“The official version,” she said, “is that Noah had seen some crazy web video about making colored flames. He’d imitated it by putting gasoline-soaked rags in a metal drum. He didn’t mean to burn the garage down or anything. It was just a mindless teenage experiment. Ha ha. Ha ha. Oh, look at the time.” The balls clattered as she took another shot, but nothing dropped into a pocket. “The truth was that my son was in the low-point swing of one of his moods. He wanted to see something burn. In the process, he nearly set the neighborhood on fire.” Nicole tapped the edge of the pool table. “Call ten in the side pocket, Jenna.”
Jenna startled and then made a quick, careless shot. The ball spun, badly hit, but torqued into the pocket nonetheless.
“The neighbors didn’t exactly call out the casserole brigade even when they heard the official version,” she continued. “There were no bagel deliveries or rotisserie chickens left at my door. That was my first hint that I would have to be very careful about whom I commiserated with.” Nicole moved around the table, searching for a good angle. “Secrecy was a way to protect Noah, so at some point, when he learned a measure of control, he could come back home and pick up his normal life.”
Normal life. Nicole flattened the cue against the side of the pool table and then bent over to squint down the length. The stick quivered under her grip. Noah had once had a normal life. She thought of the preadolescent Noah, the intense boy bent over pads of paper almost as big as he was, kicking his feet up as he sketched vegetable gnomes and imagined dragons in cloud formations.
Nicole bobbled the shot then reached for her drink. It was sticky-sweet. The kind of drink loaded with liquor that tasted like cotton candy. She felt the attention of both women, even if Claire seemed intent on Jenna lining up her next shot. Nicole debated how much to tell them. Should she go all the way back to the forced forty-eight-hour lockdown? She’d been so furious, even knowing that it was standard procedure in situations the doctors deemed suspicious. She was more furious when the psychiatrists reassessed him after that time and decided to keep Noah for another two weeks. She had been adamant. She knew her son. He was an intense, curious, artistic young man struggling under the flux of hormones.
He was not mentally ill.
During a cocktail party at a college reunion, Nicole had once met an old graduate school friend who’d finished the clinical path Nicole had long abandoned. The colleague now worked in private practice. Her old friend had expressed frustration about her own struggling business, how no one really wanted to have years of weekly psychotherapy sessions with no guarantee of success, no guarantee of change. What people wanted, she’d said earnestly, was what Nicole was giving them—enthusiasm, practical advice, and quick-and-easy solutions to real-world problems. Nicole had left that conversation numb. Her friend had essentially called life coaching the therapy equivalent of McDonald’s.
But even a drive-through therapist should be able to see signs of mental illness in her own son.
“You’re up, Nic.”
Nicole startled at Jenna’s voice, then walked around the table and stared at the setup of the balls. Her brain made no sense of them. “Do you guys know that moment in a horror movie when the main character is creeping down into the dark basement?”
Jenna bobbed her chin against the felt tip of her cue. “You just know there’s someone down there with a chain saw.”
“Well, that’s sort of how I felt when Noah got sucked into the system. I knew what they were going to do to him in that ward. He had ECGs to check his brain waves and MRIs to make sure he didn’t have a tumor and a million other tests, physiological and psychological. They were looking for some reason for his ‘aberration in behavior.’”
Jenna hissed, “Holy Clockwork Orange.”
“I was so crazy with worry during those months that there came a point where I actually hoped they would find a tumor.”
She shouldn’t have said that. She’d never spoken those words before, too ashamed of the feeling. She hadn’t even shared the sentiment with Lars. And here she was blurting it out in front of a woman who’d just had a double mastectomy.
Claire didn’t seem the least fazed. “A tumor can be cut right out,” Claire said, patting her flat chest. “A tumor means the possibility of a cure.”
