Room 7, one with no gold or crimson blooms of mold on the walls, and with, still, a blackened sink, dry as dust. Our room. Chicken-wire glass at the high windows; a metal door half off its hinges, as if someone had thought to steal it, and renounced. Bessie stood guard over a blue down form curled against one wall, a ski-jacket blob with stick limbs and a limp tangle of white-blond hair. Bessie alternately stamped her paws excitedly, wagging her tail and barking, and ran forward to try to lick—literally lick—Cassie into shape. Cassie, neither fully conscious nor unconscious, had battened her arms over her face. She writhed and moaned—“No, no, no,” was all I got—more intensely when Bessie’s tongue slurped at her. “No, no, no.”
I took in the plastic jug of Smirnoff, largely empty, and the yellow Wheat Thins box knocked on its side, its wax bag half spilled out. A two-liter Diet Coke bottle, lid off, half full. There was her backpack too, almost empty, a deflated sack, and next to it, a couple of orange prescription pill bottles, their big white caps bright wheels on the dirty tiles. I stood in the doorway, just looking, as Rudy huffed up behind me. I didn’t say anything.
“No, no, no,” Cassie moaned.
“Fuck me,” Rudy breathed in my ear, like he’d thought it was all a story too, and now couldn’t believe what he saw. But Bessie, although not entirely calm (she was justifiably excited; she’d won the game) knew that the prize was human and the consequences real. Once Rudy stood beside me, Bessie stopped barking: still stamping and wagging, she turned her head to look at Rudy, then back at Cassie, then back to Rudy again. He was clearly supposed to tell her what to do next.
“Good girl, Bessie,” he managed; and “Sit,” which, tremblingly, she did. “Fuck me. Fuck me,” he kept whispering. He handed me the flashlight, which I turned off—excessive now. We didn’t need it to see Cassie lying there in the corner. He fumbled for his cell phone, and punched the number.
Only slowly did I become aware of the reek around us, of vomit and the other too. A sort of olfactory complement to Rudy’s, in a way. Cassie wasn’t dead by any means; but not for want of trying.
Rudy, wincing from the stench, stepped forward and tried gently to rouse her, tenderly shaking her shoulder. Another muffled rebuff. She wouldn’t lift her arms away from her face. I imagined her eyes were closed, but we couldn’t tell. Her famous hair lay snarled around her in the dust. My back against the wall, as far from her as I could be and still be in the room, I slid to the floor and waited, my knees to my chest. Lord, it was cold in that room—even though there was still glass at the window. I noticed that: she’d chosen a room where the window was still shut, where the wind could be kept out. I didn’t say a thing. When Rudy and Bessie left to go meet the medics down at the driveway, I didn’t move. It was full daylight by then. I watched her down jacket rise and fall with her breath. She snored a little. As far as I knew, she didn’t even know I was there.
The ambulance men finally appeared, a ruckus in the stairwell and along the corridor, all clanking stretcher and jaunty banter, and I thought then she would stir; but even though they spoke to her directly and asked her questions, she didn’t speak.
“She’s awake all right,” the bearded one observed, pulling unsuccessfully at the arm clamped across her head. “She may not want to be, but she is.”
“What a fucking mess,” said the other one. And, to me, “Give us a hand and pack up this shit?” He gestured to the bottles and the bag.
“You’re the friend, eh?” asked the bearded one as I knelt down to follow instructions, putting the pill bottles and the crackers into the backpack, casting around for the lid to the Coke bottle.
“That’s right,” said Rudy from the doorway, where he stood smoking a cigarette, perhaps to mask the smell. “If not for this one, we’d be none the wiser. Police thought she was gone to New York, or up north, or something.”
The surly medic shook his head, intent on strapping Cassie, now willfully rigid all over, to the stretcher. “Fucking mess,” he said again.
“Good for you.” The other guy tilted his head at me. “You probably saved her life.”
