So my choices were God and nothing. I shut the book, feeling frustrated. A few minutes later, Aubrey stuck her head through my doorway. “We need to go to Share.”
I consulted my binder and made my way to the art therapy room. Three round tables had been pushed to the walls and two dozen folding chairs were arranged in a semicircle, with women seated in most of them. I took a seat between Mary and Aubrey.
“Good afternoon, Meadowcrest!” called the middle-aged woman sitting behind a desk at the center of the semicircle. A moderator, I figured, except she wasn’t wearing khaki. Her laminated nametag hung on a pink cord, instead of a plain black one. Her name, according to her tag, was Gabrielle.
“Good afternoon!” the group called back.
“Is this anyone’s first community meeting?”
After Mary looked at me pointedly, I raised my hand. “Hi, I’m Allison.” When this was met with silence, I muttered, “Pills.”
“Hi, Allison!” the room chorused.
“Welcome,” said Gabrielle, who then began reading from the binder. “Here at Meadowcrest, we are a community.” Just like Stonefield, I thought. And probably just as expensive. “Is there any feedback?” Silence. “Responses to yesterday’s kudos and callouts?” More silence. “Okay, then. Today we’re going to hear from Aubrey. Aubrey, are you ready to share?”
Aubrey crossed her skinny legs, tucked stray locks of dyed hair behind her small ears, and licked her lips. “Hi, um, I’m Aubrey, and I’m an addict.”
“Hi, Aubrey!”
She lifted one little hand in a half wave. “Hi. Um, okay. So I was born in Philadelphia in 1994 . . .”
Oh, God. In 1994 I’d been in college.
“My parents were both alcoholics,” Aubrey continued, twirling a strand of blonde hair around one finger. “They split up when I was two, and I lived with my mom and my stepdad.” She took a deep breath, pulling her knees to her chest. “I guess the first time he started abusing me, I was five. I remember he came into my bed, and at first he was just snuggling me. I liked that part. He said I was his special girl, and that he loved me more than he loved Mommy, that I was prettier, only we couldn’t tell Mommy; it had to be our secret.”
I started to cry as Aubrey went into the details of what happened for the first time the year she turned six, and kept happening until she was fourteen and moved out of the house and in with a boyfriend of her own, who was twenty-two and living in his parents’ basement. How at first pot and vodka made the pain of what was happening go away, and how pills were even better, and how heroin was even better than that.
By the time Aubrey moved from snorting dope to shooting it, I was crying so hard it felt like something had ruptured inside me. Tears sheeted my face as her boyfriend turned abusive, as she moved in with her estranged father, who stole her money and her drugs, as she got pregnant and delivered an addicted baby when she was only seventeen.
Lurid and awful as it was, Aubrey’s story turned out to be dismayingly typical as my week crawled by. During every “Share” session, twice each day, a woman would talk about how her addiction had happened. Typically, the stories involved abuse, neglect, unplanned pregnancies, dropping out of school, and running away from home. There were boyfriends who hit; there were parents who looked the other way. Instead of being the exception, rape and molestation were the rule.
My mom’s new husband. My sister’s boyfriend. The babysitter (female). The big boy with the swimming pool who lived at the end of our street. I listened, crying, knowing how badly these girls had been damaged, and how pathetic my own story sounded. What would happen when it was my turn to share? Could I say that the stress of motherhood, writing blog posts, coping with a faltering marriage, and aging parents, parents who maybe weren’t the greatest but had never hit me and certainly had never molested me, had driven me to pills? They’d laugh at me. I would laugh at me.
On my third day at Meadowcrest, a woman named Shannon told her story. Shannon was different from the other girls. She was older, for one thing, almost thirty as opposed to half-past teenager, and she was educated—she talked about her college graduation, and made a reference to graduate school. She’d lived in Brooklyn, had wanted to be a writer, had loved pills in college and had discovered, in the real world, that heroin was cheaper and could make her feel even better.
“Eventually, it turned me into someone I didn’t recognize,” Shannon told the room, in her quiet, cultured voice. “You know that part in The Big Book where it talks about the real alcoholic?” Shannon flipped open her own blue-covered paperback and read. “?‘Here is the fellow who has been puzzling you, especially in his lack of control. He does absurd, incredible, tragic things while drinking.’ Or, if you’re in the rooms”—“the rooms,” I’d learned, was a shorthand term for AA meetings—“you’ll hear someone talking about how they paid for their seat, and ‘paid’ stands for ‘pitiful acts of incomprehensible destruction.’?”