Nicole sagged against a post. That was the heart of it, she supposed. Noah’s issues were deeper, fully embedded, more complicated. She’d thrown herself into them. The months that followed had been a flurry of research. In order to keep fed and clothed, her vegetarian daughter learned to make baked macaroni and cheese, and her two-sport younger son, Christian, learned how to bleach the whites. Lars had been a rock, keeping the house running and keeping track of Noah’s meds. Meanwhile, she’d lined up therapists—only the best of the best—and researched troubled adolescent behavior as if she were in graduate school again.
Why, why, why, after dropping out of her PhD program, hadn’t she pushed to at least become a licensed professional counselor? It might have taken three years to finish the sixty credits required, maybe a few months more in supervised training, but then, at least, she might have been able to help Noah. She pointedly ignored the fact that she and Lars had started a family young and therefore had to build a life from scratch. If she’d only been more determined, she could have done it. Then she might have been able to pick up the subtleties between normal adolescent behavior—the occasional angry outbursts, a slammed door, increasing withdrawal—and the something-more-complicated that was the fascinating, frightening mind of Noah.
“So,” Claire prompted, “did Noah ever give any kind of explanation for what he did?”
Nicole shook off the troubling thoughts then lined up another ball for a side pocket. “Do you have any teenage nephews, Claire?”
“Paulina has two.”
“Have you ever had a conversation with either one of them?”
“Briefly.”
“Precisely. That was one of Noah’s blessedly normal traits. When Noah spoke in sentences longer than three words, we served dinner on china.”
Jenna piped into the conversation. “Honestly, Nic, after all that time in therapy, he was probably all talked out.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Nicole said. “I think teenage boys have a daily word quota. Once that’s used up, pfft, that’s it for the day.”
“No, I mean, talk therapy itself is overrated.” Jenna leaned down and aimed. “Maybe it’s good for you, for some people. But for me, it’s like a cow chewing cud over and over, only to be forced to vomit it back up before chewing it down into a different stomach. After a while, it all turns to some formless soup in your mouth.”
Nicole let the odd image sink in. She thought about the weeks after Noah finally came home when she posed more and more direct queries. Why had he lit the rags in the garage? It was stupid. Why had he waited until she was out of the house? I dunno. Not only had Noah’s attitude become more sullen and dismissive, but the more she probed, the more his responses became muddled.
She remembered sitting by his bed in the hospital the evening of the fire. She remembered how Noah had opened his bloodshot, sooty eyes in the ER, blinked at his surroundings, and then, when he realized where he was, his whole face crumpled.
She’d plunged her hand through his dark curly hair, gritty with soot.
Why? Why, my baby boy?
Nicole dropped into a chair. The shock joggled her spine. She gripped the cue so she wouldn’t slip right down to the sticky floor, so she wouldn’t let Claire and Jenna see how bad it all really was.
A shadow fell across her, and she glanced up to see Jenna standing between her and the pool table light. “Did they ever classify him?”
Nicole felt the grit of the blue chalk on the smooth wood of the cue. First they’d classified him with depression, which was what she’d expected, but then they suggested he suffered from a more serious mood disorder. One therapist proposed that he might have a borderline personality disorder. The next consider
ed him mildly bipolar.
“Noah has always been an outlier.” She shrugged, hoping it looked casual. “He never fit into a neat diagnostic box.”
“In my teens, my mother dragged me to dozens of child psychologists.” Jenna set the pool cue standing right in front of her. “I think the sixth doctor finally satisfied her by saying I had ‘pervasive development disorder not otherwise specified.’ It even has an acronym, PDD-NOS.”
“Better known as ‘physician didn’t decide.’”
“Exactly.”
“Noah got that one, too, early on.”
“I tell you, my mother was so relieved. It explained everything. I had a condition. Inherited from my father, of course. He had the same strange affliction that I did, the one that made him prefer to stay indoors and read.”
Claire scraped her chair so she sat beside her. “So how long have you been dealing with this, Nic?”
“Eighteen months.” Two weeks. One day.
“How’s he doing?”
