ELEVEN
“How’s your dad?”
I sighed, taking a seat at Janet’s kitchen counter, next to a stack of catalogs and what appeared to be a half-assembled diorama of a Colonial kitchen. It was three-fifteen on a balmy, sweetly scented May afternoon, and I’d just arrived at her house, half a mile from my own, with perfectly pruned rosebushes lining the walkway from the street to the front door. We’d passed the living room and the den, both decorator-perfect, and ended up in the kitchen, where Janet was thawing a pot of beef stew on the stove and had the wineglasses out on the counter.
“Half a glass,” I said, as she started to pour from a lovely bottle of Malbec. We’d already agreed that I would fetch the kids from Enrichment, the after-school program that Stonefield: A Learning Community offered between the hours of three and six for working parents. I would, therefore, drink responsibly. Of course, Janet had no idea that I’d helped myself to a handful of my dad’s Vicodin in the car, and that there were more pills in my purse and in my pocket.
“And thanks for asking. My dad’s adjusting.” Sipping my wine, I told Janet about how, the day after his arrival, my father had switched from silent to belligerent, throwing things and shouting at the attendants to show him another room, that he’d reserved a suite, goddamnit, and if there wasn’t a suite he at least wanted a better view. As best I could figure, he thought he was in a hotel, on a business trip. He’d unpacked, hanging his shirts and pants in the closet, and if he’d noticed the lack of ties and jackets, or that the only shoes I’d sent with him were sneakers, he hadn’t said anything. Eastwood had assigned seating at mealtimes, and his case manager, a young woman named Nancy Yanoff, reported that my father was eating and seemed to be enjoying the company of the other residents at his table. Meanwhile, I was scrambling to get my parents’ house on the market, to finish filling out the thick sheaf of forms the long-term care required, and to figure out a long-term plan for my mom.
God bless narcotics. The pills gave me the energy and confidence to get through the day. They lulled me to sleep at night. They made it possible for me to have an uncomfortable conversation with my husband about how long my mom could stay. Dave was still being generous, still speaking to me kindly, but I sensed that his patience had a limit, and that in a month or two I’d find myself approaching it.
For now, though, he’d moved his belongings back to the master bedroom. I’d hastily ordered a dresser, two bedside tables, lamps, and an area rug for the guest room that had previously contained only a bed. Most nights I’d fall asleep before Dave did. Sometimes, if he woke me up with the bathroom light, I’d take my book and go to Ellie’s bedroom, lying beside my daughter in the queen-sized bed we’d been smart to purchase, telling her that Daddy was snoring again when she woke up and was surprised to see she had company. “But all things considered, it’s not too bad,” I told my friend.
Janet looked at me sidewise, skepticism all over her face. “How is it going with Little Ronnie?”
“Okay, here’s the shocker. She’s actually functioning. She helps take care of Ellie in the afternoons.” It was true that my mother still had the annoying habit of wandering down to the kitchen for breakfast, lunch, and dinner with the expectation that someone (not her) would put a hot, balanced meal on the table, and clean up afterward. She would leave her dirty clothes piled in the hamper with the unspoken assumption that they would be washed and put away, and she would announce that she had an appointment here or there instead of requesting a ride . . . but she was spending a few hours each day with Ellie. “And Ellie’s actually calmed down a little. I think, in a weird way, she feels responsible for her grandmother.”
Janet nodded, sipped her wine, and said, “Maybe I could rent your mother. My three need to get the memo that they’re responsible for more than just wiping themselves.” She made a face, flashing her crooked teeth. “And one of the boys isn’t even doing that so well. I don’t know which one—I buy them identical undies, and it’s not really the kind of thing you want to, you know, investigate thoroughly . . .”
I smiled, imagining my friend with a pair of lab tweezers and a fingerprinting kit, gingerly tugging a pair of skidmarked Transformers underpants out of an inside-out pair of little boy’s jeans.
“And did I tell you that Maya is now a vegan? And the boys won’t eat vegan food—which I can’t really blame them for—so I’m now cooking two meals a night? What happened?” she asked. Her cheeks were flushed, eyes narrowed, ponytail askew. “I mean, really. I was Phi Beta Kappa. I was most likely to succeed. I billed more hours than any other associate my first three years out of law school. And now I spend my days driving my kids to hockey practice and swim club and choir rehearsal, and my afternoons making lasagna with tofu cheese, and my nights folding their underwear and checking their homework and spraying the insides of hockey skates with Lysol. I don’t even know who I am anymore.”
