile she’d never give me. “I’ll bet she’s never had high-fructose corn syrup in her life.”

“Actually . . .” I’d never told anyone this—not Dave, not any of the mothers at the JCC or on the PhillyParent message board, not even my own mother, who wouldn’t have understood why it was a big deal—but something about Janet invited confidence. I lowered my voice and looked around, feeling like a con on the prison yard. “I gave her a McNugget.”

Janet gave me a look of exaggerated horror, with one hand—unmanicured nails, major diamond ring—pressed to her lips. “You did not.”

“I did!” I felt giddy, like I’d finally found someone who thought mommy culture was just as crazy as I did. “On a plane trip! She wouldn’t stop screaming in the terminal, so I bought a Happy Meal.” I paused, then thought, What the hell? “She had fries, too.”

“Whatever it takes, that’s my motto,” said Janet. “Flying with kids is the worst. When we went to visit my in-laws in San Diego last Christmas, I bought my oldest an iPad, and brought mine and my husband’s so I wouldn’t have to listen to them fight about who got to watch what three iPads. My husband thought I was crazy. Of course, he got upgraded to first class. I told him he could either give me his seat or suck it up.”

“So did he suck?”

“He sucked,” she confirmed. “Like he was going to give up the big seat to come back and run the zoo. Thank God I had half a Vicodin left over from when I had my wisdom teeth out.”

“Mmm.” On that beautiful, long-ago morning, I hadn’t had any painkillers since my post-C-section Percocet had run out, but I remembered loving the way they’d made me happy, loose-limbed, and relaxed. A kindred spirit, I thought, looking at Janet—someone with my sarcastic sense of humor and my by-any-means-necessary tactics for getting kids to behave.

That had been three years ago, and now Janet and I talked or texted every day and saw each other at least twice a week. We’d pile the kids in her SUV and go to one of the indoor play spaces or museums. In the summer, we’d take the kids to the rooftop pool in the high-rise in Bryn Mawr where her parents had a condo. In the winter, we’d go to the Cherry Hill JCC, and sometimes meet my parents at a pizza parlor for dinner. Eloise adored Maya, who was happy to have a miniature acolyte follow her around and worshipfully repeat everything she said, and I was happy that Ellie had a big-girl friend, even if it meant that sometimes she’d come home singing “I’m Sexy and I Know It,” or tell me seriously that “nobody listens to Justin Bieber anymore.” She and the boys mostly ignored one another, which was fine with me. If Ellie had favored one over the other it would have meant I’d finally have to figure out how to tell them apart.

Back in the kitchen, I stowed my phone, picked up my mug of coffee, and grabbed Ellie’s lunchbox from the counter. The instant I felt its weight—or, rather, its lack of weight—in my hand, I realized I’d forgotten to pack her lunch the night before. “Crap,” I muttered, and then looked at Ellie, who was busy taking her shoes off. “Ellie, don’t you dare!” I yanked the refrigerator door open, grabbed a squeezable yogurt, a juice box, a cheese stick, a handful of grapes, and a takeout container of white rice from when we’d ordered in Chinese food that weekend. I’d probably get a sweetly worded e-mail from her teachers reminding me that Stonefield had gone green and the Parent-Teacher Collective had agreed that parents should do their best to pack lunches that would create as little waste as possible, but whatever. At least she didn’t have any tree-nut products. For that, your kid could be suspended.

It was 7:41. “Honey, come on.” Sighing, in just socks, Ellie began a slow lope toward the door. I grabbed her jacket, then saw that her hair was still wet, already matted around her neck. Steeling myself, I set down the mug and the lunchbox, sprinted back upstairs, and grabbed the detangling spray, a wide-tooth comb, and a Hello Kitty headband.

Ellie saw me coming and reacted the way a death-row prisoner might to an armed guard on the day of her execution. “Nooooo!” she shrieked, and ducked underneath the table.

“Ellie,” I said, keeping my voice reasonable, “I can’t let you go to school like that.”

“But it HURTS!”

“I’ll do it as fast as I can.”

“But that will hurt MORE!”

“Ellie, I need you to come out of there.” Nothing. “I’m going to count to three, and if you’re not in your chair by the time I say ‘three’ . . .” I lowered my voice, even though Dave was gone. “No Bachelor on Monday.” Obviously, I knew that a cheesy reality dating show was not ideal viewing for a kindergartner. But the show was my guilty pleasure, and Dave usually worked late on Mondays, so rather than wrestle Ellie into bed and have her sneak into my bedroom half a dozen times with requests for glasses of water and additional spritzes of “monster spray” (Febreze, after I’d scraped the label off the container), thus risking an interruption of the most dramatic rose ceremony ever, I let her watch with me.

Moaning like a gut-shot prisoner, she dragged herself out from under the table and slowly climbed up into her chair. I squirted the strawberry-scented detangling spray, then took a deep breath and, as gently as I could, tugged the comb from her crown to the nape of her neck.

“Ow! OWWWW! STOBBIT!”

“Hold still,” I said, through gritted teeth, as Ellie squirmed and wailed and accused me of trying to kill her. “Ellie, you need to hold still.”

“But it HUUUUURTS!” she said. Tears were streaming down her face, soaking her collar. “STOBBIT! It is PAINFUL! You are MURDERING ME!”

“Ellie, if you’d stop screaming and hold still it wouldn’t hurt that much!” Sweating, breathing hard, I pulled the comb through her hair. Good enough, I decided, and used the headband to push the ringlets out of her eyes. Then I scooped her up under my arm; snatched up her jacket; half set, half tossed her into her car seat; and, finally, got her to school.

THREE

My cell phone was ringing as I pulled into the driveway. “Did you see it?” Sarah asked.

“Just the headline,” I told her. I’d been late again. Mrs. Dale, the take-no-shit teacher who was on drop-off duty that morning, had given me a tight-lipped smile as I’d made excuses over Ellie’s still-damp head.

“It’s mostly great. Seventy-five percent positive.”

My skin went cold; my heart contracted. “And the other twenty-five?” I asked, trying to keep my voice light.

“Oh, you know.” She lowered her voice until she sounded like Sam the Eagle of The Muppet Show fame. “ ‘Some in journalism question the proliferation of female-centric websites, and whether the issues they cover—such as sex, dating, and the politics of marriage and motherhood—and the way that they cover them, with a particular off-brand, breezy sense of humor, are doing feminism any favors.’ ”

“ ‘Some in journalism,’ ” I repeated. “Did he quote anyone?”

Sarah gave her gruff bark of a laugh. “Ha. Good one. As far as I’m concerned, ‘some in journalism’ are his girlfriend, his mom, and a pissed-off intern who couldn’t cut it at Ladiesroom.”

I flipped open my laptop, saw that the battery had died because I’d failed to plug it in the night before, and then started hunting the living room for Dave’s. I knew that Sarah was probably right. I’d been in journalism long enough to know that anonymous quotes usually came from disgruntled underlings too chicken to sign their names to their critiques. But I was the one who’d written about—how did the Journal put it?—“the politics of marriage and motherhood,” and whatever the piece said was sure to sting.

I had started on the marriage-and-motherhood beat by accident with a post on my personal read-only-by-my-friends blog called “Fifty Shades of Meh.” I’d written it after buying Fifty Shades of Grey to spice up what Dave and I half-jokingly called our “grown-up time,” and had written a meditation on how the sex wasn’t the sexiest part of the book. “Dear publishers: I will tell you why every woman with a ring on her finger and a car seat in her SUV is devouring this book like the candy she won’t let herself eat,” I had written. “It’s not the fantasy of an impossibly handsome guy who can give you an orgasm just by stroking your nipples. It is, instead, the fantasy of a guy who can give you everything. Hapless, clueless, barely able to remain upright without assistance, Ana Steele is that unlikeliest of creatures, a college student who doesn’t have an e-mail address, a computer, or a clue. Turns out she doesn’t need any of those things. Here is dominant Christian Grey, and he’ll give her that computer, plus an iPad, a Beamer, a job, and an identity, sexual and otherwise. No more worrying about what to wear—Christian buys her clothes. No more stress about how to be in the bedroom—Christian makes those decisions. For women who do too much—which includes, dear publishers, pretty much all the women who have enough disposable income to buy your books—this is the ultimate fantasy: not a man who will make you come, but a man who will make agency unnecessary, a man who will choose your adventure for you.”

I’d put the post up at noon. By dinnertime, it had been linked to, retweeted, and read more than anything else I’d ever written. The next morning, an e-mail from someone named Sarah Lai arrived. She was launching a new website and wanted to talk to me about being a regular contributor. “I write about sex,” she told me. “Don’t be alarmed when you Google me.” So I’d Googled her and read her posts on pony play and next-generation vibrators on my way to New York City.

I’d walked into the Greek restaurant in Midtown where we’d decided to meet for lunch expecting a leather-clad vixen, a kitten with a whip, in teetering stripper heels and a latex bodysuit. Sarah Lai looked like a schoolgirl, in a white button-down shirt with a round collar tucked into a pleated gray skirt. Black tights and conservative flat black boots completed her ensemble. “I know, I know,” she’d said, laughing, when I told her she wasn’t what I expected. “What can I say? The quiet ones surprise you.” She set down the wedge of pita she was using to scoop hummus into her mouth and said, “So how’d you know your husband was The One?”

I looked at her, surprised. I’d figured she’d want to know how I got started with my blog, where I found my inspiration, which writers I admired, what other blogs I read. What I saw on her face, underneath the tough-girl pose of a cynic in the city, was unguarded curiosity . . . and hope. She was twenty-six, maybe old enough to have a serious boyfriend of her own, and wonder, as I had at her age, whether he was a keeper or just a guy who’d keep her happy through the holidays.

“On our first date, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to see him again,” I told her, picturing Dave across the table at the Chinatown restaurant where we’d walked after work. “He was handsome, but really serious. He scared me a little. I thought he was a lot smarter than I was—I still think that, sometimes—and he was, you know, completely focused on his work.” We’d talked about his current project, about the mayoral candidate he admired and the three others running for the office he thought were stupid or corrupt, and then he’d told me the story that had won my heart forever, his dream of the Me So Shopping Center.

“The what?” Sarah’s expression was rapt, her eyes wide. She’d done everything but pull out a notebook to take notes.

“You’re probably too young to remember the movie Full Metal Jacket, but there’s a scene where this Vietnamese prostitute says, ‘Me so horny’? It was the title of a rap song.” I was convinced Sarah had no idea what I was talking about, but she nodded anyhow. “Dave’s big idea was to have a bunch of shops. Like, Me So Horny would be the town brothel, and Me So Hungry would be the diner, and there’d be a psychiatrist’s office called Me So Sad, and a clothing shop . . .”

“Me So Naked?” Sarah guessed.

“It was either that or Me So Cold. And the doctor’s office, Me So Sick, and the cleaning service, Me So Messy.” I was laughing as I remembered the increasingly silly ideas we’d come up with, how I’d contrived to touch Dave’s hand and wrist as I’d laughed. “And that was it. He was already losing his hair, and I could see that sometimes he’d bore me, but I thought, we’ll always have Me So. He’ll always make me laugh.”

Sarah nodded. I had the sense of clearing some invisible hurdle, passing a quiz I hadn’t known I’d taken. Sarah had moved to New York from Ohio, had gotten a job in a coffee shop and given herself a year to make it as a writer. When we met, she’d started making a decent amount of money from the ads on her blog. Her dream was to start a bigger, more comprehensive, less sex-centric site. “Fashion, food, magazines, marriage, children, all that,” she’d rattled off, before giving the waiter our order—moussaka, grilled lamb, stuffed grape leaves, and more warm pita. “I’ll write about sex, of course, but I’ll need someone to cover marriage and motherhood.” Throughout the lunch we discussed design and ad buys, ideas, headlines, and titles. By the time dessert arrived, Sarah suggested I give the column a shot and try to write a few blog posts.

“Are you sure you don’t want someone with more experience?” I’d asked. I’d never thought of myself as a writer. Dave was the writer; I was a graphics-and-images girl. But we could certainly use the extra money. And the truth was that staying at home with a baby—now a toddler—did not fulfill me the way working at the paper once had. With work, there was a sense of completion. You’d start to lay out a page, or create graphics, or embed just the right video clip in an article about the city’s failing schools, and eventually, after editing and feedback and sometimes starting over again, you’d be done. With motherhood and marriage there was no finish line, no hour or day or year when you got to say you were through. Life just went on and on, endless and formless, with no performance evaluation, no raises or feedback or two weeks’ vacation. I thought that maybe working for money again could give me back that sense of satisfaction I’d once gotten from a job well done . . . or even just done.

“How is this website going to be different from the women’s websites that are already out there?” I had asked. Sarah, who’d clearly been waiting for that question, launched into her answer, about tone and content and reader engagement. I nibbled a stuffed grape leaf and thought about how lucky I was—how without my even trying, a solution for my worries had landed, like a gift-wrapped box dropped out of a window, right in my lap.

Ladiesroom.com had launched six weeks after my interview, finding its niche in the online world—and its advertisers—faster than either of us could have expected. Four months after its launch, the site was acquired by Foley Media, a bigger company looking to expand its brand. I was working harder than I had at the Examiner, pulling my first all-nighters since college, powering through the next day on espresso and a twenty-minute nap, engaging each day with the people who commented on my posts. And now the Wall Street Journal had decided we were, in a sense, newsworthy.

“Call me when you’ve read it,” Sarah said. I made some kind of affirmative noise and then turned on Dave’s laptop and found the story. I scrolled through their recap of our success, the quotes that captured Sarah’s and my funny banter, and the claims from critics who questioned our experience and asked whether our motives were self-promotional. Beneath the words LIVING OUT LOUD, I found my photograph. “Oh, God,” I groaned. I’d worn a pink jersey dress and nude heels, and Sarah and I had posed on Sarah’s desk, in front of her floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked Bryant Park. When the shot had been set up, I’d thought we looked nice. Seeing the picture now, all I could think was Before and After. Way, Way Before and After. Worst of all, the caption underneath read “SEXY MAMAS: Mom-bloggers Allison Weiss and Sarah Lai at play in Manhattan.” Never mind that I hardly looked sexy, and Sarah wasn’t a mom.

