If I had, I might have told them: What I felt when I saw that frozen face was not fear or disgust. It was relief. It lasted only a moment, but it was so profound that it bordered on joy.
Katherine
There were parts of Florida that really did look like heaven—Katherine had seen them on the drive from the airport. Paradise Lake Recovery Center looked more like Eden, after God and Man and the more discerning animals had deserted it. The whole property was overgrown with banyan trees—which were also known as strangler trees, according to her cabinmate Rachelle. Katherine found this both appropriate and disturbing. Though the staff tried to maintain suburban-style lawns around each of the cabins and the main buildings, the grass was always patchy and muddy, with strange weeds growing defiantly around the edges.
Paradise Lake’s website had promised a “camp-like” atmosphere, which Katherine did not consider very appealing. She had always hated summer camp. There were six female and five male cabins, each with four residents at a time. Katherine had never been inside the male cabins, as per the strict guidelines, but she doubted that they looked much different. Vaguely rustic, but mercifully clean, with white walls and Ikea furniture. Her cabin included framed paintings of the ocean and decorative pillows embroidered with the serenity prayer. LIVE LAUGH LOVE! commanded a wrought-iron wall decal. Katherine was not the violent type, but she was a little surprised that no one else had ever tried to bludgeon someone with it, considering that it was attached to the wall with nothing but a flimsy hook. It remained there during her entire four-month stay. Even with the lights off, she could still see its vague outline, taunting her.
When she arrived, Katherine was twenty-eight, which was young for an alcoholic. I’m practically a prodigy, she told her parents over the phone. They didn’t laugh. Katherine hated that she came from such humorless people. When she repeated the same line to Blake, he called her the Mozart of Substance Abuse.
If she’d met Blake at a party, or a bar, Katherine would have liked him a lot. It helped that he was movie-star handsome, the kind of handsome that shifted the air in the room when he walked in. Because she met him in rehab, where they weren’t allowed to touch, she loved him right away.
It was weird, the people you ended up liking at a place like that. One of Katherine’s favorites was a fat, red-haired former frat boy named Jimmy, who was in rehab instead of prison after getting drunk and killing a woman with his car. He was from a wealthy family, and the sentencing had caused a huge outrage in the Georgia town where it happened. There was even a petition to oust the judge in the case. Under different circumstances, Katherine probably would have signed it. Of course Jimmy deserved to go to jail. But he was friendly, and told great jokes at the expense of the therapists, and so Katherine was glad he hadn’t.
“You are not a good person.” That’s one of the first things Katherine’s primary therapist, Arthur, had told her. “Once you get over that, you might figure out how to be functional.”
Arthur was sixty years old, but looked older. He looked like he had died of old age and been resurrected for the sole purpose of yelling at addicts. Of everyone at Paradise Lake, Katherine hated him the most, despite plenty of competition. He was a dickhead, and he made her cry during almost every session. He talked to her like she was the worst person in the world, like she had drowned babies in a bathtub or set a nursing home on fire.
She preferred Lucy, who ran her morning group, and who started and ended each meeting with a prayer, even though Paradise Lake was technically a secular treatment center. Lucy had frizzy hair and huge eyes that made her look like she had recently been electrocuted. She rarely gave advice, just listened intently, and occasionally shushed a person who was interrupting someone else’s story. Katherine always left morning group a bit calmer than before, ready to make a collage or go for a nature walk or whatever other preschool-level activity would be required of her that day.
Arthur, however, was known for getting results. At least two former residents had named kids after him. Katherine imagined little Arthurs running around all over the country, shoelaces untied, screaming motivational quotes on the playground.
Some of the people at Paradise Lake were sort of glamorous. There was even a famous country singer, but she left a couple of days after Katherine arrived. One girl around Katherine’s age was an heiress who as a child watched her father kill her mother. He smashed the mother’s head in with the claw end of a hammer. Daddy painted her red, she told the police. Her name was Carmen, and she was exactly as fucked up as Katherine would have expected, but she was also kind of a bitch, always muttering mean things under her breath during group and refusing to share her cigarettes.
