Where It Began (13 page)

In fact, armed men with badges have been beating down the door, and she isn’t letting them anywhere near me, with the complicity of the helpful, alien nurses who have adapted to life on Earth well enough to appreciate gifts of really nice perfume from Saks. The conversation I overheard between Bunny Shirt and Gun Lady was evidently one of many.

Many
many.

Thanks to Vivian, as far as the outside world is concerned, I have been barely conscious all this time, and when I do emerge from my foggy state, I can barely hum “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” or chew Jell-O jewels without drooling.

The thing is, as much as I don’t want to have a meaningful dialogue with an armed person with handcuffs, I
have
to go home if I want any slight chance of ever seeing Billy. Billy even thinks that phoning me at the hospital is too risky for him, which, all right, being somewhat familiar with total paranoia, I can kind of see.

But my room at home is an electronic wonderland, and even in my altered state, I am prepared to text and message and learn to wipe my hard drive clean endlessly if that’s what I have to do to talk to him. My dad is pretty much comatose half the time, my mother is out shopping, and Juanita is only there two days a week. I am prepared to hang over the edge of the balcony above the canyon and send him sappy yet un-clingy smoke signals if that’s what it takes.

But going home, it turns out, is going to be a bigger production than just pulling out the tubes and wheeling me through the front entrance. Because of the teenage felon aspect of the situation, Vivian is pretty sure that I’m going to be charged with some kind of major crime as soon as I’m unplugged and we no longer have the nice ladies in the bunny-printed nurses’ uniforms repeating “closed head injury” over and over and running interference whenever law enforcement types show up.

“How is a child whose head got smashed against a tree supposed to deal with the police?” Vivian says to anyone who will listen, just in case they don’t have a handle on her version of the situation.

And then she says, “Look at you! How are you supposed to talk to them and not incriminate yourself in something
really serious
? He never said that you could drive that sports car of his, did he?”

And I go,
Shit, Gabriella. You stole the car. You’re toast.

Because: Billy would never let me drive that car. Billy wouldn’t even let Kaps drive that car around the Winston School parking lot. And it is hard to see how I am going to avoid incriminating myself about taking the car since it seems somewhat obvious that this is how I ended up in the hospital surrounded by funeral-ready floral offerings and cheesy, ozone-wrecking Mylar balloons.

To accomplish at least the temporary postponement of consequences that are too scary to contemplate without feeling sicker than I already feel, my job is to pretend I am too out of it to think a straight thought.

Vivian, meanwhile, remains obsessively devoted to getting me to look semi-normal. Which, given my new goal of getting home and somehow getting Billy to want to see me, is not what you could call a bad thing. I really wish she would spend her time getting me a lawyer in between buying all the industrial-strength makeup, but I don’t get too far with this completely reasonable suggestion.

I keep trying to explain to her that even if she gets me to remember what I did and look like Miss Teen America, it’s not going to make it so I didn’t somehow total Billy’s car with like a 98% blood alcohol level.

But she’s not listening.

“Daddy is working on it,” she says. Which makes you wonder if she could even pick Daddy out of a lineup, because he would be the one standing there sipping the dry martini and not the one doing the meticulous research on the top ten criminal attorneys of the Los Angeles basin.

“Billy says I have to get a lawyer before I talk to the police.”

“You talked to
Billy Nash
?”

I let her marinate in this for a few seconds. Then I say, “Yeah, but you can’t tell anybody. He’s not supposed to talk to me.”

“Now there’s a surprise,” she says.

She is not even smiling.

You would
think
she would be happy about the (slight) return of Billy. But she is too busy protecting me from anyone who might think she has a funny-looking kid. Sitting there answering the phone and explaining to anybody who wants to see me that
I am too debilitated and emotionally overwrought to see them. Telling Lisa and Anita and Huey and the kids who just want to see a train wreck when they get the chance, “Not yet, dear.”

As if I were anything other than numb and confused and waiting for Billy to figure out a way to call me again.

I can visualize the concerned faces on the other end of the line, Lisa and Anita and Huey and Huey’s mother with her herd of visiting therapy dogs all pulling on their leashes and, weirdly, Andie Bennett, who you figure would be functioning on the level of those dumb Piaget babies from psychology, forgetting I even exist the second I get stuck in a mechanical bed somewhere beyond her field of vision, all kind of frowning sympathetically and gently touching their end-call buttons.

It doesn’t matter.

It’s not as if they’re Billy.

WENDY SAYS, “THAT LOOKS LIKE PRINCE CHARMING.”

She is so enthralled with the artistic possibilities of occupational therapy with a patient over four years old that she has taken to making daily deliveries of actual, good art supplies. Then she makes me squeeze a squishy ball a couple of times and writes a chart note. And never is heard a discouraging word because I really want all that nice paper.

I say, “That’s my boyfriend.” Although, I admit, I have made him kind of glowing and unusually golden for a human. And then there’s the issue of the slightly green horse.

Wendy says, “Well, he sounds nice too.”

And I think:
You can totally do this, Gabriella. Tell her. Just because he hasn’t been calling you every five minutes and he isn’t lurking by your bedside, doesn’t mean he’s not your boyfriend. Tell her.

I say, “That’s not my boyfriend on the phone.”

Wendy starts lining up the pencils on the tray table.

I say, “I don’t want him to see me when I look like this.” Which you have to give me points for, which is semi-true. “I want to look vaguely like myself and I want to be thinking straight before I even talk to him.”

Wendy says, “Oh,” like she almost believes it.

I almost believe it, too.