But then there was a moment, while they fussed around her body, while Rudy, exhausted, smoked with his eyes all but closed and stroked Bessie’s now-quiet head, scratching her gently behind the ears, a moment when I was alone in watching Cassie properly—her head I mean. She moved the defending arms, just slightly, so that I could glimpse her eyes glittering behind them, as if from within a cave: open, alert, they turned on me with a rage I hadn’t known in all our years, a rage essentially murderous. I could swear her lips moved, that she spoke to me—silently, I mean, she mouthed the words,just three of them: Fuck you, traitor. I could swear that’s what she said.
BY MID-JUNE, they were gone. When ninth grade drew to a close, so too did the familiar shape of my life up to that point: whatever lay ahead, I had to accept that my friendship with Cassie—my defining friendship—was truly finished. Through that first summer and fall, I clung to Peter and he to me: Cassie did, in that sense, give me what I wanted. I got to have Peter as my boyfriend for over six months, six whole months in which we reassured ourselves that each of us had acted for the best, for Cassie’s best; and that we were the only two—obviously—who had truly known and understood her.
But it’s a strange thing, to share your love with a phantom—or more than that, to feel that the love between you is basically love destined for her that she threw back at you. How else could we have gone in a matter of a few weeks from Peter recoiling when I touched him to his not being able to keep his hands off me? Jodie said it was all perfectly logical, that he’d pulled back in the first place because of how much he desired me, but that he’d felt it would be wrong on account of Cassie, especially when she was in trouble, and so on. Her version was the inverse of mine, like the Escher drawing of a staircase in our attic bathroom; but I could only see things her way intermittently, and I kept worrying that when he kissed me and closed his eyes, he saw Cassie, or that when he slipped his hand onto my leg at the movies or when we watched TV, he was comparing, in his mind, the doll-like breadth of Cassie’s thigh beneath his palm, and the substantial weight of mine. When we talked about poetry or played music, I didn’t worry; those passions we shared weren’t hers. But then he wrote another song about her—another ballad, with a sweet refrain about how she smelled of roses—and then that too was tainted.
So maybe I killed things because I was so sure they were dying—like everything else, like all my stories it sometimes seems, I willed the make-believe into reality, fiction into fact, as if imagining made it so. Or maybe I was right all along. By Christmas, anyway, we agreed we were better off as friends—it made us seem like characters in a novel, and certainly it was coolest to stay close to your exes, in that nonchalant but affectionate way where the next girlfriend couldn’t worry, but also couldn’t help but worry. Above all, I didn’t want to be the sad girl, the one who lost her girlfriend not once but twice, and then lost in love in the bargain; although like the Escher drawing, once you’ve seen things from a certain perspective, you can’t entirely unsee them.
My story about Peter and me worked out pretty well; we really were good friends, almost inseparable friends, until late in the spring of tenth grade—eleventh for him—when Peter started seeing Djamila, a new girl in his year with green eyes and fine café-au-lait skin and a beautiful—really beautiful—spirit. She was in eleventh grade too at that point, and she ran track too, and she sang, in the bargain. Everyone really liked her—I really liked her—and when she opened her mouth, it was like Whitney Houston suddenly appeared in the room.
But all that is much later. I’m still here. I’m fine. I’ll be a senior soon. I still go once a week to see a therapist in Newburyport that the school shrink recommended to my parents. My mother drives me and waits in the local Dunkin’ Donuts with her laptop while I sit in the woman’s drab office, overlooking a parking lot. It has a daybed, which I ignore, and a hard chair, on which I sit, and a large
potted fern. Boxes of Kleenex strategically dotted around.
On the wall hangs a strange dark painting, a sort of fairy scene of sprites and toadstools in a night forest. Why? Who would choose that, whimsical but super dark? One of the sprites—with hideously shimmery wings like a dragonfly—has white-blond hair and reminds me of Cassie. More than that, the sprite reminds me of my dream about Cassie and her black feathered flying cloak, the poisoned cloak that would kill her instead of setting her free. Every week when I look at that painting, it is like a goad, urging me to tell this woman about that dream, about that girl, about what I now know—not in words, but just in knowledge, like a weight in the atmosphere, like the residue of an odor—about growing up. Each week, I resolve more firmly to say nothing about it.