Ah, well. At least we looked reasonably professional. The photographer, who’d clearly been expecting the online version of Girls Gone Wild, had been disappointed to find ladies in business clothes, one of whom was almost forty, with nary a tattoo in sight (Sarah had a few—“just not,” as she put it, “where the judge can see them”). He had not-so-subtly pushed me toward the edge or the back of the shots, while trying to get Sarah to bend over her desk, or to stand with her hands on her knees and wave her bottom in front of her laptop—“so it’s, you know, sex and the Internet.” When she refused, and also politely turned down his offer to shoot her posing with a whip, he’d asked us to have an edible-body-paint fight (thanks but no thanks). Finally, he asked if we would at least stand side by side. “And can you kind of touch each other?”

We’d declined but agreed to play catch with the Egg, a vibrator designed to look like a retro kitchen timer that Sarah had reviewed in her monthly sex-toy roundup.

I turned away from the laptop and slipped my finger into my bag, found my tin, put the pills I knew I’d be needing—two Percocet, courtesy of my dentist, who was still prescribing them for the wisdom teeth he’d taken out six months ago—underneath my tongue. Then I called Sarah.

“It’s great!” I said. I’d meant to sound cheery, but I thought I sounded closer to hysterical.

“I told you it was NBD,” Sarah answered. I took a deep breath.

“I guess I’m just worried about what Dave’s going to think.”

“Ah.” Sarah’s boyfriend, an architect ten years her senior, was unswervingly supportive and, as far as I knew, completely unthreatened by a girlfriend who wrote about threesomes and bestiality for a living.

“But it’ll be fine,” I reassured her. “Hey, I should get going on my post. Call you later?” We hung up and I scrolled, idly, to the bottom of the Journal’s story, where twenty-three comments had already appeared.

I clicked, and began to read. LOL the one in the pink looks like Jabba the Hutt. No wonder she needs sex toys! “But I’m not the sex-toy writer,” I said, as if my computer could hear me. I shook my head and kept reading. I’d hit that . . . the second commenter had written, followed by three blank lines that I scrolled past to read, . . . with a brick, so I could get to the hot one. The third left behind the topic of my looks to consider my credentials. This is why the terrorists hate us, added commenter number four.

I closed my eyes. I told myself it did not matter what a bunch of strangers who, clearly, could hardly read and who would never meet me had to say. I told myself that it was ridiculous to get upset by comments on the Internet . . . It wasn’t as if the people could reach through the screen to actually hurt me. It wasn’t as if I was real to them; I was a name, a picture, a thing: Feminism, or Women Today. I told myself that I looked just fine and that the people who’d written those hateful things were probably idiots who played video games in their parents’ basement, putting down their joysticks only long enough to spew a little hate online and then masturbate bitterly.

Dave’s computer gave a soft chime, the same noise my laptop made when an e-mail arrived. Reflexively, I toggled to the e-mail screen and double-tapped the link that would let me read the incoming missive. Which turned out to be for Dave, from one LMcintyre@phila.gov. Happy birthday!

Okay, I thought. Totally benign. Except that when another e-mail arrived, I clicked it open again, almost without thinking. This one was from Dave, asking, We still on for lunch?

Absolutely, wrote back L. McIntyre. I ran through lists of male names that began with “L.” Larry. Luke. Lawton. Lonnie. Then I scrolled to the next line. I wouldn’t miss it!

Hmm. Possibly still innocuous. Dave’s reply, See you soon, was also perfectly proper. But, in addition to his usual e-mail signature—David Weiss, Reporter—he’d used an emoji, a winking yellow smiley face, the kind that subliterate fourteen-year-old girls would text to their crushes, the kind Dave and I rolled our eyes at and had vowed to never use. “We’re word people,” Dave had said, and even though I was more of a picture person myself, I’d agreed with him that these silly symbols were the height of the ridiculous, turning adult conversations into puppet shows and ruining the English language. Except, if I could believe what I was seeing, here was my husband, using emojis, with someone named L. McIntyre.

Don’t do it, a voice in my brain mourned. The computer chimed again, and here was L’s reply, another smiley-face emoji, only hers had lipstick and long eyelashes.

“Oh, you have got to be kidding me!” I cried.

First things first. I pulled my hair into a ponytail and literally rolled up my sleeves. I’d never acquired the ninja-level Googling skills that Examiner reporters took for granted, but I didn’t need them. A quick search revealed that L. McIntyre was Lindsay McIntyre, and she was an assistant United States attorney, and she had gone to UPenn and law school at Temple and she looked—I would ask Janet to confirm this—like a younger, paler, mousier version of me. We both had shoulder-length hair, and similar features, only my face was rounder and her complexion was lighter. But there was a definite resemblance. Except she was single. And young.

It was just after ten o’clock in the morning, but it felt like my wet-the-bed wake-up call had happened to a different person, possibly a century ago. I was considering another pill but decided that I didn’t have the luxury. No matter what was going on with my husband, I had work to do.

I sat in front of the laptop. I opened a new window and typed a single word: Exposed. The word seemed to expand and contract, throbbing like an infected tooth at the top of the page. I think my husband is having an affair, I wrote, then, as if typing them might make it real, I erased the words, then wrapped my arms around my shoulders, sitting in front of the computer and rocking. I thought about calling Sarah and asking for a sick day, but I knew that, today of all days, with traffic probably at an all-time high, there was no way I could afford to go dark.

I squeezed my eyes shut, hearing the percussion of my fingers coming down harder than they had to on the keys as I typed: Hey, commenters, I’m sorry. I’m sorry my disgusting, blobbity body (which is, after all, no bigger than the average American woman’s, but who’s counting) offends you. I’m sorry I was foolish enough to pose for a photograph, and let that photograph appear in the world, instead of hiding behind an avatar of an actress or insisting on being air-brushed into acceptability. I’m sorry my mere existence has forced you to actually consider the reality of a woman who is neither a model nor an actress and does not feel compelled to starve herself, or binge and purge, or spend hours engaged in rigorous workouts so that she scrapes into “acceptable” territory and can thus be seen in public.

I’m sorry I’m not skinny. I’m sorry I haven’t had my fat sucked, my face plumped, my nose bobbed, my skin peeled, and my brows plucked. I’m sorry that I forced you into the unwelcome realization that MOST WOMEN DO NOT LOOK LIKE THE WOMEN YOU SEE ON TV. I’m sorry that even the women you see on TV don’t look like the women you see on TV, because they’ve been lit and made up, strapped into Spanx and posed just so.

I’m sorry that, evidently, you are living with terrorists who have the ability to force you to read stories you’re not interested in reading. That must be terrible! I, personally, can click or flip away from something that doesn’t hold my attention, or interest me, or line up with a worldview that I want affirmed. Whereas you, poor, unfortunate soul, are required to read every loathsome syllable written by some uncredentialed housewife. How sad your life must be!

They’ll never print this, I decided. So I saved it, logged off, and then sat there, my heart beating too hard, wishing I was somewhere else, or someone else.

I told myself I wouldn’t look at Dave’s e-mail again, and I didn’t. I also told myself I wouldn’t read any more comments on the Journal story, but of course I found myself refreshing obsessively, watching the tally grow higher, feeling each insult and cruel remark burn itself into my brain. FEMINAZZI, read one. Angry and a shitty speller. Excellent. I wondered whether Dave had seen the piece, whether he was reading the comments, how he might feel, watching the world consider his wife and find her wanting.

Just before noon, my phone buzzed, flashing my mother’s number. Since the day she’d called me and said, “Daddy got lost on the way to the JCC this morning,” we’d talked every day, even if most of those “talks” consisted of my mother sobbing softly while I sat there and squirmed.

I picked up the phone. “Hi, Mom.”

“Are you okay?” she asked. For a crazy instant, I thought that somehow she knew about L. McIntyre and that she was calling to comfort me. Which was, of course, insane on two fronts: my mother had no idea what was going on in my private life, and if she did, she wouldn’t have any idea of how to help, and she wouldn’t even try.

“Am I okay with what? Did something happen?” Did I sound awful? I must, I decided, if every caller’s first question was whether or not I was all right.

“Oh, no. But I saw the story.”

“Don’t read the comments,” I said. As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I realized that if she hadn’t already, my telling her not to look was a guarantee that she would.

“It’s been quite a morning,” said my mother. “Sharon Young picked me up for yoga, and she had the story up on her phone.” She paused. I braced myself.

“Slow news day,” I murmured.

“I told her that probably not many people read it. I told her that Dave’s the real writer, and you just do it for fun.”

“For shits and giggles,” I said.

“What?”

“You’re right. I only do it for fun,” I said, marveling, as I often did, at my mother’s passive-aggressive genius, the way she could minimize and dismiss any of my achievements, all under the guise of doing it for my own good.

Having dispensed with the subject of her problematically opinionated daughter, my mom moved on to a new one. “Daddy has an appointment at the urologist’s tomorrow.”

By “Daddy,” she meant her husband, my father, not her own . . . and I thought the visit was next week. Had I gotten it wrong, maybe entering the date incorrectly after taking a few too many pills?

My mom lowered her voice. “He had an accident this morning, so I called to see if they could fit him in.”

I cringed, feeling ashamed for my father and sorry for my mom, that she now had to see her husband, the man she’d loved and lived with for almost forty years, shamefaced, with sodden PJ’s clinging to his skinny legs. “There’s a lot of that going around,” I said.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

My mother started to cry. “I’m sorry,” she said, the way she always apologized for her tears. “It’s just so hard to watch this happening to him.”

“I know, Mom.” It was horrible for me, too, seeing the slackness of his mouth, the eyes that had once missed nothing swimming, befuddled, behind his bifocals.

“He was so embarrassed,” said my mother. “It was just awful.”

“I can imagine,” I said, knowing that as hard a time as Eloise had given me, coaxing a seventy-year-old man in the grip of early Alzheimer’s out of his clothes and into the shower would be exponentially more difficult, especially for my five-foot, ninety-five-pound mother.

“I need you to take him to the doctor’s.”

“When’s the appointment?”

“Nine.” She sniffled. Her Philadelphia accent stretched the syllable into noine. “That was the earliest they could see him.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll make it work.”

My mother hung up. Without remembering reaching for it, I found a pill bottle in my hand and two more pills in my mouth. Crunching and swallowing, I waited for the familiar, comforting sweetness to suffuse me, that sunny, elevating sensation that everything would be all right, but it was slow in arriving. My heart was still pounding, and my head was starting to ache along with it, and I was so overwhelmed and so unhappy that I wanted to hurl my phone against the wall. My husband is cheating. Or at least he’s flirting. My father is dying. My mother is falling apart. And I’m not sure what to do about any of it.

Instead of throwing the phone, I punched in one of my speed-dial numbers. The receptionist at my primary-care physician’s office put me through to Dr. Andi.

“The famous Allison Weiss!” she said. “I was drinking my smoothie this morning, and there you were!”

“There I was,” I repeated, in a dull, leaden voice.

“Ooh, you don’t sound good.” It was one of the many things I liked about Dr. Hollings—she could take one look or one listen and know something was up. “Back go out again?”

My life, I thought. My life went out. “You got it. This morning. I crawled up to bed and I’ve been here ever since. I took a Vicodin, but, honestly, it’s not doing much, and I can’t stay in bed all day. I’ve got a million things to do, and it’s Dave’s birthday dinner tonight.”

“Well, God forbid you miss that!”

“I know, right?”

There was a pause. Maybe she was pulling my chart, or checking something in a book. “Okay, let’s see. We called in a refill, what, three weeks ago? I don’t normally recommend doing this because of the acetaminophen—it’s not great for your liver—but if you’re really struggling, you can double down on the Vicodin.”

“I tried that,” I confessed. “I know I wasn’t supposed to, but . . .” I let her hear the quaver in my voice, the one that had nothing to do with my discs and everything to do with L. McIntyre, my dad, and the article. “I’m really not doing so well here.”

She clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth, thinking. “Okay. I can call you in a scrip for OxyContin. It’s a lot stronger, so be careful with it until you see how you react. I don’t want you driving . . .”

“No worries. I can take a cab tonight.”

“Good. Check in with me in a few days. Feel better!”

“Thanks,” I said.

An hour later, the pharmacy had my prescription ready. I zipped through the drive-in window to pick it up and tucked the paper bag into my purse, but at the first traffic light I hit I found myself opening first the bag, then the bottle inside it.

The OxyContin pills were tiny, smaller than Altoids, and bright turquoise. “Take one every four to six hours for pain.” Pain, I thought, and crunched down on one, wincing at the bitterness, then swallowed a second.

By the time I got home, I was finally beginning to feel some relief. I floated up the stairs and drifted into the bathroom for a proper shower, not one with Princess Bath Soap. As I lathered my hair I sang “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair” under my breath. Why had it taken me so long to find OxyContin? It was lovely. Blissful. Heaven.

L. McIntyre. Maybe she was just a work friend who’d become more like a work wife. I felt the knot between my shoulder blades loosen incrementally as I thought of those words. I knew what a work wife was. I’d been one myself, back when I was at the Examiner. My work husband’s name was Eric Stengel. He was a photographer, and very discreetly gay, my friend and ally, my partner-in-crime and my lunch buddy. We talked about everything—MTV series, the spin classes that were just popping up in Philadelphia, the mysteries of men’s hearts, our shared obsession with the movie Almost Famous. We never saw each other outside of the newsroom hours, but every Monday morning I’d pick up cappuccinos for both of us and a single muffin to split, and we’d spend our first hour of the workweek at his desk, debriefing each other about our weekends. We had lunch together at Viet Nam at least once a week. In warm weather, we’d buy fruit salads from the vending truck on Callowhill, and sit outside and talk about Liev Schreiber and Jake Gyllenhaal and the mysterious appeal of Ryan Gosling (Eric got him; I didn’t). I was there to talk Eric out of having his name legally changed to Edward (“It has nothing to do with Twilight; it’s just that Eric’s such a nerd name,” he’d said). He’d been there to convince me that Dave wasn’t cheating after I’d found an inscribed book of Pablo Neruda poetry, dated two weeks after we’d started seeing each other, under Dave’s bed. “He’s not going to marry someone who reads Neruda,” Eric had told me. “Cummings, maybe. Auden, Larkin, those guys, I could see it. But Neruda? Nuh-uh.”

