The First True Thing

by Claire Needell

  Twenty-Two

  MY LAWYER’S NAME is Barbara Fine. I meet with her tomorrow after I go to the Center. Detective Perez will come here as well. I hear Mom in the kitchen tell Perez, “Listen, she doesn’t know where she was or who she was with. I know what’s at stake, believe me,” but in the end it sounds like he agrees on tomorrow. If I knew something that would give the cops more to go on, a way to focus their search, I’d talk to Mom. I’d call Perez myself. But I don’t. I said enough in the meeting at school for the cops to get the details when they talk to Senna, Chuck, and Jonas. Senna and Jonas are the people who know exactly what Alex was doing with Hannah. They know his last name, his address, where he’s from.

  From the couch in the den, I listen as Mom makes more calls—to Dad, and to Barbara Fine. I fold my arms over my face and shut my eyes. I’m both jittery and weirdly exhausted—on the verge of slipping into a restless sleep, so that what Mom is saying in the other room seems both real and the product of some dimly recalled nightmare.

  I suppose by now the cops are searching every inch of Playland Park, of the nature preserve, the marshland filled with cattails and skunk cabbage, dog shit and weird, skittish animals—beavers, muskrats, swamp-smelling rodents that give you a heart attack when they pop out of the tall, dense reeds. Dad and I used to go to the preserve for walks when I was little. He liked to smoke an occasional cigar, which Mom hated and refused to be around. I always thought the smell was kind of nice, sweet and musky. I liked the way Dad would stop to name all the birds he saw, sandpipers, herons, egrets, and ibises. I was proud he could tell one bird from the other by their shape or the color of their legs.

  When it’s quiet in the kitchen, I force myself to get up and talk to Mom. I climb on one of the kitchen stools and watch as she takes out a package of chicken, puts it in a bowl in the sink, and turns on the water. She doesn’t look at me until I speak.

  “So, that’s all set?” I ask. “Am I going to school tomorrow? What about the Center?” Mom picks up a dish towel and wipes her hands. For a moment, she looks angry, and then you can see she’s counting to ten or something, trying to control herself, because her voice is annoyingly neutral and flat. “Yes, Marcelle, you’ll go back to school tomorrow. As for the Center, that’s even more critical. I can’t understand how you could even question your need for support at this point.”

  I feel like she’s not understanding me on purpose. “No, I mean, of course I’ll go back, but just for now. I’m really tired, and we don’t know how long everything will take, and I have all this work, and there’s Michiko’s . . .” I trail off because Michiko’s is overstepping, I know. But going to Michiko’s will be my only chance to talk to Andy, and to find out what’s happening with Jonas. I want to know if what I said at the meeting will clue people in to Jonas’s part in things. I want Jonas to speak up, but I want to know Andy is okay—that the cops will leave him out of it, and that his parents will see that it was Jonas, not Andy, who got everybody so fucked up. Andy brought Jonas around to Senna’s, but he did what anyone would do. He just put people in touch who wanted the same thing. Maybe that’s a lame defense. I know it is. But Andy isn’t bad. I know that, too. It’s not like he could somehow see the future.

  Mom puts her hands on her hips and says, “You need to meet all of your obligations, Marcelle. Not only when it’s comfortable, but each and every day, just like your dad and me. I know you did your best today, but unfortunately, you chose to be honest too late in the game. I don’t blame you for Hannah’s actions, not at all. You can’t take that on yourself. But you do need to think about what you’ve done and what you have failed to do. You’re upset right now, we all are, but what you need to do going forward is stay on your own path and not get distracted and make excuses because of the risks other people are taking.”

  I nod and look serious, as though going to Michiko’s was something I dreaded.

  I think about the homework I have to get done, and how I have to spend two hours at the Center this afternoon, somehow convincing the group that I should be there. I don’t know how I can focus on any of it with Hannah out there—with Hannah gone.

  Twenty-Three

  UPSTAIRS, AT MY desk, I try to teach myself today’s Precalculus lesson off the classroom website, but I’ve visited five pages and am still confused. I look at the homework and sigh. I can’t do it, not even the first, and likely the easiest, of the ten problems. I decide I’m better off starting with Center work, especially since I have to go get stared down by the group in an hour. If my mom knew what things were really like in Group, I think she’d let me take a break. After the meeting at school today, I can hardly get my head around having to sit through another ninety-minute torture session.

