by Ann Packer
“What?” he said.
“Should we be doing this? Is it the right thing?”
The psychiatrist had said hospitalization significantly reduced the likelihood of repetition, and that was enough for him. Though Lauren’s wails when she found out had nearly cut him open.
“Well,” he said doubtfully, “we could bring her home,” and to his relief Liz looked alarmed.
“I suppose we could,” she said. “But—”
“We already told her she was going.”
“Yeah.” She stayed still for a moment and then began digging around in her purse. “OK,” she said as she produced her keys. “We’d better go then.”
It was the worst day of Liz’s life. The place was shocking in the way the impossible could be shocking: Were she and Brody going to leave Lauren here? Leave her? In a room with barred windows? Near a lounge full of dinged tables and stained linoleum? Among kids who were so plainly sick it made Liz’s stomach hurt?
And there was a terrible smell—like maple syrup and gravy and urine combined.
At home afterward, the sky drained of color, Liz puttered around in the kitchen and did not answer the phone: not when her parents called, not when it was her brother John from Philadelphia, not when it was her brother Steve. Thank God for caller ID.
Lauren hadn’t even cried. They’d delivered her up for whatever would happen—talking, Dr. Porter had said, groups, support, help, the words themselves acquiring a kind of menace as they were spoken—and she’d barely looked at them when they left. “It’s not uncommon,” the intake nurse said, “for kids to clam up when they first get here.”
At dinner, Joe leaned over his food, chewing quickly, strands of wavy hair falling onto his forehead.
“Joe,” she said, suddenly unsure whether or not she’d told him about Thanksgiving.
He looked up. “Yeah?”
“We’re not having Thanksgiving. The dinner. With Steve and Kelly and the twins.”
“You told me.”
Across the table, Brody twirled a forkful of spaghetti. As he chewed he began right away to twirl another.
“It’ll still be Thanksgiving,” she said. “Obviously.”
Brody looked up. “I’m sure Joe wasn’t thinking the president would rescind it.”
“The president?” she said, her face warming.
“It’s a presidential order every year. This day of November shall be the Thanksgiving holiday.”
“It’s the fourth Thursday.”
“Not automatically. And I think it’s the fourth Thursday after the first Monday.”
“That would be automatic.”
“It’s proclaimed every year,” he said. “According to a formula.”
Joe cleared his throat, and she came to her senses. Bickering—how foolish. The question was what to do on Thursday: on Thanksgiving. She wished they had something other than the feast to mark the day, a habit of actually giving thanks somehow. Though perhaps that would be harder.
“What are Grandma and Grandpa doing?” Joe said.
Liz’s mother had been the first to mention it. “What should I tell Steve and Kelly?” The question had flustered Liz not because she hadn’t thought of it but because she had. She was ashamed of having wondered even briefly if they should go on with their plans.
“I guess they’ll be at the condo,” she told Joe.
“Can I go over there?”
“Is that what you’d like?”
Brody sent her a look across the table, but what was he trying to say? Nothing—what he’d been saying all day. He’d been silent on the drive to the hospital, silent on the drive back home.
She didn’t want Joe with her parents, she wanted him here, but she assumed that what she wanted was wrong and therefore in need of correction. So Joe should go. Or maybe they all should, she and Brody and Joe. Her mother had offered. But that felt wrong. Maybe Brody and Joe? She didn’t know where “should” was coming from—from how things felt or how they ought to be.
After dinner she went into her bedroom and closed the door. She had to call Sarabeth. She was glad Brody hadn’t—it was something she needed to do herself, for herself and for Sarabeth. When she said the words to Sarabeth she would cry, which was probably why she hadn’t called yet. Sarabeth would cry, too. For a moment, looking at the phone, she saw Sarabeth’s little house as a refuge, much as Joe seemed to see her parents’ condo; she imagined driving there now, telling Sarabeth not on the phone but face-to-face in Sarabeth’s living room. Sarabeth’s house was too small, though, too quirky-pretty. Arriving there tonight, with her monstrous news: Liz would feel grotesque, a giantess.