“He’s so mysterious,” I’d moaned—back then, when I thought I had things to complain about. “How am I supposed to know if he’s cheating?”

Eric had lifted one finger. “Is he working late?”

I shook my head. Some nights, he was even home before I was.

Eric continued the questions. Was Dave finding excuses to go out, alone, on the weekends? Had he joined a new gym, started wearing a new cologne, bought himself a new wardrobe or a new car? No, and no, and no again.

“Finally,” Eric had said, performing a fingertip drumroll on his desk, “are you two still making the beast with two backs?”

I’d giggled and said, “All the time.” It had been true, then . . . and it was true now that at least one of us wanted an active sex life. At least once a week I’d get into bed and feel my husband’s hand brush the side of my breast, or my thigh, marital shorthand for You wanna? The trouble was, I didn’t. Ever. At the end of a day, especially after I’d taken a pill or three to deal with the emotional obstacle course of getting Ellie to bed, the absolute only thing I wanted to do was curl on my side with my cheek against the soft white pillowcase, close my eyes, and let sleep take me. Sex felt like an invasion. Things weren’t as bad as they had been the first few months after Ellie was born, when Dave’s touch had actively revolted me, when, more than once, I’d shuddered in dismay if he tried for a kiss, but they hadn’t improved all that much. I hadn’t worried about it, either. Judging from the women’s magazines I read, and the stories I’d hear on the playground or in the school pickup lane, our story wasn’t especially original. When we’d first started dating, and during the first year and a half of our marriage, we’d done it in the bed, in the shower, on the kitchen table, and, a few times late at night, in various corners of the newsroom. By the time I left the paper, there was one editor’s desk I couldn’t look at without blushing. Dave had a great body. Better than that, he had an amazing imagination, and the two of us would pretend all kinds of crazy stuff. He’d be a reclusive dot-com genius who’d made ten million dollars at nineteen but had never slept with a woman, and I’d be the high-priced hooker he hired to teach him about women. He’d be the quarterback for the Eagles, and I’d be the rookie sportswriter he invited up to his apartment for an in-depth interview. He’d be a BMW salesman, and I’d be a woman who’d do anything to get a break on the price of the new sedan.

The last time we’d attempted any role-playing had been months ago. It had not gone well. “How about we’re both virgins, and we’ve just gotten married in an arranged marriage, and it’s our first night together?” he’d suggested, one leg slung over both of mine, his erection growing against my thigh.

I’d stifled a yawn. I wasn’t bored, just tired. “Were there elephants at our wedding?”

“Boy, you really weren’t paying much attention,” Dave said.

Focus, I told myself. Maybe I wasn’t a hundred percent into it, but for the sake of the greater good, I could, as they said, take one for the team. “Okay. You’re Ramesh, and I’m Surya. What’s your job?”

“I’m a chemical engineer.”

“What, you don’t own a Dunkin’ Donuts?”

He’d propped himself up on his elbow, glaring at me. “Jeez, Allie.”

“I was kidding!” I said, thinking, sadly, that there was a time, not long ago, when I wouldn’t have had to explain that it was a joke.

“Fine.” He flopped onto his back, removing his leg from mine. His erection was wilting. I placed one hand gently on his chest, on top of his T-shirt. “Can I touch you?” I whispered, in character as an inexperienced bride.

“Yes,” he whispered back. Slowly, I began stroking his pectoral muscles, feeling his nipples getting stiff against my palm. I tweaked one gently, hearing him suck in his breath. “Just like mine!” I said, delighted. “Will you kiss me?” I whispered.

He nibbled at my neck, nipped at my earlobe, pressed his lips gently against mine. I shut my eyes, lost in the sensation of his tongue dipping into my mouth, gently prodding my own tongue, as one hand slid up the leg of my pajamas. “Actually,” he breathed in my ear, “I lied. I have been with a woman before.”

I drew back, feigning shock. “When was this?”

In the darkness, he looked ashamed. “Well. You know I’m an engineer. But I also play the sitar in my uncle’s restaurant on the Lower East Side on Saturday nights. And you know how ladies love musicians.”

“So you didn’t save yourself for me?” On behalf of the imaginary Surya, I was feeling legitimately angry. “Where did you take your groupie?”

“We did it . . .” He stifled a yawn. “In the back of my uncle’s minivan.”

“You couldn’t even spring for a hotel room?” Unbelievable. Why did Dave have to be cheap, even in fantasies?

He flopped on his back. “You know what? Let’s forget it.”

And that had been the end of that. The truth was, in the past year, I could count the times we’d had sex on two hands . . . and I’d probably have fingers left over.

Tonight, I promised. It was, after all, his birthday. I would force all thoughts of L. McIntyre and the jerks from the comments out of my head. I would pull on my flimsiest, most tight-fitting T-shirt, and the drawstring bottoms Dave liked best. I’d light candles by the side of the bed; I’d sing “Happy Birthday to You” Marilyn Monroe style; I would do all the things he liked, just the way he liked them, and we would come back to each other and be a team, a partnership, again.

FOUR

I spent almost an hour in a pilled-up haze, styling my hair, applying my makeup, squeezing myself into a dress with a built-in belt that made it seem like I still had a shape. Even the five minutes it took me to wrestle myself into my Spanx weren’t so terrible.

“Oh, you look beautiful!” our sitter, Katrina, said as I came down the stairs, while Eloise narrowed her eyes. I was carrying my pair of Jimmy Choos, one of the few surviving relics from my single-lady days, in one hand.

“When will you be BACK?”

“Not too late. It’s a school night.”

“Why aren’t you taking me?” Her lower lip quivered. “I want to go out to dinner!”

“No, you don’t. This place only has fish,” I lied. Ellie’s face crumpled. “I’ll bring you a dessert,” I promised . . . and then, before her pique could swell into a full-blown tantrum, I brushed a kiss on her forehead and trotted out to the car, feeling a pang of guilt at my broken promise about not driving. Dave would drive us home, I told myself . . . and, at this point, sad to say, I had enough of a tolerance that even the new medication didn’t seem to be hitting me too hard. It was just making me feel unguardedly wonderful, like life was a delicious lark, full of possibilities, all of them good. So what if a few online meanies had jerky things to say about me? Tonight was my husband’s birthday. We would celebrate with our friends, share a delicious meal, fall asleep in each other’s arms, and wake up in the morning once more, one hundred percent, a couple.

Cochon was a tiny BYOB in our old neighborhood, one of our longtime favorites. With its black-and-white-checked floors, café tables, and framed Art Deco posters on pumpkin-colored walls, it looked Parisian . . . or as Parisian as you could get in Philadelphia. As I pulled my Prius to the curb, I saw David waiting inside by the hostess stand with his phone pressed to his ear. My heart started hammering. I wondered if he was chatting with L. McIntyre, and made myself promise that I wouldn’t bring anything up until we were alone and, preferably, after I’d spoken to Janet. No dropping the bomb, and no drinking, I told myself sternly as I struggled to parallel park, a skill I’d lost almost entirely since our move to the burbs.

As I backed into the curb for the second time, I watched Dave through the window. He turned his back to end his call and put the phone back in his pocket. While he walked outside, I extricated myself from the driver’s seat. It took a little while, given that my undergarments made it hard for me to breathe and my gorgeous shoes were half a size smaller than what I usually wore now. Damn clogs, I thought.

“Happy birthday,” I said once I reached him, and handed off the bag containing six bottles of wine to the hostess.

Dave’s hands were in his pockets, his stylish canvas messenger bag—the one I’d had made for his last birthday—was slung over his shoulder, and his jaw was already bluish, even though he’d shaved that morning. In his best blue suit, he was so handsome, I thought, feeling a wave of nostalgia, and sadness. I knew all of his quirks and failings, his hairy hands and short, stubby fingers, his toes oddly shaped, the nails so thick he needed special clippers to cut them. I knew the sound he made when he ground his teeth, deep in sleep; how he’d sometimes skim the first paragraphs of a story or chapters of a book and then claim he’d read it; the name of the boy at his high school who’d stolen his backpack and thrown it into the girls’ locker room; and how he cried every time he read The World According to Garp. I knew him so well, and I loved him so much. Why had I pushed him away that last time in bed, and the time before that, and the time before that? What woman wouldn’t want him? What was wrong with me?

Dave, meanwhile, was looking me over carefully. “Did you get the party started early?” he asked. He took one hand out of his pocket and rubbed it against his cheek, checking to see if he was due for a shave. “You look a little loopy.”

“I’m fine,” I said, and did my best not to teeter in my heels. A little loopy, I thought, was better than looking like my heart was breaking. I grabbed his arm, which he hadn’t offered, and let him walk me the few steps to the empty table, trying to act casual as I brought my head close to his shoulder and inhaled, hoping I wouldn’t smell unfamiliar perfume. The new pills made my body feel loose and springy, warmed from the inside, but I didn’t think there was a chemical yet invented that could have quelled my insecurity, or convinced me, in that moment, that my husband loved me still.

A waiter, touchingly young, in a crisp white shirt, black pants, and an apron that looped behind his neck and fell to his ankles, pulled out my chair. “Something to drink?”

“Let’s open the white,” said Dave, before I could announce, virtuously, that I would just have water. Before I knew it, there was a glass in my hand. “Mmm,” I hummed, taking a sip, enjoying the wine’s tart bite. Show him you love him, I thought, and tried to give the birthday boy a seductive look, lowering my eyebrows and pouting my lips.

Dave frowned at me. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I’m fine. Why?”

“Because you look like you’re half asleep.”

So much for seduction. Dave got to his feet as Janet and Barry came through the door, followed by Dan and Marie. I adored Janet’s husband, who was round and bearded, a professor in Penn’s history department, smart about pop culture and FDR’s legacy, and madly in love with his wife. He and Dave weren’t really friends—they tolerated each other because Janet and I and the kids spent so much time together, but they didn’t have much in common. Still, they gave each other a manly hug and back slap, and Barry’s “Happy birthday, buddy” sounded perfectly sincere.

“My man,” said Dan, thumping Dave between his shoulders hard enough to dislocate something. “How’d this happen? How’d we get so goddamned old?” As much as I liked Barry, I disliked Dan. Dan managed a consortium of parking garages that stretched from Center City to the Northeast and did what I thought was extortionate business, charging someone (me, for example) eighteen dollars for half an hour’s worth of time spent at Twentieth and Chestnut so she (I) could run into the Shake Shack for a cheeseburger and a milkshake. He and Dave had been fraternity brothers at Rutgers, and Dan was the kind of guy I could picture sitting on his frat house’s balcony, watching girls as they walked along the quad and holding up cards rating them from one to ten; the kind of guy who took it as a personal affront when a woman larger than his all-but-anorexic wife had the nerve to show herself in public.

Said wife, Marie, gave Dave a peck on the cheek and mustered a weak smile for me. Marie was the kind of lady the Dans of the world ended up with: eight years younger than her husband, slim of hip and large of bosom. The hair that fell halfway down her back was thickened by extensions, human hair glued to her own locks, then double-processed until it was a streaky blonde. “Two thousand dollars,” she’d once told me, raking her bony fingers through her tresses, “but it’s worth it, don’t you think?” Marie worked as an interior designer, although in my head, the word “work” came with air quotes. She had a degree in theater and had built sets for student and community-theater productions before she’d landed Dan. Now she spent her time redecorating her girlfriends’ beach houses. She’d drive down the Atlantic City Expressway to Ventnor or Margate or Avalon with her Mercedes SUV stuffed full of swatch books, fabrics and trims and fringes, squares of wallpaper and samples of paint. Marie had offered to give me a consultation about our place after we’d bought it, and I’d been putting her off as gracefully as I could, knowing that eventually, for the sake of Dave and Dan’s friendship, Marie and her swatches would be a regular fixture in my life, and that I, too, would end up with shelves full of objets d’art, at least one statement mirror, one red-painted wall, and prints that had been chosen because they matched the furniture.

“Should we open up the Beaujolais?” asked Barry, who’d helped me choose the wine. Dan had another glass of white. Marie pulled a Skinnygirl margarita packet out of her purse and gave it to the waiter. “Did you get a lot of feedback from the story?” asked Janet, after our waitress distributed menus and ran down the specials.

I eased my feet out of my shoes, wondering where to start as I recalled some of the choicest comments—Fat load and Feminazzi and This is why alpha men marry women from other countries. “I need another drink,” I announced. I said it without thinking about it, and certainly without thinking about the quiz I’d taken in the doctor’s office, or the pills I’d been downing all day. Nobody looked shocked. In fact, nobody seemed to hear me.

“I thought the story came out great,” said Barry. I glanced to my left, where Dave was sitting, and wondered if he’d heard. If he knew about the story, he hadn’t said anything to me yet.

“The comments were a real treat.” As if by magic, my wineglass was full again. I lifted it and sipped.

“Oh, God, do not tell me you actually read the comments!” Janet cried. “Please. How many times have I told you? You lose brain cells every time you read one.”

“I know,” I said, nibbling at an olive. Certainly I did know how bad online comments were—I’d read enough of them, in stories about celebrities and politicians. But why me? Who was I hurting? Why even bother going after me?

“Seems like it’s been good for business,” Barry offered. “Your post today got a ton of hits.”

I managed a faint smile. I’d written a new version of my apology—sorry for offending you, sorry for the nerve of showing up unairbrushed, unretouched, looking like your mom or your sister or maybe even you.

“You read it?” I was touched.

“I read everything Janet tells me to read.” He leaned across the table to brush a kiss on Janet’s cheek.

“As if,” she said, coloring prettily. Janet had confided once that Barry believed she was seriously out of his league, all because the guy she’d dated before him had been a professional athlete. “Never mind that he was a benchwarmer for the Eagles who got cut after three games, and that we only went out once,” Janet said. That single date had been enough to convince Barry that Janet was a prize above rubies. He treated her with a kind of reverence that might have been funny, if he hadn’t taken it so seriously. Janet never drove the car when they were together, never pumped gas, never lifted anything heavier than a five-pound bag of flour, and Barry never questioned her spending—on pricy shoes, on designer handbags, on a cleaning lady who came five days a week, meaning that the only housework Janet was responsible for was hand-washing her own bras, a task she refused to entrust to anyone else.

