“That’s it?” an Ashley or a Brittany murmured. I wondered if I should have talked about learning that my mom was an alcoholic . . . but where could I have fit that in?
“Hey, look, I’m sorry I don’t have some big, dramatic story about almost dying, or almost killing someone, or getting in a car crash . . .”
“It’s not that.” I’d expected Gabrielle to be the one to push me for more details, more emotion, just more in general, but instead it was shiny-haired, tiny-voiced Aubrey, all scrunched up in the seat on my left, who was calling me out. “It’s like you’re telling your story, only it sounds like it happened to someone else.” She squirmed as I looked at her, but she didn’t back down. “Were you sad about it? When it was happening?”
“Of course I was sad!” I snapped. “God. Do you think I’d be here if I wasn’t sad?”
“But you don’t sound sad.” Now one of the Brittanys had taken up the attack, only she didn’t sound angry as much as puzzled. “You just sound, like, okay, this happened, then that happened, and then I started taking Percocet, and then I started taking Oxy . . .”
I wanted to say that progression was a central part of every other girl’s story—first the booze, then the pills, then the powder, then the needle. So why was I being criticized for giving a version of the same tale everyone told?
“What about when your daughter would want you to play with her, and you’d tell her to go away?” Finally, Mary had decided to join the conversation. “How do you feel about that?”
“I feel incredibly ashamed. I hate myself for not being there for her.” I mustered up all the sincerity I could—the hurt look, the shaky voice, the defeated posture acknowledging I’d committed the ultimate female transgression, the Sin of Bad Motherhood. “I feel awful about what I did. That’s why I’m here. So I won’t ever have to do those things again.”
This announcement was met with unexpected silence. Aubrey fidgeted in her seat; an Amber retied her shoelaces. Gabrielle flipped to a fresh page in her notebook. Finally, she said, “I guess maybe Allison’s story sounds different to us because she wasn’t using for very long.” She looked at me. “What was it, six months?”
“About that.” Six months was as long as I’d been buying pills online. My actual abuse—or, if not abuse, the length of time my use had been problematic—was closer to two years.
“For most of us, there was that big wake-up call,” Mary continued. “I got a DUI. Aubrey got arrested. People lost their relationships, or had their kids taken away. But just because Allison’s got a high bottom . . .”
“Thank you,” I murmured. High bottom. Was there a lovelier phrase in the English language?
“It doesn’t mean she didn’t have a bottom. Or that she’s not in trouble. Or that she doesn’t need our help.”
“Thank you,” I said again. As the next Share began—this one from a twenty-eight-year-old heroin addict from New Mexico who’d come to New Jersey as part of some kind of rehab exchange program—I returned my attention to the new lyrics to “One Day More.” “One more day, then I’m in rehab . . . Gonna get drunk off my ass . . . I’ll buy ev’ry pill and take it . . . plus Champagne and speed and grass.” Would Melanie be able to pull off the role of Liesl, the besotted sixteen-going-on-seventeen-year-old, who we’d decided would be in love with crystal meth instead of Rolfe the Nazi messenger boy? I looked around the circle, realizing that I’d never know. If everything went the way I’d planned, I’d be in the car with Dave when the first song began. I felt a surprising amount of regret, as I looked at Mary, and Aubrey, and Shannon, and realized I’d never hear how their stories turned out. Ellie, I told myself sternly. Ellie was the one who mattered.
That night they turned the phones on, so that the women who were off the seven-day blackout could have their regular twice-a-week ten-minute phone call home. “Where am I picking you up?” asked Dave, who’d swallowed my story about having a day pass without a single question.
“You can just wait in the parking lot. I think I remember what the car looks like.”
I waited for a laugh that did not come. “When do you need to be back?” He sounded like he was scheduling a dentist’s appointment, not a reunion with his wife.
“Eight.” Actually, I wasn’t planning on coming back at all. I would attend Ellie’s party, then ask Dave to take me for an early dinner, during which I would convince him that I’d gotten everything I could out of my rehab experience and was ready to come home. “Is Ellie excited?”