She poured wine almost to the top of her glass and took a healthy swallow. “Do you know what I think when I wake up in the morning?” Without waiting for an answer, she said, “I count how many hours there are until I can have a glass of wine. There’s something wrong with me, if that’s all I’m looking forward to. If I have this . . .”—she gestured, hands spread to indicate the room, the house, the neighborhood—“this life, these kids, this house, this husband, and I love him, I swear I do, but most days the only thing that’s giving me any pleasure, the only thing I’m looking forward to at all is my goddamn glass of wine. That’s a problem, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” I said, and started reflexively straightening the stack of catalogs on the counter. Pottery Barn. J.Crew. L.L.Bean. Lands’ End. Ballard Designs. Garnet Hill. Saks. Nordstrom. Restoration Hardware. Sundance. All the same ones I got and kept in a basket in the powder room, to leaf through late at night. If Janet was counting the hours until her five o’clock drink, I was in way worse shape than she was. I wasn’t waiting until five anymore. Or even noon. My days began with pills—I would wake up sad and shaky and overwhelmed and I’d need a little pop of something just to get out of bed—and I kept a steady dose of opiates in my bloodstream all day long. More and more, my mind returned to that quiz in the doctor’s office, and I found myself wondering: What would happen if I tried to cut back and I couldn’t?
You can stop, my mind said soothingly. But you don’t have to. Not right now. Which sounded good . . . except what if I couldn’t? What if I was really and truly addicted, just like the actresses in the tabloids, or the homeless people I avoided while they begged at the intersections and on the sidewalks of Center City? What if that was me? Late at night, with Dave snoring away and Ellie and my mother asleep down the hall, I’d lie awake, the bitterness of the pills still on my tongue and my laptop making the tops of my thighs sweat, Googling rehabs, reading articles about drugs and alcohol, taking quizzes and reading blogs and newspaper stories about mommies who drank and celebrities who’d ended up addicted to painkillers or Xanax. With my Oxy or Percocet still pulsing in my head, I would point and click my way down the tunnel as midnight slipped into the small hours of the morning.
“I think you’re a great mother,” I told Janet. “You’re doing an amazing job. And you know this isn’t going to last. You’ll blink and they’ll be in college.”
“College,” she repeated. She lifted her glass and seemed surprised to find it almost empty. “I was going to have this big life. Barry and I were supposed to have adventures. I was going to be a prosecutor, then a judge, and then maybe I’d teach law. I used to dream about that. And now . . .” Her lips curled, her face twisting into an expression of deep disgust. “Allison, I’m a housewife. When I go online, I’m researching cereal coupons, or trying to figure out if my kid’s ADHD medicine is going to interact with his asthma stuff. The last thing I read for pleasure was Wonder, which was great but was written for ten-year-olds, and the only reason I even read that was because it was lying around the living room because Maya had to read it for school. I have all these clothes . . .”
As discreetly as I could, I snuck a look at the clock on my phone, wondering if my mail had been delivered yet and if the pills I’d ordered from Penny Lane had arrived. They came in regular Express Mail envelopes, but I couldn’t risk Dave’s intercepting one of them. I didn’t want the first real conversation we had in forever to be about why I was illegally purchasing prescription medication on the Internet.
I slipped my hand into my pocket, touching my tin. At this point, I could guess just by its weight how many pills it contained. Ten, I estimated. Surely ten pills would last me until tomorrow, if they had to? Maybe I could excuse myself, tell Janet I had to make a call, and see if one of my doctors would phone in another prescription, just to tide me over.
“All these clothes,” she repeated. “Skirts and suits and jackets. High heels. All that stuff, just hanging there.”
“You’ll wear them again,” I told her. I knew Janet’s plan had been to start working part-time the previous fall, when the boys started kindergarten. But then Conor had gotten his ADHD diagnosis, and Janet had spent what felt like an entire year at some doctor’s or therapist’s office every day after school. As soon as Conor had been stabilized with the right combination of medicine and tutoring and a psychologist to teach him cognitive behavioral strategies for managing his disorder (translation: how to keep from screaming and throwing things when he got frustrated), Dylan had started acting out, getting in fights at school, yelling at his teachers, hiding in the bathroom when recess was over. This, of course, meant therapy for him, too. Somewhere in there, Maya had stopped speaking to her mother. When Janet had described her attempts to give Maya the “your changing body” talk, and how Maya had literally thrown the helpful Care & Keeping of You book into the hallway so hard it had left a dent in the paint, Barry and I had laughed, Barry so hard there were tears glistening in his beard, but I could tell that Janet was heartbroken at her daughter’s silent treatment.
