All Fall Down: A Novel

TWENTY-EIGHT

“How about these clementines?” The clerk at the Whole Foods on South Street—a white guy of maybe twenty with mild blue eyes, a wide, untroubled brow, and dreadlocks down to his waist—gave me a gentle, Namaste kind of smile. He spoke softly and slowly, with great deliberation. It was maddening. This guy wouldn’t have lasted a day in the suburbs, but in Center City, where the Whole Foods was next to a yoga studio, infuriating slowness was the rule. “Should we leave them in the box? Or take them out of the box and put the fruit in a bag?”

“Fruit in a bag, please.” I was only buying a dozen things—a turkey breast to grill for dinner, the miniature oranges that Ellie loved in her school lunches, a twenty-dollar maple-scented candle that was way too expensive but that I’d found impossible to resist—but I could already tell that I was going to be checking out for a while. Use it as a chance to practice patience, Bernice’s voice said in my head. When I’d left Meadowcrest, I’d joined Bernice’s outpatient group, and her voice had taken up residence in my brain. I tried not to sigh, and actually managed a smile as the clerk first rummaged in his drawer, then patted down his pockets, and finally called over a manager, who called over a second manager, who located a pair of scissors to snip through the netting.

“Oh, dear. It looks like a few of these are moldy,” said the clerk as the miniature oranges tumbled from their wooden crate into a plastic bag.

“Mommy, I do not want MOLDY CLEMENTINES,” Ellie announced.

“Do you want to get another box?” the clerk asked. Behind me, the woman with the Phil&Teds stroller and the black woolen peacoat gave a small but audible groan. Send her peace. That wasn’t Bernice; that was the voice of my new yoga instructor, Loyal. Peace, I thought. Old Allison would have scoffed at the dopey sayings, at the idea that the checkout line at the supermarket offered a chance to practice anything at all (not to mention at the notion of someone named Loyal). New Allison took advice wherever she could get it—at meetings, from magazines, from Oprah’s Super Soul Sundays, and from Celestial Seasonings tea bags.

“That’s okay,” I told the clerk. “How about just separate out the moldy ones? You can toss those, and we’ll take the good ones home.”

He looked at me, concern furrowing his brow. “Are you sure? You can just go get another box. It’s no trouble at all.”

“It’s fine.”

“Ooookay.” Clearly, it might have been fine for me, but it was deeply troubling for him. “Now, how about the turkey? Would you like that in a separate bag?”

“Please.” I held up the shopping bags I’d brought. The clerk blinked, like he’d never seen or imagined such a thing.

“So . . . use that one?”

“Oh my God,” murmured the woman in the peacoat. Ellie, meanwhile, had crouched down, the better to inspect the beeswax lip balms.

“Mommy, is this MAKEUP?”

“Kind of. Not exactly.”

“Well, can I HAVE it?”

“No, honey, we have stuff like that at home. You can use what we’ve got. We’ll shop the closet!”

“But that will have your SPITTY STUFF ALL OVER IT!”

I squatted down, feeling my body protest. My hips creaked; my back twinged. I’d done an hour of hot yoga that morning and had a run planned for tomorrow. How’d you do it? they asked in AA and NA meetings, when you went up front to collect your chip—for your first twenty-four hours of sobriety, then for thirty days, sixty days, ninety days, six months, nine months, a year, and on from there. One day at a time was the rote answer, the line you had to say, but each time I’d collected a chip I’d made sure to say that exercise was part of my recovery. It was a chance to get completely out of my head, forty minutes when all I could do was take the next step, find the next pose, manage the next inhalation. No matter how crappy or sad I felt, how locked in my own head, in my own unhappy run of thoughts, I would force myself up and out of bed, into the clothes I’d laid out the night before, and I would make myself go through my paces like I was swallowing a dose of some noxious medicine that I knew it was critical to get down.

Some mornings Ellie would join me for a walk down Pine Street, all the way to the Delaware River, or we’d do workout routines in the basement of the row house where I’d rented an apartment back in Philadelphia. Dave had found his own place, just a few blocks away. He’d kept the fancy treadmill; I’d found one on Craigslist, along with hand weights and a step bench. Together, Ellie and I had downloaded free fitness videos, and gotten various ten-, fifteen-, and twenty-minute workouts from magazines. We would do jump squats and mountain climbers. We’d lunge our way back and forth across the basement, and do planks and push-ups, V-sits and donkey kicks, all while playing word games. I’d start with a letter of the alphabet; Ellie would give me a classmate at her new public school whose name began with that letter . . . and then, typically, a rundown as to why she didn’t like that particular kid. (“D is for Dylan, who is nice sometimes but would not let me have the window seat on the bus when we went to the art museum.”)

In the grocery store, I looked Ellie in the eye. “Ellie. Remember how we talked about using a respectful inside voice?”

She pursed her lips. “Yes, except I wanted a COOKIE and you said NO COOKIE.”

“I said no cookie until after dinner.”

“And now I want lipstick and you are saying NO and ALL YOU EVER SAY IS NO.”

“Oh, honey.” I held my arms open. After a minute, Ellie let me hug her. “I know things feel hard sometimes. But there’s good stuff, too.”

