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?