Letting Loose

by Joanne Skerrett

  “Who’s after you?”

  “The FBI. They think I’m helping him.” She started to cry. “It’s just so crazy how they think they can just ruin my life. They’re taking everything from me. My job. My man. They’re gonna want my house next.”

  “Whitney, what are you talking about? The FBI is not after you.” I guided her to the one clear spot on the couch.

  “Don’t tell me they’re not,” she cried. “I know. They’ve called my job. They watch my house at night. I see them driving by. And it’s all because of Max. They’re holding him and they don’t want me to find out what they did with him, Amelia.”

  I sighed. “Whitney, I saw Max this afternoon.” I said this firmly and flatly.

  She stopped crying and looked at me. Then it was as if she hadn’t heard what I said. She went back to crying and talking about the FBI staking out her house. I held her and let her cry and jabber on. I had to make sense of this.

  “When did they start driving by your house, Whitney?”

  “A couple weeks ago. Right after Max disappeared. At first I didn’t make the connection, but then after they got to my job I started to notice things.”

  I nodded and kept on holding her. “And this all started after you started calling them and asking about Max, right?”

  She nodded in my shoulder.

  “What about your lawyer, Whitney? What’s he saying about this?”

  She pulled her head away from my shoulder. “He’s working for them, too. He said he couldn’t keep the case. That I should get some help. I think they got to him, too.” She started crying again. “I’m not giving up, Amelia. I’m going to find out what they did to Max.”

  “Okay,” I said, holding her. Then I noticed the prescription bottle on the coffee table. I knew that over the years that she’d been on Prozac, then Zoloft, then some other new drug.

  “Have you been taking your medicine, Whitney?”

  She nodded again into my shoulder. “It’s not working, though. I can’t sleep at nights, and I get these headaches.”

  She sniffed and stopped crying. “Do you think they got to my doctor and they’re drugging me?” Her eyes opened wide.

  I was no doctor, but I’d read enough to know that these drugs had all manner of side effects. It looked to me that Whitney could be hallucinating or suffering from some kind of paranoia. I made a mental note to remember the name of the doctor on the prescription bottle. I’d give the woman a call once I got home. In the meantime, though, I’d have to get Whitney as close to the land of living as I possibly could.

  “Okay, girlie. I’m gonna get this place cleaned up and we’re gonna go out to dinner.”

  Her eyes opened wide. “No! I can’t go out!”

  I stood there in shock at her reaction.

  “All right, Whitney. Then we’ll stay here. I’ll order us a pizza.”

  “Don’t have them deliver it, go to the restaurant to pick it up.”

  I sighed. “Maybe I’ll cook us something to eat.”

  I began to clean up the living room, putting books back on bookshelves and gathering the clothes she had strewn about into one pile. Whitney was sick, and it was tearing me up inside. I recognized it. She was this way when she’d gone away to McLean the first time. This time I hoped it wasn’t that serious, but I had to talk to her doctor and find out what I should do next.

  “You wanna take a shower and wash your hair, babe?” I asked her lightly. “I’ll give you a roller set.”

  She ran her hand over her hair and nodded.

  “Go ahead. I’ll make us pasta.”

  When I heard the water flowing upstairs, I called her doctor’s office. Luckily, the doctor was in the office and came to the phone quickly.

  I told her who I was and what was going on with Whitney. She listened without interrupting. “Is there any way you can bring her in to see me?” the doctor asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “She’s terrified to go outside.”

  “I need to be able to see her soon. I think it might be the medication, but it could also be the trauma of the breakup. I need to be able to talk to her.”

  “Is there any way you can come here? To her house?”

  The doctor was silent for a few minutes.

  “That’s not really something that’s encouraged. I mean, this is an HMO….”

  “Doctor, I don’t think I can get her out of the house. Please…”

  “Okay, I’ll stop by this evening. How about in an hour or so?”

  I thanked the woman as if she were saving my own life.

