I figured it had to be a scam . . . but what did I have to lose? Other than some money. And my freedom, I assumed, if you could be jailed for trying to buy prescription drugs on the Internet, but that was a risk I decided I was willing to take. I spent about ten seconds wondering if anyone would recognize my name, then decided that the overlap between illegal drug dealers and Ladiesroom.com readers was probably tiny. Downloading the software took less than a minute; learning how to use it took maybe five minutes more. The hard part was figuring out how to trade dollars for the e-coins the site used instead of cash. It took me the better part of another week to register the bank account I’d established for my own personal use, an account at a different bank from the one Dave and I used. I’d then had to register with yet another website to send my e-currency to my account at Penny Lane. Once I’d picked a screen name (“HarleyQueen,” a play on the name of one of the sexy lady villains in Batman) and loaded a thousand dollars’ worth of cash into my account, I started wandering through the virtual aisles, amazed at what was for sale. Hallucinogens. Amphetamines. Dissociatives, whatever they were. Viagra and Cialis, Ecstasy and Special K and crystal meth. I’d clicked on “Opiods,” and there was everything—your Percocet, your Vicodin, your Tylenol with codeine. With my mouth open in disbelief, I put twenty OxyContin pills into my cart, then browsed around, pricing Vicodin from India and wondering, again, whether this could possibly be legitimate.
I figured that I’d be sent fakes, if the vendors bothered sending anything at all. Then the first delivery arrived. The pills were in a tiny plastic bag that had been encased in a layer of bubble wrap and folded and tucked into an Altoids tin. They looked exactly like the ones I’d been prescribed and, according to Pillfinder.com, they appeared to be exactly what I’d paid for. Cautiously, I slipped one underneath my tongue, waiting for the familiar bitterness. It arrived right on schedule, but, still, I was seized with dread. What if it was a clever fake? What if I’d taken poison? What if Ellie came home and found me convulsing on the kitchen floor? But ten minutes later I was dreamy-eyed and practically floating around the kitchen. Since then, my use had ramped up slightly (or maybe “considerably” would be more accurate) . . . but if I could get as many pills as I wanted whenever I wanted them, if I could afford my vices, and if the whole transaction felt as risky as ordering a bra from Victoria’s Secret, what did it matter?
At a stoplight, I punched in my mother’s number. “Daddy just woke up,” she said. “He thinks he needs to get dressed to go to the airport. I’ve been telling him and telling him . . .”
“Okay, Mom.”
“. . . but he won’t listen. I didn’t get any sleep last night. He kept shaking me, or turning on his phone and shining it in my eyes. At three a.m. he started packing his suitcase . . .”
“I’m ten minutes away,” I said, mentally canceling the pit stop I’d planned at Starbucks (or, if I was being honest, at McDonald’s). I’d spent so much time trying to coax a few bites of cereal into Eloise’s mouth that I hadn’t had time for my own breakfast. I deserved a hash brown. Hash brown, singular, I told myself, and definitely no sausage biscuit.
“Ronnie!” I could hear my dad yelling. “Where’s the cab?”
“Put him on the phone with me,” I told her, figuring it couldn’t hurt.
A minute later, my father was growling “Who’s this?” into my ear.
“Daddy, it’s Allison. Mom says you need a ride?” I hadn’t been sure whether it was a good idea to play along with someone suffering from early-stage Alzheimer’s and dementia—which my mother, God love her, pronounced dee-men-she-ah—but Dad’s doctor said it was all right to indulge him up to a point. “A therapeutic lie” was what he’d called it. Translation: whatever worked.
“Allison,” said my father. I held my breath. Last Saturday, when I’d sent Eloise to Hank’s house for a playdate and invited my parents over for brunch, he’d known who I was, but sometimes he thought I was his sister and called me Joyce. I knew that the day was coming when he wouldn’t know me at all, but I prayed it hadn’t come yet, not so much for my sake, but for my mother’s.
My parents had met when my mom was eighteen-year-old Ronnie Feldman, with an adorable pout and soft brown eyes, a cute little figure and shiny black hair, and my dad was twenty-eight, a college graduate who’d served for two years as an information officer in the army, stationed in Korea, and was finishing up his MBA at Penn. She’d been a CIT at the summer camp he’d attended, and he was back for a ten-year reunion. She was still in high school, still riding her ten-speed with a wire basket embellished with plastic flowers between the handlebars and buying her clothes in the children’s department. Little Ronnie, who’d dotted the “i” of her name with a heart, who’d never lived on her own, never paid a bill, and never held a job outside of being a not-quite counselor at Camp Wah-Na-Wee-Naw in the Poconos; Little Ronnie with her tanned legs and pert chin and the ponytail she tied in red-and-white ribbons—camp colors, of course—had married him two summers later, going straight from her parents’ house to the apartment my dad had rented, where she played house until I came along and it stopped being a game. There had always been a man to take care of her, first her own father, then mine. My mother never had any reasons to master the fundamentals of adulthood—balancing a checkbook, registering a car, buying a house. My dad had taken care of everything. Pretty Little Head, or PLH, was what Dave and I called my mom in happier times, when we’d still had a private language of jokes with each other, as in “Don’t worry your pretty little head about a thing.”