All Fall Down(24)
Author: Jennifer Weiner

“What?”

“Nothing.”

My mother started to cry. “I’m sorry,” she said, the way she always apologized for her tears. “It’s just so hard to watch this happening to him.”

“I know, Mom.” It was horrible for me, too, seeing the slackness of his mouth, the eyes that had once missed nothing swimming, befuddled, behind his bifocals.

“He was so embarrassed,” said my mother. “It was just awful.”

“I can imagine,” I said, knowing that as hard a time as Eloise had given me, coaxing a seventy-year-old man in the grip of early Alzheimer’s out of his clothes and into the shower would be exponentially more difficult, especially for my five-foot, ninety-five-pound mother.

“I need you to take him to the doctor’s.”

“When’s the appointment?”

“Nine.” She sniffled. Her Philadelphia accent stretched the syllable into noine. “That was the earliest they could see him.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll make it work.”

My mother hung up. Without remembering reaching for it, I found a pill bottle in my hand and two more pills in my mouth. Crunching and swallowing, I waited for the familiar, comforting sweetness to suffuse me, that sunny, elevating sensation that everything would be all right, but it was slow in arriving. My heart was still pounding, and my head was starting to ache along with it, and I was so overwhelmed and so unhappy that I wanted to hurl my phone against the wall. My husband is cheating. Or at least he’s flirting. My father is dying. My mother is falling apart. And I’m not sure what to do about any of it.

Instead of throwing the phone, I punched in one of my speed-dial numbers. The receptionist at my primary-care physician’s office put me through to Dr. Andi.

“The famous Allison Weiss!” she said. “I was drinking my smoothie this morning, and there you were!”

“There I was,” I repeated, in a dull, leaden voice.

“Ooh, you don’t sound good.” It was one of the many things I liked about Dr. Hollings—she could take one look or one listen and know something was up. “Back go out again?”

My life, I thought. My life went out. “You got it. This morning. I crawled up to bed and I’ve been here ever since. I took a Vicodin, but, honestly, it’s not doing much, and I can’t stay in bed all day. I’ve got a million things to do, and it’s Dave’s birthday dinner tonight.”

“Well, God forbid you miss that!”

“I know, right?”

There was a pause. Maybe she was pulling my chart, or checking something in a book. “Okay, let’s see. We called in a refill, what, three weeks ago? I don’t normally recommend doing this because of the acetaminophen—it’s not great for your liver—but if you’re really struggling, you can double down on the Vicodin.”

“I tried that,” I confessed. “I know I wasn’t supposed to, but . . .” I let her hear the quaver in my voice, the one that had nothing to do with my discs and everything to do with L. McIntyre, my dad, and the article. “I’m really not doing so well here.”

She clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth, thinking. “Okay. I can call you in a scrip for OxyContin. It’s a lot stronger, so be careful with it until you see how you react. I don’t want you driving . . .”

“No worries. I can take a cab tonight.”

“Good. Check in with me in a few days. Feel better!”

“Thanks,” I said.

An hour later, the pharmacy had my prescription ready. I zipped through the drive-in window to pick it up and tucked the paper bag into my purse, but at the first traffic light I hit I found myself opening first the bag, then the bottle inside it.

The OxyContin pills were tiny, smaller than Altoids, and bright turquoise. “Take one every four to six hours for pain.” Pain, I thought, and crunched down on one, wincing at the bitterness, then swallowed a second.

By the time I got home, I was finally beginning to feel some relief. I floated up the stairs and drifted into the bathroom for a proper shower, not one with Princess Bath Soap. As I lathered my hair I sang “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair” under my breath. Why had it taken me so long to find OxyContin? It was lovely. Blissful. Heaven.

L. McIntyre. Maybe she was just a work friend who’d become more like a work wife. I felt the knot between my shoulder blades loosen incrementally as I thought of those words. I knew what a work wife was. I’d been one myself, back when I was at the Examiner. My work husband’s name was Eric Stengel. He was a photographer, and very discreetly g*y, my friend and ally, my partner-in-crime and my lunch buddy. We talked about everything—MTV series, the spin classes that were just popping up in Philadelphia, the mysteries of men’s hearts, our shared obsession with the movie Almost Famous. We never saw each other outside of the newsroom hours, but every Monday morning I’d pick up cappuccinos for both of us and a single muffin to split, and we’d spend our first hour of the workweek at his desk, debriefing each other about our weekends. We had lunch together at Viet Nam at least once a week. In warm weather, we’d buy fruit salads from the vending truck on Callowhill, and sit outside and talk about Liev Schreiber and Jake Gyllenhaal and the mysterious appeal of Ryan Gosling (Eric got him; I didn’t). I was there to talk Eric out of having his name legally changed to Edward (“It has nothing to do with Twilight; it’s just that Eric’s such a nerd name,” he’d said). He’d been there to convince me that Dave wasn’t cheating after I’d found an inscribed book of Pablo Neruda poetry, dated two weeks after we’d started seeing each other, under Dave’s bed. “He’s not going to marry someone who reads Neruda,” Eric had told me. “Cummings, maybe. Auden, Larkin, those guys, I could see it. But Neruda? Nuh-uh.”