Elementary, My Dear Watkins

by Mindy Starns Clark

  Alexa had slipped away at that point, choosing not to hear the rest of their conversation. She didn’t like it when people talked about her that way—as though she was the sum of all those tests and examinations they were always doing, rather than a real person with feelings. Consuela’s intentions were good, but she had been wrong about one thing: Taking Alexa out of her mother’s home and plunking her down anywhere was the nicest thing anyone could have done for her. At least now Alexa didn’t lie awake at night worrying that her mother’s freebasing would catch the house on fire, or wake up the next morning to find yet another “uncle” in her kitchen, making breakfast. To be honest, her mom had never been much of a mother.

  Sometimes, Alexa didn’t even miss her.

  Now, she made it to her bedroom without incident and then pushed open the door, stepped inside, and then closed it behind her, exhaling slowly. She had done it.

  Alexa locked the door behind her and then she set about finding a hiding place for the map, one that wouldn’t be discovered by the maids if they decided to change her sheets or gather up her dirty laundry. It was nice having people to clean up after her, but in a way it was one more invasion of her privacy.

  Alexa quickly scanned the bedroom and the closet, finally spotting a jacket that hung near the back with its tags still on, the uncool one with the stupid removable liner the old lady had given her for her birthday. She grabbed it from the rack, carried it out to the bed, and unzipped one side. Carefully, she slid the folded paper between the nylon of the jacket and the fleece of the liner. Then she zipped it shut again.

  Perfect.

  She hung the jacket back in the closet and left, making her way through the house, out the back door, and across the beautiful lawn to the studio. It was going to be a long evening, she knew, trying to keep her very intuitive art teacher, Nicole, from sensing her excitement, and then killing time until she could get a taste of freedom tonight.

  Alexa couldn’t wait to escape and make her way back to the Grave Cave.

  “Water?”

  Jo snapped up to see a policewoman holding out a bottle of water. It was dripping with condensation, and suddenly Jo was thirstier than she’d ever been in her life. She took it and drank a long sip. When she was finished, she tried to find her voice.

  “Thank you,” she croaked.

  “No problem. Do you feel up to answering a few questions?”

  Jo shook her head, trying to get her bearings. Where was Bradford? Why had they taken him away?

  “Is Bradford okay?” she asked, not wanting to hear the answer.

  “The fellow that got hit by the train? He’s hurt pretty bad,” the cop replied, pulling a notebook from her pocket, “but he’s hanging in there. They’re taking him to the hospital on Lexington. You can go there once you’re finished here.”

  “Okay,” Jo whispered, standing. “Sure.”

  The woman began her questions starting with the basic facts: names, next of kin, what time she and Bradford got there, where they had been standing. Once they got through that, she asked Jo to describe what happened.

  Closing her eyes, Jo tried to walk back through the whole incident as best she could. She described the press of the crowd, the hand on her back, the push that propelled her forward. When Jo opened her eyes, she was surprised to see the cop looking at her skeptically.

  “You’re trying to tell me that someone intentionally pushed you onto the tracks of an oncoming train?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying. Somebody tried to kill me.”

  Jo told how she had started to fall when Bradford seemed to sense her movements and did what he could to pull her back to safety.

  “This station gets busy at rush hour,” the cop replied, closing her notepad and tucking it into a pocket. “A lot of tourists might feel all those folks pressing in on them and think they were pushed. Doesn’t mean somebody was trying to kill you.”

  “But they were. And I’m not a tourist. I grew up in this city.”

  That wasn’t exactly true. Jo had grown up in different places all over the world, dragged along on each new business assignment of her father’s. But throughout her childhood her family had maintained an apartment in Manhattan, and she had lived there, on and off, for months at a time. Not counting her grandparents’ house in Mulberry Glen, New York City was as much “home” as anywhere else had been.

  “Well, if you grew up here, then you know what it’s like. We got a lot of people all stuffed together on this one little island. Accidents happen.”