“Ma’am?”

I straightened up. The clerk was holding my maple candle and the jug of on-sale moisturizer I’d selected. “Do you want your non-food items in a separate bag?”

“Sure,” I said, and gave him a smile.

“You,” said the peacoat woman, “are a saint.”

I smiled at her. “Believe me, I’m not.” She was maybe five years younger than I was, her hair bundled in a careless ponytail at the nape of her neck, a diamond sparkling on her left hand. I wondered, as I always did when I met strangers these days, whether she was one of them or one of us; one of the earthlings, who could take or leave a glass of wine, or a joint, or a Vicodin or an Oxy; or one of the Martians, for whom, as the Basic Text said, one was too many and a thousand was never enough. You never can tell, Bernice said, and, from the people in my group, I knew it was true—pass any one of them on the street, and you’d have no idea that they were drunks and druggies. Well, maybe you’d guess about Brian, who had the word THUG tattooed on the fingers of his right hand, and life on the fingers of his left. But you’d never guess about Jeannie, a lawyer, who came to meetings in smart suits and leather boots, and who’d lost her license after blacking out and plowing her car into a statue of George Washington on New Year’s Day. Gregory looked like your run-of-the-mill fabulous gay guy, in his gorgeous made-to-measure shirts and hand-sewn shoes. Maybe you’d think that he liked to party on weekends, but you’d never imagine that he’d done three years in prison for drug trafficking. I wondered how I looked—to the clerk, now ringing up my yogurt in slow motion, to the young mother behind me, pushing her stroller back and forth in angry little jerks. Probably no different from the rest of the earthlings, with my hair in a bun, in my workout pants and zippered black sweatshirt. I still wore my wedding ring, and Dave still wore his. We’d never discussed it, which meant I didn’t know whether I was wearing the platinum band out of hope or nostalgia or just so creepy guys in the dairy aisle wouldn’t ask me for help in picking out heavy cream.

“Ma’am?” After what felt like another five minutes’ worth of wrangling—debit or credit? Cash back? Tens or twenties?—I gave Ellie the little bag with the candle and the moisturizer and slung the bigger one over my shoulder, along with my purse, and the two of us walked onto South Street. I’d drop her off with Dave, then go to the five-thirty meeting of what had become my home group, the AA meeting I attended every week. He’d grill the turkey, I’d make rice and asparagus to go with it when I got back, and the three of us would share dinner together before Ellie and I went home.

No big changes for the first year was what they told us at Meadowcrest, but Dave and I had had to downsize, moving to modest apartments in the city and putting the big house on the market, especially after it became clear that my job, at least for the first little while, would be staying sober, with blogging a very distant second. I had struggled with it mightily, complaining to Bernice that there was no box on the tax return that read “not taking pills.”

“I hate that this is what I do,” I told her and the other seven members of my outpatient group, the one I attended four mornings a week, two hours at a time. I was desperate for my world to return to the way it had been before I’d gone to rehab, before I’d started with the pills. “I want my life back. Does anyone else get that?” Fabulous Gregory had nodded. Brian had grunted. Jeannie had shrugged and said that her pre-sobriety life hadn’t been all that great.

“Tell us what you mean,” Bernice prompted.

“I mean,” I said, “I wake up. I take Ellie to school. I get some exercise. I come here for two hours. I go to AA meetings for another hour or two, and I don’t take pills, and I don’t take pills, and I don’t take pills.” I raised my hands, empty palms held open to the ceiling. “And that’s it. God, can you imagine if I had a college reunion coming up? ‘What are you up to these days, Allison?’ ‘Well, I don’t take pills.’ ‘And . . . that’s it?’ ‘Yeah, it’s pretty much a full-time gig.’ ”

“Why you so worried ’bout what other people gonna think?” Bernice could switch in and out of ghetto vernacular—or what she referred to as “the colorful patois of my youth”—with ease. When she was talking to me, she’d alternate between her brassiest round-the-way tones and her most overeducated and multisyllabic. “You really worried about what the tax man’s gonna think? Or some made-up person at some college reunion you don’t even have coming up?”

“I don’t know,” I muttered. “I just feel useless.”

“Useless,” said Bernice, “is better than using. And if you use . . .”

“You die,” the group chanted. I hung my head. I still wasn’t entirely convinced this was true, but I’d heard it enough, and seen enough evidence, to at least be open to the possibility. There would be no one more pill or just one drink for me. That way lay madness . . . or jails, institutions, and death, as the Basic Text liked to say.

The night of Ellie’s birthday party, when I’d gone back to Meadowcrest, I was humbled. More than that, I was scared. In that moment, in the bathroom, I’d seen a version of my life unfolding, a path where I faked and glad-handed my way through the rest of the twenty-eight days, and then went home and picked up my addiction right where I’d put it down. Soon, of course, the pills would get too expensive, and, probably, I’d be making less money, assuming I’d be able to work at all. Maybe it would take years, maybe just months, but, eventually, I would do what all the women I’d met had done, and trade the pricy Vicodin and Percocet and Oxy for heroin, which gave you twice the high at a quarter of the cost. I pictured myself dropping Ellie off at Stonefield in the morning, then driving my Prius to the Badlands, where even a straight white lady like me could buy whatever she wanted. Philadelphia Magazine had done a special report on the city’s ten worst drug corners and, of course, I had firsthand recommendations from the various Ashleys and Brittanys. And maybe I’d get away with it, for a little while. Or maybe I’d get into a car accident with a thousand dollars’ worth of H stuffed in my bra, like one of the Meadowcrest girls. Or I’d get arrested, dragged off to jail, and left to kick on a concrete floor with nothing but Tylenol 3, like an Amber had told us all about.

