by Sarah Dessen
I was worn out, broken: He had taken almost everything. But he had been all I’d had, all this time. And when the police led him away, I pulled out of the hands of all these loved ones, sobbing, screaming, everything hurting, to try and make him stay.
Me
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“Caitlin.”
I rolled across my pillow, turning away from the broad green hills outside my window. My roommate, Ginger, the bulimic, was standing in the doorway of our room. She had on overalls, her hair in braids, a pencil tucked behind her ear.
“Yeah?” I said.
“You have another visitor,” she said, cocking her head toward the other end of the hallway. “Lucky girl.”
I got up off the bed, grabbing my sweatjacket off the chair of my desk. As I shrugged it on, Ginger jumped onto her own bed, pulling a rolled-up crossword puzzle magazine out of her back pocket. She slid the pencil out from behind her ear, licked its tip, and flipped a few pages in the magazine until she found her current challenge.
I pulled my hair up in my hands as I started out of our room, up the hallway that was flanked with huge, double-glassed, floor-to-ceiling windows. It was so bright at midday I imagined it must be like what people see in near-death experiences, that long, bright walk that takes you right to God. Here, however, you opened the door at the end to find the visitors’ room, where the real world was allowed to peek in every Sunday and Wednesday from three to five.
I’d been at Evergreen Care Center since the day after the Fool’s Party. What had happened was a blur, punctuated by flashes of horrific moments: Rogerson’s face so dark, yelling at me. My mother, sobbing, as she carefully turned my arms and legs, examining the bruises. And finally, my own screaming, terrible shame as I pulled away from everyone, trying to hold on to the one person who had hurt me the most.
Once the police had taken Rogerson away, my father had carried me inside, where I sat balled up in a kitchen chair, clutching my knees and rocking back and forth. My parents and Boo and Stewart conferred in the other room, made phone calls, and tried to figure out what had happened. Later, I’d find out that it was Mrs. Merchant, from the Ladies Auxiliary, who’d glanced out the front window and seen us. She’d told my mother, then called the police, which effectively broke up the party. All that night, the tent stood empty outside, with pounds of tempeh salad and shelled shrimp rotting away. It was all still there, crackers fanned out on pretty party dishes, punch bowl half-full, surrounded by abandoned glasses and crumpled napkins, when I left the next day.
Rogerson’s car was there, too, parked right where he’d left it. Later, someone would come to pick it up. Maybe Dave. But the sight of it, sitting there, scared me all night long, as if he was still sitting in it, waiting for me so that we could replay that night again and again, like a movie where you can’t even tell the end from the beginning.
I’d heard of Evergreen Care Center before. Cass and I had always made fun of the stupid ads they ran on TV, featuring some dragged-out woman with a limp perm and big, painted-on circles under her eyes, downing vodka and sobbing uncontrollably. We can’t heal you at Evergreen, the very somber voiceover said. But we can help you to heal yourself. It had become our own running joke, applicable to almost anything.
“Hey, Cass,” I’d say, “hand me that toothpaste.”
“Caitlin,” she’d say, her voice dark and serious. “I can’t hand you the toothpaste. But I can help you hand the toothpaste to yourself.” Which she would then do, passing it off to me with a pseudo-nurturing squeeze of my hand.
Ha, ha. It didn’t seem quite so funny now.
Technically, I was admitted for drugs. This was because my mother had found a small bag of pot and my bowl in my jacket pocket, both of them coated with Commons Park sand. But everyone knew the bruises, Rogerson, what I had let happen to me—was the other reason I was here.
I wasn’t able to tell my parents anything in that first twenty-four hours. I couldn’t say I was sorry, or explain how I’d let this happen. I just sat in my room while my mother packed up my things, my knees pulled up tight and close to my chest. We left for Evergreen early in the morning, in the rain, and none of us spoke the entire way.
I suddenly realized, in that silent car ride, how long it had been since any of us had mentioned Cass out loud. It was like I’d finally done something to overshadow her completely, but not in the way I wanted to.
