Wintergirls

by Laurie Halse Anderson

  I look out the window. A car is stuck in the parking lot. The engine races as the driver spins her tires, pushing the accelerator but going nowhere fast. Plows lumber by, chains tinkling, blades sending up sparks as they scrape the ice from the road. Everything is buried in the snow. It looks like a different world.

  “Sucks, doesn’t it?” Cassie says.

  My heart crashbangs into my ribs.

  She’s sitting across the room, feet propped up on the coffee table, the magazine in her lap folded open to a crossword puzzle. She’s dressed for the weather: blue coffin dress, gray ski jacket, knit cap with matching mittens on the chair next to her, damp boots lined with fur.

  “They never give you a break. It’s always ‘talk to the shrink, talk to your mother, do what you’re told, why can’t you grow up?’” She fills out a couple of boxes in the puzzle, then erases them. “Thirteen down. Do you know a four-letter word for ‘contract’?”

  “Why won’t you leave me alone?”

  “I miss you.”

  The back of my throat tastes like I might pass out. I lean against Sheila’s desk and pinch one of the cuts between my ribs. The pain lights me up like a taser. “You know what Emma saw, right?”

  Cassie writes an answer in the puzzle. “‘Bind,’ that’ll fit. Maybe.”

  “I can’t believe I did that to her.”

  “You don’t deserve to live.” She says it like she’s telling me which pair of jeans fits better. “Use a bigger knife next time. Cut deeper. Get it over with.”

  “I don’t think I want to die.”

  She snorts. “Yeah, right. You can’t even eat a bowl of cereal without having a meltdown. Do you honestly think you’ll ever do something difficult, like, say, go to college? Or get a job, maybe live on your own? What about shopping in the grocery store? Ooooh—scary!”

  The toilet in Dr. Parker’s office flushes.

  I inch toward the door. “Why are you being so mean?”

  “Friends tell friends the truth.”

  “Yeah, but not to hurt. To help.”

  One instant she’s in the chair by the window. The next, she’s standing in front of me, right up in my face, dropping the temperature below zero. Her skin is rough like a cemetery statue. Her smell is choking.

  “You want me to help you, Lia-Lia?”

  Can you kill a ghost by driving a knitting needle through her heart? Or least put her back in the ground where she belongs?

  “Help you like you helped me?” She stretches out the last word until it rattles in her throat. “How’s this then? You’re not skinny. You’re a pus-filled whale. Your mom wishes she had given you up for adoption. Your dad secretly thinks you’re not really his kid. People laugh at you when your fat jiggles. You’re ugly. You’re stupid. You’re boring. The only thing you’re good at is starving, but you can’t even do that right. You’re a waste.”

  She winks. “And that’s why I love you. Hurry up, okay?”

  Dr. Parker opens the door. “Ready?”

  054.00

  She turns on the space heater and gives me an emergency blanket to put on top of the ugly hair afghan. “Sorry it’s so cold. They really need to replace these windows.”

  I curl into a ball on the couch, clutching my knitting to my stomach.

  She assumes her position behind the desk. “You’ve had a rough time of it. I’m really happy you’re here. I imagine those stitches are hurting.”

  This is where I keep my mouth shut for fifteen minutes, pluck the white fuzz on my arms. But my heart is filled with poison and it’s swelling, throwing itself against the bone cage so hard my teeth are rattling and my stitches want to pop.

  “It feels like they pumped an entire ocean into me,” my lips say.

  “Because of the IV fluids?” she asks.

  “I slosh every time I move.”

  “You were very dehydrated. Had you stopped drinking, too, even water?”

  I take the knitting out of the bag. Knit, knit, purl. “I don’t remember. Maybe.”

  “How are the cuts?”

  “The stitches hurt more than the cuts. The doctor put in too many of them. I can hardly move without ripping them open.”

  She lets a quiet minute flow by, then asks, “Can I see the stitches?”

  “No,” I say. “Not yet.”

  She nods. “What else is bothering you?”

  “That smell is driving me crazy.” Crap. I wasn’t going to say that.

  “What smell?”

  I put the needles in my lap and watch as the yarn winds itself around my hands. “You don’t smell it, do you?”

  She shakes her head slowly, afraid to startle this strange talking girl who is covered in my skin. “Can you describe it?”

  “At first I thought it was cookies, Christmas cookies, and that I was smelling it because my stupid brain was trying to trick me into eating. But it’s not that. It’s Cassie. When I smell it, she’s close by.”

  “Cassie, your friend who died last month.”

  “Ginger, cloves, and sugar, like burning cookies. At first it was nice. It reminded me of her. Now it scares me.”

  “I don’t quite understand.”

  Oh, God. Oh, God. I am on top of the highest mountain. The icy ground is shaking, an earthquake, the world beneath me opening up with fire, steel arms ready to pull me down.

  I have to move. I can’t stay here anymore.

  I throw myself down the mountain and open my mouth.

  I tell about Nanna Marrigan’s funeral and the shadows that have hovered on the edges of things ever since. I tell her about seeing ghosts in store windows and old mirrors and how most of them are quite nice, but not all.