Dave would divorce me—that part, of course, was nonnegotiable. Worse, I would lose Ellie. In a few years’ time . . . well. You know how they say you never see any baby pigeons? I remembered Lena asking in group one day. You know what else you never see’s an old lady heroin addict. Or, Shannon had added, one with kids.

Back in my room, my Big Book was still open on my desk and my clothes were still in the dresser. “Ohmygod, where were you?” Aubrey demanded as she stormed into my bedroom, followed by Lena, who was still wearing the mascara mustache she’d donned to appear in our play. “We were so worried,” said Mary. She twisted her eyeglass chain. “The RCs wouldn’t tell us anything, but they were all on their walkie-talkies, and they made us all sit in the lounge and watch 28 Days again. They thought you ran away!”

“I did,” I confessed. Sitting cross-legged on my bed, the expectant faces of the women who’d become my friends around me, I couldn’t remember ever feeling so scared. Admitting you had a problem was the first step—everyone knew that—but admitting you had a problem also left you open to the possibility that maybe you couldn’t fix it. “I got Dave to pick me up, and I went to Ellie’s birthday party, and we dropped her off at her friend’s house, and I was in the bathroom, and I looked in the medicine cabinet, and I was thinking, Please let there be something in here, and then . . .” Shannon took my hand in hers.

“What is wrong with me?” I cried. “What’s wrong with me that I can be at my daughter’s birthday party, having a perfectly nice time, and the only thing I can think about is where am I going to get pills?”

Lena made a face. Mary patted my shoulder. But it was little Aubrey who spoke up. “What’s wrong with you is what’s wrong with all of us,” she said. “We’re sick people . . .”

“. . . getting better,” the room chorused.

Nicholas wanted me to stay at Meadowcrest for ninety days. Horrified at the thought of being away from Ellie for so long, I’d bargained him down to sixty. I threw myself into the work, the meetings, the lectures, the role-playing assignments, the making of posters, the writing of book reports, knowing that I was safe at Meadowcrest. I couldn’t get pills, even if I wanted them. The world would be a different story.

A week before my discharge, Dave came to a family session. I was so nervous that I hadn’t been able to eat anything the day before. “What’s the worst thing that could happen?” Kirsten asked me, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell her. The worst thing was that he’d show up with papers, or a lawyer’s name; that he’d tell me he didn’t know if he’d ever be able to trust me again and that he didn’t want to stay married. I’d gone into the meeting prepared for that, so it was actually a relief when Dave sat there, stone-faced, and ran down the list of my lies, my failings, my fuckups and betrayals—the money I’d blown on pills, the way I’d put my job, my health, and my safety at risk, and worst of all, the way I’d put Ellie in danger. “It’s the lying,” he’d said, in a soft, toneless voice. “That’s what I can’t get over. She had this whole secret life. I don’t even know who she is anymore.”

I didn’t even try to defend myself, to point out the ways he’d let me down and made it hard to tell him the truth about how I was feeling. I’d been warned about what was known in the AA rooms as cross-talk. I couldn’t argue, or bring up L. McIntyre, or talk about how he used marathon training as an excuse to literally run away from his wife and his daughter. I couldn’t do anything but sit there and stare at my hands and try not to cry when Kirsten asked if he thought our marriage was irreparably damaged and listen to him sigh and then, slowly, say, “I don’t know.”

After sixty days, most of the women who’d been there when I arrived had gone. Mary had left early, after her husband developed a bladder infection and her kids couldn’t manage it—and him—without her. Aubrey’s insurance had cut her off after twenty-eight days. When her parents and her boyfriend all declined to come get her, Meadowcrest had gotten her a bus ticket back to Center City. Lena and Marissa and Shannon had all gone and been replaced by a fresh crop of Ashleys and Brittanys and Ambers and Caitlyns. Addicts, it seemed, were a renewable resource. The world made more of us every day.

By nine o’clock on my discharge day, I was standing in the reception room with my bags neatly packed. By noon, I was in a meeting in a church on Pine Street. Hi, my name is Allison, and I’m an addict. Hi, Allison, welcome, the room chorused back. At three, I was in Bernice’s office in Cherry Hill. Technically, it was an intake evaluation, during which she’d determine whether I was an appropriate addition to her intensive outpatient group, the just-out-of-rehab folks whose therapists had determined they were ready to live in the world again. “One thing we gon’ do right this minute,” she’d said, and spun her big push-button telephone around on her desk until it faced me. While she watched, I called every one of my doctors who’d ever prescribed me anything stronger than an aspirin, and told them what had happened and where I’d been.