  Jo studied the woman’s face, wondering why she was being so skeptical. Then the woman closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose, and Jo realized she was just an exhausted transit cop, overworked and probably underpaid, who really thought Jo was just paranoid.

  Reluctantly, Jo went on to explain how the situation was more complicated than it seemed, that in fact Bradford had been warning her for the past hour that she was in danger.

  “There’s even more to it than that,” Jo added, wishing she hadn’t given the printouts of the anonymous e-mails over to her grandmother. “This isn’t the first time today I had to talk with the police.”

  Jo explained about the e-mails and her visit to Kreston, and the cop seemed to grow more convinced, especially when she realized that Jo was the Jo Tulip, of Tips from Tulip fame.

  “Oh!” the cop cried suddenly. “Get out! You’re Tips from Tulip?”

  “Yes.”

  That seemed to change everything. The cop whipped out her notebook and asked Jo to repeat her story. This time through, however, Jo’s word was valid and all that she was claiming was absolute truth. As the cop enthusiastically began asking more questions, Jo was relieved. Sometimes a little celebrity came in handy.

  The cop took thorough notes and asked good questions, but when she asked Jo if she knew why she was in danger, or from whom, Jo was reluctant to answer. If this had to do with her family and the family company, she knew it would be best to keep her mouth shut for now. Who knew what can of worms awaited her there, or what problems she might create for them, all based on the desperate whispers of a man who might or might not have been telling the full truth? Better to keep the authorities out of that part of it for the time being, at least until she’d had a chance to talk to her father.

  “Bradford was going to explain once we got on the train,” Jo hedged. “Now I might never know.”

  The cop nodded, again tucking away her notebook.

  “Well, you sit tight for a few,” she said. “The detective will need for you to repeat everything you’ve told me and then some.” She gestured toward a man who was talking to someone else nearby. “He’ll probably be getting to you next. Don’t go anywhere.”

  “Don’t worry,” Jo said emphatically. “I won’t.”

  5

  Alexa dipped her brush into the light blue paint and then hesitated in front of the easel that awaited her. Slowly, reaching out with the brush, she painted a small circle in the center of the empty white canvas.

  Once the circle was done, she thought about it for a moment, rinsed her brush, and then dipped it into the red, using it to paint a ring all the way around the blue. After red, she added a ring of yellow, then green, then black. As she painted, her concerns about hiding her excitement from her art teacher melted away. She was lost in the moment, so focused on capturing the image on the canvas that tonight’s escape was the furthest thing from her mind.

  “There,” Alexa announced, looking up at her art teacher. “I’m done.”

  Nicole Stebbins walked behind the easel and stood there for a long moment, obviously studying the display. She always wore soft, fluttery clothes, and today’s outfit was no exception. Her shirt looked as though it were made of pastel scarves, the sleeves hanging down in elegant points at her wrists. With the bright art room lights shining on her wavy blond hair and through her gauzy sleeves, she looked kind of like an angel. A really colorful angel.

  “Interesting,” Nicole said
finally. “Tell me about it.”

  “You wanted me to paint an abstract of my mother,” Alexa answered, shrugging. “That’s her.”

  Nicole pointed to the center of the multihued ball.

  “That’s a pretty color,” she said. “You began with light blue. Why?”

  Alexa hesitated, not knowing how to explain—or if she even wanted to. When she was young, her favorite blanket had been that exact soft shade of blue. She thought maybe mothers were supposed to feel like that color—when they loved you, at least.

  “I guess that’s the ‘mom’ stuff. You know, like being nice. Playing dolls. Putting on Band-Aids. I think she used to do that sort of thing when I was a kid. Sometimes.”

  “But it’s been a while?”

  “I’m fourteen,” Alexa answered, rolling her eyes. “What do you think?”

  Nicole looked at her with a strange expression, sadness mixed with pity, her vivid blue eyes piercing through to Alexa’s heart.

  “I think even fourteen-year-olds need the mom stuff sometimes.”

