“Maybe that’s not what I was going to say.”
“Was it?”
He shrugged.
“Honey,” she said. She put her hand on his arm and left it there, and after a while he began not to mind it. He stared at the game. It was late November, sunny and clear and sixty degrees, a day the Midwest couldn’t fathom. The bay was blocks away, the ocean just on the other side of the mountains, the country’s most beautiful city a half hour north. All of this Brody knew.
This is why we live here,
people said at all times of the year.
This is why we wouldn’t live anywhere else.
Was it more dangerous, though, here in the Bay Area, where it was so beautiful and so temperate? What if he had stayed in the Midwest? Where hardship came every year in the form of frozen pipes and cars that wouldn’t start and months of cabin fever. Did a certain kind of ease pave the way for trouble?
17
I
t was Sunday morning, and Sarabeth’s living room was filled with a pinkish glow. Her skin was pink. The
New York Times
was pink. Her life was going to be pink, because she’d hung a red tablecloth over the living room window, and it was going to stay there for all of time.
She was never going to look at the Heidts again.
She lay on her couch. Across the room, a little charcoal drawing of a bird hung on the wall, and she stared at it, wishing there were something between her and that bird. She wanted to call Liz. The bird had an eye. She reached into her purse for her cell phone and then held it and looked again at the bird. It had been drawn with an economy of strokes: head, beak, feathers, twiggy feet. There was pressure in her chest as she scrolled to Liz’s home number. It had been five days since the Tuesday morning phone call that had seemed to right things, Liz sounding so sympathetic and forgiving. On each of those days Sarabeth had wanted to call Liz, and had wanted Liz to call her, and had done nothing.
Joe answered. His voice was changing, its pitch today that of the man he would become.
“Joe?” she said, and then “It’s Sarabeth, how are you?” and then “I’m so sorry about your sister.”
“Thanks,” he said.
There was a silence, and she realized she’d spoken too quickly, hadn’t given him any time to respond.
“Hang on,” he said, and she lay there with her cell phone held to her ear, looking at the picture of the bird, then at the pile of pointless belongings still strewn across the floor below it. The pink dish from Liz was pinker in this light.
“Hi,” Liz said.
Tears spilled from Sarabeth’s eyes. “Hi.”
Liz was silent, and Sarabeth wiped the tears away and sniffed.
“Are you crying?” Liz said.
“No,” Sarabeth said, but it was a throaty, nasally “no,” and now she did cry.
“What’s up?” Liz said a bit stiffly.
“I’m sorry,” Sarabeth sobbed.
“It’s OK,” Liz said. “I told you, really.”
“No, I mean for this.”
“I don’t even know what ‘this’ is.”
Not just stiffly: coldly.
“Nothing,” Sarabeth said. “I’m sorry to bother you.”
“You’re not bothering me.”
“How is she?”
“The same.”
Sarabeth waited, but that was it—that was all Liz was going to say. She let go of the cell phone and let it balance on the side of her head. She put her hands over her face.
“What are you upset about?” Liz said.
“Nothing,” Sarabeth said, her hands still half over her mouth, the phone wiggly on her head. “I’m sorry to bother you,” she said again.
“You’re not bothering me,” Liz said, “but you’re baffling me, and I can barely hear you.”
“Oh, my God,” Sarabeth said, and then the phone slipped off her ear, and though she grabbed at it she failed to catch it, and it fell to the floor. Retrieving it, she saw that the call had been cut off. Redial, she thought, redial, but she’d never mastered the ins and outs of this phone, the shortcuts, the easy-dials. She set it on the coffee table and yearned for blankness.
18
L
ucas had not spoken to anyone in two days. It was schooltime on Monday, but he was off somewhere with Dr. Porter, who had arrived in an uncharacteristic hurry just as check-in was ending.
One of Abby’s friends had left yesterday, and there was a new girl no one had seen yet—Casey had mentioned her at breakfast. Casey knew everything. She was leaving Wednesday, after almost three weeks. She’d been here the longest of anyone.
