Mrs. Edwards had immaculately laid out printed-paper napkins in a bamboo box on the back of the toilet next to a basket of potpourri—like everything else in the house the arrangement felt forced. What exactly was I doing here, in this bullshit average house in Pennsyl-fucking-vania? I felt displaced and recognized the pang in the base of my stomach, a distaste and longing for the same intangible thing.
After dinner I told Alice I needed some fresh air, so we went out to the front porch and sat on the steps. I inhaled the cool, late autumn air. Alice lit a cigarette.
“Do your parents care that you smoke?”
“It’s not their favorite thing.” She shrugged. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah.”
“You sure?”
“Just a little headache.”
“I’m sorry, baby.”
She pressed her cheek against my arm and proceeded to ramble on with stories of the dog Nellie, how sad she was about Nellie and why, and I did my best to provide consoling answers. Even after we thanked her parents for dinner and went upstairs and fucked in the shower, I hardly felt any better. I watched the backs of Alice’s short legs through the water and all I saw were Lucy’s legs, svelte and impossibly long. The way they curved into her beautiful ass. Her perfect body. I came hard thinking about Lucy and it was over too quickly, disappointingly so. I stared at Alice’s naked, wet figure.
That night I lay in the guestroom bed alone (the Edwardses were not kosher with premarital sleepovers) and decided that I needed to text Lucy, even though it had been a very long time. I couldn’t remember why we’d stopped communicating in the first place—just because there was a geographic distance between us it didn’t mean we shouldn’t talk. It suddenly seemed right that I should say hello, check in and see how her senior year was going.
I snatched my cell off the nightstand.
STEPHEN: Hey Luce, it’s been a while. How are you? Happy Thanksgiving.
I sent the text and waited, my eyelids drooping.
She hadn’t answered by midnight so I switched the light off, exhausted. But once I shut my eyes, sleep wouldn’t come. I tossed and turned through the night, a series of random, relentless thoughts crowding my head. I was still awake when a grayish-yellow light peeked through the curtains and slid its way along the carpet, and I felt doomed at the prospect of getting through a full day with the Edwardses without a wink of sleep. I rolled over and checked my phone again. I wanted an answer, just to know she was there on the other end. But Lucy hadn’t texted me back.
I managed to drift off somewhere around dawn, and when I woke it was half past nine and Alice was shaking me, telling me to come downstairs for blueberry pancakes.
I dressed and checked my phone one more time, craving affirmation that she still wanted to talk to me, a want so prevailing I couldn’t ignore it. But there was no text from Lucy, and she didn’t respond all day, or the next day, or the next, or the day after that. She didn’t respond at all.
35
LUCY
JANUARY 2014
“You seem better,” Jackie said as we walked to the house party down the street from us. “Even better than first semester, I mean.” The sun hid behind a thick wash of clouds, but the air was warm.
“I do feel better,” I agreed. “I feel like my old self again. Aside from the fact that I’ve totally screwed up my old self’s career plans.”
“What do you mean? Not minoring in journalism?”
“Given that I’ve only taken two journalism courses during my entire four years here, no. I was so out of it I didn’t even take the right classes. How did that happen? I could’ve done more writing for The Lantern, but I didn’t. And now I can’t exactly go and try to be a journalist without any formal education in journalism. I won’t even be able to get hired as an intern.”
“You could go back to school. Get a master’s in journalism. Right?”
“I guess. I just feel like I’ve played my cards all wrong.”
“You can’t think like that, Luce.”
“I know, I know. I should schedule a call with Dr. Wattenbarger and ask him about it. He’s very wise.”
“I mean, I wish I could talk to your therapist. I’m the one freaking out about Stuart every five minutes.”
“Breakups are hard.”
“It’s been a whole year, though.”
“I know. Baird is just too small, that’s the problem.”
“Yeah, like right now, case and point. The party has to be at Stuart’s house. And I want to go because it’s where all our friends are going, and I can’t not go because that would be so dramatic.”
