All Fall Down: A Novel Read online

  SIX

  “Allison?”

  “Yes, Mom?” I called toward the car’s speakers as I steered, one-handed, into the parking lot of BouncyTime, where the birthday party for a classmate of Ellie’s named (I was almost positive) Jayden was starting in ten minutes. It was a miserable April day, gray-skied and windy, with a dispirited rain slopping down.

  “Are you almost here?” she asked in a quivering voice.

  Dave sat next to me, stiff and silent as one of those inflatable man-shaped balloons that drivers in California buy so they can use the high-occupancy-vehicle lanes. It had been several weeks since his birthday dinner, but we hadn’t talked about anything more substantive than whether we were running out of milk or if I’d remembered to make the car insurance payment. I took my pills, he, presumably, found comfort in conversation with L. McIntyre, and we tried to be polite to each other, especially in front of our daughter. Said daughter was in the backseat, chatting with her friend Hank.

  “If you are going to put something in your nose,” I heard Ellie announce, “it should not be a Barbie shoe.”

  “Okay,” Hank snuffled. Hank was a pale and narrow-faced little boy with a ring of whitish crust around his eyes and mouth. He was going on six, the same as my daughter, but thanks to his allergies to eggs, wheat, dairy, shellfish, and pet dander, he was the size of a three-year-old and he sniffled nonstop.

  How did Ellie even know what a Barbie doll was? I wondered as I maneuvered into a parking spot between a Jaguar and a minivan. I wasn’t sure, but I bet that I had Dave’s mother, the Indomitable Doreen, to thank. Doreen scoffed at my “notions,” as she called them, about organic food, gender-neutral toys, and limiting Eloise’s TV time. Doreen was tall, broad-shouldered, and slim, with the same fair complexion that her sons had inherited and the same cropped dark hair, although I suspected she dyed it. Doreen had raised three boys and had been waiting for years to have a girl child to dote upon. Whenever Doreen got my daughter alone, she’d let her gorge on ice cream and candy. They would stay up all night in Doreen’s silk-sheeted king-sized bed, playing Casino and watching Gilligan’s Island and God only knew what else. “Lighten up,” Doreen would tell me, sometimes with a good-natured (but still painful) sock on the shoulder, when I politely reminded her that Ellie did better when she kept to her bedtime schedule, or mentioned that Dave and I gave her an allowance for doing her chores, and that when she slipped our daughter twenty bucks it tended to undermine our authority. “Calm down, or you’re going to make yourself crazy!”

  I knew that my mother-in-law meant well. She’d never talked about whether she’d missed the job she gave up once her sons were born, but I wondered if she had, and if she saw how I had struggled, first as a full-time stay-at-home mother and now as a stay-at-home mom with a part-time (inching ever closer to full-time) job. I could have asked, but the truth was, things hadn’t been great between us since I learned that she’d read my birth plan out loud to her book club. In retrospect, the plan might have been a little excessive—it was eight pages long and spelled out everything from the music I wanted to how I didn’t want any external interventions, including an epidural, and had gone on, at length, about the necessity for a “peaceful birthing environment”—but that did not mean I wanted the six members of Words and Wine laughing at me over copies of Sue Monk Kidd’s latest.

  In the backseat, Ellie was regaling Hank with the story of the dead squirrel she’d seen at the corner of South Street during one of our visits to the city. “Its middle was all crumpled, and there was BLOOD on its BOTTOM,” she said, as Hank mouth-breathed in horror.

  “Hey, El, I’m not sure that’s appropriate,” I said.

  Ellie paused, gnawing at her lower lip. Then she turned to Hank and said, in such a perfect lady-at-a-cocktail-party tone that both Dave and I smiled, “And what are your plans for the weekend?”

  I put the car in park and waited until Hank said, “I don’t know.”

