Things I Shouldn't Think

by Janet Ruth Young

  “Just a moment, ma’am,” Officer Pinto says. “Young lady, why don’t you tell your mother exactly why we made a call at Mrs. Draper’s house?”

  “All right, Mike,” says the older cop. “Why don’t I do this?” The younger partner wiggles his head as if he’s bored. Dani gets the floating-up feeling she had when she told Mrs. Alex. Things would have been so different two days ago if she had been able to tell her mother at the time and in the way she had wanted to. Now her mother is asking what’s wrong, the bad cop is making her tell what’s wrong, and what’s wrong is known by too many people. She feels the wrongness seeping from the other side of the line into this life.

  “It’s so awful, Mom. I can barely tell you.” That childish wailing again. She grabs Beth’s hand.

  “It’s okay. Tell me.”

  “I keep thinking about hurting Alex.”

  Dani expected Beth’s face to come closer. But her expression turns inward, the way Mrs. Draper’s had. Maybe she’s seeing pictures like the ones Dani saw.

  “Is Alex okay? Did you hurt him? Is that why they brought you here? Is Alex . . . dead?”

  “Alex is alive, Mom. I didn’t hurt him.” Beth isn’t connecting this conversation to the one Dani tried to have.

  “Does your daughter have a history of mental illness, ma’am?” Officer Pinto asks.

  “Alex isn’t hurt? No one’s hurt?”

  “No, they’re not hurt. Ma’am, does your daughter have a history of mental illness? Ever threaten to hurt or kill anyone in the family? Anyone at school?”

  “Kill anyone at school? Oh my God. What kind of question is that?” She stares from one officer to the other.

  “I didn’t do anything, Mom,” Dani wails. She’s crumbling and she needs all of her mother’s attention. “I just kept thinking about it.”

  “But why? Why would you want to hurt Alex? I thought you loved Alex!”

  “I never wanted to hurt Alex. I kept asking to get out of babysitting, but Mrs. Alex wouldn’t let me go. I’m just glad it’s over.”

  Dani wants over to be the word everyone hears.

  “I can’t believe you or anyone would think about hurting little Alex,” Beth says. She turns to the police. “Did she do anything? Has she done anything? Tell me she hasn’t done anything.”

  “You don’t have to tell us right now,” Sergeant Mason answers, “but someone is going to ask whether there is a history of this nature.” When he puts his hands on his hips he looks broad enough to protect someone. “I suggest—and I cannot stress this strongly enough—that you make an appointment with a psychologist. You may also want to retain a lawyer, in case news of this gets out, or in case Mrs. Draper pursues any legal action.”

  “What kind of legal action would it be?” Beth Solomon asks, envisioning something, starting to shift ahead. Maybe there are events to come from this, bad events, that Dani hasn’t thought of yet. She’s still looking forward to the relief part.

  “You never threatened that child, correct?” Mason asks in a kind voice.

  “I told you, no. It’s still no. Can you leave me now so I can rest? Can I be alone with my mother?”

  “You’re probably all right, then,” he says to Beth. He even winks at her, but Beth doesn’t notice.

  The younger officer speaks. “Do you monitor her online activities, ma’am? Has she ever sent death threats over the Internet?”

  “That’s enough, Mike,” Mason says. “Did Mrs. Draper say anything about death threats on the Internet?”

  “She did not, but I regard it as a routine line of questioning.”

  “Dani, have you?” Beth was starting to sit, but she gets up again. She looks drained, like her skin has gotten too big for her body.

  “Of course not!” Dani says. “You know I would never do that, Mom.”

  “I wouldn’t respond to any of this, ma’am,” Mason suggests. “Not until you see a lawyer.”

  “I wonder just what it is you know and don’t know,” Pinto persists. “Did you have any inkling of this, ma’am?”

  “No . . .” It took a while, but Beth is crumbling too. When the cops came in she was ready to protect Dani. Now Beth blinks a few times and looks from Mason to Pinto to Dani, with dampness trapped in her eyelashes. “I didn’t know about it. How long has this been going on, Dani?”

