FIFTEEN
I was too upset to sleep that night. I sat in the living room with my laptop, pounding out a blog post called “Husbands Just Don’t Understand,” while Ronnie slept in the guest bedroom and Dave snored away down the hall. I burned through work I’d been putting off, spending ninety minutes engaging with the comments section and coming up with story ideas for one of the magazines that had been e-mailing in the wake of my “vibrator in every purse” comment. Every time I felt my brain edging toward the words Dave knows what I’ve been doing or I’m going to lose my family or even just I want to stop and I can’t, I would march myself into the bathroom and take another pill. By six a.m., I was wild-eyed, smelling of acrid sweat, feeling both sluggish and frantic. And, somehow, the unthinkable had happened. I was out of pills.
“Can you take Ellie to school?” I rasped through the bathroom door. Rats’ teeth of panic were nibbling at my heart. Dave sounded disgustingly collected.
“Sure. No problem.”
I went to the computer and logged on to Penny Lane, to make sure I hadn’t placed an order and then forgotten about it. No. There was only the stuff that Dave had intercepted. Prior to that was an order for sixty pills that had arrived two days ago, and every last one of them was gone. I stared at the screen, feeling my jaw drop as I did the math. Thirty pills in less than a day and a half? That couldn’t be right. Except I could remember the package arriving, and how fast I’d gotten the envelope open and transferred the pills into my mints tin, how before I’d even gotten inside the house I had four of those babies inside me.
“F*ck,” I whispered. I went to the bedroom and began to go through my usual hiding places: my tampon box, the second drawer of my bedside table, the zippered pockets inside the different purses I’d used that month. There was nothing. I couldn’t even find a piece of a broken pill to tide me over. Everything was gone.
I sat down on the bed, heart thumping, palms and temples greasy with cold sweat. I picked up my phone and scrolled through the names of my doctors. Called her last week . . .. called him on Monday . . .. haven’t called her in so long she’ll probably ask questions about why I need painkillers now.
Think, I told myself fiercely as I heard the garage door open and the car pull out of the driveway. Maybe there was stuff left in my father’s medicine cabinet . . . except I knew that there wasn’t. I’d cleared it all out before the Realtor had come for a final walkthrough. Did my mom have anything? And did I want to risk trying to get her out of the house so I could check?
Forty minutes after Dave’s departure, still in my pajama bottoms and the Wonder Woman T-shirt I’d worn while I worked, I sat on the examination table of a strip-mall clinic where a cab had dropped me off, talking to a doctor with a heavy accent and bags under his eyes.
“You hurt the back when?”
“Two years ago.” I was shivering, sweating, and having a hard time keeping my legs still. My knees wanted to kick, my feet wanted to tap, my body itched all over, and my fingers wanted to dig into my skin and start clawing. Withdrawal, I thought bleakly. A loop of every movie I’d ever seen in which a junkie kicked his or her habit had set itself on “repeat” in my mind. I was terrified of the agony I suspected was awaiting me . . . and I was furious at myself, furious that I’d let this happen, not stayed on top of what I had and what I needed. All those weeks—months, even—of promising myself I’d cut back, just not today, when in fact my use had increased and increased, my tolerance building until I needed four, or five, or even six little blue OxyContin to feel the transporting euphoria that a single Vicodin had once given me . . . and now here I was with nothing.
“You take how much of the painkiller?”
“I don’t know. A lot. Maybe ten pills a day,” I lied.
“Of the thirty milligrams?”
“Yes.” Ten was a good day, and Oxys weren’t the only thing I was taking, but never mind. He’d give me something—I didn’t even care what. Then I’d get on top of this. I’d slow my roll, start being prudent. No more pills first thing in the morning, no more pills in the middle of the night. Three or four days—a week, tops—and I’d have this under control.
“Every day, you take them?”
I nodded, launching into the story I’d already told the intake nurse. “And, like I said, I’m going to see my regular doctor, only she’s out sick, and I’m leaving for vacation this afternoon, and if you could just give me maybe ten pills, just so I can get through the plane trip . . .”
He leaned back against the exam room’s sink, taking me in. His name was Dr. Desgupta, and his eyes, behind heavy brown plastic frames, were not unkind.
“Every day, you’re taking these pills,” he said again.