We met with the administrator, who checked me in and then took us to my room. My mother made my bed and put away my clothes while my father stood by the window, watching the rain, his hand in his pockets. Then it was time for them to leave.
“I’ll be back on Wednesday,” my mother told me, pulling me close to her chest. She was still handling me so gingerly, as if I was a piece of china already cracked and a fingertip’s weight could break me completely. “I’ll bring your blue sweater and some nice shams for this bed. Okay?”
I nodded. My father hugged me and kissed the top of my head, saying, “Hang in there, kiddo. You’re a good girl.”
I stood in my doorway as they left, my mother dabbing at her eyes and looking back every few steps, as if she wasn’t quite sure she could leave without me. When the main door clicked shut behind them, I went back and sat on my bed. Then I started crying. I didn’t stop for two days.
I cried in my room and through lunch. During group, individual, and specialized therapy. During crafts and personal time. I cried the entire time I was making huge amounts of potato salad in the kitchen for my chore work, and then I cried all night long under a huge, yellow moon that seemed to take up most of my window. I cried out everything I’d kept in since that summer day Cass had left, becoming a huge, drippy, snotty mess, a tissue permanently balled in my hand, my eyes so puffy I could hardly see.
I cried for Rogerson, and for Cass, and for myself. I cried because I was ashamed and I knew I could never face all of the people from the Fool’s Party. I cried because I’d fought with Rina and never had a chance to apologize, and I cried because I was homesick and missed my parents more than I had ever thought possible. I cried because I missed Rogerson, even though I knew that was crazy, and I cried because Corinna was gone, probably all the way to California, and I’d never told her what a good friend she’d been to me. But mostly, I cried because my life had been going full speed for so long and now it had just stopped, like running right into a big brick wall, knocking the wind and the fight right out of me. And I didn’t know if I ever even wanted to get up and start breathing again.
Evergreen was bearable. There was a certain peace to it, being so secluded, my day broken up into tiny manageable pieces. I didn’t think about getting through the week, or what would happen the next day: I just concentrated on making it through chore detail, or crafts class, or another therapy session. It was easier to take the days in tiny swallows, rather than biting everything off at once. I wasn’t sure yet how much I could keep down.
Ginger, who moved in with me after being attacked by her kleptomaniac roommate for using her nail file, said that the thing she hated most about Evergreen was all the talking.
“Group therapy, individual, specialized,” she complained to me one day as she tackled another crossword puzzle—her vice—and ignored the tray of food sitting in front of her on the table between us. “I am so sick of myself, I cannot even tell you. It’s like I’m some episode of the Brady Bunch I’ve been forced to watch eight hundred times. There’s nothing new there.”
But Ginger had been at Evergreen for almost a year, and she still had to divide her food into tiny little piles—a hierarchy I didn’t quite understand involving color and consistency—as well as be monitored so that she did not purge after each meal. As for me, I kind of liked all the talking, at least after the first session.
My doctor, Dr. Marshall, was a short, round woman with wildly frizzy hair who kind of reminded me of Boo. She wore running shoes and jeans and kept a bowlful of Jolly Ranchers on the table in her office. That first day, I ate s
ix of them, one right after the other, and didn’t say a word. She sat and watched me. I thought of Cass, that solemn look: At Evergreen, we can’t make you eat Jolly Ranchers. But we can help you to eat them yourself.
“Just start somewhere,” Dr. Marshall had said to me as I ground a banana-pineapple one to bits between my teeth. “It doesn’t have to be at the beginning.” She’d pulled her legs up, Indian-style, letting the legal pad she’d been holding drop to the floor.
“I thought everything always had to start at the beginning,” I said.
“Not in this room,” she said easily. “Go ahead, Caitlin. Just tell me one thing. It gets easier, I promise. The first thing you say is always the hardest.”
I looked down at my hands, stained mildly red from the particularly sticky watermelon Rancher. “Okay,” I said, reaching forward to take another one out of the bowl, just in case. She was already sitting back in her chair, readying herself for whatever glimpse I would give her into the mess I’d become. “What was the name of Pygmalion’s sister?”
