Crazy Love You (18 page)

It was too powerful, too heavy a shove, and she lost her footing. And suddenly, unbelievably, she was losing her balance. Then she was tilting, falling over the edge—the weight of her bag sealing the deal. She landed hard on the wood and metal below, the gravel crunching beneath her. She knocked her head, but she didn't feel the impact. She was only distantly aware of a siren of pain, the thrum of fear.

All she could take in was the approach of the train, the screaming all around her from both sides of the platform. And then she was washed over with a kind of peaceful paralysis.
This is it. I don't get married. I don't get my book published. I don't have a baby. I don't get to say good-bye to my parents, to Ian.

And she was okay with it, in that moment. She got it. None of us are promised anything. She remembered something her mom told her when she was a child:
You get what you get and you don't get upset.
This all happened in a flash of seconds.

But New York is a city of heroes. And two young men, a stockbroker and a bodybuilder who didn't know each other, jumped onto the tracks at the same time. They were able to lift her past the third rail to get her to the space between the local and express tracks in the fewer than thirty seconds they had to do it. The train roared past them, a killing metal wave of light and sound. The stockbroker started to cry, Megan told me. And she comforted him, thanking him and the other man for saving her life.

By the time the police and paramedics arrived, the crowds had cleared the platform.

“Did you see who pushed you?” the cop asked. She remembered that the cop was baby-faced, looked too young to be wearing a uniform. The gun at his waist was shiny and new.

“No,” she said. “I never saw anyone.” Neither had the other men.

“We'll get the CCTV video,” said a detective. She was a young woman, wearing jeans and a Rangers jersey, her hair done in a spiky blond crew cut. “It'll take a couple of days.”

•  •  •

That night at my apartment, after Julia and Binky had left, Megan was in good spirits. Giddy, actually, talking a mile a minute. She had skirted death and had moved from frightened and shaky to angry, then on to manic. I assumed there would be another dip in her mood, probably nightmares. She had a minor concussion and a black eye. But she was otherwise unscathed.

I was a wreck, wanting nothing more than to get drunk or high to take the edge off my fear and anger. Who had pushed her? If it hadn't been for those two guys—whom I was filled with gratitude toward and an irrational jealousy of—she'd have died. Lights out, just gone, her body mangled on a subway track. Who would do that to a girl like Megan, someone who'd never hurt anyone?

Binky had been to Katz's and picked up Meg's favorite matzo-ball soup. And she was slurping it happily on the couch. She'd gone quiet.

“God,” she said after a big bite of matzo ball. “It's
so
good.”

“Megan,” I said. I sat next to her, put my finger gingerly to the swollen black puff under her eye. There were so many colors—violet, pink, plum, a kind of green. “You're sure you didn't see who pushed you? Try to think of who was standing around you.”

If she'd seen Priss, she'd have recognized her from the books, the drawings all over my place. Priss couldn't hide herself. She was too beautiful; all the flowers turned toward her when she walked into a room, attracted by her light and heat.

“I wasn't paying attention,” she said. I noticed that her hands were shaking. “It could have been anyone.”

“When are they going to have the CCTV footage?”

She put the soup down on the coffee table and looked at me. “I don't know.”

I kept thinking of the panels I'd drawn of Fatboy falling onto the tracks. The single white light in the black tunnel, the thugs above him, the flash of their gold teeth, the expression of fear and pain on his face. It was too similar. What did it mean? Had Priss come into the apartment and seen the sketches? Was she trying to send me a message? Or was this just some kind of bizarre coincidence?

I walked over to my drawing table, which stood in the far corner of the loft, and brought the pages over. She flipped through them, and I heard her gasp.

“The tunnel, the headlight,” she said. She went paler than she had been. “It was just like that.”

She put the pictures aside and dropped her head into her hands. I sat beside her, wrapped my arms around her. She still smelled like the emergency room, antiseptic and strange.