I bent my head and prayed. Please, God, just let him give me enough to get through the day and I’ll stop, I’ll get help, I’ll do something, I swear I will.
“And is it because the back hurts? Or is it because you need them, because you are getting sick without them?”
I didn’t answer. I wrapped my arms around myself and concentrated, as hard as I could, on not throwing up. “Sick,” I finally said. “I’ve never tried to stop, and I think . . . I mean, I’m not feeling so great already.”
“There is medication. Suboxone.” I lifted my head. “An opiate agonist-antagonist. It blocks your receptors, so you can’t take the heroin, or the Vicodin, or the OxyContin. Whatever narcotic you were taking. But it gives you some opiate, too. Not enough so you get, you know, the high, but enough that you feel okay.”
I nodded. This sounded like an acceptable solution. I could take this Suboxone stuff and stop hurting, and then take a day to sort myself out. I’d get more pills, either online or from doctors, enough so that this would never happen again. I would contact a lawyer, and a child psychologist, which Ellie would undoubtedly require. I would taper myself off the pills, maybe try more of those meetings, or get myself a therapist, or start running again. But all I wanted, at that moment, was something to take, something to swallow or smoke or snort. Something that would ease my panic, slow my heartbeat, let me feel okay again.
“Here.” Dr. Desgupta had finally pulled out his prescription pad. “I will write for seven days. The medicine is a film; you dissolve it under your tongue.” He ripped off the page. I snatched it out of his hand. “How long ago was last dose of OxyContin?”
I tried to remember what time it had been when I’d chewed up the last of my pills, and tried not to remember licking the inside of the jewelry box where I’d found the final two Vicodin. If you were ever wondering whether you had a problem or not, the taste of jewelry-box felt was answer enough. “Four in the morning?”
He looked at the clock, calculating. He had big brown eyes, a bald head with a few strands of black hair carefully arranged on top, and a soft, accented voice. “Take first one at noon. You should be started in the withdrawal by then. Feeling like you have the flu. Sweaty, hands shaking . . . you feel like that, you take first one.”
“Thank you,” I said faintly, and was up and out of the chair, the prescription in one hand and my cell phone in the other, before he could tell me goodbye.
? ? ?
I could remember the rest of the day only in snatches. I remembered my cab ride from the doc-in-a-box to the drive-through lane of the pharmacy. The flu, the doctor had told me . . . except this was to the flu like a pack of rabid pit bulls was to a Chihuahua. I was running with foul-smelling sweat and shaking so hard that my teeth were chattering. My skin was covered in goose pimples; whatever I’d eaten the day before churned unhappily in my belly. I remembered the pharmacist telling me that the medicine wasn’t covered by my insurance without prior approval, and insisting, over and over, that I didn’t care, that it didn’t matter, that I’d pay out of pocket and worry about reimbursement later.
Back at home, I speed-read the instructions, then tore open one of the packets and let the yellow film dissolve into sour slime under my tongue. I locked the bedroom door and lay on my bed, where I endured six hours of the worst hell I could imagine. My entire body twitched and burned. My legs kicked and flailed uncontrollably. I couldn’t hold still, couldn’t get comfortable. My skin felt like it was host to hundreds of thousands of fiery ants wearing boots made of poison-tipped needles. I scratched and clawed, but I couldn’t make them go away. The first time I threw up, I made it to the toilet, and, from there, I managed to send my mother and Dave a text explaining that I was sick and that, between the two of them, they’d have to handle Ellie and her obligations. The second time, I made it to the sink. The third time, I couldn’t even make it out of bed. I was freezing cold, so I’d tried to get under the covers, but the kicking—kicking! I was actually kicking!—had disarranged everything, had loosened the fitted sheets and the mattress cover. I writhed on the bed, trying to moan into the pillow, praying that the Suboxone would start its work, that I’d feel better, that Ellie wouldn’t see or hear this.
My mother knocked at the door. “Allison? Allison, are you okay?”
“Flu,” I called back, in a voice that didn’t sound like mine. I’d gotten myself wrapped in a blanket and was sitting, hunched over and moaning, in the old glider chair I’d used to nurse Ellie. I was burning up, my hair glued to my cheeks in matted clumps, making high, whining noises. I moaned and rocked, moaned and rocked, as the minutes dragged by. At six o’clock I couldn’t stand it any longer. I found the phone, crawled into bed, and managed to dial the clinic and tell the receptionist that it was an emergency and that I needed Dr. Desgupta.
