“You’re still angry with me? What the hell for? No, don’t answer that. I don’t care.
I am not going to back down this time, Johnny Ryan. I’m not giving you space or cutting
you slack. If I didn’t fight you right now, Katie would kick my ass. I promised her
I would take care of Marah. You obviously haven’t done a great job.”
“Tully.” The warning in his voice was unmistakable.
“Let me take her home and get her in to see Harriet on Monday, or Tuesday at the latest.
Then we can decide what comes next.”
Dad looked at Marah. “Do you want to see Dr. Bloom in Seattle?”
The truth was, Marah didn’t care about Dr. Bloom. She didn’t want anything except
to be left alone. And to leave Los Angeles. “Yeah,” she said tiredly.
Dad turned to Tully. “I’ll come up as soon as I can.”
Tully nodded.
Dad didn’t look convinced. He stood up and faced Tully. “I can trust you to take care
of her for a few days?”
“I’ll be like a mama hen sitting on precious eggs.”
“I will want a full report.”
Tully nodded. “You’ll have one.”
Ten
Marah didn’t go to her high school graduation after all, and it was a relief. Instead,
she boarded a plane with Tully and flew back to Seattle. True to her word, Tully got
Marah a two o’clock appointment with Dr. Harriet Bloom on the following Monday.
Today.
Marah didn’t want to get out of bed. She hadn’t slept well last night and now she
was exhausted. Still, she did what was expected of her. She took a shower and washed
her hair and even bothered to dry it. Although it took a lot of effort, she picked
her clothes from her suitcase instead of from the pile she’d left on the floor last
night.
When she put on her 7 for All Mankind jeans—once one of her favorite possessions,
in that other life—she was horrified at how much weight she’d lost. The jeans hung
on her, exposed the sharp knobs of her hip bones. She chose a heavy Abercrombie sweatshirt
to give her slight frame a little bulk—and to hide the scars on her upper arms.
Zipping the hoodie up to her throat, she started to leave the bedroom. She meant to
just walk out, slam the door shut behind her, and get started.
But as she passed her open suitcase, her gaze landed on the pocket sewn into the side,
where her pocketknife was hidden. For a second, the world seemed to blur and slow
down. She heard her heartbeat thudding and felt the blood flowing through her veins.
She imagined it: bright red, beautiful. The thought of hurting herself for a second,
just once so that this terrible pressure in her chest would ease, was so tempting
she actually took a step forward, reached out.
“Marah!”
She yanked her hand back and glanced quickly around.
She was alone.
“Marah!”
It was Tully. She’d yelled twice. That meant she could be on her way down the hall.
Marah fisted her hands, felt the pinch of fingernails in the fleshy middle of her
palms. “Coming,” she said, although her voice was dry and small, barely audible even
to her.
She left the bedroom and shut the door with a little click.
In no time, Tully was beside her, holding her by the arm, guiding Marah out of the
condominium, as if she were blind.
As they walked uptown, Tully talked.
Marah tried to listen, but her heart was beating so fast it deafened her to anything
else. Her hands were sweating. She didn’t want to sit down with some stranger and
talk about cutting herself.
“Here we are,” Tully said at last, and Marah came out of the gray fog and found herself
standing in front of a tall glass building. When had they passed the park where the
homeless people gathered beneath the totem pole? She didn’t remember. That scared
her.
She followed Tully into the elevator and up to the doctor’s office, where a serious
young woman with a lot of freckles offered them seats in the waiting room.
Marah perched uncomfortably on an overstuffed blue chair by an aquarium.
“I guess fish are supposed to be calming,” Tully said. She sat down beside Marah and
took hold of her hand. “Marah?”
“What?”
“Look at me.”
She didn’t want to, but one thing she knew: it was a waste of time to ignore Tully.
Slowly she turned. “Uh-huh?”
“There’s nothing wrong with how you feel,” she said gently. “Sometimes missing her
hurts more than I can stand, too.”
No one
ever
said stuff like this anymore. Oh, they’d talked about Mom all the time eighteen months
ago, but apparently there was an expiration date on grief. It was like an exterior
door closing; once it shut and you were in the dark, you were supposed to forget how
much you missed the light. “What do you do when it, you know, hurts to remember?”