Some of them had been brusque and businesslike about it. Dr. Andi had practically been in tears. “Oh, God, Allison. Was this my fault? Was this going on and I didn’t see it?”

“Don’t blame yourself,” I told her as Bernice listened on speakerphone. “I was playing you. I was good at it, too. Just . . . if I ever call you in the middle of the night and tell you I’m in agony . . .”

“Nothing!” said Dr. Andi, laughing. “Not even a hot water bottle!”

“Now go and do the next right thing,” Bernice told me. I’d left her office feeling rattled and dazed. No more pills. Not unless I went back online or I found new doctors, convinced them I was in trouble, got them to give me what I needed . . . I shook my head, raised my shoulders, and quickened my pace along the street. No more. That part of my life was over. I had a daughter who needed me, I had a life to live, and I was determined to be clearheaded for all of it.

My determination lasted exactly twenty-three days. Looking back, I was trying to do too much, too fast, to have it all be normal again. Then, at ten o’clock one night, after a day of outpatient therapy and meetings and Monopoly with Ellie, I found myself thinking, Would just one glass of wine be so bad? Just a glass of red, like a million other women were probably sipping at that very moment, a little something to ease me, to calm me, to send me off to sleep?

I had the glass in one hand and the bottle—leftover Manischewitz from some Passover seder—in the other. Even though I’d never been a drinker, I could taste the kosher wine, sweet as syrup on my tongue, warming me, calming me as it went down.

I don’t know where I found the strength—if that’s what it was—to put down the bottle and pick up what people in meetings called the thousand-pound telephone. I called Sheila, a big, tall home health aide from my IOP group who’d been addicted to crack and who called me, and all the other women in the group who were under the age of fifty, baby girl. “SheilaIwanttodrink,” I blurted before I’d even said “hello,” or my name.

“Who this?” she asked, laughing. “Which white girl calling me ’bout wanting a drank?” Drank was how she said it, and the delicious silliness of it made me laugh.

“It’s Allison. The Jewish one.”

“Ooh, Allison, with that pretty little baby, callin’ me ’bout wanting to drink. You’re not even a drinker, right?”

“No,” I said. “Pills. But you can’t buy them on the corner.”

“Not in your neighborhood, I guess,” she said, and cackled. “So what you want,” she said, suddenly serious, “that glass of wine or your baby? Because you know it is never just one glass of wine. Not for us. And you know where it ends, right?”

“I know,” I said. I was gripping the phone tight, tight, tight. Tears were coursing down my cheeks. They’d told us that in rehab, and in group: we had given up the right to drink or take drugs like normal people. No Champagne toasts at weddings, no Vicodin after we had our teeth pulled. And what did we get in return for that sacrifice? Our lives back. Not just returned, but improved. Bernice closed every session with the Promises: “If we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are halfway through. We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness. We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. We will comprehend the word ‘serenity’ and we will know peace. No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others. That feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear. We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows. Self-seeking will slip away. Our whole attitude and outlook upon life will change. Fear of people and of economic insecurity will leave us. We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us. We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.”

To me, it sounded like bullshit . . . maybe because I was still clinging, hard, to the notion that my life had been pretty much okay, or that I’d pulled out of my tailspin before things had gotten really bad. I didn’t want better; I just wanted what I’d had before it all got so crazy, before we moved to Haverford, back when it had been the three of us in the row house in Center City. This was a point about which Bernice and I disagreed. “Don’t you quit before the miracle happens,” she would tell me. “I want you to experience everything this program has to offer. There’s a new life out there for you, and it’s better than any life you could ever have imagined. I want you to have that new life.”

“Okay,” I would tell her, and she’d tell me to keep doing the next right thing, and the next right thing, and the next right thing after that, and that “God” stood for Good Orderly Direction and “Fear” stood for Face Everything and Recover. All those silly sayings, those stupid platitudes, the ones I’d scoffed and rolled my eyes at. Now I wrote them down, I memorized them, I printed them out in pretty fonts and stuck them on my computer monitor, on my bathroom mirror, on my refrigerator door, and recited them to myself while I waited in supermarket lines.

In the mornings, before I put on my exercise clothes, I rolled out of bed, onto my knees, and prayed, even though I felt stupid, like an imposter, like someone acting out the idea of prayer instead of actually doing it. Dear God, I would think. After months and months of hearing the phrase “God of our understanding,” of listening to people refer to “my Higher Power, whom I choose to call Goddess,” or “Nature,” I still couldn’t come up with any image of God except the old tried-and-true: an ancient dude with a long white beard and a stern look on his face. Thank you for helping me stay sober another day. Thank you for not letting me hurt Ellie, or myself, or anyone else, while I was using. I’d run down my list, thanking God for central air-conditioning when it was hot out and my space heater when it was cold, for a favorite sweater, a comfortable pair of boots, a peaceful few minutes with my daughter.

