All Fall Down: A Novel

SIXTEEN

When I was a girl, every summer my parents and I would spend a week in Avalon, at the Jersey Shore. Every summer we’d rented the same little cottage a block away from the beach and set up camp there. Now that I was a mother myself, I would have called it a relocation instead of a vacation, but back then it was like being transported to the land of fairy tales. Every day I’d swim in the ocean, and at night I’d fall asleep listening to the sound of the waves through my open window instead of the hum of our house’s central air, looking at the little bedroom that was mine by the glow of moonlight on water instead of my Snow White night-light. The last night, we’d go to the boardwalk in Wildwood, gorge ourselves on sweet grilled sausages and cotton candy, play the carnival games, ride the Ferris wheel and the roller coaster.

In the mornings, we’d eat cold cereal and toast, then pack up a cooler of sodas and snacks and walk the single block between our cottage and the beach. My mother would spread out a pink-and-white-striped blanket; my father would rock the stem of our umbrella back and forth, digging it into the sand, and then swoop me into his arms and carry me, screeching with half-pretend terror, out into the waves.

Every year, I was allowed to buy a single souvenir. The summer I was eight years old, I’d saved a few dollars of tooth fairy and allowance money, augmented by the quarters I’d cadged from the sofa cushions and the dollar bills from the lint filter in the dryer. My plan was to go to the store by myself, buy a pair of Jersey Shore snow globes, and give them to my parents for Chanukah.

I waited until my mother was dozing, facedown on her beach towel, her back and legs gleaming with Hawaiian Tropic lotion, and my dad was settled into his folding chair with the Examiner before I took my shovel and pail as camouflage and walked down the beach, toward a spot where, beneath the disinterested gaze of a teenage babysitter, a half-dozen kids were at work making sand mermaids, with long, wavy strands of seaweed merhair and seashell bikinis. “Stay where we can see you,” my father called as I walked off, and I told him that I would. I waited until he’d opened the Business section before double-checking to make sure I had my change purse and walking from the beach to the sidewalk, then to the corner, looking both ways before I crossed the street.

The store where we shopped every year was a high-ceilinged, barnlike room where the sunshine streamed in through skylights. It was full of bins of lacquered seashells and preserved starfish, penny candy and wrapped pieces of taffy. Behind a glass case were glossy slabs of fudge and caramel-dipped apples. Next to the cash register were racks of postcards, some featuring pretty girls in bikinis, with “See the Sights at the Jersey Shore” written underneath them. That morning, though, it was cloudy outside, and the store looked dim and empty. The cash register was abandoned; there weren’t any teenage clerks in their red pinnies, restocking shelves or telling shoppers where they could find inflatable floats or swim diapers. Instead of a sparkling treasure trove, the merchandise—marked-down T-shirts, foam beer cozies, “Jersey Shore” shot glasses, skimpy beach towels—looked dingy and cheap. The postcard rack squeaked when I spun it, and I noticed a card I hadn’t seen before. It had a picture of a very heavy woman in a red one-piece bathing suit not unlike my own. “The Jersey Shore’s Good, but the Food Is Great!” read the words printed over the sand. I stared, not quite understanding the joke but knowing that the woman in the bathing suit was the brunt of it, and wondering under what circumstances she’d posed for the picture. Had she just been lying there, sunning herself, when a man with a camera came by and tricked her, saying, You’re so pretty, let me take your picture? Or had she been aware the picture was going to be used for a joke? And if that was the case, why had she allowed it, knowing that people would laugh at her?

I readjusted my grasp on my change purse, gave the metal rack a final spin, and was heading off to find the snow globes when a man grabbed me by the shoulder and spun me around.

“Did you see?” he demanded. I blinked up at him. He wore a baseball shirt with the buttons open over his bare chest, cutoff denim shorts, and leather sandals. His eyes looked wild and his teeth were stained brown, and the smell of liquor coming off of him was so thick it was almost visible, like the cloud surrounding Pig-Pen in the Peanuts comic strip. As I stared, the man shook my shoulder again. “Did you see?”

I shook my head. I hadn’t seen anything, but even if I had, I would have denied it. There was something wrong with this man; even a little kid like me could tell. I couldn’t remember ever being so scared. Worse than the waves of liquor smell that rolled off him was the feeling of not-rightness. His pupils were too big; his hand was holding me way too hard. A squeak escaped my lips as tears spilled onto my cheeks. I wished I’d never come here, never snuck away from my parents. I wished they would come rescue me, right this minute. As we stood there, with his fingers still curled into the flesh of my shoulder, a woman, barefoot in a bikini top and a short denim skirt, with the kind of bleached-blonde hair my mother would have dismissed with a curled lip and the word “cheap,” came around the corner. She had a red plastic shopping basket over one forearm, empty except for a canister of Pringles, and a tattoo of what looked like a heart visible above the bra cup of her swimsuit.

“You’re scaring her, Kenny,” the woman said, and knelt down beside me. She had a southern accent and a sweet, high voice, but she, too, smelled like booze when she breathed. “What’s your name, pretty girl? You want some fudge?”

“No, thank you,” I whispered, as wild-eyed Kenny repeated, in a droning whine, “She saw us.”

“She didn’t see a thing.” The woman’s eyes looked like spinning pinwheels, her pupils tiny pinpricks of black in the blue of her irises. “How about a lollipop, pretty little miss?”

“I have to go now,” I whispered, and ran past them, out the door. I knew which way the beach was—there was only one street to cross, then I’d be there—but, somehow, I must have gone the wrong way, because when I stopped running I couldn’t see the water, and the street was completely unfamiliar. BAR AND GRILLE, read one sign. I heard the sound of an American flag, hanging at the corner, snapping in the breeze. There were people on the street, but not tourists, not people like me and my parents, in swimsuits and sun hats, carrying coolers and portable radios and folding chairs. All I saw were a few men dressed like Kenny, men with dark glasses and bent heads and a palpable aura of strangeness, of off-ness, around them, going in and out of the BAR AND GRILLE. I stood on the corner in my pink rubber flip-flops and my white terry-cloth cover-up. I’d dropped my change purse at some point during my flight.

Eventually, a man in a blue bathing suit, with a coating of white zinc on his nose, found me standing on the street corner, crying. “Little girl, are you lost?” I’d told him my name and that I lived in Cherry Hill but was staying in Avalon, and he’d walked me back to the beach, just two blocks away, where I found my parents at the lifeguard station. “Where did you go?” my mother asked, her voice shaking as she scooped me into her arms. My father gave me a lecture about staying where I could see them and not ever, ever scaring my mother like that. “You know how sensitive she is,” he’d said, and I’d nodded, crying wordlessly, meaning to explain that I’d wanted to go shopping, to get presents, to surprise them, but I never caught my breath enough to form the words, and they never asked where I’d gone, or why. They’d taken me back to the blanket and given me lemonade. My sobs tapered off into hiccups, and, eventually, I’d fallen asleep in the wedge of shade under our umbrella, and had to be woken up so they could walk me back to the cottage for lunch. By the afternoon, I’d all but forgotten about my adventure . . . but as I got older, I’d remembered, and I would spend hours trying to figure out what the couple, he with the baseball shirt, she with the shopping basket and the southern accent, had been doing that they’d worried I had seen. Had they robbed the place? Shoplifted a bottle? Were they paranoid because of something they’d smoked or swallowed, jumping at shadows, scaring little girls for no reason? I never knew . . . but the sense of that morning had never left me, the idea that everything could change with just one wrong turn. There was a parallel universe that ran alongside the normal world, and if you went through the wrong door, or turned left instead of right, ran up the street instead of down it, you could accidentally push the curtain aside and end up in that other place, where everything was different and everything was wrong.

That was how I felt, waking up that first morning in a single bed in a small, dingy room at Meadowcrest. “Oh, shit, not here,” I’d said when Dave had pulled off the road and I’d seen the signs that read MEADOWCREST: PUTTING FAMILIES FIRST. There were at least half a dozen billboards with the same slogan along I-95 on the way from Center City to the airport, with a picture of a white guy with a superhero’s jawline holding a beaming toddler in his arms. Dave and I had joked about it, wondering if the guy had been told he’d be posing for an ad for beer or Cialis, and the ribbing his buddies must have given him when he’d turned out to be the face of addiction.

Tight-lipped, without smiling, Dave had said, “They had a bed.”

“I want to go to Malibu. Seriously. If I’m going to do this, I might as well do it right.” I still felt awful—sick and weak and nauseous, and gutted from the shame—but I had lifted my chin, trying to look imperious with my ratty hair and my dirty clothes and Ellie’s Princess Jasmine fleece blanket wrapped around my shoulders. “Take me to the place where Liza Minnelli’s on the board of directors.”

Dave said nothing to me as he pulled the car up to the guard’s stand. “Allison Weiss. She’s checking in.”

“I’m checking in!” I sang, trying to remember the lyrics of the Simpsons rehab anthem. “No more pot or Demerol. No more drugs or alcohol! No more stinking fun at all . . !” I glanced sideways, wondering if Dave remembered how, when we’d started dating, we’d call each other and watch The Simpsons together, him in his apartment, me in mine, and how we’d speculate, during commercials, about whether the severely nerdy bow-tied weather guy on the NBC station got laid nonstop.

He parked the car, took my duffel bag out of the backseat, and walked me inside, where a woman behind a receptionist’s desk led us to the comfortable, well-appointed waiting room, with leather couches and baskets of hundred-calorie snack packs and a wide-screen TV.

They’d been showing Jeopardy! The categories were World History, English Literature, Ends in “Y,” Famous Faces, and—ha—Potent Potables. Curled on the couch in my Jasmine blanket, I answered every question right. “Do I really need to be here?” I’d asked Dave.

“Yes, Allie,” said Dave, sounding distant and tired. “You do.” I could see wrinkles at the corners of his eyes and a few grayish patches in the beard that had grown in since that morning, and the cuff of one pant leg was tucked into his sock. How must these last few days have been for him? I wondered, before deciding it was better not to think about it.

I’d tried to tell him that I felt much better, that, clearly, I’d had some kind of bad reaction to Suboxone, but now I was fine and, as Jeopardy! indicated, clearheaded, that it would be all right for him to take me home, and I remembered him not-too-gently removing (prying might have been a better word) my fingers from his forearms and delivering me into the care of a short, bald male nurse who’d hummed Lady Gaga’s “The Edge of Glory” while he’d taken my blood and medical history, before handing me a plastic pee cup and directing me to the bathroom. “Gotta pat you down,” he’d said when I came out, handing me a robe and telling me to take everything off. “And we’re gonna do the old squat-and-cough.” I stared at him until I realized he was serious. Then, shaking my head in disbelief, I squatted. And coughed.

Once my exam was done, I’d joined Dave in a cubicle, where a young woman with doughy features and too much blue eyeliner sat behind a computer and asked me embarrassing questions. When I didn’t answer, or couldn’t, Dave stepped in. “I think she’s been abusing painkillers for about a year,” he’d said, and, “Yes, she has prescriptions, but she’s also been buying things online,” and, finally, most terrifyingly, “Yes, I’ll pay out of pocket for what insurance doesn’t cover.” I’d grabbed his sleeve again and leaned close, whispering, “Dave . . .”

He’d pulled his arm away and given me a look that could only be called cold. “You need to get yourself together,” he’d said. “If not for your own sake, then for Ellie’s.”

So here I was. I looked around, running my hands down my body. My jeans felt greasy; the waistband had slipped down my hips, the way it did when I’d worn them for too long without a wash. My clogs, resting by the side of the bed, were stained with something I didn’t want to examine too closely. My T-shirt smelled bad, and there was a smear of the same offensive something on its sleeve. I had clean clothes in the duffel Dave had packed, but I’d last seen it on the other side of the receptionist’s desk. “We’ll just hang on to it up here until one of the staffers has time to search it, ’kay?” she’d said.

“Good morning, Meadowcrest!” a voice blared from the ceiling. I bolted upright with my heart thudding in my chest. I still felt weak, and sick, and I ached all over. I wasn’t sure whether that was related to precipitated withdrawal, or how much was the result of the phenobarbital they were giving me to get me through the worst of the lingering withdrawal symptoms.

“It is now seven a.m.,” said the ceiling. “Ladies, please head down to get your morning meds. Breakfast will begin at seven-thirty. Gentlemen, you’ll eat at eight o’clock. Room inspections will commence at nine. Riiiiiise and shiiiine!”

I collapsed on my back. My head hit the pillow with a crackling sound. Investigation revealed that both the pillow and the mattress were thin, sad-looking affairs encased in crinkly, stained plastic. Lovely.

Swinging my feet onto the floor, I took my first good look at my room: a narrow, cell-like space with a bed, a desk, a scarred wooden wardrobe, and a tattered poster reading ONE DAY AT A TIME stuck to the wall with a scrap of Scotch tape. My duffel bag, which now had a construction-paper label bearing the words ALLISON W. and SEARCHED attached to one strap with a garbage bag twist-tie, sat on the floor beside me.

I took one shuffling step, then two, then crossed the room to the door, where a man in a khaki uniform was pushing a mop. “Excuse me,” I said.

He looked at me blankly.

“Is there someone here I can talk to?”

The blank look continued.

“I’m not supposed to be here,” I said, enunciating each word clearly. “I need to talk to someone so I can go home.”

The man—a janitor, I guessed—shrugged and cocked his thumb toward the opposite end of the hall. There was a desk with no one behind it. A few people—teenagers, mostly—were milling in the hall, wearing pajama bottoms and slippers and sweatshirts, making quiet conversation. I stood there until they saw me. “Excuse me,” I said. “Is there anyone who works here who can help me?”

“They come in at eight o’clock,” said one of the shufflers in slippers. I went back to my room, where, for lack of anything better to do, I unzipped the duffel bag and inspected its contents. Dave hadn’t even let me go home from the hospital long enough to pack. He was probably worried that I’d use the opportunity to run, when all I wanted to do was say goodbye to Ellie and my mom. A look in the mirror in my hospital room had convinced me to wait. If Ellie had seen me looking so sick, she’d probably have been even more worried. I hoped Dave would tell her I’d gone away on a last-minute trip to New York.

I made the bed, smoothing the thin, pilled brown comforter before I started going through the bag. There were six pairs of tennis socks, two pairs of lace panties that I had bought before Eloise’s birth and not tried to squeeze myself into since, a single sports bra, a pair of jeans, two long-sleeved T-shirts, and a pair of black velvet leggings that I recognized as the bottom half of a long-ago Catwoman Halloween costume. I stopped rummaging after that. It was just too depressing. Why had Dave packed, and not Janet or even my mom? Was there anything like a toothbrush and deodorant in here? How had he managed to pack everything I’d needed that weekend when Ellie was a newborn, but get it so wrong this time?

Maybe he was scared, I thought. Five years ago, he’d been packing for a romantic retreat, a family honeymoon by the beach. This time, he’d been shipping a drug addict to rehab. Big difference.

Someone was knocking on the other side of my bathroom door. “Come in,” I called. My voice was weak and croaky. A girl who didn’t look much older than fourteen stuck her head into my room and looked around.

“We share the bathroom and you gotta keep it clean and everything off the floor,” she said. “Or else we’ll both get demerits.”

Demerits? “Okay,” I said, and forced myself to stand on legs that felt as though something large and angry had been chewing on them all night long.

“I’m going to brush my teeth. Do you need to use the bathroom?”

I shook my head, although I wasn’t sure what I needed, other than my pills. I cast a sideways glance at my purse. Maybe there was a stash I’d missed, or even some dust in the Altoids tin that could help.

“I’m Allison,” I said.

“Hi,” said the girl as she followed my gaze. “Forget it,” she said. “They search everything that comes in.” She had shimmering blonde hair hanging to the small of her back, a small, foxy face, pale eyes, and vivid purple bruises running up and down her bare arms.

“I’m Aubrey,” she said, and tugged at the strap of her tank top. She was dressed like she was ready to go clubbing, or at least the way I imagined girls on their way to clubs would dress. Her jeans were tight enough to preclude circulation, her black boots had high heels, her top was made of some thin silvery fabric, which she had matched with silver eye shadow and, if I wasn’t mistaken, false eyelashes that were also dusted with glitter.

“Listen,” I said, trying not to sound as desperate as I felt. “Who do I talk to about getting out of here?”

Aubrey snickered.

“No, seriously. I think this is a mistake.”

“Sure,” said Aubrey, in the same indulgent tone I used to jolly Eloise out of her bad moods.

“Please. There must be, like, a counselor, or a supervisor. Someone I can talk to.”

“Yeah, you’d think so,” Aubrey said. “For what this place costs, there should be. But there’s nobody, like, official, until lunchtime. Hey, it could be worse,” she said, after seeing the look on my face. “My last place, there were, like, six girls to a room, in bunk beds. At least here you’ve got your own space. So why are you here?” she asked.

“Because my husband’s an asshole,” I said.

She smiled, then quickly pressed her lips together, covering her discolored teeth. “You better not let the RCs hear you say that,” she said. “They’ll say you’re in denial. That until you’re ready to admit you have a problem, you won’t ever get better.”

“What if I don’t have a problem?”

She lifted her narrow shoulders in a shrug. “I dunno. Honestly, I’ve never seen anyone in rehab who didn’t have a problem. And I’ve been in rehab a lot.”

Yay, you, I thought.

“What were you taking?” she asked. When I didn’t answer, she said, “C’mon, you must have been taking something.”

“Oh. Um. Painkillers. Prescription painkillers.” The “prescription” suddenly struck me as important, a way of announcing to this girl that I wasn’t scoring crack on the streets, that I might be a junkie, but I was a reputable junkie.

“Percs?” she asked, smoothing her hair. “Vics? Oxys?”

“All of the above,” I said ruefully.

“Yeah. That’s how I started.” She looked over my shoulder, out the window, which revealed an unlovely view of a waterlogged field. “You know how it goes. One day you’re snorting a Perc before history class, the next day you’re down in Kensington, and some guy named D-Block is sticking a needle in your arm.”

“Ah,” I said. Meanwhile, I was thinking, D-Block? There was no D-Block in my story. Or Kensington. Or needles.

“You court-stipulated?” she asked, without much interest. She’d moved on from her hair and the window and was now checking her eye makeup in a mirror she’d pulled out of her pocket.

I shook my head.

“Did you fail a random?”

I tried to make sense of the question. “I don’t know what that means.”

“Like, a random drug test at work. A lot of the older ladies are here for that.” She gave me a look that was not unsympathetic. “No offense.”

“Oh, none taken.” I wasn’t sure whether her “no offense” applied to my age or to the assumption that I’d gotten in trouble at work. “No, I work for myself, so no drug tests or anything.”

