“Um.” I closed my notebook, then drummed my fingertips on its cover. I had known this day was coming, but, of course, they never told you exactly when it would be your turn. I sat up straight, remembering how every Share began. “Well. Let’s see. I was born in New Jersey, in 1974. I think I tried liquor for the first time at someone’s bat mitzvah, when I was twelve or thirteen. We were sneaking glasses off the grown-ups’ table. I had maybe a sip, and I hated the way it tasted, and that was that until I was sixteen. Um.” I tilted my body back in my chair, looked up at the ceiling and noticed, without surprise, that it was stained. Everything in this place was worn and dirty, frayed and patched, like we didn’t deserve anything better. “I got drunk at a party when I was sixteen. Vodka and peach schnapps, which was a thing back then. I hated the way it made me feel, and I didn’t drink again until college . . . and even then, it was, like, a beer. Or maybe I’d have a few puffs of a joint.”
“You’re kidding,” said a new girl whose name I didn’t know. I could have gotten defensive, but instead, I just shrugged.
“Yeah, I know it sounds ridiculous, but it’s the truth. I didn’t like booze, I didn’t like pot, and I didn’t really try anything else because there wasn’t much else around . . . oh, wait, I did do mushrooms one time, but they made me puke, so forget that.” I shuddered. “I hate throwing up.”
“Don’t do heroin,” said Lena, and everyone else laughed.
“So, flash forward, I’m thirty-four, I’m married, I have a kid, I throw my back out at my gym, and my doctor gives me Vicodin.” I breathed, remembering. “And it was like that scene in The Wizard of Oz where everything goes from black-and-white to color. It was like that was the way the world was meant to feel.” I could feel my body reacting to the memory, the blood rising to the surface of my skin, my heartbeat quickening. “I was calm, I was happy, I felt like I could get more things accomplished. I started writing these blog posts, and they really took off. The pills made me brave enough to write with all those people reading. They made me patient enough to put up with my daughter, who is gorgeous and smart but can be a handful. They made me who I was supposed to be. I know that’s not what I’m supposed to say in here,” I said, before anyone could chide me for romanticizing my use or failing to “play the tape,” “but I also know that we’re supposed to be honest. And that’s the God’s honest truth. I loved the way I felt when I was on pills.”
“So what happened?” Gabrielle prompted.
I sighed. “I just started taking too many of them. More pills, different kinds, stronger medications, and then, eventually, I wasn’t taking them to feel good, I was taking them just to feel normal. I was napping all the time, and I was impatient with my daughter. I wasn’t myself. I took money from a petty cash account at work and moved it into my personal account. It wasn’t exactly embezzlement, but it wasn’t exactly something I was supposed to be doing. And . . .” Here came the hard part. “I tried to drive while I was impaired. One of the teachers saw what was going on and took my keys away. Then my husband found out what was going on and . . .” I shrugged. By now, my look of contrition was so well-rehearsed that it felt almost natural on my face. “Here I am. Just another sick person trying to get better.”
For a minute, there was silence, as the ladies contemplated my boring, bare-bones, drama-free tale. Everyone had something better—an overdose, an arrest, an intervention full of tears and accusations. The previous week one of the women, a fifth-grade teacher who’d also bought pills online, had talked about being blackmailed. The person she bought from spent an afternoon on Google, figured out where she worked and to whom she was married, and then e-mailed her to say that if she didn’t pay first five hundred, then a thousand, then three thousand dollars, he’d tell her husband and her boss—and maybe even the local paper—just what she’d been up to. It had gone on for months. Linda had drained her savings account and dipped into her twelve-year-old daughter’s college fund before trying to kill herself. Luckily, it hadn’t worked, and now she was here . . . and as for the guy who’d tortured her, Linda said with a sad smile that her counselor had helped her fill out a form on the DEA’s website. “I have no idea if they caught him,” she’d said. “Probably he’s still out there, shaking down other housewives.”
I remembered feeling almost dizzy with relief that nothing like that had ever happened to me. Now, with dozens of puzzled and accusatory faces staring at me, I almost wished something more catastrophic had landed me at Meadowcrest.