Songs Without Words

by Ann Packer

  He didn’t respond.

  She waited a bit, but he read on, not looking at her. She said, “What are you reading?”

  Again, he remained silent, but he raised the book so she could see the cover: Ramona the Pest by Beverly Cleary. She laughed, but rather than laugh with her, he looked up and gave her a quick, mean look, then returned to the book.

  “What?” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  He stayed slouched, face lowered. Lauren had read Ramona the Pest in first grade—he couldn’t be reading it for real, could he? She wouldn’t have laughed except she thought that was what he was expecting.

  “I always loved that book,” she said, but he still didn’t move.

  Lauren felt sick, and she glanced around to see if anyone was looking. Casey was. Casey was entirely evil—she hadn’t let up on Lauren since the first morning. Now she gestured for Lauren to come to the card table.

  Lauren shook her head.

  Casey gestured again: a quick, insistent com’ere with her arm. Her short hair was going in all directions this morning, and Lauren wondered if maybe she did that on purpose, to look more messed up. Casey was very into how messed up she was. And yet, she was probably leaving soon.

  “Lauren,” Casey called.

  Now Ivan looked, too. Lauren glanced at Lucas, then got up and crossed the room to their table. Ivan was holding the fourth chair out for her.

  “How’s it going, Lauren?” he said.

  “OK.”

  She waited for Casey to tell her that she wasn’t OK, but instead Casey said, “Lucas is down today.”

  “Down?”

  “It’s his disease. He’s way down.”

  “But his medications,” Lauren began. The whole thing with Lucas was, it was treatable. With drugs. “I thought—” She turned and looked at him, and all at once she understood that he wasn’t actually reading the book. She even understood that holding it like that, to look as if he were reading it, was hard work. And, as if to confirm this, he closed the book and slumped deeper in his chair.

  “Does Dr. Porter know?” she said.

  Ivan scratched the side of his neck. “We’ll let her know when she checks in.”

  Lauren stared into the center of the table. They were playing some kind of card game where you discarded into a pile, and the most recently discarded card was the jack of diamonds. She stared at the card, and all of a sudden she was thinking about Jeff Shannon. And that made her think about being in bed at home on a sunny weekend morning, hearing noises downstairs, seeing that line of light around the edges of her curtains. She saw herself in her closet, crying. What on earth was wrong with her?

  Liz was at Safeway. She never shopped on the weekend, but she was out of milk, out of Wheaties, so here she was. Brody had taken Joe to a soccer tournament in Foster City—she was going to meet them over there this afternoon. She felt bad about not seeing the whole thing, but sometimes it was just too much. Did it disappoint Joe, her not always being there? In the last week he had been quiet, hard to read. Mute on the subject of Lauren.

  “It’s not about your guilt. It can’t be.” This was what Dr. Lewis had said to her and Brody last night, out in the corridor after the session with Lauren was over. Liz had understood him to mean that in order to help Lauren they must focus on Lauren, and she knew he was right. But at home afterward, moving from room to room, all she could think was that this was the place where she’d catastrophically mismanaged things, and they might have to move to recover. She started to say this to Brody, and he looked at her as if she were crazy.

  The Safeway was nearly empty—it was the weekend after Thanksgiving; everyone was at the malls. Liz moved down the aisles, grabbing cereal, bread, rice, mayo, salad dressing, and on down her list. Tuna—she took a couple of the no-drain vacuum bags, remembering a funny Sarabeth soliloquy on the new technology of tuna, the breakthrough potential of the new packaging, how if tuna were traded on the stock market it would be skyrocketing. And why did that make her think of the time Sarabeth confessed that she always confused Nasdaq with NASCAR?

  She hadn’t heard from Sarabeth since the cell phone calls she didn’t answer Tuesday. “You didn’t want to invite Sarabeth?” her mother had asked over the roast beef on Thursday. Liz had shrugged, but a bad feeling had lingered, and here it was again. She felt in some sense duty-bound to call Sarabeth, but also enraged that it should have to be she who called. So what if this was hard on Sarabeth—what was Liz supposed to do about it?