She punched in the familiar numbers and listened to the ring. “It’s me,” she said when Sarabeth answered.
There was a pause before Sarabeth said hi.
“Listen,” Liz said. “I have to—”
“I know I’m horrible,” Sarabeth said. “I’m so sorry.”
Puzzled, Liz hesitated for a moment, then started again. “I have something to tell you.”
“I know,” Sarabeth said. “There’s no excuse.”
“What do you mean?” Liz had the strangest feeling that Sarabeth meant for Lauren, for what Lauren had done—that there was no excuse for that. But that made no sense, because Sarabeth didn’t know. “I have something to tell you,” she said again. “Something bad.”
Sarabeth inhaled sharply. “Oh, no.”
“Lauren—” Liz said, but before she could say any more, Sarabeth burst into tears.
“Oh, no,” she cried. “Oh no, oh no, oh no.”
Liz waited. In a moment, something would become clear. She was on the edge of the bed, and she reached for a small pillow and held it on her lap.
“How did she do it?”
“Do what?” Liz said.
“Hurt herself. Did she—not make it?”
Liz brought the little pillow to her face. She breathed in and out, the familiar smell of Tide. She said, “You knew she hurt herself?”
“Brody called me. He said you wanted him to tell me. Wait—you didn’t know that? That’s what you were going to tell me? And she’s—OK?”
“Brody called you?” Liz said.
Sarabeth was silent.
“When?”
“Yesterday,” Sarabeth whispered. “He left a message.”
“So you already knew.”
“I was going to call you.”
“But I beat you to it.”
“Yes.”
“I have to go,” Liz said, and she hung up the phone.
In seconds it rang, and for some reason she answered it. “I’m so sorry,” Sarabeth said. “I’m incredibly sorry. Can’t we talk? I don’t even know what happened to Lauren. What happened? How is she?”
“Here’s what happened,” Liz said. “She slit her wrists, took most of a bottle of Tylenol, and is now about to spend her first night in the psych ward of the hospital.” And you knew for an entire day and didn’t call me. “I can’t talk right now.”
“Liz.”
“I can’t talk right now. I can’t talk to you now.”
She hung up and lay back on the bed. She closed her eyes, then rolled onto her side. She felt for the little pillow, down near her hip where she’d left it; she brought it up and put it over her ear. Large pillow below her head, small above. She imagined a wedding cake, with her own sideways face in place of the middle layer. Something to slice.
13
Sarabeth opened her front door and stepped onto the porch. It was very cold, and she shivered and crossed her arms tightly over her chest, but she didn’t go back inside. She had wept and wept in there, moving from room to room, from couch to bed to floor. She had come out here to stop.
…slit her wrists, took most of a bottle of Tylenol…
Quickly, she crossed the porch and braced herself against the post. At the Heidts’, all the upstairs lights were on, and she focused on the bright windows, imagined Bonnie and Rick up there putting the
children to bed. Chloe, Pilar, Isaac. Girl, girl, boy. At the Castleberrys’ it had been boy, girl, boy.
…slit her wrists……slit her wrists, took most of a bottle of…
She pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes and wiped them on her pants. She took a deep breath. There was wood smoke somewhere, faint and far away.
What had happened to Lauren? She remembered Lauren abruptly leaving her bedroom when the two of them were talking last time. She remembered thinking Lauren was dressing differently, that Lauren was a little spacey. And what did she do? Recommended a book. Recommended a book that had ultimately caused Lauren trouble. Oh, and had a small tantrum over the condition of the cheese rolls she’d brought.
She put her face to the cold post. This isn’t about you, she said to herself again, but it was baritone deep this time: wobbly, distorted, vanishing. She was worthless. All day today she had told herself she would call, but she had not called. All day today she had thought she should drive over with food, but she had not driven. And again, now, still: she wasn’t driving. Liz had saved her, saved her a thousand times over—it was the central truth of her life. Had it been inevitable that she would one day fail Liz?