“Five years from now you’ll be running the attorney general’s office, and you’ll be too important to take my calls,” I told her.
“Ha.” It was a very bleak “Ha.” I wanted to reassure her that we’d get through this time, that in three or five or eight years things would come around right and we would find ourselves again the smart, vital women we’d once been . . . but who was I to talk?
“OMG,” Janet said, looking at the clock. Somehow, it was five-thirty. “Are you okay to drive? Are you sure?”
“I’m good.” I’d had only a single glass of wine. At least, as far as she knew.
“Want me to come with you?”
“That’s okay. I’ll have the boys back here by six-fifteen.”
She nodded. Then she hugged me, with her wineglass still in her hand. “You’re my best friend,” she said, and, briefly, rested her head on my shoulder. I gave her a squeeze, located my purse, got behind the wheel, and pulled out of Janet’s driveway. My heart lurched as I heard a car honking and the word “ASSHOLE!” float down the street. Shit, I thought, realizing how close I’d come to backing into the side of someone’s BMW. Oh, well. The other car had probably been speeding. I hoped Janet hadn’t seen it as I put the car in drive and proceeded toward Stonefield, coming to a full stop at each stop sign, keeping assiduously to the speed limit. Where had that BMW even come from?
I pulled up at a red light, with my eyelids feeling as heavy as if someone had coated them with wet sand. I kept my foot on the brake and let my eyes slip shut, feeling the warmth of the pills surging through my veins, that intoxicating sense of everything being right with the universe. My head swung forward. I could feel my hair against my cheeks . . .
Someone behind me was honking. I bolted upright, opening my eyes. “Jesus, cool your jets!” I hit the gas and was jerked backward as my car leapt through the intersection. Why was everyone in such a goddamn rush? What happened to manners? I squinted into the rearview mirror, trying to make out the face behind the wheel of the car that had honked, wondering if it was anyone I knew . . . and then, in an instant, the sign for Stonefield was looming up on my right. I stomped on the brakes, hit the turn signal, and heard the squeal of rubber on the road as I made the turn, cutting off the car in my right-hand lane. My heart thudded as I hit the brakes. There were two cars in front of me, and I could see Janet’s twins waiting, in their baseball caps and matching backpacks, along with Eloise, in the Lilly Pulitzer sundress she’d picked out herself. I put the car in park, grabbed the key fob, and hopped out of my seat. The heel of my shoe must have caught on the floor mat, because instead of the graceful exit I’d planned on, I tripped and went down hard on the pavement, landing on my hands and knees.
“Ow!” I yelled. My palms were stinging, dotted with beads of blood, and my pants were torn at the knee. I wondered if anyone had seen me. I looked around, swallowing hard as I spotted Mrs. Dale, one of the teachers in Ellie’s class, standing at the curb with a clipboard in her hand. Just my luck. Miss Reckord, the other teacher, was a sweet-faced, dumpling-shaped twenty-five-year-old with rosy cheeks and a whispery voice. The little boys all nursed crushes on her, and the girls fought to sit on her lap at story time, where they could finger her dangly earrings. Mrs. Dale was a different story. Thin-lipped, broad-shouldered, and flat-chested, with hair the color and consistency of a Brillo pad and skin as pale as yogurt, Mrs. Dale—who had, as far as I knew, no first name that was ever used by anyone in the Stonefield community—had been bringing five-year-olds to heel for more than thirty years. Mrs. Dale was not impressed with your special little snowflake. She did not believe in affirmations or unearned compliments to boost a kid’s self-esteem, or the unspoken Stonefield philosophy that every child was a winner. She believed in children keeping their hands to themselves, not running in the hallways, and coloring inside the lines. She took zero shit off of anyone, and she never, ever smiled.
I waved at her, surreptitiously sliding my bleeding palms into my pockets. “Sorry I’m late! Come on, everyone!” I opened the rear passenger side door, scooping Eloise up by her armpits and hoisting her into her seat.
Mrs. Dale was watching me. “Did you get my messages about the board meeting?”