  Dani plops down on the couch. “A few weeks.”

  “A few weeks? It’s been going on a few weeks.” Beth consults some internal calendar and closes her eyes.

  “Ma’am,” Sergeant Mason begins, “I’m a parent too. And if my kid ever said something like this, I would find it unsettling. I would not delay in taking her to a psychologist or therapist.”

  “All right,” Beth says. “You hear that, honey? We’ll find a therapist. I’ll start calling around tomorrow.” Mason leans toward her. “Today,” Beth says.

  Dani knows Beth is thinking about all she needs to do today, meetings and client appointments and searches in the registry of deeds, to which the therapist calls will have to be added.

  “Did you have to park a cruiser in front of my house?” Beth asks.

  Sergeant Mason smiles. “That’s the car I work in, ma’am.”

  “I don’t think Dani’s done anything wrong.”

  “Let’s hope not.”

  “I think it’s the stress,” Beth says, pressing her hands to the bridge of her nose, “with school and tennis and music and college applications and so on. And I wasn’t home often enough.”

  “Lots of kids are under stress these days, ma’am,” Mason says.

  “I don’t think she did anything wrong. Yet you’ve parked a marked police car in front of my house. Was there any reason to bring her here? Couldn’t you have called from the station?”

  Dani looks out at the driveway. The elderly couple across the street methodically removes bags of groceries from the trunk. The woman passes them to the man, who carries them inside. Neither of them seems to notice the squad car. They’re sweet elderly people, but Dani stopped waving to them when she started having thoughts about yelling that they would die soon.

  The cops exchange looks. “She’s your child,” Mason says. “She’s living at this address, and she should be home.”

  Beth moves closer to the door. “What will I say when people ask why a cruiser was parked in front of my house?”

  Pinto smirks. “Tell them you got a visit from the parenting police.”

  “I didn’t know anything about this until you walked in the door five minutes ago.”

  “You should pay more attention to your kids, ma’am,” Pinto pushes.

  “Kid, singular,” Beth says.

  “Tell me, ma’am,” Pinto asks, “where is your husband?”

  Beth smirks. “I killed him. Joke!”

  “We have another call,” Mason says.

  “Just one more question,” Beth says. “Is this going to be in the papers?”

  “It’s up to me if I want it in the police log. I’ve suggested you take your daughter to see somebody. I’ll check back in a week to see if you’ve done that.”

  “All right,” Beth says. “But call next time. Don’t just . . . drive up like that.”

  “Good luck, ma’am,” says Pinto.

  Mason claps Dani’s shoulder. “No more trouble from you, okay, young lady?”

  Dani has a lot of experience smiling under stress. That’s from both winning and losing tennis matches. “Thank you for bringing me home,” she tells them.

  “She seems like a nice girl,” Mason tells Beth.

  Because Beth has been painting, the windows are open. Dani hears Officer Pinto on his way to the car.

  “Nice girl? She’s a freaking whack job,” he says to Mason. “And it’s always the rich parents who have their heads in the sand.”

  26

  “Oh, thank God it’s over. I wanted to tell you, but I didn’t know how to say it. Can you see why I had trouble making people understand, because it’s so weird? But now I to
ld and babysitting is finally over.”

  Dani kept it together when the police were in the house. Now she feels like throwing up tears. She’s taller than her mother, but she needs the sensation of someone solid and established taking charge of her situation. She inhales the smells of her mother’s lotion and paint and fabric softener.

  Beth hugs Dani. “It’s all right. It’s all right,” she says into Dani’s hair. “Dani, did you tell me everything? Did you hurt Alex?”

  “Mom, of course not!”

  “Is there anything you didn’t tell the police? Did you ever touch Alex . . . sexually? If there is anything at all, this isn’t the time to keep secrets. You have to tell me now so we can get a lawyer.”

  “Alex? No. That’s so gross.” The grossness of it propels Dani into walking away, the same way Shelley helplessly waved her hands while thinking about touching Mr. Gabler.

  “Then what did you do?”

  “I never did anything. I kept picturing weird things happening, and I didn’t want them to happen, so I told Mrs. Alex I couldn’t babysit anymore. That’s all.”

