“We’d stay up talking,” Vanessa said. “She talked about you a lot. She had this stuffed animal, this cat, that she said was yours. She said you’d told her it warded off evil spirits, and she used to wiggle it at every nurse who came in for night checks.” So that was where Mr. Tequila had gone, I thought, my favorite stuffed toy, the orange tabby.
In the mornings, the St. Cloud’s girls had group therapy. The therapist would ask: “What’s your safety level today?” which meant how likely it was that you were going to hurt yourself or those around you. The safety level was measured on a scale of blue to red, with shades of purple in the middle. Blue was safe, red was murder or self-harm. When it was her turn, Lizzie always said she was feeling as purple as a bruise, which won her no points with the therapists, but it didn’t get her put in solitary confinement either.
Vanessa said she and Lizzie both signed up for TV time during the same shows; they both liked reruns of Friends. Lizzie liked to play poker before dinner, and after dinner there was letter-writing and journal time, which had to be done with crayons since pencils and pens were too easily used as weapons. A crayon couldn’t puncture an artery.
“Things were mostly going well,” Vanessa said. “I wouldn’t say Lizzie was getting better, but she wasn’t getting worse. And then, it happened.” Lizzie was four weeks into her treatment when she had a breakdown in her private therapy session. “She really flipped out, I guess. She wouldn’t tell me what happened, she still won’t. It was right after the girl died from the seizure. I heard from one of the orderlies that the therapist was asking Lizzie questions about her mother’s death, and Lizzie just lost it.”
Then Lizzie was taken to the sixth floor, which everyone called heaven because most of the girls who went up there never came back. Vanessa said she was miserable without Lizzie, and they didn’t even get to see each other in the dining hall. The girls in heaven ate at a different time.
When Lizzie did come back down from the sixth floor, Vanessa said, they had her on way too many meds. “She was loopy,” Vanessa said. “She wasn’t herself. She was like that for a while after, you remember.”
I’d already read in the DSM for Kids! that there were lots of reasons for breakdowns, including stress and grief. Hallucinations were symptoms of a breakdown too. “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe we already know the reason she had a breakdown. Our mom died.”
“Okay,” Vanessa said. “I just thought you should know.”
I really didn’t think Lizzie had a secret, or at least not the kind of bad secret Vanessa seemed to think it was. Besides, I didn’t even know if Vanessa was telling me the truth; she was a proven liar.
Vanessa and I stopped talking as I led her through the huge greenhouse called Bird Paradise. The birds could fly free in here, so you had to be careful when you opened the doors. Powerful fans kept the birds away from the exits, although occasionally a budgie would get loose. Inside the temperature-controlled garden, the female Costa’s hummingbird had built a nest, using plant fibers, animal hairs, and spiderwebs to weave it together. The male hadn’t helped with the nest, as hummingbirds don’t form pair bonds.
“It’s so small,” Vanessa marveled, leaning forward toward the nest.
“Second-smallest hummingbird,” I said. “Both eggs could fit on a dime.”
“Wow,” Vanessa said, looking down at her thumb. “The thing was,” she continued, “St. Cloud’s was the happiest I’ve ever been and I really mean it. It was safe there, just Lizzie and me. What can go wrong when the world is that small? Like a hummingbird’s nest.”
I didn’t tell her that a lot could go wrong in a hummingbird’s nest. It is hard to breed hummingbirds in captivity; the female Costas had been laying eggs for the past two years, but none of them had hatched. The zoo would let her sit on them for long after they’d determined they wouldn’t hatch, the bird waiting and waiting, because the visitors liked to see the hummingbirds when they were still, when they weren’t flitting about. Eventually a zookeeper would take the tiny eggs away, toss them into the compost, where they were dwarfed by other eggshells, the speckled ones we threw out from the nest in the waterfowl enclosure.
We walked through Asia Quest next. I showed Vanessa the Amur leopard, and then we walked by the red pandas. I waited for her to say that with their ringed tails and bandit masks they looked like red raccoons, not pandas, but she didn’t say that. I told her that the red panda’s taxonomic name means shining cat.