Today marked a week for Lauren. She sat at a table doing a math worksheet. The idea of Mr. Pavlovich getting a note that she was out…she didn’t want to think about it. Nor about Amanda, who had called yesterday and said how much she missed Lauren and cared about her. Nor about her parents, visiting last night, coming again tonight, not
doing
anything for her, nothing at all. Did they
want
her to be in here? They must. Better here than bugging them at home.
Lucas came back in, followed by Dr. Porter. His face was the same as it had been since Saturday, lifeless and black eyed. He sat on a couch and stared off into space. Dr. Porter spoke quietly to Kitsy and then left; she’d be back in the afternoon. What did she do in the mornings, anyway? If she had kids, she’d be more likely to
work
in the mornings and
not
be here in the afternoons. Then again, if she had kids they’d be around thirty. Lauren couldn’t imagine having a shrink for a parent.
What was that like for you?
Actually, her mom was full of that shit. She fucking studied it, she had books about parenting. When Lauren was little, she was always talking with other moms about naps and stuff, “boundaries,” “limits,” who knew what all.
Lauren put her pencil down and went over to one of the windows. Someone had stuck a Hello Kitty sticker on the glass, and she picked at an edge until there was a lip she could pull. She tore away half the sticker, then scratched at the rest until all that remained was the thin white under-layer. She looked at her fingernails, imagined what it would be like to attack her cuticles the way some of the other kids did. There was this one guy, Angus, with fingers that were puffed like doughnuts around the tiny, bitten plates of his nails. No guys cut themselves, though—as far as she knew. From the window she glanced at Lucas. He was looking at her, and she gave him a little wave. His face stayed the same, but after a moment he beckoned for her.
“What?” she said, approaching the couch. He beckoned again, and she stepped closer, then sat on the edge of the chair next to him. It was a square yellow armchair, vinyl—this was the first time she’d sat in it. In fact, it was where
he
usually sat.
He inhaled, as if to speak, but then he just sighed and let his head fall back.
“Are you OK?”
He looked up, looked right at her. His eyes were wet, and she didn’t know if that meant tears or something else, something she’d never heard of that had to do with bipolar disorder. He was taking a mood stabilizer, according to Abby. Abby knew all about the different medications. She knew that Lauren was taking Prozac without Lauren’s ever having told her. “How’d you know?” Lauren asked, and Abby said, “After a while you get to recognize all the pills.”
The wetness pooled and fell onto Lucas’s cheeks. Lauren put a hand out and then, after a moment, pulled it back. She looked up and saw three or four people staring at her. One of the nurses gave her a sad smile. All at once she had to get out of there, and she stood up and raced for her room and slammed the door behind her.
In a moment Ivan opened it. “Lauren?”
“Go away.”
“Do you want to talk?” He locked the door open, pushing the doorstop into the bracket on the wall. “It’s hard to see a friend so down.”
“He’s not my friend,” Lauren said. She was near tears again, furious. “He’s not my friend!” she yelled.
Ivan gave her a sympathetic look, and she flung herself onto her bed and buried her face in her pillow, waiting for him to go.
But even once he was gone, she was still there. She sat up after a while. Went to lunch. Went to group. In art she doodled with her colored pencils, making rainbows and hearts and four-leaf clovers, as if she were some dopey little kid. Dr. Lewis appeared for her session, and she followed him to their meeting room. He was incredibly geeky. He’d have been laughed out of her school. He wore horrible plaid shirts—orange and green, say, or purple and brown. Purple and brown! Maybe he was color blind. He had really dorky shoes, too, loafers with tassels. He wore a wedding ring, and she figured his wife was a bigger dork than he was, someone who would wear a ski turtleneck as a top, someone who would wear a fake tortoiseshell headband. Probably they were each the only one ever to have liked the other.
“How are you feeling?” he said once they were seated.
“Fine,” she replied, as always; she didn’t know why he wouldn’t get the message.
“How was the weekend?”
“Fine.”
“Your day today?”
At this she just shrugged.