  “What kind of weird things?”

  “Like stabbing him or something.”

  Beth follows Dani to the far corner of the room. “I wish I could see inside your mind. You look the same as you did yesterday. But the things I hear you saying . . . We have to get a doctor.”

  “Okay, we’ll get a doctor.”

  “So what did you tell Mrs. Alex? How much does she know?”

  “That I had thoughts of harming Alex.”

  “Why did you tell her that?”

  “So she could get another babysitter. Are you going to call a doctor now?”

  “What did Mrs. Alex say when you told her?”

  “She didn’t say much. She immediately called the cops.”

  “You shouldn’t have told Mrs. Alex anything. You should have just quit.”

  “I tried. She wouldn’t let me.”

  “If something like this ever happens again—”

  Dani sits on the couch. “I’m never babysitting again. It isn’t going to happen.”

  “Oh, Dani.” Beth scoots over to Dani and pulls Dani’s head onto her shoulder. Dani can tell her mom is trying to figure out how to tell Sean. This will be one of only three times in Dani’s life that her mother hasn’t been proud of her. The other two were when Dani made her mother a Valentine’s Day card from a nonexistent secret admirer, and the time Dani was late for the concert. “It should have been you and me having that conversation, not you and Mrs. Alex.”

  “I tried two days ago, I said.”

  “That was your way of telling me? You could have said it was an emergency.”

  “Oh, well.” Dani wraps her arms around herself.

  Beth presses her hands to her face again. The right hand wears a ring from Sean that he called a friendship ring. Beth spent hours on the phone with her friends discussing the ring’s significance, whether it meant she was pre-engaged. One friend said, “I didn’t know people used the term ‘friendship ring’ anymore.”

  “Dani, why do you think you’re doing this?”

  “It doesn’t feel like something I’m doing. It feels like something that’s happening to me. I think Sergeant Mason is right. I think I’d like to talk to somebody.”

  “Dani, is somebody putting ideas like this into your head?”

  “No.”

  “Who are you spending time with these days? Is it still Shelley, or are you with a different crowd? I feel like I’ve been ignoring you lately and I know that isn’t good.”

  “It’s still Shelley.”

  “I should start calling around. We need a really good therapist. Not just any hippie-dippie who can hang up a shingle.”

  “Mom, would you sit with me a few minutes? Then we’ll make the appointment? And then can we go to the movies and the sandwich place? I think a good movie might rinse some of the bad stuff out of my mind.”

  Beth strokes Dani’s hair. “I need to catch my breath a minute, honey. This is a lot to hit me with.”

  It’s over, Dani tells herself. Finally she doesn’t have to go back and babysit. Finally she doesn’t have to be alone with Alex. Her problem with the bad thoughts had seemed to be expanding, picking up power and momentum and spreading into every area of her life. But she did the right thing and told Alex’s mom. That’s the bottom line. Her shame and embarrassment meant nothing in comparison to Alex’s need to be safe. It was awkward and horrifying to have to discuss the thoughts with the police and Beth. It was absolute hell to discuss it with Mrs. Alex. But Dani has put Alex first, and so she privately congratulates herself with the same word she used for Shelley. I’m brave, she thinks. I may be crazy, but I’m brave.

  But her relief lasts only for moments, because an old saying starts to run through her mind like a musical loop: Where there’s a will, there’s a way. The fact that she’s no longer babysitting doesn’t mean that she won’t kill Alex. A new thought comes into her mind, of going to Alex’s house and dragging him home to her house and murdering him there.

  Not after all that work, Dani thinks. Not after all I’ve done. Finding someone to listen to me. Asking and asking. Telling and telling. Involving the police and Mom and Mrs. Alex and everyone. I thought it was over. I tried to end it. How can I still have these thoughts? She thought she had left them behind, but they followed her here. The thoughts are like the water that comes into a hole you dig in the sand, Dani realizes. If you create an empty space, they will fill it. She looks at her hands and squeezes them together. I’m not hurting anyone; I haven’t hurt anyone; at least as of this exact minute, I still have not hurt anyone.