“Exactly. How are you supposed to get over Stuart when you constantly have to run into him? If we weren’t at Baird, if we were out in the real world, he’d be old news.” I linked my arm through Jackie’s. I was grateful to hear her confirm what I’d been feeling myself—even better. All around me the world seemed bright and sunny and fresh. Baird was humming with students excited to be back from Christmas break, and the air stirred with a sense of anticipation that invigorated me from the inside out. God it was nice to be wearing shorts and a tank in January, I thought, smiling up at the exotic, slender-stemmed palm trees lining Carroll Street, with their beautiful, intricate fanning green leaves that I felt I hadn’t truly noticed until now.
During the first fifteen minutes of my first appointment with Dr. Wattenbarger back in June, he’d diagnosed me with clinical depression.
“You are depressed, Lucy,” he’d said, smiling at me with whimsical gray eyes, as if this were excellent news.
“Right. That makes sense.”
“Clinically depressed. I knew it the moment you walked into my office,” he’d continued brightly, running a hand through his thick silver hair. “I’ve been doing this a long time. I can see it in your face, in your movements, in the way you speak. This is positive.”
“How is this positive?” Of course CJ would send me to some crazy doctor who thinks depression is fantastic.
“Because it means I can help you. You have a chemical imbalance in your brain—it’s what’s giving you these intense feelings of despair. It’s what is causing you to feel like you’re moving through molasses. But I can prescribe you an antidepressant that will make you feel much better. Fast.”
“What do you mean, a chemical imbalance?”
“Think of it like an infection. Like strep throat. If you had strep, you’d be given antibiotics. Depression is like an infection in your brain, but it’s chemical. Your neurotransmitter levels are low. Neurotransmitters are the chemicals that relay messages from neuron to neuron, and right now yours are firing too slowly, which is why you feel this sense of lethargy and dejection.”
I watched Dr. Wattenbarger write me a prescription for Prozac as he continued to explain about depression and how it affects one in ten people in America.
“It’s probably genetic,” he said. “But it’s hard to tell, because about two-thirds of people with depression are left undiagnosed. Especially older people who’ve developed an aversion toward therapy.”
I’d nodded, figuring I’d gotten it from CJ’s side of the family. CJ’s mother is a complete nutcase, always miserable and complaining about everything and yelling at my grandfather even though he’s 80 percent deaf.
“It’s important that we combine the Prozac with regular therapy, though,” Dr. Wattenbarger said. “While depression is rooted in a chemical imbalance, there are external factors that can facilitate the condition.”
“External factors?”
“Yes. ‘Triggers,’ I like to say. That’s where the therapy is effective. We do the work to figure out what’s going on with you, what kind of struggles you might be dealing with in your day-to-day life that may have helped trigger the depression.”
I nodded again.
“So you’ll come see me once a week,” he instructed. “And you’ll fill this prescription and take one pill daily with breakfast.” Breakfast. I would have to eat breakfast.
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CJ had been right about Dr. Wattenbarger after all—he was a good psychiatrist, because the Prozac worked fast. After a few days it was as if something had shaken loose deep within me and lifted up and out of me. I felt lighter. I started to notice things, as if a fog was breaking or a windshield was defrosting or my eyes were acclimating to the dark. Life became clearer and clearer, until suddenly, I could see everything.
I went to Dr. Wattenbarger’s office once a week for the rest of the summer. The more I saw him, the more comfortable I felt with him, and the more I confessed. I’d gone to him with the intention of talking about the Unforgivable Thing, but the Prozac made me feel so much better so quickly that even though I knew I should still tell him it seemed unnecessary, and the few times I did open my mouth to say the words, nothing came except for air, and Dr. Wattenbarger looked at me with his curious gray eyes.
Dr. Wattenbarger and I discussed Georgia and my dad and my grandparents and Gabe and Parker and Lydia and my friends from school and parts of CJ, and even a little about my “eating issue,” as he called it. And we usually ended up discussing Stephen. Dr. Wattenbarger said that Stephen wasn’t necessarily the reason I’d become depressed, but that my feelings for him (in effect, the feelings he gave me) had been a source of relief for me, therefore Stephen himself could be deemed a “trigger.”
