by Jodi Picoult
I met her mother at the hospital. Now, after being given an activated charcoal solution to drink, Lucy has been brought up to the inpatient psych ward on suicide watch. It remains to be seen how much damage she's done to her liver and kidneys.
Sandra DuBois sits beside me on a chair in the waiting room. "They need to keep her under observation for a few days," she says, and she forces herself to meet my eye. "Ms. Shaw, I don't know how to thank you."
"Please, it's Vanessa," I say. "And I do: Let me help your daughter."
I have tried, for the past month, to convince Lucy's parents that music therapy is a valid scientific tool to try to break through to their increasingly isolated daughter. So far, I haven't gotten them to agree. Sandra and her husband are heavily involved in the Eternal Glory Church--and they don't treat mental illness on a par with physical illness. If Lucy was diagnosed with appendicitis, they would understand the need for treatment. But depression, to them, is something a good night's sleep and a Bible study meeting can cure.
I kind of wonder how many suicide attempts it will take before that changes.
"My husband doesn't believe in psychiatrists . . ."
"So you've told me." He's not even here, in spite of Lucy's close call--he is traveling for business, apparently. "Your husband wouldn't necessarily have to know. We could keep this a secret, just between you and me."
She shakes her head. "I don't really see how singing songs can make a difference--"
"Make a joyful noise unto the Lord," I quote, and she blinks at me, as if I have finally spoken her language. "Look, Mrs. DuBois. I don't know what will help Lucy, but whatever you and I have done so far doesn't seem to be working. And you might have a whole congregation praying for your daughter, but if I were in your shoes, I'd have a backup plan just in case."
The woman's nostrils flare, and I'm certain that I've crossed that unwritten line where professionalism and personal belief bleed together. "This music therapist," Sandra says finally, "she's worked with adolescents before?"
"Yes." I hesitate. "She is a friend of mine."
"But is she a good Christian?"
I realize I have no idea what religious affiliation, if any, Zoe is. If she asked for a priest at the hospital, or even checked off a box on her intake form for any given denomination. Stumped, I watch as Sandra DuBois stands up and starts down the hall, toward Lucy.
And then I remember Max. "I believe she has relatives who attend your church," I call out.
Lucy's mother hesitates. Then, before she turns the corner, she looks back at me, and nods.
On the first day I visited Zoe, she was unconscious. Dara and I played gin rummy, and she asked me probing questions about my childhood before offering to read the dregs of my green tea.
On the second day I visited Zoe, I brought a flower that I'd made by sticking three dozen guitar picks into a piece of floral foam in the shape of a daisy. And let me just say I am not crafty, and in fact have a gag reaction when confronted by a glue gun or crochet hook.
On the third day, she is waiting for me at the front door. "Kidnap me," she begs. "Please."
I look over her shoulder, toward the kitchen, where I can hear Dara banging pots and pans for dinner preparations. "Seriously, Vanessa. There is only so much conversation about the positive effects of copper bracelets on a body that a normal human can take."
"She's going to kill me," I murmur.
"No," Zoe says. "She's going to kill me."
"You're not even supposed to be walking . . ."
"The doctor didn't have any restrictions against going for a little ride. Fresh air," she says. "You've got a convertible . . ."
"It's January," I point out.
Still, I know that I'm going to do what she asks; Zoe could probably convince me that it's a fantastic idea to take a vacation to Antarctica in the middle of winter. Hell, I'd probably book a ticket, if she was going, too.
She directs me to a golf course that is covered in snow, a local haunt for elementary school kids who drag their inflatable tubes up the hill and then grab each other's legs and arms before sledding down, linked like atoms in a giant molecule. Zoe rolls down the window, so that we can hear their voices.
Man, that was awesome.
You almost hit that tree!
Did you see how much air I got on that jump?
Next time, I get to go first.
"Do you remember," I ask, "when the most tragic part of your day was finding out that the cafeteria was serving meat loaf for hot lunch?"
