All Fall Down(97)
Author: Jennifer Weiner

I shuddered. Not me, I thought again . . . but the words from the Basic Text wouldn’t stop playing. Very simply, an addict is a man or woman whose life is controlled by drugs. We are people in the grip of a continuing and progressive illness whose ends are always the same: jails, institutions, and death. I shook my head, so hard that Aubrey and Mary both looked up. No. Not me. Not me.

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.