by Ann Packer
“He looked so wiped out,” Sarabeth said, referring to Mark. “The darkest circles under his eyes.”
“Mmm,” Liz said. With a new baby—she didn’t doubt it.
Sarabeth leaned forward suddenly. “Do you think it’s weird that I didn’t have sex with him? Why didn’t I?”
“Because you didn’t want to make the same mistake twice?” Liz said, but she regretted it right away. “Sorry, I didn’t mean that. It sounds to me as if you were trying to protect yourself.”
“He brought a condom over,” Sarabeth said. “The second time. It was kind of sad—he showed it to me like he wanted to admit what he’d been thinking.”
“That’s not the kind of protection I meant,” Liz said, and then she sat there like a stone while Sarabeth’s eyes widened in surprise. There was a tingling on the rims of Liz’s ears, and her lips felt strange.
Sarabeth looked into her eyes, then quickly looked away again. She wore several slim silver chains around her neck, and she used her forefinger to separate them. Liz took a slow breath in, then released it even more slowly.
“Tell me about Brody,” Sarabeth said. “And Joe. How are they?”
What could Liz say? That they were fine and also entirely ruined? Brody’s shoulder was killing him, and she was sure it was stress, but when she asked how he was doing he brushed her off. “Getting through,” she managed. “You know.”
Sarabeth clasped her hands in front of her chest and leaned forward. “Are you mad at me?”
“Don’t be silly.”
Sarabeth’s eyes filled again, and she closed them and pressed her fingertips against them for a moment.
“Maybe you’re mad at me,” Liz said.
“What reason could I possibly have to be mad at you?”
“I have a reason?”
“I failed you,” Sarabeth said, and Liz felt a wave of fury.
“What happened happened. What do you want me to say?”
“See, you are mad.”
“Oh, Sarabeth.”
Sarabeth put her face in her hands, and Liz was filled with remorse. What was her problem? She reached across the table and hooked a finger around Sarabeth’s pinky, and now Sarabeth began to weep.
“What’s going on?” Liz said.
Sarabeth shook her head.
“What? Sweetie.”
“It’s just”—Sarabeth raised her head and gave Liz a desperate look—“I had a really hard time.”
“When? Tell me.”
“Starting that day. That weekend.”
Liz tried to remember what Sarabeth had said earlier, about the timing of going to the play in Billy’s neighborhood. Hadn’t there been something about the Sunday when Brody called her with the news about Lauren? A feeling of the story came to Liz, of how the time line of the story had in some sense been the story. But…was this actually happening? Was Sarabeth stationing her own misery in the field of what had happened to Liz’s family? Was she saying she’d sat on the knowledge of Lauren’s trouble, done nothing, because she was upset about having gone to Billy’s neighborhood?
She was. She was even saying something about how she’d been alone with her pain because Liz had been busy. That Liz had failed her.
“I can’t believe you,” Liz whispered.
Sarabeth’s eyes widened. “What?”
“You’ve been wanting to tell me this since then, haven’t you? You’ve been waiting.”
“I—”
“You probably wanted me to come see you!”
“I never asked you to!”
“You did,” Liz exclaimed. “You wanted me to come see you. And you know what? You didn’t have to ask. You knew I’d find out. Asking or not asking, you always want something!”
Sarabeth stared at her and Liz stared back. She felt that this was their truth, hers and Sarabeth’s—that what she’d just said was the only true thing she could say about the two of them, and Sarabeth knew it. She looked at Sarabeth’s crumpled face, and she said: “I’m not your mother.”
28
Up in Tilden Park, the nighttime sky was hammocked with low fog. It was gray and gray and purple, and it clung to the treetops like spiderwebs or wasps’ nests stuck to old wood. Sarabeth had not wanted to go home, and so she had driven up into the woods, to this place where a woman shouldn’t be alone after dark.