“Lose your license? DUI?”

I shook my head. “How about you?” I said, like we’d just been introduced at a cocktail party and she’d just tapped the conversational ball over to my side of the net. “Are you working, or in school?”

“I waitressed.” It took her a minute to remember how conversation happened. “What do you do?”

“I’m a journalist,” I said, which sounded like more of a real job than “blogger.”

“Huh.” She tugged at her hair. “Did you have to go to college for that?”

“Um. Well, I did. But I guess, technically, you don’t have to. You just need to have something to say.” I had to remind myself that I was here to get help for myself, not to rescue anyone else, or save all the little broken birds. You are not coming out of here with an intern, I told myself. I didn’t plan on staying long enough to learn names, let alone collect résumés.

“Good morning, Meadowcrest!” the intercom said again. Aubrey rolled her eyes and shot her middle finger at the ceiling. “Ladies, it’s about that time. Morning meds, breakfast, and inspections. Riiiise and shiiine!”

There was another knock. “Are you the new girl?” an older woman asked. She had curly white hair and wore black polyester slacks, white orthopedic sneakers with pristine laces, and a red cardigan with shiny cut-glass buttons. Reading glasses dangled from a beaded chain against her sizable bosom. She wore a gold watch, a gold wedding band, a gold cross hanging on a necklace, and another necklace with little ceramic figurines in the shapes of boys and girls, probably intended to represent her grandchildren.

“Hello,” she said, offering me her hand to shake. “I’m Mary. I’m an alcoholic.”

Aubrey rolled her eyes. “You don’t have to say that, like, everywhere you go, Mare,” she said. “Only in meetings.”

“I’m trying to get used to it,” Mary said.

“Hi,” I said, and tried to think of a polite follow-up. “So, how long have you two been here?”

“Three days,” said Aubrey.

“Four for me,” said Mary. “We’re the new kids on the block.” She looked at Aubrey anxiously. “Did I get that right? New kids on the block?”

Aubrey made a face. “Like, how should I know? They’re oldies.”

“Well,” said Mary, looking flustered. “Do you want some help with your room?”

“Fuck,” Aubrey said. I followed her gaze past the bathroom to what must have been her bedroom, a narrow space the twin of mine. Based on its appearance, Aubrey had had a seizure in the middle of the night and flung everything she possessed to its four corners.

“I’ll help,” said Mary. I decided to join in, thus avoiding demerits, whatever they turned out to be. I wouldn’t be staying here long, but that didn’t mean I wanted to make a bad impression. Bending down, I began to gather up girl things: ninety-nine-cent nail polish, Victoria’s Secret panties, a black eyeliner pencil, a paperback copy of The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, a packet of Xeroxed pages labeled RELAPSE PREVENTION, a piece of posterboard with MY TIMELINE OF ABUSE written on top, a blouse, a pair of inside-out jeans, a single Ugg boot, and a half-empty package of peanut butter cookies.

“Do you know where we are, exactly? Like, what town?” I’d been so sick and so out of it on the ride down, I’d barely noticed exactly where we were heading.

“Buttfuck, New Jersey,” Aubrey said, shoving books and papers under her bed. “I mean, I guess it’s got a name, but I have no fucking clue what it’s called. All rehabs are, like, in the middle of fucking nowhere. So you can’t cop.”

I took my armload of stuff and deposited it gently at the bottom of her freestanding wardrobe. “How many times have you done this?”

She kept her smirk in place while she answered, but her eyes looked sad. “Six.”

Six rehabs. Dear Lord.

“How about you?” I asked Mary, who shook her head.

“Oh, no, dear, this is my first time in treatment. Come on,” she said. “We should get in line for meds.”

Aubrey wandered toward the bathroom. In my bedroom, I put on clean jeans and a T-shirt, gave my plastic pillow a fluff, and zipped up my duffel and set it in the wardrobe. Then I followed Mary out of the bedroom and into the wide, fluorescent-lit hallway. Dozens of doors just like mine ran along each side of it, amplifying the place’s resemblance to a cheap motel. We walked down the hall until we arrived at the desk I’d found earlier. There were maybe two dozen women milling around, most of them dressed, a few in pajamas and robes. Many of them held white plastic binders. “What’s that?” I asked, pointing to the one Mary had in her arms.

“It’s the welcome packet, and the schedule. You didn’t get one?”

I shook my head no. A heavy-set woman wearing khakis and a yellow short-sleeved shirt hunched behind the computer at the desk. An engraved plastic nametag announced that she was MARGO, and the words MEADOWCREST COTTAGE were sewn in red thread onto the right side of her chest. Her desk was a poor relation to the burnished oak desk out front, with a bouquet of flowers and a dish of hard candy. This desk was made of cheap pressboard, and, instead of blossoms or treats, there was a stack of papers with the title A LETTER FROM YOUR ADDICTION.

Dear Friend, I’ve come to visit once again. I love to see you suffer mentally, physically, spiritually, and socially. I want to have you restless so you can never relax. I want you jumpy and nervous and anxious. I want to make you agitated and irritable so everything and everybody makes you uncomfortable. I want you to be depressed and confused so that you can’t think clearly or positively. I want to make you hate everything and everybody—especially yourself. I want you to feel guilty and remorseful for the things you have done in the past that you’ll never be able to let go. I want to make you angry and hateful toward the world for the way it is and the way you are. I want you to feel sorry for yourself and blame everything but your addiction for the way things are. I want you to be deceitful and untrustworthy, and to manipulate and con as many people as possible. I want to make you fearful and paranoid for no reason at all and I want you to wake up during all hours of the night screaming for me. You know you can’t sleep without me; I’m even in your dreams.

“Excuse me,” I said, aiming a smile at Margo. “I’m hoping I can speak to someone about leaving.”

She looked up at me. “Where’s your tag?”

“Tag?”

“Tag,” she repeated, pointing to my chest in a way I might have found a little forward if I hadn’t been such a wreck. “When you’re admitted, they give you a nametag with your welcome binder and your schedule. You need to wear it at all times.”

“Right. But I’m not staying. I’m not supposed to—”

She lifted her hand. “Honey, I can’t even talk to you till you’ve got your tag on. Check your room.”

“Fine.” I went back to my room as more women drifted out into the hallway. Most of them appeared to be Aubrey’s age, but I saw a few thirty- and fortysomethings, and some who were even older. The young girls wore tight jeans, high heels, faces full of makeup. The women my age wore looser pants, less paint, and, inevitably, Dansko clogs. The official shoe of playgrounds, operating rooms, restaurant kitchens, and rehab. “Excuse me,” said a sad, frail, hunched-over woman who looked even older than Mary, as she used a walker to make her way toward the desk. I shuddered, thinking that if I were an eighty-year-old addict, I would hope my friends and my children would leave me alone to drink and drug in peace.

Sure enough, back in my cell of a room, on top of the desk, I found a beige plastic nametag clipped to a black lanyard with my name—ALLISON W.—typed on the front. Beside it was a binder and schedule. I spared my single bed a longing glance, wishing I could just go back to sleep, then looped the tag over my neck and proceeded back down the hall.

SEVENTEEN

The scent of mass-produced food was seeping from behind the cafeteria’s double doors. Even if I hadn’t been so nauseous, I couldn’t imagine eating anything. I felt like Persephone in the underworld—one bite, one sip, a single pomegranate seed, and I’d be stuck here forever.

I walked back to the desk and flapped my nametag at Margo, the desk drone. “I’d like to call home.”

“Morning meds,” she said, without looking up.

I went to the nurse’s counter, stood in line for twenty minutes, swallowed what was in the little white paper cup she gave me, and then returned.

“I took my medicine,” I said, showing Margo the empty cup, feeling grateful she hadn’t asked to see my empty mouth, the way the nurse had. “May I please use the phone?”

“You’re on a seven-day blackout,” she recited without looking past my chin. “No visits, no phone calls.”

“Excuse me? I don’t remember agreeing to that.”

Margo heaved a mighty sigh. “If you’re here, then you signed a contract agreeing to follow our rules.”

“May I see that contract, please?” I remembered signing my name to all kinds of things—releases for my doctor to share my medical history, releases for Meadowcrest to talk to my insurance company—but it seemed unlikely that I’d sign something promising I wouldn’t call home for a week. Nor did it seem reasonable that they’d expect parents with young children to go that long between calls. Besides, could a contract be legally binding if the person who signed it was fresh out of the ER and still going through withdrawal?

Margo yawned without bothering to cover her mouth. “You can ask your counselor.”

“Who is my counselor?”

“You’ll be assigned one after orientation.”

“When’s that?”

“After breakfast.”

“I’m not planning on staying for breakfast.” I made myself smile and lowered my voice. “This isn’t the right place for me. I just want to go home.”

“You need to discuss that with your—”

Before she could say “counselor,” I pointed toward the front of the building—the nice desk, the clean waiting room with its wide-screen TV and baskets of snacks, the door—and said, “What happens if I just walk out of here right now?”

That got her attention. She sat up straighter and looked at me like she was seeing me for the first time. “If you choose to sign yourself out AMA, you can leave after twenty-four hours,” she recited. “We can’t let you go right now. You still have detox drugs in your system. It would be a liability.”

“Even if I have someone pick me up? And I go right to a hospital or something?” A hospital sounded good. I’d get a private room, and I’d bring my own bedding, of course. I pictured an IV in my arm, delivering whatever drugs would make this process more bearable. Then maybe I’d take myself to a spa for a few days. Fresh air, long hikes, nothing stronger than aspirin and iced tea. That was the ticket.

“Twenty-four hours. That’s the rule.”

“Okay.” I could endure anything for twenty-four hours. I’d been in labor that long, having Eloise. I went back down the hall and found Mary and Aubrey waiting in line.

“Where’d you cop?” I heard a statuesque brunette, who could have been a model except for her acne-ravaged complexion, ask a petite blonde girl in a see-through top. I didn’t hear the girl’s answer, but the brunette gave a squeal. “Ohmygod, no way! Who was your dealer?”

The petite girl gave a shrug. “He just said to call him Money.” She must have noticed me staring, because she turned toward me, eyes narrowed. “You work here?”

“Me? No, . . .” Now there were a few young girls staring at me.

“Booze?” asked the tall brunette.

“Pills,” I said, deciding to keep it short and sweet.

“Yeah,” the brunette said wistfully. “That’s how I started.” I was beginning to get the impression that pills were how everyone started, and that when you couldn’t afford or find the pills anymore, you moved on to heroin.

“Come on,” said Aubrey, as the herd of girls and women began moving down the hall. “Breakfast.”

I bypassed the limp slices of French toast and greasy discs of sausage in stainless steel pans on steam tables, with jugs of flavored corn syrup masquerading as maple, and made a mug of tea. The room was chilly and cavernous, a high-school cafeteria from hell with unflattering lights, worn linoleum, and aged inspirational posters, including the inevitable kitten-on-a-branch “Hang In There!” thumbtacked to walls painted a washed-out yellow. Six long plastic-topped tables with bolted-on benches took up most of the room’s space. Each one was adorned with a tiny ceramic vase of plastic flowers—someone’s sad attempt at making the place look pretty. The air smelled like the ghosts of a thousand departed high-school cafeteria lunches—steamed burgers and stale French fries, cut-up iceberg lettuce birthed from a bag and served with preservative-laden croutons hard enough to crack a tooth. I sat at the end of a table, numb and aching for my pills, listening as the conversation between the tall, dark-haired girl and the petite blonde continued.

“. . . parents found my works underneath my mattress and, like, hired an interventionist . . .”

“You had an intervention? That is so cool! Shit, my mom said she was taking me to the movies, and then she dropped me off here . . .”

I sipped my tea and watched the clock. I would say as little as possible for as long as I could. I’d sit through their orientation and endure the mandatory twenty-four hours. Then I’d find a supervisor, explain the situation, and get Dave or Janet or someone to come pick me up.

I didn’t belong here. I wasn’t like these women. I didn’t have any DUIs that needed to be expunged, a judge hadn’t ordered me to stay, and I hadn’t flunked a drug test at work. Nobody named D-Block had ever stuck a needle in my arm, and I wasn’t sure I could find Kensington even with my GPS. Heroin, I thought, and shuddered. These girls had done IV drugs, and probably worse things to get the drugs. All I’d done was swallow a few too many pills, all of which (except the ones I’d ordered online) had been legitimately prescribed. I didn’t belong here, and all I needed to do was figure out how quickly I could leave. My daughter needed me. So did my readers. How on earth had I let Dave convince me, even for a minute, that I could just check out of all of my responsibilities to come to a place like this?

“What’s your damage?” asked the girl next to me. She was in her twenties, broad-shouldered and solid, with no makeup on her pale skin and long brown hair piled on top of her head in a messy bun. She wore gray sweatpants and an Eagles jersey and a nametag that read LENA.

“Excuse me?”

“Your stuff. Your drug of choice,” she explained in a flat, nasal voice, as Mary sat down across from me.

“Pills. But I don’t really . . . I mean, I don’t think that I’m . . .” I shut my mouth and tried again. “I’m not actually planning on staying. I don’t think this is the right place for me.”

The Eagles-jersey girl and Mary both gave me knowing smiles. “That’s what I said,” Mary told us. With her blue eyes and white curls, her rounded hips and sagging bosom, she looked like Mrs. Claus. Possibly like Mrs. Claus after a rough weekend, during which she’d discovered naughty pictures of the elves on Santa’s hard drive. “I used to put my gin in a water bottle. Because that was classy.” A Boston accent turned the word to clah-see. I sipped my tea as the other girls and women nodded. “So I came down here with my bottle of Dasani, thinking I had everyone fooled.”

“I wasn’t fooling anyone,” said Lena. “I came straight from the hospital. They Narcanned me.”

“Excuse me?” I asked.

“I OD’d. I almost died. They had to give me Narcan—it’s a shot that, like, brings you back to life. I woke up and ripped the IVs out of my arm and, like, ran out the door. I had my stash in my bra,” she said.

“Ah.” Stash in bra, I thought. Add that to the list of things I didn’t do and did not completely understand. Was stash different from works?

“But they caught me—of course.” Lena used her hands when she talked, big, broad, sweeping motions. When she wasn’t gesturing, she was smoothing her ponytail like a pet. “I was in jail for six weeks, and then I was on work release, but I fucked that up and got loaded, and my PO busted me . . .” PO. Work release. Jail. Gin in water bottles. Drinking before the third hour of the Today show. I looked around, again noting the doors, wondering what would really happen if I just got up, collected my purse and duffel bag, and walked out. Of course, I didn’t know exactly where I was. That was a problem. Nor did I have any money—I remembered that they’d taken my wallet and my phone when they’d taken my bag. I rested my throbbing temples in my palms and forced myself to breathe slowly, trying to keep that jumping-out-of-my-skin feeling at bay.

A buzzer sounded. The girls and women stood, trays in hand, and marched to a stainless steel window cut into the wall. I picked up my own empty tray and got in line, depositing my silverware in a bin full of detergent, pushing my mug through the slot, from which a plastic-gloved, hair-netted dishwasher grabbed it. “Come on,” said Aubrey, and I followed the crowd out the door.

EIGHTEEN

At nine o’clock that morning, I was sitting on a couch covered in a shiny and decidedly unnatural fabric in a room called the Ladies’ Lounge, and a thumb-shaped, red-faced man was yelling at me.

“All addicts are selfish,” he said. He was, like the famed little teapot, short and stout. His cheap acrylic sweater was a red that matched his face. His blue slacks bunched alarmingly at his crotch, the cuffs so short they displayed his argyle socks and an expanse of hairy white shin. His tassled loafers were scuffed. On his sweater was pinned a nametag reading DARNTON. He looked at us accusingly. There were three of us in orientation: me, and Aubrey, and Mary, who’d been crying quietly since she’d walked through the door.

“All addicts are selfish,” Darnton repeated, and raised his caterpillar-thick eyebrows, daring us to disagree. When no one did, he opened the blue-covered paperback in his hand and began reading. I wondered idly whether he was starting where he’d left off with the last group; whether he just worked his way right through The Big Book, regardless of who was listening. “The first requirement is that we be convinced that any life run on self-will can hardly be a success.” I blinked. My hands hurt and were trembling. My head was still throbbing. I wanted to lie down, curled beneath a blanket, soothed and calmed by my pills.

“Why are you here?” Darnton asked Aubrey.

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

“Do you want to stop using?”

Another shrug. “I guess.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What about you?” the man asked Mary.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Okay, but they look exactly the same.”

“All the women on that show look exactly the same.” I could talk about this forever and had, in fact, written several well-received blog posts on the homogeneity of The Bachelor’s ladies.

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

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

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

“Who is it?”

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

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

“Can I use the phone?”

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

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

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

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

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

“But I don’t have a counselor!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And you weren’t?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Your counselor can help you to arrange that.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Acceptance is hard,” she said.

I frowned. “Acceptance of what?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

NINETEEN

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

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

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

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

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

“ ‘Half-measures availed us nothing!’ ”

“Excuse me?”

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

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

“I think you missed the entrance.”

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

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

“Why?”

“This is equine therapy,” Mary explained.

“How’s it supposed to help us?”

“Well, I’m not exactly sure, dear.”

Aubrey handed me the straps and buckles. It was some kind of harness. At least that was my best guess. My experience with horses was limited to taking Ellie on pony rides at the zoo. “Excuse me,” I asked the woman in the cowboy hat. “Can you tell me what the point of this is?”

She didn’t answer. “I don’t think they’re allowed to talk to us,” Mary said.

“This is ridiculous,” I muttered. Aubrey shifted from foot to foot, rubbing her arms with her palms. “Do you have any idea what this has to do with anything?”

Aubrey shrugged, shaking her head. “Maybe it’s about working as a team? Or building confidence or something? I don’t know. Half the shit in rehab doesn’t have anything to do with anything, and the other half’s so boring you could die. Just wait till Ed McGreavey does the ‘Find Your Purpose’ lecture.”

“You didn’t like that?” Mary asked. “Oh, I’ve heard that it’s very inspiring.”

Aubrey began finger-combing her hair. “Yeah, I thought so, too, like, the first time I heard it. But after you’ve heard it, like, three or four times, and you’ve seen Big Ed cry at the exact same part . . .”

“When he talks about how his brother broke his leg when they were heli-skiing?”

“You know it.”

I looked at the harness, then looked at the horse. “So we just have to get the harness on the horse somehow?”

“And,” said Aubrey, “we have to be touching each other while we do it.”

“Huh?”

“Like a conga line,” Mary explained, and put her hands on my hips.

“Okay.” With Mary holding my hips and Aubrey holding hers, we inched across the ring and approached the horse. It lifted its head and gave us the equine equivalent of a raspberry. Aubrey squealed, and Mary flinched backward.