Now I know, for what little it’s worth, what it means to be a girl growing up. Maybe you can choose not to put on the cloak, but then you’ll never be free, you can never soar. Or you can take on the mantle that is given you; but what the consequences may be, what the mantle might do, what wearing it may entail, you can’t know beforehand. Others may see better, but they can’t save you. All any of us can do for another person is to have the courage not to turn away. I didn’t, until I did.
We have little to say to each other, this therapist and I. She’s a nice lady, but honestly, what does she know? To her, I’m another mildly troubled teen, a girl whose friend got really depressed. But my curse is to see things, to know stories, how they unfold, and people, what they are like. I don’t seek to know these things, I just do. It tires me, to be honest. Cassie got the prophetic name, but I got the curse—or the gift, depending how you look at it. If the nice lady saw these things too, then there’d be no need to explain; but if she doesn’t—and at this point, I’d venture with some confidence that she doesn’t—then there’s no point in trying. What I’d like is for someone to take the burden from me, or at least to share it. If I didn’t see, I wouldn’t try to know; and of course, you can’t ever really know what happens to another person, or what they think happens to them, which amounts to the same thing. I can’t know what the poisoned cloak felt like burning into Cassie’s skin. I can’t even really imagine it.
AFTER THE AMBULANCE men left to ferry Cassie up to Haverhill, and the policeman came to take charge of her stuff, Rudy took me home. My parents hadn’t woken up yet, so they might never have known I’d been gone. Rudy wasn’t the kind of grown-up to march me to the front door and engage my mother in conversation—he was probably more afraid of my parents than were most of my friends. We sat for a few minutes in the warm cab of his truck, the three of us—him, Bessie, me—hollowed out by the morning’s events. The stink wasn’t as strong by then, or maybe my nose had just been filled up.
“Rudy,” I said eventually, “thank you. And Bessie—” She turned a hooded eye in my direction, and sleepily bared a fang.
“Paramedic seems to think she’ll be okay.” Rudy’s grubby hands clutched the steering wheel with force.
“I’d better go in. My parents will be wondering where I am.”
“Sure thing, missy.” I thought he might lean toward me, across the dog, but he didn’t. “When you go visit her, tell her Rudy’s glad she’s okay, okay?”
As I slipped into the house, I thought that Rudy had never once asked why I thought Cassie would be at the Bonnybrook. He trusted that I knew. I wondered whether my parents would be angry with me when I told them what we’d done. I’d have to tell them about my time there with Cassie, years before; my mother especially wouldn’t be pleased.
I was right. I could see my mother’s face darken when I recounted the history, as if she looked at her daughter and realized I wasn’t the kid she’d always believed me to be. She didn’t say anything in particular, nodded, but I could tell that the story of me and Cassie playing at the asylum that long-ago summer unsettled her almost as much as Cassie’s current story. On some level, in some unsayable way, my mother didn’t care that much about Cassie anymore. She was relieved that Cassie had been found, and was safe, but beyond that, she didn’t need to know. I was what mattered to her; and when, for so many years, Cassie had been a part of me, she had been important to my mother. But my mother had written Cassie off, long before. To my parents, she was what’s commonly called “bad news,” the sort of kid for whom muted pity is the most optimistic possible response.
This wasn’t only true of my mother. It was just the truth of it. On Monday, in school, the principal gathered an all-school assembly in the gym to announce that Cassie had been found and was in stable condition in the hospital, and in the loving care of her family, so we could all rejoice; he used the word “rejoice,” peculiar to me. He loomed at the podium, thick-thighed in his tight suit with his careful coif, looking like an aging rocker at a wedding, and he said, would we all please give Cassie and her family (her family? Anders Shute?) their privacy, at which comment I could hear some enraging titters behind me in the crowd; and then he said this was a personal matter only, we did not have any reason to discuss it further, so please not to speculate or spread rumors. Then he dismissed us to our classrooms, and of course in the hallways nobody spoke of anything but Cassie.
“Hey, Julia.” A tenth grader named Ollie who had never spoken to me before sidled up close. “We hear you were in on it, helped her hide out.”