Blake was, relatively speaking, pretty similar to Katherine. He had also grown up in suburbia—she in Oregon, he in Maine. He liked to read, and they traded books sometimes. He lent her books by Dostoyevsky and Céline and many other authors Katherine had pretended to read in college. In return, she lent him a biography of Marie-Antoinette, which she enjoyed even though it gave her weird dreams about having her head cut off.
He called her Katie, which she found endearing. Even as a kid, she’d always been a Katherine, sometimes a Kat. He must have thought that it suited her.
Once, when he found her crying after an exhausting session with Arthur, he told her: “If I looked like you, I’d never be sad.”
It was the strangest and the best compliment she’d ever received. Katherine knew that she was not beautiful, though she suspected she had been, once. Now her face was bloated and scarred from acne, and the Florida sun had bleached her hair in a way she felt made her resemble a pumpkin. For a second she wondered if Blake was making fun of her. But the way he kept his pale gaze fixed on her suggested otherwise.
His eyes were an intense blue. Cracked out, Rachelle called them, but Katherine liked them. She had never seen a boy with eyes that pretty.
Everyone gossiped at Paradise Lake, because despite the swimming pool and the tennis court and the infinite supply of arts and crafts, there was really nothing better to do. That’s how Katherine found out that Blake had murdered someone.
Carmen told her, a week before Katherine left. She must have let it slip somehow that she liked Blake—by looking at him too much, or laughing at one of his jokes, and Carmen noticed.
“Don’t you know what he did?” she asked Katherine, as they stood in line for dessert, which was brownie bites, unnecessarily arranged in the shape of a heart.
“Nope,” said Katherine, not looking at Carmen, not wanting to give her the satisfaction.
“Do you want to know? Maybe you don’t. It’s pretty bad.”
“Either tell me or don’t tell me.”
“He killed his girlfriend. He took her into the woods and slit her throat,” Carmen said, miming the action, just in case Katherine didn’t get it. Carmen still had rich-girl hair, which fell in soft gold waves across her shoulders, but her teeth were rotten. “Just fucking left her there to die. Took them two days to find her.”
Katherine had a million questions. Internet access was strictly forbidden at Paradise Lake, which meant she was going to have to rely on Carmen for answers.
“Two days?” she said, stupidly, as if that were the most interesting part of the information.
“Yup.” Carmen frowned. She had probably been expecting a more extreme reaction.
“That’s fucked up,” Katherine said, evenly.
“Yup. It really is. Do you have any cigarettes?”
Paradise Lake’s official motto was A Place for Healing. Its real motto was Hurt people hurt people. Katherine wondered where the hurt came from in the first place. She imagined it pooled at the center of the earth, like oil.
During yoga, Katherine decided to find out if Jimmy, who shared a cabin with Blake, knew anything.
“Do you know why he’s here?” she asked, as they did downward dog.
“Depression, he said,” answered Jimmy. He turned his face, red with effort, toward her. “
Why do you ask?”
“Just curious. Carmen said he killed someone.”
“Really? No shit.” Jimmy seemed a little impressed.
“She could be making it up.”
“Carmen does love lying,” Jimmy acknowledged. “But it would kind of make sense. Maybe he did that, felt super guilty, so he tried to off himself, and now he’s here.”
You would know about feeling super guilty, Katherine was tempted to say. But instead she exhaled and moved into cat pose.
The worst part of rehab, next to all the rules, was that people said stupid shit all the time, and you weren’t allowed to make fun of them. It made her worry that she herself was going to start saying stupid shit, and wouldn’t even realize it, because no one would tell her. It was nerve-racking. In evening group, a middle-aged former crackhead named Billy said, in total seriousness, “I’m interested in interesting things. Like neuroscience, and how the moon looks like a face.”