When it came to talking about Stephen I spared few details, because the more I heard the truth out loud the more sense it all made.
“What’s he like?” Dr. Wattenbarger had asked that very first day.
In my foggy mind a clear image of Stephen had appeared—I could always picture him lucidly—and an invisible clamp seized my chest.
“It’s hard to explain him.”
“Try.”
I fought the barricade across my collarbone, until I found words, and they spilled out.
“He’s tall. He has dark hair, and these intense green eyes. He’s easy to talk to. He always knows what to say. He can have a conversation with anybody. He’s funny. I’m always laughing when I’m with him. Genuinely laughing, not pretending. He’s smart. He knows exactly what he wants, and he goes for it. And he gets me. He gets parts of me that other people don’t. He can make me feel so good about myself, better than I’ve ever felt about myself, like a million bucks. He’s different, but good different. And there’s this thing between us, it’s like chemistry but more tangible. I’ve never met anybody who makes me feel that. Not even close.”
“But there’s a problem?” Dr. Wattenbarger’s expression grew thoughtful.
“Yes.”
“What is it?”
“Everything else,” I’d said, hitting on something, proceeding to tell him about the unabashed cheating and lying, the flipside of the irresistible charmer I held on a pedestal.
“You have to be careful with charm,” Dr. Wattenbarger had said. “You know what they say—charm is the ability to make someone think that both of you are quite wonderful.”
After a few sessions, Dr. Wattenbarger told me that Stephen’s motivations were consistent with sociopathic and narcissistic behaviors.
“Like Patrick Bateman in American Psycho?”
“Not exactly,” Dr. Wattenbarger replied. “There’s a spectrum, Lucy. Serial killers like Patrick Bateman are on one end. Stephen is probably closer to the other, less extreme end.”
We’d looked up both terms in his giant psychiatric glossary.
SOCIOPATH—A person with antisocial personality disorder, the most widely recognized personality disorder. Antisocial personality disorder is a chronic mental condition in which a person’s way of thinking, perceiving situations, and relating to others are dysfunctional and destructive. People with the disorder typically have no regard for right and wrong and often disregard the rights, wishes, and feelings of others. A sociopath is often well-liked because of his or her charm and high charisma, but he or she does not usually care about other people. Though some sociopaths become murderers, most reveal their sociopathy through less extreme means.*
*Harvard Medical School estimates that as many as 4 percent of the population are conscienceless sociopaths who have no empathy or affectionate feelings for humans or animals. Males are three times more likely to be sociopaths than females.
NARCISSIST—A person with narcissistic personality disorder, a mental disorder in which people have an inflated sense of their own importance, a deep need for admiration, and a lack of empathy for others. Behind this mask of ultraconfidence lies a fragile self-esteem that’s vulnerable to the slightest criticism. It is estimated that this condition affects 1 percent of the population, with rates greater for men.
“A lot of people cheat and lie, though,” I’d proposed to Dr. Wattenbarger during a later session, thinking of CJ.
“Do you think that?”
“I think it happens more than it should.”
“Maybe so. But you can’t attribute every cheating episode in history to sociopathic behavior. It could be an isolated event or have some kind of context. Chronic unfaithfulness is a different story. When you lie and cheat consistently, as it seems Stephen does, well, that isn’t human nature. There’s no guilt in that kind of behavior, see? Someone who causes harm to others without guilt—that’s a sociopath in action.”
“Yeah. I guess.” Like me, I couldn’t help but think, since the absence of guilt had been a notable void since the day I’d sold half of Marilyn’s jewelry and tossed the rest in the East River. I kept waiting to regret what I’d done, to feel some sense of remorse as I’d witnessed CJ in hysterical tears on the phone with the police and as I’d watched her fire Gloria, our housekeeper of ten years. I was shocked at myself and slightly horrified, sure, but I didn’t feel guilty. Instead, I felt strangely liberated. I felt no shame for what I’d done, which, in Dr. Wattenbarger’s eyes, would’ve made me a sociopath, too.
