The Venus Fix

by M. J. Rose

  The hesitation was enough for her.

  “She didn’t make it, did she?”

  “I’m sorry, no.”

  “I already figured it out. We were both sick with the same stuff. If she was okay, even if she was as bad as I am, no one would have kept it from me. How stupid is this? Just like some dumb movie—” She stopped talking and closed her eyes. Tears rolled down her cheeks but she didn’t break down. “She died of the same thing that made me so sick, right?”

  “Yes,” Jordain said.

  “Do you know what it was?”

  “Not yet. Not for sure. We’re doing tests. We need you to tell us what happened. Okay?”

  Tania nodded, but now she was crying too hard to talk.

  Thirty-Eight

  I didn’t get out of my office that day until it was time to leave for my session at the Park East School. It hadn’t been snowing five minutes earlier, when I’d looked out of my window to check, but now it was coming down hard again and I didn’t have time to go back for an umbrella without risking being late. But if I didn’t find a taxi—which I doubted I would in weather this bad—and I had to walk, I’d get soaked.

  Rushing inside, I grabbed one of the extra umbrellas Allison kept in a stand by her desk. She was on the phone and waved good-night to me, and then I saw Blythe coming down the steps, wrapping her scarf around her head.

  “It’s bad out there,” I said as I opened the door and held it for her.

  “What else is new?”

  She was heading Uptown, too, she said, and so we walked to Park Avenue together, hoping we’d find a cab to share. The two of us huddled under the one small collapsible umbrella and blinked the snow out of our eyes as we forged ahead. The wind was blowing west and I had to swirl the umbrella to keep it from flying away. It wouldn’t have mattered; it wasn’t preventing the snow from stinging our cheeks and our lips.

  The sidewalks were packed with that day’s fresh snowfall, which covered previous layers of both snow and ice. Walking was hazardous, and halfway down the block Blythe hit a patch of ice and started to slide. Reaching out, I grabbed her arm, and she steadied herself.

  “I can’t believe how dangerous it is just walking to the corner.” She laughed and thanked me for holding on to her.

  We got lucky a few minutes later when a young woman with a toddler got out of a taxi in front of an apartment building on Sixty-seventh Street.

  Once we were in the cab, I told Blythe I was going as far as Eighty-eighth Street and she said she’d drop me off then. She was going all the way up to 103rd Street.

  “Mount Sinai hospital? Everything all right?” I’d felt an immediate lurch of fear in the center of my stomach upon hearing the address. There wasn’t anything else up there.

  “The girl who was poisoned on Saturday night—the Webcam girl—she’s there. I don’t think there’s anything I can do for her, but I wanted to go in case she needs to talk to someone.”

  “Do you know her?”

  “No. Not personally. But…I feel like I do.”

  The taxi was warm and I was wearing a heavy coat and good, thick gloves, but I shivered. Blythe, despite her degrees and her potential as a therapist and her desire to excel in my own field, was so close to the tragedy.

  As the cab crept Uptown, I told Blythe where I was going and a little bit about the sessions I was doing at the school.

  “I hope you can help them,” she said earnestly.

  “So do I.”

  “You don’t sound as if you think you can.”

  I didn’t know if Blythe was especially perceptive or if my tone of voice had been too revealing. “These kids are encased in stone. Every week I chip away but make almost no progress. I can’t find a fissure to use to crack them open.”

  “I never thought much about this before, but what’s going to happen when I have to work with a patient who has this problem? Has my problem?”

  “You’ll be that much more sensitive and compassionate.”

  She laughed. “Compassion is hardly my issue.”

  “You’re being too hard on yourself. You’ve only been seeing patients for a few months. You’re going to learn how to deal with all these feelings you have. I promise. That’s why we’re working with each other.”

  She looked at me the way Dulcie used to and maybe would again when she was older—when she reached Blythe’s age.

  We all need someone whom we believe has the answers and whom we can trust to help us. But when that person disappears from our lives, we feel every shift in the wind as a threat—we become one of the lost girls. It had happened to me when my mother had died. Blythe was one, too; I knew the signs. At some point in her life, Blythe’s anchor had disappeared. We needed to talk about it in a session, not in the back of a steamy cab.

  The taxi stopped at a light at Eighty-seventh Street. I’d be getting out at the next block. I reached into my bag, opened my wallet, pulled out a ten dollar bill and handed it to Blythe. “Take this.”

  “No, I can pay.”

  “There’s no reason for you to pick this up. It’s a business expense. I’m on my way to a session.” I forced the bill into her hand. The light changed. The driver pulled up to the middle of the next block. I put my hand on the door handle and then turned to Blythe.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “Really, it’s not a big deal. I had to come Uptown, anyway.”

  “No, I didn’t mean the cab. I meant what you said about me being okay. You always make me feel so much better. Like everything will work out.”

  She smiled. That wide-open smile. It pulled me in again.

  I stood on the corner in the falling snow. Flakes landed on my hair and my cheeks. A fat one settled on my bottom lip. While I watched the taxi pull away, Blythe turned around and waved at me, and for a moment I felt it, too—that maybe everything that was wrong really could be fixed.

