Wintergirls (13 page)

The minister gave us little booklets so we could follow along, but I didn’t take one. My mother cried without crumpling up her face because Nanna didn’t like it when people made a spectacle of themselves in public. I was so stunned by the sight of the tears streaming down her cheeks I missed most of the service.

The grave diggers lifted my grandmother’s coffin as if it were filled with feathers. As they lowered it into the ground, the wind blew and ghostshadows unfolded and folded themselves like butterflies on the ground. The marble girls whispered and the ghostshadows
snuck inside and hid behind my ribs. . . .

I open my eyes. The minister is still quoting his Bible.

Elijah’s face is tilted up to the sky, perfectly calm. Mira from school is sobbing, her father’s arm around her shoulders. My mother has her head bowed, her lips moving. I wish I knew what she prays for.

Mrs. Parrish leans against her husband. He lays his cheek on the top of her head, his arms and hands holding her tight so she doesn’t jump in. The rose petals on the coffin flutter in the wind. A few are ripped off and sucked straight up into the sky.

The rest of the mourners shiver as the storm slides down from the north. Restless clouds of ghosts swirl paths from grave to sticky grave.

“Amen!” the minister shouts into the wind.

Game over.

The man in black hollers that we’re all invited back to the family’s home to continue the celebration of Cassie’s life and find strength in one another. As Cassie’s parents walk away from the tent, my mother approaches them and says something. They take turns hugging her, Mom patting them gently on the back.

“Funerals suck,” Elijah says to me. “Next time we bet, we’re playing poker. Ready to go?”

“Not quite,” I say. “I want to watch them cover her up.”

He chews the inside of his cheek. “I’ll wait for you at the car. The dead people are weirding me out.”

“Lia!” The wind almost blows her voice away, but not quite.

Damn.
She saw me.

I step behind Elijah. “Don’t move.” He tries to turn around but I poke him in the ribs. “I mean it.”

“What’s going on?” he asks. “Who are you hiding from?”

“My mother.”

He starts to turn around again. “Why?”

I grab his shirt to keep him from moving. “Just don’t let her see me.”

I huddle against his back, my face behind the curtain of my hair. Car doors are opening and shutting, engines turning over, tires crunching on the gravel.

“Why not?” he asks.

. . . The second time they admitted me,

. . . the second time they locked me up, I was bad, bad, bad. My parental units were frowny mad, mad, mad.

Dead, rotting daughters leave a bad smell that won’t come out no matter how hard the cleaning lady scrubs.

My parents bounced the blame back and forth, bouncing Lia bean, sick starving Lia bean, what is wrong with her, it’s all your faultfaultfault.

My mother wanted to be the boss, wanted to be Dr.

Marrigan instead of Sick Lia’s Mom. That didn’t work.

The clinic docs dug a moat around me and said she could not swim across it, she had to wait until she was invited to cross the drawbridge. After that, she missed a couple of family therapy sessions. She tried to explain why, but my ears were stuffed with bread and pasta and milk shakes.

I limped alongside the other rag-doll girls. One had a plastic door cut in her belly so she could dump the food in without using her mouth. When she got angry, she would puke the food out the belly door, slam it shut, and lock herself.

I had to shave my furry legs in front of a nurse so I didn’t accidentally open a vein. When I was a pink, hairless mouse, she took away the razor. I curled up in a matchbox filled with sawdust and covered my face with my cold rope tail. The shrinks dug into their bag of tricks and doled out new pills, my crazy candies, baby blue and nap-time gray.

They experimented on me for weeks. 089.00. 090.60.

093.00. 095.00. They stuffed the Lia-piñata with melted cheese and bread crumbs. 099.00. 103.00. 104.00. 105.00.

106.00. They released me at 108.00 with a three-ring slut-red binder that held all of my lessons: meal plans, follow-up appointments, magic incantations affirmations to keep away the nasty thoughts.

I refused to return to the house of my mother. If I was such a difficult child, such a pain in her neck, then I’d find someplace else to live. She tried to talk me out of it, but I pulled up the drawbridge, locked it with iron bars, and posted an armed guard.

The doctors gave Dad and Jennifer a black slippery bag filled with jingle-bell bottles
of crazy seeds, perfect
mini-castanets,
shooka, shooka, shooka.