  I take out the yellow pad where I started writing with Kevin yesterday. My accountability letter is supposed to say clearly and without excuses the things I did that got me into trouble, that landed me under Michiko’s parked car, and then in the emergency room with my blood alcohol level so high the doctor wondered why I was still breathing. I chew on my pen. How do I draw the line between my shit and everybody else’s?

  I didn’t tell Hannah to stop. I didn’t tell Hannah she was going too far. I spoke up, but only once it was too late. When Hannah showed me the other stuff she bought, not the clothes, but the sex shop toys, I sat down on the bed and picked up each one. They were still wrapped in plastic and had names like “The Rabbit” and “The Suregasm.” At first glance, they looked like baby toys.

  “You bought all this stuff?” I asked. She grinned and nodded. “In the city. It was hilarious,” she said. “The girls in the store are really professional. No one acts like there’s anything wrong or pervy about it.” Hannah looked down at the crap on the bed, and then suddenly gathered it up and stuck it back in the box.

  “Don’t look at me like that, Marce,” she said. “It’s not like you’re some fucking saint.” With the black wig, Hannah’s eyes looked amber. Her cheekbones were more prominent. She was so thin, so frail. But none of that made her beautiful. It was something else—a quality that isn’t really physical.

  Maybe it’s that she’s freer than other people. Or more trapped. Braver. Or more afraid. Whatever it is, I was in awe of her one minute, and in the next instant, I wanted to shake her. I guess a part of me always wanted to be her. Whatever her magical quality was, I wanted to have it too. I can’t tell now if I’m even over that—or if she came back tonight I’d feel exactly the same way.

  Hannah chased the light that coke gave her—the brilliant light. She chased the darkness Alex showed her—the darkness that makes a person something to buy or sell.

  I take out my iPad and I write about everything I did that led to my crash on the Death Wish night. I write about loving beer and vodka. I write about riding my bike away from Andy, cutting through the woods in the dark between our neighborhood and Senna’s. About Andy and me shit-faced in Senna’s garage, banging into the lawn mower, the snow shovels, the ladder, cans of paint; of being dirty, bruised, hungover, and fucked up out of my brain.

  I curl up on my bed with my pink-fringed throw blanket that covers everything but my feet.

  My toes are cold. I feel sick.

  Hannah’s phone has been found with more than one set of fingerprints. . . . That sentence has poisoned me.

  I picture the phone in its sparkly gold-toned case lying in the mud in the reeds and swampy mess behind Playland. I try to force my brain to think about Hannah herself, but all I can see in my mind is the dark and the dirt.

  Twenty-Four

  AT 3:20 IT’S almost time for Mom to take me to the Center. She says she’ll bring me to Michiko’s after, but that she’ll wait in her car for me there while I take care of the bird and Marco. That means no meeting Andy. I need to hear what he has to say about the meeting at school, about Hannah’s phone and the two sets of fingerprints. Mostly I need to hear his voice, and to know what’s happening between us is still real.

  Dad gets home a few
minutes before Mom and I are supposed to leave. He puts down his briefcase, which is one of those black vinyl types, nothing fancy. He stands by the door in his corduroys and tweed jacket, his usual non-meeting work clothes.

  He puts his hand on my shoulder as I head toward the door. I’m tall enough to look him right in the eye. “We’re going to the Center,” I say. “I’ve got Group.”

  “I’d like to come,” Dad says.

  “Come?” I ask. “But it’s Group. It’s led by other kids. I don’t have any other meetings scheduled.”

  “I want to get a feel for this place, see what it’s doing for you,” Dad says. I try to get my head around this. Dad came to the hospital the night of my accident; he was there when they pumped my stomach, but other than that he’s let Mom handle “the situation.” I get the feeling he’s rethinking things, believing there must be more he can do. We’ve talked about this sort of thing in Group—how parents try to rescue you, once they realize things have gotten serious. But it’s almost always by doing something useless, like what Dad is doing now.

