PART THREE
Checking In
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 a*shole,” 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?”
“F*ck,” 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.
“Buttf*ck, New Jersey,” Aubrey said, shoving books and papers under her bed. “I mean, I guess it’s got a name, but I have no f*cking clue what it’s called. All rehabs are, like, in the middle of f*cking 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.