“He loves me more than I love him,” she’d told me one morning while our kids splashed in her parents’ pool and we ate the bagels we’d bought, still warm, on South Street.

“Really?” I’d asked.

“I think, in every couple, there’s one who loves the other one more. In our case it’s Barry.” She looked at me from behind her fashionably gigantic sunglasses. “How about Allison and Dave? What’s the history?”

I hadn’t answered right away. Dave and I had met when we were both in our late twenties. He’d been newly hired at the Examiner, where I’d worked since I’d graduated from Franklin & Marshall with a degree in graphic design. I’d always loved drawing and painting. When I was a teenager, every artist I discovered became my favorite for a few days or weeks or months. I fell in love with Monet’s dreamy pastel gardens, Modigliani’s attenuated lines, the muscular swirls of van Gogh’s stars, the way a Kandinsky or a Klimt could echo inside me like a piece of music or the taste of something delicious.

I loved looking at art. I loved painting. But I’d been realistic about the world and my own talents, and susceptible to my father’s influence. “It’s good to have a skill you can depend on,” he’d told me during one drive into the city, where I was taking a figure study class at Moore College. My parents supported my dreams, but only up to a point. They’d paid for classes, for paints and canvas; they’d attended all my student shows and even sent me to art camp for two summers, where I had a chance to blow glass and try printmaking and animation, but they let me know, explicitly and in more subtle ways, that most artists couldn’t make a living at art, and that they had no intention of supporting me once I was an adult.

Graphic design was a way to indulge my love of color and proportion, my desire to make something beautiful, or at least functional, to see a project through from start to finish, and still have a more or less guaranteed paycheck.

So I’d gone to Franklin & Marshall and studied art and art history, supplementing my courses in drawing and sculpture with summer courses in video and layout and graphic design. The Examiner had come to a recruiting session on campus; I’d dropped off my résumé, then gone to the city for an interview, then gotten hired, at a salary that was higher than anything I had the right to expect. At twenty-two, with an apartment in Old City, I’d been the pretty young thing, with a wardrobe from H&M and the French Connection and a few good pieces from Saks, a gym membership, a freezer full of Lean Cuisine, and a panini press that I used to make eggs in the morning and sandwiches at night.

After almost six years on the job, I’d met Dave. He had graduated summa from Rutgers and started his career at a small paper in a New York City suburb in New Jersey, where he’d covered five local school districts. After his second year there, he’d exposed how a school superintendent and the head of the school board were colluding to raise the superintendent’s salary. By his third year, he’d won a statewide prize for his stories about how the Democratic Party was paying homeless men and women to fill out absentee ballots. Then, at the Examiner, I’d been tapped to design graphics for his series about the mayor’s race, fitting together the text elements with pictures and, online, with video.

“Hey, thanks,” he’d said, bending over in front of my oversized screen as I’d shown him my first draft. “That’s really great.” Unlike most of the other, dressed-down reporters, he wore a crisp, ironed shirt and a tie. He smelled good, when I was close enough to notice, and I’d already appreciated his slender-hipped, broad-shouldered body and imagined myself folded against the solidity of his chest. He’d smiled at me—white teeth, beard-shadowed cheeks. “Can I buy you a snack item?” He’d walked me out into the hall to the vending machine, where I’d selected a bag of pretzels and he’d bought himself a bottled water, and we sat in the empty stairwell, exchanging first names, then work histories. The conversation flowed naturally into an invitation to meet at a bar the next night. Drinks became dinner at Percy Street Barbecue, where we sat over plates of ribs and Mason jars of spiked lemonade, talking about our parents, our schools, which bones we’d broken (his leg, my wrist), and our shared love of Dire Straits and Warren Zevon. We’d both been startled when our waiter had cruised by our table to announce that it was last call. We’d talked from six o’clock that night until two in the morning.

Within a week, we were a couple. I imagined he’d only get more successful as time went by. Neither of us believed that newspapers were going anywhere or that, eventually, my funny, dashed-off blog posts would be more valuable than his ability to wrest a great (or damning) quote out of a politician or a criminal, to write fast on deadline, to think of witty headlines and slyly funny photo captions, or to bide his time for months, filing Freedom of Information Act requests, gathering documents, hunting down sources, doing the kind of reporting the Examiner ended up not being able to afford anymore. He would be the breadwinner, I would be the homemaker . . . only now, as I looked at him, with his eyes the same shade as Ellie’s and the circles that had been underneath them since her birth, I marveled at how everything had changed, and wondered if our marriage could survive it.

• • •

“Ma’am?” I blinked. The waitress stared down at me, pen and pad in hand. Somehow, my wineglass was empty. I’d had an oyster—Dan had ordered two dozen of them—and a single slice of bread, but nothing else.

“Oh . . . um . . .” I fumbled for my menu, doing the quickstep between what I wanted (scalloped potatoes and slow-roasted pork shoulder) and what I should allow myself (steamed asparagus, grilled salmon). I settled on the stuffed pork chop.

“Very good,” she said, and vanished. I turned back to Janet, who was gossiping with Dave and Barry about whether the pretty twenty-four-year-old pre-K teacher with the tattoos we could sometimes glimpse under the sleeves of her vintage blouses had actually worn nipple rings to Parents’ Night.

The food arrived. I used my heavy steak knife to slice into the glistening meat. A puddle of juice pooled underneath the pork chop. I squeezed my eyes shut and made myself nibble a tiny sliver.

“Not hungry?” Janet asked. She’d ordered the pork shoulder dish with a lot of garlic—per its name, Cochon was heavy on the pig—and the smell was making me queasy.

“I think I already drank my calories,” I said. The truth was, I hadn’t been hungry much lately, a strange situation for a girl who’d always loved her food. Nothing looked good, and the effort of purchasing groceries, preparing a meal, setting the table, and washing the dishes seemed monumental. I’d heat up organic chicken nuggets for Eloise and keep the freezer stocked with Trader Joe’s heat-and-eat meals that Dave could prepare on the nights I was stuck at my computer, writing or editing or interacting with Ladiesroom’s readers. For myself, I’d grab a yogurt or a bowl of cereal. The irony of the Internet comments was that I was thinner now than I’d been in years, but I didn’t look good, and I knew it. My complexion had taken on a grayish undertone; my flesh—even if there wasn’t as much as usual—seemed to sag and hang.

Janet touched my arm. I looked up, startled. We were good friends, but neither of us was the touchy-feely type. “Are you okay?” she asked quietly.

I bent my head. “I’m scared,” I said quietly.

“Of what?” Janet asked, looking worried. “What’s wrong?”

“Hey, honey, can we get that Pinot down here?” Dan asked. I reached out and managed only to knock the bottle onto the floor. There were gasps, a flurry of fast motion, Skinny Marie thrusting herself away from the spill like it was toxic. A waiter and a waitress hurried over with rags. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. Nobody appeared to hear me. “Oh, this’ll never come out of silk,” Marie was fretting, and Janet was asking, “Could you bring us some club soda, please?” and Barry was patting Marie’s back, saying “No big deal,” and, from the other side of the table, Dave was looking at me with his eyes narrowed and his lips compressed.

“It was an accident,” I said. My voice came out too loud, almost a shout.

“It’s okay.” Dave sounded cool. “It happens.” Which, of course, was what we said to Ellie when she wet the bed.

Eventually, the tablecloth got changed and the worst of the damage was mopped up. Marie had returned from the ladies’ room, where she’d fled with a carafe of club soda and an offended look on her face, and I’d apologized half a dozen times, my face hot as a griddle, wilting underneath my husband’s disapproval. I’d just tried to restart the conversation, asking Janet and Barry about the twins’ hockey season, a topic guaranteed to take up at least ten minutes of their time, when I heard Marie’s high-pitched voice from the opposite side of the table.

“Did you all hear about that Everleigh Connor?” she asked. I looked up to see Dave pouring the last bit of the last bottle of red into his glass. Everleigh Connor was a reality-TV star who’d launched her career on one of those shows about the private lives of rich people—she’d been the teenage daughter of one of the face-lifted fortysomething moms who were the ostensible stars of the show. Then she’d appeared in a sex tape—she put out some statement about how the tape was a private memento she and her boyfriend had made that had been stolen from a safe in her house, but it was obvious that the tape had been made with a hired porn star, not a boyfriend, and that she, her mother, and their PR firm had managed every step of its release. From there, Everleigh had gotten and dumped a boyfriend in the NFL, landed a small role on a network drama, and had most recently become the Las Vegas bride of an eighteen-year-old pop star.

“What happened?” I asked . . . Did my voice sound the tiniest bit slurry?

Marie smiled. “You didn’t hear? OMG. It’s all over Twitter!”

“What?” There. It was impossible to slur on words of one syllable. To reward myself for sounding coherent, I had another sip of wine.

“She’s pregnant,” said Dave, directly to me.

“They’re saying that she basically forced Alex to put a ring on it,” said Barry.

Janet rolled her eyes. “My husband the twelve-year-old girl. ‘Put a ring on it,’ Bar? Really?”

I looked down the table at my husband. He looked back at me, his eyes meeting mine, one eyebrow lifted, like he was daring me to say something.

I felt as if I’d been slapped, having him give me that look, when I wasn’t the one sending dozens of chatty, flirty e-mails to someone who was not my spouse. I raised my chin, suddenly furious . . . and sober. Or at least it felt that way. “Honey, you should tell everyone about your big story. The one about the casino.” For months, Dave had been tracking down rumors about which consortium would be the next to put a casino in Philadelphia, about where they’d buy, what they’d build, which neighborhood could brace for the boom and the nuisance of dozens of buses loaded with slot-machine-playing, quarter-toting retirees and well-lubricated frat boys rolling through its streets each day.

“Seriously, Dave-O, give me a tip,” said Dan. “We build a parking lot in the right place, we’re golden.”

“Dave’s got all the best sources,” I said, my tongue loose and reckless. “Who’s that woman in the mayor’s office you’re always talking with? Lindy someone?”

From across the table I thought I saw my husband flinch, and saw hurt in his hooded eyes.

“She’s a wonderful source, isn’t she?” I asked. “What’s the word . . . ‘forthcoming’? Is that it? You’re the word guy, right?” Janet was looking worried. Barry was, too. I got myself away from the table in a series of small steps: pushing my palms against the edge, unlocking my knees, levering myself upright, making my way carefully around my chair, squinting through the dimly lit restaurant past groups of laughing, red-faced men with empty bottles lining their tables, until I found the bathroom, a spacious stall for just one, thank God. I locked the door and, without turning on the lights, sat on the toilet and rested my cheek against the cool stainless steel of the toilet-paper dispenser, feeling stunned and empty and furious.

There was a gentle tap at the door. “Allie?” Janet said, her voice a whisper. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I told her. “Just a little too much wine. I’ll be right out.” My heart was thudding; my temples were pounding. My purse was in my hands. My hands were in my purse. My new little blue friends were in their bottle. I shook one of them out into my palm, craving the comfort they would give me, the easing-toward-sleep feeling that would take away the scalding hurt, the shame of the way Dave had looked at me.

Nobody knew this—not Janet, not my parents, not anyone—but after Dave and I had been dating for a little over a year, my period, typically regular, had failed to arrive. I was on the pill, and I’d always remembered to take it, but I knew, from my tender breasts to the way I woke up nauseated by the smell of coffee, what had happened. I’d freaked out and gone to Dave in a panic, watching his face turn pale and his lips tighten until they were almost invisible as I’d laid out the options: I could have the baby and place it for adoption. I could have the baby and raise it myself. Or we could get married.

By then, we’d been seeing each other exclusively for months. The Pablo Neruda girl was gone—or, at least, I’d never seen evidence of another female in his apartment, or on his phone (which I had guiltily checked once). We’d been saying “I love you” and talking, casually, about which neighborhoods we liked, whether we preferred condos in the new high-rises in Washington Square West or a row house in Society Hill or Bella Vista. There had been no explicit promises, we were spending three or four nights a week at my place but not yet living together, we had not plighted our troth nor promised our future, and I would never have tried to trick Dave, or trap him by getting knocked up accidentally on purpose. Still, I’d been confident that, in light of the reality of our situation, he would do the thing he’d been planning on doing, albeit on a somewhat expedited schedule.

Instead of looking happy, though, Dave had pinched the bridge of his nose between finger and thumb and looked everywhere but at me after I’d laid out the news.

“You wouldn’t get an abortion?” he had asked. We were in my walk-up apartment on Arch Street, Dave on my denim-covered couch, me in the armchair I’d inherited from my mother and had slipcovered in a pricy French toile I’d found on Fabric Row. My cute little living room, perfect for two, was in no way big enough for three. Even the thought of dragging a stroller up three flights of stairs left me exhausted. My eat-in kitchen would be just a kitchen if I had to add a high chair; my bathroom had a luxurious shower, with extra showerheads poking out of the walls, but no bathtub. It was all entirely unsuitable for a baby.

“I don’t know,” I said slowly. I was certainly pro-choice in my beliefs—I’d gotten my well-woman checkups and my contraception at Planned Parenthood since I was an undergraduate, and I’d been supporting them with regular, if modest, donations since I’d gotten my job—but in my mind, it was a baby, Dave’s and mine, and I could no more consider aborting it than I could hurting myself, or hurting him.

The silence stretched out until I heard Dave give a slow sigh. “Well, then,” he said, “let’s get hitched.” It was not, needless to say, the proposal of my dreams . . . but Dave was the man of my dreams, and, surely, the life we would build together would be the stuff I had dreamed about, the life I had always wanted, a partnership with a man I adored and admired. I flung my arms around his neck and kissed him and said, “Yes.”

Four weeks later, with a hastily purchased one-karat princess-cut diamond ring on my finger and the memory of the Indomitable Doreen’s stiff smile and my mother’s insulting exuberance at our meet-the-parents-slash-engagement party still crisp and bright in my mind, I’d gone to my obstetrician and learned, during the ultrasound, that there was an egg sac, but no heartbeat. No baby. My body, it seemed, had ended the pregnancy before it really started. He gave me four pills; I went home and took them, then endured the worst cramps and bleeding of my life while Dave fetched me hot-water bottles and shots of brandy. Half-drunk, with my fifth industrial-strength sanitary napkin stuck into my high-waisted cotton briefs, I’d said, “We don’t have to go through with it now, if you don’t want to. I won’t hold you to anything. You’re free.”

