by Luanne Rice
“Lay off him,” a deep voice said, from behind where we were standing. An old man came toward us, limping with a cane.
Everyone turned to look. He had pure white hair, a ruddy face, and sun lines around his eyes and mouth, as if he’d spent his life on the water. He wore khaki work pants and a plaid shirt. And he had green eyes.
“How dare you?” my mother asked. “This is a family discussion, so please stay out of it.”
“I am family,” he said. “I’m Billy’s grandfather.”
The man’s gaze bored into Billy’s. I thought Billy must have phoned him, too, but Billy looked completely shocked, rooted in place, unable to move.
“Grandpa,” he said. “What are you doing here?”
“I got a phone call,” his grandfather said.
“Who called you?”
“It doesn’t matter, Bill. Come with me.”
“I didn’t think you wanted me.” Billy’s voice broke. In his face I saw the little kid he’d been, the boy who still needed his family and couldn’t quite believe his grandfather, the man who’d abandoned him and sent him to foster care, was actually here.
“I made a mistake,” his grandfather said, sounding gruff. “A big one.”
“Grandpa, it’s okay.”
“No, it isn’t. But let’s fix it now. We’re going home.”
“No!” I said, clutching Billy’s hand. “You can’t. We have to stay together. You were right, everything changed here, but we can get it back. It can be the way it was again. Our pact!”
Billy held me and leaned his forehead against mine, and we looked into each other’s eyes the way we had along the way.
“I want you to keep the sand dollar,” he said. “For us. We need to do this right now, Maia. You have to get well. I don’t know who called my grandfather, but he’s here now, and …”
“You’re going with him,” I said.
“Yeah,” Billy said. “I am.”
“You can make things right with each other later,” I argued. “But we need each other now!”
“Maia,” he said, his face full of pain.
“What will happen?” I asked. “To us?”
He shook his head. He had tears in his eyes. “Everything good in life was gone, but you brought it back. It killed me, calling your dad, but I did it for you. There was no other way.”
“But there is,” I said. “You trust me, right? You said you did. So why can’t we stay together? Just trust it will all work out?”
“Because it won’t,” he said. “Not right now.”
Billy kissed me, right in front of my parents and stepmother and step-whatever Drake was, and his grandfather. It was only the third day of us kissing, and my knees went weak—not because of that feeling of closeness that had enveloped us, kept us in our beautiful, private world, but because it felt like the end.
“Let’s go, Billy,” his grandfather said. “We have a long trip ahead of us.”
“Okay, Grandpa,” Billy said, then walked away. He didn’t look back. I had the feeling he couldn’t. I heard his grandfather’s cane thumping down the quay until they were too far away for me to hear it anymore.
“You’d better go, too, Andrew,” my mother said to my dad. “The three of you are going to miss your flight.”
The three of us: me, Dad, and Astrid. Not me and her. I wasn’t even part of her family now. I felt every single thing I loved and cared about washing away faster than Billy’s drawing in the sand.
“You haven’t changed, Gillian,” Dad said. “You want us out of your life; you can’t wait to get back to whatever you’re doing.”
“You know nothing about me,” she said. “You never have.”
“Because you don’t let people …”
I heard Drake join in to defend my mother. The bickering went on, and then it was just a roaring in my ears. I didn’t remember moving my feet, but suddenly I was at the end of the quay. The river blurred.
I felt an arm around my shoulder. I smelled Chanel No. 5. I knew if I turned around I’d see the off-white cashmere sweater, the heavy gold necklace.
“Maia?” Astrid asked quietly.
She was trying for an embrace, but I wrenched out from under her arm.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. If she started criticizing my mother I would lose my mind, I’d push her into the water.
“Just don’t, Astrid,” I said.
“For what you’re going through,” she continued. Her voice was gentle. I didn’t want her to see, but I couldn’t stop the tears leaking from my eyes. I steeled myself for the next part: She’d tell me she’d seen this coming, she’d known I was getting depressed again, and of course I should have known better than to expect anything from my mother. But then came the shocker.
“You’re in love,” she said.
I felt stunned and stared at her. No one else had said that to me. No one else seemed to understand. This was Astrid; there had to be something more coming, a twist of the I-told-you-so knife. She had to be setting me up.
“And he’s in love with you, too,” she said.
“How can you tell?” I asked, my voice shaking, backing away because I didn’t trust her and couldn’t bear what might come next.
“Oh, Maia,” she said, smiling sadly. “Anyone who looks at him, at either of you, can tell.” And I knew she was speaking the truth.
I saw Billy’s freckles, his wide smile, his green eyes. My love had started before this trip, at home, sitting at my bedroom window and looking up the hill toward Stansfield. I realized my hand was empty. I patted my pocket—the sand dollar wasn’t there, either. I must have dropped it when we had stepped apart.
“It feels over,” I said. I heard the words echoing in my ears and couldn’t believe I was saying something so gut-wrenching to Astrid.
“No,” Astrid said. “If you could have heard what he said to your father when he called. We both knew—we both could feel how deeply he cares, how he wants the best for you. It was a sacrifice he made. Giving up his time with you to make sure you got help.”