“Why can’t they just be their own animal?” she asked. “They aren’t pandas or cats.”
I wanted to tell her that I’d touched the male red panda once when I’d cleaned his cage and his fur felt softer than any housecat but instead I ushered her along toward the prairie dog exhibit. “They aren’t dogs either,” I said, trying to let her know I understood what she meant exactly.
I knew once school started up again the next week, everyone would call me Lizzie Babbitt’s little sister. All the Three Rivers teachers would definitely remember her. I would never be my own animal, whether my sister ever came home or not. She had already made her mark.
Vanessa drove me home, but she got out of the van when we got to the house. “I have something for you,” she said. She pulled an envelope out of her backpack. “If I had a good dad like yours, I’d want to live at home, whether I realized it or not.”
I opened the envelope and pulled out a stack of paper. I only had to read the first few lines of legal jargon before I stuffed the document back into its pouch.
“Thanks Vanessa,” I said, and she gave me a thumbs-up.
I ran upstairs and called the Silver Sand. The call went to voice mail, asking me to leave my name and number and the dates I’d like to book a room. “Thanks for calling the Silver Sand Motel and Marina,” the recording said. “We look forward to having you stay with us.”
I didn’t leave my name or my number. Instead, I read out loud from the pages of Statutory Rape: A Guide to the Law and Reporting Requirements. I was glad when the system cut me off because the specifics of the law were getting pretty graphic. I was sure I’d made my point.
When Dad got home from work, he called me into the living room and showed me his phone. The age of consent in Alabama is sixteen, the first text message read, followed by: Pass that along to my little sister.
So Lizzie was old enough to have sex, I guess, at least in Alabama.
“Sorry,” I said. “I just wanted her to come home.”
“Me too,” Dad said. “Me too.”
34.
After a long hot summer, the school year started up again. At Three Rivers, I had a different teacher for each subject, so I didn’t get to know my teachers that well, not like I’d known Ms. Powell. But school really wasn’t that bad. We were reading Island of the Blue Dolphins in English class, which is about a girl surviving on an island by herself and the girl’s only friend is her dog. We were learning about the structure of cells in science class and the teacher didn’t seem to notice when I doodled in my notebook during math.
The cafeteria tables at Three Rivers were divided exactly like cafeteria tables in the movies: a table for the popular kids and one for the geeks and one for the jocks and another for the kids in marching band. Everyone was always ready for a fight in the cafeteria. The first week of school, there were punches thrown between two girls.
Since I didn’t have any friends at all, I sat in the No Bully Zone, the designated part of the cafeteria where anyone could sit alone, guarded by a security guard in a blue suit with a gold pin-on badge. The security guard was paid for by the parents of Matthias Matthews, also known as Matt-Matt. Matt-Matt was a legend at Three Rivers. He’d hung himself days after he was beaten up in the Three Rivers lunchroom. This was years ago, and I never knew Matt-Matt, but I thought of him every day when lunch began.
The second week of school, the gym teacher told me in the middle of a volleyball game that she thought I had scoliosis. The school nurse gave me a plastic back brace that strap
ped around my middle. She said I’d have to wear it day and night for at least nine months. Scoliosis meant that I didn’t have to go to gym class; I had an extra study hall now instead.
We’d watched a video about the condition in health class. The class had been transfixed as a series of X-rays first showed a slight curve in a spine that then grew into a gnarled, twisted root. It looked like the carrots that I’d grown in the garden two years ago, which turned out nothing like the simple straight ones we could buy in the grocery store. “Probably too many rocks in the yard,” Mom had said, and I imagined rocks in my body too.
Scoliosis also meant I couldn’t clean cages at Serengeti Park; it was too difficult to bend at the middle while wearing my brace. Dr. Rotherwood offered me a permanent space as the volunteer afternoon-and-weekend receptionist at the exotic animal veterinary clinic. He gave me a vet clinic sweatshirt with my name stitched in yellow thread on the sleeve. He had even ordered it a size up so I could wear it over my spine-correcting brace.
