Thumbsucker (16 page)

A girl, a senior debater I had a crush on, plopped down a dollar, guessed sixteen hundred and twenty, and asked me if I’d heard the news.

“Truman Capote was here. He got his fortune told.”

“Who’s Truman Capote?”

“He walked right past your booth. You really don’t know who he is?”

“Not really.”

“Pathetic.”

“A politician?”

“Pathetic. Get a clue.”

The pain of this conversation took days to heal. I changed the route I took to school each morning, avoiding the streets where I’d seen the shuttle vans. And if one of my friends even mentioned Maple Glen, I changed the subject. I didn’t want to hear it.

Then one night at dinner disaster struck.

“Audrey got a new nursing job,” Mike said.

“It’s only part-time. It’s nights,” she said. “It’s nothing.”

“Where?” I said.

“Maple Glen.”

“She’s stunned,” Mike said. “Guess who she saw in the lobby before her interview?”

“Stop it,” said Audrey. “I can’t go leaking names. I signed an agreement about it.”

“That writer,” I said.

Audrey gave me a hard look. “Eat your venison.”

I put down my fork and asked to be excused.

The long morning baths were the first sign she was changing. When Audrey would get home from work at breakfast time, she’d put on a robe and slippers, tie her hair back, and run the water in the claw-foot tub. The downstairs bathroom adjoined the kitchen, and the smells of the salts Audrey sprinkled in her bath—lavender, hyacinth, vanilla, cinnamon—penetrated the refrigerator and tainted the milk I poured over my cereal. When her tub was full, Audrey would shut the door and stay in there, soaking, until I left for school.

One morning I couldn’t find my Ritalin. I rapped on the bathroom door.

“I left my prescription in the medicine cabinet.”

“I’m meditating. Go away.”

“Just check.”

“It wouldn’t kill you to skip a day.”

“You’re
meditating
?”

When Audrey finally opened the door a crack and handed me my pills, I glimpsed something next to the tub: a flickering candle. To burn a candle so early in the day seemed wasteful to me, a troubling self-indulgence. When I smelled the candle again the next morning. I said something about it through the door.

“It’s sunny out.”

“So?”

“You lit a candle.”

“So? Let your mother do something for herself for once. She can’t just take of others all day long.”

This was the last time I tried to speak to Audrey during one of her baths. I listened instead. Sometimes, over the slip and slop of bathwater, I could hear her reading from a book written by one of the doctors at Maple Glen:
One Year in Recovery: A Spirit Log
. I’d sneaked a look at the book one day and I hadn’t liked what I’d seen. The pages were divided down the middle, with a little prayer on one side and a brief quotation on the other: “I will stop comparing my ins ides to others’ outsides.” “Don’t just do something, sit there.” “Easy does it.”

One morning school was called off because of snow and I was still home when Audrey left the bathroom. She’d been soaking by candlelight for ninety minutes.

“How was work?” I said.

“Quiet. Very quiet.” She set a kettle on the stove and opened the cupboard where she kept her tea. Instead of the Lipton she normally drank, she took down two colorful boxes of herbal tea I hadn’t seen before: Chamomile Cloud and Licorice Life Force.

“Any interesting patients?” I said.

Audrey hung a bag of Licorice Life Force on the rim of a mug from Maple Glen. A motto encircled the mug in silver lettering: “Growth is Change is Growth is Change is Growth.”

“Give me a hint,” I said.

“You know the policy.”

We’d been through this routine before. Audrey seemed to take great pride in shielding her patients’ identities, as if it allowed her to share their fame somehow. In fact, since going to work at Maple Glen she’d started to act like she was better than other people. Just yesterday, for example, while watching the evening news with Joel and me, she’d dismissed the entire United States Senate as a “bunch of senile white male narcissists.” Even Joel did a double take at her new haughtiness.

“It must get awfully depressing,” I said, softening my interrogation tactics, “seeing people who have everything throw it all away.”

“Addiction doesn’t play favorites,” Audrey said, pouring hot water over her herbal tea. “I’m learning something, Justin: the higher their status and level of achievements, the needier human beings tend to be.”

I sensed her relaxing, lowering her guard. If I could make her spill just one big name, I thought, we would be equals again. Just one big name.

“Truth be told,” Audrey said, “I pity these characters. Back where they come from—Los Angeles, New York—they’re surrounded by flatterers, by hangers-on. No one ever tells it to them straight. They smash up a sports car or run a traffic light and the cops let them off for an autograph. It’s sad. They have to come all the way out to Minnesota just to hear the truth about themselves.”

“You tell them the truth,” I said.

“It’s pretty obvious: they worship their own egos. They’re sick with selfishness. No higher power.”

“Like who, exactly?”

“Stop it. There but for the grace of God go you.”

That was as far as I got that day, but it was further than I’d gotten before. The trick, I’d found, was to play on Audrey’s pride. The excitement of rubbing elbows with celebrities, and maybe even believing that she was saving them, was bound to get the best of her eventually.