Everyone had nodded and murmured their assent, and Katherine wanted to scream. She had been there for five months, and she had three days left.
After group, she declined Lucy’s invitation to arts and crafts hour, and instead walked to the pool. No one ever swam in it, because no one ever cleaned it, because there was no need to, because no one ever swam in it. It was a ten-by-twenty-foot representation of human folly, coated in algae.
Katherine hitched up her skirt and stuck her feet in the water. It was gross, but it still felt good. She sat there for a while, smoking cigarette after cigarette, staring at the stars, trying not to despair.
“Hello,” said Blake, startling her.
“Hi.” Katherine glanced around. It was rare for male clients and female clients to be left alone together, even in a setting as profoundly unsexy as this one. Usually a staff member would intervene. Maybe everyone was busy. Or maybe, because Katherine was leaving so soon, they had given up on her. They had to prioritize, after all. Blake sat down next to her, cross-legged.
“I had a dream about you, Katie. You had wings. But they were bird-sized. Like, small. In the middle of your back. You couldn’t fly but you kept showing them off.”
Katherine felt a shiver of pleasure down her back, right in the location of her dream-wings. She swirled her feet around in the water, examining the ripples.
“What color were they?”
“Green.”
“Like a parrot’s?”
“I guess.”
“That’s good. Could be gross little gray pigeon wings.”
Thanks to the new cocktail of medications from her Paradise Lake psychiatrists, Katherine no longer remembered her dreams, which she was glad of, because if she did, she would have to tell Arthur about them. Those doctors knew what they were doing, even if you did have to wonder how they ended up in the middle of Florida, ministering to junkies.
She watched Blake take off his shoes and roll up the hems of his jeans, and felt another shiver. It had been three months since she’d been touched by anyone, except to shake hands with Arthur at the beginning of each session. It wasn’t natural, she thought. It was enough to drive a person crazy, even under the best of circumstances. When she was out of there, she would write Paradise Lake a letter, telling them so.
“Did you ever try that?” he asked, gesturing to the crowd of people on horses in the distance.
“Equine therapy?”
“No, escaping on horseback.”
Katherine laughed. “No. I don’t like horses. They’re huge, and they smell like their own shit.”
“True,” he said. “Good thing that they’re vegetarians, right?”
“What?”
“Like, if they ate meat? That would be really scary.”
“Oh shit. I never even thought of that! Shit. That’s fucked up.”
They both laughed.
“Did you really kill your girlfriend?” she asked, trying to use a light, flirtatious tone of voice, but she was out of practice. It came out silly, high-pitched, and she cringed at the sound of it.
“Yes,” he said.
“Really?”
“Really. I was on acid. I had some kind of a psychotic episode. It was like I was someone else, watching someone do this terrible thing. I closed my eyes, so that I wouldn’t have to see it. And then when I opened them again, I was in a jail cell.”
He did not seem angry, or even offended, which is what Katherine had expected. He didn’t sound particularly remorseful, either.
“What was she like?”
“Lovely. Very clever, very sweet. She was a brilliant painter. You would have liked her. Everyone did.” He said this without any discernible emotion, not meeting Katherine’s gaze. She shifted, trying to keep her face still. After all, how was one supposed to talk about a girl they’d stabbed to death?
“Do you miss her?”
“Every second of every day.” That, at least, sounded sincere.
“Is that why they made you come here? Because you killed someone?”
“No. No one made me come here. It was my idea. I’ve been depressed, very horribly depressed, for a long time. I thought they might be able to help me here.”
So Jimmy had been partly correct.
“Why didn’t you go to prison?”
“I was found not guilty by reason of temporary insanity.” He gave a short, hollow laugh. “Not to brag or anything, but it’s pretty rare, that verdict. It’s just, like, me and that lady who cut off her husband’s dick.”
Katherine winced. “How did you get it, then?”
“Well, I had a pretty good lawyer, and no criminal history. I think the judge could tell, you know, that I really loved her. That I never would have done something like that to her if I was in my right mind. And well, you know, it probably helped a lot that I’m white.”