She blinked, twice, obviously surprised. “Ummm,” she said, keeping her eyes on me. “I don’t know.”
“Rogerson did,” I told her. “Rogerson knew everything.”
During my second week at Evergreen, my mother brought me my dream journal. She didn’t know what it was, or even that Cass had given it to me. She’d just found it when she went to turn my mattress during spring cleaning, with all of my photographs tucked into it. I didn’t ask if she’d read it, and she didn’t offer if she had or not. After she left, I spread the pictures across the bed in front of me.
I soon realized that the ones of Rogerson—as well as the only one of us together—were missing. I could just see her carefully slipping them out, maybe ripping them to shreds, burning them in the grill among the briquettes. I couldn’t really blame her; it was the only way left to protect me. But all the rest were there: Boo with her Buddha; Corinna and Mingus on the porch; Rina and her cigarette; my father watching the last-second shot. And finally, at the bottom of the stack, was one I’d forgotten. It was the last picture I’d taken, and it was of me.
We’d been assigned a self-portrait for our final project in photography: They were to be displayed by our names at the Arts Center exhibit, a way of matching our work to ourselves. I’d taken mine the week before the Fool’s Party, in my bedroom. I was standing in front of the mirror, the camera held at my stomach, shooting up to catch my reflection. In the picture you can see my few certificates and pictures circling the mirror, and a slant of light coming through the window behind me. I am wearing a white short-sleeved T-shirt and barely, just barely, you can make out a gray, thumb-shaped spot at the base of my neck. I have my head kind of cocked to the side, and I’m not smiling. In fact, there is no expression at all on my face, just a kind of dead, stoned flatness.
I sat on my bed at Evergreen and looked at that picture for a long, long time. I hated the girl I saw there, and she didn’t even care, didn’t know, just staring out, oblivious. She’d spent her whole life wanting to be someone else, something else, and it had gotten her nowhere. I wanted to reach through that mirror and shake her, wake her up. But it was too late now.
So I ripped the picture, one long gash crossing her face. Then again, and again, tearing the pieces down until they grew smaller and smaller, tiny bits like the stones of a crazy mosaic. My hands were shaking as I brushed them all up, like tossed confetti, into my hand. I went to throw them in the trash can, but just as I was about to open my hand and let them fall like confetti, something stopped me.
I emptied the pieces of the picture into a small bag, then curled it shut and put it carefully in the front drawer of my desk. Then I went and lay down on my bed, closing my eyes and trying to clear my mind. But still, all I could think about was that girl, torn into tiny fragments, with nothing to do but sit and wait to be made whole again.
If there was one thing that set me apart from everyone else at Evergreen, it wasn’t that I’d had a drug problem, or family issues, or that my boyfriend had beaten me. These things were a dime a dozen here, and everyone wore their neurosis like a badge, each carrying a certain weight, the way a particular brand of sweater or jeans had in junior high. There were some with it easier, and many with it worse.
What set me apart, though, were my visitors.
From the first Wednesday I was there until the day I left, someone came to see me each visitor’s day. I found out later that this was unique, as well as a source of envy among a lot of the girls on my floor. But my mother, the queen of organization, drew up a schedule, dividing up days just as she had always allotted chores for PTA drives or Junior League functions. Between herself, my father, Boo and Stewart, and Rina, each Wednesday and Sunday, someone was always in the solarium waiting for me.
For the first week, it was my mother. It was hard at first. The minute she saw me she smiled, took a deep breath, and then opened her mouth to talk nonstop for almost twenty minutes, words flowing out of her as if they were the only thing keeping her afloat, a life preserver of inane details and incidents from the last week. She told me about a new doll she’d ordered, how my father had wrenched his shoulder reaching for something in the backseat of the car, how she’d found a perfectly lovely recipe for vanilla custard in Southern Living. She did not take a single breath while doing this. Finally, when she sputtered to a stop, the sudden silence hung between us, sucking up the last of her words like a black hole absorbing light.