The trails were squishy with mud, and the air under the trees was as damp as it would have been if it were raining. She walked until she was out of breath, and then she sat on a bench. All around her were the smells of the wet earth, the leaves. The bench was wet, and her skirt grew damp, followed soon after by her ass. She turned sideways and lay back, and she exhaled and watched the cloud of her breath float away. Away, away: she was in some sense gone herself, far from the agony of what Liz had said. How this could be she didn’t know. How she had avoided crying, had left the restaurant and found her car, she didn’t know. On the bridge she had imagined herself weeping on Nina’s doorstep, collapsing into Jim’s arms, but she had steered away from those possibilities. Here and now, they all seemed irrevocably distant, the people she knew: as far away as Earth was from the moon. The planets, the heavens…how sad it was that she had never thought of her mother as an angel watching over her, a guardian of her experience.
But how ridiculous: Lorelei could never have done that, never have been that. And Sarabeth didn’t believe in stuff like that, anyway. Mystical phenomena, messages embedded in the everyday. “It was meant to happen.” The truth was that nothing was meant to happen. Things just did.
She lay on the bench and stared up at the fog. The quiet itself seemed like a sound. She remembered being in Tilden Park one night during college—high on mushrooms, standing naked under a tree. She was with her boyfriend Timothy. Being undressed together felt different here: they were at once shier and emboldened, and they touched each other and separated to look and touched again. She learned that a hand on her breast was one thing in a bedroom, something else entirely when she and her lover were on their feet outside, moving slowly, stopping to watch. They were Adam and Eve. The expulsion from the Garden, the Fall—these took the form throughout the relationship of doubting feelings. She was uncertain, and that was the bed she made, the bed she lay in with him. Is this it? she kept thinking—after sex, during breakfast, in the car on the way to visit his brother at Davis. Then, one day, she was alone at the library, bored with a science textbook, and she realized this was it—all there was and all there was going to be. No great change was going to come over him; he was not going to become someone else. She broke up with him.
But the problem had been in her. She understood that now. It had been in the fact that she had wanted more, she had wanted him to make her life marvelous. She saw Liz’s face across the table at the restaurant, heard Liz’s voice saying You always want something, and she sat up quickly. Pinpoints of light swarmed before her eyes. Her shoulders began to shake, and in a moment she was sobbing. It was horrible, what she was, horrible: someone who always wanted something. Liz was right—she had wished Liz would come to her during that week in November. She had wished it without really even knowing she was wishing it. She knew it from how ashamed she felt now. She remembered lying on her couch one Sunday, looking at her bird picture and talking to Liz—it was come to me she had wanted, and why? So Liz could see her, so Liz could see how terrible she felt. It sickened her to think of it now. She had used Liz, hadn’t she? She had used Liz for years, as a cauldron, a repository for everything that hurt, and it had been too much, she had been too much. I’m not your mother.
Was a mother a cauldron? What had she poured into Lorelei that had made her so ill?
But this thinking was dangerous, as she knew all too well: the bottomless bog of whose fault it was. Of causality. “The guilt, the guilt,” she and her suicide sister used to say—like “the horror, the horror.” “Did I drive her to it?” “I may not have driven him to it, but I didn’t stop him—I wasn’t enough to stop him.” All
of this was true and best forgotten.
She didn’t know where she’d left her car, but she stood and began to walk. Her feet and legs were wet, her ass was wet, and she was cold, cold. She stumbled on rocks and brushed against bushes, but on she walked. Uphill, so that soon her breath came harder. She began to sweat lightly, a film at her hairline and between her breasts. There was the real and the metaphorical: the fact of her muscles and bones, their actualness, their ability to transport her; and this insistent new idea that she, her body, was a vessel for something that could pour out and fill other people, overwhelm them, poison them. That she was toxic.
She touched the trunk of a tree, felt its rough, creviced bark. She leaned against it and then slowly lowered herself to the ground. She had never felt worse.
29
In some ways, it wasn’t as bad as she’d expected. The first few days had been intensely weird, people staring at her, the guidance counselor popping up all over the place to see if she was OK, Amanda sort of hyperly nice—as if Lauren were a new girl and Amanda had been assigned the job of making her feel welcome—but now things were kind of normal. She was at school. That was that.