Elijah cracks his knuckles. “Why don’t you want to see your mom?”

“Do you like your parents?” I ask.

“Love my mom. Dad beat the crap out of me, then kicked me out.”

“Oh,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

“Hang on,” he says. “We need to spin left a little.” He twists slightly to keep his body between me and the eyes of my mother.

“Thanks,” I say. “Is she looking this way?”

“She was, but then two ladies holding umbrellas tackled her. Now they’re bashing her in the face with their purses. Why don’t you want to see her? Did she burn your dolls in a sacrificial fire? Read your e-mail?”

“She wants to run my life,” I explain.

“What a bitch. It’s like she thinks she’s your mother or something.”

“She’s a psychopath,” I said. “It’s complicated.”

“Psychopaths can’t afford fur coats.”

“This one can. What is she doing now?”

“Her head is spinning three hundred and sixty degrees and she’s spewing frogs,” he says.

“What are you—?” I poke my head out around his shoulder.

She is standing only three graves away. “Lia?” she calls.

“Lia?” Elijah echoes.

He steps to the side and takes away my hiding place.

I step on the closest grave—Fanny Lott, 1881–1924—

hoping the earth will collapse under me. It doesn’t.

“What are you doing here?” Mom Dr. Marrigan asks.

“Um,” I say.

“Your name is Lia?” Elijah asks.

“I thought we agreed you wouldn’t come,” she says.

“Hold on.” Elijah raises his hand for attention. “You’re Lia, the friend Cassie was trying to call. Why didn’t you answer your phone that night?”

Dr. Marrigan scans him in a nanosecond. “Who is this?”

“This is my friend, Elijah. Elijah, my mother, Dr.

Chloe Marrigan.”

She steps in between us. “Excuse us. I need to talk to my daughter.”

Elijah shivers and tries to hide it. “Why didn’t you tell me your real name?”

Along the road, cars are put into low gear for the slow ride down the hill.

“I’m sorry about that,” I say. “I can explain.”

“You have a lot of explaining to do,” Dr. Marrigan says.

“No, I don’t, Mother,” I snap. “Dr. Parker told me I could come, not that it’s any of your business. Nothing I do is your business anymore.”

Elijah winces at the razor blades in my voice.

Dr. Marrigan opens her mouth to say more, but a man and a woman call out her name. I don’t recognize them, but she does and turns away from me to talk to them.

“Okay, so she’s intense,” Elijah says quietly. “Not a psychopath, but a little wired.”

“She hates it when I think for myself,” I say.

Mom is wearing the friendly face, good for shaking hands after church and running into former patients at the grocery store. She does not introduce me.

“You look like her,” Elijah says. “Except for the color of your hair.”

“That is not a compliment.”

“She really pushes your buttons, doesn’t she?” he asks.

“She’s gifted that way.”

“And you deal with it by running away?”

“It worked for you.”

He crosses his arms over his chest. “Not really.”

I really should give him back his jacket, but I’ll freeze in an instant and she’ll say something awful and I’ll break into tiny pieces.

Elijah unfolds his arms and blows on his fingers.

“Even if your mom is a nut job, she’s reaching out to you.

You gotta respect that.”

“That’s not reaching out, that’s choking.”

The funeral director’s assistant is folding up the fake grass strips under the tent. A man in a red hunting jacket is driving a tiny backhoe to the grave. The wind blows the assistant’s hat off his head and he chases it.

As the couple walks away, Dr. Marrigan turns to us again. “I have to go to the hospital to check on a patient.

You’ll be at the house when I get back, right?”

Elijah nudges my sneaker with his boot.

“Right,” I say, without thinking. “But I have to drop off Elijah first.”

She blinks rapidly, trying to recover her balance. She was bracing for a fight and didn’t get it.

“Okay, then,” she says, slightly uncertain. “I’ll see you there. Be careful driving.”

“Right.”

As she walks away, the assistant under the tent picks up a small remote and presses a button, sending Cassie’s casket into the ground.

Elijah and I walk back to the car without a word.

“Are you mad at me?” I finally ask as I unlock the car.

“About the name thing?”

“I don’t think so,” he says.

“I can explain—” I start.

He holds up both hands to stop me. “Could we not talk for a while?” he says quietly. “My head’s a little crowded.