“When did you draw these?” she asked finally. She moved away from me, pushed herself into the corner of the couch.

“A couple of days ago,” I said. I picked them up and started looking at them. “Maybe a week.”

She said something, but I didn't hear it. I was immediately lost in the drawings, thinking about the lines and the colors and how they didn't look quite right. The white wanted to be bluer. The tunnel needed a shadow outline of the oncoming train. Fatboy had to look more horrified. He was about to die in the most hideous possible way. In the sketch, he just looked merely scared, not mortally afraid. There should be more of a blankness, that slack expression of pure terror.

“Ian!” she said. I snapped back in.

“I'm sorry,” I said.

“
What
are you trying to tell me?” she asked.

“I don't know,” I said.

She wore an expression I hadn't seen before but would see many times again—dismay meets disappointment, concern meets anger. “You're scaring me.”

•  •  •

I started seeing a psychiatrist after Jones Cooper's visit. They didn't have enough evidence to charge me with the Beech fire. Really, they didn't have
any
evidence. But everyone in town believed it was me.

The good news was that Mikey Beech and all the other bullies were giving me a wide berth. There was a nervous chatter in the hallway when I passed now, long, anxious looks. No one stood near me in the locker room, where I still had to change and sit on the bleachers even though I'd been excused from gym class until further notice, on order of my new shrink. (Because that's what I needed, to get
less
exercise, to be
more
of an outcast.) And no one sat at my table during lunch, where I unapologetically gorged myself on cafeteria food—pizza, hot dogs, hoagies, fish sticks, what have you. I didn't have a single friend.

My dad wasn't exactly the forward-thinking type. So I'm surprised that he took the step of seeking psychiatric help for me. Looking back, I realize that he was afraid; he'd failed to see the signs of trouble with my mother—or ignored them, more like. And it had cost him everything—his daughter, his wife, much of his business. I guess he'd learned his lesson.

There was a family and adolescent psychologist in town, but she was Detective Cooper's wife. So I wound up seeing a child psychiatrist at a place called Fieldcrest, a school for crazy kids that offered some outpatient services.

It was another thing that would seal my fate in The Hollows. Once this news got out, I became a complete pariah. In The Hollows, once you
were
something—the popular girl, the burnout, the football hero, the crazy kid—you were never anything else. The Hollows liked to put you in a box and keep you there forever—like in a coffin.

So once a week I got to sit in this plush office with Dr. Crown. He was an older man with a ring of hair around his shiny pate and a pair of round wire spectacles. Every week he wore a different colorful tie with some kind of cartoon character on it. I guess he was trying to be relatable, and it
is
the detail that I remember the most vividly about him. In a landscape of brown, beige, black, and maroon—in his office, his outfits, and his coloring—there was always the shocking color of his tie. Electric blue with the Tasmanian Devil, bright orange with that weird Bugs Bunny monster, red with Mickey and Minnie and tiny hearts all over. (Cool side note: The shrink in my comic has ties like that—art imitates life and all. It was really hard to come up with a new one for every time he appeared; I was running out of cartoon characters. Last time out, I'd resorted to SpongeBob.)

We started off talking about Ella's death, my mother's institutionalization, the bullying I was enduring at school. Dr. Crown was a careful, engaged listener. But I knew what we were really there to talk about: my imaginary friend Priss. Because nobody believed that she was real—not my grandmother, not my father, not the good doctor.

“When did you first meet her?”

“After Ella was born.”

“And how were you feeling at the time?”

“I don't know,” I said. “Fine.”

I didn't want to tell him how angry and jealous I'd been then, how forgotten I felt. It didn't seem right. I'd have done anything to have my mother and sister back. I was deeply regretful for hating Ella; I missed her so much—her fuzzy head, her powdery smell.

He looked at me over his glasses and waited.

“Ella cried all the time.” I examined the pile on the carpet, the water stain on the ceiling. “My mom was always with her.”