A blade across the tender, pale skin. She pulled back her sleeve, felt the tendons where they surfaced close to her hand. Taut chords, strings on a violin. She found a tendon just to the side of the base of her throat and turned her head so she could pinch it between her fingers.
Lauren couldn’t have meant it. Liz couldn’t bear that.
Liz couldn’t bear this.
She made her way down the steps to the little scrap of walkway that led to the Heidts’ driveway. She paused. To her left was their garage, to her right their driveway and their car. The wind shifted, and she thought she felt a drop of rain on her forehead. She backed up and sat on her bottom step.
She should have taken food.
On Cowper Street, the day after her mother died, so many people brought so much food she couldn’t get it all into the refrigerator. She remembered finally giving up and just randomly stowing it: in cabinets, drawers, the cold oven. Then when people finally left, even Liz and her parents gone home, she retrieved the improperly stored dishes and scraped into the garbage creamy chicken and noodles; broccoli and rice; thick, tomatoey rafts of lasagne. She left the empty dishes in the sink until, in bed at last, she thought better of it and went back downstairs to wash them, thinking that she didn’t want her father to come upon them in the morning when he sought the small solace of a cup of coffee.
All this time later, all these years later. She brought her feet up and wrapped her arms around her shins, then lowered her forehead to her knees. After a while, she felt a drop of rain on her scalp, and then, some time later, another. She looked up again. Invisibly, barely audibly, it was raining. She heard it on the leaves, slow, and on the Heidts’ driveway. It hadn’t rained since yesterday morning, when she’d woken to the sound of it and had for a moment forgotten Billy, forgotten the long hours she’d spent thinking about him Saturday evening, Saturday afternoon, Friday night.
She longed to tell him about Lauren. Why?
Because she knew him, that was why. She knew what he would do. He would hold her, stroke her hair, make it easy to cry. The very things she’d failed to do for Liz.
14
Lauren had to get out—she had to get out. This was all such a mistake, such a nightmare. During breakfast she sat by herself and tried to think of how to explain that this was all wrong, and she tried not to look at the other kids. Her roommate, Abby, was across the room, at a table full of very thin girls. Abby was very, very thin, and though Lauren hadn’t asked, she knew Abby had an eating disorder. She was like a biology lesson on how little of the body was bone. Bone was all she was, and there wasn’t much of her. Her collarbones jutted, and her face looked like a drawing in a kids’ book, pointy, all nose and chin.
Lauren felt like a blimp. Sitting here, she felt her stomach bulge over her jeans, her ass spread across the seat of the chair. The food was horrible—dried-out scrambled eggs and canned fruit. Tonight she would order what she wanted to eat tomorrow; last night, her first, she’d stupidly refused today’s menu. Her wrists hurt, and the bandages were getting raggedy and gray. No one would have to wonder what she was doing here.
She had started taking an antidepressant. You had to build up to the full dose, and there were side effects sometimes and then you tried something else. Nausea could be one. Light-headedness. Those were things she experienced anyway, though, so how would she know? Also, what was it supposed to do? Her life was her life.
After breakfast there was a meeting led by the nurse Lauren had talked to when she arrived, Kitsy. She was this short, round woman with glasses and incredibly frizzy hair. After this meeting, Lauren was going to tell her she was in the wrong place.
Kitsy had everyone pull their chairs into a circle—twelve girls and five boys. It was so much like a movie Lauren wanted to laugh. Besides Kitsy, there were a couple other adults—mental health workers—and Lauren couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to work in a place like this.
Lauren was between Abby and a guy with curly hair. He smiled at her, and there was something about him: something not quite matching between his eyes and the rest of him. She looked away.
“Some of you have met Lauren,” Kitsy said. “She arrived yesterday.” Kitsy smiled at Lauren, and Lauren’s cheeks burned. Turning to a girl with bleached streaks in her hair and inch-long, grown-out roots, Kitsy said, “Would you like to start?”