“He’s more afraid of us than we are of him,” I said. I found a vaguely loop-shaped opening in the complicated mess of straps and pushed it over the horse’s head. Then I tied the remaining dangling straps in a bow. “There. Done.”

Mary was frowning. “That doesn’t look right.”

“They said it had to be on. They didn’t say it had to be pretty.” I pulled on the straps. The horse didn’t move. I yanked harder. “Come on, you.” Finally, reluctantly, the horse lifted one foot, then another.

“It’s moving!” Aubrey cheered.

“We did it!” Mary cried. The stone-faced woman in the cowboy hat said nothing as she watched our progress. We were almost done with our second lap when a golf cart zipped up to the fence and a kid in khakis called my name. “Allison W.?”

I handed the reins to Mary and caught a ride in the cart, which dropped me at a single-story building that looked like it was made of wood but turned out to be covered in vinyl siding. The couch in the waiting room looked like leather, but wasn’t, and the Twelve Steps framed and hung on the wall were simplified: I Can’t, read Step One. God Can, said Step Two. Let Him, Step Three advised. God again, I thought, and collapsed onto the couch. The God thing was going to be a problem. I’d been raised Jewish, with a vague notion of God as a wrathful old guy with a long white beard who was big on testing and tormenting His followers: casting Adam and Eve out of the garden, punishing poor Job, drowning Egyptian soldiers. Was that God—a God I wasn’t even sure I believed in—actually supposed to keep me from taking too much OxyContin? Especially when He let kindergartners get shot in their classrooms and young mothers die of cancer and millions of people suffer and die because of their skin color or religion?

There were no magazines I recognized in the waiting area, just battered copies of something called Grapevine, which appeared to be a cross between True Confessions and MAD, only for drunks. In the hallway outside, I saw a constant flow of people, men and women, alone and in groups, slouchy dudes with shifty eyes, pretty girls in jeans so tight I wondered if they were actually leggings with pockets painted on. Finally, a door flew open and a willowy African-American man in a linen suit smiled at me.

“Allison W.?”

I nodded, getting to my feet and breathing deeply as another wave of dizziness swept over my body.

“Come on in.”

His office was by far the nicest place I’d seen at Meadowcrest. There was a plush Oriental rug on the floor. The walls were painted a pretty celery green, the carved and polished wooden desk looked like a genuine antique, and the chair behind it was leather. The obligatory copy of the Twelve Steps hung on the wall—did they buy them in bulk?—but at least his had a pretty gold-leaf frame.

Nicholas took my hand. “It’s nice to meet you,” he said. Maybe it was the way he actually appeared to be seeing me when he looked my way, or maybe it was that my gaydar was pinging, but Nicholas reminded me of Dr. McCarthy in Philadelphia. Dr. McCarthy, in whose office I’d taken that quiz, Dr. McCarthy, who’d asked me so kindly what I was doing to take care of myself. How different would things be if I’d told him then what was going on, or even if I’d just stopped it all right there, before I’d learned about ordering pills on the Internet?

I took the chair on the other side of his desk and looked at a picture in a silver frame. There was Nicholas and an older white guy, both of them in tuxedoes, each with one hand on the shoulder of a pretty dark-haired girl in what looked like a flower girl’s dress.

He saw me looking. “Our wedding,” he said.

“Is that your daughter? She’s beautiful.”

“My goddaughter, Gia,” he said. “You’ve got a little girl, right?” There was, no surprise, a folder open on his desk, with my name typed on the tab.

“Eloise,” I said, feeling my heart beating, hearing her name catch in my throat.

“From the book?”

“From the book,” I confirmed. Ellie, I thought, remembering her funny, imperious gestures, the way she would yell every fifth word, or complain that whatever I was doing was taking for HOURS, or come home crying because “everyone else in kindergarten has loosed a tooth but me.”

Nicholas sat down, flipped open the first page of my folder, and ran his finger from top to bottom.

“So, painkillers.”

“That’s right.”

“Why?”

“I beg your pardon?”

He crossed his legs, folded his hands in his lap, and looked at me steadily. “Why were you taking so many painkillers? Were you in pain?”

“I guess that’s how it started. I hurt my back at the gym.”

“So you were taking them for back pain?”

I shook my head. “Just . . . pain. Pain in general. Or to unwind at the end of the day. I thought it was sort of the same as having a glass of wine at night. Except I never really liked wine. And I did love pills. I loved how they made me feel.”

He lifted one arched eyebrow. “Twenty pills,” said Nicholas, “is more than one glass of wine.”

Blushing, I said, “Well, obviously, things got a little out of hand. But not, you know, rehab-level out of hand. That’s why I asked to see you. I really don’t think I need to be here.”

Nicholas flipped to another page in the folder. Then another one. “I had a conversation with your husband while you were in Equine,” he began.

I felt as if I’d swallowed a stone, but I kept my voice calm. “Oh?”

“He was able to fill me in on a little more of what’s been going on in your life.”

My lungs expanded enough for me to take a deep breath. “So you know about my father being sick?” That was good news, I told myself. If he knew about my dad, and maybe even about Ellie, if he had any sense of my job, and what it was like to get torn apart in public, maybe he’d understand why pills were so seductive . . . and he’d know that someone who was managing that kind of life, keeping all those balls in the air, was clearly not someone who required this kind of facility.

“He told me about your father, yes. And the incident at your daughter’s school?” His voice lifted, turning the sentence into a question.

I winced, feeling my face go pale at the memory. “That was awful. I had a glass of wine with a friend after I’d taken my medication.” I congratulated myself for the use of the phrase “my medication,” even though I knew the pills I took had been bought online rather than prescribed.

“I’m sure you know that David is very concerned. About your safety, and also your daughter’s.”

“That was a terrible day. What happened—what I did—it was awful. But I would never do anything like that again.” My sinuses were burning, my eyes brimming with unshed tears. “I love my daughter. I’d never hurt her.”

“Sometimes, in our addiction, we do things we’d never, ever do if we were sober.” His voice was low and soothing, like the world’s best yoga teacher. “David also said there was an incident with your business? The misappropriation of some funds?”

I sat up straight. How did Dave even know about that? “Th-that was a clerical error,” I stammered. “I was just being careless. It was the end of a week from hell; I was trying to get my parents’ financial stuff over to our accountant so they could admit him at the assisted-living place . . .” I shut my mouth. The thing with Ellie had been a mistake. The thing with the money—another mistake. The word “unmanageable” was floating around in my head with dismaying persistence. I pushed it away. I was managing. I was managing fine.

“Have any authorities been involved?” asked Nicholas. “The police? The Department of Youth and Family Services?” I shook my head. “Teachers are mandated reporters, and normally, in a case like that, they’d be obligated to tell someone at DYFS what was going on.” He gave me a serious look. “You’re very lucky that no one got hurt . . . and that you still have custody of your daughter.”

I felt sick as I nodded numbly, accepting the reality of how badly I’d fucked up. They could have taken Ellie away. I could have gone to jail.

“You’re an intelligent woman,” said Nicholas. “I think that if you’re here, if you agreed to come here, even if there were extenuating circumstances, probably a part of you thinks you need to be here.”

I opened my mouth to say No way. Then I made myself think. An intelligent woman, Nicholas had said. What would an intelligent woman do under these circumstances? Would she resist; would she fight; would she argue and continue to insist that she didn’t have a problem and that she didn’t belong? Or would she fake compliance? Would she nod and agree, march to meetings and activities with the rest of the zombies, eat the crappy cafeteria food and drink the Kool-Aid? If I did all that, if I toed the line and recited the slogans and—I glanced at the poster on Nicholas’s wall—made a searching and fearless moral inventory of myself, I could probably get out of here in a week. Two weeks, tops.

“You know what?” I said. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe there was a part of me that knew it was time to stop. I was concerned about how many I was taking. I was concerned that I needed to keep taking more and more to feel the same way. Then I was worried about having to take them just to feel normal, and always worrying about whether I had enough, and if I was going to run out, and which doctor I could call to get more. And I didn’t . . .” I swallowed hard around the lump in my throat, letting Nicholas hear the catch in my voice. “I didn’t want to be all spaced out around my daughter. She deserves a mom who’s there for her.”

“Had you made attempts to stop before?” Nicholas’s voice was so calm, so quiet. Did learning to talk that way require special training?

I shook my head, thinking about that afternoon at Stonefield, Mrs. Dale wrestling the car keys away from me, telling me that I wasn’t safe to drive my own daughter, and how I’d sworn to myself that I would quit, or at least stop taking so much. I thought about that terrible AA meeting the next morning, and how by noon that day I’d been right back in the bathroom, staring at my face in the mirror as I shook pills into my hand. In spite of my best intentions, and the very real threat of being exposed or shamed or worse, I hadn’t even been able to make it halfway through one day without a pill.

Nicholas pushed a box of tissues across the desk. “What are you feeling?”

“I don’t know,” I said, and swiped at my face. “I’m not feeling well.”

“That’s completely understandable. You’re still going through withdrawal.”

“I feel so stupid,” I blurted. “I’ve never been in trouble my whole life, you know? I’ve been successful. I’m good at my job. I have a beautiful little girl. I had everything I wanted. And now . . .” Now I’m a drug addict. The words rose in my head. I shoved them away. I wasn’t. I wasn’t. I was just having a little problem. I was experiencing technical difficulties, like they said on TV.

“I’m worried about being here,” I said. I figured this was exactly what someone who’d come to a place like this would say. It also happened to be the truth. “My mom is staying with us, but, really, she’s not going to be much help. My husband works full-time, and I’m the only one who can write my blog posts. There’s not, like, a substitute I can call in.”

“You’re going to be surprised at how people step up,” said Nicholas.

I shook my head, brushing tears off my cheeks. I made myself take a deep, slow breath. What was the stupid slogan I’d seen on the church basement wall? “One Day at a Time.” I would get through this place, one day at a time. I would fake contrition, pretend acceptance, act like I bought every bit of the Higher Power hooey, and sort out the rest of it when I was back home. I sniffled, wiped my face again, and gave Nicholas a brave look. “I don’t suppose you have massages here,” I said, feeling the tiredness, the sickness of withdrawal, the sadness that had colored everything gray settle inside me.

“Every other week, we have someone come in.” He leaned forward to match my posture and kept his voice low. “I can’t promise you it’s going to rival what you’d get at Adolf Biecker.” I suppressed a smile. Somehow he’d landed on my favorite Philadelphia salon, the one I never told my mother I patronized, because she operated on the assumption that anyone named Adolf was a Nazi.

“And in our common room, you’ll find any number of board games.” He smiled, then made a show of looking around, making sure we were alone. “You haven’t lived until you’ve played Jenga with someone having DTs. We’re talking guaranteed victory.”

I smiled in spite of myself. Then I remembered my mission. “I want to make a phone call,” I said. “Michelle said I needed permission from my counselor, but I don’t have one yet, and I need to tell my daughter . . .” I felt the lump swelling in my throat again, remembering how I must have looked in the throes of withdrawal. “I want to tell her that I miss her, and that I’m thinking about her. I want her to know I’m okay.”

“I don’t think that should be a problem,” he said, and scribbled something on the back of a business card. “You can use the phones behind the main desk back in Residential. And you have my permission to skip drum circle, if you’re still feeling woozy.”

Drum circle? “I am,” I said, grateful that not everyone here was a robot who’d treat me like a junkie. “Two other things. I’m supposed to be on TV next week.” I tried to sound casual, as if I were the kind of woman who was on TV so regularly that mentioning it was akin to saying that I was the snack mom for that weekend’s six-and-under soccer game. The Newsmakers on Nine people, perhaps unsurprisingly, had asked me back, this time to talk about abstinence-only sex ed in public schools. “And my daughter’s birthday party is on the fourteenth, and I can’t miss it.” That, I decided, would be my endgame. I’d be out of here in time for Ellie’s birthday party. I would meet her at BouncyTime, where she’d asked to have her party (in hindsight, she had decided the giant slide was the most fun she’d ever had in her entire life), and then, when the party was over, I’d load the trunk of the Prius with presents and leftover pizza, and we’d drive back home.

Nicholas steepled his fingers and rested his chin on top of them. “That,” he said, “might be a problem.”

“I can skip the TV thing,” I said, eager to show that I was a reasonable woman, able to compromise. “But I can’t miss Ellie’s birthday.”

“Normally, twenty-eight days is twenty-eight days. It’s your time to focus on yourself.” When he saw the look on my face, his voice softened. “Your daughter is going to have other birthdays. She probably won’t even remember you weren’t at this one.”

I gave him a thin smile. “You don’t know my daughter.”

“Well, I won’t tell you we’ve never made exceptions.” He turned to his computer, tapped at the keyboard. “It looks like you’re going to be in Bernice’s group. Why don’t you mention it to her, see what she says.”

“Okay. When will I meet her?”

“Monday.”

Monday? I blinked in disbelief. Today was Thursday, and I wasn’t seeing a therapist until Monday? I filed that factoid away for the letter to the director of Meadowcrest that I was already composing in my head.

“All I’d suggest is that you keep an open mind,” Nicholas said. “I know you’re not in the best place physically to process a lot of new information, but just listen as much as you can.”

I got up, with the card in my hands . . . and then, before I could stop myself, I blurted the question that had kept me awake for months. “What if this doesn’t work? What if I can’t stop?”

“Honesty, willingness, and open-mindedness,” said Nicholas. “You’re being honest already, telling me what’s scaring you. Are you willing to try? And keep an open mind about twelve-step fellowships?”

I looked out the window—gathering clouds, trees stretching their budding branches toward the sky, shadows flickering across the grounds. Girls strolled along the path, carrying what I now knew were copies of The Big Book, and they didn’t look like drunks and junkies, just regular people, leading ordinary lives.

Across the desk, Nicholas was still looking at me, waiting for my answer. “I don’t think I believe in God,” I finally said.

He smiled. “How cheesy would it sound if I told you that God believes in you?”

For what seemed like the first time since I’d landed in this dump, I smiled. “Pretty cheesy.”

“For a lot of beginners, their Higher Power is the group itself—it’s the other people working toward the same goal, supporting your sobriety.”

I pointed out the window at a guy I’d glimpsed from the waiting room. He had pierced ears and a tattooed neck, and wore a baseball cap pulled low over his brow. His sweatshirt hung midway down his thighs, his jeans sagged off his hips, and his enormous, unlaced basketball shoes looked big as boats. “Does he get to be my Higher Power?”

Nicholas followed my finger. “Maybe not him specifically.” He squeezed my shoulder. “Lunchtime,” he said. “Hang in there. I know this part is hard. Just try to keep an open mind. Try to listen.”

I nodded as if I was listening, as if I believed every word he’d told me, and walked back across the campus, taking care to stay on the women’s path. Inside Residential, all the women were lined up again, in front of a window from which a small, plump, dark-skinned woman with bobbed black hair and big, round glasses was dispensing medications.

“Boy, did you miss all the fun,” said Mary. “We had to figure out a way to get the horse to jump over a puddle.”

“Fucking bullshit,” Aubrey muttered. “How is leading around a horse on a rope supposed to help me not shoot dope?”

“You are a poet!” said Mary. “I bet you didn’t know it!”

Aubrey snorted, then gazed down balefully at her mud-caked feet. “These fucking boots are ruined.” In front of the window, a woman gulped her pills, then opened her mouth wide and waggled her tongue at the nurse.

“How desperate do you have to be,” I wondered, “to convince someone to save their saliva-coated pill for you?”

“Just wait,” Aubrey said. “When you’ve only slept for two hours a night six days in a row, you’ll give anything for that pill.” She banged a boot heel against the wall, sending a shower of flaked dirt onto the carpet.

“Aubrey F., that’s a demerit,” called the teenage boy behind the desk. I wondered what it meant, and made a mental note to find out later. Aubrey rolled her eyes and, when he turned back to the desk, shot him the finger. Mary giggled as the cafeteria doors swung open, releasing the smell of detergent and deep fryer, and we filed in for lunch.

TWENTY

“So listen,” said Aubrey, after we’d gathered our chicken fingers, Tater Tots, and canned corn and taken a seat at one of the long cafeteria tables. “Do you think . . .” She twirled a lock of hair around her finger.

“No,” Mary said immediately. She was cutting her chicken fingers into cubes, dipping each cube into ranch dressing, and then popping them in her mouth, one after another.

“But he’s in rehab, too!” Aubrey stabbed an entire chicken strip, doused it in ketchup, and held it aloft on her fork as she nibbled. “If I think he’s not gonna stay sober, doesn’t that mean that I’m not gonna make it, either?”

“I’m not saying you can’t give him a chance,” said Mary. “Remember what they said back in the Cold War? ‘Trust but verify’?”

Aubrey dunked her chicken back into the ketchup slick. “Like I remember the Cold War.”

Mary turned to me, the light glinting off her glasses as the chain swung against her bosom. “Aubrey’s boyfriend is in rehab, too. She’s trying to decide whether to see him again when she’s done here.” Over the younger woman’s head, Mary mouthed the words Bad idea.

I looked at Aubrey’s bruised arms. “This would be the guy who did that to you?”

Aubrey gave a shamefaced nod.

“Oh, Aubrey. Why would you even think of going back to someone who hurt you like that?”

She mumbled something I couldn’t hear.

“What?”

She raised her head. “We’ve got a kid,” she said defiantly. “A little boy.” She flipped her white plastic binder so I could see a snapshot of a toddler centered in the plastic cover, a beaming toddler with fine blond hair and two bottom teeth and a slick of drool on his ruddy red chin.

I felt my heart clench. This child, who couldn’t possibly be a day over eighteen, had a baby? She’d had a baby with a drug addict who beat her?

Mary reached for her hands across the table. “What kind of life is that for Cody?” she asked. “Do you want him to grow up thinking that men push women around? Choke them? Hit them?”

“It only happens when he’s high,” Aubrey protested.

“But you told us he’s high all the time,” Mary said.

“Well, but maybe if he goes to rehab and takes it seriously this time . . .”

“Who’s got the baby now?” I asked.

“Justin’s mom. That’s who we were living with. Me and Justin and Cody.”

A recovery coach—I’d learned that’s what the khaki-clad teenagers who seemed to be running Meadowcrest were called—tapped Aubrey’s shoulder. “They need you in Detox,” he said. Aubrey cleared her tray. We watched her go.

“I’ll pray for her,” Mary said, and touched the gold cross around her neck before returning to her chicken. “Not that I’m judging,” she said, “but I’m not sure Aubrey has the equipment she needs to make better choices.”

Another recovery coach, a girl with elfin features and delicate, pointed ears exposed by a cropped haircut, tapped my shoulder. “Allison W.? There’s a phone free, if you want to make your call.”