Lizzie still hadn’t come back, so I called Ms. Bernstein’s home phone. I needed to talk to a guidance counselor and didn’t want to start all over with a new one at Three Rivers. She said it was good to hear from me, and she asked about my sister, like she always did. I told her Lizzie had run away with my mom’s old boyfriend.
“Well, he’s her old student, really,” I said, correcting myself. “It sounds worse than it is.”
“Wow,” she said. “No impulse control.”
“Yeah,” I said, and I wrote that down so I could look up what it meant later. I remembered Vanessa had also mentioned impulse-control problems.
“How are you liking middle school?” she asked.
I told her about my promotion at the zoo.
“What about the other kids in school? Made any new friends?”
“The pygmy hippo is pregnant,” I said. “We gave her an ultrasound today. She’s due the end of January, it’s a six-month gestation period for pygmy hippos, and Cleopatra is already a month along. She’s part of the worldwide captive breeding program. They’re endangered.”
“That’s nice, Elvis,” she said. “But I’d like you to focus on working on your social skills. Maybe you could join a club. I know they have a Middle Earth club.”
“I didn’t like The Lord of the Rings that much,” I said. “Not even the movies.”
“Science club?” she offered.
“You’re not my guidance counselor anymore,” I reminded her, even though I had been the one to call.
“I know, Elvis,” Ms. Bernstein said. “But I really care about you.”
“Do you have any ideas on how to get my sister to come home?”
“Call the police,” Ms. Bernstein said. “Lizzie is a minor.”
“Okay,” I said. “Thanks.” I couldn’t call the police; they might put her in jail. Dad had been crystal clear about that.
Ms. Bernstein said I could call back anytime, but not too often because she had a new boyfriend, and he didn’t like it when she brought her work home with her, whatever that meant.
“I heard hippos are mean bastards,” Dad said when I went into the kitchen to give him back the phone. I guess he’d been eavesdropping. “How’d you give the ultrasound?” he asked.
“Cleopatra is sweet,” I said. “She’ll do anything for a carrot.” Dr. Rotherwood had said we were never to speak poorly about the animals. He said Cleopatra was “a radiant spirit,” even after she’d charged at him.
“Sweetie,” Ernest whistled.
“You’re a sweetie,” Dad cooed. He was paying more attention to the parrot again; maybe he was getting used to Lizzie being gone.
When I looked later, the DSM for Kids! said an impulse-control disorder was a failure to resist certain urges or temptations. One suggested way for parents to help cure impulsive tendencies in their children was to provide a stable home environment, and a regular routine. I realized that was what Vanessa had liked about St. Cloud’s, why she thought it was so safe there, like a hummingbird’s nest. She liked how predictable her day was.
A regular routine would never happen at the Silver Sand. People were always checking in and out at a motel. It wasn’t a real home for anyone.
35.
August, September
The second week of September, I came home from school to find Ocean Jesus sitting cross-legged on the living room couch and my sister lying on the carpet. She’d called Dad to pick her up at the motel that morning. She’d come home on her own in September, just like Miss Ida said she would.
But once she was home, she couldn’t stop crying. “I can’t believe he broke up with me,” she kept repeating. “He promised he’d help me. He promised we’d be happy. He said he understood.”
“So, what happened?”
“He was freaked out by the sleepwalking,” she sniffed. Soda had known from the beginning that she was a sleepwalker, he had promised her he would help her with it. But Lizzie said that Soda got upset with her after the motel guests started complaining about the strange noises they heard at night.
“Coyotes, maybe,” Soda told them. “Wildlife.”
But the guests insisted that the noises were distinctly human in nature. It was deer-hunting season in Alabama, and the Silver Sand rooms were packed with hunters, people who should know the sounds of an approaching wild animal.