  Tuna casserole had been a great favorite of Joe’s long ago, and she grabbed a third vacuum bag, deciding on the spot that she’d make tuna casserole tonight. She found the soups, added a can of cream of mushroom to her cart, then went back to the pasta aisle and got a cellophane bag of wide egg noodles. Tuna casserole, spaghetti and meatballs, all those dishes from the kids’ childhoods. Had she lost something, setting those recipes aside?

  In produce she despaired over the wilted weekend fare. Why pay money for lettuce that looked like that? She found the least objectionable red leaf she could, then skipped fruit altogether, thinking there were a few bananas left at home, some oranges, and she just didn’t have the heart to spend any more time here.

  Foster City soccer tournaments were a Thanksgiving weekend staple, and Brody had spent many a late-November weekend exactly where he was now, in his collapsible chair under a crisp blue sky.

  Joe had played well this morning, but the noon game had been a disaster, 7 to 1, and Joe had been especially clumsy. Grouped under a small cluster of pine trees before the start of the day’s final game, he and his teammates were being lectured by their coach, and Brody kept his eyes averted lest he see the coach look too often at Joe.

  His shoulder was killing him. He got up from his chair and twisted side to side from his waist, then walked toward the tennis courts. There were lots of doubles games going on, plus two serious guys about his age running each other to pieces. A pair of teenage girls made up the only other singles game, and from several courts away Brody watched them until he realized he was studying their bodies, not their strokes. He turned his back and leaned against the chain link. He remembered the smell of girl sweat from the times in high school when he and Andrew Drayson had played mixed doubles, how girls’ sweat smelled different: cleaner, grassier. He and Andrew would smirk at each other across the net: at their superiority to the girls, at their desire and cockiness, at their intimate knowledge of the other’s fear. Later, they might sit on the bench near the girls’ locker room and watch the girls come out, their legs no longer exposed by their little white skirts. Brody and Andrew would pretend they were not on that bench for any particular reason, but the girls would laugh knowingly, say, “Fancy seeing you guys here,” and Brody and Andrew would make stupid jokes and elbow each other, and fail, each time, to ask the girls out.

  Andrew was still in the Cleveland area. Brody had seen him only once in the past couple of decades, at the twentieth reunion of his high school class. He and Liz had flown out for the weekend, leaving the kids with Liz’s parents, and they’d had a surprisingly good time catching up with people, dancing under a disco ball, drinking Tom Collinses because that had been the favorite illegal drink of Brody’s youth. Andrew had gotten very, very fat and only laughed when Brody asked if he still played tennis. It made Brody sad now to think of it—not Andrew fat, not Andrew no longer playing, but that he himself hadn’t known until that night what had become of Andrew, hadn’t wondered. Flying home, he’d thought that his best friend had vanished into a fat guy in a huge navy-blue blazer, and he’d wondered if Andrew’s best friend had vanished, too.

  A couple fields down, Joe’s team was starting to warm up, and Brody returned to his chair. If only Lauren had played soccer, this probably never would have happened. She had played as a very little girl, but a year or two after Joe started, she stopped. As far as Brody knew, the only exercise she got was in PE. Liz had always been dead set against forcing, or maybe even encouraging, the kids to try things,
and as a result Lauren had no passions. They need to be allowed to make their own choices. Yeah, but what if they didn’t make any? Brody was certain a sport, or even a hobby, would have made a difference.

  “Hey, there,” said a voice, and then Liz was touching his shoulder and unfolding her chair next to his.

  “You came,” he said.

  “I said I would.”

  “And you did.”

  The game was about to start, and Joe stood at left halfback, his face flushed from the jog around the field. For a moment he seemed to be looking at Brody and Liz, but from so far away it was hard to tell. Liz waved, and Brody stifled an impulse to tell her not to distract him.

  “Your mother called,” she said.

  He turned to look at her. She was wearing a zippered fleece jacket that he’d bought for himself and then rarely worn, the color a brighter blue than he liked.

  “Hello?” she said.

  “I heard you.” He glanced at the field. He’d told his mother and sister on Thursday evening, in a call that had lasted only a few minutes. “What’d she say?”