“Yes, hello?” he answered.
I told him my name. My voice was a high, wavering whisper. I didn’t sound like myself; I sounded like Ellie when she woke up sick in the middle of the night. “There’s something wrong . . . I’m really sick . . .”
“You are having the nausea and the diarrhea?”
“Yes,” I whispered. I was crying, on top of everything else. “I’m cold . . . I can’t stop shaking . . . everything hurts . . . I feel like I’m going to die . . .”
“Twenty-four hours,” he said calmly. “The Suboxone is kicking the opiates off your receptors. But in a day or two you will be well again.”
A day or two? I wasn’t sure I could take another twenty minutes of this agony. “I can’t do this,” I said. My voice was sounding less like human conversation than like a cat’s yowl. “Please, you have to help me . . . I think I need to go to a hospital . . .”
“I am thinking,” the doctor said calmly, “that maybe you need to be in a rehab bed.” He trilled the “r” of “rehab,” making it sound like something wonderful and exotic.
“No rehab,” I said. “I’m not an addict. Please. I’m not. I’m just really, really sick.”
“You go to one of these places, they will help you,” he explained. “There is no need to stay for the twenty-eight days unless you like. But you need to be watched until you are well.”
Rehab. I started crying even harder, because I suspected that he was right. Maybe I didn’t need rehab, but I needed to be somewhere with nurses and doctors and medicine and machines. The pain was intolerable. I could barely speak; I couldn’t keep my legs still. I actually wanted to die. Death would be an improvement over this.
The doorknob turned. Shaking and sick, I felt the weight of Ellie’s body as she crawled beside me. “Mommy?” she whispered. With her tiny hands she patted my hair, then my forehead. “Mommy, do you need true love’s kiss?”
I made some noise, thinking that I’d never hated myself as much as I did at that moment. Then my mother was there. “Oh my God.” Somehow, she kept her voice calm as she said, “Ellie, go to your room. Let me help your mommy.”
I opened my eye. “Mom.” She bent down and hugged me hard. I whispered Dr. Desgupta’s name, then handed her the phone, and shut my eyes again as I heard her say, “Yes, I’m Allison Weiss’s mother, and she’s very, very ill.”
Curled on my side, I rocked and rocked. Faintly, as if I were listening through a paper tube, I could hear my mother’s voice, her questions and answers. Opiate addiction . . .. Suboxone . . .. Precipitated withdrawal . . .. Which facility would you recommend?
“No rehab!” I moaned, and grabbed at my mother’s sleeve.
“Yes, rehab,” she said, and pulled herself away. She wasn’t falling apart or weeping. There were no snail tracks of mascara on her cheeks, no trembling hands or whimpered complaints about how she could not go on. It was funny, I thought. All it took for my mother to actually be a mother was a little withdrawal. “You’re sick, honey. You’re sick, but I’m going to help you get better.”
I shut my eyes. Later I remembered voices in the bedroom, a stethoscope against my chest, my mother’s voice, then Dave’s, reciting from the Penny Lane invoice a list of what I’d been taking, how many, and for how long. We see a lot of this, someone—a paramedic—had said. More than you’d expect. Happens to the nicest people. The nicest people, I thought. That was me. Then they lifted me onto a gurney, and I felt the sting of a needle in my arm, and when I opened my eyes again I was in a hospital bed, feeling as if every bone in my body had been smashed, then clumsily reset.
“Where am I? What happened?” I whispered. Dave stood there in a Blind Melon T-shirt and jeans, looking at me. I hurt all over. My body felt like a skinned knee, flayed and bloody, like a single, stinging nerve ending . . . and I was more ashamed than I had ever been in my life. I couldn’t deal with this. Not now. Not until someone gave me something for the pain.
“You’re in the hospital. You had something called precipitated withdrawal.” Dave had come to the doorway, but had not taken a single step inside the room, like he’d committed to stopping by, but not staying, at a party whose guests he had no interest in knowing. “It’s what happens when you’ve been taking lots of opiates for a long time, and then something kicks them off your system.”