  As Whitney and I sat down to dinner, I told her that the doctor was on her way over.

  “Why?”

  “She thinks something might be wrong with your prescription. She just wants to take a look at you.”

  Whitney looked down at her plate, but then continued eating. She ate ravenously like she hadn’t eaten in days.

  I guessed that she’d been living on coffee and grapes. That was all I’d seen in the dirty dishes and cups that she’d left about the house.

  “I’m not going back to that hospital,” she said.

  “I’m sure you won’t have to. They just have to change your pills. That’s all.”

  She sniffed and took another forkful of spaghetti into her mouth. “They’ll admit me again. This is what they want.”

  I couldn’t bear to ask her who “they” were.

  The doctor came earlier than I expected.

  “Do you mind?” she asked as she sat at the table with Whitney.

  I went into the living room and turned the TV up loud so she would know that I wasn’t eavesdropping.

  It was almost eight P.M. and I hadn’t gone home yet. I was exhausted. I pulled my cell phone out and dialed Drew’s number. This call would cost me more than I wanted to think about, but I was so emotionally beaten up I needed to hear his voice.

  He was sympathetic when I told him about Whitney.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Wish I was there for you.”

  “I wish you were here, too.”

  Then I heard footsteps behind me. The doctor and Whitney came out of the dining room, both with grave expressions on their faces. I said a quick good-bye to Drew.

  “Amelia,” the doctor said, pronouncing my name with a question mark at the end. “Whitney and I decided it’d be best if we checked her into the hospital for observation. Just for tonight.”

  I looked at Whitney and all I saw in her face was defeat.

  “Is that necessary?” I stood up. How did she get Whitney to agree to this?

  “For now? Yes, I think she shouldn’t be by herself.”

  “But I’m here with her. I’ll stay with her!”

  “I meant she should be under medical supervision.”

  I looked at Whitney again, and she was saying nothing. Not defending herself. Not resisting. I didn’t get it. Whitney didn’t belong in a hospital. She was just going through breakup hell. She’d be fine.

  “Whitney, are you sure you want to go?”

  She nodded.

  “Do you want to drive her there? Or…”

  “Yes, I’ll drive her,” I said.

  She didn’t say anything as I drove through the city, following the doctor to the hospital. Twice I asked her if she was sure she wanted to do this and both times she answered yes. She didn’t cry. But I did as I watched my best friend get admitted to McLean for the second time since I’d known her. It was so freaking unfair.

  Again, I was no psychiatrist, but I thought Whitney has abandonment issues. It not only went back to the fact that she was a foster kid. There was more to it than that. See, Whitney knows her mom. The lady gave her up after her dad left and married some other woman. Her mom left Massachusetts in the early 80s and Whitney actually tracked her down to somewhere in Houston. They’d talked a few times, but the woman had no interest in seeing Whitney or even coming back to Massachusetts for a visit. The bigger problem was Whitney’s dad. He was still here. Matter of fac
t, he lived just fifteen minutes away from Whitney in some mansion in Newton. I helped her track him down when we were in twelfth grade at Latin. We would stake out his house sometimes, watching him from behind a tree across the street. Back then he drove a silver Volvo and his wife, a white woman, drove a black one. He was a tall, good-looking man who works for the governor. But he didn’t always do that. He used to be a college professor. Over the years I’d stopped thinking about him and I thought Whitney had, too. But then she contacted him right before she graduated MIT. She told him who she was and that she wanted him to come to her graduation. She said that he was angry. Told her not to call him anymore and that if she needed anything from him it would be best if she found herself a lawyer. When she asked him what he meant by that, he told her that he wasn’t sure that he was her father. That her mother was not the woman he thought she was, and that she should stay away from him and his family.

