Would that have been better or worse? Or maybe that’s a dumb question. Maybe these things just are.
“Why do things have to break?” I say.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t like it either. Have you ever seen me on a bad cleaning spree?”
I give her a look. Everybody knows how she gets.
“That’s my way of coping,” she says. “Some people throw fits. Some people run away. Some people drink. I scour.”
“At least yours is practical,” I say.
She laughs softly. “It’s more than a little OCD. I think you get it from me.”
I always thought of myself as having more in common with Dad—his need to control things. His avoidance. Dad tries to control other people. Mom tries to control her environment.
I try to control everything by controlling myself.
It’s like the things in Mom and Dad that grate against each other met in me. If they couldn’t live with each other, how am I supposed to live with myself?
“I’m sorry,” I say to Mom.
“What for?”
I’m not even sure. I’m sorry for being how I am, for making her worry, for not being able to help things between her and Dad, for the dark thoughts I had underwater.
“Can I sleep now?” I say. “I’ll go see Dr. Rice, but right now I just want to sleep.”
When I wake to see Peter filling the doorway, at first I’m embarrassed he caught me dreaming about him, which doesn’t make sense. If I’m awake, I’m not dreaming about Peter at all. Peter’s real.
I hate to think how I must look, all pasty and red-eyed. My sleep shirt’s medicinal green, and I haven’t brushed my hair for days. But Peter doesn’t look at me. He sits in the rocking chair by the side of my bed and stares at his boots.
A bunch of flowers hang between his knees. They’re warm and cheery colors—red, orange, and yellow for a girl who’s feeling blue.
“Your mom said you might be asleep,” he says.
“Sorry.”
“What? No . . . Do you have . . . I don’t know . . . a vase?”
I shrug and he sets the flowers on the night table. A few petals fall.
“My mom let you up here?”
He nods. “She said company might do you good. I thought she should warn you, but she said you’d tell me to go away.” He grins and looks me in the eyes for the first time. “Sorry to take you by surprise.”
I don’t answer. I can’t say it’s okay, can’t say I don’t care, and I don’t trust my voice.
“Happy Halloween,” Peter says.
It’s actually Halloween. I love Halloween, but I hadn’t even realized it was today.
“I heard a crazy story,” he says, “that the strap on your shoe broke, and that’s why you fell in the pool.”
“Hmm.” My throat is too tight. If I let one word out, who knows how many might come tumbling after?
“Everybody was watching the flash mob, but I was watching you.”
“Yeah, I’m sorry for wrecking that.”
“Why did you jump in?”
“I didn’t jump. I fell.”
“But you let yourself fall.”
I shift on my pillow to face him. “You jumped off a roof.”
He looks toward the door. “That was stupid of me.”
“Are you calling me stupid?”
He almost smiles at that, but he checks himself.
“You were drunk . . .” He trails off. He knows there’s more to it than that.
I hold his gaze.
He pulls a flower from the bunch and picks it apart so its orange petals drift to the floor. “You stayed under so long. Did you mean to?”
I look up at the ceiling. Tired as I am, it hurts to hold my face still for so long, to pretend I’m okay when I know that I’m not—it’s like holding my breath underwater.
“I don’t know,” I say, and I don’t like how ripped up and raw my voice sounds. “I don’t know what I wanted. I hope I didn’t mean to, you know, stop breathing. I just—I had an impulse and it felt right, so I did it. It made me feel free.”
I shut up then, because he’s too close. I’ve already told him too much. The space in my room closes in on itself, filling up with bad feelings and worry, no air.
“You can talk to me,” Peter says, but what he’s really saying is, Let me help you. Please, please, let me in. Let me touch you, squeeze you, press you. Let me breathe all your air.
I love that he came here, love that I haven’t totally scared him away. But he should be with a girl who can hold his hand, kiss, maybe more. He shouldn’t get stuck with my problems.
“I don’t think I can explain it,” I say.
Peter pulls the last petals from the stem in his hand and watches them fall to the floor. Any second he’ll stand up and leave me alone, let the bubble close up around me again, let me breathe.
He reaches down to pick up a few of the petals and holds them toward me as if he means to press them into my bare hand that lies open on the quilt. I haven’t been wearing the gloves to bed. I pull my hand back. “Don’t—”
“No, I know,” he says, gentle. Those words make me flood. My heart pumps hard, extra blood heats my face.
He holds the petals in the space between us. “If I promise not to touch, is that okay?” he asks, and his hand doesn’t move. I let mine fall open, cupped on the quilt at the edge of the bed. He moves his hand closer to mine, slowly, tentatively, giving me plenty of time to pull away.
I close my hand into a fist and press it down into the mattress, but I stay.
He’s almost to me when the words come: “It’s scary,” I say. I laugh at myself even though it’s not funny. It’s safer to laugh than to cry.
Peter pauses but doesn’t pull back; he exhales a few little breaths, his own nervous laugh. His hand shakes. My breath catches. The sheets feel like they’re on fire, but I still dig my fist into the mattress, fight the impulse to scurry away.
