Wintergirls (7 page)

I spear the thinnest slice of potato. “Physics. He post-poned it. Nobody understands the speed of light. How’s the migraine?”

“Like a herd of cattle stampeding through my head.”

“Ouch,” I say. Emma tries to cut a Brussels sprout with her fork, but it jumps off her plate and rolls across the table to me. Jennifer winces when the fork screeches across the plate. I toss the runaway sprout to Emma, who catches it with a giggle and wipes her eyes on her sleeve.

Jennifer reaches over to take the sprout out of Emma’s hand, and knocks over the glass of milk. Emma flinches as the milk floods her plate, then soaks the tablecloth and starts to drip on the new carpet.

The phone rings. Jennifer buries her head in her hands.

Dad stands up. “Let the answering machine get it,” he says. “I’ll clean up the mess.”

Jennifer takes a deep breath and heads for the kitchen. “I hate people who screen their calls. I’ll get it.”

Dad mops up the spill, pats Emma’s back, and tells her it’s just a glass of milk. I sweep my roll and half the meat into my napkin, fold it up and put it in my lap.

Jennifer comes back with her mouth in a perfect knot.

“It’s her.” She holds the phone out to Dad.

Jennifer is not the reason my parents got divorced.

The reason was named Amber, and before her Whitney, and before her Jill and the others. When Mom finally kicked him out, Dad went to a new bank to open his own checking account. Jennifer worked there. He was so smit-ten he went back every day for a week, making up dumb questions about home equity loans and IRAs. They were married before I was used to the fact that my parents had actually divorced.

Dad takes the phone. “Hello? Hang on. . . . Chloe, I can hear you —”

Jennifer frowns and shakes her head.

He gets the message. “We’re eating dinner,” he says as he walks out, phone three inches from his ear. “Yes, all of us. She’s dealing with it fine.”

As he walks down the hall the music stops. The CD

player
cli-clicks
and changes disks: Tchaikovsky,
Swan
Lake
. Jennifer tells Emma to wipe the cheese sauce off her chin.

Half an hour later, Dad opens the door to Mom. Her voice in the hall lashes me to my chair with prickly vines. The last time I saw her was August 31, the day I turned eighteen.

I can’t see her see me now strong/empty/strong.

The breakup with my mother was the same old story told a million times. Girl is born, girl learns to talk and walk, girl mispronounces words and falls down. Over and over again. Girl forgets to eat, fails adolescence, mother washes her hands of Girl, scrubbing with surgical soap and a brush for three full minutes, then gloving up before handing her over to specialists and telling them to experiment at will. When they let her out, Girl rebels.

Mom walks into the dining room, and Jennifer vanishes,
poof!
It screws up the laws of physics for her to occupy the same room as the first wife.

“Late rounds?” Dad asks.

Mom ignores him and walks toward me. She kisses my cheek and pulls back to study me with her X-ray/MRI/

CAT scan–vision. “How are you feeling?”

“Great,” I say.

“I’ve missed you.” She gives me another kiss, lips cool and chapped. When she sits in Jennifer’s chair, she winces. Her knees act up when the weather changes.

“You look tired,” she says.

“Pot calling the kettle black,” I say.

Dr. Chloe Marrigan wears her fatigue like a suit of armor. To be the best, you have to give everything all the time, then you have to give some more: hundred-hour weeks, crushing patient loads, working miracles the way other people flip burgers. But tonight she looks worse than usual. I don’t remember seeing those lines around her mouth. Her corn-yellow hair is tamed into a tight French braid, but a few strands of silver hair flash in the candlelight. The skin on her face used to be tight as a drum. Now it’s sagging a little at her neck.

Dad tries to make small talk again. “Was it an emergency surgery?”

She nods. “Quintuple bypass. The guy was a mess.”

“Will he make it?” Dad asks.

She puts her pager next to Jennifer’s dirty fork.

“Doubtful.” She measures the three bites of turkey left on my plate and the bread crumbs that I scattered next to it. “Lia looks pale. Has she been eating?”

“Of course she has,” Dad says.

It took her seven sentences to piss me off. That’s an Olympic-qualifying accomplishment. I lock my mouth, stand up, pick up my plate, pick up my father’s plate, and walk out of the room.