  Thirty-Nine

  “I was online but just goofing around. I wasn’t surfing. I wasn’t watching them…” Barry started and then stopped. He rubbed a spot on his left arm almost to the point of obsession.

  We had a rule in the group, only one rule: if any of the kids watched porn or engaged in it, they’d come clean. They wouldn’t get dissed or lectured; no one’s parents would be told, but they had to be up front with me and with the rest of the group. And since the group was the only thing standing between them and expulsion or suspension, they were pretty good about it.

  I waited, keeping my eyes on Barry’s, keeping my body language neutral.

  “But a bud IM’d me and told me that these two chicks were going at it and acting all weird and I clicked over to check it out. I didn’t get what he’d meant by acting weird. I thought they were doing something kinky.”

  “How long did you watch it?” I asked.

  He looked down at the floor. “Not long. I got sort of sick.”

  “Sick?”

  “Like I was gonna throw up, you know?” He was embarrassed.

  “Do you know why?”

  “They were in pain. It was awful, you could tell.”

  I wanted to find a way to make him realize he was connecting to what he’d seen—understanding it was happening to two real women—instead of the detachment he’d felt with all the women he’d been watching online the past two years.

  “How could you tell they were really sick?”

  “They just weren’t acting. I don’t know. You could just tell.”

  “You kept watching it?” Jodi asked. “That’s disgusting. How long?”

  He shrugged.

  “Did you do anything?” she asked.

  “Like what? Jerk off?”

  “No. Like call the fucking police or something.”

  He shook his head.

  I waited for one of the other kids to get involved.

  “You watched the whole thing?” Ellen asked. Unlike Jodi, she wasn’t angry, she was incredulous.

  “Yeah.”

  “You think that the one gir
l tried to kill the other one?” Ellen was playing with the button on her jacket, twisting it around and around.

  “Come on,” Amanda said. “That’s so lame.”

  No one said anything. I waited. Watched her face. Felt the pain from across the room. Why was it so hard for her to talk about this?

  “Why is it lame to wonder that?” I finally asked.

  “They wouldn’t hurt each other.” Amanda’s voice was low; I had to strain to hear her. “They were friends.”

  She seemed so sure. And so pained.

  “Amanda, did you see those two girls on Saturday night?”

  She shook her head.

  “Have you seen other girls like them?”

  She didn’t answer.

  Who had she seen? When had she seen them? How was I going to help her feel comfortable enough to share whatever she was struggling with?

  A few seconds went by.

  “When you watch women online, what do you think they’re thinking? What do you think those two women were feeling before they got sick?” I asked.

  “Nothing. They’re being hot. They’re ho’s. That’s all,” Paul volunteered, and then shrugged.

  I watched Amanda flinch.

  “Do you ever really think about it, Paul?”

  “About what? What they are feeling?”

  I nodded.

  “Shit, I don’t know.”

  “Try now. Let’s all try. First thing that comes to your mind—what do you think they are feeling?”

  “They probably dig all that attention.” Paul smirked. “They—”

  “Maybe it was suicide,” Amanda said in a very low voice. She was interrupting but didn’t seem to be aware of it. She hadn’t looked up when she said it but had kept her eyes on her shoes—suede boots with thick rubber soles. Most of the girls wore them. My daughter wore them. They were the accessory du jour in Manhattan schools.

  Timothy quickly looked over at her, a concerned look in his eyes.

  “What makes you think so?” I asked.

  “Because you get to a point where the only way you can come out on the other side is to die.”

  The tone and timbre of her voice alerted me that her stress level was high. All the kids sensed something was happening and waited. I needed to keep her talking. “Amanda, do you ever feel like that? Like you need to come out on the other side?”

  She shrugged.

  I leaned forward. “What do you do when you feel like that?”

  “I guess I do art stuff.”

  I nodded. “Me, too. When I feel like that, I sculpt. I know how it works. It helps, doesn’t it?”

  She was watching me—so much going unsaid, so much I couldn’t read in her eyes, and so much I needed to say to reach her. “Yeah. Sort of.”

  “Amanda, what could have happened to the girls online that would have been so bad that they would have wanted to kill themselves?”

  “Just because they were getting paid doesn’t mean it was only about that. At first they probably liked knowing guys were watching. Like Barry said. They probably did like the attention.” She wasn’t looking at me anymore, or at anyone in the room. Her eyes were still on her boots.

  “And then?” I asked, encouraging.

  Everyone was still riveted, waiting. She had galvanized the group.

  “It was what they did, right? They were pros. The ultimate Venus fantasy that every guy is stuck on, and they knew it. Two chicks. Going at it…putting on a show. But it wasn’t…” Her voice shook as she went on. Her eyes were still cast downward, but her hands had curled into fists in her lap. “They probably didn’t get off on it at first. Didn’t even think about it. But then all that touching. All that touching each other, all soft and caring and naked like that…”

  Hugh whistled. Barry joined in.

  Amanda winced.

