Wintergirls (23 page)

“Take care, Lia,” she tells me. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

Cassie has disappeared.

I open the magazine to the crossword puzzle. Thirteen down—
bind
. Fifteen across—
Cassandra
. Seven down—
Lia
. Our names are not the answers to the clues, but they fit in the boxes.

Dr. Parker would like that. She wants me in a box the size of a diagnosis. She’ll put me there so people can stare at me and stick their fingers through the bars.

I knew three girls from New Seasons who had been locked up on a psych ward: Kerry, Alvina, and Nicole.

They told horror stories while we did crunches in the showers, push-ups and jumping jacks in the three A.M.

moonlight. The padded walls were real, they said. And padded restraints to tie down people who went all the way over the edge. Med fogs so thick they forgot their names, screamers down the hall, lights that never turned off. It was never morning and never night, Kerry said.

Never.

Would that be worse than the grown women who lived on our hall but didn’t talk to us much? Wintergirls who were twenty-five, thirty, fifty-seven years old, walking around in their eleven-year-old bone cages, empty caves with bleeding eyes dragging from one treatment to the next, always being weighed, never being enough. One day the wind will carry them off. Nobody will notice.

A car rolls into the parking lot. Not Jennifer. It might be faster to walk, except I’m already half frozen and tired.

I study the diplomas on the wall. I scared Dr. Parker.

She can’t admit that my ghosts exist. If she did, it would destroy her version of real. If I’m right, then her ideas of trauma and behavioral modification and self-talk and closure are pretend. Fiction. Bedtime stories told to fussy patients in need of a nap.

We are both right.

The dead do walk and haunt and crawl into your bed at night. Ghosts sneak into your head when you’re not looking. Stars line up and volcanoes birth out bits of glass that foretell the future. Poison berries make girls stronger, but sometimes kill them. If you howl at the moon and swear on your blood, anything you desire will be yours.

Be careful what you wish for. There’s always a catch.

Dr. Parker and all my parents live in a papier-mâché world. They patch up problems with strips of newspaper and a little glue.

I live in the borderlands. The word
ghost
sounds like
memory
. The word
therapy
means
exorcism
. My visions echo and multiplymultiply. I don’t know how to figure out what they mean. I can’t tell where they start or if they will end.

But I know this. If they shrink my head any more, or float me away on an ocean of pills, I will never return.

I dial the phone on the receptionist’s desk. Jennifer’s cell goes straight to voice mail. So does Daddy’s. Dr. Marrigan is still at the hospital, no point even trying.

The snow is falling so fast it’s hard to see the streetlights. Shadow humps of cars crawl along, small mountains on their roofs. Jennifer panics in snow, always thinks the wheels are slipping and the back end is fish-tailing. But she promised. She’ll show up, drive me to my mother’s house, the one without a Christmas tree because it’s such a bother. I will ingest fluids and excrete them into a plastic container. Mom will make calls and take calls and do whatever she has to to keep me locked in iron dungeons.

The snow is falling fast enough to suffocate us.

I call a cab. I offer to pay double the rate because of the weather.

The guy shows up in two minutes flat. Still no Jennifer. I get in, tell him what I want. He apologizes for his heater not working. I say it doesn’t matter.

The cab stops at the bank. They let me in, even though it’s one minute till closing.

The cab stops at the pizza shop. They never close.

He doesn’t want to drive out to the Gateway. Says there’s no way he’ll get a fare back into town and what happens if he gets stuck?

I wave three twenty-dollar bills in his face and ask him to hurry.

There is one car-sized hump in the motel parking lot, an El Camino. The cab driver refuses to pull in because it hasn’t been plowed. I hand over his money, grab my purse, my knitting bag, and the pizza, and wade into the snow.

Elijah opens the door to Room 115, the chain still on.

The wind blows off my hood. “Please.”

I drag in the storm on my boots, talking desperate fast.

“Okay, listen. My dad kicked me out and my mom’s rules are insane.”

He just stares. I shove the pizza box at him.

“Give me a ‘for example,’” he says.

“She makes me pee into a plastic cup every time I go to the bathroom so she can measure it.”

He puts the box on the bed. “Why?”