“Whatever,” the girl said with a shrug. She had heavy black eyeliner circling her eyes and a silver stud in her lower lip. She smiled a weird, almost sexy smile at Kitsy. “I’m Callie,” she said.
“What’s your goal for today?”
“Talk to my foster mom, I guess.”
“That was your goal yesterday,” said a guy across the room.
“Bite me.”
There was a silence, and Lauren waited to see if Callie would get in trouble for this. There were time-outs here, and there was also a reward system for good behavior, like if you were good you could go to the cafeteria and choose your own pukey food.
“Morgan?” Kitsy said as she looked at a big-boned girl with stringy white-blond hair.
“I want my sister to visit me.”
Something ran around the group, shock or something.
“Can your sister visit you?” Kitsy said.
Morgan stared into the center of the circle. As Lauren watched, her face changed: it went from blank, to scared and miserable, to blank again.
“Your sister can’t visit you,” said another girl in a sort of pissy way.
Morgan looked at Kitsy. “I know.”
“It’s very painful,” Kitsy said, and then there was a long silence. Lauren wondered why Morgan’s sister couldn’t visit her. Maybe Morgan had done something awful to her.
“Do you have a more realistic goal?” Kitsy said.
Morgan shook her head, which seemed to be permissible; the next girl ran a hand through her incredibly short, boyish hair and began to speak.
“I’m Casey,” she said, “and one of my problems is I cut myself.” She paused and stared right at Lauren’s wrists, and Lauren felt her face burn. “I’m working,” she continued, “on why I do that. My goal today is to talk to my doctor about it some more.”
Kitsy nodded at Casey and then looked at the guy next to her, a tall, skinny beanpole with greasy black hair hanging to his shoulders. He said he was going to try not to listen to his voices, and Lauren’s stomach lurched: there were crazy people here. What a moron she was, being surprised by this. The guy blinked and then looked into his lap and picked at his thumbnail. The curly-haired guy was next, and then it would be Lauren’s turn, and she had to figure out how to tell them that this was a mistake, that she shouldn’t be here.
The curly-haired guy said, “I’m Lucas, and I’m going to try not to punch the wall.” A half laugh ran around the c
ircle, as if he actually might punch the wall, and he turned to Lauren and gave her a bright smile. He was sort of cute, in a totally un-Jeff-like way.
Kitsy looked at Lauren. “Would you like to tell us about yourself?”
Lauren shook her head.
“You have to say something,” said Casey, the short-haired, cut-herself girl. She was staring at Lauren’s wrists again.
“This is a mistake,” Lauren said. “I shouldn’t be here, I didn’t mean to do anything.”
“Yes, you did,” Casey said.
Lauren got up and started toward the hallway leading to the bedrooms, but one of the adults, a guy with black nerd glasses, caught up with her.
“Hey,” he said, not exactly like hey you hey, but not exactly hi. She stopped.
“I shouldn’t be here,” she said. “I shouldn’t.”
“A lot of kids feel that way at first.”
“Yeah, well I shouldn’t.”
“The thing is, you are.”
She looked down, and to her horror tears streamed from her eyes.
“It feels terrible, doesn’t it?”
Lauren put her face in her hands and sobbed.
“This is our morning check-in,” he said. “You don’t have to say anything you don’t want to say, but I need you to come back to the circle.”
It was the longest day of Lauren’s life. After the meeting there was school, and the woman in charge said she was going to call Lauren’s teachers to see what Lauren should be working on, which made Lauren cry again. Her school couldn’t know! Did everyone in the world have to know? She’d made a mistake. She hadn’t even meant it. The other kids looked at her and whispered.
At lunch Lucas sat next to her and talked almost nonstop—about his schoolwork, his friends, his whatever. His T-shirt said GOT COCAINE? but the COCAINE had been markered the same color as the shirt, dark blue, and it almost didn’t show up. His shirt looked like GOT———? and it only made you want to get closer to see what he was hiding.
“Are you allowed to wear that?” Lauren said.
“We’re working on it.”
“My mom would never let my brother wear a shirt like that.”