Last Summer

by Holly Chamberlin

  Frannie had actually laughed. “What? Why?”

  “I can’t tell you who told me,” Fred went on, glancing quickly over his shoulder, “but Elaine has been telling your boss that you steal from the supply room and leave early when he’s not in the office.”

  “I don’t believe you,” she had replied, stunned now and angry that someone would accuse her friend of such bad behavior. “Why would you say such a thing?”

  “I have no reason to lie,” Fred said. “I just thought you should know the truth so you can watch your back. Look, everybody knows you should have gotten that promotion, not Elaine.”

  “But I’m happy that Elaine got the promotion,” Frannie protested. “She’s my friend.”

  Fred shook his head. “It’s your funeral,” he said. Then he walked off to his own car.

  Frannie hadn’t wanted to believe that Elaine had betrayed her, but Fred had planted a seed of doubt. After an uncomfortable few days she worked up the nerve to confront Elaine. Elaine hotly denied she had spread false rumors about Frannie. She said she was hurt by Frannie’s accusation. Frannie had believed her and apologized. She had felt like a fool for believing Fred’s lies.

  But then, only a few days after that, Frannie was in one of the stalls in the women’s bathroom when she overheard Elaine whispering to the receptionist about another coworker, accusing her of crimes similar to the ones she had accused Frannie of committing. The truth had hit her hard.

  Despite Peter’s protests that she “suck it up” and his declarations that “business was a bitch” (like he would know, never having worked in an office), Frannie had immediately begun to look for another job. From that day forward she said not another word to Elaine. It seemed safer not to, and besides, Elaine didn’t seem to care. She had gotten what she wanted, the promotion. And from that day forward Frannie had been wary of becoming too close to anyone in the workplace. Maybe she had been too cautious, overall. But it was too late now to change the past.

  Frannie leaned against the sink, suddenly feeling tired. She wondered if either Mrs. Monroe or Elaine Blair could be fairly accused of having bullied her. Whatever the proper word for their behavior, each had acted with malice. Why was there such a terrible and embarrassing tradition of women behaving badly to other women? Of girls going mean and wild? Frannie remembered Jane telling her once about an old English play called Women Beware Women. The title still haunted Frannie. She didn’t exactly know what went on in the play, but she had a pretty good idea that the characters weren’t swapping helpful investment tips over cappuccinos or sharing recipes for casseroles over cups of tea.

  Ugh, and the preponderance of those awful reality TV shows that perpetuated the stereotype of the backstabbing, face-scratching woman—catfights, indeed! Frannie had often wondered to what degree those shows reflected reality. She was a bit afraid to learn the answer to that question. Thank God Meg found the shows as repulsive as she did.

  That’s it, Frannie decided, standing away from the sink and draping the dish towel she had used to dry her hands over its edge. In the spirit of sisterhood—of women caring for women!—she was going to make a gesture of reconciliation to Jane. The term “sisterhood” might be outdated (the feminist movement was, what, forty years old, and Gloria Steinem was almost eighty!), Frannie didn’t really know, but it sounded right for her purposes. Jane had always been more like a sister to her than her own, biological sister had been.

  Frannie fetched a note card and pen from the drawer that held an assortment of miscellany, and sat down at the kitchen table.

  It wasn’t really a difficult note to write. First, Frannie wished Jane a happy birthday; Jane would be forty-three on the fifteenth. Then she simply told Jane that she missed their friendship, that it had been one of the best things in her life, an anchor as well as a source of pleasure. She apologized again for Meg’s misstep and for any part she might have unwittingly played in fostering Meg’s bad behavior. She hoped that Jane could find it in her heart to at least try to rebuild the trust that had once flourished between them. She signed the note “with love” and sealed the envelope. She would slide it under the Pattersons’ front door after dinner.

  And then she would wait. She would have to be strong enough to take her own advice and give Jane time, as much time as she needed. And she would have to prepare herself to accept whatever answer Jane gave in return. Even if that answer dashed all hopes of a reunion.