I thanked God for my mother, who’d moved into a posh fifty-five-and-over community near Eastwood, near my dad. She’d taken up bridge, and found new friends for golf and tennis, and she came into the city two, sometimes three days a week, to spend afternoons with Ellie and give me time to go to my appointments and my meetings. I thanked God for my dad, who still, sometimes, knew who I was when I brought Ellie to visit him every other week. “Proud of you,” he would tell me, and I wasn’t sure what he thought he was proud of me for. Did he know I’d been in rehab, or why? Did he remember anything about how I’d become an accidental writer? Did he know that I was married and a mom? Or, in his head, was I still eighteen, with my acceptance letter from Franklin & Marshall in my hand, telling him about my big plans for my future?

I thanked God for Janet, who drove to Center City once a week to have lunch with me. I’d regale her with funny stories from my AA and NA meetings. Janet especially liked to hear about Leonard, who’d begin his recitations by thanking God “for keeping me out of the titty bars for another day.” “What happens if he goes back?” she’d asked, and I’d told her how shamefaced Leonard looked when he’d stood up and said, “Well, they got me again!” We’d split a dessert and talk about our kids, our parents, and whether sex addiction was really a thing. “I love you,” she would say, her face solemn, and she’d hug me at the end of every visit. Once, she’d cried, telling me that she thought she should have noticed, should have seen that I was in trouble, should have done something. I told her it was my problem and my job to solve it. “Just be my friend,” I said. “That’s what I need most.” I thanked God that L. McIntyre was, like Dave had insisted, just a friend. “Maybe it could have been something more,” he’d told me over dinner after my third week home. “But what kind of jerk cheats on his wife while she’s in rehab?”

Thank God for Dave, I thought . . . and, last, I would thank God for what was, blasphemous as it sounded, the best development of my new, sober life, a small black-and-white dog named Bingo.

We’d gotten her in September, my first month back from rehab. Ellie and I had driven from Philadelphia down to Baltimore through a gorgeous fall afternoon, the sky a brilliant blue, smelling of leaves and wood smoke and, faintly, of the coming cold. Our first stop had been Target, where we’d bought everything we would need—a leash and harness made of pink nylon, a compromise between the faux-leather and rhinestone rig Ellie had fallen in love with and the plain red I preferred. We had plastic food and water dishes, a carrying crate, a ten-pound sack of dog food, a fluffy round brown-and-pink polka-dotted dog bed, a chewy toy, a squeaky toy, and the Cesar Millan video that Janet, who’d adopted three different rescue dogs, had recommended.

“Can the puppy sleep in my room?” asked Ellie.

“Fine with me,” I said. Ellie had been asking for a dog ever since she’d read Fancy Nancy and the Posh Puppy. Of course, she’d lobbied for a teacup poodle, but had been surprisingly amenable when I’d explained that there were many dogs who needed homes, and it would be better to adopt one of them. Together, we’d spent a half hour each night online, reading about breeds, watching videos of pups, getting a season pass on TiVo for Too Cute. Ellie had been keeping the tantrums to a minimum, and doing her chores—making her bed and clearing her dishes and helping me make her lunches and load the dishwasher—without complaint.

“One eleven, one thirteen . . . here we go!” The house was a yellow cape, with a front yard dotted with little piles of dog poop. As we pulled into the driveway, the front door opened, and a teenage girl came out with a small white dog with black spots on a leash. The dog had a finely molded face, a whiskered snout, and a long tail that curled at its tip. One of her ears stood up straight; the other one flopped like a book page you’d turned down to mark your place.

“BINGO!” yelled Ellie, and she was out of the car almost before it had stopped rolling. She raced across the lawn, fell to her knees a few feet away from the dog, then, as instructed, held out her hand for it to sniff. The dog, who’d seemed alarmed by Ellie’s charge, sniffed her hand, then wagged its tail, sat calmly, and allowed Ellie to pet it.

“She is so CUTE!” Ellie said to the girl, who looked amused at Ellie’s antics. I walked over, shook her hand, and signed the papers while Ellie crooned at the puppy. She was a young adult dog, her Internet profile had said, somewhere between three and five years old. She had shown up pregnant at a shelter. They’d found her a foster family, where she’d given birth, and all five of the puppies were quickly adopted. “Now we just need to find a place for Mom,” said the website, and that, of course, had made me want to drive straight to Baltimore and bring the sad-eyed little dog home. She was, according to the website, some kind of terrier mix, a solid fifteen pounds, spayed, friendly, good with kids, and with all of her shots.

“I wish we could tell you more about her,” said the teenager, who had a brown ponytail and a metallic smile. “She was a good mom when the pups were here.”

“I’m sure we’ll figure it out,” I’d said. On the application, which had struck me as astonishingly detailed, there’d been a question about whether I had ever been arrested or in jail. Nothing about rehab or addiction, but still, I wondered if I would have answered those questions honestly . . . and, if I had, whether they would have turned me down. It was crazy: Who needed a pet more than a sick person trying to get better? Who would take better care of a dog than someone trying to demonstrate to the world that she was, indeed, worthy of its trust again?

Ellie and I walked Bingo around the block, Bingo trotting briskly, Ellie clutching the leash with two hands. “Say goodbye,” Ellie instructed the dog. Bingo was docile as I scooped her up and placed her in her crate, even as Ellie begged me to let the dog ride in her lap. She didn’t make a sound the entire ride home. Once we were back in Philadelphia, we walked her around the neighborhood, letting her sniff the trees and hydrants. She ignored other dogs, hiding, trembling, behind my legs when they got close enough to try to sniff her. “She is SHY,” said Ellie, who didn’t seem to mind, as long as Bingo let her put the little tinsel collar she’d crafted around her neck, and hold the leash while they walked.