He tilts his head and touches the petals to the back of my hand. Peter considers my hand like he’s taking an X-ray of my bones and knows exactly what he’ll see.
I unclench my hand, and Peter brushes the petals along my fingers. He’s still shaky, but careful and slow. When he reaches my fingertips, I turn my hand up and let him drag the petals down all the joints to my palm. It tickles and twitches so much I have to flex my fingers back, extend to resist squeezing shut.
He traces the lines on my palm—the life line, the love line, the ones of lesser consequence—and I concentrate on relaxing my muscles, letting go, so my hand folds back into a cup.
I take a deep breath, feeling . . . proud, and I meet Peter’s eyes. He smiles. Not a grin, but a full smile.
He lets the petals go, lets them fall into my open hand.
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32.
Peter waits downstairs while I shower and change.
My whole body feels different under the water. Everything is sharper, more sensitive and alive. It almost hurts, but in a good way—a why-haven’t-I-showered-in-four-days way.
I pull on jeans and a top with long sleeves, and I put on my gloves—one scary step at a time, please.
Peter’s in the den, checking out Jordan’s costume—a mask that fills up with blood when he presses a pump. Next year, Jordan might be too old for trick-or-treating. It almost makes me sad, but I check myself. He has horror movie marathons, visits to haunted houses, and parties, so many parties, in his future. Not every change is sad.
“All better?” Jordan asks me.
“Working on it.”
“I thought maybe you caught some kind of sleeping sickness, like from a mosquito.”
“No such luck,” I say.
“I’m not kidding. I was worried about you.” Jordan looks a little offended.
“I’m sorry I made you worry.”
> “You ready to get out of here?” Peter asks.
“Yeah, I guess I’m feeling brave.”
I can’t fix everything all at once, but there’s one important thing I need to fix as soon as possible, maybe even tonight. As Peter pulls out of the driveway, I confess, “I think I’ve been a bad friend to Mandy.”
“She’ll forgive you,” he says, “once she understands.”
But how to make her understand? Peter seems to accept my fear without needing to ask a lot of questions, but Mandy will want to know a clear reason why. I remember how she talked about Peter’s “nuttiness” after I first met him. I can’t bring that up to Peter, obviously, but it makes me worry that Mandy might shun me now that I’ve let my crazy show.
Peter parks at the top of Mandy’s drive, and we walk in and out of the cones of harsh area light that surround Mandy’s house. At the pool, we find Mandy and Drew on lounge chairs.
Mandy’s up like a shot with her arms spread dramatically as if to block me from leaping in. “Step away from the pool,” she says like an agent in a cop show. “Swimming season is over.”
“I’m done swimming,” I say.
She relaxes her arms, takes a drag on her cigarette, and considers me. She doesn’t look angry but poised—at any moment she could shift into attack mode. She turns to Peter and says, “This is my surprise?” He responds by walking around to take Mandy’s seat next to Drew.
“Can we talk?” I ask, and Mandy shifts her pursed lips to the side. She’s not going to make this easy.
“You want something to drink? Non-alcoholic.”
“No, thanks. I’m good.” She leads the way to the upper lawn, removed enough from the pool that Peter and Drew won’t be able to hear us.
I perch on the edge of the trampoline, but Mandy chooses the grass.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
Mandy nods.
My words spill out in a rush, things I’ve waited too long to say. “I’m sorry I freaked out. I’m sorry I haven’t been a good friend. I’ve been keeping things from you, and I haven’t been able to talk about why, and that sucks. And I’m sorry I missed rehearsal and messed up your scene. I’m sorry I’m interrupting your . . . date, or whatever, right now.”
She nods again. “Okay. Apologies accepted.”
But she doesn’t look at me.
“Are we still friends?” I ask, and waiting for her to answer is as scary as holding my hand still for Peter. She doesn’t respond for a long time.
“I think you and I will always be friends, in a way,” she says. In a way. “We have a history together. That’s important.”
I nod, but my mind’s racing, thinking how to make it up to her.
“I don’t know, Caddie,” she says, and she ashes onto the grass. “We don’t even know that much about each other—not recent stuff anyway.”
“I want to know,” I say. “I want to talk about it.”
“About what?”
“About . . . you and Drew. About my weirdness. About the state of affairs in the Middle East. About how to get Livia to give up on Hank. Whatever you want.”
Mandy’s quiet for a long time, staring out toward the ridge. Bats dip and play, and at first it takes me by surprise to see them there. In my mind, they came out special for the party—atmosphere for Peter and me. But here they are, a week later, not caring about me and my little drama, just doing their own batty thing.
“She’s really making an ass out of herself,” Mandy says.
It takes me a second to register that she’s talking about Livia.
“I don’t know if I’d go that far.”
“No, it got worse after you left. Hank knows that she likes him; she knows that he knows; he and Oscar make faces about it as soon as her back’s turned. Maybe . . .”
