Later—after the power was on, and the tree was a pile of logs, and the donuts were gone—my mother and I sat on the couch and went through the pictures. Our heads bent together over the dinky screen, we relived today and the last five months in reverse. There was a picture of the Christmas tree taken before Christmas, and a picture of our Thanksgiving turkey, and one of me on the couch looking like a slob in sweatpants in front of the TV. Mom pressed the button, and there was me crossing a finish line, and me standing with Coach Buffman, and me dressed up for Kylie’s party. First day of school. My new haircut. An “after” picture of my mom’s bedroom, followed by one of me on the ladder, with paint on my nose.
Mom laughed. I pressed the button.
My father’s urn, on the desk, in the room that is now my bedroom.
My mother sighed. I was about to shut off the camera, but I pressed the arrow once more.
“Who’s that?” she said.
I couldn’t breathe. I felt like I’d been hit in the chest with a wrecking ball. The room started spinning. I was floating. There, on the camera, was the picture I’d taken in my room. But not exactly. It was my room in the In-Between. It was the picture I’d taken of Madeline before I knew my father was dead and my mother was alive. Before I knew my best friend was my sister. My stone angel. She was down on all fours, crawling toward the camera.
“Is that you?”
“It’s her!” I cried.
My mother squinted and then snatched the camera from me. “That’s you,” she said defiantly.
“It can’t be!” I snatched the camera back. “Look!” I pressed the reverse arrow. There was a picture of Mom and me packing up our old house. I pressed the forward button. Madeline. I pressed it again. My father’s urn. Our camera’s too cheap for a time stamp, but it can’t be me in the picture. My mother tried to say that she must have taken it right after we got to Pottsville, but she knows it’s not true. I had a giant bruise on my forehead. I was ten pounds heavier. My hair was still ragged. I didn’t even own that shirt then, not until we went school shopping, and that was after we buried my dad. She knows all of these things. She knows that’s not me.
She took the camera again, to get a closer look.
“We’re not identical,” I said. “Just our hair and eyes. She’s beautiful, isn’t she?”
My mother let the camera slip from her hands. She stood up suddenly and went to the kitchen and then upstairs. She came back down and asked for the camera and then went back up.
I think she’s in shock. I have to give her time. Tomorrow, my mother will call my doctor and she’ll call Erika, and I’ll show the picture to Autumn, and everyone will know that I am not crazy.
seventy-five
I hate her. I want to scream her to pieces. I want to claw and kick and grind her into oblivion. I can’t see straight. I can’t breathe. It’s tearing me apart. I am splitting. She deleted her daughter, my sister. Erased all trace that she exists. She will be sorry. She will regret this day. Someday. Trust me. She will pay and pay and pay. I knew something was wrong when she tried to make me take my pills. I told her I didn’t need them. She told me to take them.
“Why?”
“Don’t argue,” she said. “Take them and get dressed. You’ve got a session with Erika.”
“You’re gonna tell her, right? You’re gonna tell her about Madeline.”
My mother placed the pills on the kitchen table.
“I took that picture,” she said, taking down a glass for juice. “It was you in that picture.”
I walked to the sink and tossed the pills down the drain and ran the faucet.
“Where’s the camera?”
“Ellie, listen to me. You’ve changed, but it was you.”
“Where’s the camera?”
“I took that picture. I must have. A lot was happening then. We just don’t remember. Ellie, listen. Please. If she’s real, then why did the pills make her go away?”
“It’s just—It’s—It’s—” I started twitching, my muscles contracting grotesquely. My right arm shot out, knocking the glass to the floor. My leg flew back and kicked the cupboard door. It was Madeline’s energy—angry—needing a way out.
My mother gripped my arm. “What’s wrong? Are you okay?”
I wrenched my arm free. I needed to find the camera.
