All Fall Down(71)
Author: Jennifer Weiner

I tried to interrupt. “Dave, listen . . .”

“You were going to drive drunk with Ellie in the car!” He started yelling, his face red, a vein throbbing in the center of his forehead, tears in his eyes. “What if she died? What if you died? What the f**k is the matter with you?”

I started to cry. “I don’t know. Maybe I don’t like having a husband who won’t even talk to me anymore. Maybe I’m sick of being the one who does everything around here.”

He glared at me, unmoved by my tears. “Don’t make this my fault, Allison.”

“You don’t know.” My voice cracked on the last word. “You have no idea what it’s like. Dealing with Ellie. Dealing with my parents. My work . . .”

“Maybe not,” he said coolly. “Maybe I don’t know. But I think there are people in the world who manage to do all of those things without becoming drug addicts.”

“I am not a drug addict!” And f**k that bitch Mrs. Dale for ratting me out. I mentally tore up the check I’d been planning to send to the Annual Giving campaign. I’d take myself shopping instead. “Okay. Obviously I shouldn’t have been drinking on top of the medication. I was tired, and I made a mistake. I’m not perfect.”

“You aren’t yourself. I don’t know any other way to say it. And everyone’s noticed. Me, your mom, Ellie . . .” He reached across the table, but I pulled my hand away before he could touch me. “If you want to get some help, I’ll support you as best I can.”

My laugh was high and shrill. “Help? What, like rehab? You think I need to go to rehab? You think I’m Lindsay Lohan now?”

“I don’t know what you need. But I know you’re taking more of those pills than you should be. I’m worried about you . . . and, quite frankly, I’m worried about you taking care of Ellie.”

I thought I’d been scared before, that day at Stonefield, when Mrs. Dale hadn’t let me drive. I was wrong. That wasn’t anything. This was real fear. This was true terror. And the best defense was a good offense. My father used to say that all the time. I drew myself up straight, grateful that I was wearing makeup, that I’d washed my hair that morning, that my clothes were clean. “Are you suggesting that I’m an unfit mother?”

Dave shook his head. “I’m saying that I’m worried about you, and I’m worried about Ellie when she’s with you. You need to take this seriously, Allison. People die from what you’re doing.”

“Okay! So fine! I’ll quit!” I made a show of extracting a bottle of Vicodin from my purse, uncapping it, and pouring the pills down the drain. I had a small secret stash, of course—a mints tin stuffed in my purse, a dozen Oxys in the bottom of my tampon box, a few Percocet in the glove compartment.

I turned on my heel and made what might have been a grand exit if my hip hadn’t caught the side of the table. I stumbled, and would have fallen if I hadn’t grabbed the wall. Dave was right behind me, holding my gaze, glaring at me, with no trace of goodwill or humor or love in his expression.

“I don’t want to have to spy on you,” he said. “But I will do whatever I have to do to keep Ellie safe.”

“Ellie,” I said, with all the dignity I could muster, “is perfectly safe. I would never, ever do anything to put her at risk.” Except, of course, the thing I’d done a few days ago.

“If you want help, I am here for you.”

I rolled my eyes. “Great. See if you can send me to the place the guy from Friends went. They have Pilates.”

“Allison.”

“I promise,” I roared, before he could get off another adult-sounding, well-meaning warning. “I promise I promise I promise.” And I kept my promise all the way up the stairs, down the hall, and into the bathroom, where I fished pills out of the tampon box where I’d hidden them, and swallowed them, one, two, three.

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.