  24

  April 2012

  Dear Diary

  I’m not sure what day it is, exactly. Not that it matters. Every day is as awful as the next.

  Today in school something bizarre happened. I was walking to Ms. Moore’s history class and suddenly, I just stopped walking. I mean, I was suddenly just frozen, my legs, everything. Something like that never happened to me before, going all—I was going to say numb, but it wasn’t like that.

  I’ve heard about something called locked-in syndrome, where someone who has a brain injury is alive inside but unable to communicate with anyone on the outside. It sounds like the most lonely and unbearable situation ever, to be thinking and dreaming but unable to tell anyone that you’re thinking and dreaming, and maybe even hearing people talk about you and saying things that are wrong, like you can’t hear them when you actually can. Maybe what happened to me was something a little like that.

  I guess I was just coming out of the ... trance ... when Charles Lin from Spanish class came over and touched my arm. He asked if I was okay because he said I looked kind of pale. He asked if I felt faint and wanted to go to the nurse’s office. I was able to shake my head and then to say no, I’m fine. I don’t think he really believed me, but after a moment he nodded and walked off.

  I can’t imagine my life in the future. I mean, I used to be able to create these amazingly real scenes about my life, but lately, nothing new comes into my mind. I remember the scenes I’ve already created—like the one where I’m living in a big castle in England, perched right on a cliff overlooking the ocean, with lots of dogs and cats and a big black horse in the stables—but I can’t really enjoy the scenes anymore. I can’t walk into them like I used to. It’s like my imagination is totally gone. Maybe that doesn’t make sense. I don’t really know what I’m saying lately.

  If I stay this way, the way I am now, I’ll never be able to—I don’t really know what I was going to say.

  I can’t DO anything.

  This diary is my only friend. Maybe Meg is still my friend, but somehow, it doesn’t feel like it anymore. But maybe that’s because I’m so dead inside.

  If I can’t trust myself to be sure of anything, how can I trust anyone else? Except this diary. And maybe that doesn’t make any sense.

  I’ve kept my promise not to cut again, though sometimes it’s really hard to resist the temptation. I keep thinking, someone, help me be strong, please. But I don’t know who it is I’m asking. Maybe nobody.

  Probably it’s nobody.

  R.

  Dear Diary

  April, another day

  I tried to find that book I read a few years ago, the one about the girl who never leaves her house, the one I wrote a book report about. It wasn’t on the shelf in the den where I thought it would be. I went through every single book on every single shelf, reading the titles out loud to be sure I wouldn’t miss it, but it was nowhere. Then I went back and did it all again. Still nothing.

  I wonder what happened to that book. I just had a bizarre thought. What if I imagined the book? What if it never really existed and I made the whole thing up in my head and wrote that report about a fantasy?

  Would that make me officially crazy?

  Probably. But who would care?

  I have nothing else to say.

  25

  Rosie and Jane were in the kitchen. They had just finished lunch. Jane had made tuna salad sandwiches on whole wheat bread with lettuce and tomato and Rosie had devoured hers in minutes. Her appetite had definitely returned. She no longer had to hol
d her pants up with pins.

  “I’m curious,” Jane was saying, putting their empty sandwich plates in the dishwasher. “I know you and Meg are getting close again. Have you told her about the cutting?”

  Rosie hesitated a moment before answering. She wasn’t sure she wanted to talk to her mother about what was going on with Meg. Their new relationship seemed very private and also, somehow delicate. “No,” she admitted finally.

  “Oh. Do you think you will tell her?”

  “I don’t know,” Rosie said noncommittally. “Maybe.”

  “Okay.” Jane wiped her hands on a clean dish towel. “There’s something else I’ve been wanting to ask you about. Your father wants to spend time again with Petey.”

  “I know. I mean,” Rosie said hurriedly, “I kind of figured he would.”