"Or what it felt like to wake up and find out it was a snow day?"
"Actually," I admit, "I still get to do that."
Zoe watches the kids make another run. "When I was in the hospital, I had a dream about a little girl. We were on a Flexible Flyer and I was holding her in front of me. It was the first time she'd ever been sledding. It was so, so real. I mean, my eyes were tearing up because of the wind, and my cheeks were chapped, and that little girl--I could smell the shampoo in her hair. I could feel her heart beating."
So this is why she directed me to the hill, why she is watching these children as if she's going to be tested later on their features. "I'm guessing she wasn't someone you knew?"
"No. And now I never will."
"Zoe--" I put my hand on her arm.
"I always wanted to be a mother," she says. "I thought it was because I wanted to read bedtime stories or see my child singing in the school chorus or shop for her prom dress--you know, the things I remember making my own mom so happy. But the real reason turned out to be selfish. I wanted someone who would grow up to be my anchor, you know?" she says. "The one who calls every day to check in. The one who runs out to the pharmacy in the middle of the night if you're sick. The one who misses you, when you're away. The one who has to love you, no matter what."
I could be that person.
It hits me like a hurricane: the realization that what I've labeled friendship is--on my end, anyway--more than that. And the understanding that what I want from Zoe is something I will never have.
I've been here before, so I know how to act, how to pretend. After all, I'd much rather have a piece of her than nothing at all.
So I move away from Zoe, letting my arm drop, intentionally putting space between us. "Well," I say, forcing a smile. "I guess you're stuck with me."
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The Last (3:25)
ZOE
My very first best friendship was grounded in proximity. Ellie lived across the street in a house that always looked a little tired at the edges, with its droopy window wells and frayed clapboards. Her mother was single, like mine, although by choice and not by fate. She worked in an insurance company and wore low heels and boxy suits to the office, but I remember her glamorously affixing fake eyelashes and ratting her hair before heading out to a dance club on weekends.
I was completely unlike Ellie, who--at age eleven--was a stunning girl with sunshine twined in the curls of her hair, and long colt legs with a perpetual summer tan. Her room was always a mess, and she'd have to dump piles of clothes and books and stuffed animals on the floor in order for us to have a place to sit on the bed. She thought nothing of stealing into her mother's closet to "borrow" clothes for dress up or sprays of perfume. She read magazines, never books.
But the one thing Ellie and I had in common was that, of all the kids in our class, we were the two without fathers. Even kids whose parents were divorced saw the missing parent for weekends or holidays, but not Ellie and me. I couldn't, obviously. And Ellie had never met her dad. Ellie's mother referred to him as the One, in a reverent tone that made me think he must have died young, like my own father. Years later I learned that this wasn't the case at all; that the One was a married guy who'd been cheating on his wife but wouldn't leave her.
Ellie's older sister, Lila, was supposed to watch us on the nights when her mom wen
t out, but Lila spent all her time in her bedroom with the door closed. We weren't allowed to bother her, and most of the time we didn't, even though she had the coolest fluorescent posters that glowed under a black light behind her bed. Instead we cooked ourselves Campbell's soup and watched scary movies on the premium cable channels, shielding our eyes from the screen.
I could tell Ellie anything. Like how, sometimes, I woke up screaming because I had a nightmare that my mother had died, too. Or that I worried I would never be brilliant at anything, and who wanted to be average her whole life? I confessed that I faked a stomachache to get out of taking a math quiz and that I had once seen a boy's penis at camp when his bathing suit slid off during a jackknife dive. On school nights I called her before I went to sleep, and in the morning, she phoned me to ask what color shirt I was wearing, so that we would match.