He picked up his clipboard and flipped through the pages. She planted her elbow on the table and rested her chin in her hand. He always kept her for exactly fifty minutes. This struck her as unfair, because a lot of people got through therapy in much less time.
“So you got a call from Amanda?”
“Who are you, my mother?” She hadn’t quite meant this, and she shook her head. “I mean, what, do you have a record?”
“I remind you of your mother?”
“No! You’re nothing like my mother.”
“What’s she like?”
“She’s fine.” She stared at him, at his ugly plaid shirt. He wore a tie with little squiggles. He didn’t speak, just waited. “She’s nosy, if you really want to know.”
“Maybe there are things you want to keep hidden.”
“There are not!” she exclaimed, but all at once she was thinking of Lucas in the lounge this morning, beckoning, and the tears in his eyes and on his cheeks. Fuck if she wasn’t about to cry again. Then she was crying.
“I think there are some things that are really painful for you,” Dr. Lewis said. “Lots of teenagers feel they need to keep painful things hidden.”
Lauren shook her head, but something had happened, something between her and Dr. Lewis, just now; she had no idea what it was, but she couldn’t say no anymore, she just couldn’t.
“I cry all the time,” she sobbed.
“I think that’s what sad people do.”
“I’m not sad,” she said, but then she looked up and saw him watching her, and she said, “I am, I am, I am.” And she lowered her head and put her hands over her eyes and said, “I am.”
Not quickly, not smoothly or continuously, Lauren began to make progress. Monday evening she wept again, but differently. She was miserable. She hated school, hated herself. Liz’s heart broke as she listened, then broke again as Lauren fell into her arms and wept harder. It was toward exactly this—Lauren admitting her unhappiness—that Dr. Lewis had said they were working; what Liz hadn’t anticipated was how painful it would be.
On Tuesday Lauren showed her and Brody a drawing, and again Dr. Lewis was present. They were in a small room, sitting on chairs around a Formica table. Liz had a squeezed feeling in her chest that she was trying to ignore. She wanted to be calm. Whatever Lauren needed, that was what she wanted to be.
Lauren set the drawing on the table and turned it so they could see. She’d drawn four figures with the general shapes of humans, but they’d been heavily charcoaled, the shading filling in and jagging over the outlines.
“They don’t have faces,” Brody said, and Liz shot him a hard stare. What was he thinking, saying something like that? She looked at Dr. Lewis, tried to read his reaction, but his face was neutral, as always. It was funny: he wasn’t good-looking in any of the usual ways—he was too thin, and he had eyebrows so sparse his eyes had a spooky, naked look—but he was attractive anyway. Maybe because he seemed so wise.
“I wonder,” he said thoughtfully, “if this picture was a way for Lauren to explore some feelings without words.”
Exactly, Liz thought. She wished he would talk more; she hoarded what he said, went over and over it in her mind. She longed to corner him with questions, and it was only the sheer unmanageable number of them that kept her from doing so. Lauren making progress meant Lauren coming home soon, which was both exactly what Liz wanted and also terrifying.
What should I do if she says this? What should I say if she does that?
The idea that she was a skilled parent had dissolved, exactly when it was what she most needed to be. Skilled? She was hapless, uninformed, inadequate. She had friends who’d gone through this kind of thing postpartum, the feeling that to be a mother was going to take resources they just didn’t have, but she had not felt that. It had been just a matter of taking care. The world of care, it turned out, was vaster than she had ever known. She didn’t think she could do it.
When she and Brody got home he went straight to the family room couch and aimed the remote at the TV. She stood watching him for a moment, then began stacking the bowls and platters that people had left, full of food, on the porch. Her friend Julie had offered to get them back to their owners, and she carried them to the front hall and set them by the door, so she’d remember to put them outside in the morning.
She headed up the stairs to find Joe.
“Enter,” he said in response to her knock, and she was briefly cheered, or charmed; he could do this, surprise her with evidence of some kind of elastic inner life.