  “Well, what do you think about the idea?”

  “I think it’s a good one. Definitely.”

  “Okay,” Jane said. “Good. I’m so relieved.”

  Relieved? Rosie watched as her mother wiped the counter on top of the dishwasher for the third time. Had she really thought her daughter would want to punish an innocent little boy? Rosie very much wanted to ask her mother to explain why she had been so reluctant to let her father spend time with Petey. She didn’t entirely believe the excuses she had overheard her mother claim, that the Pattersons’ loyalty to Rosie forbade them from being nice to Petey. She was beginning to realize there were a lot of things about her mother she didn’t understand. That was probably a part of growing up, she thought. Realizing that your parents were real, individual people. And sometimes, they were people you didn’t always agree with or even always like. But that was okay.

  Mrs. Patterson folded the dish towel neatly and placed it next to the sink. “To be honest,” she said then, “I didn’t really want your father to—”

  The doorbell rang then, cutting off whatever it was she was going to say. Rosie was disappointed. Her question might have been answered without the need for it to be asked.

  Jane looked at her watch. “There’s my client,” she said. “She’s here for a fitting.”

  Jane left the kitchen and went to open the front door. Rosie went up to her room with the intention of cleaning out her closet. Usually, she kept it neat and organized, but since the awful hair-cutting incident back in January she had been lazy about some of her routines. Well, that had been due to the depression. She had been “lazy” about living, come to that. Getting through each day with her mind intact had been her priority, not a neat closet.

  Rosie peered into the closet now. She was sure there had to be some old, forgotten toys she could donate to Goodwill the next time Meg’s mom was going shopping there for packets of slightly irregular underwear for Petey or new clothes for herself and Meg.

  Rosie bit back a smile though there was no one to see. Everyone who knew Meg even a little knew that it killed her (that was Meg’s expression) to have to buy most of her clothes secondhand. Which was one of the reasons she worked as hard as she did to earn money. Like this afternoon, Meg was baby-sitting for a family with three children under the age of ten. The very thought of shepherding three small children all afternoon—playing with them, giving them their snacks, putting the youngest down for a nap—exhausted Rosie. She didn’t know how Meg did it. Of course, Meg would say that she did it because she had to do it. Brand-new clothes weren’t the only things hard to come by in the Giroux household. Rosie knew she was lucky not to have to work yet. She knew she was lucky to have parents who could afford to give her piano lessons and take her for weekends in Boston or vacations north to Montreal.

  The closet was far less of a disaster that Rosie had feared—for donation there was only an old board game she had forgotten about and one good blouse she realized she had outgrown—and she was done with reorganizing before long. What to do now? It had begun to rain pretty heavily, so the option of reading beneath the big old pine at the back of the property held no appeal. Instead, Rosie decided on the next best thing and settled in the big comfortable armchair by the bedroom’s window.

  But after reading a few pages of Emma, she realized that she couldn’t concentrate. It had nothing to do with the book, which she was thoroughly enjoying. She hadn’t known that Jane Austen was so funny, and that she could create such incredibly horrible characters, like Mrs. Elton. It was just that since she had been seeing Dr. Lowe, she had a lot of things to think about. She was coming to realize that her life really was in her own hands, and that meant responsibility as well as freedom and opportunity. She was coming to realize that she owed it to Rosie Patterson to make decisions based on what was going to be best for her and not on what she thought might be best for someone else.

  Like, there was still the issue of the piano. She was about 99 percent sure that she didn’t want to pursue lessons, but she still hadn’t worked up the courage to be honest with her parents about that. She knew she was just being cowardly, even silly. After all, it wasn’t like she was committing a crime, wanting to give up piano lessons. And as Dr. Lowe had pointed out, not everyone was destined to be a professional musician. In fact, more and more Rosie thought she might want to become a writer. Which was a bit odd because she still wasn’t ready to start keeping another diary.