“It's normal to be jealous and angry about a new sibling. You don't need to be ashamed of that, if that's how you felt.”

More silence. It expanded and swallowed me. I wanted to go home.

“Is that how you felt, Ian?”

“I guess,” I said. “A little.”

“So at a time when you were feeling angry, jealous, maybe a little lonely, you met Priss out in the woods behind your house. Will you tell me about that?”

I told him about the day we met, how we played out in the woods. Then I recounted the night that Ella died, and how Priss saved me.

“She's real,” I told him. “She is.”

He gave me a kind, small smile, a slight nod of his head. “I believe that she's real to you.”

“No,” I said. I felt something go hard and mean inside me. “Not just to me, you asshole. To
anyone
. She's a real person.”

The doctor pulled himself up from his relaxed posture, took off his glasses, and leaned forward just a little.

“Let's be mindful about how we speak to each other in here, Ian. This should be a safe place, a respectful place for both of us.”

I'm not sure I remember quite what happened next. I just remember a rush of rage so intense that it turned the world red. My father came through the door, and then there were hands on me.

I remember the look on Dr. Crown's face. He wasn't surprised by my rage or the intensity of it. He wore a calm, impassive expression as he helped my father subdue me. He had seen it when I walked through the door, that raging angry beast that lived inside me. He spoke in soothing tones about taking deep breaths and coming back to the moment, and slowly I returned to myself, exhausted and weak. My father laid me down on a couch, where I began to sob.

She's real
, I just kept saying over and over.
She's real
.

On the day of Fatboy and Molly's wedding, the sky is a heavy gunmetal gray, with a dark looming shelf of clouds moving slowly over the ocean. They were getting married at her father's country club on a bluff overlooking the sea.

Rows of white chairs set against the green lawn, an altar of lilies and roses, doves in a basket waiting for their release, the stately white country-club building surrounding the space like a pair of comforting arms. And that sky, that dark, dark sky threatening rain.

The guests arrive, crisp suits and floral dresses, high heels and gleaming leather loafers. They are the beautiful ones—the wealthy, the intellectual elite, the manicured, the coiffed. They are Molly's people.

Fatboy stands alone in the dressing room where he has donned his tux. He is red-faced and sweating, tugging at the hard collar, messing with the tie that's not quite right. He has invited no one. There is no “friends and family of the groom” side. All of these people are here for Molly
.
Fatboy had asked his mother if she would come, but she was too afraid. Of course, he didn't invite Priss. His father, his grandmother, and sister are all dead. He has never had a real friend. He has been alone until Molly.
Now you have us
,his mother-in-law-to-be said. But he saw worry as much as kindness in her eyes. Fatboy thinks she must be wondering: What does Molly see in him?

The guests filter onto the lawn, and Molly's father comes to walk with Fatboy down to his place at the altar. Her father will give Molly away, and then, in a break with tradition, he'll stand up as the best man. There really is no one else, and her dad is too kind to let Fatboy stand alone. There is the usual speech about how Fatboy needs to take care of his daughter, and you're a part of the family now, son, and you can count on us. The sky starts rumbling and the guests stare nervously at the clouds above. Attendants run out with umbrellas just in case.

When Fatboy sees her, Molly coming down the aisle, all his fear and nervousness falls away. She is an angel and he loves her. And when he looks at her, he can see that she loves him, too. For some reason he thinks of his baby sister, and something his mother said a lifetime ago
. If you're good to her, she'll adore you forever.
He's going to do that. He is going to be the man that Molly deserves. He is going to take care of her and love her forever.

She reaches him and the pastor begins to speak. They take their vows. And then the heavens open and it starts to pour, a big bolt of lightning slices the sky. The guests flee, but Fatboy and Molly stay put. Attendants rush to cover them with umbrellas, and they finish reciting their vows, and exchange rings alone in the rain with just the pastor and Molly's parents braving the weather.