“If I told you, your mom would come down from heaven and kick my ass. I’m supposed
to be the responsible adult here.”
“Fine,” Marah said. “Don’t fricking tell me how you handle it. No one ever does.”
She glanced sideways to see if the receptionist was eavesdropping, but the woman wasn’t
paying attention to them.
Tully didn’t respond for a minute, which seemed to go on too long. Finally, she nodded
and said, “I started having panic attacks after her death, so I take Xanax. And I
can’t sleep for shit anymore. And sometimes I drink too much. What do you do?”
“I cut myself,” Marah said quietly. It felt surprisingly good to admit.
“We are quite a pair,” Tully said with a wan smile.
Behind them, a door opened and a slim woman emerged from the office. She was beautiful,
in a gritted-teeth, angry kind of way that Marah recognized as pain. The woman wore
a heavy plaid scarf wrapped around her upper body and held it closed with a gloved
hand, as if she were heading out into a snowstorm instead of a Seattle day in June.
“See you next week, Jude,” said the receptionist.
The woman nodded and put on sunglasses. She didn’t glance at either Marah or Tully
as she left the office.
“You must be Marah Ryan.”
Marah hadn’t even noticed the other woman who’d come into the waiting room.
“I’m Dr. Harriet Bloom,” the woman said, extending a hand.
Marah stood up reluctantly. Now she really wanted to bolt. “Hi.”
Tully got to her feet. “Hi, Harriet. Thanks for agreeing to help us on such short
notice. I know you had to change your schedule. You’ll need some background information,
of course. I’ll come in for—”
“No,” the doctor said.
Tully looked nonplussed. “But—”
“I’ll take good care of her, Tully, but this is between Marah and me. She’s in good
hands. I promise.”
Marah didn’t think so. In fact, she thought she was in weird hands, bony hands with
age-spotted skin. The opposite of good hands. Still, she played her good-girl role
and followed the doctor into her sleek, grown-up office.
A wall of windows looked out over the Pike Place Market and the sparkling blue Sound.
A polished wooden desk cut the room in half; behind it was a big black leather chair.
Two comfortable-looking chairs sat facing the desk and a black sofa was pushed against
the back wall. Above it was a soothing picture of a beach in the summer. Hawaii, maybe.
Or Florida. There were palm trees anyway.
“I suppose you want me to lie down,” Marah said, hugging herself. She was cold in
here, too. Maybe that was why the other lady was so layered up. The weird thing was
that there was a gas fireplace in the wall, and bright orange and blue flames sent
heat splashing toward her. She could feel it and she couldn’t.
Dr. Bloom sat down behind her desk and uncapped a pen. “You may sit wherever you like.”
Marah flopped into a chair and stared at the plant in the corner, counting its leaves.
One … two … three … She really didn’t want to be here. Four … five …
She heard a clock ticking through the minutes, and the even in and out of the doctor’s
breathing, and the rough hiss of her black nylons as she crossed and uncrossed her
legs.
“Do you think there’s something you’d like to talk about?” the doctor asked after
at least ten minutes had passed.
Marah shrugged. “Not really.” Fifty-two … fifty-three … fifty-four. The room was getting
hot now. That little fireplace was a real dynamo. She felt sweat crawling across her
forehead. A drop slid down the side of her face. She tapped her foot nervously on
the floor.
Sixty-six … sixty-seven.
“How do you know Tully?”
“She’s a friend of—”
“Your mother’s?”
The way she said it was all wrong, clinical, the way you’d ask about a car or a vacuum,
but still Marah felt her stomach tightening. She did not want to talk about her mom
with a stranger. She shrugged and kept counting.
“She’s gone, right?”
Marah paused. “She’s in my dad’s closet, actually.”
“Excuse me?”
Marah smiled. Score one for the home team. “We rented a casket for the funeral—which
was way weird, if you ask me. Anyway, we cremated her and put her in this rosewood
box. When Tully wanted to scatter her ashes, Dad wasn’t ready, and when Dad was ready,
Tully wasn’t. So Mom’s in the closet behind my dad’s sweaters.”
“What about when you were ready?”
Marah blinked. “What do you mean?”