  Timothy glared at both of them and hissed, “Shut the fuck up.”

  I was surprised. Real emotion. A protective streak.

  I watched a tear fall from Amanda’s eye and get lost in her jeans. Another. She did nothing to wipe them away.

  Timothy got up. He walked across the room, knelt down in front of her, put his hands on the arms of her chair, and whispered something to her that I couldn’t hear. I don’t think anyone in the room could. She didn’t respond but another tear fell, this one landing on Timothy’s hand. He looked down and stared at it but didn’t brush it off.

  “Amanda?”

  They’d all left the session and were walking toward their lockers to get their things. She turned, said something to Jodi and walked back toward me.

  “I wanted to give you this,” I said, and held out my business card.

  She didn’t take it.

  “You left it on the seat three weeks ago when you joined the group. All the guys have my number and address. And the other girls took it.”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “So who knows. It doesn’t mean you have to call me, but if you don’t take it, you won’t have the choice.”

  She was staring at it. I was certain there was something she needed to talk about but that she was afraid of. Otherwise, taking the card would be meaningless. If she had it, she might be tempted, and something about opening up was scaring her.

  “I promised everyone in the group. Nothing anyone ever says will ever leave the room. I’ll never break a confidence. That’s my job.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why don’t you believe me?”

  “It’s not that.”

  “Then what is it?”

  She shrugged.

  I took a chance.

  “I really would like to see some of your artwork.”

  She nodded, seemed to be thinking about it. “Why?”

  “I love art. I told you I sculpt a little. I think that making art is one way we explore our feelings. We can say things in a painting or sculpture that can be hard to put into words.”

  “Photographs, too.”

  I nodded. “Do you take photographs?”

  “Yeah. And I make shorts.”

  It was quiet in the hallway; the voices and footsteps of the other kids had faded away. Her words lingered, not quite an echo, more like a piano note fading away.

  “Short films?”

  She stepped back, frightened.

  “Amanda? What is it?”

  She shook her head.

  “I don’t want you to tell me anything you aren’t ready for. But I want you to take this. I know something is bothering you and that it’s something that seems overwhelming and impossible.”

  “How?”

  I smiled at her. I would have preferred to reach out and take her in my arms, but I couldn’t do that. “It’s what I’m trained to do, Amanda. I can help you straighten it out. Not make it go away. Not even make the pain go away. But help you put it in some kind of perspective, so you aren’t controlled by it.”

  She shifted. A shield came down. She backed up. “Yeah, like you’re helping the guys to get control over how much they go online? They still can’t stay away. You’re not helping them.”

  “We don’t know that yet. It takes a long time to break an addiction.”

  “Amanda?” It was Ellen calling out; she was at the end of the hall. “You ready or what?”

  “I have to go.”

  I was still holding the card. “Take it.”

  She stared at it for a few seconds.

  “The secrets get bigger and bigger the longer you keep them.” I extended it so that it was even closer to her. It almost glowed in the darkened hallway.

  “Amanda?” It was Ellen again.

  She turned with most of her body, broke eye contact with me, but somehow reached out with her left hand and took the card, as if it was an afterthought and didn’t matter.

  But it did. Very much.

  Forty

  My mother had a snow globe that sat on her battered dressing table in our dingy apartment downtown. Inside was a theater marquee with the words The Lost Girls on it, a
long with my mother’s name spelled out in what looked like tiny yellow lights.

  Now that globe sat on my dresser, among perfume bottles and picture frames. When she was growing up, Dulcie had loved it as much as I had, and would sit and play with it for a long time, enchanted by the way the snowflakes fell over the marquee.

  I was having one made for her next birthday—with her marquee and her name and the title of the play she was appearing in. When my taxi pulled up to the theater, the marquee was indeed brushed with snow just like the scene inside the snow globe. Dulcie and I were still talking, albeit cautiously, but she’d accepted my decision about her not doing the audition.

  For the first time in hours, I forgot about the kids from Park East and the strange sense I’d had that Amanda and Timothy knew something I needed to know—the sooner the better.

  Inside, the doors to the theater were shut. Harold, the usher, saw me, smiled and let me slip quietly inside.

  I stood in the back, behind the last row of seats, and looked at my daughter on stage. No matter how many times I watched the play, I was still surprised each time I saw Dulcie in the footlights. There was always a first rush of shock that she was there, on Broadway—not in her junior high school auditorium, not at a summer camp production, but a professional, performing for strangers every night.

  At the same time that I was incredibly proud—the audience had burst into applause as Dulcie finished up her second-to-last song—I felt the rise of a low-lying anxiety fluttering up from under my ribs. She was so vulnerable. And as the play moved ahead to its finale, I saw the teenager on stage not as my daughter, not as my mother’s granddaughter, but as a wholly independent creature—like the kids I’d been working with earlier. They each had secrets inside of them that their parents, their teachers and their families didn’t know about, couldn’t guess.

  What secrets did Dulcie have from me? From Mitch?

  I wouldn’t know, even though I’d had secrets, too. Kept them close to me and away from my father, from my stepmother, and from Nina.