“What?”
“Maybe we could get Livia to go for Oscar.”
“Oh, I do not see that happening.”
“No? Yeah, you’re probably right.”
“Not everybody has to be coupled up.”
Mandy’s turned back toward the pool, where her eyes follow Drew as he paces beside Peter’s chair. Peter’s laughing; Drew isn’t, emphatic about whatever position he’s taken, per usual.
“I think I’m afraid of being alone,” she says, and she looks to me, eyes full and dark. I used to think of Mandy as never being afraid of anything.
She breaks away from watching Drew and lies back, looking up to the sky. I slip from the trampoline and lie down beside her, leaving maybe half a foot between us. “You’re thinking about breaking up with him?”
She takes a long drag, lets it out. “I love Drew, but we aren’t always nice to each other. We’re too much alike. But the thought of letting him go . . . it makes me want to jump out of my skin.”
Crickets sing, and I don’t have to say anything. Just listen.
“Did you ever think about how brave your parents were,” Mandy asks, “to split up?”
“Maybe there’s something to that.”
She says, “You’re looking very couply with Peter.”
“Am not.”
“Are so.”
We both laugh. I haven’t felt this much myself since Dad left, nothing forced or performed. Mandy rolls onto her side, propping up on one elbow to face me.
“So, you and Peter? How’s that going to work, if you can’t . . .” She holds a finger in the air between us, and I raise one gloved finger to meet it.
“. . . touch anyone? Yeah, it’s a problem. For the play, too. I was hoping you might help me work on that.”
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ACT FOUR
And as my love is siz’d, my fear is so.
Where love is great, the littlest doubts are fear;
Where little fears grow great, great love grows there.
—PLAYER QUEEN, HAMLET (III.II.117-19)
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33.
I tell Mandy everything, and she doesn’t look at me like I’m contagious. She listens like I’m the most important person in the world, nodding and saying a sympathetic, “Oh, Caddie,” when I get to sad parts.
“It makes so much sense now that I know,” she says.
“You always suspected I was crazy?” I meant it as a joke, but I realize I’m eager to hear her answer.
“No, no, I never thought you were crazy, but you used to space out sometimes.”
“I’d be going through things in my head, making deals with myself, trying to make sure I didn’t think the wrong thing.”
Mandy nods. “And I knew you had panic attacks. My mom told me.”
“She did?”
“But she told me not to bring it up to you, that it wasn’t polite to talk about. I should have said something.”
“I should have told you. I was always so freaked out, and . . . when we were drifting apart, I thought maybe it was because you could tell something was wrong with me, that I was weird.”
“No!”
“It seems dumb now.”
“I could tell there were things you weren’t sharing with me. I thought—”
“You thought I didn’t want to be your friend.”
Mandy wipes her eyes with her scarf. “God, it’s so dumb.”
I shake my head. “I’m not going to hug you right now—because I can’t—but Mandy, when I’m better, I may hug you to death, okay?”
She nods, sniffling. I never imagined, back in middle school, that it might have hurt Mandy to lose me.
Dr. Rice offered to squeeze me in first thing Thursday morning, and Mom jumped on it. Waiting in the office isn’t as nerve-racking as I remember. For one thing, Mom’s not crying.
She actually makes a joke when I’m called. “If she gives you
a hard time,” she says, “just blame it on your parents.”
When I first met Dr. Rice, she terrified me. Not because she’s particularly scary—she looks like a soccer mom and her office smells like cinnamon—but because I feared she might know more about me than I did about myself. She might have figured out horrible things about my brain that she’d tell Mom and Dad but not me.
But now, she seems more like a regular person, a lady with a job. A job that involves listening to me babble for an hour about my problems.
“Your mom mentioned the divorce and your new school,” she says. “You’ve been under a lot of stress.”
“I guess.” I feel a bit patronized, like she’s trying to win me over with her understanding.
It’s true there’s been a lot of stress. But Mom and Dad are the ones splitting up. The academy’s a change for the better.
“A lot of folks would have needed to come see me sooner,” she says, and the smile lines around her eyes, the one giveaway to her age, crease. Her voice is neutral, but that smile says, Come on, Caddie, what took you so long?
It’s a fair question.
“I’m pretty good at hiding it when things upset me,” I say, studying the faded tips of my gloves.
“Well, I’m glad you came back to see me,” she says, “when you weren’t feeling right.”
She helped me before, when the panic grew so frequent and fearsome that even a hint was enough to make an attack start in force.
“I didn’t exactly come right away,” I say. “Things have been bad for a while.”
The first half hour is mostly me talking. She asks whether the exercises she taught me still help with the panic. And she asks about my “unwanted thoughts.” She gives me an assessment for OCD, and I tell her what Mom said about her cleaning.
“That doesn’t surprise me at all,” she says. “Anxiety tends to run in families.”
She makes it sound like eye color, or shoe size, the luck of the genetic draw. Nothing any individual person can control.
And that actually makes me feel a little better.
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