  Beth puts her hands on top of Dani’s. “Tough day, huh?” She’s trying to understand.

  “Will you start calling the doctors now?” Dani asks. “I think it’ll be a big relief to talk to someone.”

  “I’ll start calling around, but no movie tonight. You look done in and so am I. Once I make some calls we’ll pop some supper in the microwave and go to bed early.”

  “Would you do me a favor, Mom?” Dani asks.

  “Of course, sweetheart.”

  “Will you lock your door when you go to bed?”

  Beth takes a few seconds to realize what Dani’s saying. When she does, it seems that Beth might find this worse than the thoughts of hurting Alex. She puts her hands over her eyes and takes a deep breath.

  “You think about hurting me, too? Why would you want to hurt me?”

  Dani stands in front of Beth with her hands folded.

  “Would you just do it, Mom? It would make me feel better.”

  “Well, am I . . . safe?”

  “I’m tired and I need to sleep somewhere,” Dani says. “That’s all I can tell you. Now will you do it?”

  After their supper, Dani hears Beth lock her bedroom door. She locks it so softly it seems she doesn’t want Dani to hear. Beth might think it’s mean and insulting, but it makes Dani feel better. Dani wishes she could feel closer to her mom right now. Dani feels like the one person in the world who wants to help her—and who can help her—is a locked door away. But she had to ask Beth for that favor. If everyone is protected from Dani, she feels safer too.

  27

  “It’s fine,” Beth Solomon tells her neighbor Lynette the next day, when Lynette asks about the cruiser. Lynette is someone Beth usually can talk to about anything. “Dani got stranded at school and ended up talking with the cop who patrols the school. He saw her standing there and offered her a ride home. Apparently she tried to call me, but I was talking to a client and didn’t check my messages. No reason to worry.”

  28

  Text messages between Shelley and Dani:

  “You haven’t told anyone, have you? You’re still the only one who knows.”

  “Of course not. You are my best friend and I will never tell anyone your secret.”

  29

  “I guess I just like being around her,” Shelley says. “It’s n
ot that I need to have this kind of relationship or that kind. I mean, she doesn’t need to know that my feelings for her are different than for any other friend. I just want to spend time getting to know her. I just want her in my life.”

  Shelley and Dani are hunkered on their bench, constructing what they know of Meghan’s relationship history. Meghan seems to like getting boys from Hawthorne High interested, but she only dates them two or three times before dropping them.

  “She’s not the kind of person who gets her whole identity from being part of a couple,” Shelley says. “I think that’s cool.”

  “I agree,” says Dani. She and Shelley are not those kinds of people either.

  Dani has already decided not to tell Shelley what happened with Mrs. Alex and the police. It’s over and done with, and anyway, judging from their earlier conversation, Shelley may not be much help. Dani still has thoughts about grabbing Mr. Gabler’s testicles. But no way is she mentioning that to Shelley again.

  30

  Dani goes for her first visit with Dr. Kumar, whose office has silk throw pillows from India and a painting of a bowl of cherries.

  “Are you angry at someone, Daniela?” Dr. Kumar asks. “Are you angry at Alex for any reason? Are you angry at Mrs. Alex?”

  Dani tells Dr. Kumar about Mrs. Alex staying out late, being disorganized, and not having food in the house, but no, she doesn’t think she’s angry at either Alex or Mrs. Alex.

  “Do you have thoughts about harming anyone else?”

  Dani tells Dr. Kumar her thoughts of knocking her mother off a ladder, grabbing Mr. Gabler’s testicles, and outing Shelley in front of the opposing team, and about Gordy in a basement with pieces beside other pieces they should never be beside. But she doesn’t feel angry at those people. She gets irritated at her mother and Shelley sometimes. But not angry enough to do those things.

  “And your relationship with your father, Daniela? Would you describe it as an angry relationship?”

  Dr. Kumar has beautiful, heavily made-up eyes, a blond streak in her hair, and white boots that make her look like a superhero. Her outfit the first day is an amethyst-colored dress with multiple silver necklaces.