I didn’t reply, kept going, looked at the ground.
“Don’t believe everything you hear,” Jodie said for me.
“That girl was a slut,” one of Ollie’s friends offered. “Don’t you remember last fall at AJ’s party? She was totally wasted.”
“And I suppose you weren’t, fuckboy?” I was surprised, because I knew Jodie thought Cassie was a slut too. But Jodie hated the boys’ hypocrisy most of all.
“Well, I don’t know,” the guy kept pushing, “I didn’t end up half-naked in a room with a bunch of girls, did I?”
“Only in your dreams,” Jodie replied, pulling me away by the elbow.
“Call your mom,” she suggested. “Head home. Take the day, and maybe tomorrow. This will quiet down.”
“It might not.”
“Believe me, it will.”
“Why are you so sure?”
“Because,” Jodie said, “it’s like before, when you kept thinking Cassie was cool. You can’t see the truth because you care too much about her. It distorts your vision. The truth is, she was way more interesting to people when she was missing. Now they know the ending to the story. It’s over. And the ending isn’t as exciting as everything they’d imagined: she could have been a teenage prostitute in Times Square. She could have found a sugar daddy in Florida. She could have been abducted. She could have been murdered and chopped up and bits of her scattered along the beach at Plum Island. Any of those things would have made her special, and remembered. Someone might have made a movie about her, or put her on the news. There might have been a trial. But it turns out she’s just another kid who had a huge blow-up with her mom, and went to sleep a couple of nights in an abandoned building.”
“She stole drugs from her mom’s medical kit. She tried to kill herself.”
“Okay, she gets a couple of interest points for that; but nobody at school knows that yet. And it would’ve made a better story if she’d actually succeeded.”
“Wow. Harsh.”
“Think of it as a speech team story, if you had to write it up. The happy ending is no ending. Nobody particularly wants the happy ending when they care more about the story than the person.”
“How can you be so mean?”
“I’m not being mean,” Jodie said. “I’m just telling it like it is.”
I went home that day and I took off the next day, the Tuesday, and went back to school on Wednesday. A few people seemed to look at me and whisper, as if saying Yeah, she’s the friend who found her; and Cassie’s new friends, Alma and a girl called Justine, sought me out in the cafeteria and asked me what had happened. I didn’t tell them the details—not about the vomit, or the
vodka, or the pill bottles—I just told them she’d gone to hide out in the asylum and I’d guessed she might be there because of when we were younger. I heard through the grapevine that Alma, at least, went to visit Cassie, not in the hospital but at home, before they left.
Not to me, but around, people told all kinds of stories. I heard them eventually. They said that Rudy Molinaro had been her boyfriend, and that they’d shacked up at the asylum together for days; that Bev had hustled Cassie out of town to keep her from Rudy’s clutches. They said that Cassie had threatened to leave for good unless Bev dumped Anders Shute. They said that Anders Shute had been abusing Cassie and her mother only found out when she ran away. They said that Cassie’s dad wasn’t dead after all, and had invited Cassie—no, Cassie and Bev?—to come and live with him. They said that Cassie’s dad wasn’t dead; in fact, Cassie’s dad was Rudy Molinaro, and she’d been ready to leave her mom for him—no, that they were having an affair and then they only later realized it was incest, that they were father and daughter. They said that she’d tried to kill herself because she was flunking out of school, because she had a drug problem, no, because she’d been gang-raped by a posse of seniors from the lacrosse team. They said that she’d apparently dyed her hair—no, shaven her head?—while on the run. They said she’d had a psychotic break and didn’t know where she was when they found her at the asylum. They said that she and I were secret lovers; they said I was jealous of her relationship with Anders/Rudy/Peter and had lured her to the asylum to try to kill her, but had felt remorse just in time. They said that what had really happened was a mystery and none of us would ever know.
I said nothing at all—not even to Jodie—and neither did Peter. I thought it was the one gift of friendship I could properly, if belatedly, give Cassie: to keep to myself the story that I knew, or thought I knew. Let them say what they wanted.
The Burning Girl Page 17