We both felt it.
“Oh, Caitlin,” she said suddenly, sliding one shaking hand over mine. “I just ... I just don’t know how I can ever tell you how sorry I am.”
“Sorry?” I said. “For what, Mom?”
She looked at me, eyes widening. “For not protecting you,” she said. All this time I’d been the one with everything to hide, everything to be ashamed of. It hadn’t even occurred to me that someone else might think to take the blame.
She squeezed my hand, tightly. “I should have known what was happening,” she said. “I should have known just by looking at you.”
Maybe I should have agreed with her. Blamed her, even, for being so caught up in Cass’s leaving that she’d allowed me to become invisible. But I’d had my chances to reach out to her as well, chances I’d passed up again and again. The night of the ceremony, when I’d come home with my face swollen and blamed it on an elbow. Or when I “slipped” on the icy walk. And even on that last day, when she’d tried to pull my jacket off of me.
But of course now it was simple to trace back and find so many places each of us could have done better. But after my two-day crying jag, I just wasn’t interested in blaming anyone else. I needed my family and friends now, and sometimes, calling a draw seemed like the way to finally let it rest.
It got easier after that. We talked a little more each time, but it came slowly. Mostly, we walked, following the long footpaths that crisscrossed the Evergreen complex. We’d move slowly with her arm linked tightly in mine, winding around trees and benches, through the parking lot, circling the fountain, and back again. Sometimes, we didn’t talk at all. But every once in a while she’d say something completely random out loud, as if she’d been carrying on a conversation in her head the whole time, that I was just now able to hear.
“I remember when I was pregnant with you,” she said one day as we crossed the little footbridge, “and your sister would come up to me at the same time every day, while I was making dinner, and just put her ear against my stomach. She said you talked to her, that she was the only one who could hear you.”
Or, as we sat by the fountain: “The night you fell off that pyramid, Caitlin ... I didn’t think anything could ever scare me that much again.” She looked down at the water, gurgling beside us. “But I was wrong, of course.”
I didn’t know what to say to these things, and I was learning with Dr. Marshall that I didn’t necessarily have to have an answer. So I’d just put my head on her shoulder, leaning against my mother, who
would hold me like she did when I was a small child, rocking me back and forth. It had been so long since someone had touched me and I hadn’t wanted to flinch.
As time went on, we talked about less important things. We traded stupid family anecdotes, like the time when Cass almost burned down the house with her Easy-Bake Oven, or when my father drank a huge glass of clam juice, thinking it was lemonade. We laughed ourselves silly, taking back our shared past gently, piece by piece.
My mother always came on Sunday, but Wednesdays were my wild card. It was kind of like a game: I never knew exactly who to expect at the end of that long, brightly lit hallway. I just pulled open the door and scanned the people waiting on the shiny vinyl couches and slippery easy chairs, flipping through out-of-date magazines, until I saw a face I recognized.
If it was my father, he always brought the book with him. He’d brought it the first day he came, when he’d stopped at Wal-Mart to pick up a new pack of socks my mother had forgotten to bring me the week before. The book was called 100 Fun Card Games and had been hanging by the register, with a pack of cards shrink-wrapped to it. My father was not the impulsive type, but I figured he’d been nervous about coming to see me, about what we would say to each other. Games would make it easier.
After he’d hugged me, and I’d sat down on the couch beside him and received my socks, he slid the book across the cushion to me. “If you’re not interested, that’s completely fine,” he said. “I just thought it might be fun.”
CRAZY EIGHTS! HEARTS! CUTTHROAT! SIX DIFFERENT KINDS OF SOLITAIRE! the book proclaimed excitedly on the back cover, and then, in small letters, FUN FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY!
I looked up at my father, knowing how helpless he must feel, not being in control of this—my—situation. He’d done all the Dad stuff so far: making the arrangements, dealing with the insurance company, explaining to the D.A. that no, I wouldn’t be available to testify against Rogerson when his court date came up. He was the ultimate facilitator, but this emotional thing, with the two of us one-on-one, was new to him.
