Halfway House

by Katharine Noel

  “Can you work with all that noise?”

  Angie shrugged. Her hair fell into her face, and Jordana stopped herself from walking over and pushing it back. She’d been yelled at for doing that.

  Angie’s room contained both the detritus of girlhood and the clichés of a teenager: her old Nancy Drews, a collection of glass hippos, taped-up magazine pictures of Olympic swimmers, milk crates of records, photos of her with Jess or with Abe. Her swimming trophies lined the windowsill, bodies straining toward invisible water. The floor, like all the upstairs floors, was covered in green wall-to-wall carpet, and the furniture, like all the furniture in the house, was heavy, dark, inherited from Jordana’s parents. Angie had (without asking) painted it white and maroon, which only made it look more lumbering. Nothing suggested that Angie could have spent five of the last twelve months in psychiatric care. Jordana didn’t know whether the room’s blandness was reassuring or strange.

  “What are you working on?”

  “Homework.”

  “What kind of homework?”

  “Anatomy and physiology.”

  They went through a few more rounds. Was anatomy interesting? Not really. Was it hard? Not too hard. How was school? Angie shot her a look, and Jordana said (she heard, hated, but couldn’t help that she was whining), “I’m just asking—”

  “You ask every day, Ma. It’s okay. I’m okay. I’m taking my meds. I’m not going to go crazy again. Okay?”

  “I know you’re taking your meds.”

  “Yeah, that’s why you watch me every single time I take them.” With exaggerated patience: “Could you get out of my room now? You’re not exactly helping me concentrate.”

  Angie made Jordana want to grab her, either to shake or embrace. Before she could stop herself, she reached forward to push Angie’s hair behind her ear. Angie jerked back. “Ma!”

  “It was in your face!”

  Angie unhooked the lock of hair, shaking it in front of her eyes again. “You’re always around.”

  “Okay.” Jordana had to force herself to start moving. “How are college applications going?”

  “They’re fine. They’re almost done.”

  Jordana made herself not push. She stooped, gathering a sticky plate, some cups. Just as she put her hand on the doorknob, her daughter said, “These questions are so pointless.”

  Jordana paused, unsure.

  “Like this one,” Angie said. “Like it really matters if you know the formula for lactic acid buildup.”

  Jordana took a hesitant step back into the room. “Do you want me to take a look at it?”

  Angie shrugged. Jordana was terrible at anything mathlike, but she bent down to see the question, something about calculating carbon dioxide in the blood.

  “Have you been drinking?” Angie said.

  Jordana’s hand flew to her mouth and she took a step back. “I had a glass of wine with Beth after work. She’d had a difficult morning.” Angie looked at her strangely; she was talking too fast. “I’ll go brush my teeth.”

  “It’s not a big deal.”

  “It will just take a minute—”

  “I need you to help me.”

  Jordana moved back into the circle of light cast by the desk lamp. She bent cautiously over her daughter’s work, lips clamped.

  They worked on the first problem until they both got frustrated, Angie near tears, saying, “Forget it, I’ll come back to that one,” and Jordana saying, “Why don’t they explain this better? Are you sure the formula isn’t here?” She took the book, flipping backward through the pages.

  “I’ll go back to it,” Angie said, twisting the book away. Then: “No, don’t go. Help me with this next one.”

  Jordana knew she wasn’t helping. But she didn’t want to leave, and her daughter clearly didn’t want to be alone. “Scootch over, then. My back is killing me.”

  “God, your breath stinks.”

  She took a deep breath and perched on the edge of Angie’s desk chair, hip to hip with her daughter. They began on the second question, about the rate of oxygen pumped into the blood during exercise. The lamp threw a circle of yellow light over her daughter, now really in tears; the penciled formulas; the erasures that turned the paper gray and nappy. They worked that way together, Angie giving up on problems and insisting she’d come back. Sometimes, they came up with answers that seemed wrong to Jordana but that Angie insisted were right, they were fine; could they just go on? Jordana breathed through her nose. When Pieter’s voice rose up the stairs, calling them for dinner, it was startling to remember the world still going on outside the room.

