All Fall Down(105)
Author: Jennifer Weiner

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 f**kups, 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.”