  I don’t know why Dad thinks if he tags along anything will be different. Hannah is missing. He can’t change that.

  But that’s not what I say to Dad. Instead, I take a deep breath and say what no one has said all day, but that everyone’s been thinking. “Dad,” I ask in a husky, strange-sounding voice, “do you think that Hannah is dead?”

  He stares at me. “I think most of us are wondering that same thing, honey. Actually, a lot of people are wondering what you think.” He speaks in a near-whisper. I nod.

  If I could get my head to stop aching for more than a minute, or if I could talk things out with Andy, I might be able to snap the pieces together of this broken chain. But without Andy, with just my own throbbing brain, I can’t get anywhere.

  I walk out the kitchen door toward Mom’s car, stuck between Mom and Dad. I sit in the back of the car like a little kid.

  The world goes by in a blur. I stare out the window. I don’t feel sorry only for myself, but for everything and everyone we pass. Everything seems stuck being a part of something else that’s being ruined by roads, cars, trash, people. I don’t know how much being sober matters. But then again, being a fuck-up in a fucked-up world hasn’t worked out too well, either.

  It has been almost three days since I’ve heard from Hannah, depending on how you count Sunday. At one point in the car, when we’re stopped at a light, I think I see her. But it’s some other small dark-haired girl on her bike, waiting for the light to change. When she turns her head, I see she has a little button nose and full, rosy cheeks—none of Hannah’s strange beauty, the high cheekbones, full lips, eyes that say yes, no, everything, all the time. No, not Hannah, just a regular girl.

  Mom decides not to come into the Center. She says she’ll wait in the car. She takes out her phone, and barely looks up when Dad and I get out and walk toward the building. Outside, it’s warm and hazy. The streetlamps cast a strange light, and somehow as we walk toward the Center the building looks blurry, like it’s fading into the sky, and like it doesn’t really exist as brick and glass.

  Some rich ex-drunk left his money to the Center for New Living, and this is where they put it, one block over from the strip mall, right across from Citibank, three blocks from the police station. Only no one ever mentions the Center, even though they drive right past it practically every day.

  Inside, I nod to the security guy who leans on his desk, eating an apple. He knows my face, and doesn’t question either me or Dad. Once you’re a Center kid, you can come and go as you please.

  I can see Dad taking it all in. He looks confused, even embarrassed. I can tell none of it is what he expected, no antiseptic hospital smell, no busy receptionist putting callers on hold. It’s about half as official-feeling as the town library.

  Kevin’s door is shut tight, and a small African-American woman sits alone on the couch in the barren waiting area. She could be Martin’s mom, or who knows, maybe a new kid is starting. I can see James through the open doorway in the Group room, notebook in front of him. He wears his usual button-down. His hair looks freshly cut. Cyndi is in the little kitchenette wearing sheepskin slippers and sweatpants. She keeps her slippers in the cubbies, where everyone is supposed to leave their school stuff. It’s like she wants everyone to know how at home she is here.

  I peer into the Group room, and I see Martin is there too, bent over the far end of the table, writing on a yellow pad. He wears headphones and rocks to the beat of his music. This is allowed until Group actually begins.

  I tell Dad Group is starting, and he takes a seat on the couch outside Kevin’s office. “You’re waiting?” I ask. Dad picks up a pamphlet from the coffee table. I’m afraid Dad thinks he can walk right into Group, or burst into Kevin’s office. You aren’t allowed to do stuff like that at the Center. I want to explain that, while it seems laid-back, there are all kinds of rules, invisible rules you have to learn by breaking them.

  Dad stares at me. He has an unfamiliar, scared-animal look to him, but he speaks in his usual Dad-the-rational-scientist voice. “Your mom and I think you need some support right now, and maybe . . .” He trails off. “. . . some protection.” For the first time it occurs to me that Dad might not be furious at me, or even suspicious. My father is afraid. It suddenly makes sense. They think it’s possible that whatever happened to Hannah could happen to me.