I hurried out of the cafeteria, clutching the card Nicholas had given me, the bright, coppery taste of pennies and fear in my mouth as I dialed.

“Hi, Mom. It’s Allison.”

“Oh, Allie . . .” She sounded—big surprise—like she was going to cry. “Hold on,” she said, before the sobs could start. “Ellie’s been wanting to talk to you.”

I waited, sweating, my heart beating too hard, my lips creased into a smile, thinking that if I looked happy, even fake-happy, I would sound happy, too. Finally, I heard heavy breathing in my ear.

“Mommy? Daddy says you are in the HOSPITAL!”

My insides seemed to collapse at the sound of her voice, everything under my skin turning to dust. Keep it together, I told myself. At least “hospital” was better than “rehab,” even if it wasn’t as good as “business trip,” which was what I’d been hoping for. “Hi, honey. I’m in a kind of hospital. It’s a kind of place where mommies go to rest and get better.”

“Why do you need to REST? You sleep all the TIME. You are always taking a NAP and I have to be QUIET.” She paused, and then her voice was grave. “Are you sick?”

“Not sick like that time you had an earache, or when Daddy had the flu. It’s a different kind of sick. So I’m just going to stay here until I’m all better and the doctors say I can come home.”

“How many days?” Ellie demanded.

“I’m not sure, El. But I’m going to try very hard to be there for your party, and I’ll be able to talk to you on the phone, and I can send you letters.”

“Can you send me a present? Or some candy or a pop?”

I smiled. Maybe it was good that she didn’t seem shattered—or, really, fazed in the slightest. Or maybe this was just her typical compensation, the way she’d try to make my father, and Hank, and now me, feel better about our screwups.

My job, I decided, was not to scare her. Let her think Mommy had some version of an earache or the flu, something that wasn’t fatal and that the doctors knew how to fix.

“What dress are you wearing?” I asked.

“New Maxi.” New Maxi was a pink-and-white-patterned maxi dress, not to be confused with Old Maxi, which I’d bought her at the Gap last summer. “Grandma does NOT make my dresses FIGHT. She says they’re supposed to all get along. But I ask you, where’s the fun in THAT?” Ellie demanded.

I smiled and made a noise somewhere between laughter and a sob, then sneezed three times in a row. “Not much fun at all, really.”

“But she said we could get a pedicure. AND that I could get a JEWEL on my toes.”

“Well, aren’t you lucky?”

“Grandma is AWESOME,” Ellie said . . . which was news to me. “And she let me have noodles for two nights!” The recovery coach tapped my shoulder and, when I looked up, pointed at her watch.

“I love you and I miss you,” I said. “You are my favorite.”

“I KNOW I am,” she trumpeted. “I KNOW I am your favorite!”

“Is Daddy there?” I asked.

Ellie sounded indignant. “Daddy is at WORK. It’s the middle of the DAYTIME.”

“I will call you when I can, and I’m going to write you a letter as soon as we say goodbye. Listen to Grandma and Daddy, and eat your growing foods, and make your bed in the morning, and floss your teeth.”

“I have to go now. Sam & Cat is on!” There was a thump, the muffled sound of voices, and then my mom was on the line.

“How . . . how are you doing?”

“As well as I can, I guess.”

“Don’t worry about anything. Everything here is going well.”

“Really?” I’d braced myself for a litany of complaints, bracketed by When will you be home? and laced with plenty of implied How could yous, but my mother sounded . . . cheerful? Could that be?

“You just take care of yourself. Everything’s under control. We’ve got . . .” There was a brief pause. “Let’s see, gymnastics today, is that right?”

“TUMBLING!” Ellie shouted in the background.

“And then Sadie’s birthday party on Saturday, and Chloe’s birthday party on Sunday . . .”

“I have presents for them in the downstairs closet.”

“Yes. We found them, and we made cards. You just take care of yourself . . .” Almost imperceptibly, I heard her voice thicken. “We’ll see you when we can.”

“Thanks, Mom. Thanks for everything.” I hung up the phone and sat there, teary-eyed and sneezing, as the recovery coach tapped my shoulder and, on the other side of the desk, a guy with tears tattooed on his cheeks shouted for Seroquel.

“You know, there’s a seven-day blackout,” said Miss Timex. “You won’t be talking to anybody again until that’s over.”

I didn’t answer. I’d already decided that the khaki brigade wasn’t worth wasting my breath on. Nicholas would be my go-to guy.

“You need to join your group,” she told me as I walked past the desk.

“Nicholas said I could lie down if I wanted.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Are you not feeling well?”

“I feel awful,” I said, and followed her as, sighing heavily, she walked me down the hall and unlocked the room where I’d woken up that morning.

I hung the handful of items that needed hangers in the gouged and battered freestanding wardrobe. Then I pulled a sheet of paper from the notebook I’d been issued and wrote Ellie a note. What do you call a grasshopper with a broken leg? Unhoppy! I love you and miss you and will see you soon. I drew a heart, a dozen X’s and O’s, then wrote MOM.

After I’d emptied my duffel bag, I went through my purse. My plan had been to curl up with a novel and try to make the time go by, but my e-reader, like my wallet and phone, was gone. I marched back out to the desk.

“Nothing but recovery-related reading,” said Wanda, my People magazine–loving friend. She looked left and right before mouthing the word Sorry.

“Is there a library?”

“You can buy approved reading materials in the gift shop. But it’s only open on Monday, Tuesday, and Friday mornings, and I think maybe Sunday afternoons.”

That figured. I remembered a New York Times story about rehabs from a few years ago. Most of them were private businesses, some were run by families, and all of them were for-profit . . . and the profits they turned were jaw-dropping. It wasn’t enough that they were milking patients and insurance companies for upwards of a thousand dollars a day so we could eat crappy cafeteria food, sleep in rooms that made Harry Potter’s under-the-staircase setup look like a Four Seasons suite, and be lectured about our selfishness by old men in polyester. We also had to pay what were undoubtedly inflated prices for recovery-related literature.

“You can read The Big Book,” she said, and handed me a copy of a squat paperback with a dark-blue cover. No words, no title on the cover, just the embossed AA logo.

I carried it back to my room, lay on the bed, and began reading, starting at the beginning, then flipping randomly. The Big Book was first published in 1939, and it didn’t take me long to realize that it was in desperate need of an update. The prose was windy, the sentences convoluted, the slang hopelessly dated (I snickered at a reference to “whoopee parties,” whatever those were). Worse, the working assumption, in spite of a footnote stating otherwise, seemed to be that all boozers were men. There was a blog post in that, for sure; maybe a whole series of them. If the Twelve Steps were the order of the day, and they were still geared toward middle-class, middle-aged white guys, how were women (not to mention non-white people, or gay people) expected to get better?

I kept reading. From what I could tell, in order to get sober the AA way, you had to have some kind of spiritual awakening . . . or, as the gassy prose of “The Doctor’s Opinion” put it, “one feels that something more than human power is needed to produce the essential psychic change.” So you got sober by finding God. And if you weren’t a believer? I flipped to the chapter called “We Agnostics,” and found that AA preached that if you didn’t believe, you were lying to yourself, “for deep down in every man, woman, and child is the fundamental idea of God. It may be obscured by calamity, by pomp, by worship of other things, but in some form or other it is always there.”

So my choices were God and nothing. I shut the book, feeling frustrated. A few minutes later, Aubrey stuck her head through my doorway. “We need to go to Share.”

I consulted my binder and made my way to the art therapy room. Three round tables had been pushed to the walls and two dozen folding chairs were arranged in a semicircle, with women seated in most of them. I took a seat between Mary and Aubrey.

“Good afternoon, Meadowcrest!” called the middle-aged woman sitting behind a desk at the center of the semicircle. A moderator, I figured, except she wasn’t wearing khaki. Her laminated nametag hung on a pink cord, instead of a plain black one. Her name, according to her tag, was Gabrielle.

“Good afternoon!” the group called back.

“Is this anyone’s first community meeting?”

After Mary looked at me pointedly, I raised my hand. “Hi, I’m Allison.” When this was met with silence, I muttered, “Pills.”

“Hi, Allison!” the room chorused.

“Welcome,” said Gabrielle, who then began reading from the binder. “Here at Meadowcrest, we are a community.” Just like Stonefield, I thought. And probably just as expensive. “Is there any feedback?” Silence. “Responses to yesterday’s kudos and callouts?” More silence. “Okay, then. Today we’re going to hear from Aubrey. Aubrey, are you ready to share?”

Aubrey crossed her skinny legs, tucked stray locks of dyed hair behind her small ears, and licked her lips. “Hi, um, I’m Aubrey, and I’m an addict.”

“Hi, Aubrey!”

She lifted one little hand in a half wave. “Hi. Um, okay. So I was born in Philadelphia in 1994 . . .”

Oh, God. In 1994 I’d been in college.

“My parents were both alcoholics,” Aubrey continued, twirling a strand of blonde hair around one finger. “They split up when I was two, and I lived with my mom and my stepdad.” She took a deep breath, pulling her knees to her chest. “I guess the first time he started abusing me, I was five. I remember he came into my bed, and at first he was just snuggling me. I liked that part. He said I was his special girl, and that he loved me more than he loved Mommy, that I was prettier, only we couldn’t tell Mommy; it had to be our secret.”

I started to cry as Aubrey went into the details of what happened for the first time the year she turned six, and kept happening until she was fourteen and moved out of the house and in with a boyfriend of her own, who was twenty-two and living in his parents’ basement. How at first pot and vodka made the pain of what was happening go away, and how pills were even better, and how heroin was even better than that.

By the time Aubrey moved from snorting dope to shooting it, I was crying so hard it felt like something had ruptured inside me. Tears sheeted my face as her boyfriend turned abusive, as she moved in with her estranged father, who stole her money and her drugs, as she got pregnant and delivered an addicted baby when she was only seventeen.

Lurid and awful as it was, Aubrey’s story turned out to be dismayingly typical as my week crawled by. During every “Share” session, twice each day, a woman would talk about how her addiction had happened. Typically, the stories involved abuse, neglect, unplanned pregnancies, dropping out of school, and running away from home. There were boyfriends who hit; there were parents who looked the other way. Instead of being the exception, rape and molestation were the rule.

My mom’s new husband. My sister’s boyfriend. The babysitter (female). The big boy with the swimming pool who lived at the end of our street. I listened, crying, knowing how badly these girls had been damaged, and how pathetic my own story sounded. What would happen when it was my turn to share? Could I say that the stress of motherhood, writing blog posts, coping with a faltering marriage, and aging parents, parents who maybe weren’t the greatest but had never hit me and certainly had never molested me, had driven me to pills? They’d laugh at me. I would laugh at me.

On my third day at Meadowcrest, a woman named Shannon told her story. Shannon was different from the other girls. She was older, for one thing, almost thirty as opposed to half-past teenager, and she was educated—she talked about her college graduation, and made a reference to graduate school. She’d lived in Brooklyn, had wanted to be a writer, had loved pills in college and had discovered, in the real world, that heroin was cheaper and could make her feel even better.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TWENTY-ONE

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

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

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

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

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

“You’re dope-sneezing!”

“What?”

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

I tried to remember and couldn’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I shrugged. “Fine, I guess.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“On top of the painkillers,” Bernice said.

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

“So you signed yourself in?”

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

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

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

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

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

“My husband found out what I’d been doing. About buying the pills online,” I began. I told them about the night I’d spent awake, my laptop heating my thighs, gobbling pills one after another until they were all gone. Heads nodded as I described how frantic, how terrified, how awful I’d felt, knowing I’d come to the end of my stash, with no idea how to get more. I told them about taking a cab to the doctor’s office in the strip mall, where, as Bernice put it, “you found some quack to give you Suboxone.” Her penciled-in eyebrows ascended. “Because replacing one drug with another is a great idea and nothing could possibly go wrong there, am I right?”

I didn’t answer. I’d already figured out that Meadowcrest took a dim view of Suboxone. There were rehabs that would use other opiates to help addicts through withdrawal, but I hadn’t landed at one of them.

“So here you sit.”

“Here I sit,” I repeated, and wondered, again, what was happening at home. How was Ellie getting to sleep each night, without me to read her three books and sing her three songs, and give the ritual spritz of monster spray? How was she getting dressed, without me to make her sundresses fight? Had Sarah posted anything on Ladiesroom explaining my absence, or had she found a substitute mom-and-marriage columnist? How was Dave managing with my mother? Was she getting to Eastwood to see my dad? Had he gotten any worse? I pictured Dave having a long lunch with his work wife, at a cozy table for two at the pub near the paper, my husband pouring out his heart as L. McIntyre listened sympathetically, nodding and making comforting noises while she mentally decorated my still-empty house, the one that would be her blank canvas once I’d been dispensed with and she’d moved in.

“What’s going on with the husband?” asked Bernice. I felt my eyes widen. Can they read our minds?

“I think he’s got a girlfriend. When I left he had a work wife. I’m thinking she probably got a promotion. But listen,” I said, suddenly desperate to turn the focus from me to someone else, anyone else. “It’s okay. Dave’s a good dad, and he’s got my mom there to help. I’m sure everything’s—”

“No fine!” the room chorused. I shut my mouth. Bernice’s gold bracelets glinted as she wrote in her pad.

“So are you two . . . estranged? Separated?”

“I don’t know what we are,” I admitted. “I can’t get him to talk to me. He wouldn’t do counseling.”

“Did he know about the drugs?” asked Bernice.

I shook my head automatically before I remembered the envelope he’d intercepted; the receipts he’d brandished, the toneless recital in front of the girl in the cubicle the day I’d arrived, with Dave giving dismayingly accurate estimates of how much and how long. “He knew.” I wiped my eyes. I’d cried more in less than a week in rehab than I had in the previous ten years of my life, and it wasn’t like I had a particularly gut-wrenching story to weep over. “I don’t know. We used to be in love, and then we had Ellie, and it was like we turned into just two people running a day care. He was the one who wanted us to live in the suburbs. He went out there and bought a house without my even seeing it. He was going to write a book, so he had this chunk of money. Then the book contract got canceled, and I started earning more, so I was the one picking up the slack there, but it was never part of the plan, you know? The plan was, I’d stay home with the baby, he’d be the breadwinner. Only he wasn’t winning a ton of bread, and my daughter turned out to be kind of hard to deal with sometimes, and now I just feel so unhappy . . .” I buried my face in my hands. “I don’t understand it. I have everything I want, everything I was supposed to want, so why am I so sad?”

“So you used.” the counselor’s voice was gentle.

I nodded. “Yeah.”

“And did it work?”

I nodded, still with my face buried in my hands. “For a while, it felt good. It smoothed out all the rough edges. It made me feel like I could get through my days. But then I was doing so much of it, and spending so much on it, and worrying all the time about where I was going to get more. And I could have hurt my daughter.” I lifted my head. My nose was running; my eyes felt red and raw. I looked at Bernice, her calm face, her kind eyes.

“Allison,” she told me, “you can do this. You are going to be okay.”

“Really?” I sniffled.

“Really really. If you want it. If you’ll do the work. It’ll probably be the hardest thing you’ve ever done in your life. But people do come back. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t see it. I wouldn’t be doing this work if I didn’t see miracles every day.”

I tasted the word “miracle.” More God stuff. But whatever. Just waking up every morning and thinking that my life would be all right without pills, that I could manage work and my parents and Ellie . . . that would be enough.

“Allison W.?” A khaki-bot teenager stood in the doorway. “Michelle wants to see you.”

“Go on,” said Bernice.

“See you tomorrow?” I asked hopefully.

She shook her head. “I was gonna wait until the end of group to tell y’all, but today’s my last day here.”

Unhappy murmurs rippled through the circle. I sank back in my seat, stunned and angry. I finally had a therapist, a therapist I liked, and she was leaving after my first session? “Where are you going?” asked Shannon.

“I’ll be doing outpatient, over in Cherry Hill.” She smiled. “So I might see some of you on the other side.”

“Wait,” I protested. “You can’t leave! I just got here!”

She gave me another smile, although this one seemed more professional than kind. Of course she couldn’t let herself get attached to women she would know for only four weeks, or, in my case, forty-five minutes. “I’m sure they’ll find someone great to replace me.”

There didn’t seem to be time to discuss it. So I shuffled down the hallway behind the recovery coach, yawning enormously. The night before, I’d dropped off at ten and woken up just after midnight, wide-awake and drenched in sweat. I’d taken a shower, put on fresh clothes, and put myself back to bed, trying to get some more sleep, but it hadn’t happened. My thoughts chased one another until I was so frantic and sad that I was sobbing into my pillow, thinking about getting divorced, and what it would do to Ellie, and what single motherhood would do to me. “Can’t you give me Ambien?” I’d asked the desk drone after four hours of that misery. “I have a prescription.”

“Ambien? In here?” the RC on duty, the one everyone called Ninja Noreen for her habit of sneaking into bedrooms and shining her flashlight directly into their eyes during the hourly bed checks, actually snorted at the thought.

“Okay, then something that’s approved for in here.”

“Most alcoholics and opiate users have disrupted sleep. We don’t believe in sleep aids. You’re going to just have to ride this out. Eventually, your body’s clock will reset itself.” They gave me melatonin, a natural sleep aid, which didn’t do a thing, and a CD of ocean sounds to listen to, which was just as ineffective. I was starting to feel like I was going crazy . . . and nobody seemed to care. Dear Ellie, I would write in the middle of another sleepless night, with my notebook on my lap and a towel next to me to wipe away the sweat and the inevitable tears. I miss you so much. I can’t wait to see you. Are you making lots of treats with Grandma? Are you playing lots of Monopoly and Sorry? I would write to her about baking and board games, telling her, over and over, that I missed her and I loved her, all the while wondering how this had happened, trying to find an answer to the only question that mattered: How does a suburban lady who’s pushing middle age end up in rehab? How did this happen to me?

TWENTY-TWO

“I understand you have a television appearance scheduled for Thursday?” Michelle began.

“That’s right.” I’d made an appointment with Michelle to discuss a visit to Newsmakers on Nine, even though I was was half hoping she would tell me I couldn’t do it. I felt so exhausted and on edge that I wasn’t sure I’d make any sense on the air. I also looked lousy. My skin was pale, my face felt drawn, my lips, even my eyelids, were chapped and peeling, and there were huge dark circles under my eyes and a good inch of dark roots showing at the crown of my dyed-and-highlighted head. If I’d harbored thoughts of emerging from rehab tanned and rested and ready to take on the world, those notions had quickly been dispelled. I wouldn’t be all right in twenty-eight days, or six months, or even a year. On my last day of orientation they’d shown us a video called The Brain Disease of Addiction, from which I’d learned that I could look forward to a year to eighteen months of no sleep and mood swings and depression and generally feeling awful. How could I live through that? I was sure the video wasn’t meant to discourage, but I was also sure I wasn’t the only woman who came out of it thinking, Eighteen months? That won’t be happening. Sobriety’s not for me.