“Do you think we should try to find a better name for her?” I asked.

Ellie considered as we approached our front door. Finally, she shook her head. “I think she is a Bingo,” she decided, and I told Ellie that I thought she was right.

At home, Bingo sniffed her dish full of kibble, had a few laps of water, then wormed underneath my bed, in spite of Ellie’s importuning and threats to drag her out into the open. “Let’s just leave her be.” Ellie had gotten into her pajamas, and we read Squids Will Be Squids and A Big Guy Took My Ball before I kissed her good night and tucked her into her bed. As tempting as it was to let Ellie sleep with me every night, I’d heard enough lectures about boundaries to know that I needed to put them in place (plus, she hadn’t had an accident in months, but I didn’t want to take chances with my new mattress). She was my daughter, not my friend, or my comfort, or my confidante . . . and so, as much as I would have liked the feeling of another warm body in my bed, or the sweet smile she wore when she woke up (in the handful of seconds before remembering that the world and most of the people in it displeased her), I made sure she at least began each night in her own room.

So it was just me in the bedroom when Bingo inched her way out from underneath the bed and peered up at me. Her tail drooped. Her expression seemed despondent. I wondered if she missed her pups, or if she even remembered she’d had them—I knew so little about dogs!

“What is it?” I asked, putting down A Woman’s Guide to the Twelve Steps.

Silence.

“Do you want to go out?” I guessed.

Nothing. I took her downstairs, clipped her to her leash, walked her down the steps, and stood at the edge of the sidewalk while she did her business. Upstairs, instead of going back underneath the bed, she stood at the edge and looked at me.

“Oh, okay,” I said, and patted the mattress. Before the second word was out of my mouth, Bingo had hopped nimbly onto the bed and was settling down against me, folding herself into the space behind my bent knees as I lay curled up on my side.

“You’re going to sleep there?” No answer. I pulled the comforter up over both of us and closed my eyes. Thank you, God, for Bingo. Thank you for Ellie. Thank you for such beautiful weather. Thank you for helping me not take pills today. It wasn’t much of a prayer, but it was the best I could do.

• • •

Each year since we’d moved to Haverford, I’d hosted a Chanukah Happening (on the invitations, I’d spell it Chappening). Dozens of kids, parents, colleagues, and relatives and friends would fill our house, some bearing gifts for Ellie, or boxes of chocolates, or, more likely, bottles of wine. I would serve roast chickens, a giant green salad, and a table full of desserts the guests had brought. In the living room, kids would spin dreidels, and guests would be participating in the latke cook-off in the kitchen. We’d have straight potato pancakes, sweet-potato latkes, latkes with zucchini and shreds of carrots, latkes made with flour or potato starch or, once, tapioca. Barry would contribute sufganiyot, the sweet filled doughnuts that were also traditional Chanukah fare, and, for weeks, the kitchen would smell like a deep fryer and my hair and skin would feel lightly coated with grease.

There would be beer and wine at those parties . . . and, as the crowd got bigger and the preparations more elaborate, I’d taken more and more pills to get myself through it, to deal with the tension of whether Dave was helping me or even talking to me, pills to cope with my mom, who would show up with an eight-pound brisket and demand the use of an oven.

This year, my Chanukah Happening was limited to four people: me and Ellie, Dave and my mom. And Bingo, of course, who sat on the floor, eyes bright, tail wagging, watching the proceedings avidly, hoping that someone would drop something. Dave, I noticed, would discreetly slip her scraps, which meant that Bingo followed him around like a balloon that had been tethered to his ankle.

“Good girl,” he’d say, sneaking Bingo a bit of chicken skin, then tipping his chair back and sighing. I had radically reduced the guest list, but I’d kept the menu the same: roast chicken stuffed with herbs and lemon and garlic, a salad dressed with pomegranate-seed vinaigrette, potato latkes, and a store-bought dessert—cream puffs from Whole Foods and chocolate sauce that Ellie and I had made together.

“She has a JAUNTY WALK,” said Ellie, imitating Bingo’s brisk stride down the street. “And at night she sleeps CURLED IN A CRULLER in Mommy’s bed.”

“I bet Mom likes that,” he said. His eyes didn’t meet mine. I would like you better, I thought at him.

“Hey, El, let’s show Daddy how we clear the table.”

“Daddy knows that I can do that.” She pouted, but she got up and carefully, using two hands, carried every plate and platter from the table to the sink.

We played Sorry! after dinner—oh, irony! I tried to breathe through my discomfort, the restlessness, tried to sit with my feelings, like Bernice advised, and ignore the questions running laps in my brain. Will he stay? Or at least come and kiss me? Does he love me a little? Is there anything left at all?

Dave stayed as I coaxed Ellie into, then out of, her tub, combing and braiding her hair, getting her into her pajamas and reading her This Is Not My Hat. After I closed her bedroom door, Bingo bounded down the hallway to assume her position, curled on top of my pillow. Her tail thumped against the comforter as she watched us with her bright brown eyes.