“She’s obsessed about my body. Always has been.

Made me eat tofu when I was little instead of normal baby food. She stuck me in ballet lessons when I was three.

Who does that?”

“So you came here to get away for a night? A little parent-free vacation?”

I take off my mittens. “Not quite. When do you leave?”

He reaches for my mittens and carries them to the bathroom. “Tomorrow, if they clear the roads. Give me your coat. I’ll hang it over the bathtub.”

I unbutton the coat and take it off. “That soon?”

“Nobody reserved a room for Christmas.” He carries the coat to the bathroom, grabbing a hanger as he passes the closet. “Charlie left for his sister’s in Rhode Island before the storm hit. I just have to lock things up, shovel like hell, and head south.”

I take a minute to breathe and look around the room.

The pages and the bits of tape have been carefully peeled off the walls. The clothes from the closet and drawers have been emptied into black garbage bags by the door.

The stack of notebooks is in the beat-up milk crate.

“Let me go with you.” I shiver. “I just emptied my bank account. I have a lifetime of babysitting money on me, in cash. I can pay for gas and I can help drive.”

“I don’t know,” he says. “I’m used to traveling alone.”

He says more, but my ears aren’t working. Blacks spots are threatening to send me to the floor. I can’t pass out. This is my only option.

“I don’t think you heard me,” I say. “I have almost a thousand dollars and a credit card we can use until my dad cancels it. You want—”

::dizzy/gravity/floor/darkness::

I wake up in his bed. All my clothes on. Under the blankets, my feet are propped up so high on pillows, I can’t see past them.

Elijah leans over me. “Are you okay? What the hell happened?”

I touch a lump on my forehead. “Must have passed out. You didn’t call an ambulance, did you?”

“Should I?”

“No.” I struggle to sit up.

“Are you sick?”

“A little.” The black dots dance in front of my eyes again. I lay back down. “I was in the hospital for a couple days because I was dehydrated. I’m still a little wobbly, but it’s not a big deal.”

His eyes bug. “Are you kidding me? It’s a huge deal.

You can’t come with me—you can’t even be here. If I wind up with another dead girl, the cops won’t care if I have a video alibi. You have to leave.”

“I can’t go home.”

“I don’t care where you go. You just can’t stay with me.”

I point out the window. “You see that storm? The police don’t have enough people to handle all the accidents; half of the roads are closed because of pileups. I’m eighteen, I’m sober, I don’t have any outstanding warrants.

They won’t come looking, I promise.”

“Maybe not, but your parents will.”

“They have no idea I’ve ever been here. I didn’t tell them where you worked or how I met you.”

He picks up the deck of cards on top of the television and drops them, one by one, back onto the pile. A few slide out and land on the floor, random. “I don’t have a good feeling about this.”

He’s going to kick me out and I’ll have to call them and they’ll pretend they were worried long enough to get me in a car and they’ll drive me to a mental hospital where the windows are painted over and I’ll never know if it’s day or night and they’ll keep me there until I forget my name because after that, nothing will matter.

Rain falls down my face again. “Please.”

“No, don’t. Don’t cry. Stop. I hate it when girls cry.”

He goes into the bathroom and comes out with a roll of toilet paper. “Here.”

I pull off a strip, wipe my eyes and blow my nose, but the tears keep leaking out.

“What happened?” He kneels by the bed so we’re on the same level. “What the hell is going on?”

“I messed up,” I whisper. “Big. Really big.”

“Are you pregnant? Smoking crack? Robbed a bank?

Shot somebody?”

“I’ll show you.”

I sit up again slowly, and pull off my sweatshirt, turtleneck, and long underwear shirt. As I reach for the last layer, he puts up his hands.

“No. Hold on. We’re not going there. This is already not working. At all. Wait, is that blood?”

I pull off my camisole, wincing. “Help me up.”

He lets me lean on his arm. I stand, counting to ten to make sure I’m not going to pass out again, then I unwrap the bandages and let the gauze fall to the ground.

His eyes drift over the cuts and stitches, black threads poking out like broken wire. The bruises have surfaced, sunset colors stretched over the tight bones. He doesn’t see my breasts or my waist or my hips. He only sees the nightmare.