Jennifer and Emma are at the kitchen table, a stack of flash cards between them so the quizzing of division facts can continue. I load the dishwasher as slowly as I can and signal the answers to Emma by drawing numbers in the air behind Jennifer’s back.

Dad calls to me from the dining room. “Lia, come back in here, please.”

“Good luck,” Jennifer murmurs as I leave the room.

“Thanks.”

I put Emma’s silverware on her plate, but Dad says,

“Don’t worry about the dishes. We need to talk.”

Talk = yell + scold + argue + demand.

Dr. Marrigan pushes up the sleeves of her green silk turtleneck. Her nails are short and polish-free, the magic fingers connected to the hands connected to the forearms roped with steel muscle and tendons that lead to shoulders, neck, and bionic brain. Her fingertips drum the table. “Sit down, please,” she says.

I sit.

Daddy: Your mother has a concern.

Mom: It’s more than a concern.

Lia: About?

Daddy: I told her that you’ve been fine since we got the news.

Lia: He’s right.

Mom, spine not touching the back of her chair: I’m afraid Cassie’s death might trigger you. The research shows—

Lia: I’m not a lab rat.

Mom glances at the blank screen of her pager, hoping it will go off.

Lia: We stopped talking months ago.

Mom: You were best friends for nine years. Not talking for a couple months doesn’t make that go away.

Lia stares at a stain in the tablecloth.

Daddy: Do you know how she died?

Mom, taking a roll from the basket: Cindy will call me when the autopsy results come in. I offered to explain them to her.

Daddy: I bet it will show drugs.

Mom: Maybe, but that’s not the point. The point is Lia.

Emma walks in to say good night, her eyes puffy. Dad kisses her; Dr. Marrigan gives her a clinical smile. I hug her close and whisper that long division is a stupid poop-head. She giggles and squeezes me tight, then runs up to take her bath. Jennifer stands with her back to Dr. Marrigan and me and asks her husband some lame questions about the garbage pickup tomorrow and his socks in the dryer, little homey details to remind Wife Number One who wears the diamond ring around here.

I brush the crumbs from the tablecloth into my hand.

Drugs didn’t kill Cassie, not unless it was a couple of bottles of aspirin. Or she drank vodka until she fell into a coma. Or she cut too deep. Or maybe someone else killed her, some bad guy who followed her and stole her purse and emptied her checking account.

No, that would have been in the newspaper.

I should have asked Elijah what he saw, what the police really said. I should have told him my name. But, no.

I don’t know who he is, not really. What if he lied about having an alibi, what if the police think he’s a suspect?

And what kind of guy lives in a creepy motel? Maybe he was a figment of my imagination. The whole day could have been a blackout dream I spun for myself because admitting that I spent the whole day in bed is pathetic.

Doubtful.

Poof!
Jennifer vanishes again.

Mom, taking roll out of basket: I can’t go to the wake because of work. Are you going?

Dad: It might be awkward. I haven’t talked to them in years.

Lia: I’ll go.

Mom: Absolutely not. You’re emotionally fragile. I’ll pay our respects at the funeral on Saturday.

Lia: But you just made a big deal about how long Cassie and me were friends.

Dad: Your mother is right. It’ll upset you too much.

Lia: I’m not upset.

Mom: I don’t believe you. I want you to see Dr. Parker more frequently. At least once a week, maybe more.

Lia, quietly: No. It’s a waste of time and money.

Dad: What do you mean?

Lia: Dr. Parker is dragging out my therapy so she can keep getting paid.

Mom, picking out bits of grain from roll: You’re alive because of Dr. Parker.

Lia, bleeding where they can’t see: Stop exaggerating.

Mom, dropping crumbs: She’s slipping back into denial, David. Why are you letting this happen? You’re not supporting her recovery, you’re letting it go up in flames.

Dad: What are you talking about? We’re a hundred percent supportive, aren’t we, Lia?

Mom, acid-eyes: You coddle her, you let her call the shots.

Dad, louder: Did you just say we coddle her?

They leap into battle, the steps to the dance burned into their muscle memory. I pull a candle close to me and push the soft wax at the top of it into the blue flame.