Except for Jeff Shannon. He knew where she’d been, and he knew why: she could tell. The first day, he blushed when he saw her, and then for the next couple days he was obviously pretending not to see her when he saw her, and now, every so often, she caught him staring at her from across the terrace at lunch or from his locker before or after class: looking and looking until he saw that she saw him and he quickly looked away.
Today was a Monday, which meant Dr. Lewis after school. She was wearing a top her mom had given her for Christmas and a pair of earrings she’d gotten from Steve and Kelly, very dangly and colorful, sort of like what you saw in magazines.
She ate a spoonful of yogurt. It was raining again, so she and Amanda were eating in the cafeteria, with its pizza smells and crowds of people. “So anyway,” Amanda was saying, “he’s just, like, different. It’s like: Oh, you’re a girl? That’s cool. We can be friends.”
“But do you want to be friends?”
“It’s very important to be friends.”
“What?” Lauren said, but then she got it. “Oh—is that your mom?”
“Corinna in a mom moment.” Amanda rolled her eyes and reached for a French fry. “She comes into my room all, ‘I want to save you from making the mistakes I made. Newsflash: you should like the guy’? Like she’s this big expert.”
Lauren nodded, but she’d just seen Jeff Shannon come into the cafeteria, and she kind of lost a little bit of time whenever she saw him—a few seconds actually shrank out of her life. He was with Tyler Moorhouse and Daniel Black: the Three Stooges, Amanda sometimes called them. Jeff’s blue North Face jacket was dripping, but though it had a hood he evidently hadn’t been wearing it—his hair was drenched, and as he stood in the food line, he pulled one arm from his jacket and used his shirtsleeve to dry his face.
“So,” Amanda said, “I go, ‘Newsflash: I’m not taking dating advice from someone who used to think a hard-on was called a hard one.’”
Lauren made herself smile. Jeff grabbed a tray off the stack and reached for silverware. She forced herself to look at Amanda. “So why do you like him? Or how?”
“‘How’?”
This was something Dr. Lewis did, said “how” rather than “why”—she was embarrassed that she’d said it to Amanda. Dr. Lewis wanted her to tell him how she felt like a loser, and at first she was like, what’s the difference? She kind of got it now: he wanted to hear what her thoughts were when she was feeling awful. The thing was, when she told him it made her cry.
“I just mean, you know, what do you like about him?”
Amanda shrugged. “He’s nice. He doesn’t, you know, goof off all the time. And—yeah.”
He was in their chemistry class, but Lauren didn’t know him, and the whole thing had started while she was away. He was a theater person, of course. Leaving class the other day, totally out of the blue, he’d said, “To pee or not to pee, that is the question,” which might not count as goofing off but was definitely goof-y. Whatever, it was Amanda’s problem.
Jeff came out of the food area, his tray loaded. He was following his friends, and with horror Lauren realized they were heading for the empty table next to hers and Amanda’s.
“Oh, my God,” she said.
Amanda glanced over her shoulder. “What? This is perfect, you can talk to him.”
“No way.”
In a moment Tyler and Daniel were setting down their trays. Jeff had stopped in the middle of the cafeteria, and as Lauren watched he began scanning the noisy room, looking like he was trying really hard to pretend he was alone, to pretend he hadn’t been following his friends until the very moment he’d seen pathetic Lauren Mackay sitting right where they were headed.
“Dude,” Tyler shouted.
The cafeteria was jammed with people and incredibly noisy, but Lauren could tell Jeff was faking that he hadn’t heard.
Tyler and Daniel were both still on their feet, Tyler’s sodden jacket close enough for Lauren to touch. “What’s the matter?” Amanda whispered, but Lauren ignored her.
Daniel yanked out his chair but still didn’t sit. He said, “What the fuck is wrong with him?” His younger brother had been on Joe’s soccer team for years, but Lauren doubted he remembered her. She stared into her yogurt, scraping at the last bit as if she were starving, when in fact she was feeling kind of sick.