“But he called his grandfather, too,” I said, my voice breaking. “So he could get away from me.”
“No, Maia,” Astrid said softly. “I made that call. Without you, I knew Billy would feel so alone. I found his grandfather online and told him everything. And you know what? He wants Billy with him. He wants that very much.”
At that, thinking of all Billy had lost, how he’d been stuck in an institution missing his old life, lobster fishing with his grandfather, I began to sob. I thought of how much I’d wanted us to stay together, how horrible I’d felt last night, finding out about my mother. It all came crashing in on me.
Astrid pulled me into a strong hug. I started to resist—my mind told me to push her away. But somehow I didn’t, and then I was leaning into her, holding on tight, not wanting to let her go.
“Take me to Turner,” I said, weeping. “I think I need to go there.”
“Of course, Maia,” Astrid said. “We will. We’ll take you there right now.”
Good work, Maia, good work,” Simone said, half teasing and half meaning it.
“Why do the doctors always say that after sessions?” I asked, sitting on the edge of my bed.
“I don’t know, but they always do,” Simone said. “I guess because it really does take work to get better. Depression is a bear.”
I nodded. Therapy was intense, and I’d had a lot of it these last six weeks at Turner. So had my roommate, Simone.
Tall, thin, with black hair that swept her shoulders, she was both gorgeous and brilliant: She’d come here from Harvard. Her mother was African American, her father Cuban, and they were both college professors in New York City. Last fall, Simone had started freshman year thinking that one day she would teach Women’s Studies like her mother. But it had been hard to adjust, and she was homesick. Her courses were grueling. She’d been valedictorian in high school, but now she was afraid of failing. Midway through spring semester she crashed
.
She had stopped getting up in the morning. For the first time in her life she was both skipping and barely passing classes. When she tried to read an assignment, all the words ran together. She felt as if English had turned into a brand-new language and she couldn’t speak it. She had lost her ability to think, and she realized she was a fraud. Walking to the T, with a vague idea that she needed to get to South Station and take a train to New York, she nearly got hit by a truck.
The driver stopped, and although Simone wasn’t hurt, she sat down on the curb and couldn’t stop weeping. Police arrived. They drove her to an ER, and within hours both her parents arrived, and arranged for her to be admitted to Turner. And she was healing here. It really was the best place, as much as I sometimes didn’t want to admit it.
“I’ve loved rooming with you,” I said.
“Back at you. I can’t believe you’re leaving me.”
“You’ll be getting out soon.”
“If I keep doing the work,” she said, and we laughed: just a little inpatient humor.
“In September we’ll both be back at school,” I said. I was actually going to be able to attend high school as a junior, along with the rest of my class, as long as I went to summer school when I got home.
“Yeah,” Simone said. “Hasta la vista Cambridge, hello living at home.”
“I know, but NYU.”
“I’m actually looking forward to it,” she said. “They have great Psychology and Women’s Studies departments. Harvard said I could transfer back if I want, but I doubt I will.”
“Don’t project. Can’t you just hear Dr. Hendricks? ‘It’s good to have goals, but ground yourself in the present.’ ” I quoted our psychiatrist in her English accent, gentle and melodic. Not only had Simone and I been roommates, but we’d shared the same psychiatrist, bonding us further. We often rehashed our therapy sessions into the night, trying to better each other’s imitation of Dr. Hendricks, even as the night staff did checks.
I’d told Simone about Dr. Bouley, whom I still loved and would see when I went home, and she told me she had no idea who her doctor would be in New York—that scared her a little, but I assured her she could always try someone different if the first wasn’t a good fit. Over the years I had become something of an expert on such things.
“Will you visit me in the city?” Simone asked.
“Definitely,” I said.
“Yes, I seem to remember you have a friend who knows his way around the city,” she said, teasing.
“I do,” I said.
“What will you miss most about this place?” she asked. “Other than me?”
I thought about it. It seemed strange to say I’d miss Turner at all, but the truth was, this time I would. It had been safe, a cocoon, protecting me from the outside world until I was strong enough.
“Not checks,” I said.
“Right—it will be nice to sleep through the night.”
At first they had me on two-minute checks—when the staff looked in to make sure I was safe, i.e., alive and not harming myself.
They weren’t wrong to do that, because when I first got to the hospital, thoughts of suicide were strong. For the first few days I wished I’d jumped off the cliff the night I’d started screaming. It was very hard to want to go on. I felt I’d lost my mother twice: once when she left us, and again now, when I’d left Canada never wanting to see her again. The idea of continuing to live with that reality stopped making sense.
Here’s the thing about wanting to die: You think nothing will ever be good again. The therapists and doctors and psychiatric nurses all tell you that it will, that if you hold on and get some perspective, a certain happiness, even joy, will return.
And if I wasn’t all the way there yet, I was starting to be. Every session with Dr. Christine Hendricks had taken me back to Tadoussac and the truth of my mother’s life.
Dr. Hendricks had listened to me describe how happy she had looked to see me, that first night in the harborside café, how she had hugged and kissed me. How I’d still believed that missing, waiting, child, song had been for me.
