The Fix

by Natasha Sinel

  “You know what they say,” I said. “Shake hands with the past and all?”

  “Sure, well, just be sure to use Purell after,” he said, chuckling at his own joke. “Alright. A trial week. Let’s start with that. Be here at eight on Monday. Rebecca, you’ll get Macy caught up on the schedule.”

  Rebecca clapped her hands.

  “Thanks, Darren,” I said. “I really appreciate it.”

  Rebecca was already out the door.

  “Macy,” Darren said as I was halfway out. “I know you’ll do great.”

  Something about that—his confidence in me—made my heart flutter a little.

  “Thanks. I won’t let you down.”

  Later in the afternoon, Rebecca and I shared a large tomato and mushroom pizza at Marcella’s. Rebecca justified the pizza when we ordered it—“at least we’re not getting pepperoni and sausage.”

  “I’m assuming you didn’t tell your mom about the job?” Rebecca asked.

  I looked at her like she was crazy.

  “What about your dad?”

  I shook my head.

  “Why not?”

  “He’s on his way to Chicago or somewhere.”

  I’d written Dad an e-mail about the job at Marwood, but he hadn’t replied yet.

  “Do you think your dad’s having an affair?” she asked. My soda went down the wrong pipe and I coughed up a mushroom. Rebecca was never afraid to put things out there.

  “No, do you? Maybe that’s why Mom’s such a bitch all the time. No. I don’t think so. Gross. The idea of my parents having sex with each other or anyone else is revolting.”

  I was sure that Dad wasn’t having an affair. Or at least I thought I was sure. Would it make any difference?

  “At least I don’t have to think about that,” Rebecca said. “My mom is definitely not having sex. I don’t think she’s had a date since Vampire Tom.”

  We cracked up laughing. Tom had these weird fangy teeth and always drank red Gatorade. One time we teased her mom about Vampire Tom taking a nice juicy taste of her neck. She laughed and told us to shut up, but a few minutes later we caught her checking out a hickey on her neck in the mirror. The relationship was over by the end of the week.

  After I dropped Rebecca off, I felt this need for quiet, for peace, so I kept the music off. I thought about writing Sebastian a letter, like the receptionist at the hospital suggested, but I had no idea what I would write.

  When I got home, Mom was standing in her usual spot at the kitchen counter eating fat-free plain Greek yogurt.

  “Who’s Sebastian?” Mom said the second I walked in the door.

  “Huh?” Was Mom a mind reader now? Had I said his name aloud?

  “There’s a message on our voice mail from Sebastian’s mother. Who is he?”

  I tried to swallow. Why was Sebastian’s mother calling me? Was she angry that I’d tried to visit him and meddled in their family business?

  I ran to the phone and punched in the codes.

  Mom watched me. I turned my back to her.

  “Hello, I’m looking for Macy Lyons,” the woman’s voice said in a thick Spanish accent. “This is Maria Ruiz, Sebastian’s mother. I have a letter for you from Sebastian. I have to go to work now, so I will leave the letter at my front door, okay? The address is 433 Pine Street.”

  Sebastian wrote me a letter. I hung up the phone and turned around.

  Mom was right in my face. Her hand was up, and she was about to touch me.

  “I just …” she said. She put her hand on my head and held one of my dreadlocks between her fingers. “Hmmm. I like it.”

  “Um, thanks,” I said. That was not what I was expecting. “I need to go.”

  I ran for the door.

  “Wait!” Mom said. “Who is he?”

  “Just someone from school,” I said. “He’s sick. I was thinking about visiting him in the hospital.” It wasn’t a lie.

  “Oh, that’s terrible. Why haven’t I heard of him before? What’s wrong with him?”

  “They don’t know yet.”

  “Well,” she said. “Maybe you shouldn’t see him in case it’s something contagious.”

  Yeah. Suicidal bacterial infection.

  “It’s not.”

  “Hold on a minute.” She took her bag from the hook in the mudroom, rummaged for a second, and pulled out some antibacterial gel. “Use it. A lot.”