My parents met at a midsummer’s party
by a lake in the mountains. Dad was finishing up his PhD and knew the guy who owned the cabin. Mom had a rare night off between her internship and residency. She and her friends were looking for a different party and got lost.

When I was a real girl, they would cuddle with me on the couch and tell me the fairy-tale version of how they fell in love:

Once upon a time, on the shores of a purple lake so
deep it had no bottom, a man saw a lady with long gold-en hair walking barefoot in the sand. The lady heard
the man singing sweetly and playing the guitar. It was
fate that their paths should cross.

They paddled a canoe to the middle of the water and
laughed. The moon saw how beautiful they were and
how much in love, and gave them a baby for their very
own. Just then, the canoe sprung a leak and started
to sink. They had to paddle hard, hard, hard, but they
made it to shore just in time.

They named the baby Lia and lived happily ever
after.

The skin on the edge of my thumb rests on the cusp between safety and flame.

The real story is not poetic. Mom got pregnant. Dad married her. They couldn’t stand each other by the time I was born. They were random gods who mated by a wine-dark sea. They should have turned me into a fish or a flower when they had the chance.

Mom: She looks like hell. I want her to move back with me until she graduates.

Dad, throwing napkin on table: Oh, for Christ’s sake, Chloe . . .

The two of them will fight forever.

I blow out the candle.

Emma hears me come up the stairs and asks me to watch a movie with her. I stick Band-Aids on my weeping cuts, put on pink pajamas so we match, and snuggle with her under her rainbow comforter. She arranges all of her stuffed animals around us in a circle, everyone facing the TV, then presses PLAY.

When she falls asleep, I flip through the channels one after the other after the other.

Dr. Marrigan leaves an hour later, without bothering to come up and say good night or notice that I haven’t unpacked most of my boxes or see what a good almost-sister I can be. The front door closes hard with a muffled
whoomp
that pushes air against all the windows. Professor Overbrook bolts the door and sets the security system. I turn out the princess light next to the bed. Emma breathes through her open mouth.

Ghosts dare not enter here. I fall asleep with my head on a raggedy elephant.

“Wake up, Lia!” Emma shouts in my ear. “You’re going to be late! You’re going to be in trouble.”

I’m under Emma’s tie-dyed comforter, my head on the elephant. Her room smells like dryer sheets and cats.

“Don’t go back to sleep again!”

“What day is it?” I ask.

“You know,” she says.

Today is waking Wednesday.

History class is a genocide lecture, ending with ten minutes of photographs of Polish children killed by the Germans in World War II. A couple of girls cry and the guys who usually make smart-ass remarks stare out the windows. Our Trig teacher is deeply, deeply disappoint-ed in our last test results. We have another nap movie in Physics:
An Introduction to Momentum and Collision
.

My English teacher flips out because the government is demanding we take yet another test to assess our reading skills, because we’re seniors and pretty soon we might have to read or something.

I eat in my car: diet soda (0) + lettuce (15) + 8 tablespoons salsa (40) + hard-boiled egg white (16) = lunch (71).

Two minutes before the buzzer sounds to set us free at the end of the day, the loudspeaker orders me to see the counselor, Ms. Rostoff, in the conference room. Most of the girls’ soccer team is there, too, along with Cassie’s friends from the stage crew and a couple of girls from the musical. Mira, my study partner from sophomore Span-ish, waves to me when I walk in. She was in our Girl Scout troop when we were little.

We are here to share our feelings and discuss a memorial to Cassie’s memory, “so her spirit will live on.” The room is freezing.

Ms. Rostoff has boxes of tissues decorated with kit-tens lined up on the table. Two gallons of discount-store red punch and tiny paper cups are arranged in a lovely display next to the plate of generic black-and-white cookies. Ms. Rostoff believes in the healing power of snacks.

She loves me better than anybody because I am such a mess I have to see a real shrink in the real world, and I have to go to the college where my dad teaches, so advis-ing me took two minutes.

The drama girls take over the beat-up couch and the rug in front of it. The soccer team wheels in spinny chairs from the conference room. I sit on the floor near the door, my back against the heating vent.

While we wait for stragglers, the soccer team complains about not getting enough time in the weight room, and the drama girls whine about the new director, a prima donna who has confused our school with Broadway.