  “She wanted to know if there was anything new.”

  “And?”

  “And I told her there wasn’t.” She crossed her legs and looked away from him, and he knew he was being an ass.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Forget it.”

  “Was she still in Cincinnati?”

  Liz nodded.

  His mother, when she heard the news, had gasped and then fallen completely silent. “Oh, my dear,” she’d finally said. After some confusion Marilyn had come on the line and asked for the whole story, and Brody had thought simultaneously that it was just like her to intervene, and that he was incredibly relieved that she had.

  The whistle must have blown, though Brody hadn’t heard it; Joe had the ball and tried for a pass, but a kid on the other team intercepted.

  Brody thought about last night, the meeting with Dr. Lewis. Every word out of his mouth had been followed by an equivocation. The Prozac was important, but long-term psychotherapy might be even more important. Talking was vital, but some teens needed medications before they could make use of it.

  And if it was all about drugs and therapy, then why was she still in the hospital, five days later?

  “I wonder,” he said, but before he could even get the thought out, Liz stiffened beside him.

  “We have to,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Keep her there. Let the setting help her.”

  There’d been a time when her ability to anticipate what he was going to say had delighted him, even as it had occasionally frustrated him that he couldn’t do the same with her. Now he found it annoying. Was it so hard to let him finish a sentence? And: Let the setting help her. That was Dr. Lewis’s phrase.

  “Maybe that’s not what I was going to say.”

  “Was it?”

  He shrugged.

  “Honey,” she said. She put her hand on his arm and left it there, and after a while he began not to mind it. He stared at the game. It was late November, sunny and clear and sixty degrees, a day the Midwest couldn’t fathom. The bay was blocks away, the ocean just on the other side of the mountains, the country’s most beautiful city a half hour north. All of this Brody knew. This is why we live here, people said at all times of the year. This is why we wouldn’t live anywhere else. Was it more dangerous, though, here in the Bay Area, where it was so beautiful and so temperate? What if he had stayed in the Midwest? Where hardship came every year in the form of frozen pipes and cars that wouldn’t start and months of cabin fever. Did a certain kind of ease pave the way for trouble?

  17

  It was Sunday morning, and Sarabeth’s living room was filled with a pinkish glow. Her skin was pink. The New York Times was pink. Her life was going to be pink, because she’d hung a red tablecloth over the living room window, and it was going to stay there for all of time.

  She was never going to look at the Heidts again.

  She lay on her couch. Across the room, a little charcoal drawing of a bird hung on the wall, and she stared at it, wishing there were something between her and that bird. She wanted to call Liz. The bird had an eye. She reached into her purse for her cell phone and then held it and looked again at the bird. It had been drawn with an economy of strokes: head, beak, feathers, twiggy feet. There was pressure in her chest as she scrolled to Liz’s home number. It had been five days since the Tuesday morning phone call that had seemed to right things, Liz sounding so sympathetic and forgiving. On each of those days Sarabeth had wanted to call Liz, and had wanted Liz to call her, and had done nothing.

  Joe answered. His voice was changing, its pitch today that of the man he would become.

  “Joe?” she said, and then “It’s Sarabeth, how are you?” and then “I’m so sorry about your sister.”

  “Thanks,” he said.

  There was a silence, and she realized she’d spoken too quickly, hadn’t given him any time to respond.

  “Hang on,” he said, and she lay there with her cell phone held to her ear, looking at the picture of the bird, then at the pile of pointless belongings still strewn across the floor below it. The pink dish from Liz was pinker in this light.

  “Hi,” Liz said.

  Tears spilled from Sarabeth’s eyes. “Hi.”

  Liz was silent, and Sarabeth wiped the tears away and sniffed.

  “Are you crying?” Liz said.

  “No,” Sarabeth said, but it was a throaty, nasally “no,” and now she did cry.

  “What’s up?” Liz said a bit stiffly.

  “I’m sorry,” Sarabeth sobbed.

  “It’s OK,” Liz said. “I told you, really.”

  “No, I mean for this.”