Behind her eyes rushed the series of doctors she’d brought him to, the group therapy she’d insisted on, the litany of medicines they’d tried—sertraline, fluoxetine, lorazepam, risperidone, divalproex—measuring side effects against how they affected his moods, watching her once-active, happy little boy grow sluggish and sullen and plump. Some antidepressants, she’d been warned, can cause morbid thinking, and his room contained a light fixture and shoelaces.
That was the problem that kept her up at night, every night, when he was home. Listening for movement in the small hours of the morning. Watching him over breakfast for signs that he’d tucked his pills between his cheek and gum. Checking his room to see if he was obsessing over his sketch pad, or, more frighteningly, lying slack-jawed and catatonic on his bed, wearing earbuds that leaked the scream of heavy metal.
“He’s spending six weeks in a treatment center.” She reached for her drink and sucked the last of that cotton-candy sweetness off the clinking ice cubes. “We’re trying something called dialectical behavior therapy. It’s specialized for teenagers with a mixture of mood and behavior issues.”
Claire raised her beer. “I was so sure you were running away from something. A malpractice suit, maybe. Or a midlife crisis. Maybe an angry ex-lover.”
“If only. And I didn’t run away,” she reminded her. “I was pushed out by Lars.”
“Like Bilbo the Hobbit,” Jenna piped in, “nudged into an adventure by Gandalf.”
“That explains things,” Claire laughed, “because life was so much simpler back in the Shire—I mean Pine Lake.”
Nicole caught Claire’s wink, and the memories tumbled over one another. Noah, eight years old, laughing as he splashed into Bay Roberts. Noah painting his body scalp to foot and playing the mud monster to send his sister squealing. Noah, falling asleep wrapped in a towel by the bonfire, whispering how he wanted to live in Pine Lake forever.
“Personally,” Claire remarked, “I think you should take up meditating.”
“I’m not sure that’ll help Noah much.”
“I’m talking about you right now. Noah will be home before you know it, but right now, it sounds to me he’s in good hands. But Buddhism could teach you a little about how to handle anxiety and suffering.”
“I’ve got a religion, thank you.”
“The untrained mind is so vulnerable. If something good happens, all is glitter and joy.” Claire leaned toward her. “And when something bad happens, it’s in pain.”
“You read that in a fortune cookie.”
Claire’s laugh was honest. “I think you’d make a great maechi.”
“I’m not moving to a place with cockroaches the size of llamas.” Nicole rattled the ice in her empty drink. “And I’m not shaving my head.”
“You look me in the eye and tell me you don’t believe it was Karma that sent us to Theresa’s burned-out house today?”
Nicole had to admit that the coincidence was odd. Then she tugged on the cross hanging from her neck. “The Roman Catholic Church might give me another reason for that coincidence.”
“Fair enough. So how do you feel, Nicole, now that you’ve confessed your so-called sins?”
Nicole stopped jiggling ice cubes at the waitress. She froze with her glass in midair. She took a long, deep breath. When she exhaled, she felt a new looseness in her ribs as the air rushed out of her, right to the bottom of her lungs. She felt loose-jointed, elastic, like she did after a long, leisurely Pilates session. She glanced into the pink dregs amid the ice in her glass as her senses tingled. Some realization eluded her, hovering just outside her now well-lubricated mental grasp.
It was probably the liquor, she told herself, shaking the cubes again. Yes, it was the liquor giving her this unexpected lightness of being.
“Are we done playing pool?” Jenna clattered the stick on the table behind her. “I see a crowd on the dance floor, and I think they’re line dancing.”
Claire stood up. “We can’t leave Kansas without line dancing.”
Nicole laid her pool cue on the table. Jenna led the charge, and Nicole followed Claire. She floated in Claire’s wake as they headed past the bar toward the dance floor where a crowd had already gathered.
Then Nicole slammed into Claire’s back.
Nicole stumbled. “Hey, Claire—”
Claire flung out one arm to hold her back, and then Claire lunged forward to seize a fistful of Jenna’s shirt. Claire dragged Jenna bodily back, pulling both of them around the curve of the bar.