  “ ‘Plans for the weekend’ just means what you are going to do,” Ellie explained. “Like, you could say, ‘Watch Sam & Cat,’ or maybe ‘Put all your nail polishes into teams.’ ”

  “I don’t have nail polishes,” Hank said wistfully.

  The phone rang again. I ignored it, thinking that at least, unlike my mother, Doreen didn’t need instructions for the most basic tasks—calling the oil company to have the tank refilled, remembering to change the car’s windshield wipers instead of just, as she’d once done, buying a new car. If my father had still been himself, I would have asked how he dealt with her, even though I suspected the answer probably involved sex.

  If I’d had time I would have helped more, but in the six weeks since the Journal story had run, traffic to Ladiesroom.com had increased by more than two hundred percent, and Sarah had started hinting that I should think about writing not just five times a week but every day. I’d also gotten a few queries from other outlets—some websites, two in-print magazines, and a cable TV shout-show—asking if I’d want to write or blog or dispense online or on-the-air commentary. So far, I’d turned them all down, but I suspected that if Sarah learned about the offers she’d encourage me to take them, knowing it would only help build Ladiesroom’s brand.

  Ideally, Dave would have taken over Ellie duties a few nights a week, and maybe even spared an hour each week for counseling, but Dave, bless his heart, had declined both of those requests and instead signed up for another marathon. I’d tried not to read too deeply into the symbolism, about how he’d be spending hours each week literally running away from his wife and his daughter, and I’d assiduously avoided Googling L. McIntyre’s name to see if she, too, would be participating in the race, thus avoiding the need to imagine the two of them logging training runs along the Schuylkill, trotting side by side along the tree-canopied paths of the Wissahickon. Instead of complaining, I’d bumped my housekeeper up to two days a week, hired a backup sitter who could work nights and weekends, and enrolled Ellie in after-school activities every day but Thursday—tumbling, swimming, Clay Club, even a class on “iPad mastery.” It was heartbreaking, but the more she was out of the house, the more smoothly things ran inside of it. She’d even found a new best friend. Hank did most of the same activities she did—his mom was a urologist who worked full-time. Ellie had all but adopted Hank, who was even more sensitive and high-strung than she was, and appointed herself as his unofficial advisor and life coach.

  “If you need to go to the potty, just ask me,” I heard her saying as she unhitched herself from her booster seat, then reached over to help Hank with his buckles. “I’ve been to probably a billion parties here before.”

  I helped Ellie out of the car, handed Dave the birthday boy’s gift, and then stood with him in the parking lot, feeling as if we’d been shoved onstage without a script. Normally, we would have kissed before I drove away—just a little peck, a quick brush, enough for me to get a whiff of his scent, which I still found intoxicating, and then we’d separate. Instead, Dave gave me a half wave and a “See ya” before shepherding the kids through the front doors. Part of me wanted to run after him and hug him, taking strength from even an instant of physical connection. Another part of me felt like giving him the finger. Since the birthday-night fight, Dave had barely touched me, and he’d continued to spend his nights in the guest bedroom. I imagined him under the covers, curled on his side with that goddamned BlackBerry pressed against his ear, talking to his work wife, L. McIntyre, while his real wife was alone in bed down the hall, staring up into the darkness, sometimes crying, until the narcotics allowed her to fall asleep.

  I sat behind the wheel as the doors closed behind Dave and Hank and Ellie, feeling hollow underneath the euphoria the pills guaranteed. At least I still had that—a guaranteed pick-me-up at the start of the day; a comfort at the end. With a pill or two (or three, or four) coursing through my bloodstream, I felt calm, energetic, in control, as if I could manage work and being a good mother and a good daughter, keeping the house running
and the refrigerator stocked and even performing the occasional stint as a chaperone during a Stonefield trip to the Art Museum.

  The bad news was that Dr. Andi was being far stingier with the Oxy handouts than she’d been with the Vicodin. “You want to be careful with this stuff,” she’d said the first time I called for a refill. “It’s seriously addictive.”

