Dune Road by Jane Green

Author:Jane Green
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Contemporary Women, Single mothers, Novelists, Fiction, Fiction - General, Connecticut, Popular English Fiction, Secrecy, General
ISBN: 9780670020867
Publisher: Penguin Group
Published: 2009-06-15T21:21:45.488000+00:00

Later on, when Adam has left and the children are watching TV, Kit and Annabel clear up the plates after dinner, chatting quietly.

“I don’t blame Ginny—Mum—whatever it is I’m supposed to call her,” Annabel says. “Dad says he kept in touch with her, would keep her updated as to what I was doing; and let me tell you, for a long time what I was doing wasn’t pretty.”

“What do you mean? ” Kit puts down the sponge, takes the kettle off the stove and pours hot water into two mugs, letting the camomile tea bags steep while she goes to sit at the table.

“I had a rough few years. I fell in with a bad crowd after university, and there were a lot of drugs, a lot of bad stuff.”

“What kind of drugs? ”

“You name it, I did it.”

“Heroin? ” Kit breathes, hoping the answer is no.

“Among other things. Don’t worry”—she pushes up her sleeves and shows off her arms—“no track marks. I didn’t inject. Mostly, it was crack. Smoking it. I know it’s hard to imagine this, looking at me today, but for a long time I looked like Amy Wine-house. But without the beehive, obviously.”

“Ouch. That’s not good.”

“No. It wasn’t. Dad paid for rehab twice, but I didn’t want to be there, didn’t have any willingness, didn’t want to change; and unless you want it badly enough, it doesn’t work. I hadn’t reached my bottom.”

“What does that mean? ”

Annabel laughs. “It’s a recovery term. It means you’re not ready to get better until you’ve reached rock bottom.”

“Okay.” Kit is awkward. “I’m sorry, I don’t know anything about . . . well . . . drugs and alcohol, or . . . AA, I guess. This is all new for me.”

“And I know so much about it that I assume everyone is as familiar with the terminology as I am,” she explains.

“So what was your rock bottom? ”

“An overdose.” Annabel shrugs, as if she was saying, a headache. “They found me overdosed on a park bench on Primrose Hill.”

“They? ”

“Someone walking their dog. I’d been there all night. I know I’d been in Camden, scoring, and I don’t remember much else. I was rushed to hospital, and something changed for me: I knew that I was going to die if I carried on, and all of a sudden I didn’t want to die.”

There is silence as Kit digests what Annabel is saying.

“It’s odd,” Annabel says, looking at Kit curiously. “You don’t have the addict gene. I can tell.”

“What do you mean? ”

“I think we are either born addicts, or not. I don’t think my upbringing led me to that life—God knows my father did an amazing job—but I would have fallen into alcohol or drugs, or both, no matter what my family life had been. That was probably the biggest lesson I learned in rehab. I’d spent my whole life being a victim, thinking that if I’d had a mother, a normal family, I wouldn’t be the person I

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