Eventually, though, even the perfume-smitten nurses can tell that no amount of communing with Ponytail Doc, who keeps showing up in my room trying to get me to tell her all the four-legged animals I can think of in thirty seconds, is going to get me to remember diddly about what happened; when I have exhausted the limits of playology and Wendy has taped my portraits of every medical resident, intern, janitor, and candy striper at Valley Mercy onto the walls of the staff lounge; when no one can figure out what possible reason there is for me to be sticking around, going up and down in the cool electric bed, having makeup sponged onto my face without being able to remember one single clue regarding how my face got that way, I get snuck out the side door of the hospital by the freight elevator, as if a bunch of paparazzi and the whole LAPD were just hanging around in the hospital lobby on the edge of their seats waiting for me to make an appearance.

I am completely petrified, huddled in the wheelchair, not even wearing my own clothes because Vivian thinks I look more pathetic in a hospital gown and she is going for the all-season pathetic look just in case. I am waiting for someone to arrest me and throw me in a tiny cell with one sixty-watt lightbulb and a
window in the door to slide in Spam sandwiches with wedges of sad iceberg lettuce. I am waiting for someone in a uniform to grab the handles of the wheelchair out of Bunny Shirt’s hands and wheel me away.

But it doesn’t happen.

Bunny Shirt helps me into the backseat of the Mercedes when Vivian pulls it up to the valet service curb. Then Vivian guns the motor, and we’re out of there.

And when I finally get home, which is exactly the same as before, when I finally get into my exactly-the-same room, the only drama left is the drama of me lying in my exactly-the-same bed with my same laptop on my stomach, staring at my same dog-on-surfboard screensaver and waiting for Billy to show up online. Staring at the new cell phone and waiting for Billy to text. Staring at the landline and waiting for Billy to call. Waiting for the miraculous evaporation of Billy’s Have-a-Drunken-Girlfriend-Go-to-Jail Condition of Probation so he can come through my door and into my bedroom and hold my hand and stroke my hair and make things stay the same.

I want to be back in my
After
and not in some weird
after-After
Purgatory, waiting to find out if I am Saved or Damned.

Staring at the row of odd little presents that Andie Bennett has been sending and Vivian has lined up on my dresser, including a pink blown glass horse, a Peppermint Patty PEZ dispenser, and a mauve Kate Spade pencil case. And you really have to wonder if the Department of Probation would actually drag Billy off in leg irons if he sent me a freaking mauve pencil.

I close my eyes, but it doesn’t work.

I can’t even get my private home movies to work. I am not sure if this is because I no longer have the interesting drugs dripping into my veins or because now that I’m home and right here, right now, in real time, this
is
my life. This is
Gabriella Gardiner’s ACTUAL Teen Life in the Three B’s
uncut, happening to me minute by minute, without chemical enhancement. I can’t close my eyes and watch it because I’m stuck in it.

Except that Gabriella’s actual teen life consists of lying in my room waiting for Billy to show up, which might not even count as a life, if you think about it.

To make things even more bizarre while I’m lying here, completely terrified about what’s going to happen with me and Billy, not to mention me and the LAPD, it is as if after all those years of flying too low to be a blip on his radar, I’ve come up with something my dad can relate to: a problem with mixed drinks in it.

I am used to being in the house with my dad and feeling comfortably alone, not having any idea what he’s actually doing closed up in the den
other
than drinking. But all of a sudden, I’m his New Best Friend. All of a sudden, he starts coming downstairs and eating breakfast with me in my room, not saying much except for jolly, totally off-the-wall things about how much he likes pink grapefruit.

After the third day of this, he gets up from my desk chair and walks over to the side of the bed just as I’m sliding my tray off my lap. He puts his arm around my shoulder and he squinches up his eyes and it hits me that he is silently crying without the sobbing
again. And even though all along, since it began, since Songbird Lane, since everything, I had pretty much thought it was the end of the world, I was wrong: The actual end of the world is
this
.

His arm is just resting there, not moving, like a dead eel. I just want him to say whatever it is he’s planning to say, assuming he’s planning to say something, so this whole freakish father-daughter episode will be over and he’ll reclaim the eel. But no, now there is some weird shaking thing going on too. I can’t tell if this is John’s rendition of Deep Emotion or if he is trying to pat me on the back but he can’t quite bring himself to do it.

And I go,
Shit, Gabriella, this is your dad having a nervous breakdown. You’re supposed to feel something and do something and help him or something.

But I don’t. Short of wanting him to magically turn into someone who vaguely resembles an actual parent, all I want is for him to retract the eel and go away.

“Oh, Gabsy,” he says, like the guy hasn’t even noticed what people call me for the past seventeen years. “I can’t help but think that if only I’d wrestled with my own demons sooner, you wouldn’t be going through this.”

Right.

Unless, of course, he’s talking about the demon that makes him a sub-regular, totally incompetent businessman, which, if he could have managed to wrestle it into the corner and slide past its defeated husk and into the
richer
than richer-than-God category, I could have been popular even if geeky.

“It’s not like it’s genetic, Dad,” I say, just wanting him to take
the eel and go back into the den, only the fish-head hand has grabbed onto my arm, hard.

“You are so wise for such a young person,” he says. Then he sighs with what sounds a lot like relief and he slinks away. Marking the end of our father-daughter breakfasts.

For a couple of days, I am so freaked out by the possibility I’ll run into him somewhere other than dinner where Vivian provides the complete antidote to any kind of emotional gushing, I only come out of my room to eat French toast in the kitchen really early with Juanita, like I always did before. Watching the
telenovelas
that got me my one and only flat-out A—other than the A’s in art that don’t even get calculated into your academic GPA—in Honors Spanish.