“When would you like to scatter your mother’s ashes?”
“No one’s asked me that.”
“Why do you think that is?”
Marah shrugged and looked away again. She didn’t like where this was going.
“Why do you think you’re here, Marah?” the doctor said.
“You know why.”
“I know what you did to yourself. The cutting.”
Marah looked at the plant again. The leaves were really waxy-looking. Seventy-five …
seventy-six … seventy-seven.
“I know it makes you feel better when you do it.”
Marah glanced at Dr. Bloom, who sat perfectly still, her sharp nose hooked out over
her thin lips. “But when you’re done, and your razor blade or knife is full of dried
blood, I bet you feel worse. Ashamed, maybe, or afraid.”
Seventy-eight … seventy-nine.
“I can help you with those feelings, if you’ll talk to me about how you feel. It’s
not uncommon, how you’re feeling.”
Marah rolled her eyes. That was one of those tarry lies adults told kids to make the
world prettier.
“Well,” Dr. Bloom said later, closing her notebook. Marah wondered what she’d written
in it. Probably,
Whack job, loves plants
. “That’s all the time we have for today.”
Marah shot to her feet and turned for the door. As she reached for the knob, Dr. Bloom
said:
“I have a teen grief group meeting that might help you, Marah. Would you like to join
us? It’s Wednesday night.”
“Whatever.” Marah opened the office door.
Tully lurched to her feet. “How was it?”
Marah didn’t know what to say. She glanced away from Tully and saw that there was
someone else in the waiting room: a young man dressed in skin-tight, torn black jeans
that disappeared into scuffed black boots with the laces falling slack. He was thin,
almost femininely so, and wearing a black T-shirt that read
BITE ME
beneath a smoke-colored jacket. At his throat, a collection of pewter skulls hung
like keys on a chain, and his shoulder-length hair was unnaturally black, tinged here
and there in peacock streaks of magenta and green. When he looked up, Marah saw that
his eyes were strange, almost golden, and heavy black guyliner accentuated the color.
His skin was pale. Like maybe he was sick.
Dr. Bloom came up beside Marah. “Paxton, perhaps you’d tell Marah that our therapy
group isn’t such a bad little gathering.”
The young man—Paxton—stood up and moved toward Marah with the kind of grace that seemed
staged.
“Tully?” Dr. Bloom said. “May I speak to you for a moment?”
Marah was aware of the two older women moving away from her, whispering to each other.
Marah knew she should care what they were saying, but she couldn’t think of anything
except the boy coming toward her.
“You’re afraid of me,” he said when he was close to her. She could smell spearmint
gum on his breath. “Most people are.”
“You think I’m scared of a little black clothing?”
He lifted a pale hand and tucked his hair behind one ear. “Nice girls like you should
stay in suburbia where it’s safe. The group isn’t for you.”
“You don’t know anything about me. But maybe you should stop playing in your mom’s
makeup.”
His laugh surprised her. “Fire. I like that.”
“Hey, Marah,” Tully said. “It’s time to go.” She strode across the waiting room and
took Marah by the arm and led her out of the office.
* * *
All the way home, Tully kept up a stream of conversation. She kept asking Marah if
she wanted to go to Bainbridge Island to see her friends, and Marah wanted to say
yes, but she didn’t belong there anymore. In the year and a half of her absence, the
old friendships had degraded like moth wings; now they were tattered bits of white
that couldn’t possibly fly again. She had nothing in common with those girls.
Tully led Marah into the bright, elegant condo and turned on the fireplace in the
living room. Flames flowered up, zipped along a fake log. “So. How was it?”
Marah shrugged.
Tully sat down on the sofa. “Don’t shut me out, Marah. I want to help.”
God, she was tired of disappointing people. She wished there were a handbook for children
of the deceased, like in
Beetlejuice,
so that she would know what to do and say so that people would leave her alone. “I
know.”
She sat down on the stone hearth, facing Tully. The fire warmed her back, made her
shiver. She hadn’t even realized that she was cold.
“I should have made your dad put you in counseling when Kate died. But we fell apart,
your dad and me. I asked about you, though, and talked to you every week. You never
said a thing. I never heard you cry. Your grandma said you were handling it.”
“Why should you have known?”