  Nine

  Angie bought her bus ticket for Boston, and then she and her mom went to the grubby doughnut store that took up an alcove at one end of the station. Angie got a cup of decaf and her mother got regular. “Should we split a maple bar?”

  “Mom.”

  “What?”

  “You don’t think I’m fat enough?”

  Her mother’s shoulders tightened. “You’re not fat.”

  “Whatever you say.” Angie took her coffee over to one of the little tables, the sticky floor pulling softly at her boots. She hadn’t seen Abe since he’d left at the end of August, more than two months ago. A bald man with gingery tufts of hair above each ear hunched over a magazine two tables over. He looked up as Angie sat. She smiled; he looked back down at his reading.

  God, why had she smiled at some stranger? Why did she have to be so weird?

  She looked to see if her mother was coming, but she’d stopped to talk to the girl behind the counter. Her mother always talked with girls and women working shitty jobs. She would also do things like go over to a woman yelling at her son in the grocery store and offer to help out. Somehow, she did it in a way so that the woman actually consented. Angie’s mother would pick up the crying kid and plant him on her hip, talking softly. She would hand the child her keys to play with, and then walk around the store with the mother, chatting, gently jiggling the child. Angie, left standing by their own cart, would watch as they disappeared around the corner.

  Though she hadn’t slept much the night before, she kept her eyes open. It was bright outside, snowing weakly. Next door, a bunch of teenagers—a year or two younger than Angie—hung out in the slushy parking lot of the Cumberland Farms convenience store. Two guys with longish feathery hair messed around, pushing each other. A girl perched on the hood of a car held a paper-bagged bottle between her knees, probably peach schnapps or Bailey’s Irish Cream. Behind them, the stubble of a November-blue field.

  Recently, Angie had begun thinking about hurting herself. It wasn’t that she wanted to hurt herself but that the images wouldn’t leave her alone. She saw herself go into the kitchen and slash her palm with a knife, stab herself in the thigh. Cut off a finger. She saw herself going into the garage after the garden loppers. If she closed her eyes even for a second, she imagined her own forearms slashed with long lozenge-shaped wounds.

  Taking a deep, shuddering breath, she tried to concentrate on Abe.

  She was sick. She was really sick. She really was sick.

  Abe. They were supposed to go see some play.

  Everything had begun to look like a weapon: nail file, bleach, window, book, belt, bathtub. Screwdriver (eye). Pen (eardrum). Stove (forearm, cheek). She avoided being in the kitchen alone, or down in the basement. She peed as quickly as possible. She hadn’t given up cigarettes (lashes, face, stomach, inner thigh, hair, hands, hands, hands), but she had given up smoking alone. In front of people, she trusted herself to maintain.

  Finally, her mother turned, balancing a maple bar in one hand. She wore a narrow oat-colored sweater and long tinkling earrings of coral and silver; she’d begun buying new clothes, something Angie and her father had been begging her to do for years. Her hair still went everywhere, she still wore old jeans of Luke’s, but the nicer things made the messy ones seem part of a deliberate effect.

  She put the maple bar down on the table, saying,
“You don’t have to have any, it’s for me.” The glaze had a dent, the size of a fingertip, cracked and hazy. “So, what are your plans?”

  “My plans.”

  “For Cambridge.”

  Angie shrugged. It made her too anxious to think about how she was going to get through the three-day weekend. Abe had said something about a party tonight. “Harvard is beautiful,” her mother said.

  Angie bit down hard on the edge of the cup. The Styrofoam tasted satisfyingly bitter, which helped keep her mind back from hurting herself.

  “I don’t want—” her mother said hesitantly. “I know Abe cares about you, but—”

  “So, like, I say I don’t want a doughnut so you put one in front of me? Is that how it works?”

  “He’s in a new place,” her mother continued doggedly. “He’ll have new friends, and—”

  Angie crossed her arms over her chest, eyebrows raised, looking at her hard.

  “I just—I don’t—”

  “God, just say it, whatever it is.”

  “I don’t want you to be disappointed if it’s not all you’ve hoped.”