I lurched up the stairs and down the hall, like some possessed marionette, knocking pictures off walls. I heard my mother on the stairs—she’s getting heavy and slow—and heard her calling, “Wait.” I kept going. There it was, on her dresser. My hands were shaking. I couldn’t stop trembling. I started mashing buttons randomly. Arrow. Reverse arrow. Christmas. Thanksgiving. Cross-country. Kylie’s party. School. My father’s urn.
The floorboards creaked. My mother was in the hall. She was saying, “Listen to yourself, Ellie. Listen to what you’re asking me to believe.”
I pressed the arrow on the left. My mother and me packing up our old house. I pressed the arrow on the right. The urn. Left. My mother and me. Right. Urn. Left. Us. Right. Left. Right. Left. I panicked. It was the same feeling I’d had in the Poconos when my father said, Hold on! We’re gonna hit—
“You stupid—”
My mother slapped me, hard, across the face. Her eyes were wide with fright.
My arm hitched like it was ejecting from its socket. The camera went flying. The stupid piece of plastic crap shattered against the closet door. The shuddering in my chest stopped. I walked past my mother and down the stairs and out the door and waited in the car. The girls were watching, dressed in snowsuits, staring at me from across the street. They waved. I gave them the finger.
It was wrong, what she did, deleting the picture. Even Erika said so. I could hear the two of them, behind the office door, talking like they thought I couldn’t hear.
“She’s lying!” I shouted from my chair in the hall. Erika opened the door. “Come in, Ellie. Please.”
“You’re lying,” I said. “You believed it yesterday.”
My mother’s face burned red.
“You know you did. Say it. Just say it.”
My mother turned to Erika. “It was a strange picture. It was out of focus. Ellie’s changed so much since summer. It caught me off guard.”
“It wasn’t out of focus. You’re lying. You’re just saying that now. Here. In front of Erika.”
“Ellie, why would your mother lie?”
I folded my arms over my chest and fell into the fake leather chair. I tried to be a stone, a rock, but it started again, in my neck, the flinching. I pulled my limbs in tight, fighting against my own body. My leg kicked forward like a reflex test. Again and again, knocking against the coffee table, knocking Erika’s mug to the floor.
“That started this morning,” my mother said.
Erika nodded, grabbed a bunch of tissues and cleaned up the coffee. “It’s a side effect,” she said. “Her doctor may need to adjust her meds. Ellie, have you been feeling anxious again?”
My head started ringing. Everything melted and my eyes went out of focus. I pinched my lips together and shut my eyes and forced the burning tears down my throat. I can’t live like this anymore, I thought. I don’t want to live like this.
“Ellie, answer her.” It was my mother. I could hear the embarrassment in her voice, the disappointment. I disappoint her time after time after time. I don’t care, I thought. I can’t answer. I won’t answer. I’m never talking again. Words are useless. They look at me and all they see is this red, angry, crazy girl, when really I’m dying inside. Can’t they see they’re killing me? Can’t they see I’m dying?
seventy-six
My mother came home with a cat. A scrawny little black thing. That’s what I call her: Thing. My mother calls her Sweet Pea, the name they gave her at the shelter. I don’t want her guilt offering. She can take it back. She can put it out in the woods and let the dogs have at it. No. I don’t mean that. That’s cruel. This cat did nothing to me. It’s my mother I hate. My mo
ther I’ll never forgive. Not ever. She thinks a cat will make up for betraying me, for treating me like I’m crazy when she knows in her heart I am not.
seventy-seven
I answer Erika’s questions, do what my mother asks, what my teachers ask, like a zombie slave. I don’t control my life. They do. The pills do. Every day is wrapped in a blanket of sameness. I am Old Ellie again. Fat. Stupid. Lonely. I go to school and watch Jess and Kylie and Rad, watch the drama of their lives as if I’m watching TV. I listen in on their conversations. Kylie thinks she’s in love with Duggers. Jess bought a new purse. Rad and the guys went snowmobiling Saturday night and got pizza. Today everybody’s talking about some ski trip coming up. This one’s bringing vodka. That one’s bringing something else. It promises to be the best. I smile like a fool and say, “I have pills. Lots and lots of pills.” But no one hears me. I’m worse than The Reject. That’s Autumn’s part. I’m worse than Autumn. The Reject has a part to play. People notice The Reject. I’m not even in the show. Before when they looked at me, their eyes said, How sad. How pathetic. Now their eyes register zero. I’m the invisible audience.