“B-I-N-G-O,” Dave sang. We were in the narrow hallway, practically touching. “You seem well.” He reached out, took a strand of my hair between his fingers, and tucked it, tenderly, behind my ear. Then his body was right up against mine, his chest warm and firm, shoulders solid in my hands. “I know they said no changes for the first year, but we’ve both done this a bunch of times already . . .”

I laughed, walking backward, as he maneuvered me onto the bed . . . and, later, I cried when, with my head on his chest and our bare legs entwined, he got choked up as he said, “Allison, there was never anybody else. It was always only you.”

“I promise . . .” I started to say. I wanted to promise him that I’d never hurt him again, never go off the rails, never give him cause to worry again . . . but those were promises I couldn’t make. One minute, one hour, one day at a time. “I never stopped loving you,” I said . . . and that was the absolute truth.

We didn’t move back in together. Part of me wanted it desperately, and part of me worried that we were disrupting Ellie’s stable environment—some mornings Dave was in bed with me, some mornings he was at his own place, and some nights Ellie stayed there with him—but she seemed to be thriving, to be growing out of the awful yelling and stubbornness.

As for Dave and me, I often thought that we were, as coaches and sportswriters liked to say, in a rebuilding year. Not married, exactly, but not un-married. It was almost as though we were courting each other again, slowly revealing ourselves to each other. My mom or our sitter, Katrina, would come for the night, and we’d go to a concert, or out to dinner, or we’d take Bingo to the dog park where, on warm spring nights, they showed old movies, projecting the picture against a bedsheet strung between two pine trees.

“Ellie’s getting big,” Dave said on one of those nights. I’d been looking at the picnics other people had packed: fried chicken and biscuits and canned peaches; egg-salad sandwiches on thick-sliced whole-wheat bread; chunks of pineapple and strawberries in a fruit salad . . . and wine. Beer. Sweating thermoses of cocktails, lemon drops and Pimm’s cups.

“She is,” I had agreed. Every day she looked a little taller, her hair longer, or she’d bust out some new bit of vocabulary or surprisingly apt observation about the world. Sometimes at night she’d cry that her legs hurt. Growing pains, Dr. McCarthy had told us.

Sometimes I felt like I was having them, too. It made me think of something else I’d heard in a meeting, about how Alcoholics Anonymous can help people with their feelings. “And it’s true,” the speaker had said. He had a jovial grin underneath his walrus mustache. “I feel anger better, I feel sadness better, I feel disappointment better . . .”

Life on life’s terms. It was an absolute bitch. There was no more tuning out or glossing over, no more using opiates as spackle to fill in the cracks and broken bits. It was all there, raw and unlovely: the little sighs and groans Dave made, seemingly without hearing them, when he ate his cereal or made the bed; the way Ellie had to be reminded, sometimes more than twice, to flush the toilet after she used it; the glistening ovals of mucus that lined the city sidewalk. Some nights, I missed my father and regretted my mother’s half-assed, mostly absent-minded parenting, and there was no pill to help with it. Some nights I couldn’t sleep . . . so I would lie in my bed, alone or with Dave, and stare up into the darkness and try not to beat myself up. We will not regret the past, nor wish to shut the door on it, The Big Book said . . . so I would try to be grateful that I’d stopped when I had instead of berating myself for letting things get as bad as they’d gotten. I had learned what I’d needed to learn, and I knew now that I was, however flawed and imperfect, however broken, undeniably a grown-up.

• • •

Then, one day, my cell phone rang, and I heard a familiar voice on the other end.

“It’s a blast from your past!” said the voice, before dissolving into sniffles.

“Aubrey!” I hadn’t heard from her since she’d left Meadowcrest. Mary and I e-mailed, and Shannon and I met for coffee once a month. Lena and Marissa had both disappeared, whether back into addiction or into new lives in recovery, I couldn’t guess. I worried about them sometimes, but Aubrey was the one I worried about most. I’d text or call her every so often, but I had never heard back. A dozen times I’d started to type her name into Google, and a dozen times I’d made myself stop. If she wants me to know how she’s doing, she’ll get in touch. Otherwise it’s snooping, I decided. Now, here she was, her voice quivering, and me clutching the phone, realizing only in that moment that I’d half believed she was dead.

“How are you?”

“I’m . . .” She gave her familiar little laugh. “I’m not so good, actually.”

By now, I knew what questions to ask. Better still, I knew how to just be quiet and listen. “What’s going on?”

“I’ve been using for . . . oh, God, months now. I was doing good at first. Then Justin started coming around his mom’s house, where I was staying with Cody . . .”

I turned away so that Ellie, engrossed in an episode of Sam & Cat, wouldn’t see my face. Justin. The fucking no-good boyfriend.