  “I’m crazy,” Angie said, “not stupid.”

  “You’re not crazy,” snapped her mother. Then, more softly, “And you’re not fat.”

  This was one of her mother’s involved, protective days; she either acted intensely present like this, or else busy and distracted, impatient, easily irritated. She pulled her broken-strapped watch from the pocket of her jeans. Angie looked away from her, at the man two seats over bent close to the table, where his magazine was laid out. As he turned the page, a picture flashed for a moment: two teenage girls in fingerless black leather gloves, their long-nailed hands on each other’s naked breasts, tongues meeting in the air.

  Angie stood, knee hitting the table. One of the cups capsized, coffee sloshing up onto her mother’s oatmeal-colored sweater. Her mother jerked up, eyes wide. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. I just think we should go.”

  Her mother sank back. “You could be a little more careful. We have fifteen minutes.” She pulled a napkin from the dispenser on the table, wet it with her tongue, and blotted at the coffee stain.

  Angie bounced from foot to foot. “Can we go?”

  “It’s not coming out. Damn it, Angie.”

  The man looked up from his magazine, head tilted toward them.

  “Please, Mom. Please can we go?” She was almost shouting.

  Her mother looked up, about to say something, then caught herself; she actually jerked a tiny bit backward. She nodded and rose, gathering up her cup and soggy napkins. She carried them to the trash, wiped her hands on her jeans.

  When she came back, she put her arm around Angie’s shoulders. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.” More forcefully: “I’m fine. God.”

  “You know, you don’t have to go to Boston.”

  For just a moment, the idea washed Angie with relief. She imagined climbing the stairs at home, getting into her clean, cool sheets, sleeping and sleeping. But even more than she was scared of going, she didn’t want to be someone who stayed home. Twisting out from under her mother’s arm, she said, “Don’t be dumb.”

  Sometimes she remembered Abe as more handsome than was true, other times as uglier, but here he was at Boston’s North Station: just Abe, with his flat wide mouth and beautiful shoulders, holding flowers. He seemed so wholesome, so normal, that she began crying with relief. She rushed to him and pressed against his warmth and solidity, wishing her body could melt into his. The gaudiness of the flowers—a confusion of mums, carnations, roses, the tulle of baby’s breath, a big orange lily—moved her.

  She continued crying on the T, Abe’s arm around her. “What is it?” he said. “What can I do?”

  “It’s nothing. I don’t know. I’m fine. I’m good.”

  Harvard Square was a jumble of street musicians, T-shirt sellers, panhandlers, students, café tables. A man played the bagpipes a few feet from another man playing the harmonica, the strains of “Amazing Grace” tangling with wheezy blues. Angie and Abe joined a surge of people crossing the street against the light; cars honked. And then they passed through a brick arch and into the hush of Harvard Yard, the chill of shadows across its lawn, the crunch of dark red leaves underfoot, students moving across the yard, two others standing still, talking. One wore an orange wool scarf so long it touched the ground behind her; crumbs of dead leaf clung to its fringe.

  Abe’s room in Thayer Hall was the inner of a two-room double. His roommate was out, and as they passed through his room Abe opened the closet: velvet, silk, what looked like tiny steel links. Angie reached out a finger to touch them.

  “Chain mail,” Abe said. His letters were filled with stories of Evan Johansson, who had turned out to be a sullen Creative Anachronist. “He’s probably out jousting.”

  “Does he wear this stuff to class?”

  “Sometimes. And the thing is, I still don’t really believe it. Like he still might turn out to be kidding. Even though clearly he’s not.” Abe closed Evan Johansson’s wardrobe and opened the door to his own room. “Ta-da!” He put Angie’s suitcase down beside the desk. “Plus he’s up all night and then sleeps all morning.”

  “What can I do with these?” she asked.

  Abe took the flowers from her, looked around, and stuck them in a coffee mug where they splayed out awkwardly.

  “Why’s he up all night?”

  “He says his circadian rhythms aren’t like other people’s.”