Dead people and angry parents are not a good combination for me. I need to chill.”

“Okay.”

We are silent until we arrive at the Gateway. I park in front of his room and hand him his jacket.

“I really appreciate everything you did today.”

“No worries. Thanks for the ride.” He takes the jacket, gets out of the car, shuts the door, and walks away.

I roll down my window. “Wait. When can we talk again?”

“I don’t know.” He pulls his keys out of his pocket.

“I forgot to ask my dad about the junkyard,” I say.

“I’ll call you when I find out where it is.”

“Thanks.” He disappears inside the darkness of his room.

I’m not sure why his mood shifted. Maybe there’s something in the air of graveyards, it penetrates the skin and infects. Maybe that’s why I suddenly feel sick, too. A wave of nausea bulldozes through my belly: sadmadbad-confused, everything gags me. I fight back the pictures in my head: roses shivering on her coffin, tears falling to the ground, clouds of sorrow racing toward us on the storm.

I choke and cough. If I had eaten anything today, it’d be coming up right now.

A red warning light pops up next to my speedometer.

I dig around in my purse for my phone so I can call Dad and ask him if the engine is going to explode, but I don’t have a phone anymore.

I crank the heat up to FULL and put my nose up to the vent. The air smells like Cassie and makes me choke again.

I’m hungry I need to eat.

I hate eating.

I need to eat.

I hate eating.

I need to eat.

I love not-eating.

The red oil light blinks ON/OFF, ON/OFF, ON/OFF. I shift out of PARK and accelerate.

Briarwood Avenue is lined with made-to-order houses.

There are no sidewalks here, no front porches. The lawns are trained to roll quietly from the front door down to the road, each blade of grass hand-trimmed to the regulation height. Usually the street is empty and swept clean.

Not today. Cars are parked along both sides of the road, wheels making muddy impressions on the fringes of the lawns. Metal doors slam, security systems chirp, black-coated people with frowns bend into the wind and shuffle to the house across the street from my mother’s.

They’re here to pay their dues, pay respects, pay the price of knowing a dead girl’s parents. They’re going to Cassie’s house.

I park in my mother’s driveway.

Mrs. Parrish’s rose garden has spread out along both sides of the house and taken over the front yard. The bushes are pruned down to thorny spikes for winter, wrapped in burlap sacks, summer dreams of fat blossoms pulled deep into the roots.

The first time I saw Cassie puke
was in that garden.

Her parents were having a Labor Day party, the last one before school started. The grown-ups were loud and drunk in the pool, the high-school couples had retreated home to the soft couches waiting in empty basements, and the little kids were in bed. We weren’t little anymore; we were eleven. We could stay up as long as we wanted if we didn’t bug our parents.

I ran across the street to my house to get a sweatshirt.

When I came back, Cassie was gone. I hunted everywhere until I found her in the shadows of the rose garden, away from the torchlights and the sound of margarita blenders.

She was gagging, finger shoved down her throat. Most everything she had eaten was splashed on the mulch: a bag of potato chips, most of a carton of onion dip, two fudge brownies, and a slice of strawberry shortcake.

“I’ll get your mom,” I said.

“No!” She grabbed me and explained in tight, cramped whispers. She was puking on purpose, so she wouldn’t get fat. She started to cry because she had waited too long and calories were leaking into her and making her feel bad.

“Why did you eat the brownies, if you don’t want to get fat?” my little elf-girl body asked.

“Because I was hungry!” Tears spilled down her cheeks and rolled into the nastiness on her chin.

I kicked mulch on the mess and snuck her up to the bathroom so she could wash her hair. I cleaned the puke off her shirt with the Dove soap in the sink, gagging the whole time. When she was in the shower, I stuck her shirt in the dryer. I used a butter knife to scrape off the nasty smell from the soap.

Buried in our sleeping bags later, she told me that every girl in her cabin at drama camp puked. When I asked why, she said it was because they were all fat-fat-fatties and something had to be done. Camp taught Cassie way more than school.

By eighth grade she had turned pro, color-coding the beginning of her binges either Doritos orange or blueberry purple so she’d know when the job was done. Her favorite puking finger was lined with scratches that never healed. She told her mom they were from soccer/lacrosse practice or play practice/set construction. Or that the dog nipped her.