“And, you know, he made it sound like it was going to be all different this time. Like we’d keep it under control. And I thought I could, you know, because I’d been clean for a while.” She started to cry. I got the rest of the story in disjointed bursts—she’d gotten kicked out of her boyfriend’s parents’ house, then her mother had taken Cody and refused to let Aubrey see him until she got clean. She described couch-surfing, spending two weeks in a shelter, and then, finally, asked the question I knew was coming: “Can I crash with you for a little while?” Her voice was tiny, barely a whisper. “I could help out . . . babysit . . . I’m good with kids . . . I wouldn’t ask, except I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

Oh, Aubrey, I thought. Aubrey, who was still more or less a kid herself. Boundaries, I told myself, even though I wanted nothing more than to tell her to come, to tell her that the trundle bed had fresh sheets, that Ellie would be delighted to meet her, that I would help her get well. Except I couldn’t. I knew my own limits, knew how close I was to my own relapse. “I can’t do that,” I said. “But I can take you to a meeting. I can hook you up with Bernice. I can help you find a place to stay.”

“You sound good,” she said. Was she high? I couldn’t tell. “I’m glad. I knew you’d do good when you got out of there.”

“Aubrey, listen to me. There’s a five-thirty meeting today at Fourth and Pine. That’s my home group. They’re really nice. They’d love to meet you. You come there, and I will meet you, and I’m going to call Bernice, and we’ll find you a place.”

“Ooo-kay.” Definitely slurry.

“Five-thirty. Fourth and Pine.” I made her say it back to me twice. Then I hung up the phone, and texted her the address, just to be sure, and started pacing, watching the door, waiting for my mother to show up for her regular Tuesday visit. Normally she was there at five at the latest, and I’d have time to grab a coffee if I wanted one before the meeting began, but that night, of course, she was running late.

“Mommy, stop WALKING,” said Ellie . . . and then, in an unprecedented move, she actually turned the TV off without being asked or prompted, and looked at me. “What are you so WORRYING about?”

“I’m not worrying,” I said automatically.

“Then why are you WALKING and WALKING?” She looked at me carefully, eyes narrowed, hair gathered in a ponytail that hung halfway down her back, pants displaying a good inch of her ankles. I’d need to go shopping again.

“I guess maybe I am a little worried.” I sat down by the window, and Bingo sprang into my lap, wriggling around until her belly was exposed for a scratch. When Ronnie finally strolled into view I grabbed my bag and half trotted past Ellie.

“There’s someone—a girl I knew from rehab . . .” I looked at the clock on the cable box. “I’ll explain when I’m back, but I’ve got to go . . .”

I hurried around the corner, my keys in my hand, my purse over my shoulder, a dollar in my pocket for when they passed the basket around, my phone tucked into my bra, set on vibrate, so I’d feel it if Aubrey texted back. It was a gorgeous late afternoon, the clear, sunny sky and brilliant leaves all promising new beginnings, fresh starts. A young woman carrying a paper parasol walked with her Boston terrier on a red leash. An older couple on bicycles passed me. I watched them riding away and thought about all the normal people in the world, just going around, doing their business, living their lives, buying food and cooking meals, watching TV shows and movies, fighting and falling in love, without even the thought of a drink or a drug to make the good times even better and the bad times less awful.

Don’t be like me, my mother had told me, when I’d gotten out. Don’t waste your life hiding. But still, even with so many of the rewards of sobriety making themselves known, it was hard not to crave oblivion and numbness, a pill that could keep my feelings safely at bay. Sometimes, I wondered how I’d gotten started with the drugs . . . and sometimes I wondered why everyone in the world wasn’t taking them, and how I’d found the strength, somehow, to resist, even just for that day.

There was a coffee shop around the corner from where the AA meetings were held. I stuck my head in, looking for Aubrey, recognizing people at a few of the tables: the fiftyish man in a plaid shirt and glasses who’d talked about dealing with both addiction and mental illness; the woman with a buzz cut and black army boots who’d described passing out in the SEPTA station and lying on the concrete, watching rats running up and down the tracks until the cops bundled her into a cruiser; the man who dressed like a cowboy and kept his long gray hair in a ponytail tied with a rawhide loop and talked endlessly about his girlfriend who’d redecorated while he’d been in rehab, and the contractor who had unscrewed the chandelier from his dining room and stolen it, and how he was going to get that chandelier back. Sometimes I went to meetings willingly, knowing that they helped, and some nights the only thing keeping me from staying home on the couch was the promise of a chandelier update or the latest installment in the long-running saga of Leonard vs. the Titty Bars.

“What can I get for you?” asked the barista, a man who couldn’t have been older than twenty-five, with thick black eyebrows and an easy smile.

I ordered an iced mocha and checked my phone again. When they called my name, I wrapped a brown paper napkin around the plastic cup. It was five-twenty. I walked around the corner to the church. In the basement with scuffed white walls and hardwood floors, fifty chairs were set up, with a group of people settling into the front rows. Once, early on, I’d made the mistake of trying to sit in the back, and the others from Bernice’s group had almost collapsed laughing. Denial Aisle! Relapse Row! they’d shouted, as Sheila had ushered me front and center.

No Aubrey yet, but I could see Johnette and Martin, and both Brians from my group. Gregory was there, fussing with the crease of his jeans, and Alice sat next to him, with a tote bag full of knitting in her lap. “We saved you a seat,” said Sheila, and tapped the empty metal chair that stood in the center of the front row. I held my cup, feeling the cool of it against my palm, and I took my place among them.