  Shortly after that the Korean broke up with her and the stalking began. I hated to be one of those people who traces every adult trauma back to childhood, or worse to parents, but I think in Whitney’s case it was warranted. I wondered whether she still stalked her father. She told me that he had a teenage daughter who looked like him and went to Newton North High School, drove his old silver Volvo, and all. That must be hard to take. To have a sister and not be able to talk to her. But she hadn’t talked about him and his family in a while. For all I know she could be totally over it. I wondered if her dad’s feelings toward her had changed over the years. What a mess this was!

  I couldn’t go straight home after I’d dropped Whitney off at the hospital. I could at least finish cleaning up her place so it would be nice and clutter-free when she came back home. Ugh. Things had changed so suddenly. So awfully.

  How in the world could I be happy when Whitney was falling apart? Drew would be here in a week, yet I felt unsettled and depressed. I literally felt as if my hands were tied. I couldn’t help Whitney and I couldn’t feel better until she was back to her old self.

  I was cleaning up Whitney’s study, when I happened upon her computer screen.

  I noticed that her Hotmail screen was still open. It was an e-mail from her supervisor, asking her to report to Microsoft’s headquarters ASAP. That was a month ago. Oh, shoot! Did Whitney still have her job? I called the supervisor immediately, hoping he would still be in the office.

  I told him who I was and he sounded exasperated. “What’s going on? What’s the deal with Whitney?”

  I told him that she’d been very sick, and that she was in the hospital.

  “Listen, we need to talk to her, okay? She’s got to check in. Just tell her to check in with us when these things happen, okay?”

  I hung up the phone, feeling lost again. Whitney was drugged out of her mind. She was in no position to think about work. I decided not to even burden her with this. If she lost her job, so be it. It wasn’t worth the stress. God! I hated feeling this helpless. I wanted to do something nice for her. And an idea came to me.

  Chapter 20

  My spring break vacation had been over for exactly a month and I’d returned to a storm in Boston that did not seem to be ending. The only thing that kept me sane was the fact that Drew would be here soon.

  James and Kelly conveniently decided to go visit James’s parents in California the week Drew was coming to visit, reminding me that I really loved those two. It didn’t negate the fact that I needed to find a place of my own. But with everything on my plate, I felt entitled to being a slacker.

  Whitney had been readmitted to McLean, and the doctor’s diagnosis was that she’d had another breakdown. I went to see her nearly every day, but nothing much came out of the visits. She said nothing except “hi” and then “bye” right before I left. It was frustrating, but the doctor said that was typical. She’d “come out of it when she was ready.”

  So I’d gone to the mall to medicate. I’d hit Victoria’s Secret first and spent a good $300 on lingerie. All I wanted was for Drew to get here and for us to get busy ASAP. I’d never missed sex after the split with bête noire, and that was over a year ago. But after spending one sexless week with Drew it was all I could think about.

  Maybe it had to do with the fact that I had lost a few pounds. Does sex drive have an inverse correlation to body weight? All my size 14 clothes were now a bit baggy, but I still wasn’t quite a 12. I needed something sexy to wear. The weather was finally starting to break. I decided to go against my morals and good sense and paid $134.99 for a pair of jeans at Neiman’s. I didn’t even like to walk by the darned store. It filled me with fury—all the things I wanted yet could never afford. While I cased the store I reevaluated my career choice. Why didn’t I have the math gene, like Whitney, who probably made millions and billions of dollars from her egghead job at Microsoft? Okay, she probably didn’t get paid millions, but her salary was probably three or four times mine. Why did I have this desire to be a teacher, and why did I not want to do anything else? Something glamorous and lucrative. Oh, well. I guess it all went back to my fear of success. And it probably had something to do with Grace Wilson, too.

  These thoughts ran through my mind as I stood in Terminal E at Logan Airport, waiting for Drew’s flight. According to the screen, the plane had just landed. I was so impatient to see him I could have run past security into the gates. I did one more pace up and down the terminal just to quell my impatience and relieve my butt from the uncomfortable chair. Those new jeans fit well—they were a tiny 14—but they still needed some breaking in.