  Rosie looked over to her bed and imagined the plastic box of diaries underneath it. The pages of those little books held evidence of so many painful emotions—sorrow, confusion, isolation, shame. But, and Rosie had been shocked when she had first realized this, anyone reading through those pages would find very little evidence of anger.

  Anger, she was coming to acknowledge, was not something a member of the Patterson family “did.” If her mother or her father ever felt angry when each was alone, Rosie couldn’t say. But she could testify to the fact that her parents didn’t fight. Well, if they did fight, it was when Rosie wasn’t around, or when they thought she wasn’t in earshot, like when they had argued over her dad spending time with Petey. And they had never, ever raised their voices to her. They certainly didn’t believe in corporal punishment. In fact, Rosie couldn’t remember ever having been punished in any way! Maybe she had never done anything worth punishing. But what kind of normal child didn’t get into trouble every now and then? That, Rosie realized, was a topic for her next session with Dr. Lowe.

  Well, whatever sort of child she had been, normal or not, Rosie had never been comfortable feeling anger or expressing it. Since she was a little girl, being around people yelling or fighting had always made her almost physically ill. Once she had been at Meg’s house, years ago, when Meg’s father had come by and gotten into a big shouting match with Meg’s mother. Rosie remembered being absolutely terrified. Meg had shrugged it off. “They’re just letting off steam,” she had explained. “It’s nothing.”

  “But they sound so furious with each other,” Rosie had said, the pit of her stomach whirring with tension.

  Meg had just smiled. “They are. But they’ll get over it.”

  Rosie was only now learning that while it wasn’t fun to feel angry, it was normal and often, it was healthy. Feeling angry about an injustice done to you meant that you had good self-esteem. Feeling angry about an injustice done to someone else meant that you were a good, empathetic person. What you did with that anger, how you acted on it and channeled it, those were the important things. It wasn’t okay to go around screaming, kicking, and throwing punches. It was okay to confront the person who had done the wrong and make your objections known. Dr. Lowe had been telling her that the right kind of anger was responsive, not reactive. Responsive meant being in control of the anger and acting appropriately. Reactive meant letting the anger rule and acting inappropriately.

  Rosie heard the doorbell ring again and wondered if her mother had scheduled another client appointment. Or maybe it was UPS, here to deliver the new part her father had ordered for the lawn mower. She got up from the armchair and ran downstairs. As was her habit, she peered through the glass panel to the right of the d
oor. She was surprised. It was a girl from school, someone she knew only by sight, someone whose name escaped her. For a moment, Rosie hesitated. She supposed she could run back up to her room and pretend that she hadn’t heard the bell. Her mother would probably answer the door on the next ring. And then she thought for a moment and realized that she didn’t feel in the least bit afraid. There was no need to run away. She pulled open the door.

  “Hi,” Rosie said. Now she remembered the girl’s name. Kristin Walsh. They were in the same grade but didn’t have any classes together. In fact, Rosie knew almost nothing about her, other than that she was one of the school’s best athletes. She was just about the only girl in her grade taller than Rosie.

  “Hi,” Kristin said, tucking a stray strand of blond hair behind her ear. “I’m here to meet my mom. I just got out of basketball practice... .”

  Rosie stepped back into the living room and gestured for the girl to follow. “Sure, come in. She’s with my mom, in the basement. I mean, in my mom’s sewing room.”

  “Thanks.”

  “They should be done soon, I think. I mean, they’ve been down there for a while.”

  “I’m Kristin Walsh,” the girl said. “We go to the same school.”

  “Yeah. I’m Rosie Patterson. Where do you play basketball when school’s out?”

  “The summer league uses the courts at Parkside Recreational Center. It’s pretty much just around the corner from here.”

  “Oh.” Rosie hadn’t been to the rec center in years, not since she and Meg had taken a pottery class there one summer. She almost smiled at the recollection of how awful their pots had come out. Of course, their mothers had said the pots were beautiful, but mothers were supposed to lie about that sort of thing.