“He asked me if I could stop,” she said. “He said I was ruining his business.” Lizzie broke into a fit of hiccups then, so I brought her a glass of water. “It wasn’t my fault that he was losing guests to the new Motel 6.”
Apparently a lot of the guests thought that the Silver Sand was haunted, and that explained the nighttime noise. She said it was amazing how many people believed in ghosts. It didn’t help that the deer population was down this year and the hunting was not very good. Many people left early, packing up their rifles.
Things got even worse when Soda tried to wake Lizzie up one night when she was in the middle of a sleepwalking episode. She hit him so hard in the face that she broke one of his molars.
“That’s when he said he’d had it,” she said. “He said I meant to do it. He said I was a devil woman.”
“We’re glad you’re home,” Dad said, poking his head in from the kitchen.
“I’m not,” she sniffed. “Daddy, I can’t stop sleepwalking. What if I hurt you or Elvis?” I was surprised that Lizzie was talking like a baby. It was unlike her.
“We’ll get locks on our doors,” he said. “I’ll go out and buy them today.” Dad had heard about Soda’s broken molar.
While Dad was out at the hardware store, Vanessa came over to hang out with Lizzie. Vanessa gave me a warm wink, but she closed the door to Lizzie’s room behind her.
I decided to get a routine planned out, something that would really help Lizzie. That week, I made the same thing for dinner every night, mac and cheese from a box, and for breakfast we had brown sugar Pop-Tarts. I woke her up at the same time every morning, handed her a toothbrush, and pushed her into the shower. She let me do it, and she even let me put her to bed at night, dragging her off the couch by her hand. She was pretty tame during the daytime, now that she had a broken heart.
When Mom was alive, dinner was always at seven, unless she had a headache. Mom had done laundry on Wednesdays and Sundays; we’d always had clean underwear. We’d never run out of toilet paper or toothpaste or cereal. Mom wouldn’t have let this all happen with Lizzie and Soda, none of it. She would have yanked Lizzie home by the ponytail.
At night, I lay in bed listening to Lizzie howl, woofing and writhing, stomping and clawing as she sleepwalked. I tried to understand how those noises were distinctly human. Boomer pawed at me, begging me to make her be quiet, but I was doing all I could. The routine would take time to work, that was what the DSM for Kids! said. Dad had called the doctors at St. Cloud’s to refill her prescription, but the pills were no use.
36.
September, October
Dad announced that we
would be going to the annual Carpet Bazaar that year. We’d skipped last year’s because Dad had been too sad about Mom. The Carpet Bazaar was held every October in a different city and it was a big deal in our family. At the bazaar, Dad’s carpet store always had its own booth, and he loved going to the antique carpet auctions while the rest of us went sightseeing. This year the fair was in South Carolina, in a fancy hotel on the ocean.
I didn’t want Lizzie to break her new routine of proper bedtimes and bland foods, all my progress would be undone, but I was excited to go to the bazaar. It seemed like a long time since we’d done something fun.
Dad said he planned on smuggling the parrot into the hotel, but Boomer would have to stay home. Vanessa agreed to take care of him. Mom always said Boomer couldn’t stay in a kennel because it would be too traumatic for a dog who had been in the pound. “He’s so sensitive,” she’d say, stroking the fur between his ears. “He’d think that we’d abandoned him.”
I wondered if Boomer remembered my mom, if he thought about her ever. Border collies are supposed to be exceptionally smart, but Boomer was getting older. One of his eyes had gone milky and maybe his memory was going too.
I thought Lizzie would be feeling better by the time of the bazaar, but I guess a broken heart takes longer than a few weeks to heal. I’d never been in love before, so what did I know? Lizzie said it was definitely love when I asked, and then she put her face back down into the pillows of the couch.
Lizzie moped all around the house before we left; she wasn’t at all excited about the trip. When we got to the hotel, Lizzie waited in the truck while we checked in; she said she was too tired to move.
“One room?” I asked, after we walked away from the front desk.
“Two hundred and fifty dollars a night,” Dad said. “Of course I only got one room.”
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