by Sara Shepard
But when she turned around, her eyes were brown, not green. Her lips were small and pinched. Her skin was sunbaked and wrinkled, raisin-like. She wore large turquoise earrings in her ears, and when she smiled, one of her front teeth was gray, possibly dead. This woman had large breasts and a sweet, motherly smile and a low, raspy voice that was nothing like my mother’s mid-range, clear one. This Meredith Heller wore no makeup, and looked out in the crowd at me and smiled. And then she smiled at the women next to me, and the man with the flat head. She smiled at us. ‘Welcome,’ she said. ‘Thank you for coming.’
I stayed anyway. She made us hum, just as I thought she would. We stood up and let our shoulders go and bent over and started shaking. ‘Loosen up,’ she demanded. We spacewalked around the room and gathered in a circle and held hands. We sculpted one another into feelings; when a woman made me ‘angry’, she jackknifed me at my waist and curled one of my arms over my head.
And then we did an exercise called ‘Find Your Mother Like a Little Baby Penguin’. People on the left side were designated the mother penguins; people on the right were the baby penguins. Meredith Heller matched mothers and babies together, and the mother was to come up with a unique sound that only her baby knew. I was on the right, a baby, paired with an older lady who hadn’t stopped smiling. She whispered her sound to me-it was like a dove, cooo. She said it a few times so I would remember it. Coo, coo, coo. Her breath smelled like violet candies.
Meredith Heller pulled us baby penguins to another part of the room. ‘Pantomime your feelings as a lost baby penguin,’ Meredith Heller instructed. I shut my eyes, trying to feel feathery and small, but the only thing I saw was that basketball court, those angry players. I held a brick over my head, and slammed it against the basketball player’s skull again and again, cracking it like an egg. Someone to my right whispered, ‘What is she doing?’
‘Mother penguins, make your sound so your babies can find you!’ Meredith Heller cried. And I heard it from across the room-coo, coo, coo. I fumbled my way toward it, the basketball player lying dead and bloody on the ground, my eyes spotted with tears. I imagined other things, too-my mother, alive and beautiful and interested, my father, strong and healthy and smiling. I reached the mother penguin and she kept cooing, flapping her penguin wings and jumping up and down. I nestled my head into her, just as all the other little penguins were doing. And then, filled with glee and purpose, I broke away from her-from all of them-and made a circle into the wide expanse of the room. I fluttered around the row of chairs and the projector screen. I squawked past Meredith Heller. I skipped past the door and the windows with the heavy blue curtains and the ladies’ discarded old-lady purses. I danced next to the man in his wheelchair, feeling free and wonderful. The class just let me do this. It was as if they understood without me having to say it. It was as if they knew, somehow, that it was something I had to do.
17
A month and a half after his last appointment, I was walking up the stairs to the apartment from my Driver’s Ed class. I took Driver’s Ed that summer because, basically, I didn’t have anything better to do. Accelerating and braking through the streets and trying to merge into one lane of bridge construction traffic seemed as productive a way to spend my time as anything else.
My father was sitting on the couch, his hands folded in his lap. We met eyes, and then he looked at the coffee table. There was a pamphlet there, next to a full glass of water. It was for something called the Klein-Stochbauer Psychiatric and Wellness Center of Connecticut.
He’d already paid the deposit, he told me. They were expecting him there the following day. There were two women on the pamphlet’s cover, both wearing flowing white skirts, both drinking tea. It reminded me of the What Is ECT? pamphlet we had received before he started treatment. What the hell was it about mental health products and people drinking tea? And the place’s nickname was simply ‘the Center’. The center of what?
We took a cab up instead of the train. The pamphlet described the place as a hospital, but it looked more like an old manor, with turrets and limestone masonry. There was a winding stream in the front yard and a labyrinth garden on the side. I saw a badminton court set up in the backyard, a wishing well next to it. My father told me about a few of the Center’s high points on the drive up: everyone got their own room, appointed with the ‘highest-quality’ sheets, carpeting and light fixtures. Everyone was given their own personal therapist, tailored exactly to their needs. And they didn’t make you do group, one of the things my father hated most at New York Presbyterian.