“Don’t be crazy,” Dave had said. He’d been so tender as he helped me into the shower. He washed my hair, soaped my body with my favorite vanilla-scented body wash, and then smoothed lotion on my arms and legs before bundling me into a warm towel, putting me into my pajamas, and tucking me into bed. I’d hung my future on that night. Whenever I’d had doubts, whenever he seemed quiet, or moody, or distant, I remembered the smell of vanilla and brandy, and how gentle he’d been, how kind, how he hadn’t considered, even for a minute, the possibility that he could be rid of me.

“Allison?” Janet’s voice was worried. “Tell me you’re okay or I’m going to get a manager and have them unlock the door.”

“I’m fine. I’m okay,” I rasped. I’m fine, I told myself, even as a voice inside whispered, softly but firmly, that I was a world away from fine, that I was not okay at all.

FIVE

I splashed water on my face, freshened my lipstick, and crammed my feet back into my shoes. With Janet’s help, I found the waiters, gave them instructions, and led the crowd in “Happy Birthday” after the cake I’d ordered from Isgro’s, with buttercream icing and a flaming crown of candles, was brought to the table. I clapped when Dave blew out all the candles, without letting myself wonder what he might have wished for, and used my fork to push bits of cake and frosting around my plate. I laughed at the jokes, raised my glass in a toast, and discreetly managed the payment of the check. I kissed Dan and Marie goodbye, let Barry hug me, and whispered, “I’m okay. I promise,” after Janet pulled me into a hug and said, “You know I’m here if you want to talk about anything.”

The ride home was silent, as if we’d both tacitly agreed not to fight until we were back at the house. I paid Katrina, Dave drove to her dorm, and I crept past Ellie’s bedroom and into my own, shucking off my dress and my painful undergarments, then pulling on a T-shirt that dated back to the 1990s and was where sexy went to die. I had planned on feigning sleep by the time Dave returned from the drop-off, but he turned on the lights and waited at the door until I sat up.

“Happy birthday,” I said, blinking at him. In my dreams I’d been in the bathtub, with Dave kneeling beside me, rubbing a warm washcloth against my shoulders, telling me that he loved me.

“What was that about?” he demanded.

I could have been coy, asking what he was talking about. Instead, I said, “Why don’t you tell me?”

He stared in my direction, hands jammed in the pockets of his suit pants, jaw jutting.

“Come on,” I sighed. “L. McIntyre? Lindsay? Linds? The one you e-mail with all day long?”

I watched as one of his hands went to his cheek and started rubbing. When he finally managed to speak, his voice was strangled. “It’s not like that.”

“Oh? Then what’s it like?”

“We talk,” he said, sounding indignant. Somehow, I didn’t think he was lying. I knew how he looked when he lied, how he’d rock from his heels to his toes, how his voice would rise. There was no shifting and no squeaking. Just Dave, looking wretched. “She’s a friend.”

I didn’t reply, or let my face show my relief.

“This hasn’t been easy for me.” Dave’s eyes were wide, his face arranged in his little-boy-wants-a-cookie expression, the one that usually made me feel sympathetic.

“Which part?” I asked, hearing the edge in my voice.

“Living here,” Dave said.

“What do you mean?” I was honestly bewildered. “You were the one who wanted to move. You were the one who complained all the time about us being in a starter house, and how you didn’t want to raise Ellie in the city.” I would have been happy to stay. I loved our little house, with its spiral staircase, the fireplace in the kitchen that contractors had uncovered when they’d installed our new dishwasher, the French doors that opened onto a narrow brick walkway, and a niche that was the perfect size for a grill and a hanging basket of impatiens that I’d set on the ground when we cooked.

Without a word, Dave turned, walked into the bathroom, and shut the door. I could hear water running, could picture him squeezing more toothpaste than he needed from the center of the tube, then leaving the tube uncapped and spit and toothpaste drips inside the sink, because buying the toothpaste and cleaning the sink were my jobs. That was the deal we’d made, the terms we’d both agreed on, before everything had changed.

Not fair, I thought, and was suddenly so angry that I jumped out of bed and knocked—pounded—on the door. “Do you think I’m happy like this? Doing everything?” I asked. “I’m the one who’s paying the mortgage. I’m the one who takes care of Ellie. I’m the one who’s in charge of her schedule, and our social life, and keeping the house clean and making sure the car gets inspected. Don’t you think I get tired? That maybe I’d like someone to talk to? Someone to take me to lunch?”

His voice came through the door, maddeningly calm. “You seem to be doing just fine by yourself.”

My fingers curled into fists. “So, what? I should complain more, so you know that I’m unhappy? Well, consider this an official update: I’m unhappy.”

“Keep your voice down,” Dave hissed as he opened the door. In his white T-shirt and boxer shorts, with his hair combed away from his forehead, exposing the growing wings of skin on his temples, he had a narrow, aquiline appeal, and I knew that if we were to split, it would take him approximately ten minutes to replace me. “You just don’t seem very interested in hearing from me.”

“I’m just . . . I’m overwhelmed. It’s all too much. I need you to help me.” I meant to sound sincere, but I thought I’d only managed sullen. Reaching out, I let my fingertips brush his forearm, feeling the soft hair, the warm skin, remembering that I used to spend hours dreaming of when he would touch me again, happy weekends when we barely got out of bed, delighting in each other’s bodies.

“I’m busy, too.” He went to the bed, pulled off a blanket and two pillows, and stood, facing me, with the bedding bundled in his arms. “I’m basically doing the work of three people now. And blogging and answering e-mail, and doing those goddamn live chats.” He rubbed at his cheek again. “I’ll help you as much as I can, but full-time is full-time.”

“I can’t keep doing all of this,” I said. There were tears on my cheeks. I scrubbed them away. “I can’t. There’s my work, my dad, my mom, and everything with Ellie, and the house, and it’s all just too much, Dave.”

He tilted his head, skewering me with his gaze. “Just a thought here, but do you think maybe the pills are part of the problem?”

My breath froze in my throat. My hands turned to ice. I couldn’t move. Had he guessed the extent of it, how many pills I was taking, how many different doctors were prescribing how many different things, and how I’d come to depend on medication to get through my days? “What are you talking about?” I asked.

He looked at me for a long moment. I felt myself cringing, wondering what he’d say . . . but instead of confronting me with what he knew or what he’d guessed, he said, “I need to get some sleep.”

“David . . .” He turned toward the door. I followed him into the guest room, reaching for him and not quite touching his shirt. “I’m sor—,” I started to say, then stopped when I realized that I didn’t know what I was apologizing for. Was I sorry that I wasn’t the one he wanted to talk to, to share his life with? Was I sorry I was taking so many pills, or just sorry that I’d gotten caught?

“Do you think we should go to counseling?” I asked, hating how timid I sounded. “Maybe we just need to sit down with someone and figure it all out.”

He shrugged, pulling back the covers on the guest-room bed. There was a phone charger plugged into the wall and a stack of Sports Illustrated and ESPN: The Magazine on the floor beside the bed, where I’d meant to put a table. He had more or less moved in here, and somehow I’d let it happen.

“Look, I’m sorry if I seem a little spacey, but things have been so stressful,” I said. “Did you see what people were saying about me in the comments on that story?” I tried to sound like I was joking, like it didn’t really bother me. “Jesus, who’s reading the paper these days? A bunch of sixteen-year-old virgins stockpiling guns in their parents’ basements?” I wanted to tell him how much the comments hurt me, and how much I wanted him to need me, to want me in his life, the way my own parents had not. I wanted to tell him why I needed the pills, and maybe even ask him for help . . . because, honestly, it was starting to scare me, how many of them I took, and how I couldn’t imagine getting through a day without them.

“What an encouraging thought,” he said. “Given that newspaper readers are my employers.”

I pressed my lips together. I wanted to cry. I wanted to scream. I wanted to take pills until I couldn’t feel anything anymore. I wanted to hate him, wanted to be angry enough to throw something heavy and sharp at his face, but I wasn’t. Maybe because I loved him . . . or maybe it wasn’t love so much as knowledge, or time, something weedy and unlovely and impossible to kill; the cockroach of emotions, a feeling that could survive even nuclear war. We had spent the past ten years of our lives together, and now every place I went, every song I heard, all of my familiar phrases and jokes, Ellie’s bedtime ritual (three kisses on her forehead and a quick spritz of monster spray), all of it I’d seen or heard or experienced or created with my husband. At our favorite restaurants I knew what he’d order, and then what I’d convince him to order by saying I just want a few bites, after which I would end up devouring it. I knew which pump he’d pull up to at the gas station, which glaze he liked on the chicken at Federal Donuts, and how he’d always forget his mother’s birthday and have to spend a hundred dollars on flowers at the last minute unless I reminded him to get her a gift. I was myself, but, I realized as I looked at his silhouette, I was also half of a marriage. How could I live a life where the person who’d built and experienced and created it alongside me, the person who’d seen me in a hundred different moods, at my highest, at my lowest, in the middle of a C-section with my uterus laid out on my belly, was gone?

With stiff jerks of his arms, Dave pulled the decorative pillows off the guest-room bed and tossed them on the floor. “I’m going to sleep,” he announced.

“Wait,” I said. He didn’t answer, just lay on the bed, on his side, knees drawn up toward his chest, hands folded. He might as well have donned a sandwich board reading CLOSED. “Dave.” He didn’t answer. I stood there, wringing my hands, and then I stepped back out into the hallway and closed the door. After the miscarriage, he was the one who’d handled the business of telling both sets of parents that there would still be a wedding but there wouldn’t be a baby. I’d never asked what he’d said, and all he told me was, “There’s nothing for you to worry about. Just concentrate on getting better.” He’d never made me feel like I’d trapped him, and, if his parents had decided I was a gold digger and told him this was his chance to slip free of the handcuffs and make a better choice, he’d never let me hear about it.

I walked back to the master bedroom, remembering when Ellie was six weeks old and barely sleeping two hours at a time and Dave had found, on his own, a little cottage at Bethany Beach. “Maybe the sound of the water will calm her down,” he’d said, and I’d been so frayed, so exhausted, shuffling through my days like a zombie in need of a shower, that I’d agreed, thinking that anything had to be better than the nights of screams we’d endured. Dave had packed for all three of us, considerately choosing only my most comfortable leggings and sweatpants, nothing with an actual waistband or buttons or zippers, because my scar was still tender and my actual waist was still buried under rolls of water weight and pregnancy bloat. He’d picked out onesies and tiny cotton pants for Ellie, as well as the dye-and-scent-free detergent we washed her stuff in; he’d packed my breast pump and bottles and nipples and pacifiers, rattles and board books and burp cloths and diaper cream and the dozens of items, big and small, that the baby required. He had loaded up the little Honda, slotting the Pack ’n Play and the suitcases, the bassinet and the jogging stroller into the trunk as if expertly engineering a game of Tetris.

In the cottage, a pair of sunwashed rooms plus a galley kitchen, he’d instructed me to nap on the daybed on the porch while Ellie, who’d fallen asleep after a hundred miles of wailing, slept in her car seat beside me, and he made the beds and set up the Pack ’n Play. He’d held the baby while I swam. The cottage was on the bay, and there was a little island, just a clump of trees and shrubs and wild blackberries, maybe a quarter of a mile out. I’d done the crawl all the way there, then breaststroked back, feeling my heart beating hard, the muscles of my chest and shoulders working, and then I’d flipped on my back and let the salt water buoy me and the waves rock me. “Don’t worry, I’ve got her,” he said after I’d rinsed off in the outdoor shower and had nursed Ellie on the porch. He clipped her into the jogging stroller and trotted off to town, returning an hour later with cartons full of shrimp and fries, clams and coleslaw—a feast, exactly what I was craving. “I’ve got her,” he said again that night, and I’d collapsed onto the crisp sheets just after seven, falling almost instantly into the deepest sleep I could remember.

When I woke up to the rosy glow of the sunrise, it was just after five in the morning. Ellie had slept through the night—there she was, blinking calmly from the center of the bed, where Dave had put her. He was on her other side in his familiar position, curled up with his knees pulled toward his chest, in his T-shirt and his boxers, dark hair sticking up in unruly cowlicks, breathing deeply, not quite snoring as he slept. I could hear the sound of the waves through the window, and of Ellie smacking her lips while she wiggled her fingers in the air and stared as if they were the best movie she’d ever seen. Now we are three, I thought. That thought filled me with such unalloyed delight that it took my breath away. This was what it meant to be a family; all three of us, so close. This was what I’d worked for and wanted since I was a little girl.

Now my husband was taking some other woman to lunch. He thought that I was spacey. No, actually, he thought I was a junkie. Worse, he was discontented with his life, our life, in a way I couldn’t understand and, thus, couldn’t fix. Had we ever really been that happy, I wondered, remembering that morning at the beach, or had I still been taking the post-C-section Percocet?

The bottle of OxyContin was still in my purse, but there were Vicodin on the bedside table. I crunched two pills between my teeth and lay back on the pillow, remembering to set the alarm on my phone so that I could wake up at six the next morning, when the life I’d always wanted would start all over again.

SIX

“Allison?”

“Yes, Mom?” I called toward the car’s speakers as I steered, one-handed, into the parking lot of BouncyTime, where the birthday party for a classmate of Ellie’s named (I was almost positive) Jayden was starting in ten minutes. It was a miserable April day, gray-skied and windy, with a dispirited rain slopping down.

“Are you almost here?” she asked in a quivering voice.

Dave sat next to me, stiff and silent as one of those inflatable man-shaped balloons that drivers in California buy so they can use the high-occupancy-vehicle lanes. It had been several weeks since his birthday dinner, but we hadn’t talked about anything more substantive than whether we were running out of milk or if I’d remembered to make the car insurance payment. I took my pills, he, presumably, found comfort in conversation with L. McIntyre, and we tried to be polite to each other, especially in front of our daughter. Said daughter was in the backseat, chatting with her friend Hank.