“Just avoid him, Lucy,” Dr. Wattenbarger said during our last session of the summer. “Promise me that you will cut all contact.”
“I will. I haven’t talked to him in months. And he doesn’t even go to Baird anymore.”
“I know. But if he calls you, if he texts you. He will try to contact you. People like Stephen, they don’t change. He will always come back for more. He won’t give it up until he has to.”
And Dr. Wattenbarger had been right. Stephen did contact me, once, in November, late at night.
STEPHEN: Hey Luce, it’s been a while. How are you? Happy Thanksgiving.
I hadn’t answered. I’d wanted to, a million times, desperately, but I fought against it. I didn’t let myself stop hearing Dr. Wattenbarger’s calm, knowing voice: People like Stephen, they don’t change. He will always come back for more. He won’t give it up until he has to.
He won’t give it up until he has to. What did that mean? When would he have to?
“Lucy?” Jackie’s voice interrupted my thoughts of Dr. Wattenbarger and therapy and Stephen being a sociopath. Stephen is a sociopath. The thought had never quite settled. If I let myself, I could miss Stephen all the way down to the tips of my toes. I could fight to reason all of it in my head.
“Huh?” I turned to Jackie.
“You’re spacing out. What were you thinking about?”
“I was just thinking that I’m sorry,” I said honestly, because apologizing to Jackie was something I’d been meaning to do.
“Sorry? For what?”
“I don’t think I’ve been a very good friend to you. At points throughout college, I mean.”
“If you’re talking about the France trip, I told you, I’m over it. I get that you were going through some shit.”
“It’s not just that. Sophomore and junior year in general. I just wasn’t at my best, and sometimes I don’t even know why you guys stuck by me.”
“Luce, you were never a bad friend. I think that’s what makes you such a good friend—you don’t even realize it. It’s just who you are. Even at your lowest points, you’ve always just accepted me, way more than a
lot of other people ever have. With the way I acted with Stuart and everything. God, I was a real psycho. No wonder he dumped me.”
“Jackie.” I squeezed her hand. “You’re not a psycho.”
“I might be.”
“We all might be. I love you.”
“I love you, too. C’mon. We’re here.”
We hurried up the creaky porch steps and inside 622 Carroll, where we were greeted by Topher Rigby, who’d ended up being one of Stuart’s housemates.
“Hello, ladies.”
Jackie and I both towered over Topher. We said hello and made our way across the wood floor of the foyer, which was sticky with a layer of dried beer.
“Now every time I see Topher I think about him trying to finger you sophomore year,” Jackie whispered in my ear.
“Ew, don’t bring that up,” I said. “Makes my skin crawl.”
“He just had zero idea what to do at all? Like, what was he actually doing with his hand?”
“Jesus, stop.” I cringed as we walked into the living room, which had no furniture except for a Ping-Pong table in the corner.
Like most Baird party houses, 622 Carroll was a shithole, and, as usual, it was packed. Stuart was playing beer pong and glanced over when he noticed Jackie. He always seemed to notice her right away. I watched them make eye contact and wave.
“Ugh, he looks so good,” she pouted.
Stuart did look good, and I pulled Jackie into the kitchen, which was crammed with people pushing their way toward the keg.
“We should’ve brought beer,” I said. “This is going to be impossible.”
“Lucy. Jackie,” said a voice behind me. “Take these.”
I turned around to meet a pair of familiar coppery eyes, flecks of amber glistening in the irises—it was Billy Boyd. He handed us two cold cans of PBR. When he smiled, those heart-wrenching dimples appeared on either cheek.
“Billy!” Jackie exclaimed. “You’re a lifesaver.”
“I’m heading out back,” he shouted over the hum of the crowd. “It’s too packed in here.”
Tell Me Lies Page 28