My father refused to let me carry his bags into the lobby. A round, cheerful woman in bright red lipstick wheeled out a cart and he piled them on it himself. Since the ECT, he’d aged even more. His back was stooped. His shoulders slumped. His legs no longer seemed sturdy-the thirty pounds he’d gained from past medication had fallen off him once he’d begun ECT. After he had completed all eight treatments, he worked for exactly three days, trying to organize his files and catch up on the developments, medications, and scientific findings he’d missed. There was so much. On the last day, he came home and went back to the couch. He said, bravely, that he needed a day off. ‘Take all the time you need,’ I told him.
He looked at me with scared eyes. I could see how desperately he wanted to be better. And then he said to me: ‘Summer, you should go.’
And I said, ‘Go where?’
‘Ireland.’
I stared at him dumbly, my lips dry. ‘You don’t think I know?’ he said. ‘I’m not stupid. I know they awarded you that fellowship. They want you to go in September, right?’
‘I know you’re not stupid,’ was all I could think to say.
‘I think you should go,’ he said again. ‘Please, go.’
‘But I don’t want to go,’ I said after a while, but it was only for show, only because I felt I had to.
‘This is beautiful,’ I said as my father and I walked now through the Center’s lobby. It had a beamed ceiling like an old hunting lodge, and the air smelled like apple cider. ‘You were lucky to find this.’
‘They have a celebrity chef,’ my father boasted. ‘Can you believe it? Or, someone who studied with a celebrity chef, anyway. I don’t know which one. Someone on PBS.’
‘That’s wonderful.’
‘I bet I’ll be just like that guy in The Magic Mountain,’ my father joked when they showed him his room, which had a terrace. No one pointed out the bars on the terrace’s perimeter, which seemed to be the sole difference between this place and, say, a resort. ‘You ever read that book, Summer? This guy has tuberculosis, so he goes into a sanatorium, and there are the kookiest of characters, people you really wouldn’t want to be around for days at a time, but then, over the course of it, he begins to fall in love with the place. All the regular meals, all the blankets. He can’t imagine living in real society again. He stays there for seven years. And then he gets out because the war starts, and he goes to war, and he dies.’
I told him I hadn’t read it.
I had dinner with him, spaghetti eaten with plastic utensils, orange soda from a pitcher. The patients were all well-groomed and had a WASPy, wealthy look about them-as they should, considering that the Center didn’t accept any form of health insurance. My father was paying for it out of proceeds from several patents he’d helped develop, plus money saved, plus cashed-in stocks I’d never known about. He assured me that he could afford this, and that I shouldn’t worry.
As we ate, I stared out the window at the endless green lawn. The posters on the walls in the hallways were also of green lawns, except the lawns were in places like Scotland and Pebble Beach Golf Course. Extra dinner portions sat on a stainless-steel table in the corner, warmed by a long column of hot lights.
After dinner, we sat in the TV room-with its marble fireplace and built-in bookcases-and watched an episode of Friends. My father smiled at the funny parts, picking at a scab on his ankle bone. Another patient, a girl about my age, walked in and
said, ‘I’ve seen this one’, and left. Someone crossed the room wearing a familiar t-shirt that said you are not what you own on the back. It took me a while to place it, but then I remembered Claire.
Not long ago, I found an old roll of film stuffed under my bed and had it developed. There were generic pictures of Paris: the Arc de Triomphe, quaint road signs in French, the Chanel storefront. Then, I came to the last photo on the roll: Claire Ryan and I were standing awkwardly together, neither of us smiling. Behind us was the same tile-and-mahogany console table that was still wedged into the corner in our Brooklyn apartment, and I was wearing my favorite purple polo shirt, the very last thing my mother had bought for me.