“If you are going to put something in your nose,” I heard Ellie announce, “it should not be a Barbie shoe.”

“Okay,” Hank snuffled. Hank was a pale and narrow-faced little boy with a ring of whitish crust around his eyes and mouth. He was going on six, the same as my daughter, but thanks to his allergies to eggs, wheat, dairy, shellfish, and pet dander, he was the size of a three-year-old and he sniffled nonstop.

How did Ellie even know what a Barbie doll was? I wondered as I maneuvered into a parking spot between a Jaguar and a minivan. I wasn’t sure, but I bet that I had Dave’s mother, the Indomitable Doreen, to thank. Doreen scoffed at my “notions,” as she called them, about organic food, gender-neutral toys, and limiting Eloise’s TV time. Doreen was tall, broad-shouldered, and slim, with the same fair complexion that her sons had inherited and the same cropped dark hair, although I suspected she dyed it. Doreen had raised three boys and had been waiting for years to have a girl child to dote upon. Whenever Doreen got my daughter alone, she’d let her gorge on ice cream and candy. They would stay up all night in Doreen’s silk-sheeted king-sized bed, playing Casino and watching Gilligan’s Island and God only knew what else. “Lighten up,” Doreen would tell me, sometimes with a good-natured (but still painful) sock on the shoulder, when I politely reminded her that Ellie did better when she kept to her bedtime schedule, or mentioned that Dave and I gave her an allowance for doing her chores, and that when she slipped our daughter twenty bucks it tended to undermine our authority. “Calm down, or you’re going to make yourself crazy!”

I knew that my mother-in-law meant well. She’d never talked about whether she’d missed the job she gave up once her sons were born, but I wondered if she had, and if she saw how I had struggled, first as a full-time stay-at-home mother and now as a stay-at-home mom with a part-time (inching ever closer to full-time) job. I could have asked, but the truth was, things hadn’t been great between us since I learned that she’d read my birth plan out loud to her book club. In retrospect, the plan might have been a little excessive—it was eight pages long and spelled out everything from the music I wanted to how I didn’t want any external interventions, including an epidural, and had gone on, at length, about the necessity for a “peaceful birthing environment”—but that did not mean I wanted the six members of Words and Wine laughing at me over copies of Sue Monk Kidd’s latest.

In the backseat, Ellie was regaling Hank with the story of the dead squirrel she’d seen at the corner of South Street during one of our visits to the city. “Its middle was all crumpled, and there was BLOOD on its BOTTOM,” she said, as Hank mouth-breathed in horror.

“Hey, El, I’m not sure that’s appropriate,” I said.

Ellie paused, gnawing at her lower lip. Then she turned to Hank and said, in such a perfect lady-at-a-cocktail-party tone that both Dave and I smiled, “And what are your plans for the weekend?”

I put the car in park and waited until Hank said, “I don’t know.”

“ ‘Plans for the weekend’ just means what you are going to do,” Ellie explained. “Like, you could say, ‘Watch Sam & Cat,’ or maybe ‘Put all your nail polishes into teams.’ ”

“I don’t have nail polishes,” Hank said wistfully.

The phone rang again. I ignored it, thinking that at least, unlike my mother, Doreen didn’t need instructions for the most basic tasks—calling the oil company to have the tank refilled, remembering to change the car’s windshield wipers instead of just, as she’d once done, buying a new car. If my father had still been himself, I would have asked how he dealt with her, even though I suspected the answer probably involved sex.

If I’d had time I would have helped more, but in the six weeks since the Journal story had run, traffic to Ladiesroom.com had increased by more than two hundred percent, and Sarah had started hinting that I should think about writing not just five times a week but every day. I’d also gotten a few queries from other outlets—some websites, two in-print magazines, and a cable TV shout-show—asking if I’d want to write or blog or dispense online or on-the-air commentary. So far, I’d turned them all down, but I suspected that if Sarah learned about the offers she’d encourage me to take them, knowing it would only help build Ladiesroom’s brand.

Ideally, Dave would have taken over Ellie duties a few nights a week, and maybe even spared an hour each week for counseling, but Dave, bless his heart, had declined both of those requests and instead signed up for another marathon. I’d tried not to read too deeply into the symbolism, about how he’d be spending hours each week literally running away from his wife and his daughter, and I’d assiduously avoided Googling L. McIntyre’s name to see if she, too, would be participating in the race, thus avoiding the need to imagine the two of them logging training runs along the Schuylkill, trotting side by side along the tree-canopied paths of the Wissahickon. Instead of complaining, I’d bumped my housekeeper up to two days a week, hired a backup sitter who could work nights and weekends, and enrolled Ellie in after-school activities every day but Thursday—tumbling, swimming, Clay Club, even a class on “iPad mastery.” It was heartbreaking, but the more she was out of the house, the more smoothly things ran inside of it. She’d even found a new best friend. Hank did most of the same activities she did—his mom was a urologist who worked full-time. Ellie had all but adopted Hank, who was even more sensitive and high-strung than she was, and appointed herself as his unofficial advisor and life coach.

“If you need to go to the potty, just ask me,” I heard her saying as she unhitched herself from her booster seat, then reached over to help Hank with his buckles. “I’ve been to probably a billion parties here before.”

I helped Ellie out of the car, handed Dave the birthday boy’s gift, and then stood with him in the parking lot, feeling as if we’d been shoved onstage without a script. Normally, we would have kissed before I drove away—just a little peck, a quick brush, enough for me to get a whiff of his scent, which I still found intoxicating, and then we’d separate. Instead, Dave gave me a half wave and a “See ya” before shepherding the kids through the front doors. Part of me wanted to run after him and hug him, taking strength from even an instant of physical connection. Another part of me felt like giving him the finger. Since the birthday-night fight, Dave had barely touched me, and he’d continued to spend his nights in the guest bedroom. I imagined him under the covers, curled on his side with that goddamned BlackBerry pressed against his ear, talking to his work wife, L. McIntyre, while his real wife was alone in bed down the hall, staring up into the darkness, sometimes crying, until the narcotics allowed her to fall asleep.

I sat behind the wheel as the doors closed behind Dave and Hank and Ellie, feeling hollow underneath the euphoria the pills guaranteed. At least I still had that—a guaranteed pick-me-up at the start of the day; a comfort at the end. With a pill or two (or three, or four) coursing through my bloodstream, I felt calm, energetic, in control, as if I could manage work and being a good mother and a good daughter, keeping the house running and the refrigerator stocked and even performing the occasional stint as a chaperone during a Stonefield trip to the Art Museum.

The bad news was that Dr. Andi was being far stingier with the Oxy handouts than she’d been with the Vicodin. “You want to be careful with this stuff,” she’d said the first time I called for a refill. “It’s seriously addictive.”

“Oh, I will be,” I promised. I could keep that promise easily because, during one of my daily rounds of the gossip websites that I wasted too much time on, I’d come across a story I at first assumed had to be fake. “Introducing Penny Lane: the Top Secret Website Where You Can Buy Any Drug You Want.” No way, I’d thought, but the story at least made the site sound legitimate as it described a kind of Amazon.com for illegal substances. You had to use anonymizing software to get to the site, and use encryption to register. Once you’d cleared those hurdles, you could, allegedly, order anything you wanted—anything from pot to Viagra to painkillers to heroin. You’d send the vendors your real name and address—encrypted, of course—and payment via a new kind of online-only currency, and the vendors would send you the goods.

I figured it had to be a scam . . . but what did I have to lose? Other than some money. And my freedom, I assumed, if you could be jailed for trying to buy prescription drugs on the Internet, but that was a risk I decided I was willing to take. I spent about ten seconds wondering if anyone would recognize my name, then decided that the overlap between illegal drug dealers and Ladiesroom.com readers was probably tiny. Downloading the software took less than a minute; learning how to use it took maybe five minutes more. The hard part was figuring out how to trade dollars for the e-coins the site used instead of cash. It took me the better part of another week to register the bank account I’d established for my own personal use, an account at a different bank from the one Dave and I used. I’d then had to register with yet another website to send my e-currency to my account at Penny Lane. Once I’d picked a screen name (“HarleyQueen,” a play on the name of one of the sexy lady villains in Batman) and loaded a thousand dollars’ worth of cash into my account, I started wandering through the virtual aisles, amazed at what was for sale. Hallucinogens. Amphetamines. Dissociatives, whatever they were. Viagra and Cialis, Ecstasy and Special K and crystal meth. I’d clicked on “Opiods,” and there was everything—your Percocet, your Vicodin, your Tylenol with codeine. With my mouth open in disbelief, I put twenty OxyContin pills into my cart, then browsed around, pricing Vicodin from India and wondering, again, whether this could possibly be legitimate.

I figured that I’d be sent fakes, if the vendors bothered sending anything at all. Then the first delivery arrived. The pills were in a tiny plastic bag that had been encased in a layer of bubble wrap and folded and tucked into an Altoids tin. They looked exactly like the ones I’d been prescribed and, according to Pillfinder.com, they appeared to be exactly what I’d paid for. Cautiously, I slipped one underneath my tongue, waiting for the familiar bitterness. It arrived right on schedule, but, still, I was seized with dread. What if it was a clever fake? What if I’d taken poison? What if Ellie came home and found me convulsing on the kitchen floor? But ten minutes later I was dreamy-eyed and practically floating around the kitchen. Since then, my use had ramped up slightly (or maybe “considerably” would be more accurate) . . . but if I could get as many pills as I wanted whenever I wanted them, if I could afford my vices, and if the whole transaction felt as risky as ordering a bra from Victoria’s Secret, what did it matter?

At a stoplight, I punched in my mother’s number. “Daddy just woke up,” she said. “He thinks he needs to get dressed to go to the airport. I’ve been telling him and telling him . . .”

“Okay, Mom.”

“. . . but he won’t listen. I didn’t get any sleep last night. He kept shaking me, or turning on his phone and shining it in my eyes. At three a.m. he started packing his suitcase . . .”

“I’m ten minutes away,” I said, mentally canceling the pit stop I’d planned at Starbucks (or, if I was being honest, at McDonald’s). I’d spent so much time trying to coax a few bites of cereal into Eloise’s mouth that I hadn’t had time for my own breakfast. I deserved a hash brown. Hash brown, singular, I told myself, and definitely no sausage biscuit.

“Ronnie!” I could hear my dad yelling. “Where’s the cab?”

“Put him on the phone with me,” I told her, figuring it couldn’t hurt.

A minute later, my father was growling “Who’s this?” into my ear.

“Daddy, it’s Allison. Mom says you need a ride?” I hadn’t been sure whether it was a good idea to play along with someone suffering from early-stage Alzheimer’s and dementia—which my mother, God love her, pronounced dee-men-she-ah—but Dad’s doctor said it was all right to indulge him up to a point. “A therapeutic lie” was what he’d called it. Translation: whatever worked.

“Allison,” said my father. I held my breath. Last Saturday, when I’d sent Eloise to Hank’s house for a playdate and invited my parents over for brunch, he’d known who I was, but sometimes he thought I was his sister and called me Joyce. I knew that the day was coming when he wouldn’t know me at all, but I prayed it hadn’t come yet, not so much for my sake, but for my mother’s.

My parents had met when my mom was eighteen-year-old Ronnie Feldman, with an adorable pout and soft brown eyes, a cute little figure and shiny black hair, and my dad was twenty-eight, a college graduate who’d served for two years as an information officer in the army, stationed in Korea, and was finishing up his MBA at Penn. She’d been a CIT at the summer camp he’d attended, and he was back for a ten-year reunion. She was still in high school, still riding her ten-speed with a wire basket embellished with plastic flowers between the handlebars and buying her clothes in the children’s department. Little Ronnie, who’d dotted the “i” of her name with a heart, who’d never lived on her own, never paid a bill, and never held a job outside of being a not-quite counselor at Camp Wah-Na-Wee-Naw in the Poconos; Little Ronnie with her tanned legs and pert chin and the ponytail she tied in red-and-white ribbons—camp colors, of course—had married him two summers later, going straight from her parents’ house to the apartment my dad had rented, where she played house until I came along and it stopped being a game. There had always been a man to take care of her, first her own father, then mine. My mother never had any reasons to master the fundamentals of adulthood—balancing a checkbook, registering a car, buying a house. My dad had taken care of everything. Pretty Little Head, or PLH, was what Dave and I called my mom in happier times, when we’d still had a private language of jokes with each other, as in “Don’t worry your pretty little head about a thing.”

“Are you all packed?” my father asked.

So he thought I was coming on this imaginary trip. “All packed and ready to go.”

“I’m proud of you,” he said, his voice thick, the way it got after he’d had the second of his two pre-dinner martinis. “I hope you’ll have fun in college. Blow off some steam! Put down the paints and go to some parties! Meet some nice boys! College isn’t just for book learning, you know.”

So he thought he was taking me to college. At a red light, I took a deep breath, remembering that trip, how we’d stopped for milkshakes and he’d given me a pained and heartbreakingly sweet speech about how college boys would want certain things, and how, at parties, I shouldn’t ever put my drink down lest some knave try to “slip me a mickey,” and how I should be careful about what I wore. “I know that’s not a very modern thing to say,” my dad had told me, and I’d been so embarrassed when he used the phrase “it’s just their nature” that I’d spent the next ten minutes hiding in the bathroom.

I stepped on the gas and tried not to think about what it would be like when the time came to drive him to an assisted-living facility, or a nursing home, or whatever he’d end up requiring. No milkshakes; no speeches about how he should avoid the divorcées with hungry eyes; no joking or resigned tenderness about how this was just what happened: little birds left the nest. It was all wrong, I thought, remembering how impressive my dad had looked offering my new roommate his hand, and how he’d helped me make my bed. I cleared my throat so he wouldn’t be able to tell that I was crying. “I’m just grabbing some coffee, and then I’ll be ready to go.”

“Sounds good, princess.” He sounded jovial, hearty, so completely himself. I thought, not for the first time, that maybe it would have been better if he’d just died, a thunderclap heart attack, an artery bursting in his brain, a peaceful exit in the middle of the night, in his own bed, after his favorite meal, with my mom beside him. We’d have mourned, then moved on. This was a slow-motion catastrophe, death by a thousand cuts.