  Alexa swallowed hard. Why was Nicole always so insightful? It was creepy, as though she could crawl inside of Alexa’s head and read what was in there.

  “And the red?” Nicole prodded, pointing toward the canvas.

  “Her temper,” Alexa answered quickly, glancing away. “It doesn’t always show, but it’s there.”

  The next ring, the yellow one, was even bigger than the red. The yellow was her mother’s energy, which was kind of intense and volatile, because it would come and go and always make trouble whenever it got too yellow. Alexa hated her mother’s energy. But she didn’t feel like explaining that. She didn’t want to talk about this stuff at all.

  “Okay,” Nicole told her. “How about the yellow?”

  “I don’t know,” Alexa said, trying to describe it and then quickly moving on to the next. “The green is money.”

  “Money?”

  “It’s a big part of who she is. Not that we ever had any. But she’s always thinking about it, always scheming to get it, always hoping for more of it.”

  “That must seem odd, in a way, for money to be such a major focus that it becomes a part of who she is.”

  Alexa didn’t respond. It didn’t seem odd to her, because that’s how it had always been. What did Nicole know about it anyway? She was a rich doctor’s wife who lived in Greenhaven and probably hadn’t had to worry about money since the day she got married. Life was different in a dumpy little apartment in a dumpy little town across the river in New Jersey: hand-to-mouth, paycheck-to-paycheck. That’s just how it was.

  “I mean, earning and handling and spending money are necessary parts of life,” Nicole added, “but sometimes our priorities get a bit askew.”

  Understatement of the year. Everything about my mother is askew.

  “Okay, well, tell me why you chose to finish in black,” Nicole added after a moment.

  Alexa was quiet. How could she explain the black? That’s what the money was for, mostly, the addiction. The drugs.

  “Black swallows all the rest,” Alexa said softly, “so that’s all anyone can see anymore.”

  At that, she dipped her brush in more black paint and smeared it across the colorful ball, wiping back and forth in an attempt to obliterate it. She wished it were that easy to wipe out everything—everything that had come before, everything that had changed.

  “Does it feel good to do that?” Nicole asked.

  “It feels real,” Alexa replied, swirling the brush with even more vigor. “That’s what she is these days, just one big globby mess.”

  Finally, she tossed the brush into the water and wiped her hands on the towel.

  “I’m tired. I want to quit,” Alexa said, feeling inexplicably angry. Sometimes, she wondered why her art lessons with Nicole always seemed to stir up her feelings. She padded across the studio and sat on the floor, pulling on her sneakers and tying them. She was ready to be done for the hour, even though they were just getting started.

  “Funny, isn’t it,” Nicole said, still standing in front of the easel, studying the canvas, “that even with all that black, the light blue still peeks through here and there. As do the other colors.”

  Alexa finished tying her shoes and looked up at the mess she had made on the canvas. Nicole was right. Even in the midst of the giant glob of black, little streaks and swirls of the other colors were still there. Alexa leaned back against the window seat, resisting the urge to cry, though she couldn’t even say why. Just a short while ago, she had been so happy. Now she couldn’t imagine feeling any worse.

  “Why do you always keep pushing, always get all symbolic on me?” Alexa asked miserably. “You just won’t let things rest.”

  Nicole turned from the canvas and crossed the room to where Alexa still sat on the floor. Nicole sat across from her, cross-legged, elbows on her knees.

  “The art doesn’t lie,” she said matter-of-factly, her curls falling perfectly into place. “That’s why it’s such a good starting point for conversation.”

  Nicole was so pretty, not in a glamorous way, but in a slightly plump, mom-ish sort of way—all soft curves and friendly smiles and gentle eyes. Sometimes late at night, Alex pretended that Nicole was her mom. She would imagine her tucking her in at night, reading her a bedtime story. And cookies. In Alexa’s fantasies, they were always baking Nicole’s secret family recipe for cookies. But that was dumb, Alexa knew.

  Nicole probably didn’t even have a secret family recipe for cookies.