“Well, Allison, the team’s been discussing it, and here is what we can offer.” Michelle picked up a pen between two pudgy fingers. “Being out on your own would most likely be too stressful for you at this stage of your recovery.” I felt myself exhale. “However, we can have a sober coach accompany you to the program.”

I held up my hand. “Excuse me? A sober coach?” I thought those were jokes, invented by the tabloids and stand-up comedians.

She nodded. “Someone who can make sure there’s no opportunity for a slip.”

“Who would this sober coach be? And what kind of training would a sober coach have?”

Michelle’s jowls flushed. “Obviously, Allison, we would send you with someone who has a lot of good clean time under her belt.”

“But not a therapist,” I surmised. “Look, some of the RCs are terrific, but some of them might as well be stocking shelves at Wawa for all they care. And none of them have degrees. In anything.”

Michelle plowed on. “We can arrange transportation to the show and have a sober coach accompany you and then bring you back here.”

“Would this cost anything extra?” I knew, from hearing other girls talk, that Meadowcrest cost a thousand dollars a day, and anything extra, from a thirty-minute massage to a family session, cost extra.

“The cost would come to . . .” She scanned the sheet of paper. “Three thousand dollars.”

I stared at her, too shocked to laugh. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

“There’s no need for profanity,” Michelle said primly.

“Three thousand fucking dollars? Yes, there fucking is!”

Michelle gave me a smile as fake as a porn star’s chest. “Why don’t you think about it, Allison?”

I sighed. “I’ll need to call my editor to cancel.”

“Are you eligible for phone passes?”

I had no idea. “Of course I am.”

Michelle scribbled out a pass.

“Just so you know,” I said, “my daughter’s birthday party is on Saturday. I am going to be there.”

Even before I’d finished saying “birthday party,” Michelle was shaking her head.

“I’m sorry, Allison, but the rules are, you need to have had at least six sessions with your counselor before you’re eligible for a day pass. By this Saturday, you’ll only have had three.”

“But that’s not my fault! You guys didn’t even assign me a counselor until I’d been here almost a week!”

Michelle pursed her lips into a simper. “As you know, Allison, we’ve been having some staffing issues.”

“Then don’t you think you need to adjust the rules to reflect that? You can’t require someone to have a certain number of sessions, and then have so few counselors on staff that it’s impossible to hit that number. And I’ve done everything else!” My hands were shaking as I fumbled for the evidence. “Look, here’s my time line of addiction.” I pulled it out of my binder and brandished it in her face. Michelle gave it a skeptical look.

“That’s it, Allison? Just one page?”

“I didn’t use anything until I was in my thirties. Sorry. Late bloomer. But look . . .” I pointed at the page. “I’ve attended every Share and all the in-house AA meetings since I’ve been here. I went to a guest lecture on Sunday, and I’m volunteering in the soup kitchen on Wednesday.” And wouldn’t that be fun. “Listen,” I said, realizing that my speeches were getting me nowhere. “It’s my daughter. She’s turning six. She isn’t going to understand why I can’t be there.”

“Children are more resilient than we give them credit for. I bet your daughter will surprise you.” Michelle looked pleased when she’d shot down my TV appearance. Now she looked positively delighted, as if she could barely contain her glee. I could imagine my hands wrapping around her flabby neck, my fingers sinking into the folds of flesh as I squeezed. I made myself stop, and take a breath, and refocus.

“Michelle. Please. I’m asking you as a mother. As a fellow human being. Please don’t punish my daughter because I’m an addict. Please let me go to her party.”

“The rules are the rules, Allison, and you didn’t do what you needed to in order to get your pass.”

“But you didn’t give me a chance! Aren’t you listening to me? Because of your staffing issues there was absolutely no way I could have met your requirements.”

“I understand that I’m hearing your disease talking. I’m hearing it say, ‘I want what I want, and I want it right now.’ Which is how addicts live their lives. Everything has to be now, now, now.” I was shaking my head, trying to protest, but Michelle kept talking. “We think there’s always going to be someone there to clean up our messes, cover for us, call the boss or the professor, make excuses.”

“I never asked anyone to cover for me. I cleaned up my own messes. I never . . .” Oh, this was impossible. Didn’t she understand that I wasn’t one of those addicts who slept all day and got high all night? Didn’t she realize that, far from making my life unmanageable, the pills were the only thing that gave me even a prayer of a shot at managing?

Michelle kept talking. “In sobriety, we don’t make excuses, and we don’t make other people cover for us. We live life on life’s terms. We take responsibility for our own actions, and our own failures. This was your failure, Allison, and you need to own it.”

Tears were spilling down my cheeks. I’d heard the phrase “seeing red” all my life but never known it was a thing that really happened. As I sat there, a red shadow had descended over my world. My heart thumped in my ears, as loud as one of those person-sized drums you see in marching bands. It took everything I had not to lunge across the desk and hit her.

“I am going to my daughter’s party. I told her I’d be there, and I’m going.”

“Allison—”

“No. We’re done chatting. We’re through.”

Still shaking with rage, I got up, closed the door, went back to my room, and lay on my bed. Okay, I told myself. Think. Maybe I could sneak out the night before the party, climb out of my bedroom window and start walking. Only where? I wasn’t sure where I was, how far away from Philadelphia, whether there were buses or trains. Even if I waited until daylight, I wouldn’t know where to go, or even how long it would take to get there.

I rolled from side to side and wondered what Ellie was doing. When we’d bought the Haverford house, we’d made only one improvement: in Ellie’s room, instead of the standard double-hung windows, I’d had the contractor install a deep, cushioned window seat with built-in bookshelves on either side. It had turned out even better than I’d hoped. The cushions were detachable, and the lid of the seat lifted up for storage. Since Ellie had been too little to read, we’d repurposed the seat as a stage, hanging gold-tassled curtains that Ellie could open with a flourish, building a ticket box out of a shoebox and construction paper and glitter. At night, Ellie’s collection of Beanie Babies and stuffed bears would perform a Broadway revue, singing everything from expurgated selections from The Book of Mormon and Urinetown to Bye Bye Birdie and The Sound of Music . . .

I sat up straight, remembering The Sound of Music. Hadn’t that musical featured a talent show—a show within a show—and hadn’t the von Trapps used the show as cover when they made their escape?

There were talent shows in rehab. I knew that from the Sandra-Bullock-gets-sober film, 28 Days, which they’d shown us. Could that be the answer? Suggest a show, come up with an act, convince Dave that I’d gotten a day pass . . . well. I’d figure out the specifics later, but for now, I could at least see a glimmer of possibility.

TWENTY-THREE

The next day at breakfast, I brought it up, as casually as I could. “You guys all know The Sound of Music, right?”

Blank looks from around the table. “Is it like American Idol?” ventured one of the Ashleys.

“No. Well, actually, you know what? There is a talent competition. See, there’s this big family, and the mother has died, so the father hires a governess.”

The Ashley made a face. “You can’t hire a governess. They have to be elected.”

“No, no, not a governor. A governess. It’s a fancy way of saying babysitter. So anyhow, she takes care of the kids, and the father starts to fall in love with her . . .”

Aubrey immediately launched into a pornographic soundtrack, thrusting her hips as she sang, “Bow chicka bow-wow . . .”

“Cut it out!” I said sternly. “This is a classic!” I remembered Christopher Plummer and Julie Andrews dancing on the veranda, his arms around her tiny waist, her eyes gazing up at him like he was the God she’d failed to find in the convent. “So they fall in love, and the kids, who’ve never gotten more than ten minutes of their father’s time, start to straighten up and fly right. There’s, like, six kids, and one of them’s a sixteen-year-old, and she’s in love with the messenger boy . . .”

“The messenger boy!” Lena snickered. “She needs a man with a real job.” She shook her head. “Ridin’ around on his bus pass, probably. Fuck that shit.”

“Anyhow. The Nazis organize this big talent show, and the Von Trapp Family Singers enter . . .”

“Wait, wait. That’s their name? That’s a terrible name.”

“Well, this was a long time ago,” I said. “Cut them some slack. So who’s into it?”

I looked around the circle. The Ashley was peeling strips of pink polish off of her fingernails. Aubrey was scribbling in her notebook—probably a list of everything she intended to do when they let her go. We all had versions of that list. The women my age wrote about the luxuries we missed, the foods we wanted to eat, the clothes we’d neglected to pack, taking a shower in which the water would not emerge in a lukewarm trickle, reading books where every single story did not involve an identical arc of despair and recovery, or watching made-for-TV movies that did not involve some C-list actor in the grip of either DTs or a divine revelation. The young girls, as far as I could tell, all wanted drugs and sex, typically in that order, often from the same person.

I sat up straight and breathed in from my diaphragm, trying to remember back to high-school choir. “Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens . . . Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens . . . Brown paper packages tied up with strings . . .”

“These are a few of my favorite things!” sang Shannon. She was looking better than she had during Share. Her skin didn’t look as dull, and her hair was shiny. “I used to watch it with my parents. It’s cute!”

“It’s corny,” said Lena.

“But we could change it!” I said. “Like . . .” I thought for a minute. “Dealers on corners and elbows with track marks. Cop cars and dive bars and—”

“Blow jobs in state parks,” said Mary, who immediately clapped her hands over her mouth and giggled.

“Silver-white Beamers, got repo’d last spring. These are a few of my favorite things!” I sang. “When the dog bites! When the cops call! When I’m feeling sad . . . I simply remember my favorite pills, and then I won’t feel so bad.”

Everyone applauded. Mary frowned. “Do you think it glamorizes drug use?”

“Maybe we should do a song about how bad it is,” Shannon offered. “Like, do you guys know Avenue Q? There’s this song called ‘Mix Tape.’ ” She straightened her shoulders and began to sing in a low, pleasant alto. “ ‘He likes me. I think he likes me. But does he like me, like me, like I like him? Will we be friends, or something more? I think he’s interested, but I’m not sure . . .’ ”

She thought for a minute, and then sang, “Piss test. Just failed my piss test. I didn’t know I’d have one . . . but then I did! And I smoked crack. And had some beers. And now I’m sitting here . . . all full of fear!”

Lena’s nose wrinkled. “I dunno. Does everything have to be, like, a musical? What about a Beyoncé video?”

“Sure,” I said, even though my knowledge of Beyoncé videos was limited to the one where she pranced around in a leotard and waved her hand to flash her ring.

“And what about the girls who can’t sing?” asked Mary.

“We could do skits. Like a parody of Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?”

Aubrey looked impressed. “You know that show?”

I frowned. “Dude. I’m old, not dead.” I forked my fingers, fake-gangsta-style. “I’m A-Dub, bitch!”

“I’m ancient,” said Mary, who did not sound upset, as she began to sing. “Gonna take a sentimental gurney . . . Gonna set my heart at ease . . . Gonna ride that gurney down to detox . . . Hope they don’t have bedbugs or fleas . . .”

“Oh, my God, we need to do one about Ed McGreavey!” I said as I joined in the other girls’ applause. “Do you guys know Les Miz?”

“It’s about French revolutionaries,” said Shannon. “And there’s a love triangle . . .”

“And this horrible innkeeper, who puts cat meat in the stew, and overcharges for everything, and steals from the patrons.”

“Does he have fake hair?” asked the Ashley.

“Probably. He’s a revolting human being who takes advantage of the needy,” said Shannon.

“That’s our boy,” said Lena, who’d spent more time with Ed than the rest of us combined.

“Master of the house!” I sang. My voice wasn’t as strong as Shannon’s, but at least I could carry a tune. “Quick to catch your eye! Never wants a passerby to pass him by. Servant to the poor! Butler to the great! Hypocrite and toady and inebriate!” I set down my pen, considering. “Wow. We don’t even really need to change it.”

“What’s an inebriate?” asked one of the girls.

“A drunk.”

“Didn’t Ed do meth?” asked Aubrey.

I shrugged, but Lena was nodding. “Oh, yeah. He came back here weighing eighty pounds and missing all his teeth. He shows a picture at the lecture.”

“Not the one about finding your purpose?” I’d seen that already, and I was certain that if a shot of Ed weighing eighty pounds and minus teeth had been on offer, I’d have remembered it.

“No, no, he does another one. It’s called ‘Finding Your Bottom,’ ” said an Ashley.

I burst out laughing. Mary was laughing, too. “What?” Lena asked.

“ ‘Finding Your Bottom’?” Aubrey asked. “My grandmother always used to say that someone was so stupid he couldn’t find his own ass with both hands and a flashlight.”

“How did Ed find his bottom?” Shannon asked. “Where did Ed find his bottom?”

“He was in San Francisco, giving blow jobs for drug money,” said Lena.

“As one does,” I murmured, and thought, again, how different I was from the drunks and druggies who populated this establishment, and how every anecdote, every personal revelation, every Share, was just another argument in favor of my not being here. Stick it out, I told myself.

“Hey,” I said. “Did you guys see the movie Pitch Perfect? or Mamma Mia? Think there’s anything there? Or, wait! Here’s one for Michelle: If you change your mind, I’m the first in line . . . I’m the one you’ll see . . . No one gets around me!”

“Gonna make some rules to break, have you pee in my cup,” sang a Xanax addict named Samantha, who’d wandered over to our table, drawn by the singing. “Gonna turn my flashlight on, gonna wake you up.”

“I think,” said a girl named Rebecca, who was so quiet that the most I’d heard her do was announce her name in Share, “that we should do a skit about applying to work here. Like, ‘Do you have a heartbeat?’ ”

“Have you been to college?” asked Mary. “No? Do you know what college is?”

“This is never going to happen,” said Lena.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because!” She rolled her eyes. “Do you honestly think they’re going to sit here and let us make fun of them? They’re stupid, but they’re not complete idiots.”

“So we don’t tell them,” I said. “We’ll just spread the word quietly. We’ll tell everyone that we’re holding a talent show in the cafeteria during Meditation after lunch on Saturday.” And then, I thought, when the staffers inevitably got wind of what was going on and hurried to shut it down, I’d stroll out to the parking lot, cool as Captain von Trapp facing down the Nazis, and let Dave drive me to Ellie’s party.

TWENTY-FOUR

“Are you feeling all right?” my new therapist, Kirsten, asked. I nodded, even though I could barely breathe, and I hadn’t been able to eat even a bite of pineapple or a single strawberry for breakfast. Three days ago, she’d asked me who to invite for my family session, the sit-down all the inmates had to endure before Meadowcrest released them from its clutches. I’d put Dave’s name and my mother’s on the list. “Do you want me to get in touch?” Kirsten had asked, and I’d nodded, knowing I wouldn’t be able to handle it if Dave turned me down. Which he did. “He didn’t say why,” Kirsten reported. She was Bernice’s opposite in almost every way—tall and young and white and willowy, with thin silver rings on her fingers and pencil skirts and sensible heels that were supposed to make her look grown-up but instead made her look like a teenager who was trying too hard. “Don’t read too much into it. It doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to be involved in your treatment.”

“Or my life,” I’d murmured, and spent the next two nights of sleeplessness fretting that he’d have divorce papers ready for me as soon as I set foot out of Meadowcrest.

“All it means is that he can’t attend today’s session.”

But why wouldn’t he make it a priority, canceling whatever other interviews or conferences he had planned? What could be more important than helping me?

My mother had agreed to come. At the appointed hour, I’d gotten up and gotten dressed, letting Aubrey help with my hair and makeup. Shannon lent me a cashmere cardigan, and a belt to keep my jeans up—in spite of the starchy food, I’d actually lost weight, mostly because I was too distraught to eat. Mary pulled out her rosary beads and told me she’d be in chapel, praying for me, and even Lena muttered a gruff “Good luck.”

I sat in a chair in Kirsten’s office, legs crossed, trying not to shake visibly as the door opened and my mother, impeccable in the St. John knit suit that I recognized as the one she’d worn to her grand-niece Maddie’s bat mitzvah, walked into the room. She’d gotten her hair styled and set, every trace of gray removed, and it hung in a mass of curling-iron ringlets, each one the same. She’d left it long, even after she’d turned forty, and fifty, and sixty. “Men like to see a woman take her hair down,” she’d told me, even as her own hair got increasingly brittle and thin, with its shine and color coming from a bottle. Her makeup was its typical mask, the same stuff she’d probably been wearing the same way since the 1970s, liquid black eyeliner flicked up at the corner of each lid to make cat eyes, foundation blended all the way down her jawline to her neck, and her preferred Lipglass lipgloss for that lacquered, new-car finish.

But beyond the hair and makeup, there was something different—an alertness to her expression, a confidence as she moved across the room, like she knew she’d make it to the other side without requiring assistance, without bumping into anything or banging her shins on the coffee table. My whole life, my mother had been accident-prone. “Whoops,” I could remember my father saying a thousand times, his hand on her elbow, guiding her away from something sharp, keeping her on her feet.

“What can I get you? Coffee? Water?” Kirsten asked.

“No, thank you,” she said. From her flared nostrils, the way she held her arms tightly against her body and clutched her bag at her side, I could tell that she’d noted the smell of institutional cleaners and cheap, processed food, the RCs with their troubled complexions, the heroin girls with their piercings and tattoos. Maybe she’d even glimpsed Michelle, whose size she would regard as a personal affront. A place full of fuckups, she’d think . . . and here was her daughter among them.

“Hi, Mom.” I wasn’t sure if I should hug her, and she didn’t make any move toward me. “How’s Ellie?”

“Oh, Ellie’s wonderful. She’s playing at Hank’s this morning.” A frown creased her glossy lips. “That boy is always sticky.”

“Hank has allergies.”

“I’m not sure that entirely explains it. Ellie misses you . . .” My mom’s voice trailed off. My eyes filled with tears.

“Why don’t you have a seat,” Kirsten told my mom, giving me a significant look. “And, Allison, remember. Of course you’re concerned about your daughter, but we’re here to focus on you.”

With that, my mother lifted her chin. “How are you?” she asked.

I shrugged. “Well, given the fact that I’m in rehab, not too bad.”

She flinched at the word “rehab.”

“You hadn’t noticed any changes in your daughter?” Kirsten asked. “Allison seemed the same to you?”