“What happened?” he whispers.

“I fell off the edge of the map.” I reach for the camisole and pull it back on. It is softer than the bandages.

“My sister saw me do this. Her name is Emma. She’s the one who plays soccer, even though she hates it. She’s nine and she loves me a lot and”—I wait until my voice comes back—“and I messed her up for the rest of her life. I can’t stay here. I hurt too many people.”

The snow floats down, each weightless flake resting on top of another until they are heavy enough to crush in a roof.

“Can I touch your arm?” he finally asks.

“Sure.”

He takes my right hand in his and pushes his thumb up the forearm along the indentation between my ulna and radius. He curls his fingers over the knob of my elbow and makes a circle with his thumb and first finger that slips easily over my bicep.

“How much do you weigh?” he asks.

“Not enough.” I sniff. “Too much.” A sob escapes. “I can’t tell.”

“Get dressed.” He hands me my shirt. “You can come with me on two conditions.”

“What?” I poke my head and arms through, pull the shirt down, and pick up the turtleneck.

“You have to eat enough to keep from passing out or dying.”

“Fair enough.”

“Second. You have to call your parents and tell them you’re safe.”

“No. I can’t talk to them.”

“If you don’t call them, you can’t come.”

“How often do you call your family?”

His face tightens. “I don’t have a family.”

“You said your dad was a jerk, but you loved your mother.”

“I lied. I was hatched. Raised myself.”

The wind blows the storm against the motel.

“You said you weren’t going to lie anymore,” I say.

He looks past me at the empty walls. “You want the truth?”

“Yes.”

Elijah picks up my sweatshirt, his thumb rubbing against the soft inside of the fabric. “My mother is dead.

She died when I was fifteen. My father beat me for the last time a week later. He threw me out because I fought back. Best thing he ever did for me.”

He hands me the sweatshirt.

“Oh,” is the only thing I can say.

“I’m not bluffing,” he says, stone-eyed. “If you don’t call them right now, I’m on the phone with the cops and reporting you as an intruder.”

I leave a message on my mother’s answering machine at the house, so it will be a while before she gets it. I tell her I’m safe, I’m with a friend, and I’ll call her later.

Elijah finds a Christmas movie on television. We watch it in silence. He eats a couple of slices of pizza and points at me. I eat a couple of crusts.

Two hours and two sleeping pills later, I fall asleep.

No Cassie in my head. No Cassie stench in my nose. No knives, no locks, not even a single shadow in the corner.

I have pizza crusts in my belly and I don’t even want to stab it.

I wake up twice.

The first time the clock says 1:22 A.M. I’m dreaming about shoveling ashes. The handle of the shovel is so hot I drop it. I open my eyes. The pills made my head too heavy to lift off the pillow.

Elijah is sitting at the tiny table by the window, cigarette in his mouth, the flickering shadows from the television lighting his face. He shuffles cards once, twice, three times. Deals a hand. Puts it back in the deck and shuffles again—once, twice, three times. His sleeves are rolled up to his biceps. The man/monster tattoo on his forearm glows brighter than the end of the cigarette. Smoke rises from his skin and hangs above his head like it’s on fire.

Elijah becomes the monster in the skin or the monster becomes Elijah; they switch back and forth as fast as the cards being dealt on the table:
flash, flash, flash.

My eyes fade to black.

The second time I wake up, the sun is burning through the holes in the curtains.

He’s gone.

I open the curtains. The space where the El Camino was parked is partly drifted-in with snow. Looks like he got stuck twice getting out of the lot. I should have heard the spinning tires, the whining engine. I would have if I hadn’t taken that second pill.

He’s not really gone. He probably went to buy gas and pick up some breakfast. We should have talked about that last night. I bet I could eat a half bagel, maybe some yogurt.

I crawl back under the blankets that smell like smoke and fall asleep.

One o’clock in the afternoon. It’s Christmas, I think.

The plows have been by. Did he have an accident? Did he get lost?

I drink cups of hot water from the tap until my head finally clears. Two sleeping pills is definitely a mistake because it has taken me this long to realize that the milk crate with his notebooks is missing. So are his bags of pages and clothes.