It was obvious when the photo was from-the pain was stark on both our faces. I’d forgotten about stealing the Fun Saver camera the day Claire came over for biology tutoring, but the emotions of that time suddenly snapped back to me, an old, unhealed wound. As I stared at the photo, I was startled to see that Claire wasn’t even fat. A bit pudgy, maybe, certainly larger than she had been, but not obese. She still had her beautiful blonde hair, her lovely round face.
Looking at it, I thought about the summer my grandmother died, when she and I were friends again and she’d wanted us to correspond while she was at her art program in San Francisco. When I’d arrived home from Cobalt, there weren’t any letters from Claire waiting for me in our mailbox. None had arrived, either, the remainder of that summer. That fall, I caught a few glimpses of her at the diner with those same friends, but she never acknowledged me, perhaps giving me what I wanted-anonymity. I heard rumors about Claire over the years-that she was a hotshot artist in Baltimore, that she begged some guy to marry her, that she was a lesbian in San Francisco. But I would probably never know the truth about any of them.
I spent five minutes watching TV with my father before I had to leave the TV room, hiding in the Center’s white, plushy-toweled guest bathroom, crying. I wasn’t sure when I’d last cried-it seemed like years. And yet, the tears felt almost perfunctory, offering me no release, no fade to black then credits, no epiphany or happy ending. I felt like something was missing, like I’d taken off a ring I’d been wearing for a long, long time, so long that it had become part of my finger. The bathroom smelled like someone’s floral perfume. An old woman, perhaps a patient, had left a gaudy costume jewelry bracelet on the edge of the sink. I slid it on my wrist and, for the rest of the night, pressed its bumpy surface up to the side of my cheek, feeling like I was, in a very small way, someone else.
I talked to my father on the phone a few hours before my flight to Dublin. I had cleaned the house, I had packed my things, I had taken the dogs to their new owner, a woman down the street my father and I screened together-she loved dogs, and had a lot of room and a lot of time to exercise them. We wanted them to remain in this neighborhood-the smells would be the same for them.
When it got to that winding-down part of the conversation where it was obvious we had nothing else to say and should probably get off the phone, my father made this sigh. In it was the smallest of whimpers. ‘Have a wonderful time,’ he said. I stared out the window, watching the kids rollerblading up and down the Promenade. One World Trade glimmered across the water. Squinting hard, I tried to accurately count twenty-two floors from the top, but the building seemed too far away, the distance between floors too ambiguous. It made me wonder if I had ever been able to tell which office was my mother’s, or if I’d just convinced myself I could.
At the airport, I tried calling my father from the pay phone near the security line, but a nurse answered. I hung up fast.
I sat in front of the arrivals and departures board outside the international terminal. I hadn’t gone through security yet; my bags were still with me, unchecked. The big schedule board said another flight to Dublin would leave a few hours later-it was on Air France, with a stopover in Paris. I flirted with the idea of not going to Dublin at all, but to somewhere else entirely. Madrid, maybe, or Johannesburg-both were leaving at the same time as the Dublin flight. If I hung out for a while, there were late-night planes to Reykjavik or Lima or Geneva. I traced the tweed pattern on the edge of my suitcase. From the bar just past the security gate, someone spoke in what I decided was Finnish. Someone else said, Would you stop it? Someone else laughed.
And then, my flight to Dublin was boarding. I heard the attendant call for first class over the PA, then rows twentyfive through thirty, then rows twenty and higher, then rows fifteen and higher. I imagined the people lining up at the gate: two old ladies, a couple with a baby, a man in a wheelchair. A beautiful boy I might be sitting next to.
All rows for Dublin, the flight attendant called. I pictured old people pressing their hands to their knees and, groaning, standing. The flight attendant would be smiling with all her teeth as she ripped their tickets. She called my name over the PA once, then twice. But I had suddenly become so sure of something: this wasn’t how it was supposed to work. I wished it were, I wished I could have gone, but I knew I couldn’t.