“Why don’t you watch CNBC?” I said, forcing cheeriness into my voice. “Check your stocks. Let Mom take a shower. I’ll be there as soon as I can.” His love of CNBC was one of the things he’d retained, even as he slipped further and further down the rabbit hole. In my parents’ house, the television in the den was always on, at a volume just slightly less than deafening, tuned to the financial news so my dad could keep an eye on his portfolio, which was, in fact, being managed by his former protégé, a man named Don Ettlinger, who worked in Center City and who remembered me from when I was a girl.

“Okay, then. I’ll see you when I see you.” There was a thumping sound as he set the phone down—sometimes he’d get confused, then angry, when he went to hang up the phone and discovered that cell phones had no cradles, just chargers. I clenched my hands on the steering wheel. When I was fourteen, after my complexion had calmed down and the rest of my features had caught up with my nose, a boy asked me out to a movie. His mother drove us there. We spent the next two hours palm to sticky palm, eyes on the screen, each, undoubtedly, waiting for the other to make a move. My father picked us up and drove us home. In the kitchen, where my mother had left a plate of cookies, he’d looked sternly down at all five feet three inches of Marc Schwartzbaum. “You two are behaving yourself, correct?” he asked, in a voice that seemed deeper than usual, and Marc, gulping, had bobbed a nervous nod.

“Excellent,” Dad said. “Because I’ll be watching.” With that, according to the plan I’d begged my parents to approve, Marc and I went down to our finished basement, where there was a wide-screen TV, a Ping-Pong table, and an air hockey game where the puck glowed in the dark, requiring that the lights be turned off. I’d flicked the switches and plugged in the machine, and after a few minutes, Marc and I had retired to the couch for what I even then recognized was inept and unsatisfying fumbling when, suddenly, my father’s voice came booming out of the ceiling, sounding, for all the world, like God. “I’LL BE WATCHING,” he intoned. Marc, shrieking like a girl, sprang into the air, hit his back on the arm of the couch, and tumbled to the floor in a groaning, tumescent heap. I started laughing, and every time I came close to collecting myself to the point where I’d be able to comfort my paramour, I’d hear my dad’s voice again, coming through the house-wide speaker system he’d installed last year so my mother could hear James Taylor and Simon & Garfunkle wherever she went. “I’LL BE WATCHING.” Marc had never asked me out again. I didn’t mind. It had been worth it.

• • •

In the driveway of the modern four-bedroom house in Cherry Hill where I’d grown up—a model of late-eighties chic, all angled hardwood and glass—I sat for a moment, taking deep breaths. I pictured a deserted beach, with white sand and lace-edged waves lapping at the shore. That was good. Then I slipped my hand into my purse and curled my fingers around the Altoids tin that contained ten magical blue pills. That was even better. I put one in my mouth and stepped out of the car.

The instant my feet touched the driveway the front door popped open. My mom opened her mouth, undoubtedly prepared to launch into her catalog of woe, and then shut it, slowly, as she considered my outfit. “You know,” she said, “in my day you’d have to put on your face to even open your front door to get the paper.”

“Aren’t I lucky that times have changed,” I said lightly, wishing I’d taken two pills. I looked down at myself: black leggings, a gray-and-black wool tunic that could have benefitted from a trip to the dry cleaner’s, black patent-leather clogs. No makeup, true, and my hair was in an untidy bun, but it at least had been recently washed. My mother, meanwhile, had lost her bounce, the ponytailed girlishness that had kept my father in thrall for all those years. Her skin, normally tanned and glowing, had a crepey, wrinkled pallor, suggesting that she’d been spending most of her waking hours indoors. The polish on her fingernails was chipped, and her ring, a rock the size of a marble that my father had purchased (at her insistence, I suspected) for their thirtieth anniversary, hung loosely from her finger. She was, as always, tiny. Never in her life had she topped a hundred pounds—“except,” she liked to say, in a just-short-of-accusatory tone, “when I was pregnant with you.” She had on the same Four Seasons bathrobe she’d been wearing last Saturday, only there was a stain I hoped was ketchup on one sleeve, and a smear of something yellow on the lapel. Her trembling hands were pressed together—my mother’s hands had shaken for as long as I could remember. I think I’d been told it was related somehow to the Accident. When I hugged her, I breathed in her familiar scent, something fruity and sweet with top notes of Giorgio and Listerine. Her tiny feet were bare, with chipped coral polish on the toenails and purple veins circling her ankles. In the morning sun, I could see the outline of her skull through her thinning hair.

“Sidney!” she yelled, over the sound of financial news. “I’M GOING TO TAKE A SHOWER!”

My father called back something I couldn’t hear. My mother walked up the stairs, head bent, moving slowly, as if every step hurt. I draped my coat over a chair at the breakfast bar. I guessed Brenda, the last cleaning lady the agency sent, hadn’t worked out any better than Maria, or Dot, or Phyllis, or whoever had preceded Phyllis. When my dad had gotten his diagnosis, I’d offered to pay for a cleaning lady–slash–helper to come five days a week. But Blanca, who’d worked for my parents forever, coming every Tuesday and Thursday to wash the floors, vacuum the carpets, run a load of laundry, and wipe down the countertops with bleach, had other families to tend to and couldn’t quit on them. I’d found an agency and explained what I needed—someone to do the housework, to help with the laundry, to take my mother to the grocery store and the dry cleaner’s and to run whatever other errands she might have, someone with a decent personality and a driver’s license. The agency had sent over an entire football team’s worth of women, but my mom had a complaint about each one of them. Maria the First had insisted on being paid in cash, not by check, and my mother refused to “make a special trip to the bank, just for her.” The second Maria drove a Dodge that was missing one of its front hubcaps. Exit Maria the Second. “There’s no way,” my mother had sniffed, “that I’m driving around in that . . . vehicle.” Dot had either refused to iron the sheets or done it badly. Phyllis, my mom claimed, had stolen a pair of Judith Leiber earrings right out of her jewelry box. (My suspicion was that if I looked hard enough, I’d find those earrings somewhere—my mother was a notorious loser of things, from keys to credit cards to jewelry—but it was easier to call the agency again than to have the fight.)

That morning, the kitchen table was covered with salad-bar take-out containers, a glass with an orange juice puddle coagulating at the bottom, a collection of prescription bottles, and crumpled sections of the newspaper. I started to straighten the mess, then gave up and went to the den to find my father.

He was sitting on the couch in a crisp white shirt with monogrammed cuffs, suspenders, and pin-striped navy pants. His suit jacket, still on its hanger, was waiting on the doorknob. I swallowed hard. He looked just the way he had the morning he’d driven me to Lancaster for college, the way he’d looked every morning of my girlhood, when he’d slipped into my bedroom, smelling of Old Spice and the grapefruit he ate for breakfast. “With your shield or on it,” he would say, which is what Spartan fathers would say to their sons before sending them off to war.

Maybe he’d have been a little gentler, more inclined to treat me like a little girl instead of a son or a successor, if I’d looked more like my mom . . . but I’d inherited my face and figure from my dad’s mother, Grandma Sadie, who was tall, especially for a woman back then, and busty. I’d learned to modulate my voice (Grandma Sadie’s honk could silence an entire supermarket), and, after an embarrassingly minor amount of begging, I’d gotten my nose done the summer between high school and college. (My father had said, “You look fine!” My mom had asked if I wanted to get a breast reduction, too.)

My mother was Sadie’s opposite, tiny and soft-voiced and sweet. Unlike my grandma, who drove the car and signed the checks and made all of her household’s big decisions, my mother was utterly dependent on my dad. He hired Blanca so she wouldn’t have to clean; he hired a car service so she wouldn’t have to drive after the Accident. When they entertained more than one other couple, he’d hire a catering company to cook and clean. If it had been possible to pay someone to go through pregnancy and labor for her, so she wouldn’t have to suffer even an instant of pain, he would have done that, too.

Until now, she had drifted through life like a queen who had only a few ceremonial duties to discharge. She didn’t work, or take care of me or the house. What she did was amuse my dad. She would gossip and dance and play card games and tennis and golf; she’d listen to his stories and laugh at his jokes and use her long, painted fingernails to scratch at the back of his neck. Her biggest fear, voiced daily, was that she would outlive him and be left all alone in a world she couldn’t begin to handle, so it wasn’t surprising that she became a world-class hypochondriac by proxy. If my father sniffled, she’d schedule a doctor’s appointment to make sure it wasn’t pneumonia. If he had indigestion, she’d want him to go to the emergency room to make sure it really was the tomato sauce and not his heart. She’d stand by the front door in the morning, refusing to let him leave until he’d put sunscreen on his hands, face, and bald spot (his own father had died of melanoma), and in the evening she’d bring him a glass of red wine (okayed because of the healthful tannins). Instead of nuts, he’d take his drink with a little green glass dish filled with vitamins, supplements, fish-oil capsules—whatever she’d read about in Prevention or Reader’s Digest that week.

We would have dinner, the two of them would retire to the den, and I’d go to my bedroom and shut the door, doing my homework or listening to music or drawing in my sketchbook.

I wasn’t the most popular girl in my school, but I wasn’t a total embarrassment either. In high school, I was moderately popular, with a circle of reliable friends and, from the time I was sixteen on, a boyfriend, or at least someone to make out with at the movies. I worked hard on my looks, keeping a food journal all the way through college that recounted everything that went into my mouth and every minute of exercise I’d done. (Recently I’d found stacks of notebooks in my childhood room’s desk drawers describing cottage-cheese lunches and apple-and-peanut-butter snacks. Why had I saved them? Had I imagined wanting to reread them someday?)

In the den, my father was bent over, pulling on his white orthopedic walking shoes, the ones that closed with Velcro straps. I turned away, my chest aching. My father had always been fastidious about his clothing. He’d loved his heavy silk ties from Hermès, the navy blue and charcoal gray Hickey Freeman suits he wore to work. Once a year, he and I would make a trip to Boyd’s, an old-fashioned clothing store on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, where the clerks would greet my father by name. I’d sit on a velvet love seat with a cup of hot chocolate and an almond biscotti from the store’s café, and watch as my father and Charles, the salesman who always helped him, discussed summer-weight wool and American versus European cuts and whether he was getting a lot of use out of the sports jacket he’d bought the year before. My dad would ask about Charles’s sons; Charles would ask me about school and sports and if I had a boyfriend. Then my dad would disappear into the changing room with one suit over his arm and two or three more hanging from a hook on the door, and he’d emerge, with the pants bagging around his ankles, for more discussion with Charles, before turning to me.

“What do you think, Allie-cat? How’s the old man look?”

I would narrow my eyes and nibble my cookie. “I like the gray suit the best,” I would say. Or, “I bet that navy pinstripe would look nice with the silver tie I got you for Father’s Day.”

“She’s got quite an eye,” Charles would say—the same every year.

“She’s an artist,” my dad would say, his tone managing to convey both pride and skepticism.

Eventually, a tailor would be summoned, and my dad would stand in front of the three-way mirror while the stooped old man with a mouthful of pins and a nub of chalk between his fingers marked and pinned. Then my father would change back into his weekend wear—khakis and leather boat shoes and a collared shirt—and he would take me out to a dim sum lunch. We’d order thin-skinned soup dumplings, filled with rich golden broth and pork studded with ginger, and scallion pancakes, crispy around the edges, meltingly soft in the middle, fluffy white pork buns and cups of jasmine tea, and then we’d walk to the Reading Terminal for a Bassetts ice-cream cone for dessert.

My father got up. Ignoring the gray nylon Windbreaker my mother had left hanging over one of the kitchen chairs—an old man’s jacket, if ever there was one—he took his trench coat off the hanger in the closet, put it on, and followed me out the door.

“Remember when we used to go to Boyd’s for your suits?” I said as I pulled into the street.

“I’m not brain-dead,” he said, staring out his window. “Of course I remember.”

“Do you think Charles still works there?” In all the years we’d shopped at Boyd’s, Charles, a handsome, bald African-American man who always matched his pocket square to his tie, had never seemed to age.

“I have no idea,” said my father. “I haven’t needed a new suit just lately, you know.”

We rode toward Philadelphia listening to NPR, not talking. My plan was to get him lunch at Honey’s Sit ’n Eat, a Jewish soul-food diner where they served waffles and fried chicken and all kinds of sandwiches. “Where’s your girl?” asked my father, as we pulled off the highway at South Street. I tried to remember whether he’d called Ellie “your girl” before, or if this was new and meant he’d forgotten her name.

“She’s with Dave at a birthday party.” Although Dave was never around as much as I’d hoped he would be, when he was with Ellie, he was a wonderful dad. The two of them adored each other, in exactly the way I’d always hoped my dad would adore me. Ellie would slip her little hand sweetly in his, beaming up at him, or pat the pockets of his jacket, searching for treats, when he came home from the Examiner. “Hello, princess,” he would say, and hoist her in his arms, tossing her once, twice, three times gently up toward the ceiling as she shrieked in delight.

I found a parking spot on the street, fed the meter, and followed my father into the restaurant, where we were seated at a table overlooking South Street: the fancy gym, the fancier pet shop, the moms piloting oversized strollers, hooded and tented against the rain.

“I love the fried chicken. And the brisket’s great. Or if you want breakfast, they serve all their egg dishes with potato latkes . . .” I was chattering, I realized, the same way I did with Ellie, trying to keep the conversational ball in the air without any help from my partner.

My father shrugged, then stared down at the menu. Was he depressed? It wouldn’t be surprising if that were the case . . . but could he take antidepressants, with the Aricept for his dementia and the other meds he took for his blood pressure? Was there even a point in treating depression in someone who was losing touch with reality?

By the time the waitress had filled us in on the specials and we’d placed our orders—a brisket club sandwich for my father, a grilled cheese with bacon and avocado for me—I was exhausted.

“Tell me the story of the night I was born.” Asking someone with memory loss to tell you a story, to remember something on cue, was risky . . . but this was one of my father’s favorites, one I’d heard him tell dozens of times, including but not limited to each of my birthdays. Maybe he would talk for a while, and I could sit quietly, catching my breath, maybe sneaking a pill in the ladies’ room before we left.