A few days later I renewed the pressure. It was Audrey’s night off and I found her on the sofa watching a late-night talk show with the sound turned low.

I sat in the recliner. “Can’t sleep,” I said. “How come you’re up still?”

“I’m staying on my schedule. The secret to working nights is turning nocturnal.”

Audrey sipped a mug of herbal tea as the talk show host welcomed a bald comedian with pink runny eyes that wobbled in their sockets as if they didn’t fit snugly in his skull. I saw her attention home in and grew suspicious. The comedian, whose name I’d missed, jogged out onto the stage and snatched the mike and cracked a series of jokes about Las Vegas. Audrey, who’d never been to Nevada so far as I knew, laughed like an insider.

“You know that guy?”

“Go back to bed,” she said.

I was onto something. When the comedian wound up
his bit, he crossed the stage and flopped down beside the host, who congratulated him on his comeback.

“So what’s he like?” I said, adding up the clues. “Is he funny in person, too?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Who are you afraid I’m going to tell? Don’t you trust your own son? Come on, it’s
me
.”

Audrey wrapped her hands around her mug. “Why is this so important to you suddenly? You’re acting obsessed. Have you been skipping your pills?”

I watched the comedian pat his forehead with a damp white hanky. He looked unwell.

“What was he in for? Booze or drugs?” I said.

“Are you afraid I’ll fall in love with one? Is that it?” said Audrey.

I leveled a stare at her.

“They’re sick, sick people. They’re lost. They’re dead inside. I don’t care how many millions of dollars they make or how many Broadway shows they’ve starred in, they’re not my type. I don’t go in for junkies.”

I kept up my stare. Audrey fidgeted, looked down.

Her promises meant nothing, and she knew it.

The van was so new it had dealer plates and its windows hadn’t been blacked-out yet. I spotted it on Highway 9 while practicing for my driver’s license road test. My driver-ed instructor, Mr. Graf, whose favorite teaching aids were bloody film strips with titles such as
Death
Drives Ninety
, had turned me into a timid, defensive driver—and yet when I saw the van I lost my caution and executed a U-turn so I could follow it.

Through the van’s rear window I could see a man sitting all alone in the backseat. His hairstyle was one I’d only seen in magazines: long in the back and spiky on the sides, but perfectly proportioned to his head. He flicked a cigarette butt out the window which bounced on the pavement and showered orange sparks.

I tailed the van for another mile or two, working up the courage to accelerate and drive alongside it for a better view. Up ahead was a diner with a gas pump. When the van turned into its driveway, I turned, too.

The driver, a woman in nurse’s shoes, opened the van’s sliding door. A man got out. He was so tall he had to duck his head and the driver reached out one hand to help him down. The man looked familiar but I couldn’t place him. His short-sleeved sport shirt showed muscular tanned arms; his face was lean and prematurely rugged, with scars on his nose and cheek that looked like beauty marks. Certain people led such charmed lives, apparently, that even their wounds worked out to their advantage.

While the driver filled the van with gas, the man took off his dark glasses and rubbed his eyes. I recognized him then. He looked thinner than on TV, but it was him: Matt Schramm, the private eye, a character in a show called
Malibu Nights
. A maverick who didn’t carry a gun because of his mastery of martial arts,
Schramm solved his cases by “thinking with his gut,” and his trademark line—“I’m onto you like glue”—had caught on at school a couple of years ago. I’d used it a few times myself.

I put the car in reverse but didn’t back up. Schramm was leaning against the van, tilting his face to the sun, arms crossed. I found myself picturing Audrey drawing blood from him—rolling his sleeve up and sliding in a needle. I imagined her weighing him, writing down his height, quizzing him about his allergies.

I backed up slowly and started to turn the wheel. Schramm looked over at me and raised one arm.

“Hang on there,” he said.

He approached my car. I stopped. He leaned in my open window, held up a cigarette, and flicked an invisible lighter with his thumb.

“Can’t use the one in the van. I’ll blow it up,” he said. “Too many gas fumes.”

I pushed in my lighter and waited for it to pop. I could smell Schramm’s cologne in the car. The lighter ejected. I held it red end out and Schramm bent closer and cupped my hand and inhaled. His skin was icy.

“Gracias, kid.”

“You’re welcome.”

“You from this town?”

“Over the hill there.”

“Great area. So
real
. I’m a midwesterner, too, originally.”

“What part?” I said.

Schramm ignored me and moved off.

“Thanks for the light, kid. Take it sleazy,” he said.

As Schramm climbed back into the shuttle van, I noticed that a small crowd had gathered on the diner’s front step. He gave them a wave and they waved back at him, not stopping when he slammed the sliding door. Then a woman pushed forward, fluttering a napkin. “I love you!” she yelled. “I
love
you! I
adore
you!” The van pulled away from the pumps, the woman ran after it. She pounded on a window. I saw Schramm duck.

That night when Audrey went to work I said a prayer for her. For both of us.