“FYI, it’s not a lot of fun,” I whispered. Dave didn’t smile.
“There’re two days left of school.” Dave was doing his reasonable, just-the-facts thing, the one I recognized from telephone conversations with his editor. “Your mom and I can manage Ellie. Then she can do day camp at Stonefield.”
“My mom can barely manage herself,” I said.
“You need to go somewhere,” he said.
“You mean rehab.” Dave did not deny it. “Look,” I said, into the silence. “Obviously, buying pills online was a bad idea. I know I was taking way more than I should have. I’m under a lot of stress. I’ve been making some bad decisions. But look, it’s been . . .” I looked around for a clock, then took my best guess. “What, twenty-four hours since I had anything, right?” Without waiting for him to confirm, I plowed on. “So I should be fine. Maybe I just need some rest. Fluids. Then I can come home, and I’ll be okay. I just won’t take any more pills.”
Could I do it? I wondered, even as I made my case. Maybe, twenty-four hours later, I’d be physically free, but I knew that if I was home alone I’d be on the computer or the phone, getting more.
You’re an addict.
No I’m not.
You can’t stop.
Yes I can.
And in that moment, in that bed, what I’d done, what I’d let myself become, hit me hard. I had endangered my daughter. Janet’s boys. Myself. Even though no one had gotten hurt—yet, my mind whispered; no one has gotten hurt yet—the truth was that if I kept going this way, Ellie might grow up with an absence far worse than what I endured. She would have the same hole in her heart that I had, the same questions that tormented me—why wasn’t I good enough for my own mother to love?
“It’s just twenty-eight days,” Dave said.
“What about my dad?” I managed. “What about Ellie?”
“Your father’s in a safe place. Your mom can take care of herself, and I can take care of Eloise.”
“And what if I don’t go?”
Dave didn’t answer. He just looked at me steadily. “I hope you’ll do the right thing,” he finally said. “Because I need to do whatever it takes to make sure that Ellie is safe.”
Panic was blooming inside me, pushing the air out of my lungs, as I sorted out what that could mean. I imagined Dave moving out, and taking Ellie with him. I pictured my husband in his good navy blue suit, standing in front of a judge, all the evidence—the envelopes from Penny Lane, bank statements and receipts, copies of all the prescriptions I’d accumulated from all the different doctors. Your honor, my wife is not capable of caring for a small child. Or, worse, what if I came home from the hospital and found that the locks had been changed?
“Allison. Be reasonable.” His voice was as gentle as it had been on the phone the day we’d moved my dad to Eastwood. “Is this how you want to live your life? Is this the kind of mom you want to be?”
I opened my mouth to tell him, once again, that things were all right, that they were almost entirely okay; that yes, obviously, there’d been some slips, that things had gotten out of hand, but they were by no means completely off the rails or—what was the word they kept using in that meeting?—unmanageable. My life was not unmanageable. I could manage it just fine.
But before I could say that, I thought about how I’d been spending my days. Waking up in the morning, my very first thoughts were not of my daughter or my husband, not of my job or my friends or my plans for the day, but of how many pills I had left, and whether it was enough, and how I was going to get more. The time I spent chasing them, the energy, the money, the mental resources . . . and the truth was, at that point I was barely feeling the euphoria they’d once provided. A year ago, one or two Vicodin could make me feel great. These days, four or five Oxys—the medicine they gave to cancer patients, for God’s sake, cancer patients who were dying—were barely enough to get me feeling normal. Was this how I wanted to live?
But how could I leave? How could I walk away from everything—my home, my work, my father, my daughter? There was no way. I could just go home and fix this on my own. I could do better. I could get it under control, cut back, be more reasonable. Except, even as I began to outline a plan in my head, I was suspecting a different truth. My “off” switch was broken, possibly forever. Having just one pill felt about as likely as taking just one breath.
I looked up at my husband. “I suppose you’ve already found a place to ship me?”
He nodded. “It’s in New Jersey. It’s very highly rated. And my insurance will pay for twenty-eight days.”
Twenty-eight days, I thought. I could do anything for twenty-eight days.
“Okay,” I said quietly, thinking, This has to end somehow, somewhere, and maybe this is as good an ending as any. “Okay.”