He took a bite of his sandwich, dabbed at his lips, and began the way he always did: “It was a dark and stormy night.” I smiled as he went on. “It was three days after your mother’s due date. We lived on the fourth floor of an old Victorian at Thirty-Eighth and Clark. I was a starving graduate student, and she was . . .” He paused, his eyes losing focus, his features softening, his face flushed, looking younger than he had in years, more like the father I remembered, as I mouthed the next five words along with him. “Your mother was so pretty.” We smiled at each other, then he continued. “When she started having contractions, we weren’t worried. First babies can take a while, and we were maybe ten blocks from the hospital. Her bag was packed, and I’d memorized the numbers for two different cab companies. She had one contraction and then, ten minutes later, another one. Then one more five minutes after that, then one two minutes after that . . .” He used his hands as he told the story—how my mother’s labor progressed faster than they had expected, how by the time they got down to the street to wait for the cab, rain was lashing the streets and the wind was bending the trees practically in half, and the mayor and the governor were on the radio, telling people to stay inside, to stay home unless they absolutely had to leave. “I was ninety percent sure you were going to be born in the back of a taxicab,” my father said.

He got every detail, every nuance of the story right—the way the cab smelled of incense and curry, the driver’s unflappable calm, how he’d left my mother’s little plaid suitcase on the sidewalk in front of our house in his haste to get my mom in the cab, and how one of the neighbors had retrieved it when the rain stopped, dried each item of clothing, and brought it over the next day.

“Did you want more kids?” I asked him. All these years of wondering, and I’d finally gotten up the nerve to ask. He waited until the waiter had cleared our plates and taken our orders for two cups of coffee and one slice of buttermilk chocolate cake, and patted his lips with his napkin again before saying, “It wasn’t meant to be. We had you, and then your mother had her trouble . . .”

“What trouble?” I asked, half my mind on his answer, the other half on my sandwich. He probably meant the Accident. That was the only trouble I’d ever heard about.

He pushed the salt and pepper shakers across the table like chess pieces and did not answer.

“Was I a hard baby?” I asked. Had I been like Ellie, shrieky and picky and inclined toward misery? Again, no answer from Dad. I knew, of course, how overwhelming a baby could be, and I suspected that in addition to feeling like a newborn’s demands were more than she could handle, my mother had also felt isolated. It couldn’t have been easy, I thought, and pictured Little Ronnie, her flawless skin suddenly mottled with stretch marks, her beauty sleep disrupted, all alone in the apartment and, eventually, in the big house my father had bought her. Who had she gone to with her questions and concerns? I’d had friends, a pricy lactation consultant, and the leader of the playgroup I attended, who had a degree in early childhood development. I’d had Janet, and my own mom, and even the Indomitable Doreen. My mother had no one. Her own mother had died before I was born, and as a teenage bride and young mother, she hadn’t yet formed bonds with the types of women I’d come to know. She had only my father . . . and that might have been lonely.

I pictured her now, back in Cherry Hill. Was she trying to clean up the mess in the kitchen? Was she paging through old photo albums, the way she had the last time I’d spent the day with her, looking at pictures of cousins I couldn’t remember and uncles I’d never met? Was she remembering my father, dashing and young and invulnerable, and wishing that she’d been the one to get sick instead of him?

“Excuse me,” I said. The bathroom at Honey’s had a rustic wooden bench to set a purse or a diaper bag on. The walls were hung with framed magazine ads from the 1920s advertising nerve tonics and hair-restoring creams, and a mirror in a flaking gold frame.

I looked at my reflection. My face looked thinner, and the circles under my eyes seemed to have deepened over the past few weeks. I’d lost a few more pounds—with the pills, I’d found myself occasionally sleeping through meals—but I didn’t look fit or healthy, just weary and depleted. Even on my best days, I was no Little Ronnie, with her bright eyes and long, thick hair, the kind of girl a man would want to tuck in his pocket and keep safe forever.

Turning away from the mirror, I reached into my purse. I crunched up two pills, washed them down with a scoop of water from the sink, and walked back to the table. I’d had an idea of how to give my mother some extra time, and make the day go by. “Hey,” I said to my father, “do you want to go see Ellie?”

• • •

As soon as I walked into BouncyTime, I knew that bringing my dad there had been a mistake. Raucous music boomed from overhead speakers. The singer fought against the roar of the blowers that kept the climbing and bouncing structures inflated. Kids dashed around the room, screaming, racing up the giant slide, hurling inflatable beach balls at one another’s heads, or shooting foam missiles out of air cannons. A clutch of mothers stood in a circle, in the Haverford uniform of 7 For All Mankind jeans and a cashmere crewneck, or Lululemon yoga pants and a breathable wicking top in a complementary color. Along the wall, a smaller group of dads had gathered, heads down, tapping away at their screens, looking up occasionally to cries of “Daddy, look at me!” or, more often, “Daddy, take a video!” I found Dave with two other men, one a lawyer, one who ran a dental insurance business.

“Hey,” said the lawyer. “It’s the Sexy Mama from the Wall Street Journal.”

“That’s me,” I said, pasting a look of fake cheer on my face. “Have you guys met my dad?” I let Dave handle the introductions while I looked around for Ellie. She wasn’t in the bouncy castle with the girls, or waiting in line for the air cannons with the boys. Eventually I found Hank, sitting glumly on one of the benches with an ice pack clutched to his forehead. He pointed out Ellie huddled against a wall, with her skirt smoothed over her lap, playing with what appeared to be the iPod I’d lost the week before.

I walked over, trying not to look angry. “Ellie, is that my iPod?”

She looked up. “You’re not supposedta BE HERE!”

“Well, hello to you, too.” I sat down on the floor beside her and held out my hand. “You know the rules. You don’t just take other people’s things. You need to ask first.” She threw the iPod at me. It hit me just above my left eyebrow and fell to the floor.

“Ellie! What was that for?”

“Jade and Summer and Willow all have THEIR OWN iPODS!” She widened her eyes into a look suggesting she could barely bring herself to contemplate such unfairness.

“Ellie, we do not throw things,” I said, struggling not to yell. Ellie ignored me.

“And they’re the new touch ones, not STUPID TINY BABY ONES like YOU HAVE!”

“We don’t throw,” I repeated. “And you shouldn’t have taken Mommy’s things without permission.”

Ellie stuck out her lower lip. “I didn’t even WANT TO COME to this STUPID BABY PARTY! Why can’t everyone just LEAVE ME ALONE!”

I sighed as she started to cry. Maybe—probably—this place was just too bright and noisy for Eloise. As if to confirm my thought, she leaned against me, resting her head on my shoulder. “I’m sorry I taked your thing and threw it at your head.”

“It’s okay,” I told her. “Just next time, ask first.”

At the sound of sniffling, I looked up to see Hank. “Will you do the slide?” he asked.

Ellie shook her head. “Too scary,” she proclaimed.

“What if we went down together?” I asked. “You could sit on my lap.”

Ellie narrowed her eyes, judging the steep angle of the slide, watching the kids zip down, hands raised, mouths open, squealing with glee. Most slid on their own, but a few made the descent seated on parents’ laps.

“You want to try it?”

She sighed, as though she was granting me an enormous favor. “Oooh-kay.”

“How about you, Hank?”

He shook his head. “I’m allergic to burlap.”

But of course. I got to my feet—not half as gracefully as one of the yoga moms would have managed—and held out my hand. Ellie and I were walking toward the line at the back of the slide when Dave intercepted us.

“Hey, Al. You want to check on your dad?”

“What’s wrong?” I peered toward the benches where I’d left him, and saw him sitting there, staring into space the same way he stared at CNBC.

“He seems kind of uncomfortable.”

I gave him a patient, beatific Mary Poppins kind of smile, and hoped I didn’t look drugged. “Ellie and I are going to try the slide. Just sit with him. I’ll be there in two minutes.”

“I don’t wanna,” Ellie said as soon as she realized she’d have to climb a ladder built into the back of the slide to get to the top.

“Honey, I’ll be right here. Just put your hands like this . . .” I bent down and lifted, putting her feet on the bottom rung and her hands on the one above it. “Now just take a step . . .”

“I don’t WANT TO DO THIS. I’m SCARED!”

“Hurry up!” shouted the little boy—Hayden? Holden?—behind us. I scooped Ellie into one arm and hauled us both up the ladder.

“Come on! You’ll love it! I used to love slides when I was a little girl!”

“I WILL NOT LOVE SLIDES!” said Ellie, but she let me carry her to the top of the slide. Red-faced, panting, with sweat dribbling down my back, I grabbed a sack, marveling at the lack of progress—in these days of satellite radios and wireless Internet, why were kids still sliding on actual burlap sacks? I hoisted Ellie in my arms and got us in position.

“One . . . two . . . three!”

I kicked off with my heels. I could hear my daughter screaming—from fear or delight, I wasn’t sure. Nor was there time to figure it out, because the instant we got to the bottom of the slide, someone grabbed my shoulders and started shaking me.

“What are you doing with my daughter?”

I tried to wriggle away, but my father’s hands were clamped down tight, his fingers curling into the flesh of my upper arms. His shirt was untucked, his tie had been yanked askew, and the Velcro closure of one of his shoes had come undone and was flapping.

“How could you be so irresponsible?” he asked.

“Dad. Dad! It’s me, Allison!”

“You put her down right this minute, Ronnie! Don’t you ever, ever do that again!”

Oh, God. Eloise was wailing as another mother-child duo came hurtling down the slide and slammed into my back, knocking Ellie out of my arms and onto the floor . . . where, unsurprisingly, she started to scream.

“Ohmygod, I’m so sorry!” said the mother.

“How could you be so irresponsible!” my father was shouting.

“Ellie’s mommy is in trou-ble,” sang the little boy as I finally managed to wrench myself free. Ellie, weeping, limped dramatically over to Dave. Everyone in the place was staring at us, moms and dads and kids.

“Um, ma’am? Excuse me?” A teenage girl in a BouncyTime T-shirt tapped my shoulder. “You can’t stay here. There are other people waiting to use the slide.”

“Believe me, I am trying to leave,” I told her. I took my father by the elbow and steered him away from the slide and over to the metal bench against the wall.

“Dad,” I said, trying to keep my voice low and calm as, beside me, Dave attempted to soothe Ellie. “Listen to me. I’m your daughter. I’m Allison. That was Ellie, your granddaughter, and she’s fine . . . that slide was perfectly safe . . .”

“Why was Grandpa YELLING at me?” Ellie wailed. She lifted the hem of her skirt and blotted her tears.

“Ew, gross!” a little boy said. My eyes followed his pointing finger. Oh, God.

“I think your dad had an accident,” Dave said. His voice was quiet, but not quiet enough. I figured Ellie would be revolted, but instead she slipped her hand into my father’s hand and pulled him toward the door.

“Don’t worry, Pop-Pop,” she stage-whispered. “Sometimes that happens to me, too.”

• • •

Ellie and Dave arranged to ride home with Hank’s mother. I got my dad back into the car, slipping a towel from the trunk onto his seat, and concentrated on getting him back home as fast as I could.

“Dad, are you okay?” I asked. “Do you need anything?”

He didn’t answer . . . he just lifted his chin and turned his face away from me. As soon as we were moving I rolled down my window, holding my breath and hoping he wouldn’t notice. When I heard what sounded like a choked sob from the passenger seat, I kept both hands on the wheel and my eyes straight ahead. Get through this, I told myself. Get through this, and there will be happy pills at the end.

We arrived to find my mother asleep on the couch, curled up in her housecoat with her bare feet tucked around each other, the same way Ellie arranged her feet when she slept. “Do you want me to . . .” I asked my dad, then let my voice trail off and cut my eyes toward the stairs. My father ignored me, pressing his lips together as he made his way past me. I waited until I heard the water running in the bathroom before I let myself collapse at the kitchen table. The room was still a mess, the sink piled with dirty dishes, the counters greasy and streaked, the flowers I’d brought the previous weekend dying in a vase of scummy water. I emptied the vase, loaded the dishwasher, sprayed and wiped down the counters, and took out the trash. I pulled a package of turkey thighs past their expiration date out of the refrigerator, along with a bag of softened zucchini and three dessicated lemons, and threw them all away. I dumped sour milk down the drain, wiped off the refrigerator shelves, and boiled water for a pot of tea, which I placed on a tray with a napkin and a plate of cookies.

I knocked on the bedroom door. “Dad?” No answer. I eased the door open. He was curled on his side, his fist propped underneath his chin, mouth open, sleeping. With his forehead smooth and his eyes closed he looked like a little boy, a boy who’d played until he was exhausted and had fallen asleep on his parents’ bed. I set down the tray, then picked up my dad’s wet pants using my thumb and forefinger and carried them to the washing machine, which was already full of damp, moldy-smelling clothes. I ran the machine again, adding more detergent. Then I slipped back into my parents’ bedroom. Half-empty water glasses, crumpled tissues, and discarded newspapers covered the bedside tables. Dirty clothes were heaped on the floor; magazines and newspapers were stacked in the corners. I stepped over a tangle of ties and a dozen discarded shoes and opened the bathroom door. The room was still steamy from the shower. Wet towels were piled in the tub, and a few more lined the floor. Hot water was pouring into the sink, and my father’s razor rested against an uncapped bottle of shaving cream. I turned off the water, capped the cream, and opened the medicine chest. My hands moved expertly over the bottles, fingertips just brushing the tops long enough to distinguish between over-the-counter and prescription stuff. I pulled down propranolol, diltiazem, and various other medications for high blood pressure and diabetes before I got to the good stuff. Vicodin 325/10. “Take as needed for pain.” Tramadol. And—bingo—OxyContin. Without pausing, without thinking, I uncapped the bottles and emptied half of each one into my hands.

What are you doing? a part of my brain cried as I crunched three of the pills, then bent down to gather the dirty towels, pick up the soap off the shower floor, pull a wad of hair out of the drain, and sweep discarded Q-tips and Kleenexes into the wastebasket. You’re stealing medicine from your father, your sick father. Have you really sunk so low?

It appeared that I had. I need this, I told myself as I moved through the bedroom, gathering armloads of clothing and piling them into garbage bags, and then loading the bags into the trunk of my car to take home to wash and fold. I need this.