  I took it and grabbed the doorknob.

  “Oh, I forgot to tell you,” she said when I was half out the door. “Scott and Yoli are coming for dinner next Tuesday. Whatever your plans are, you need to be home by six.”

  I got in my car and slammed the door, but I could still hear Mom as I started the engine.

  “Did you hear me, Macy?” she shouted. “Put it in your calendar. Next Tuesday night. Home by six!”

  “We’ll be home by six!” Mom shouted. She was taking Gavin to speech therapy.

  I was seven.

  “What’cha reading?” Scott asked after we heard the car leave the driveway. He was fourteen.

  “Um, Superfudge ,” I said.

  Scott turned on the TV.

  “Okay, Macy, enough reading, this is going to be our secret,” he said.

  A secret. Hmmmm. I slid a bookmark in my place and put the book down.

  “What?” I asked, hoping for something good. Maybe Scott had some of those Hostess pink snowballs. Mom never let me eat junk food. Sometimes Dad would buy me Hostess pink snowballs when he took me to Manhattan. He would let me eat both of them, even though we knew that I’d have a tummy ache for the rest of the day. The pink snowballs were our secret. I never told Mom about the snowballs. I was good at keeping secrets.

  “I’m going to teach you about football,” Scott said. My face must have looked disappointed because he said, “Hey, football is awesome. You’ll be able to impress your boyfriend.”

  “I don’t have a boyfriend.” Why would I want a boyfriend? Even though Chris was my friend and he was a boy, I never wanted a boyfriend.

  But I was excited about the football lesson. Scott was so cool. He was fourteen. He had tons of friends and was always so busy doing things with them, but when Mom asked him to babysit, he said yes. He said hanging out with me was fun.

  I watched the men in helmets and all their giant pads on the screen.

  “Am I rooting for the green guys or the red guys?” I asked.

  “The green guys. They’re the Jets. They’re our team.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  He started to explain touchdowns and field goals, offense and defense. When he got to downs and yardage, I started yawning.

  “Come here,” he said.

  I drove down Main Street and turned left onto Pine. Number 433 was two blocks down on the right. Sebastian lived right in the center of Mount Kisco, where there were sidewalks, and the houses were small and close together. That’s why he’d been able to walk to Rebecca’s that night, I realized—he was only a few blocks away from her house. And only a few miles away, on the border of Mount Kisco and Bedford—my neighborhood, if you could call it that—was the opposite with long gated driveways, giant houses with pools, and acres and acres of manicured lawn against wild forests. Even though we were less than an hour away from Manhattan, the historical white houses, wide open spaces, horse farms, and occasional quaint dirt roads made it seem like the city may as well be on another continent.

  Sebastian’s house was just a house, nothing remarkable about it, but it seemed like a house lived in by people who were good. Small, white, a front porch with two rocking chairs on it. Some neat landscaping and tulips and other colorful flowers coming up, and a flagstone walkway. An envelope was taped to the red door.

  I took the porch steps two at a time, the urge to read Sebastian’s letter propelling me.

  Just as I grabbed the envelope with Macy Lyons written across the front in boy handwriting, Sebastian’s mom opened the door. Her black hair was short and styled. She was beautiful, even w
earing baggy green hospital scrubs.

  “Hello, Macy,” she said, and I froze, feeling like I’d been caught with my hand in the cookie jar.

  “Oh, hi,” I said. By the tightness in her lips, I wasn’t exactly sure how welcome I was here, even though she’d been the one to ask me to come. I decided to just come clean.

  “I’m sorry I went to the hospital. I guess I wasn’t really thinking of your family’s privacy or anything. I shouldn’t have done that,” I said without taking a breath. I started twirling a dread and then stopped.

  She smiled at me, still tight-lipped, but a smile nonetheless.

  “Please sit down,” she said, gesturing inside the house. It was bright, and the afternoon sun made the un-air-conditioned living room stifling hot. I picked a green plaid chair that had an afghan draped over it, and Mrs. Ruiz sat on the cream-yellow couch across from me. I could see a clear bin filled with pink toys in the corner of the room—princesses, My Little Ponies, Polly Pocket. Sebastian’s sister’s toys.

