All Fall Down(75)
Author: Jennifer Weiner

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.”

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.