  “Amelia!” I looked toward the escalator and my heart leapt. I wanted to sprint toward him and jump into his arms, but that would have been so TV. And it’s not like I was some 105-pound girl. I collected myself, smiled, and walked quickly toward him.

  We embraced for a long time, and I said it again, “I love you.” I think I meant it this time. And before I could even feel embarrassed about saying it, he said it back and then kissed me before I could talk. Oh, my gosh. We’d said it. Did that finally mean that I was no longer a relationship arriviste? I was in? I’m in!

  We walked hand in hand to the dark parking lot and he laughed at my Beetle. “Wow. Amelia, like, your car’s, like, soooo adorable,” he mocked.

  “Don’t be a hater, Drew. I love my car.”

  “James and Kelly are in California for the whole week, so we have the place all to ourselves,” I smiled.

  “Cool,” he said. “At least you won’t have to keep your voice down….”

  Thank goodness, he was as horny as I was. Else I would have been ashamed of myself.

  “Oh, man. This is beautiful,” he said, gazing at the lit-up Boston skyline. “You don’t appreciate those things until you’ve been away from it for a while.”

  “I felt the same way when I looked up at the sky and saw all these stars that first night on Dominica.”

  He paused. “You’re right. There’s no skyline that could compete with that.”

  That night we stayed up all night, talking, making love, talking, making love. It was beautiful, and I was exhausted by the time the sun came up on a gorgeous spring Saturday morning. I was so happy! My man was here.

  As a teacher one cannot just take a week off from work. It’s just not done. You have all summer, and all those breaks during the year. So my week with Drew was no vacation. I went to work; he found ways to amuse himself during the day; then I came home. We’d hang out, make love, and then go to sleep. On the surface it seemed pedestrian and a bit boring, but it felt romantic and luxuriously comfortable. It felt like we were a real couple.

  He said he spent the days exploring the city. He bought me artifacts from the MFA and the Freedom Trail. Those are things, despite living in Boston my entire life, I had never even done. Well, I did go to the MFA once, but it wasn’t to look at art. It was for First Fridays. I hadn’t gotten lucky, so that had been my first and last Friday there.

  We drove out to Carlisle to Kimball Farms for ice cream one day after school.
I wanted to turn him on to my favorite flavor, Khalua Crunch.

  “I wouldn’t mind living out here,” he said as he glanced at the old Colonials along Route 225 in Lexington and Bedford, and the sprawling farms in Carlisle. It was chilly but the sun was shining so we sat on a bench in the tiny flower garden at the back of the ice-cream stand.

  “It’s so peaceful,” he said. “Kind of reminds me of home—minus the sub-fifty-degree temperature.”

  “Then why don’t you move back to the U.S., then?” It wasn’t that I hadn’t been thinking about this from the get-go. Why did I have to be the one to move? Was it because I was the woman?

  “It could be nice, but this is still America. Not the best place for an ambitious brother like myself.”

  “Ah, I see. The man will keep you down.”

  He laughed. “Not really. I did all right while I was here. I’d just much rather be in a place where I’m the man.”

  “How come your father chose to send you here for school?”

  “He loved the idea of reckless capitalism and thought I’d learn a lot more here than I would back there.”

  “Do you think he’d want you to run for office?”

  “I don’t think he’d want me to run right now. He’d probably think that I wasn’t ready yet.”

  “Why is that?”

  “My father was from the old school. He believed in rules, process, taking all the appropriate steps in the right order, that kind of thing. He’d probably want me to start small, probably village council.”

  “Did you have a good relationship with him?”

  “It was all right. He was busy.”

  “Really?” I wanted him to say more but I didn’t want to make him feel as if he was in a therapy session.

  “Amelia, it’s not like your relationship with your mother. It was all good. We just didn’t have a lot to say to each other.”

  “But he invested so much in you…. He must have loved you a lot. Don’t you miss him?”

  “Of course, I miss him. Sometimes. We really weren’t that close.”

  “Everyone down there wants you to be him.”