Jenna said, “Claire, what—”
“Shhh!”
Claire shoved them behind her. Then she stretched up on her tiptoes, bobbing her head perilously close to the bald pate of the nearest bar patron, who stopped sipping whiskey long enough to give them all a baleful look.
Nicole ignored him and followed Claire’s gaze. She saw a woman standing just inside the doorway to the pool hall. Nicole shook her head and looked again.
Maybe one Cody’s Revenge was all she could handle. The woman at the door looked a lot like Claire’s sister Paulina.
“Come on.” Claire swiveled on a heel and darted back toward the pool tables. “Every pool hall must have a back door.”
Chapter Eleven
Getting the heck out of Kansas
Jenna shot out the back door of the pool hall and slammed into a white apron. The white apron stumbled back. She glanced up at the man wearing it as he flung his cigarette out of the way and shot blue smoke toward the moon. Above the shouts of cooks, the clatter of pots, and the plunging hiss of frying oil, she mumbled an excuse, only to have Nicole and Claire barrel out behind her. The young man gave her a shrug as if women escaped through the pool hall kitchen every day.
Jenna caught up with her friends as they raced to the corner of the building. The sky was gray in the gloaming just after sunset. Claire hesitated, peering around the corner, then minced down the narrow alley between the pool hall and what smelled like a dry-cleaning establishment, rounding the garbage cans as if hitting them would alert the hounds.
At the front corner of the building, Claire pressed her back against the wall. “Jenna, take out your keys.”
Jenna plunged her hand into her purse and curled her fingers around the Hello Kitty key chain Zoe had gifted her on her thirty-second birthday.
“Nicole,” Claire said, “you take the backseat. I’ll ride shotgun.”
“But you don’t know how to use the GPS—”
“You don’t need a GPS when you’re fleeing an angry sister.”
“So that really was—”
“We’ll talk on the road. Jenna, are you ready?”
Jenna jingled the keys.
“Lightning-fast. Let’s go.”
Jenna shot out behind her friends and followed the tail of Claire’s braid. Claire skidded to a stop as the front door of the pool hall opened. Jenna braced herself to dive between parked cars—she figured that was what Claire would want her to do, though Jenna didn’t know why
—until she saw a couple emerge, too wrapped up in each other to notice the three women frozen in the glow of an overhead fluorescent light.
She had a quick flashback to senior year. That freezing winter night when she sat with Claire and a bunch of fellow Key Club members sharing a bottle of peppermint schnapps around a fire at Coley’s Point. They’d heard a shout beyond the firelight. They’d squealed and scattered willy-nilly into the winter woods, outracing the scanning beam.
As the door of the pool hall slammed shut, they zipped back into action. Jenna shuffled around the car to unlock the doors. She hauled her purse over her head and tossed it in the back. Lucky’s tags rattled as he jerked awake. Jenna dove into the driver’s seat. She plunged the key into the ignition, and the engine roared to life.
She put the car in reverse and slapped her arm on the passenger seat behind Claire to scan the parking lot behind her. “Where to?”
“West.”
Jenna hit the gas. “Which way is west?”
“Hell if I know.” Claire’s gaze was glued to the front door of Fast Eddy’s. “Just get on the road, we’ll figure—”
“Take a right out of the parking lot,” Nicole said. “As if we’re going back to Theresa’s house.”
Jenna cranked the steering wheel to turn out of the parking spot, and then cranked it the other way to head toward the exit. She eased up just long enough to notice no cars coming then slammed the accelerator. The tires squealed.
Jenna’s heart pounded, but she felt a tickling urge to laugh. That was the first time she’d ever burned rubber.
Claire’s whole body twisted in the seat as she kept an eye on Fast Eddy’s until she couldn’t see the front door anymore. “We have to put some miles between us. A thousand would work. How the hell did she find me?”
From the backseat, Nicole blurted, “Find you?”
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