  “Okay so, I am going to speak very honest with you,” she said. Her Spanish accent was so thick, I knew I’d have to pay close attention to understand everything she said. My hands were clammy. I waited for the lecture to come, for her to tell me to stay the hell out of their business.

  “Sebastian will not be happy with me, but it’s for his own good,” she said.

  She stared at the wall for a second, as if she were reconsidering.

  “I work so many hours—I don’t know who are his friends in school. I know he goes to the parties—and now I know why, because he could find alcohol and drugs—but who knows him, who are his friends, you understand?”

  I nodded, but I didn’t really understand. I was barely keeping up with deciphering her accent, let alone what she was really trying to say.

  “You are his friend?” she asked, staring at me with dark brown eyes not unlike Sebastian’s.

  I hesitated for a second.

  “I guess so,” I said. “I don’t know.”

  She seemed to consider this for a minute.

  “Then, if not his friend, why did you go to the hospital?”

  I felt my face get prickly hot with embarrassment. I took a deep breath.

  “Um, when I heard he’d tried to, um, that he was in the hospital, I was upset. I saw him the weekend before. And I felt like … was there something he said that I should have noticed? I don’t know.”

  She looked at me, and her eyes were warmer now.

  “Oh, no, there was nothing you could do.” She paused for a minute. “Macy, I need to know something of you.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Do you do drugs?”

  Now I was really sweating. I wiped my upper lip.

  “No,” I said. It wasn’t exactly a lie. I had tried some, but there was no reason for her to know that, right?

  “Let me explain,” she said. “Sebastian is not talking so much in the hospital. He knows you visited, and now he talks more. He is happier, says the doctor. He wrote you a letter.” She gestured at the unopened letter clutched in my hand. “I think maybe if you visit him in the hospital, it would help. We visit, but if he has a friend, that might be good.”

  “Oh,” I said, trying to digest. I looked down and started fiddling with the tassels on the afghan, wishing I had a glass of water. My throat felt like it was closing up.

  “If you go, I need to make sure that you do not do drugs. Sebastian needs only friends who do not do drugs.”

  I shook my head, still worried my voice wouldn’t work.

  “I’m making you uncomfortable,” she said.

  “No. It’s okay.”

  She looked down at her hands, resting in her lap. She twisted her wedding ring around her finger a few times.

  “Everything is uncomfortable. My boy is in the hospital, and I don’t know how to help him.” Her voice cracked, and her face twisted in sadness. But she immediately pulled herself back together into tough no-nonsense nurse mode.

  She looked at her watch.

  “I will be late for work,” she said. “Please think about visiting him. But you should not feel the pressure.”

  She stood up, and I immediately stood too, feeling the rush to my head. I put my hand on the arm of the chair to steady myself. Luckily, she was already looking for her bag, getting ready to leave, so she didn’t notice. When I felt okay again, I caught up to her at the door. We walked out together.

  “I hope you can understand,” she said. “I just want to make my son better.”

  I nodded.

  She fished in her bag and handed me a business card. MARIA RUIZ, RN.

  “Call me anytime,” she said. “I can talk to your mother too, if she has a question.”

  I nodded, but why would I tell my mother any of this? And then I realized that maybe other people would tell their mothers this kind of thing. Chris probably would. Maybe even Rebecca.

  She got into her car and drove away. And I was left standing on the porch, Sebastian’s unopened letter in one hand, his mother’s phone number in the other.

  I sat down hard in one of the red rocking chairs and leaned forward, putting my head between my knees. The dizziness still hadn’t gone away completely.

  I stared at the floorboards of the porch and noticed the little bits of wood that stuck up, waiting to shove splinters in some poor little girl’s unsuspecting foot. Then I remembered those agonizing moments when Dad would hold my foot tight and do his tweezer surgery on splinters. I’d scream and carry on even though it didn’t hurt that much. It just felt so good to have a real reason to scream and cry. And then the relief when it was over and the comforting hugs and ice cream I’d get afterward.