I had found it easier to talk about the whales: how their haunting songs expressed their own emotions, how they had complicated lives and relationships just like humans. They longed for connection, like Gray Girl and Aurora, and they disappeared from their homes, like Persephone.
I wondered if Persephone had reappeared, if she’d had her baby.
Eventually we talked about the real baby in my life: Merie. How much I loved her, in spite of being shocked that she existed. Then we finally got to my mother: her lies and omissions, the reality that she was nothing like I’d imagined—or wanted—her to be. Dr. Hendricks said that someday I’d be ready to write to her again, even see her, but I didn’t have to rush it. I could do it when I was ready.
I was ready for a lot of things, but not for that. Not yet, I told Dr. Hendricks. I’d save the real truth for Dr. Bouley: I was never going back to see my mother. It’s just that if I said that at Turner, they might never let me out.
Turner really wasn’t that bad. They called the grounds “the campus” as if it were a college instead of a hospital. It did resemble an Ivy League university with a thousand acres of lawn and woodlands, including a gigantic oak tree that had been there since the Revolutionary War. The famous landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, who had designed Central Park in New York City, had figured out a way to create his gorgeous grounds around that ancient tree, and I loved him for it.
If possible, I loved him even more when I found out he had some kind of a mental breakdown and wound up in a hospital a lot like this one. It comforted me to think that the man who had conjured up such a peaceful, inspiring setting had not been immune to the demons of misery. If mental illness could affect him, it could happen to anyone.
The hospital, which used to be called “The Turner Insane Asylum”—nice, right?—when it opened in 1820, had large brick mansionlike buildings with towers and turrets, leaded windows, slate roofs, and many chimneys. Some rooms had fireplaces from the old days, the marble mantels adding a nice touch, but the plastered-over openings reminded us that there was no escape, even up the flue.
Mostly I loved sitting in the shade of the spreading branches of the oaks and maples, walking the trails with staff and Simone and other patients. They let people smoke on the walks. Patients weren’t allowed to have lighters or matches, so they could only light up when staff was there. One girl, Calista, was really smart and pretty in a geeky short-brown-hair-with-heavy-black-glasses way, but she was so nervous and full of anxiety she’d carry two cigarettes, one in each hand, and take turns puffing on them.
“Maia, your ride’s here.” Natalie, one of my favorite nurses, poked her head into the room.
“Okay,” I said, looking around to make sure I had everything. These four walls, painted soft yellow, had held me safely this last month and a half. My duffel bag was full of everything, including the notebooks I’d filled with notes and drawings. I’d started turning them into a graphic novel. Maybe I was inspired by the fact that Turner had helped many writers. Or perhaps it was just my need to make sense of what I’d been through.
Simone and I hugged, and I hoisted my duffel. Natalie and I walked out to the nurses’ station.
He stood right by the elevator, waiting for me. I approached him, feeling waves of both shyness and excitement. This was our first time seeing each other in six weeks.
“Hey,” Billy said.
“Hey,” I said.
“Ready to hit the road?” he asked.
I nodded. Michele, another of my favorite nurses, gave me a hug and handed me my discharge papers, a sheaf of prescriptions, and enough meds to hold me over till I could get them filled. She unlocked the elevator, and Billy and I were on our way.
When we got down to the parking lot, I caught sight of our ride and gulped a deep breath: the rusty red truck.
“No way,” I said.
“Yeah,” he sai
d. “My grandfather and I picked it up last week.” He took my duffel bag and loaded it behind the seat. He faced me. We still hadn’t touched.
“It seemed right … coming to get you in it. I was pretty sure your dad would want to drive you home himself,” he said.
“I guess he trusts you.”
The trust word.
“Maia, I know how badly I hurt you when I called him.”
“You did the right thing.”
“I wasn’t sure …”
“Let’s just go, Billy,” I said.
And we went.
Driving south to Connecticut, we basically retraced the route we’d taken on our way north. This truck had been our home away from home. We’d sought escape from real life and the ache of our missing mothers, filled in as each other’s family and so much more.
Billy reached across the seat as if he wanted to take my hand, but he didn’t. Maybe he felt as awkward as I did. All those days driving to Tadoussac, we had gotten so comfortable together. I’d started to feel as if I knew how it felt inside his skin. But right now there were six weeks of time between us, and everything was brand-new again.
“You’re really better?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“How’d you do it?”
“Talking a lot, getting my meds stabilized, and writing.”
“Letters,” he said, nodding.
“Not only,” I said. “I started a graphic novel, too. It was part of art therapy, but I want to keep going.”
“You didn’t tell me. What’s it about?”
I hesitated. It was so hard to sum up my writing because it wasn’t linear, it wasn’t a list of themes or characters or settings. “A road trip, whales, and …” I said. I held back the last word: love. I couldn’t say it out loud. Billy and I were different now.
“I want to read it,” he said.
“You will,” I said. “Someday.” In the hospital I’d drawn pictures and told the story of Billy and me running away with each other, the story of us. But now, sitting with him in the same truck that had become so familiar, where we’d shared so much, I felt hesitant, as if I needed to keep some things inside, just for myself.