  “Of all my teachers and tutors and medical people,” Alexa said, “how come you’re the only one who worries about what I’m feeling? Can’t we just stick to the art lessons? You’d think this was counseling or something.”

  Her words came out sounding more bitter than she meant, but when she looked at Nicole to apologize, she didn’t understand the expression on the woman’s face.

  “Alexa, what do you think this is? What do you think we’re doing together?”

  “Art lessons.”

  “Art therapy,” Nicole corrected.

  “Yeah, like to go with my physical therapy. Art therapy. Coordination. Physical movement. That kind of stuff.”

  Nicole shook her head, and she seemed so disconcerted that Alexa frowned in confusion.

  “Honey, I’m sorry you didn’t understand. Art therapy isn’t physical. It’s emotional. We’re using the art to understand your feelings.”

  Alexa felt like such a dummy. Of course. Therapy. Counseling. Art therapy. How many of these once-a-week lessons had they had now? Five? Six? And every time, Alexa just thought Nicole was especially nice, especially chatty. Especially insightful.

  Figures.

  “I’m so stupid,” Alexa said softly, covering her face with her hands.

  “No, you’re not,” Nicole said. “Look at me, Alexa. Look at me.”

  She reached up and gently pulled Alexa’s hands from her eyes.

  “What?” Alexa asked, blinks sending tears down her cheeks.

  “This is my fault and my husband’s fault. You are not stupid. You misunderstood because we didn’t make it clear. You probably never even heard of art therapy until Dr. Stebbins asked you if you wanted to meet me and give it a try. And since you were already in physical therapy and occupational therapy, you made a logical conclusion.”

  Alexa nodded, wishing she had just kept her big mouth shut about the whole thing. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

  “Why do my feelings even matter?” she asked finally, wiping at her cheeks. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  Nicole explained, saying there were two reasons Alexa needed therapy—one, as yet another part of the research, one more area that needed to be cataloged and documented. That wasn’t too surprising, since Dr. Stebbins had had Alexa tested and examined in a thousand other ways.

  “That’s not fair. Isn’t counseling supposed to be confidential?”

  “It is,” Nicole said. “All I do is fill out a checklist
once a week, evaluating your emotional state. I never add any notes or include any specifics.”

  Alexa considered, and then she decided that made it okay.

  “What’s the second reason?” she asked.

  Nicole seemed to study her face for a moment before speaking.

  “Because Dr. Stebbins and I care about you, Alexa, and we worry. In less than a year, your entire life has done a complete one eighty. Everything’s changed—your body, your mind, your living situation, your schooling. That’s hard enough, but add to that practically living under a microscope, and you’ve got a recipe for major stress. I want to help you learn how to cope.”

  “Cope?”

  “And grow. When the trial phase is over and Dr. Stebbins is finished collecting his data, we want you to be much, much better for all of this, not worse. You’re not just our medical subject, Alexa. You’re also our friend—not to mention our responsibility.”

  Responsibility.

  Alexa closed her eyes, in her mind suddenly seven years old, hovering in the hall outside of her classroom, listening to the second grade teacher yell at her mother. It wasn’t anything her mother had done; it was Alexa’s fault. Again.

  “This is your responsibility!” the teacher was practically yelling. “It falls on you!”

  “Look, we both know Alexa is a handful,” her mother said calmly, trying to soothe the old battle-ax. “In fact,” she added with a conspiratorial chuckle, “that’s what my fiancé and I call Alexa when we’re alone, ‘The Handful.’ But that doesn’t mean she needs to be on medication. I won’t put a seven-year-old child on drugs just to make your job easier. You give it all the fancy names you want—attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, whatever. My kid’s not a psycho. She just has a lot of energy. And maybe a little trouble staying focused.”

  Even at seven, Alexa knew what irony was: It was her mother calling this week’s live-in lover her “fiancé”; if so, he was about her tenth fiancé so far that year. It was also her use of the word “drugs,” the heroin addict refusing to give her kid the prescription medication she needed for a legitimate condition. Irony.