Bernice was staring at me, her eyes sharp behind the thick lenses of her glasses. She looked like someone they’d cast as a mom in a TV commercial, the one who’d have to be convinced that the heat-and-eat spaghetti sauce was as good as what her own mother used to make. “How’d you feel, watching Miss Lena at the meeting last night? No. Scratch that. Let’s back up. How do you feel about being here in general?”
I shrugged. “Fine, I guess.”
The group groaned . . . then, as I watched in astonishment, everyone stood and did ten jumping jacks.
“You can’t say ‘fine.’ Or ‘good,’ ” Marissa explained. “Bernie thinks they’re meaningless.”
“Tell me how you really feel,” said Bernice.
“Okay. Um. Well. I knew I needed help.” After nearly a week in here, I knew that was Rehab 101. You had to start by admitting you had a problem, or they’d badger you and break you down, pushing and pushing until you blurted the worst thing you’d ever done in the worst moment of what they insisted you call your active addiction.
“How come?” she asked, tilting her head, watching me closely. “You get a DUI? Fail a drug test?”
“No, no, nothing like that.” I swallowed hard, knowing what was coming, as Bernice looked down at her notes.
“Says here you got in some trouble at your daughter’s school.”
“That’s right.” No point in lying. “I went to pick up my daughter and my friend’s kids at their school, and I’d had some pills. I thought I was fine—” Aubrey nudged me, whispering, “No ‘fine’s.” “Sorry. I thought I was okay to drive,” I amended. “I know what I can handle, when I’m okay and when I’m not—but my friend and I had been drinking, and even though I’d only had one glass . . .”
“On top of the painkillers,” Bernice said.
I nodded. “Right. Wine and painkillers. The teacher in charge of the carpool line took my keys away.”
“So you signed yourself in?”
“Um.” I swallowed hard, wondering, again, exactly what these people knew, and how much I’d told them when I’d arrived. “I—my husband and I—there was . . . I guess I’d call it kind of an intervention. He found out what I was doing, and he told me I needed to get some help, and I agreed.”
Bernice looked at my file again. “Walk us through exactly what happened before you came here.”
I cringed at the memories—the sickness of withdrawal, the doc-in-the-box, the ill-fated Suboxone, Ellie finding me in bed, sick and covered in vomit. Ellie seeing me on my hands and knees, ass in the air, face pressed into the carpet, desperate for one more crumb of Oxy.
“Allison?” Bernice was looking at me. Her expression was not unkind. “Little secret. Whatever you did, whatever you’re remembering that’s making you look like you just ate a lemon, believe me. Believe me. Someone in here’s done worse, or seen worse.”
I shook my head. I couldn’t speak. What kind of mother would let herself get so out of control, fall down so far, that her daughter would witness such a scene? I sat there, breathing, until I was able to speak again.
“My husband found out what I’d been doing. About buying the pills online,” I began. I told them about the night I’d spent awake, my laptop heating my thighs, gobbling pills one after another until they were all gone. Heads nodded as I described how frantic, how terrified, how awful I’d felt, knowing I’d come to the end of my stash, with no idea how to get more. I told them about taking a cab to the doctor’s office in the strip mall, where, as Bernice put it, “you found some quack to give you Suboxone.” Her penciled-in eyebrows ascended. “Because replacing one drug with another is a great idea and nothing could possibly go wrong there, am I right?”
I didn’t answer. I’d already figured out that Meadowcrest took a dim view of Suboxone. There were rehabs that would use other opiates to help addicts through withdrawal, but I hadn’t landed at one of them.
“So here you sit.”
“Here I sit,” I repeated, and wondered, again, what was happening at home. How was Ellie getting to sleep each night, without me to read her three books and sing her three songs, and give the ritual spritz of monster spray? How was she getting dressed, without me to make her sundresses fight? Had Sarah posted anything on Ladiesroom explaining my absence, or had she found a substitute mom-and-marriage columnist? How was Dave managing with my mother? Was she getting to Eastwood to see my dad? Had he gotten any worse? I pictured Dave having a long lunch with his work wife, at a cozy table for two at the pub near the paper, my husband pouring out his heart as L. McIntyre listened sympathetically, nodding and making comforting noises while she mentally decorated my still-empty house, the one that would be her blank canvas once I’d been dispensed with and she’d moved in.