I switch off the show that is their lives and turn to the Autumn channel. In Autumn’s show, I’m the comatose friend. Squeeze once for yes, twice for no. When my mom is at school, I sit on Autumn’s couch and write poems in my head, poems that don’t make any sense when I put them down on paper. They’re just random words. Things I pick up from TV or conversations between Autumn and her grandma. Things like: There’s more here in the small than there is in the big. When I’m home, I sit on our couch, with Thing in my lap, and watch TV and eat all the foods that used to be off-limits. Tonight I ate a whole box of snack cakes—twelve servings if you can believe the label. My body squeals and groans, but my arms and legs have stopped flailing. It’s like the new drugs are straps binding Madeline. They’ve got her wrapped up tighter than tight. I hear the straps straining, creaking. Someday they’ll snap. They can’t keep her tied up forever.
seventy-eight
I woke in the dark, in my pitch-black room, with someone holding my hand. A voice was crying, whispering softly, “Come back to me, Ellie. Please come back.” My heart swelled. I thought it was Madeline until something hard and smooth grazed my knuckle—my mother’s wedding ring. I pulled away and then regretted it. How could I be so mean? To my mother? She held my hand the entire time I was in the hospital. She was my only connection to this world. Without her I might have died. I reached through the darkness, searching for her fingers. The floorboards creaked, the door hushed closed. Too late. That’s me with my mother, typical Ellie: always too little, always too late.
seventy-nine
The sign on Erika’s door said BACK IN 5 MINUTES. I wanted to leave but I had nowhere to go. My mother wouldn’t be back for an hour. I could sit in the reception area with the sickly lights and the fake plants and wait for Erika, or I could sit outside in the gray and the cold and wait for my mother. I stayed because it was my last session. The insurance company will pay for all the pills I’m on, but they won’t pay for me to sit in Erika’s office three times a week and talk about my problems. It’s obviously a waste of my time and their money.
“Ellie, I’m sorry you had to wait,” Erika said. “Come on in.”
There was a can of chocolate diet shake on her desk and a plastic baggie with carrot sticks. Erika’s nose was red—she either had a cold or she’d been crying. The hand sanitizer by her computer made me think it was a cold. She motioned toward the chair—my chair—and asked me to have a seat. She had her pad ready to take notes. I don’t know why. After today, I’m not her responsibility.
“How are the new meds working for you?”
“Okay.”
“School?”
“Okay.”
“How are things going with your mom?”
“Okay.”
Today she wanted me to leave with a blueprint for creating change. She gave me some paper to write stuff down because I didn’t have my journal with me. It was my last day. I didn’t think I’d need it. While Erika blew her nose, I wrote down blueprint and underlined it. I wrote down change, too.
“Life is full of choices, Ellie. There’s always a choice. Some choices are healthy and some choices are unhealthy. In our last session, you expressed some concern about weight gain and grades.”
I knew where she was going. My grades suck. I’m getting fat again. Worse than fat. Bloated. I look like I’ve been sucking on a bicycle pump.
“Do you think you’ve been making healthy choices?”
What choices do I really have? Name one. I didn’t choose any of this any more than I chose to be born. My life was a train wreck before my body ever saw the light of day. I wanted to say something snotty—it’s not like I’ll ever see her again—but I couldn’t. “No,” I said. “I’ve been making really bad choices. I’ve been watching a lot of TV instead of studying. I’ve been eating a lot of junk.”