Oh great, thought Katherine. A racially sensitive murderer.
“I was in a mental hospital for two months. Jesus, if you think you meet some weirdos here …”
He grinned, the kind of grin Katherine had always been a sucker for, both broad and apologetic, revealing a single dimple on the left side of his face.
“Wow,” she said. She moved her feet in circles around the dirty water, not looking at him.
“Why did you have a knife with you?” she asked, finally. “Where did you get it?”
“The knife?” He seemed confused for a moment. “Oh. It belonged to my friend Sam. He was into outdoorsy stuff, hiking, all that. It was a survival knife.”
“That’s kind of ironic,” Katherine said.
His face darkened. He looked more sad than angry, and Katherine was so embarrassed that in her haste to change the subject, she didn’t realize that he hadn’t really answered her question.
He continued. “When I got out of the hospital, I moved back home. None of my old friends wanted anything to do with me. Which I understand. Even my family was nervous around me. I had dreams about Sara all the time. Nightmares, really. It got to a point where I could barely tell when I was sleeping and when I was awake, because I was so fucking tired. And I couldn’t talk to anyone about it.”
Katherine nodded. However weird and incomprehensible the rest of his story was to her, she knew what it was like to be that lonely.
“I’m an alcoholic,” she said, even though he probably already knew that. “I was a party girl in college. I had lots of friends. We had so much fun. But then everyone else grew up and moved on, and I didn’t.”
She felt stupid after she said it—why was she trying to convince him they had something in common? But he nodded, and said, kindly: “It’s hard, feeling alone.”
“Is being here good for you? Does it help?”
“Yes. I like the routine. I like talking to people. I like talking to you.”
“Before I came here, I got so drunk, I almost died. In the hospital, I stopped breathing twice.” She paused. “I was legally dead.” Actually, she was uncertain of the precise legal parameters of death, but she was pretty sure that she was telling th
e truth. “But that’s not why I came here. I came here because my parents said they would stop sending me money if I didn’t. I was more scared of not having money than I was of being dead.”
He nodded, slowly. “That makes sense, actually. Often death is too abstract for people to process fully. Especially young people. Money is just more real.”
He was right, of course. She felt a small lift inside her chest, like a window opening, cool air rushing in.
Years ago, while she was taking time off from college, Katherine worked at a bookstore in her hometown. One day, a woman came in to purchase books for someone in prison. The whole process was complicated, but being the nice liberals that they were, Katherine and her co-worker helped the woman sort it out. The books she chose were The Stone Diaries and Amsterdam. Later Katherine’s co-worker looked up the name of the recipient and discovered that he was serving ten years for the rape of a thirteen-year-old girl. “Well, at least she didn’t send him Lolita,” said Katherine, a little too blithely. Doing a bad thing doesn’t make you a bad person, Lucy had said, more than once. It was comforting, but at some point, it must cease to be true. There must be a certain threshold of bad things that did in fact reflect on your character. It’s just that no one was really qualified to make that call.
And what about forgiveness? Certain things had to be unforgivable, otherwise the whole concept was meaningless.
So Katherine had never cut anyone’s throat or run them over with a car. She was still selfish, impulsive, destructive, an embarrassment to her family, a toddler inside the body of a grown woman. There’s more than enough time for redemption, Arthur told her, more than once. That’s why you’re so lucky you got here while you’re still young.
So, what, should she spend the rest of her life volunteering in fucking soup kitchens?
“Well,” Arthur replied, “I was thinking more along the lines of, getting a fucking job.”
A job. Something benign, maybe at a library. Or a vet’s office. She’d always loved animals, and maybe she could get used to the smell. A job, AA meetings, a shitty little apartment with plants on the windowsill, new friends, a cat, perhaps, dinner with her parents every week, grocery shopping, laundry, falling asleep in front of the television.
Nothing Can Hurt You Page 2