One weekend, during a sleepover at Ellie's house, I climbed out of the bed we shared and crept down the hallway. The door to her mother's room was open, and inside, the room was empty, even though it was after 3:00 A.M. Lila's door, as usual, was closed, but there was a purple line of light bleeding out from beneath it. I turned the knob, wondering if she was still awake. Inside, the room was magical--cloudy with incense and lavender streams of light, those ultraviolet posters coming alive in 3-D. One, a skull with rosette eyes, seemed to be moving toward me. Lila was lying on the bed with her eyes wide open and a rubber hose tied around her arm, like the kind I'd seen at the doctor's office when I had to have a blood test, once. A syringe was in the palm of her open hand.
I was quite sure she was dead.
I took a step forward. Lila was incredibly still, and faintly blue in the eerie light. I thought of my father, and how he collapsed on the lawn. I was gathering the loose threads of a scream in my throat, when suddenly Lila rolled over in one languid move, scaring the hell out of me. "Get lost, you little shit," she said, her words as round and thin as bubbles, popping as soon as they hit the air.
I do not remember the rest of that night. Except that I ran home, even though it was three in the morning.
And that, after what happened, Ellie and I were never really friends anymore.
When I was in high school, my mother used to make up alternate names for the kids I invited over to our house. Robin became Bonnie, Alice became Elise, Suzy became Julie. No matter how many times I corrected her, she preferred to call these girls by names that felt comfortable to her, instead of what was accurate. After a while, my friends even started answering to whatever she called them.
Which is why it's so extraordinary to me that my mother has never--not once--messed up Vanessa's name. The two of them hit it off the moment they first met. There is no end to the things they have in common; and they seem to think it's funny that it drives me crazy.
It's been two months since Vanessa and I bumped into each other at the Y, and she has slipped seamlessly into the role of my closest friend at a time when I desperately needed it--since my former closest friend happened to have recently divorced me. So much of a friendship is like a love affair--the novelty and sparkle wearing down at the edges to become something comfortable and predictable, like the cardigan you take out of your drawer on a rainy Sunday because you need to surround yourself with something cozy and familiar. Vanessa is the one I call when I am procrastinating on organizing my taxes; when I am channel surfing and find Dirty Dancing on TNT and cannot stop watching; when the homeless guy in front of Dunkin' Donuts looks at the five-dollar bill I've given him and asks if he can have it in ones. She's the one I call when I'm bored in traffic on I-95, and when I'm crying because a two-year-old patient with burns over eighty percent of his body dies in the middle of the night. I've programmed her cell number into my phone, on the speed-dial key that used to belong to Max.
It is easy, with twenty-twenty hindsight, to see how I got to a point where I didn't really have any friends. There's that necessary shift that comes with marriage, when your best confidant is now the one you're sleeping with at night. But then the other women I knew all started having babies, and I distanced myself from them out of self-preservation and jealousy. Max was the only one who understood what I so badly wanted and needed. Or so I'd told myself.
Here's what girlfriends do for you: they provide the reality check. They are the ones who tell you when you have spinach between your teeth or when your ass looks fat in a pair of jeans or when you're being a bitch. They tell you, and there's no drama or agenda, like there would be if the message had come from your husband. They tell you the truth because you need to hear it, but it doesn't alter the bond between you. I don't think I realized how much I missed that, until now.
Right now, Vanessa and I are about to be late to a movie because my mother is talking about a breakthrough with one of her clients. "So, I bought two dozen bricks and loaded them in the back of my car," my mother is saying. "And then, when we got to the cliff, I had Deanna write on each of the bricks with a Sharpie marker--keywords, you know, that signified her emotional baggage."
"Brilliant," Vanessa says.
"You think? So she writes My Ex on one. And Never made peace with my sister on another. And Didn't lose last 20 pounds after having kids, and so on. I'm telling you, Vanessa, she went through three markers alone. And then I got her on the edge of the cliff and had her hurl the bricks, one at a time. I told her that the minute they hit the water, that weight was going to be off her shoulders for good."
"Sure hope there wasn't a humpback migration going on below the cliff," I murmur, tapping my foot impatiently. "Look, I hate to break up the professional development session, but we're about to miss the early showing--"
Vanessa stands up. "I think it's a terrific idea, Dara," she says. "You ought to write it up and submit it to a professional journal."