  Twenty-Five

  I CATCH JAMES’S eye as he peers out of the Group room, nod, and pick up my book bag, leaving Dad on the couch with the Center pamphlet unopened on his lap. Just as I pass, Kevin’s door opens, and I hear voices. Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpse a familiar woman—tall and slender, with hair down to her chin in a neat bob. She’s all polish and gloss. Then I recognize a voice. And there, at the Center, coming forward to greet me with a shy smile, is Chuck.

  “Marcelle,” Kevin says. “On your way to Group?” I nod, mute. “I think you may know Chuck Glasser?” I nod again. “Chuck is considering joining us. You two have outside contact?”

  “We hang out with the same group,” I say. “I mean, social group.”

  “Understood,” Kevin says. “Well, we have a special way of handling this sort of thing.”

  We are all standing in the hallway, Chuck, his mom, Kevin, and me. Dad is down the hall, and I can’t tell if he can hear what’s going down, but Kevin catches me looking his way.

  “Dad?” Kevin asks. I nod again, and Kevin slow-jogs over to where Dad is, and they do the quick handshake and then Kevin calls us all back over to the waiting area.

  “Here’s our deal,” Kevin starts again, pulling nervously at his beard. “We are a peer-based program, and we run on the honor system. Kids support kids. Therapists are here to get kids ready to be Group members, to work out goals, and to get kids started on being accountable. Once a kid gets what accountability really means to the Group, the kids basically run the show and old folks like me oversee the process. Group leaders are trained to take detailed minutes of each meeting. I read the minutes every morning. I can tell you the kids have a fantastic handle on what makes other kids tick. It’s pretty brilliant.”

  Kevin pauses and glances at Mrs. Glasser and my dad, who nod as if they immediately get what Kevin is saying, which I can tell they don’t. “You two, Marcelle and Chuck, are what’s considered an OC pair. Meaning you two have outside contact. There are three rules for OCs. He holds up two fingers: One, no discussing the Group outside of Group time. Two, no bringing in outside shit. You, Marcelle, do not bring Chuck’s outside stuff in. Vice versa. One exception is if you, Chuck, or you, Marcelle, see the other engage in substance abuse. Not hear about it, but see it, got it?” We both nod. “Third thing: You’re both out on your asses if either of you violate the other two rules.”

  I start to drift and can’t really focus on what Kevin is saying. Chuck is here, at the Center. It feels like an eternity ago that he told me he was thinking about giving up blow. But this? Somethin
g is wrong. What exactly is “outside shit”? I have no idea what to say, so I keep silent. My throat feels parched and the feverish feeling returns.

  Dad breaks in suddenly. “How is that fair?” he asks. “If Chuck violates the rules, why would Marcelle be asked to leave? Why is her membership in jeopardy?”

  “Ah,” Kevin says. “Great question, Dad. It’s about mutual trust. If Marcelle can’t trust the group, she can’t support the group either. She’d have to reapply even if Chuck violates her. So, as OCs, they really are partners, and need to sign the OC contract. Here’s the other thing. You, Marcelle, have been accepted as a probationary Group member. As far as we know, you’ve surpassed your ‘cold two,’ or so you say. You started on some goals. You’ve been introduced to the accountability structure—the accountability narrative or letter or whatever the fuck you guys call that thing is complete or will be by end of today. So, you have until tomorrow’s Group to decide whether you can trust Chuck. If you say no, no questions asked, Chuck is out. If you say, yes, the two of you are bound together. You succeed or fail only if you both abide by the confidentiality structure. Got it? You have a day to decide.”

  Dad stares at Kevin, his mouth slightly open. I can tell he’s starting to get the picture about the Center, that it’s not just talking about your problems or reading about teen issues like you do in health class at school. It’s an after-school bizarro universe. It’s emotional purgatory. It’s peer pressure turned on its head, supposedly for our own good. It’s bullying each other into sobriety. It’s totally fucked.

  Now, here is beautiful blue-eyed Chuck, and I have to decide, in twenty-four hours, where we stand. There is no way Kevin, or Dad, can understand what a huge question that is.

  “So, Marcelle, okay if Chuck joins as a silent participant today, gets a feel for Group? You can take a pass on Feedback today if doing Feedback in front of Chuck makes you uncomfortable before you’ve made up your mind.”