  “I don’t even know what ‘this’ is.”

  Not just stiffly: coldly.

  “Nothing,” Sarabeth said. “I’m sorry to bother you.”

  “You’re not bothering me.”

  “How is she?”

  “The same.”

  Sarabeth waited, but that was it—that was all Liz was going to say. She let go of the cell phone and let it balance on the side of her head. She put her hands over her face.

  “What are you upset about?” Liz said.

  “Nothing,” Sarabeth said, her hands still half over her mouth, the phone wiggly on her head. “I’m sorry to bother you,” she said again.

  “You’re not bothering me,” Liz said, “but you’re baffling me, and I can barely hear you.”

  “Oh, my God,” Sarabeth said, and then the phone slipped off her ear, and though she grabbed at it she failed to catch it, and it fell to the floor. Retrieving it, she saw that the call had been cut off. Redial, she thought, redial, but she’d never mastered the ins and outs of this phone, the shortcuts, the easy-dials. She set it on the coffee table and yearned for blankness.

  18

  Lucas had not spoken to anyone in two days. It was schooltime on Monday, but he was off somewhere with Dr. Porter, who had arrived in an uncharacteristic hurry just as check-in was ending.

  One of Abby’s friends had left yesterday, and there was a new girl no one had seen yet—Casey had mentioned her at breakfast. Casey knew everything. She was leaving Wednesday, after almost three weeks. She’d been here the longest of anyone.

  Today marked a week for Lauren. She sat at a table doing a math worksheet. The idea of Mr. Pavlovich getting a note that she was out…she didn’t want to think about it. Nor about Amanda, who had called yesterday and said how much she missed Lauren and cared about her. Nor about her parents, visiting last night, coming again tonight, not doing anything for her, nothing at all. Did they want her to be in here? They must. Better here than bugging them at home.

  Lucas came back in, followed by Dr. Porter. His face was the same as it had been since Saturday, lifeless and black eyed. He sat on a couch and stared off into space. Dr. Porter spoke quietly to Kitsy and then left; she’d be back in the afternoon. What did she do in t
he mornings, anyway? If she had kids, she’d be more likely to work in the mornings and not be here in the afternoons. Then again, if she had kids they’d be around thirty. Lauren couldn’t imagine having a shrink for a parent. What was that like for you?

  Actually, her mom was full of that shit. She fucking studied it, she had books about parenting. When Lauren was little, she was always talking with other moms about naps and stuff, “boundaries,” “limits,” who knew what all.

  Lauren put her pencil down and went over to one of the windows. Someone had stuck a Hello Kitty sticker on the glass, and she picked at an edge until there was a lip she could pull. She tore away half the sticker, then scratched at the rest until all that remained was the thin white under-layer. She looked at her fingernails, imagined what it would be like to attack her cuticles the way some of the other kids did. There was this one guy, Angus, with fingers that were puffed like doughnuts around the tiny, bitten plates of his nails. No guys cut themselves, though—as far as she knew. From the window she glanced at Lucas. He was looking at her, and she gave him a little wave. His face stayed the same, but after a moment he beckoned for her.

  “What?” she said, approaching the couch. He beckoned again, and she stepped closer, then sat on the edge of the chair next to him. It was a square yellow armchair, vinyl—this was the first time she’d sat in it. In fact, it was where he usually sat.

  He inhaled, as if to speak, but then he just sighed and let his head fall back.

  “Are you OK?”

  He looked up, looked right at her. His eyes were wet, and she didn’t know if that meant tears or something else, something she’d never heard of that had to do with bipolar disorder. He was taking a mood stabilizer, according to Abby. Abby knew all about the different medications. She knew that Lauren was taking Prozac without Lauren’s ever having told her. “How’d you know?” Lauren asked, and Abby said, “After a while you get to recognize all the pills.”

  The wetness pooled and fell onto Lucas’s cheeks. Lauren put a hand out and then, after a moment, pulled it back. She looked up and saw three or four people staring at her. One of the nurses gave her a sad smile. All at once she had to get out of there, and she stood up and raced for her room and slammed the door behind her.