My mother doesn’t notice me at all, I thought, as she took a seat and started working the clasp of her handbag, clicking it open, then shut. That wasn’t particularly charitable, or entirely true—my mother noticed me; she just noticed my father much more—but I wasn’t in an especially generous or honest frame of mind. This was the most embarrassing thing I could imagine; worse than the time my mom had been called to school after I’d barfed up all those doughnuts after our birthday breakfast gone wrong, or the time they’d called her in fifth grade after my best friend, Sandy Strauss, and I got in trouble for telling the new girl, a kid whose southern accent was strange to our ears and who had the improbable name Scarlett, that we’d called in to Z-100 and won tickets to a Gofios concert and that she could come with us. Where was Scarlett now? I couldn’t recall her last name, but I could remember her narrow, rabbity face, her watery blue eyes that always looked like she’d just been crying.

“Allison?” I blinked to find Kirsten and my mother both looking at me. “I asked your mother if she’d noticed any changes in your behavior over the past year.”

“You have to remember that my father was diagnosed around that time. I think my mom—well, all of us, really—were focused on him.”

“That doesn’t mean I wasn’t paying attention to you,” my mother said a little sharply. She turned to Kirsten. “I did notice. Especially since I started staying with Allison and Dave. Her moods were . . . a little strange. Sometimes she’d seem sleepy . . . or cheerful, but with an edge to it. Like she could go from being so happy to crying in a minute.”

“I never cried,” I said.

“Allison,” said Kirsten, in her professionally soothing voice, “try to just listen, okay?”

I nodded. But I couldn’t believe that my mother would have the nerve to come in here and try to make it sound like I was the needy one.

Kirsten turned from me to my mother. “The way your daughter’s described it, she was under a tremendous amount of stress.” Kirsten bent, reading from the folder she held open in her lap. “She was working a lot, and taking care of her daughter, and helping you with your husband. He has Alzheimer’s, is that correct?”

My mother nodded wordlessly. Tears slid down her cheeks. Now, I thought, we’d landed on the topic that would take up the rest of the session, the rest of the day, if that was possible. My father, comma, suffering of, and mother’s subsequent agony.

“Are you surprised that Allison ended up in a place like this?” Kirsten asked.

It got so quiet I could hear the clock ticking. Then, unbelievably, my mother shook her head. “No,” she said in a husky whisper. “No, I wouldn’t say I was surprised.”

I opened my mouth, feeling shocked. I wanted to remind her what a good girl I’d been, never skipping school, always turning in my homework, getting a job three weeks after I graduated from Franklin & Marshall, never embarrassing her, never being a burden. But it seemed the shocks were just getting started. My mother asked, “It runs in families, doesn’t it?”

Kirsten nodded. “We know from research that a child who has a parent with an addiction is eight times more likely to develop substance-abuse problems him- or herself.”

I braced myself. I knew what was coming from listening to the other women. Next I’d hear how my mother’s father had been a secret tippler, or how Grandma Sadie had gotten strung out on Mexican diet pills. My mother bent her head, crying harder. “I never meant to hurt her,” she wept. “If I could be here myself . . . if I could take this pain away . . .”

Kirsten passed my mother a box of tissues, an act that was strictly forbidden during normal therapy sessions, on the grounds that being handed a box could derail someone’s epiphany. Her issue, her tissue, the group would chant. My mother grabbed a fistful and wiped her eyes.

“What do you mean, you never meant to hurt Allison?” Kirsten asked. When my mother didn’t answer, I said, “Yeah, I’d like to know what you’re talking about.”

“You don’t remember.” Her voice was dull. “Well, maybe you wouldn’t. You were just four.”

“Remember what? What happened when I was four?” She clicked her purse clasp open, then shut, and I remembered—of course I knew what had happened. The Accident.

“But that didn’t have anything to do with me,” I started to say. My mother, her eyes on Kirsten, started talking at the same time.

“I was in a car accident,” she said. “I was drunk. And Allison was in the car with me.”

My mouth dropped open. My mother kept talking.

“You had your seat belt on, but there were no car seats back then. When . . . when the car . . .” She gulped. “I drove into a telephone pole. You broke your arm.”

My body felt icy. “I don’t remember any of this,” I said, but something tickled at the back of my mind. A whining buzz, hands on my shoulder, a burning smell in the air, a man’s voice saying, “Hold still, and you’ll get a lolly when it’s done.”

My tongue felt thick as I tried to talk. “Did you get arrested?”

She shook her head. “Back then . . . back then it was different. But your father . . .” She buried her face in her hands. “He was so angry he took you away for a week.”

I didn’t remember that, either. “Where did we go?”

“Down the shore. It was the summertime. He must have rented a place, you know, that little cottage in Avalon where we’d go? It belonged to one of the partners at his firm. I never asked, I never knew for sure, but I think he went there. And when he came back, he told me . . . t-told me that if I ever hurt you again, if I ever did anything to put you in danger, that he’d leave me, and he would never come back. He would take you away and I’d never see either one of you again.”

Puzzle pieces clicked into place in my mind. Keys slid into locks. Doors opened, revealing a different world behind them. “So you stopped driving.”

She nodded.

“But you didn’t stop drinking.”

Her eyes welled up again. “I couldn’t,” she whispered. “I tried, so many times. I wanted to. For you. For your father. I wanted to be a good mother, and a good wife, but I . . .” She shook her head. I shut my eyes, remembering scenes from my girlhood. Being seven or eight years old, having a friend sleep over, and telling her to whisper when we got up the next morning. “My mom sleeps late.” But she wasn’t incapacitated. By ten o’clock most mornings, she was at the tennis court . . . and, if she sipped white wine and seltzer all afternoon, I never saw her sloppy, or tipsy, or heard her slur or saw her stumble.

“So you made sure Dad would never get mad at you again.” By acting like a little girl, a bubbleheaded teenager, I thought but did not say, as my mother nodded again.

“And you stayed away from me.”

She looked up, her eyes accusing. “You didn’t need me!”

“What?” I looked at Kirsten, hoping she’d jump in. “What little girl doesn’t need her mother?”

“You were so smart,” said my mom. Her voice was almost pleading. “You could do everything by yourself. You never wanted my help getting dressed, or picking out your clothes, or with your homework. You didn’t want me walking you to school.” She dropped her voice to a whisper. “I felt like you were ashamed of me. Like you knew what I’d done. How stupid and reckless I’d been. You didn’t want anything to do with me.”

I closed my eyes, trying to imagine my mother, my beautiful, distant mother, as an alcoholic, who’d kept this secret for more than thirty-five years. How circumscribed her life must have been. No car. No friends, not real ones, because who could she trust, and how could she talk honestly to anyone? No relationship with me, and a kind of desperate, clingy, please-don’t-leave-me marriage, in which other people—my dad, me—did everything because she didn’t trust herself to do anything. It explained so much.

“Were you ever going to tell me?”

She didn’t hesitate before shaking her head. “How could I have told you that I’d almost gotten you killed? How could you ever forgive me? But now . . .” She lifted her head, looking around. “If I’d known that you were at risk I would have said something. I would have warned you. But I never thought . . .” She shook her head again, and pressed her hands together. I saw that she was trembling, and that there was a fine mist of sweat at her temples, and above her upper lip. She must have wanted a drink so badly. I wondered what it had cost her, to get herself out of bed, and dressed, and all the way out to New Jersey, alone and sober. I wondered if she had a flask in the car, or if she’d tucked one of those airport-sized bottles into her purse, and if she was counting the minutes, the seconds, until she could slip away, into the bathroom or the backseat, to unscrew the lid with slick, shaking hands, to raise the bottle to her lips and find that relief.

“You weren’t like me. You were strong. You had it all figured out.”

“I don’t have anything figured out,” I said. “And I’m not strong.”

“I wonder,” Kirsten said, “if you two might have that in common. The ability to put on a show, where everything looks good from the outside.”

I didn’t answer. Probably, even now, my mom did look fine from the outside. Her makeup was always perfect, her clothing was impeccable, and she had a mantel full of tennis trophies to prove her athletic prowess. But inside she was a wreck, a walking-around mess. Just like me. My mother raised her head. “Allison,” she said, “you need to know that I have never once been impaired around your daughter.”

“Did you quit?” I asked.

She bent her head. “When your dad was diagnosed, I made myself cut back to just two glasses of wine at night,” she said. “I want to help you, Allison.”

“Was it hard?” I asked. Could you really go from being a fullblown alcoholic to drinking just two glasses of wine at night? Was my mom telling the truth? There was no way of knowing.

“I’ll do whatever I can to help you,” she said. “Only please.” She was crying again, but her voice was steady. “You have to stop taking those pills. You have to try. For Ellie’s sake. You can’t hurt her, and you can’t waste your life hiding, the way I did, pretending that things are okay, being drunk or on pills or whatever, and not being a real mother, and not really living your life.” She got to her feet, crouched in front of me, and grabbed both of my hands in her icy ones. Up close, I could see what I hadn’t seen, hadn’t wanted to see, my whole life. It was there in the web of wrinkles around her eyes, the way her lip liner didn’t strictly conform to her lips and, more than that, the faint sweet-and-sour fruity smell that exuded from her pores. I’d never given a name to that odor, any more than I’d given a name to Dave’s scent, or Ellie’s. People had their own smells, that was all. But now it was like I was getting blasted with it, like I’d dived head first into a vat of cheap white wine, in which my mother had been marinating for decades.

I’d never noticed. I’d never even guessed. Even though the clues were all there, I had never put them together to come up with the inescapable conclusion. What was wrong with me, I wondered, as my mother squeezed my hands and held on hard. Was I just as selfish as she was, that she’d been sick and suffering, and I’d never seen?

“Promise me, Allison.”

“I never want to be in a place like this again,” I said. It was the most I could give her and not be lying.

“That’s a start,” Kirsten said.

TWENTY-FIVE

I staggered out of the room, a minute after my mother’s departure. I hadn’t remembered the Accident when I was a girl, but I now felt like I’d been in one in that little room, like a bus had run me over and left me flattened on the pavement.

“Drink a lot of water,” Kirsten said. “Breathe. It’s a lot to take in.”

I tottered along the women’s path, head down lest I accidentally make eye contact with the men, and snuck a glance at the visitor’s parking lot. My mother’s car and driver would be waiting. She could go out into the wide world, wherever she wanted to go. Soon, I would have that freedom, too. Where would I go? What would I do?

It was a sticky June day, the drone of bumblebees and lawn mowers in the humid air that sat like a wet blanket on my limbs and my shoulders. The sun blazed in a hazy blue-gray sky, and the air itself looked thick with pollen that dimmed all the colors, making it fuzzy and faint. Somewhere there were kids splashing in swimming pools, dads underneath umbrellas, streaming the game on their phones, moms dispensing sunscreen and sandwiches and saying Oh, won’t that hit the spot to offers of a cold beer or some white wine or a vodka-and-cranberry, tart and refreshing, just the thing for a hot summer day.

Behind the administration building I found a little garden, overgrown with weeds, the borders of the flower beds ragged, squirrels chittering in the dogwood tree, a splintery wooden bench in its center. I sat on the bench, staring numbly straight ahead. I felt like I’d been looking at one of those optical illusions. Examine it one way you’d see a beautiful young woman, the smooth lines of her chin and cheeks, the ripe curls of her hair. Then you’d blink or tilt your head and realize you were seeing a withered crone, her nose a tumorous hump, the young girl’s hat really the old woman’s rat’s nest of hair. The world I had once known did not exist, had never existed. Instead of the Tale of the Childlike Mom, the Distant Dad, and the Love They Shared, I had, instead, to consider the Story of the Drunk Mother, the Dad Who Could Never Trust Her, and the daughter who was an endless source of worry for both of them.

Had I known? On some level, I must have at least guessed. All those afternoon naps in her bedroom with the shades drawn . . . and yet she’d emerge every morning in her tennis whites or her golf clothes to drink a little glass of orange juice (wheatgrass juice in the 1990s) and go off to her game. There was that ever-present tumbler full of wine and seltzer . . . but I never saw her take a sip of anything stronger. She smoked, but so did plenty of moms back then. She didn’t drive, but that didn’t seem worse than other parents’ idiosyncracies: Dorothy Feld’s mother had weighed three hundred pounds until she got her stomach stapled; Kurt Dessange’s dad wore a toupee that looked like it was made out of spray-painted pine needles.

“All those years,” I said out loud. Years of lying, years of hiding. Years of her knowing she wasn’t living right, that she wasn’t the mother or the wife she could have been. Years of loneliness, because those kinds of secrets you couldn’t tell, not to your own mother or sister or your very best girlfriend. I don’t love my husband. I’m having an affair. Sometimes I can’t stand my children. I could imagine saying these things, but I’m a secret alcoholic? I drove drunk with my daughter in the car? I want to stop and can’t? Who could tell another soul things like that? Who would react with anything other than horror?

You’re only as sick as your secrets. Another little slogan I’d picked up. Not to mention that whole fearless and searching moral inventory, where you’d list all your faults and then tell someone else exactly what you’d done wrong. “That sounds horrible,” I’d told Wanda at the desk, after she’d finished her whispered recap of the previous night’s Bachelor episode. “No, no,” she’d said, with a kind of crazy glow in her eye, “it’s the most liberating thing you can imagine! It makes you free!”

“Free,” I croaked. My mom had never been free. She’d lived her whole life under the yoke of her secrets, with a man who probably desperately wanted her to get better but didn’t know how to fix her, or how to help. So what were my chances? Where did that leave me? Was it possible that I wasn’t really an addict, that I could take pills, just more carefully than I’d taken them before? Or was it like everyone in here said, that the only path the pills would put me on would end in jails, institutions, and death? Half-measures availed us nothing, said The Big Book. We stood at the turning point. Well, here I was. Which way would I turn?

One afternoon on our honeymoon in Mexico, Dave and I had gone fishing. It had been one of those perfect days: not too hot, with a crisp breeze, the sun glinting off the waves’ surfaces, and the fish shoving one another out of the way for the privilege of swallowing our hooks. We’d caught half a dozen striped bass in just four hours on the water. Then, while we’d sat back (with beers, I remembered, and the tortas I’d bought in a little panadería on the street), the mate had set up a table and two twenty-gallon buckets of water near the back of the boat and expertly gutted each fish, stroking the blade down the center of their bellies and deftly sliding out their guts. I felt like that now, like someone had sliced me open and dumped out my insides, then stitched me back together and set me on my feet.

“So how’d it go?” Lena asked at lunch, which was manicotti, limp noodles and rubbery cheese in a meat sauce that made you sorry for the cows that had given up their lives to enter the food chain. Just the smell turned my stomach. I’d made myself a cup of tea and sat, shivering, in my customary spot between Aubrey and Mary.

“Are you all right?” asked Shannon.

“Clearly, she isn’t,” said Mary. “Just look at the poor girl!” She squeezed my shoulders. “Honey, what’s wrong?”

“What did they say?” asked Aubrey. “Were you, like, molested by an uncle or something?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said Mary.

“Well, it happens,” I heard Aubrey reply.

“Not that,” I said, in a voice I barely recognized as my own. “It turns out that my mother’s an alcoholic.” I took a breath. “It explains a lot.”

“You didn’t know?” asked Lena.

“I feel pretty stupid,” I admitted.

“Hey,” said Lena, “addicts lie.”

I nodded, wondering what that said about my mother, and what it said about me. She’d lied, but I’d never noticed, never tried to figure it out. I thought of that day I’d gotten lost in Avalon when I was little, how the streets and the store and the sidewalks and the sand had all looked different, completely different, like they belonged in a world I couldn’t even imagine, and how the walls between this world and that one were so thin. One slip, one misplaced foot, one secret out in the open and you’d go crashing through the boundaries and find yourself in that other, unimagined world where everything was different, where everything was wrong. I made myself drink my tea, and a glass of water, and follow the group out onto the Meadowcrest lawn, where we sat in a circle and listened to a man with a flowing gray beard and a woman young enough to be his daughter who was probably his girlfriend bang on African drums and tell us that music had the power to heal. Eventually, I opened my notebook again, flipping through pages of jokes and songs that would get me to my daughter. Eyes on the prize, I told myself, and bent my head and began to write.

TWENTY-SIX

Three days after I came up with the concept of a talent show at our table, we had more skits and songs than we could use. The entire women’s campus had caught talent-show fever. Girls who hadn’t been interested in anything but reconnecting with their boyfriends or their dealers were busy writing lyrics or scraping together costumes or finding props for The Sound of Rehab.

As we walked to Share, two girls, Amanda and Samantha, were performing a version of a Run-D.M.C. rap called “My Addiction,” instead of “My Adidas.” “My addiction walked through high-school doors and danced all over coliseum floors . . . spent all my dough just blowing trees . . . we made a mean team, my addiction and me.” I was learning all kinds of new words and phrases. “Blowing trees,” I learned, was smoking marijuana. “On my grind” meant working. “So, when I’m at my desk, writing a blog post, that means I’m on my grind?” I asked, and both Amanda and Samantha started laughing and said, “Nah, it’s a little different than that,” but they wouldn’t tell me how.

We were almost at the art therapy room when Michelle popped her head out of her office. “Allison W., can I see you for a moment?”

I rolled my eyes, left the group, and took a seat on the opposite side of her desk. “Allison,” she began, “I understand there’s a talent show in the works.”

I shrugged, saying nothing.

“You know,” Michelle continued, “that any activities have to be approved by staff.”

“Oh, sure,” I said. Then I resumed my silence. Michelle stared at me for a moment. Then she reached into a folder and pulled out a script that, judging from the coffee stains, looked as if it had been retrieved from a cafeteria garbage can. “ ‘How do you solve a problem like an RC,’ ” she read, in a tuneless, cheerless voice. “ ‘How do you make them understand your world? How do you make them stay . . . and listen to what you’d say . . . when they look at you like you’re a human—’ ”

“You know,” I interrupted, “it really sounds much better when you sing it.” I sat up straight and demonstrated. “Many a thing you know you’d like to tell them. Many a thing you’d hope they’d understand . . . Low bottoms and low IQs . . . they’re low on empathy, too . . . with nary a prayer of ever getting canned.” I bent my head to hide my smile. “You see?”

“Allison, I admire your team spirit. But you are not permitted to perform skits and songs that make fun of the staff members.”

“Why?” I asked. “I mean, of course, assuming that there is a talent show.” I arranged my face into an approximation of confusion. “And why do you think I’m the one in charge?”

“Allison, I’m not going to get into that with you. What I need you to understand—”

I cut her off before she could finish. “What I need you to understand is that, to misquote Alexander Haig, I’m not in charge here. I’ve got nothing to do with anything. I’m just some poor, stupid pill-head who can’t figure out how many sessions with her therapist it takes to get a day pass.”

Michelle narrowed her eyes, causing them to practically vanish into her doughy face. “Let me ask you something, Allison. Do you want to get better?”

“Better than what?” I muttered. Better than you? I thought. I was pretty sure I’d achieved that particular goal already.