  As my lips move, the room stretches long and narrow, like the red rubber walls are being pulled by giant hands. Dr. Parker’s voice shrinks as her desk moves farther and farther away from me.

  “Do the ghosts frighten you?”

  “Cassie does.”

  The yarn tightens around my hands until my fingers are purple.

  “Can you tell me about that?”

  I tell her. I tell her everyfreakingCassiestory, how she sat up in her coffin, how she watched me at night, how she crawled in my head, haunted every step, made it snow in the drugstore. How I stopped taking my pills, took extra pills, worked out for hours at night, stopped eating, stopped drinking, cut and cut to make her go away, to make everything go away. How nothing works. Rain, rain, rain pours down my face, nearly drowning me.

  Dr. Parker keeps her tiny spider eyes locked on mine, coaxing the words out by sitting motionless in the center of her web, hardly breathing. I talk until my throat is empty and I have no feeling in my hands.

  She comes out from behind the desk and gently unwinds the yarn. The blood burns back into my fingers. She wipes my tears with a soft tissue and sits next to me.

  “Who else knows about this?”

  “Nobody. No, wait, that’s not true. Cassie knows.”

  “You never told your parents about seeing ghosts? Not when you were younger?”

  “No way. Mom would have told me to cut the drama. Dad would have suggested I think about majoring in poetry, maybe plan on a PhD in Gothic. They never hear me; they can barely see me. I’m a doll that they’ve outgrown.”

  Dr. Parker pulls a cherry cough drop out of the pocket of her cardigan, unwraps it and puts it in her mouth. She clicks it against her teeth for a minute. Outside, the snow piles higher and higher.

  Finally, she speaks. “Why are you telling me this today?”

  I swallow, hard. I’m already in over my head. Might as well give her everything.

  “Cassie’s trying to kill me. She says I’m trapped between the living and the dead, and she wants me on her team. She’s in your waiting room right now, working on a crossword puzzle.”

  “You saw her there?” Dr. Parker rubs the back of my hand with her fingertips.

  “I told her to leave me alone. She won’t.”

  Ding! The shut-up-now timer int
errupts me.

  She presses her lips together and stands, slowly, stretching the muscles in her legs and back. “Can you see Cassie now?”

  “No, she’s not in here, she’s on the other side of that door. Or she was. Go check the crossword puzzle. She got thirteen down wrong. She wrote ‘bind.’ It should have been ‘oath.’ ”

  As I explain, Dr. Parker pours water into a Styrofoam cup and sticks it in the microwave.

  “You could check the magazine.” I stuff my yarn into the bag. “I’m not making this up; I am not hallucinating. It’s as real as the blood on my bandages, or that cough drop in your mouth.”

  “There is no way of proving who filled out the puzzle,” she says.

  “But I told you about the mistake she made.”

  She takes the cup out of the microwave, sticks a tea bag in it, adds a packet of sugar, and stirs it with a plastic stick. “You could have seen that when you were flipping through the pages or made the mistake yourself.”

  “I suppose.”

  There are voices in the waiting room, the next patient desperate enough to come out on Christmas Eve day in a snowstorm.

  Dr. Parker hands me the cup. “Tea,” she says. “Always helps.”

  I sip. It tastes like sweetened pencil shavings.

  She sits back at her desk and picks up her pen. “I’m really proud of you, Lia. You accomplished more today than in the last two years.” She makes a note on a yellow pad. “Do I have your permission to discuss this session?”

  I blow my nose. “Sure, why not?”

  “Thank you. I want to talk to the New Seasons director about this. We may want to develop a different treatment plan. His facility might not be the right place for you.”

  I blow my nose. “I can stay at home and be treated as an outpatient?”

  She writes down another note before she speaks. “No. That’s not what I said.”

  Something in her voice freezes me, my hand in the air, reaching for another tissue. “I don’t get it.”

  “I think we should consider a psychiatric-care facility.”

  There is a booming noise outside, thunder in the middle of the snow. The windows shake. She keeps talking like it’s an everyday thing, like she’s in the habit of throwing scared little girls into nuthouses.

  “You deserve the best,” she continues. “Skilled people who know how to bring your mind back into balance. When the hallucinations and delusions are under control, it will be easier for you to work on your self-image issues and the relationships that cause you so much pain.”

  “You think I made it up,” I say. “You don’t believe that I see ghosts.”

  “I believe that you’ve created a metaphorical universe in which you can express your darkest fears. In one aspect, yes, I believe in ghosts, but we create them. We haunt ourselves, and sometimes we do such a good job, we lose track of reality.” She stands up. “I hate to stop now, but I have another patient waiting. You really should be proud of yourself, Lia. You made a breakthrough today. How are you getting home?”

  “Jennifer.”

  She pulls aside the curtain and looks into the parking lot. “Black SUV, right? I don’t see it out there.”

  “She hates driving in bad weather.”

  “I’m sure she’ll be here soon.”

  “Better late than never.”

  I follow her to the waiting room, where a very pissed-off mom is yelling in whispers at her daughter, whose eyes look like murder. Dr. Parker waves them into her chamber.

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

  055.00

  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.

  056.00

  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.”

  057.00

  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.
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  “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—”