Oof. I’d gotten several calls from the school over the past few days—maybe even the past few weeks—but I’d hit “Ignore” and let them go straight to voicemail. I was busy. I was tired. I had a job, unlike half the mothers of kids in Ellie’s class. Why didn’t the school ever call them?
“Sorry. I’ve been running around like crazy. New project . . .”
“MOMMY, I’m BLOODY!” Eloise shrieked. I looked at her and, sure enough, my bloody palm had left a red smear on her pink-and-green dress.
Mrs. Dale stepped closer. “Mrs. Weiss? Are you all right?”
“What? Oh, yeah. Just ripped my pants, no big deal. I’m such a klutz. Don’t ever stand near me in a Zumba class.” I followed her gaze down to my palms. Blushing, I grabbed a baby wipe from the box in the backseat and cleaned my hands, then fumbled with the buckle of the seat belt, tugging it hard against Ellie’s chest.
“Ow, Mommy, that HURTS!”
“Sorry, sorry,” I said. I could feel it now, the pills and the wine, surging through me with each heartbeat, singing their imperative: Sleep. Now. I finally clicked the buckle shut. “We’ll be at Janet’s in ten minutes. I’ll give you a Despicable Me Band-Aid.”
“I HATE Despicable Me!”
“Sure you do,” I muttered. She’d loved it last week. “Dylan? Conor? You guys okay?” The boys nodded. One of them had a handheld video game. The other had an iPod, with the buds stuck in his ears. I pulled the rear door shut, turned, and felt Mrs. Dale’s hand close around my hand. Around my key fob.
“Why don’t you come in and have a cup of coffee?”
“Oh, that’s so nice of you, but I really . . . I have to . . . Janet’s got dinner on the table, and Ellie’s going to freak out if I don’t get her cleaned up.”
“We can wash her dress in the nurse’s office. We’ve got Band-Aids there, and snacks if the boys are hungry.”
“That’s very kind.” I could hear my pulse thumping in my ears. “But I really have to get these guys going.”
Mrs. Dale’s hand stayed in place. “Have you been drinking?” she asked, stepping close, eyes narrowed, nostrils flaring, like she was trying to smell my breath.
I stiffened, feeling the flesh of my back break out in goose bumps, almost swooning in terror. Busted. I was busted. I’d get arrested. I’d lose my license. Dave would find out. Everyone would know.
I pulled myself up straight, trying to look and sound as sober as I could. “Janet and I had a glass of wine, but that was over an hour ago. I’m fine. Really. I swear.” I said it firmly, trying to look and sound respectable and sober, hoping that Mrs. Dale would be mindful that I was, for all intents and purposes, her employer. I smoothed my hair and tried to ignore my torn pants and my bloody palms, and project a look of serenity and competence.
Mrs. Dale appeared to be unmoved. “Mrs. Weiss, I think you need to come inside.”
“I’m fine.” I yanked at the keys, pulling them out of her hand so hard that I stumbled backward, almost falling on the sidewalk.
“Listen to me.” Her voice was the commanding, imperious one I’d heard on the playground, a tone that could get a few dozen unruly kindergartners to snap to attention. “As a teacher, I am a mandated reporter. If I believe that children are in danger, I have to call the Department of—”
“What are you talking about?” My voice was almost a shout. I widened my eyes to show how completely ridiculous she was being. “You think the children are in danger?” The soft comfort of the pills was gone, vanished, evaporated, as if it had never been there. My body was on high alert, heart pounding, adrenaline whipping through my bloodstream, and I could hear my voice getting higher and louder. “I had one glass of wine.” Never mind the pills I’d taken beforehand. “One. Glass. I’m fine.”
“I don’t know what you’ve had, but I can’t let you drive with children in your car.” She put a hand—a patronizing hand—between my shoulder blades. “Come inside. Sit down. Have coffee.”
Now there were three cars behind mine. I recognized Tracy Kelly, and Quinn Gamer, and a man I didn’t know, and all of them were staring. Quinn had her phone in her hand, busily texting, probably telling someone—her husband, a friend—exactly what was going on; Allison Weiss, Mrs. Vibrator in Every Purse, had shown up at Stonefield wasted.
“Mommy?”
I looked inside the car, where Ellie was buckled into her booster seat, with her thumb hooked into her mouth. Ellie hadn’t sucked her thumb since she was three. “Why is everybody YELLING?”
“Okay,” I said, and opened my hand. The key fob slid out from my sweaty fingers and fell onto the sidewalk with a clink. “Okay.”