  “Oh, I will be,” I promised. I could keep that promise easily because, during one of my daily rounds of the gossip websites that I wasted too much time on, I’d come across a story I at first assumed had to be fake. “Introducing Penny Lane: the Top Secret Website Where You Can Buy Any Drug You Want.” No way, I’d thought, but the story at least made the site sound legitimate as it described a kind of Amazon.com for illegal substances. You had to use anonymizing software to get to the site, and use encryption to register. Once you’d cleared those hurdles, you could, allegedly, order anything you wanted—anything from pot to Viagra to painkillers to heroin. You’d send the vendors your real name and address—encrypted, of course—and payment via a new kind of online-only currency, and the vendors would send you the goods.

  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.”

  “Are you all packed?” my father asked.

  So he thought I was coming on this imaginary trip. “All packed and ready to go.”

  “I’m proud of you,” he said, his voice thick, the way it got after he’d had the second of his two pre-dinner martinis. “I hope you’ll have fun in college. Blow off some steam! Put down the paints and go to some parties! Meet some nice boys! College isn’t just for book learning, you know.”

  So he thought he was taking me to college. At a red light, I took a deep breath, remembering that trip, how we’d stopped for milkshakes and he’d given me a pained and heartbreakingly sweet speech about how college boys would want certain things, and how, at parties, I shouldn’t ever put my drink down lest some knave try to “slip me a mickey,” and how I should be careful about what I wore. “I know that’s not a very modern thing to say,” my dad had told me, and I’d been so embarrassed when he used the phrase “it’s just their nature” that I’d spent the next ten minutes hiding in the bathroom.

  I stepped on the gas and tried not to think about what it would be like when the time came to drive him to an assisted-living facility, or a nursing home, or whatever he’d end up requiring. No milkshakes; no speeches about how he should avoid the divorcées with hungry eyes; no joking or resigned tenderness about how this was ju
st what happened: little birds left the nest. It was all wrong, I thought, remembering how impressive my dad had looked offering my new roommate his hand, and how he’d helped me make my bed. I cleared my throat so he wouldn’t be able to tell that I was crying. “I’m just grabbing some coffee, and then I’ll be ready to go.”

  “Sounds good, princess.” He sounded jovial, hearty, so completely himself. I thought, not for the first time, that maybe it would have been better if he’d just died, a thunderclap heart attack, an artery bursting in his brain, a peaceful exit in the middle of the night, in his own bed, after his favorite meal, with my mom beside him. We’d have mourned, then moved on. This was a slow-motion catastrophe, death by a thousand cuts.

  “Why don’t you watch CNBC?” I said, forcing cheeriness into my voice. “Check your stocks. Let Mom take a shower. I’ll be there as soon as I can.” His love of CNBC was one of the things he’d retained, even as he slipped further and further down the rabbit hole. In my parents’ house, the television in the den was always on, at a volume just slightly less than deafening, tuned to the financial news so my dad could keep an eye on his portfolio, which was, in fact, being managed by his former protégé, a man named Don Ettlinger, who worked in Center City and who remembered me from when I was a girl.

  “Okay, then. I’ll see you when I see you.” There was a thumping sound as he set the phone down—sometimes he’d get confused, then angry, when he went to hang up the phone and discovered that cell phones had no cradles, just chargers. I clenched my hands on the steering wheel. When I was fourteen, after my complexion had calmed down and the rest of my features had caught up with my nose, a boy asked me out to a movie. His mother drove us there. We spent the next two hours palm to sticky palm, eyes on the screen, each, undoubtedly, waiting for the other to make a move. My father picked us up and drove us home. In the kitchen, where my mother had left a plate of cookies, he’d looked sternly down at all five feet three inches of Marc Schwartzbaum. “You two are behaving yourself, correct?” he asked, in a voice that seemed deeper than usual, and Marc, gulping, had bobbed a nervous nod.