The flight attendant called my name for a final time. I watched the departures board. After a while, the status of the flight to Dublin changed from Boarding to Departed. I ran to the window, dragging my bags. There it was, a big Aer Lingus jet. The massive, capsule-shaped contraption backed away from the gate, the old people and the children and the cute boy inside, their luggage packed in like Tetris pieces. Eventually, it pulled to the runway, hovered there for a while, warming up, and then with a splintering, white sound, it took off, screaming faster and faster, higher and higher, until it was rushing over Manhattan, until it was indistinguishable from the stars.
PART FOUR
Cobalt, PA,
September, 2001
it will kill you
if you’re not looking
Prologue
They encourage me to write letters to everyone I know, even if I’ll never send them in a million years. They say if I’m stuck, I should just start writing. Just go for it, they tell me. Dive right in. Talk about anything.
So I guess you’d be out of school by now. Maybe in grad school, if you’ve gone that far, or maybe out of that, too. Perhaps you didn’t go to grad school, or even college. Which is perfectly okay. Sometimes I’m not sure how much I learned in college, really. There was an awful lot that was just filler.
You might have a job now, or perhaps even a family. Your house might have a view of those enormous mountains. I admit the only mountains I’ve ever seen are pretty pathetic in comparison, mere hills stuffed with coal-although, I suppose, they were the first mountains you saw, too. What did you think when you first laid eyes on the real ones, all purple and capped with snow? Was the wind knocked out of you? Did you cry?
And what do you go by? Jo? Josie? Just J? Or maybe you have a fabulous nickname.
One day, maybe I’ll work up the courage to write a real letter to you, one with substance and explanation. Sometimes, it doesn’t even feel like you exist. You’re so far away, almost nothing. But some days, when I’m feeling very brave, I admit to myself that I don’t want you to be far away, not anymore. Some days, I think I want to know the truth about you, once and for all.
18
Samantha pulled into the driveway in a deep gray Mercedes SUV. Stella and I watched her through the dingy curtains in the front room, the one with the pictures of Sinatra and the television. ‘Well, isn’t she fancy?’ Stella said in an awed voice. ‘I bet that car has that wonderful, leathery new-car smell. You know that smell?’
Samantha parked, slid out of the front seat, and grabbed a brown snakeskin purse from the back. When she rang the doorbell we snapped the curtain closed, as if we hadn’t been watching. Stella settled back into the chair, and I answered the door. Samantha’s head was bent down as she keyed something into her cell phone. ‘Hi,’ I said.
She looked up and broke into a five-alarm smile. ‘Hello, Summer! So nice to see you!’
Her blazer and skirt were the same iridescent gray as her car. As she p
ushed her sunglasses up on her head, I tried to make myself presentable, standing taller and wriggling my toes around to conceal the hole in my sock. I quickly tried to think up excuses for my disheveled appearance: I was wearing pajamas so Stella wouldn’t feel so self-conscious. I hadn’t washed my hair because we were trying to conserve water. And anyway, Samantha had told us she’d be coming yesterday.
‘Sorry, I got tied up yesterday,’ Samantha said, as if reading my mind. ‘I was waiting for paperwork from a seller and it took forever.’ She pushed her way into the door…and then stopped. I watched as her knuckles gripped her bag and then released. It was pretty obvious what she was looking at.
‘Hi, Sam,’ Stella cried in a voice louder than mine. She sat up straighter on the couch, adjusting her black satin gloves and straightening her magenta wig.
‘Well, Stella!’ Samantha cried, returning to herself, as polished and as unsnagged as her nut-colored pantyhose. She gently rested her purse on the worn corduroy couch, glided over to Stella and gave her a delicate, uncertain hug. ‘Are you cold?’ she asked, her eyes falling to the blanket around Stella’s legs and the other blanket around her torso.
‘Not really,’ Stella said. ‘Nice car out there!’ She attempted a whistle.
Samantha rolled her eyes. ‘Well, you know. It was a present to myself. For closing on six houses in one month. In the real-estate world, that’s tough-that’s more than a house a week. I worked like a dog, though.’ She sighed and panted, as if she’d just finished not only closing on the houses but building them, too. Then, she looked around, frowning. ‘You could use some more light in here.’