“Think about it,” she suggested in a sugary-sweet tone, and sent me off to Share, where I listened to a thirty-eight-year-old mother of two named Dice describe her descent from high-school cheerleader to crackhead. She’d arrived at Meadowcrest after her parents told her they could no longer care for her boys (twelve and nine), and would be putting them in foster care unless she got her act together.

I would never, I thought, as Dice described leaving her boys home alone or, worse, with strangers while she wandered the streets to cop. Her hands, with the nails bitten short and bloody, trembled as she worked to extract pictures of her sons from underneath the plastic lining of her binder. “That’s Dominic Junior, my little Nicky, and that’s Christopher. He eats so much I can’t even believe it. Like, mixin’ bowls full of cereal, gallons of milk . . . I tell him we should just get a cow, let him suck on that, ’stead of using all our money on milk . . .”

Had she ever been like me and Janet, with a husband and a house, a car in the garage and money in the bank? Had she ever had a chance at that kind of life?

“Allison?”

I glanced up. Gabrielle, she of the pink lanyard and officious-bank-lady look, was staring at me. So, I noticed, were the rest of the eighteen girls and women in the circle. “Allison, are you ready to share?”

“Um.” I closed my notebook, then drummed my fingertips on its cover. I had known this day was coming, but, of course, they never told you exactly when it would be your turn. I sat up straight, remembering how every Share began. “Well. Let’s see. I was born in New Jersey, in 1974. I think I tried liquor for the first time at someone’s bat mitzvah, when I was twelve or thirteen. We were sneaking glasses off the grown-ups’ table. I had maybe a sip, and I hated the way it tasted, and that was that until I was sixteen. Um.” I tilted my body back in my chair, looked up at the ceiling and noticed, without surprise, that it was stained. Everything in this place was worn and dirty, frayed and patched, like we didn’t deserve anything better. “I got drunk at a party when I was sixteen. Vodka and peach schnapps, which was a thing back then. I hated the way it made me feel, and I didn’t drink again until college . . . and even then, it was, like, a beer. Or maybe I’d have a few puffs of a joint.”

“You’re kidding,” said a new girl whose name I didn’t know. I could have gotten defensive, but instead, I just shrugged.

“Yeah, I know it sounds ridiculous, but it’s the truth. I didn’t like booze, I didn’t like pot, and I didn’t really try anything else because there wasn’t much else around . . . oh, wait, I did do mushrooms one time, but they made me puke, so forget that.” I shuddered. “I hate throwing up.”

“Don’t do heroin,” said Lena, and everyone else laughed.

“So, flash forward, I’m thirty-four, I’m married, I have a kid, I throw my back out at my gym, and my doctor gives me Vicodin.” I breathed, remembering. “And it was like that scene in The Wizard of Oz where everything goes from black-and-white to color. It was like that was the way the world was meant to feel.” I could feel my body reacting to the memory, the blood rising to the surface of my skin, my heartbeat quickening. “I was calm, I was happy, I felt like I could get more things accomplished. I started writing these blog posts, and they really took off. The pills made me brave enough to write with all those people reading. They made me patient enough to put up with my daughter, who is gorgeous and smart but can be a handful. They made me who I was supposed to be. I know that’s not what I’m supposed to say in here,” I said, before anyone could chide me for romanticizing my use or failing to “play the tape,” “but I also know that we’re supposed to be honest. And that’s the God’s honest truth. I loved the way I felt when I was on pills.”

“So what happened?” Gabrielle prompted.

I sighed. “I just started taking too many of them. More pills, different kinds, stronger medications, and then, eventually, I wasn’t taking them to feel good, I was taking them just to feel normal. I was napping all the time, and I was impatient with my daughter. I wasn’t myself. I took money from a petty cash account at work and moved it into my personal account. It wasn’t exactly embezzlement, but it wasn’t exactly something I was supposed to be doing. And . . .” Here came the hard part. “I tried to drive while I was impaired. One of the teachers saw what was going on and took my keys away. Then my husband found out what was going on and . . .” I shrugged. By now, my look of contrition was so well-rehearsed that it felt almost natural on my face. “Here I am. Just another sick person trying to get better.”

For a minute, there was silence, as the ladies contemplated my boring, bare-bones, drama-free tale. Everyone had something better—an overdose, an arrest, an intervention full of tears and accusations. The previous week one of the women, a fifth-grade teacher who’d also bought pills online, had talked about being blackmailed. The person she bought from spent an afternoon on Google, figured out where she worked and to whom she was married, and then e-mailed her to say that if she didn’t pay first five hundred, then a thousand, then three thousand dollars, he’d tell her husband and her boss—and maybe even the local paper—just what she’d been up to. It had gone on for months. Linda had drained her savings account and dipped into her twelve-year-old daughter’s college fund before trying to kill herself. Luckily, it hadn’t worked, and now she was here . . . and as for the guy who’d tortured her, Linda said with a sad smile that her counselor had helped her fill out a form on the DEA’s website. “I have no idea if they caught him,” she’d said. “Probably he’s still out there, shaking down other housewives.”

I remembered feeling almost dizzy with relief that nothing like that had ever happened to me. Now, with dozens of puzzled and accusatory faces staring at me, I almost wished something more catastrophic had landed me at Meadowcrest.

“That’s it?” an Ashley or a Brittany murmured. I wondered if I should have talked about learning that my mom was an alcoholic . . . but where could I have fit that in?

“Hey, look, I’m sorry I don’t have some big, dramatic story about almost dying, or almost killing someone, or getting in a car crash . . .”

“It’s not that.” I’d expected Gabrielle to be the one to push me for more details, more emotion, just more in general, but instead it was shiny-haired, tiny-voiced Aubrey, all scrunched up in the seat on my left, who was calling me out. “It’s like you’re telling your story, only it sounds like it happened to someone else.” She squirmed as I looked at her, but she didn’t back down. “Were you sad about it? When it was happening?”

“Of course I was sad!” I snapped. “God. Do you think I’d be here if I wasn’t sad?”

“But you don’t sound sad.” Now one of the Brittanys had taken up the attack, only she didn’t sound angry as much as puzzled. “You just sound, like, okay, this happened, then that happened, and then I started taking Percocet, and then I started taking Oxy . . .”

I wanted to say that progression was a central part of every other girl’s story—first the booze, then the pills, then the powder, then the needle. So why was I being criticized for giving a version of the same tale everyone told?

“What about when your daughter would want you to play with her, and you’d tell her to go away?” Finally, Mary had decided to join the conversation. “How do you feel about that?”

“I feel incredibly ashamed. I hate myself for not being there for her.” I mustered up all the sincerity I could—the hurt look, the shaky voice, the defeated posture acknowledging I’d committed the ultimate female transgression, the Sin of Bad Motherhood. “I feel awful about what I did. That’s why I’m here. So I won’t ever have to do those things again.”

This announcement was met with unexpected silence. Aubrey fidgeted in her seat; an Amber retied her shoelaces. Gabrielle flipped to a fresh page in her notebook. Finally, she said, “I guess maybe Allison’s story sounds different to us because she wasn’t using for very long.” She looked at me. “What was it, six months?”

“About that.” Six months was as long as I’d been buying pills online. My actual abuse—or, if not abuse, the length of time my use had been problematic—was closer to two years.

“For most of us, there was that big wake-up call,” Mary continued. “I got a DUI. Aubrey got arrested. People lost their relationships, or had their kids taken away. But just because Allison’s got a high bottom . . .”

“Thank you,” I murmured. High bottom. Was there a lovelier phrase in the English language?

“It doesn’t mean she didn’t have a bottom. Or that she’s not in trouble. Or that she doesn’t need our help.”

“Thank you,” I said again. As the next Share began—this one from a twenty-eight-year-old heroin addict from New Mexico who’d come to New Jersey as part of some kind of rehab exchange program—I returned my attention to the new lyrics to “One Day More.” “One more day, then I’m in rehab . . . Gonna get drunk off my ass . . . I’ll buy ev’ry pill and take it . . . plus Champagne and speed and grass.” Would Melanie be able to pull off the role of Liesl, the besotted sixteen-going-on-seventeen-year-old, who we’d decided would be in love with crystal meth instead of Rolfe the Nazi messenger boy? I looked around the circle, realizing that I’d never know. If everything went the way I’d planned, I’d be in the car with Dave when the first song began. I felt a surprising amount of regret, as I looked at Mary, and Aubrey, and Shannon, and realized I’d never hear how their stories turned out. Ellie, I told myself sternly. Ellie was the one who mattered.

That night they turned the phones on, so that the women who were off the seven-day blackout could have their regular twice-a-week ten-minute phone call home. “Where am I picking you up?” asked Dave, who’d swallowed my story about having a day pass without a single question.

“You can just wait in the parking lot. I think I remember what the car looks like.”

I waited for a laugh that did not come. “When do you need to be back?” He sounded like he was scheduling a dentist’s appointment, not a reunion with his wife.

“Eight.” Actually, I wasn’t planning on coming back at all. I would attend Ellie’s party, then ask Dave to take me for an early dinner, during which I would convince him that I’d gotten everything I could out of my rehab experience and was ready to come home. “Is Ellie excited?”

“She is. She and your mom have been making cupcakes, and paper chains.”

“Paper chains?” I hadn’t heard of such a thing since I was Ellie’s age myself, and, certainly, they hadn’t been a feature of any of the birthday parties I’d attended with her.

“Yup. We decided to have the party here instead of BouncyTime. It’s always too loud there. She gets overwhelmed. And, after Jayden’s party . . .” He let his voice trail off, too polite to remind me of the disaster Jayden’s party had become.

“Okay,” I said slowly. I was surprised that nobody had asked me, or even told me, before making this change, but my main concern was that the party was a success, and that Ellie was happy. “So did you hire a magician? That petting zoo that Chloe had? And what about favors?” Lately, the trend was for kids to burn CDs of their own party-music mixes, and hand them out in the goody bags.

“I think there’s just going to be games.”

“Games?” I wondered if he meant something like laser tag.

“Party games. Charades, and pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. Like that. Your mother’s really the one running the show, and it sounds like it’s under control.”

Charades? Paper chains and homemade cupcakes? I wasn’t sure anything was under control . . . but I tried to sound cheerful as I said, “See you Saturday.”

This will work, I told myself as I got ready for bed that night. As always, I was thinking of Ellie. What had she done that day? What dress had she worn? Had she eaten her dinner, or snuck it into the toilet, the way I’d caught her doing the week before I left? Were there kids she knew at the Stonefield camp? Did she like the counselors? How was my mother handling life without my dad? And what about Dave?

I couldn’t bring myself to ask him the big questions: Do you still love me? What do you tell yourself about why I’m in here? Will we still be married when I’m out?

I refused to let myself think about it. Instead, I brushed my teeth, put on what I knew would be the first of at least two sets of pajamas (I was still waking up at midnight, or one in the morning, having completely sweated through the first pair), and, feeling clumsy and strange, got down on my knees.

“Are you there, God?” I began. “It’s me, Allison. Thank you for the beautiful sunshine today. Thank you for the inspiration about the talent show. Thank you . . .” At this part, my voice got clogged with tears. “Thank you for keeping Ellie safe. For not letting me hurt her. Thank you for another day of not using.” That last part struck me as completely ridiculous—how could I possibly use, even if I wanted to, in a place like this? I said it anyhow. Then I worked myself back upright, stretched, and climbed into bed.

At ten o’clock, the lights went out. For a moment, I lay in the darkness. Then Aubrey called, from the other bedroom, “Good night, Allison.”

“Good night, Aubrey,” I called back.

“Good night, Mary,” Shannon said.

“Good night, Shannon,” said Mary.

“Good night, Ashley.”

“Which one?”

Giggles, then, “Ashley C.”

“Good night, Marissa.”

I remembered what Nicholas had told me, about how sometimes beginners substituted the group for God.

“Good night, Ashley D.”

“Good night, Lena.”

Could you call this love, or a Higher Power? All of us working toward the same goal, helping one another as best we could? Something that’s bigger than you, and something that’s kind and forgiving, I’d heard one of the meeting leaders say. That’s all your Higher Power has to be. So could this be it?

I wasn’t sure. I shut my eyes, rolled onto my side, and slipped into what had become my standard two hours’ worth of sleep, followed by five hours of lying awake, sweating and crying in my narrow bed, waiting for the flashlight’s glare to shine through the slit of a window, wondering how I’d gotten here and what my life would be like when I got out.

TWENTY-SEVEN

By Saturday morning, you would have thought the ladies of Meadowcrest were getting ready for a wedding . . . or an actual Broadway debut. Lena was on her bedroom floor, attempting to press a pair of pants with a curling iron. Aubrey was humming scales in the bathroom, Mary was practicing “Sentimental Gurney” in the hall, and the girls I’d dubbed the Greek Chorus were singing “Dope that’s so slammin’ it makes your heart flutter . . . Dealers on corners and needles in gutters . . . Wax-paper Baggies all tied up with strings . . . These were a few of my favorite things.” Knowing I’d be heading home, I got Aubrey to help with my hair and makeup. She plucked my eyebrows, smoothed on concealer, and used mascara to cover my gray hairs. “Thanks for doing this,” she said, unwinding the Velco curlers she’d used. “Of all the times I’ve been in rehab, this was the most fun.” I was so touched that for one wild instant I thought about staying—directing the talent show, seeing how it all turned out. Then I thought of Ellie, gave Aubrey a hug, and said, “I’m glad I met you.”

At ten o’clock, while some poor woman who’d driven in from the Pine Barrens attempted to share her experience, strength, and hope, we passed and re-passed scripts from hand to hand, making corrections, adding new jokes. By the time the announcement blared, “Ladies, please proceed to the cafeteria for afternoon Meditation,” I was trembling with nerves. Sure enough, instead of the typical single, bored RC, there was Michelle . . . and Kirsten . . . and Jean and Phil, two counselors I didn’t know. A half-dozen RCs were lined up by the door . . . and at the head of the line stood none other than my pal Ed McGreavey, noted heli-skier and locator of lost bottoms.

“Good morning!” he said pleasantly as we filed into the room. “Ladies,” he said, as the women stared at him, then at me. “I understand you’ve got a performance in the works. I want to tell you, personally, how happy it makes me to see this kind of motivation!” So that was his strategy, I thought. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em . . . and act like it was your good idea all along. “We’re looking forward to hearing what you’ve got.”

I smiled as, behind me, Amanda and Samantha got into position. “Ladies and gentlemen!” I said, nodding at Ed and at the pimply RC who’d hollered at me about walking on the wrong path. “Welcome to the inaugural, one-time-only, debut performance of The Sound of Rehab.”

Behind Amanda and Samantha, the rest of the women lined up in a half circle. Aubrey stepped to the front of the circle, twirling and twirling, before she opened her mouth and, in a very credible Julie Andrews–ish manner, began to sing, “The hills are alive . . . with the sounds of rehab . . . with songs drunks have sung . . . for a hundred years!”

I slipped to the door. “Be right back,” I whispered to Mary. I was sorry to miss it, I thought as I hurried to my room, grabbed my purse, strolled past the empty desk, pushed through the double doors, and found Dave in the parking lot, behind the wheel of the Prius, right where he said he would be.

He looked at me with suspicion as I practically skipped into the passenger’s seat. “Go, go, go!” I hollered, pounding the dashboard.

“You okay?”

“I’m great! It just feels so good to be getting out of here!” I could barely breathe, or hear anything, because of the thunder of my heartbeat in my ears as we pulled past the security guard’s hut, but no one said a word. The gate lifted, and we were on the road, driving toward Philadelphia. Free.

“Tell me everything,” I said, adjusting the seat, and then the music, looking around for coffee or candy or anything at all from the outside world.

Dave’s voice was terse, his words careful. “Ellie’s been doing fine. She seems to like camp, and her swimming’s gotten much better. And your mother’s really stepped up to the plate. She’s been driving Ellie to camp in the mornings—”

“Wait. Driving? My mom?” I felt my throat start to close again, remembering her promise, that she’d never be impaired around my daughter.

“She went out and renewed her license. Passed the test on her first try.”

“Wow,” I said, wondering why she hadn’t told me. Dave drove us along an unfamiliar two-lane road, past a farm stand selling sweet corn and tomatoes, and a small white church. “How long’s the ride home?”

“Maybe half an hour.”

“That’s all?”

“You don’t remember?” His tone betrayed little curiosity. Dave looked good, lean and broad-shouldered as ever in his worn jeans and dark-blue collared shirt. He smelled good, too, freshly showered, the bracing scent of Dial soap filling the car.

“I wasn’t in great shape at the time.” I stared at him, willing him to take his eyes off the road, even for just a second, and spare me a look. When he didn’t, I began talking. “Dave. I know we haven’t really discussed things, and we probably won’t have much of a chance today, but I want you to know how sorry I am about everything.”

For a long moment, he didn’t answer. “Let’s just focus on Ellie,” he finally said, in that maddening, almost robotic tone.

“Can’t you tell me anything? Give me a hint? Because, you know, if I’m going to be single, there’s a trainer who comes to Meadowcrest once a week. I gotta start working on my fitness if I’m going to be back on the market.”

I saw the corners of his eyes crinkle in what wasn’t quite a smile, but was at least a sign that I could still amuse him. “I made mistakes, too,” he said. “I knew there was something going on for a while, and I didn’t try to find out what. It was just easier to let things go.”

“No, no, it wasn’t your fault. It was me. I thought I could handle everything . . . that the pills were helping me handle everything . . .” I reached over the gearshift for his free hand, and he let me take it, and hold it, until we left the highway. We sat in silence until Dave parked in front of our garage.

“Mommy, Mommy, MOMMY!” Ellie shrieked once we were inside, racing into my arms, almost knocking the wind out of me. She wore a party dress with a purple sash and crinolines, her hair in a neat French braid, her feet in lace-cuffed socks and Mary Janes.

“Hi, baby girl.” Oh, God, she’d gotten so much bigger. I lifted her up, burying my face in the crook of her neck, inhaling the scent of her skin. “I missed you, oh, so much.”

“Why did you have to LEAVE?” She wriggled out of my arms, planted her hands on her hips, and scowled at me.

“Because I needed to get some help. Sometimes mommies need a time-out.”

“Hmph.” Ellie looked as if she’d heard these lines before. “Well, you’re all better now, right?”

“She’s getting better,” said Dave. “Mommy can spend the day with you, and then I need to take her back.”

Ellie’s eyes filled with tears. “Why do you have to go BACK? You aren’t even SICK. You look FINE.”

