All Fall Down(83)
Author: Jennifer Weiner

“. . . parents found my works underneath my mattress and, like, hired an interventionist . . .”

“You had an intervention? That is so cool! Shit, my mom said she was taking me to the movies, and then she dropped me off here . . .”

I sipped my tea and watched the clock. I would say as little as possible for as long as I could. I’d sit through their orientation and endure the mandatory twenty-four hours. Then I’d find a supervisor, explain the situation, and get Dave or Janet or someone to come pick me up.

I didn’t belong here. I wasn’t like these women. I didn’t have any DUIs that needed to be expunged, a judge hadn’t ordered me to stay, and I hadn’t flunked a drug test at work. Nobody named D-Block had ever stuck a needle in my arm, and I wasn’t sure I could find Kensington even with my GPS. Heroin, I thought, and shuddered. These girls had done IV drugs, and probably worse things to get the drugs. All I’d done was swallow a few too many pills, all of which (except the ones I’d ordered online) had been legitimately prescribed. I didn’t belong here, and all I needed to do was figure out how quickly I could leave. My daughter needed me. So did my readers. How on earth had I let Dave convince me, even for a minute, that I could just check out of all of my responsibilities to come to a place like this?

“What’s your damage?” asked the girl next to me. She was in her twenties, broad-shouldered and solid, with no makeup on her pale skin and long brown hair piled on top of her head in a messy bun. She wore gray sweatpants and an Eagles jersey and a nametag that read LENA.

“Excuse me?”

“Your stuff. Your drug of choice,” she explained in a flat, nasal voice, as Mary sat down across from me.

“Pills. But I don’t really . . . I mean, I don’t think that I’m . . .” I shut my mouth and tried again. “I’m not actually planning on staying. I don’t think this is the right place for me.”

The Eagles-jersey girl and Mary both gave me knowing smiles. “That’s what I said,” Mary told us. With her blue eyes and white curls, her rounded hips and sagging bosom, she looked like Mrs. Claus. Possibly like Mrs. Claus after a rough weekend, during which she’d discovered naughty pictures of the elves on Santa’s hard drive. “I used to put my gin in a water bottle. Because that was classy.” A Boston accent turned the word to clah-see. I sipped my tea as the other girls and women nodded. “So I came down here with my bottle of Dasani, thinking I had everyone fooled.”

“I wasn’t fooling anyone,” said Lena. “I came straight from the hospital. They Narcanned me.”

“Excuse me?” I asked.

“I OD’d. I almost died. They had to give me Narcan—it’s a shot that, like, brings you back to life. I woke up and ripped the IVs out of my arm and, like, ran out the door. I had my stash in my bra,” she said.

“Ah.” Stash in bra, I thought. Add that to the list of things I didn’t do and did not completely understand. Was stash different from works?

“But they caught me—of course.” Lena used her hands when she talked, big, broad, sweeping motions. When she wasn’t gesturing, she was smoothing her ponytail like a pet. “I was in jail for six weeks, and then I was on work release, but I f**ked that up and got loaded, and my PO busted me . . .” PO. Work release. Jail. Gin in water bottles. Drinking before the third hour of the Today show. I looked around, again noting the doors, wondering what would really happen if I just got up, collected my purse and duffel bag, and walked out. Of course, I didn’t know exactly where I was. That was a problem. Nor did I have any money—I remembered that they’d taken my wallet and my phone when they’d taken my bag. I rested my throbbing temples in my palms and forced myself to breathe slowly, trying to keep that jumping-out-of-my-skin feeling at bay.

A buzzer sounded. The girls and women stood, trays in hand, and marched to a stainless steel window cut into the wall. I picked up my own empty tray and got in line, depositing my silverware in a bin full of detergent, pushing my mug through the slot, from which a plastic-gloved, hair-netted dishwasher grabbed it. “Come on,” said Aubrey, and I followed the crowd out the door.

EIGHTEEN

At nine o’clock that morning, I was sitting on a couch covered in a shiny and decidedly unnatural fabric in a room called the Ladies’ Lounge, and a thumb-shaped, red-faced man was yelling at me.

“All addicts are selfish,” he said. He was, like the famed little teapot, short and stout. His cheap acrylic sweater was a red that matched his face. His blue slacks bunched alarmingly at his crotch, the cuffs so short they displayed his argyle socks and an expanse of hairy white shin. His tassled loafers were scuffed. On his sweater was pinned a nametag reading DARNTON. He looked at us accusingly. There were three of us in orientation: me, and Aubrey, and Mary, who’d been crying quietly since she’d walked through the door.