He was on his bed with a book, lying on his stomach with his saggy jeans showing a couple inches of boxer waistband. His shoes were on, but she didn’t really care—she didn’t want his life to be a cacophony of correction.
She sat at the foot of the bed. “What are you reading?”
He looked over his shoulder and turned the book so she could see:
Catcher in the Rye,
of all things. He was just a little way in. She wondered if he’d known before he started what it was about.
“Is that for English?”
“Just reading it.”
Sarabeth had read it at his age, over and over again; for a while there, nearly everyone she knew was a big phony.
Liz had been harsh with Sarabeth on the phone Sunday—she knew she had. She’d barely slept Saturday night, tossing and getting up for water and tossing some more. When Joe told her Sarabeth was on the line, she was lying down, not sleeping but in a lulled state. She’d almost asked him to take a message. Clearly she should have.
“Do you know any big phonies?” she asked him now.
He thought for a moment. “Mrs. Graham.”
“How so?”
“‘OK, persons, let’s get into our small groups for some Civil War brainstorming.’”
“How is that phony?”
He scooted toward the head of the bed, turning and leaning against the headboard. He had Brody’s sapphire eyes and smooth, beautiful skin. This boy of hers, this boy. Were many women as moved by their sons as she was by Joe? It wasn’t the kind of thing she discussed with other mothers.
“Well,” he said, “first of all, ‘persons.’ I mean, we’re people. But she’s also so hyper, like if she doesn’t call it brainstorming we won’t go, we won’t be motivated. It’s like:
We’re in school, just tell us what to do.
”
“Annoying.”
“Yeah.”
She hesitated. “What’s Holden’s sister’s name again?”
“Phoebe,” he said, but a guarded look came down over his face, saying
Don’t.
She had to. “Yours will probably come home in a day or two.”
“She will?”
Liz nodded.
His face stayed in neutral, but he’d set the book down and now he picked it up again and held it in his lap, forefinger between the pages marking his place.
She said, “How are you doing, sweetie?”
“OK.”
“I know we’ve already talked about this, but—it’s no one’s fault.”
“I know.”
On top of his bookcase were some family photos she’d put in special frames for him when he was younger: one with little wooden train cars along the top, another with a baseball and a soccer ball glued onto opposite corners. In the train frame the four of them were on the beach in Carmel. In the sports frame it was Christmas Day, and Lauren and Joe were posed on brand-new bikes, and Joe was looking at Lauren while Lauren beamed.
What should she say to him now? What would Dr. Lewis say?
She sat where she was, and after a while his body seemed to relax, and he began to read again—or pretended to, anyway. How would it be when Lauren got home? What were they trying to get to? She heard him turn a page. If she could just sit near him while he read, if she could just stay for a few more minutes.
The image of Lauren’s drawing lingered in Brody’s mind. People with no faces—no detail at all, just messy shading. Her drawings were usually so careful and precise. She drew a lot of plants, studied the leaves in the backyard and captured the stems, the veins. Years ago it was pictures of animals.
He remembered a time when she was four or five and so shy that the arrival of company would literally bring her to her knees. She’d put her hands on the floor and crawl over to him, maybe meow a little as she rubbed against his lower leg. “Got a new kitty?” the company would say.
He glanced at the French doors, the black night behind them. The days were growing shorter and shorter. Tonight he would go again, to the tennis courts at the high school; he’d gone every night since the first time, last Wednesday. Late, long after Liz and Joe were asleep. The first few nights he went to bed first, then got up once Liz was sleeping soundly. After that, he just stayed up. “I’m not really tired,” he told her. He sat in front of the TV, or with a book, but in fact he was waiting for her to be gone. Begone, he thought one night as she lingered in the family room doorway, talking on and on about something that didn’t matter. Be gone.
His shoulder was worse than it had ever been. One night, warming up, he’d thought he shouldn’t continue—his shoulder hurt that much. Another night a cop pulled up, got out of his car, and strolled to the fence. Something rose up in Brody—a wish to meet the cop in some dark encounter—but the cop just watched Brody for a moment and then said, “Insomnia?”