  I sat up slowly, allowing the blood to distribute evenly again. I rocked the chair a few times. Why was I nervous? I did want to see Sebastian. Especially now that his mom said I could help him. That should have completely freaked me out and scared me off, but it didn’t. The only thing scaring me was that his letter might say the opposite—that he didn’t want to see me. I turned the envelope over. I felt exposed there on his porch in the middle of town, so I got up and ran to my car. Once I was in and the door was closed, I ripped open the envelope and unfolded three pieces of lined notebook paper inside.

  Dear Macy,

  I’m in the Psychiatric Ward (they call it Behavioral Health here). I guess you knew that, because I got a message that you came here. I tried to figure out why you came. But then, I really only care that you did. So, now I’m dying to know what you would have said.

  I’m sure you want to know why I’m here. No, I didn’t try to kill myself. That’s probably what people are saying, if they’re saying anything. My mom read my journal, and I wrote some pretty bad shit in there. She thought I was suicidal, so she sent me here. The truth is, I don’t think I was suicidal, but I am addicted to painkillers, and pretty much anything else I can get. I thought I had it under control, but they’ve made me admit that I didn’t. Before I got here, I’d wake up every morning and say I wouldn’t take the pills anymore. And every day I did anyway. And that made me depressed and angry and hate myself for being so weak. And it made me not want to wake up in the morning to have that hopeful feeling again. I disappointed myself fresh every day. So I guess the whole “not wanting to wake up in the morning” thing made my mom think I didn’t want to live anymore, which is sort of true if you think about it, but it’s not like I had any plans to do anything about it.

  This place is exactly how you’d picture it. Some of the people here are really messed up. We’re not allowed to have anything, not even combs, because one girl tried to slit her wrists with one. The first few days here without my pills were hell. Anything you can imagine about hell, it was worse. But they’re giving me lots of meds to help with that. My roommate is as crazy as they come. He sees things. He’ll probably never get out of here. Not everyone is crazy, though. Some kids are just going through something they can’t really handle on their own.

  One
thing, though, when I get home, I’ll have a collection of pretty funny stories. The other day, this guy Ralph tried to escape. He stripped naked, covered himself with Vaseline, and started running for the door. The staff couldn’t catch him because he was so slippery. Finally, someone threw a blanket over him and got him back to his room. The whole scene was pretty hilarious, even the staff guys chasing after him were laughing.

  It made me miss home, though, watching Ralph try so hard to get away. I miss my little sister. She thinks I’m at engineering “sleep-away” school.

  I think about that night at Rebecca’s all the time. I wish I’d stayed and talked with you more. I didn’t realize it until I got here. And hearing that you came here made me happier than anything in a long time. I’ll probably regret writing that.

  You can write me back if you want. They’ll open the letter to make sure there are no pills or blades or anything in there, but you can still write whatever you want. I swear they definitely don’t do that whole crossing out thing so you can’t read what the other person wrote. It’s not like that at all.

  We get phone privileges if we’re good, and I’ve been good. So maybe we can talk at some point.

  Sebastian

  P.S. Here’s a little psych ward humor one of the guys found online. He convinced the staff to let us hang it up in the common room because it’s “healthy to laugh at ourselves a little.”

  PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL PHONE MENU

  Please select from the following options:

  If you are obsessive-compulsive, press 1 repeatedly.

  If you are co-dependent, please ask someone to press 2 for you.

  If you have multiple personalities, press 3,4,5, and 6.

  If you are paranoid, we know who you are and what you want, stay on the line so we can trace your call.

  If you are schizophrenic, listen carefully and a little voice will tell you which number to press.

  If you are manic-depressive, it doesn’t matter which number you press, nothing will make you happy anyway.

  P.P.S. Here’s that eye you liked—the one that’s always watching over you. And also a picture of my giant muscles to protect you when you’re in danger.