“Jeff!” Tyler shouted.
Amanda was staring straight at Lauren. She didn’t know about the day, the last day, when Lauren had spoken to Jeff and he had smirked. Only Dr. Lewis knew. And Jeff himself, of course.
Tyler left his tray and headed for the middle of the room, and now Jeff took off, striding in the direction of the side exit, aiming for an empty table by the window. He managed to sit before Tyler reached him. Lauren’s heart was racing. They spoke for a moment, and then Tyler headed back alone. She didn’t want to hear what he would say to Daniel—yet she did. She reached for her backpack, unzipped it, pretended to look for something.
“What the fuck?” Daniel said as Tyler arrived at the table.
“He’s an asshole.” Tyler sat down and began to eat. Daniel was halfway through his burger, and they chewed in silence, picked up their sodas at the same moment, put them down, and ate again. Amanda had an obnoxious consoling look on her face, but Lauren ignored her. She watched Jeff’s friends out of the corner of her eye. Tyler ate like a machine: bite, chew, chew; bite, chew, chew. He kept his eyes on his plate, even when he drank—he’d pick up his cup, sip hard, put it back down, bite into his burger again. Daniel was more restless—he’d look up and drum his fingers on the table every now and then, glance around the room, scratch his neck. Guys were weird—it was like the two of them weren’t even at the same table. Why did they even want Jeff there?
“So,” Amanda said. “Do you want to get going?”
“Hang on.” Lauren picked up her water bottle and drained it. She looked across the room at Jeff’s table, and there he was, head bent low, spoon going to his mouth over and over again, as if he had soup or something. The navy bean had looked disgusting—she hoped he didn’t have that.
She stood and got into her jacket, then hefted her backpack onto her shoulder. At the next table, Daniel burped loudly.
“Dude,” Tyler said, and then he went back to his lunch.
Dr. Lewis shared a tiny waiting room with three other therapists—just a couch and two chairs in what felt like a closet. Lauren was glad no one else was ever around. As she sat waiting for the door sounds that would tell her his current patient was leaving his office and then departing through what she’d learned was called the privacy exit, she thought that she’d never seen Jeff looking scared before, the way he had at lunch. She felt almost sorry for him, though he was the last person in the world anyone should feel sorry for. He was whatever the opposite of a loser was. Not a winne
r, that was too one-time. A king?
A jack of diamonds.
She heard Dr. Lewis’s office door open. The person before her was a man; sometimes she heard him say goodbye, but not today. The door closed, and then the privacy exit opened and closed. Lauren picked up a magazine, then put it down again. Dr. Lewis had five minutes now, and she always wondered what he did. Listened to messages, returned phone calls? Or would he take off his shoes and lie down for a bit?
She pulled up her sleeve and looked at her scars. They were much lighter now, pink. She stroked them one by one and thought what she always thought: Jeff Shannon, school, how ugly she was, what a loser. The scars felt slightly softer than her regular skin, like short lengths of kitchen string laid on a piece of paper.
All at once she remembered her earrings, and her stomach tipped. Did she have time to get them off? They were kind of flashy; she didn’t want Dr. Lewis thinking she’d dressed up for him. She pulled the backing off one, slid the post out of her ear, and then, fingers shaking, replaced the backing on the post and dropped the earring into her coat pocket. Was it safe there with her keys? She didn’t have time to reconsider. She took off the other one, and it tapped onto the first just as the light next to Dr. Lewis’s name went off. A moment later, he opened the door. He was wearing his purple-and-brown plaid shirt, the shirt she wished he’d throw away, and he smiled and said, “Hi, Lauren.”
She had to pass close by him to get into his office. As always, she breathed in for his soap smell—which, as on most Mondays, was not as strong as it usually was on Thursdays, her theory being that he showered later in the day on Thursdays, maybe after going home at lunch to screw his wife.
In his office she took off her coat and sat in the leather chair. He came in after her, closed the door, and sat in the chair opposite.