  The room had ebony-framed windows and elaborate ceiling moldings. The elegance of its architecture contrasted with the stolid furnishings: blond wood headboard, blond dresser, blond wardrobe, blond desk. The bed was neatly made up with a red blanket. Before Abe left for school he’d asked Angie for a photograph, which now sat, framed, on the blond bedside table. Above his bed hung R.E.M. and Elvis Costello posters he’d gotten from Stars.

  “At last: we are alone,” Abe said. He started the sentence off stagy and Dracula-like but ended in a normal voice, as though he’d gotten self-conscious midway through.

  She went over to hug him. If she could always be in arm’s reach of Abe she’d be okay. Breathing him in, she made the mistake of closing her eyes a moment and saw her gashed arms again.

  “What?” Abe said.

  “What?”

  “You made, like, a sound.”

  She reached over to pick up the photograph of herself, studying it as though she hadn’t seen it before. It had been taken a little over a year ago, before her break and before lithium. She sat on a picnic blanket, looking over her shoulder, smiling at the person (her mother) taking the picture. They’d been having a family picnic, the kind of occasion that Angie and Luke called Enforced Voorsterism. She’d been smiling because it was a photograph, not because she’d been having a particularly good time. She wasn’t stupid enough to think that before she got sick everything had been perfect.

  “Do you tell people about me? I mean, do you tell them about … that I was sick?”

  Abe shook his head. “That has nothing to do with who you are.” He took the photo, tossed it on the bed, kissed her. As long as she kept her eyes open, she could stay okay. Abe moaned and put his hands on her hips, pulling her against him.

  Kissing her, he began to tug her sweater up. “I’ve missed you so much,” he said.

  She tried to go through the motions, trying to think what the right motions should be.

  Abe stopped and pulled back. “Is everything all right?”

  She reached up and put her hand over his eyes. “Don’t look at me, okay?”

  “What?”

  “Just, right now—I just. … Close your eyes.”

  Evan Johansson turned out to be stocky, with a dark circular beard, like he’d pressed a dirty glass to his mouth. It was five in the afternoon and dark; outside the window, wind gusted up old leaves from the grass. To Angie he said, “You must be the H.T.H.”

>   “This is Angie. Angie, Evan.”

  Angie said, “H.T.H.?”

  “Hometown Honey.” His accent, flat and midwestern, contrasted bizarrely with his voluminous wine-colored cloak. Perched on one shoulder was some kind of stuffed animal—no, an actual taxidermied raven. Angie winced. Its scaly feet had been sewn directly to the cloth.

  “How was jousting?” Abe asked.

  Evan turned away to hang his cloak in his closet. “Sparring. Did you see horses?”

  “Sorry.” Abe made a face at Angie. “How was sparring?”

  “Would it mean anything to you if I said I scored six touches?”

  “Nope.”

  “Well, that’s how it was.” He finished arranging the cloak on the hanger, shut the door of the wardrobe, turned, and faced them with his legs planted wide apart and arms folded across his chest.

  “We’re off to the Union.”

  Evan said, “For a change.”

  “Do you want to come?”

  She should admire Abe’s niceness, but actually it annoyed her: always believing the best of people made him obtuse. Clearly Evan Johansson despised Abe. She imagined he saw Abe—saw both of them—as conventional and untroubled. Also dumb in a way that unconventional, troubled people didn’t have the choice to be. She was sure Evan Johansson would sigh noisily and turn Abe’s invitation down. Instead, he sighed noisily, turned back to the wardrobe, pulled out his cloak again. She couldn’t believe he walked around with a dead bird on his shoulder; was that even legal?

  A needle going through the feet, the tug of thread as it pulled through her flesh.

  “Ouch.” Abe jerked his hand from hers and shook it; she must have been clutching too hard. “Careful, there.”

  She groped for his hand again. “I’ll be careful. Sorry. I’ll be careful.”

  The three of them went out into the hallway, which was filled with the noise of people getting drunk and shouting. Angie had imagined something different for Harvard, a greater solemnity. Instead, paper banners festooned the hall, not unlike the paper banners at Applefield High, advertising events in Magic Marker: a room-to-room party; a movie—The Shining—to be shown in the Common Room.