“That’s good, Ellie,” she said. “Not your choices, but accepting responsibility for them.”
I swallowed funny and started coughing. When I caught my breath, she said she wanted us to make a list of positive choices, life-changing choices. She made me write them down. I don’t remember them all, but mainly it was crap like:
I can choose to set goals for myself.
I can choose to forgive my mother.
I can choose to let people into my life and make new friends.
I can choose to accept my illness and choose to get well and choose to let Madeline go.
As I wrote, I thought, I can choose not to sit here and listen to your crap about how my messed-up life is all my fault.
“My mom’s picking me up early,” I said. “I have to go.”
“Wait,” Erika said. “I have something for you.” She went to her desk and pulled out a drawer and handed me a copy of the phoenix poster, a smaller version of the one hanging on her wall. My parting gift. I walked out of her office and into the first bathroom and tossed my notes in the trash. The poster, I kept. The poster is cool.
eighty
It’s not like being dead. I know what that’s like, and this isn’t it. Being dead is a lot like dreaming, but this isn’t a dream. This isn’t even a nightmare. This is nothing. They’re poisoning me. I am empty inside, like some creepy jack-o’-lantern. And now I’m starting to rot.
I have choices. Erika said so.
I smile at my mother and put the pills on my tongue.
Upstairs, I spit the pills in the toilet.
eighty-one
It’s been ten days since I stopped taking my pills. The hum is back. The humming in my head that means I’m alive. I feel like I’m on another kind of drug, a good drug, a white-hot star burning through the fog. I can think again. I can feel. For the first time in a long time I’m comfortable in my skin. It’s the dead of winter, but everything sparkles and blooms. Everything is so intense, so alive. It’s like waking up from one of those dreams where you think you’re already awake—you’re in your bed, in your room, and your room is your room exactly—but you’re paralyzed. You try to lift your arm, but it feels like lead. Your lips are sewn shut. People are standing over you, talking and staring, but you can’t move, you can’t respond. Now that I’m awake, really awake and not dreaming, not paralyzed, I can’t stop moving. I never want to sleep again. I want to be doing something every minute. I want to run through the woods. I want to smoke cigarettes with Autumn behind her chicken coop. I want to twirl around the house and cut my hair and sing and write poems. I want to call up Rad and Jess and Kylie, and say, Look, guys! It’s me! I’m back! It’s torture at night, sitting in front of the TV with Mom, with Thing in my lap. My mother has noticed. She says I seem different, better. She thinks it’s the drugs working. She does not know. She says I’m more like my old self. Which self, Mom? There are so many Ellies, I can’t keep track. I have to do something, anything, to keep from exploding, so I settle for homework and laundry and feeding th
e cat. I have to remind myself that it’s all about killing time. I can’t get too involved with other people. This is about my sister. I went off my drugs for her. She’ll be back. I know it. I keep rereading our conversations in my old journal—the one with the Pegasus on it. There’s a plan. She had a plan. I have to be patient.
eighty-two
It’s been twelve days, but she hasn’t shown herself to me. Not yet. Every noise, every flicker, every draft makes my heart beat wildly. Usually it’s just Thing, scampering from room to room, or the furnace kicking on, or the house groaning, shrinking in this bitter cold. In the dark, every shadow looks like Madeline. I stand frozen, my eyes straining, thinking she’s taking shape in that corner, behind this door, at the top of the stairs. It’s always the stupidest things that catch me off guard: the floor lamp by the computer, the sheets lumped beneath my comforter, my mother’s robe hanging from the back of the bathroom door.
It’s some drawn-out game of hide-and-seek. She’s here. I know it. My mother confirmed it. Tonight after dinner, while we were doing dishes, she said, “I don’t want Sweet Pea in the babies’ room. That’s why I keep the door closed.”
I tossed some forks in the silverware drawer and said, “Yeah? So?”
The In-Between Page 15