“Remember what we talked about, Ellie?” And here was my mother. I blinked at Casual Ronnie; my mother without her lipgloss, without foundation and mascara, with her hair—I could barely believe it—pulled back in a ponytail, dressed in jeans (jeans!), with an apron (another item I’d never seen or imagined her to possess) wrapped around her waist. A pair of sneakers on her feet, where I’d only ever seen high heels or jeweled sandals, her fingernails clipped short, filed, no polish. “The doctors are taking good care of your mom, and she’ll be home as soon as she’s ready.”

“But there is nothing WRONG with her!”

“Ellie,” said Dave, “why don’t you go count the apples and make sure there’s enough for everyone to get one?”

Ellie gave us a darkly suspicious look before stomping off toward the dining room. “We’re bobbing for apples,” she called over her shoulder.

“Isn’t that more of a Halloween thing?” I looked around, with a feeling of dread gathering in the pit of my stomach. There was an old-school portrait of a donkey taped to the dining-room wall, along with a metal bin full of water with a bowl full of apples beside it.

“I thought we’d play party games,” my mother said.

“Party games,” I repeated. It didn’t sound like an awful idea, and maybe it wasn’t, unless you knew that these days, in our neighborhood, a typical six-year-old’s birthday party might include an outing to the local bowling alley, where the lanes were equipped with bumpers and at least some of the snacks would be gluten-free, or a scavenger hunt at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, followed by a make-your-own-sundae bar.

I followed Ellie into the dining room and found her sitting in the corner with an apple in her hand. “Hey, El,” I said, and began to sing. “ ‘I did not live until today . . . how can I live when we are parted?’ ”

“ ‘Tomorrow you’ll be worlds away,’ ” she sang, eyes wide, one hand over her heart, teenage Cosette falling in love. “ ‘And yet with you my world has started.’ ”

“ ‘One more day out on my own,’ ” I sang. “ ‘One more day with him not caring.’ ” I tried not to look at Dave, who was standing in the kitchen with his back to me as Ellie sang, “ ‘I was born to be with you!’ ” She stretched out her arms and I lifted her up, holding her against me, singing, “ ‘What a life I might have known.’ ” I tickled her ribs and she wrapped her arms around my neck, cheeks pink, a picture of delight. “ ‘But he never saw me there.’ ” I peeked over her head. Dave was watching us—maybe, I hoped, preparing to launch into the Valjean/Javert section—but before he could start a car pulled up the driveway and Hank emerged from the backseat.

“MY PARTY FRIENDS ARE HERE!” Ellie shrieked, vaulting out of my arms and hitting the ground at a sprint. I got one last whiff of her scent, a final instance of the sweetness of her skin against mine. Then she was gone.

“Happy birthday, Ellie,” Hank said shyly, wiping his nose and handing my daughter an enormous, elaborately wrapped box with pink-and-white-striped wrapping paper and pink-and-silver ribbons.

“Wow,” I said as Mrs. Hank smiled indulgently at her son. She wore dark glasses, skinny jeans, and a silky sleeveless top. “Looks like someone blew his allowance.”

“He’s in love,” Mrs. Hank affirmed, leaning over to offer her smooth cheek for the pro forma air kiss. “Meanwhile, you! You look amazing!” She eyed me up and down. I tried not to flinch under her scrutiny and wondered exactly what she was seeing. I had Aubrey’s work in my favor, but my clothing options weren’t great. I was wearing the best of the limited choices Dave had given me, which meant jeans that were too loose and a T-shirt that was too casual to look right underneath Shannon’s cardigan. The good news was that I’d been taking every yoga class Meadowcrest offered, plus walking around the track with Shannon and Aubrey. That, and the sunshine, and the water I’d been drinking, and the absence of drugs meant that my skin was tanned and clear, and my eyes were bright.

“Amazing,” Mrs. Hank repeated. I wished I could remember her first name. It was Carol, or Kara, something in that family. We’d had coffee together, and chatted at PTA meetings, with most of our conversations revolving around Hank’s allergies and Ellie’s sensitivities. “Are you doing a cleanse?”

“Something like that,” I said.

“Allison?”

My mom called me into the kitchen, where she stood with a tray of cupcakes in her hands. Homemade. Oh, dear. Ellie had probably told her cupcakes but had failed to tell her to get them at Sweet Sue’s. Their cupcakes were incredible, dense and rich, topped with swirls of icing in flavors you could never hope to duplicate at home, dulce de leche and salted caramel and panna cotta. My mother had baked treats that I bet came from a box, with frosting I was certain came from a can. I wondered how that conversation had gone, with Ellie telling my mom about the bakery and my mother somehow convincing her that baking from scratch would be better and more fun.

“Can you help me with the punch?” my mom asked.

Punch. I didn’t say a word as I poured ginger ale over a block of melting sherbet in the cut-crystal punch bowl Dave and I had gotten for our wedding and, if I remembered right, had never used. My mother’s transformation was astonishing. She was exuding the kind of quiet confidence I couldn’t remember from my own childhood, when she’d been either brisk and brittle, rushing me out of rooms, or as giggly and giddy as a young girl, waiting for my father to come home.

“This is some affair,” I said, as she arranged the cupcakes next to the punch bowl.

“Ellie and I planned it together. She helped me bake the cupcakes, and we went online and found all the party games. We downloaded the donkey!” My mother seemed very pleased with her achievement.

“That’s great!” For a minute, I wanted to tell her about the talent show, and I felt a pang of unhappiness as I realized it was probably over by now.

“How are you feeling?” My mother’s eyes were on the cupcakes as she waited for my answer.

“Physically, I’m okay. Mentally . . .” I sighed. I couldn’t think of how to explain what I was feeling. Most days, I barely knew myself.

Mrs. Hank came breezing into the kitchen, along with a few other mothers whose names, thankfully, I knew. Holly Harper was Amelia’s mom, and Susan van der Meer belonged with Sadie. “How can we help?”

My mom picked up Mason jars filled with marshmallows and penny candy and carried them into the dining room. Mrs. Hank turned to me with a conspiratorial look on her face. “Listen,” she said, “we promise we won’t tell a soul.” I felt the muscles in my torso clench. Somebody knew. Somebody knew, someone had found out, someone had told, and now all the moms knew exactly what was wrong with me . . . and they wanted details.

“But here’s the thing,” Mrs. Hank continued. “My high-school reunion’s coming up, and Holly’s got an—”

“Anniversary,” said Holly. “And it was Jeff’s big idea to go back to Hawaii. He’s got this picture of me from twenty years ago in a bikini, and then he went online and actually found the goddamn thing on eBay—I should have known he was up to something when he asked what size I wore, and of course I lied, because, seriously, like I’m going to tell him the truth?”

Laughter all around. I laughed, too, and wondered how fast they’d grab their little darlings and dash out of my house if I told them what I’d been lying to my husband about.

“Just tell us,” Carol/Kara whispered. “If it’s a trainer . . . or one of the food-delivery things . . .”

“Oh, guys, really. I wish it was some big secret. But I just haven’t been that hungry lately.”

There was a beat of incredulous silence while the three of them just stared at me. Holly Harper started laughing first, and then the other two joined in.

“Oh! Good one!” said Kara/Carol. She mimed wiping tears from the smooth skin beneath her eyes. “Okay, seriously. Is it a juice fast?”

I opened my mouth to provide another jokey denial, and for a single terrifying instant I was sure that what would tumble from my lips would be the truth, the tale of what had really happened, possibly in the rhyming lyrics of one of the talent-show songs: Vicodin, and lots of them! OxyContin, pots of them! Chewing pills up by the peck . . .. Allison was bound to wreck!

“Allison?” My knees trembled in relief as Janet came into the room, a wrapped gift box in her hands. By the time she crossed the kitchen she’d assessed the situation, setting down her gift and grabbing me in a hug. “How are you?”

“She’s thin,” said Susan van der Meer, in a tone just short of accusatory.

Janet kept one arm around me as she turned to face my interrogators. “Her dad’s been sick,” she said. “Allison and her mom had to move him into assisted living a few weeks ago.”

I saw surprise on their faces, heard sympathetic murmurs. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” said Susan, and Holly said, “Isn’t it the worst? We went through it last year, after Jeff’s mom had an aneurysm.”

“Excuse me for a minute,” I said. I made myself breathe until the dizziness went away, then led Janet up the stairs and down the hall to my bedroom. She closed the door behind us, then looked me up and down.

“Okay, you look . . .”

“Thin!” I said, and started making some shrill noises that approximated laughter. “I’m thin, can you believe it! What’s my secret? Do you think I should tell them, or would they just fall over dead from the shock?” I sank down on the bed and put my face in my hands. “I went rogue,” I confessed.

“Wait, what?” Janet ducked into my bathroom. I heard drawers and cabinets opening and closing. A minute later, she came out with her hands filled with concealer, brushes, my flat iron, and a comb.

“I don’t actually have a day pass. They told me I couldn’t go. It was some big red-tape nightmare. I was supposed to have a certain number of sessions with my counselor, only they didn’t even assign me a counselor until I’d been there almost a week, and then she left, and they weren’t going to let me leave . . .”

“Okay. Deep breath. You made it. You’re here now. Want some water?”

Downstairs, I could hear the door opening, and my mother, suddenly transformed into the gracious lady of the manor, greeting Ellie’s other grandmother, Doreen. If I’d stayed at Meadowcrest, if I’d gone to the talent show, then to Circle and to Share, the party would have gone off without a hitch. I wasn’t indispensible. I wasn’t even sure Ellie would have missed me.

“We should go downstairs.”

“Here. Wait.” Gently, Janet dabbed a sponge dipped in foundation on my cheeks and chin. She tapped powder onto a brush and swiped lipstick onto my lips, either undoing or redoing Aubrey’s work. “When are you getting out?”

As I started to explain the logistics, there was a knock on the door.

“Allison?” called Dave. “We’re going to get started.”

All through the afternoon, through the games, through the cupcakes and ice cream and the inevitable gluten-free versions that the allergic and intolerant kids’ mothers had sent, I felt like a fake, like this was a show someone else had written, and I’d been assigned the role of wife and mother. And, louder and louder, like something out of an Edgar Allan Poe short story, I could hear a voice whispering, Pills. While I negotiated the rest of the night with Dave, assuring him that I was free until eight o’clock, pleading with him to take me to Han Dynasty for dinner “so I can eat something that tastes like something” before he sent me back, I thought, Pills. Handing out the goody bags, packed with candy necklaces my mom and Ellie had strung and handwritten notes that read “Thank You for Coming to My Party,” I thought, Pills, pills, where am I going to find pills?

The plan, which Dave reluctantly agreed to, was to drive Ellie to Hank’s house for dinner with Hank’s family. My mom would get a break, Dave would take me out for Chinese food, we’d have our talk, and then, depending on how the talk went, either he’d drive me back to Meadowcrest or I’d convince him that I could come home.

By the time Dave, Ellie, and I got to Hank’s house, I could almost taste the familiar, delectable bitterness on my tongue. I got out of the car as soon as it stopped, led Ellie inside, and asked Mrs. Hank—her name, I finally remembered, was not Kara or Carol but Danielle—if I could borrow a tampon. She waved toward her staircase. “Master bathroom. Everything’s in the cabinet under the sink.”

Up in the bathroom, I locked the door, put a tampon in my pocket, then opened the medicine cabinet above the sink. Beside the half-used bottles of antibiotics and Advil and Tylenol PM, there were Percocet, five and ten milligrams, both with refills, and an unopened, unexpired bottle of thirty-milligram OxyContin, prescribed for Hank’s father.

“Mommy!” I heard Ellie yell from downstairs.

“Hang on!” I called back, and began opening the bottles, shaking a few pills into my palms, stashing them in the pockets of my jeans.

“Mommy?” Ellie sounded like she was right outside the bathroom door. For once, she wasn’t yelling.

“Just—” Hang on, I was about to say, when I caught sight of myself in the mirror. My eyes were enormous and frantic. My face was pale, except for two blotches of red high on my cheeks. I looked like a thief, like a junkie, like Brittany B., who’d come to Meadowcrest from jail after she and her boyfriend had robbed the local Rite-Aid . . . and all I could think of, all that I wanted, was for Eloise to go away, to go to Hank’s room or the playroom or the basement or the backyard, anywhere that I could have five minutes and get myself a little peace.

What happens if you get caught? a voice in my head whispered. It seemed like a crazy thought—there had to be dozens of bottles in here, all of them (I’d checked) with refills on the labels. No way would Mrs. Hank miss a few pills, if I selected judiciously. There’d be more than enough to carry me through rehab, if I decided to return, or through my first few days home.

And then what? my mind persisted. Then I’d have to go back to my old rounds, my old sources, days of counting pills, worrying and wondering if I had enough . . . and, if I didn’t, how I’d get more.

“Mommy?” Ellie sounded like she was crying. “I am sorry if I am a bother.”

“What?” I sank down to the floor, my ear pressed against the door, a bottle of Percocet still in my hand.

“If that’s why you went away. Because I am a bother.”

It felt like a knife in my heart. “Oh, El. Oh, honey, no. You’re not a bother to me. I love you! I’ll . . . just give me a minute, I’ll be out in a minute, and we can talk, I’ll explain about everything . . .”

I put the first pill under my tongue and got that first blast of bitterness. Then it hit me. This was it: the moment they talked about in those stupid AA handouts and alluded to with those mealy-mouthed slogans, delivered with an earnestness suggesting they had been freshly minted in that moment. Half-measures availed us nothing. We stood at the turning point. One is too many and a thousand is never enough. It didn’t matter that my turning point didn’t involve turning a trick in the back of a car, or looting my parents’ retirement fund, or sticking a needle in my arm. This was it. My hand in a stranger’s medicine cabinet, my little girl on the other side of a locked door, needing a mother who only wanted her to go away. Congratulations, Allison Rose Weiss. You’ve finally made it all the way down.

I spat the pill out into my hand, then flushed it down the toilet. I put the pills back in the bottles. I put the bottles back in the cabinet. I sprayed about half a bottle’s worth of air freshener, in case it turned out Mrs. Hank had a suspicious mind.

Outside the door, Ellie was standing with her hands in her pockets, pale-faced, in her pretty party dress, the one we’d picked out online the month before, with her sitting on my lap and me scrolling through the pages, still struggling with her “th” sound, her little finger pointing, “I will have lis one, and lat one, and lis one,” and me saying, “No, honey, just pick your favorite,” and her turning to me, eyes brimming, saying, “But they are ALL OF THEM MY FAVORITE.”

I bent down and lifted her in my arms.

“Do you need to take a nap now?” she asked. “I will be quiet.”

If anyone ever asked me what it felt like the instant my heart broke, I would tell them how I felt, hearing that.

“No. No nap. I’m okay.” And I was. At least physically. Sure, I wanted the pills so bad that I was shaking. I could still taste that delectable bitterness in the back of my throat, could already feel the phantom calm and comfort as my shoulders unclenched and my heartbeat slowed, but I could get through it, minute by minute, second by second, if I had to. Even though I suspected I would remember that bliss, and crave it, for the rest of my life.

I took Ellie downstairs to play with Hank. Dave was in the kitchen, talking about the Eagles’ dubious fortunes with Mr. Hank. “Honey, can I talk to you for a minute?”

I took him by the forearm, walked him out to the driveway, and told him the truth, watching my words register on his face—his wrinkled forehead, his mouth slowly falling open. “You did what?” Before I could start to explain my talent-show exit strategy again, he said, “No. You know what? Never mind.” His hand was on his phone. I turned away, my eyes brimming. I wanted to ask if I got any credit for honesty, if it meant anything to him that I’d told the truth, however belatedly . . . but, before I could ask, he was connected to Meadowcrest.

“Yes . . . no, I don’t know who I need to speak with . . . I thought my wife had a day pass, but now she’s telling me she didn’t . . . Allison W. . . . Yes, I’ll hold.”

While he was holding, I went back into the Hanks’ house. Ellie was engrossed in a game of Wii bowling. “I’ll be home soon,” I whispered. She barely spared me a hug. Mrs. Hank—Danielle—was in the kitchen. “Thanks for taking her,” I said. “I wonder if you could be extra nice to her for the next little while . . .”

“Are you going away again?” Danielle asked. She wasn’t my friend, but, at that moment, I wished she was.

“Yes. I actually . . .” I’m going back to rehab, I almost said. It was right there, the words lined up all in a row, but I wasn’t sure if that was oversharing, or asking for sympathy where I didn’t deserve any. “A work thing,” I finally concluded.

“Well, don’t worry. Your mother’s a rock star. And Ellie is always welcome here.”

I thanked her. Dave was already behind the wheel when I got back outside. “Are they letting me come back?” I whispered.

He backed out of the driveway. “At first someone named Michelle wanted me to call a facility in Mississippi that treats dual-diagnosis patients. That’s when you’re an addict with mental illness.”

I gave a mirthless giggle. “Does Michelle know I’m Jewish? I might be crazy, but there’s no way I’m going to Mississippi.”

“Eventually, they said you could come back. No guarantees about staying. Someone named Nicholas is going to be waiting for you.”

Nicholas. I shut my eyes. Then I made myself open them again. “Do you want to talk about . . . anything?”

I could see his knuckles, tight on the wheel, the jut of his jaw as he ground his back teeth. “Honestly? Right now, no. I don’t.” We drove for a minute, me sitting there clutching my purse handles hard, Dave’s face set, until he burst out, “When are you going to stop lying?”

“Now,” I said immediately. “I’m done with . . . with that. With all of it. I don’t want to be that kind of person. Or that kind of mom, or that kind of wife.”

Dave said nothing. I didn’t expect a response. I’d been honest, but, of course, what else would a liar say, except I’m done with lying and I’m done with using and I don’t want to be that way anymore? It was classic I-got-busted talk . . . and part of accepting life on life’s terms, the way they told us we had to, meant living with the knowledge that maybe he’d never be able to trust me again.

I sat in silence, the way I had during my first trip to Meadowcrest. Dave pulled up in front of the main building and sat there, the car in park, the engine still running. I’d had half an hour to think of what to say, but all I could manage was “Thank you for the ride.” I got out of the car, walked past the nice-desk receptionist, back beyond the RESIDENTS ONLY PAST THIS POINT sign, to the shabby hallway with its smell of cafeteria food and disinfectant. I left my purse in my empty bedroom, looped my nametag around my neck, and took the women’s path to Nicholas’s office, where, as promised, he was waiting for me.

“Allison W.,” he said. His voice was so kind.

I sat in front of his desk and bent my head. Then I said the words I’d already said, in Group and Share and the AA meetings, where I’d sat off to the side and scribbled lyrics in my notebook. “I think I’m really in trouble,” I whispered. “I think I’m an addict. I need help.”

“Okay,” he said. His hand on my shoulder was gentle. “The good news is, you’ve come to the right place.”