My mother's cheeks pinken. "Honestly?"
I grab my purse and my jacket. "Are you going to let yourself out?" I ask my mother.
"No, no," she says, getting to her feet. "I'll just go home."
"Are you sure you don't want to come along?" Vanessa asks.
"I'm sure my mother's got better things to do," I say quickly, and give her a quick hug. "I'll call you in the morning," I say, and I drag Vanessa out of the apartment.
Halfway to the car, Vanessa turns around. "I forgot something," she says, tossing me the keys. "I'll be right back." So I let myself into the convertible and turn the ignition. I am surfing the channels of her radio when she slips into the driver's seat. "Okay," Vanessa says, backing out of the driveway. "Who spit in your Cheerios?"
"Well, what were you thinking, inviting my mom to come with us?"
"That she's all alone on a Saturday night?"
"I'm forty, Vanessa--I don't want to hang out with my mother!"
"You would if you couldn't," Vanessa says.
I look at her. In the dark, the reflection from the rearview mirror casts a yellow mask around her eyes. "If you miss your mother so much, you can have mine," I say.
"I'm just saying you don't have to be so mean."
"Well, you don't have to enable her, either. Did you seriously think her brick exercise was a good one?"
"Sure. I'd use it myself, except the kids would probably write the names of their teachers on the bricks they're tossing, and that wouldn't be very constructive." She pulls up to a stop sign and turns to me. "You know, Zoe, my mother used to tell me the same story five times. Without fail. I was constantly saying, Ma, yes, I know, and rolling my eyes. And now--I can't even really remember her voice. I think sometimes I've got it, in my head, but then it fades before I can ever really hear it. Sometimes, I put on old videotapes just so I don't completely forget how she sounds, and I listen to her telling me to get a serving spoon for the potatoes, or singing 'Happy Birthday.' Right now, I'd kill to have her tell me a story five times. I'd settle for even once."
I know, halfway through her story, that I am going to cave in. "Is this what you do with the kids in school?" I sigh. "Make them see themselves for the
petty, nasty people they really are?"
"If I think it's going to work," she says, smiling.
I turn on my cell phone. "I'll tell my mother to meet us at the theater."
"She's already coming. That's why I ran back into the house--to invite her."
"Were you really so sure I'd change my mind?"
"Give me a break." Vanessa laughs. "I even know what you're going to order at the concession counter."
She probably does. Vanessa is like that--if you say or do something once, it sticks in her memory so that she will be able to reference it the next time it's necessary. Like how I once mentioned I don't like olives, and then, a month later at a restaurant when we were given a basket of olive bread, she asked for crackers instead before I could even make a comment.
"Just for the record," I say, "there's still a lot about me you don't know."
"Popcorn, no butter," Vanessa says. "Sprite." She purses her lips. "And Goobers, because this is a romantic comedy and those are never quite as good without chocolate."
She's right. Down to the candy.
I think, not for the first time, that if Max had been even half as observant and attentive as Vanessa, I'd probably still be married.
When we pull up to the theater, I'm amazed to find a crowd. The movie has been out for a few weeks now--it's a silly, fizzy romantic comedy. The other movie playing is an independent film called July that's gotten a lot of press, because a very popular preteen singing sensation is starring in it, and because of the subject matter: instead of being a Romeo and Juliet tragedy . . . the love story is about Juliet and Juliet.
Vanessa spots my mother on the other side of the throng and waves her over. "Can you believe this?" she says, looking around.
I've seen a few articles written about the film and the controversy surrounding it. I begin to wonder if we should go see that movie instead, just based on its popular appeal. But as we get closer to the theater, I realize that the people milling around are not in the ticket line. They're flanking it, and they're carrying signs:
GOD HATES FAGS
GAY: GOD ABHORS YOU
ADAM AND EVE, NOT ADAM AND STEVE
