Been There, Done That (31 page)

thirty-five

When I crept into our darkened room, I was afraid I would interrupt Tiffany with yet another anonymous man, but she was sprawled out on top of her pink bedspread, alone and fully clothed. Had she added binge drinking to her list of newfound vices? At least it wouldn’t give her any diseases, I reasoned—in the short term, anyway.

I retrieved my laptop from my desk and unhooked the modem. The cord fell with a crash against my metal wastebasket. I swore softly and checked Tiffany. To my relief, she didn’t stir.

The library was empty. For Parents Weekend, the students were all tucked into bed early, their bellies full of chicken cordon bleu or salmon if they were lucky enough to have parents who took them to a real restaurant, or with chewy roast beef if they were like the rest of us.

I found a carrel and plugged in my computer. I was physically exhausted but mentally buzzing. I braced myself for the usual panic that hits whenever I start something new, but it didn’t come. I’d been preparing myself for this moment for months now and couldn’t wait to get to the end.

 
I went on to make less-than-flattering remarks about the student body, which I described as being “generally white and affluent, frequently spoiled.” I referenced the flashy autos, the gold cards, the flat-screen computers.

 
The story of Troy’s accomplice was especially tantalizing—and frightening:

 
From there, I described the spate of household robberies plaguing Mercer and ended with my own heroic role in ousting the culprit—who just happened to be Mercer’s premier drug dealer. I left out the Little Tikes log cabin.

As I finished proofreading the article for the second time, the sky outside the library turned a murky gray, signaling the approach of a nasty New England autumn morning. I typed a quick message to Tim, attached the file, and sent my story out over the Internet.

Trudging back to the dorm, I realized just how exhausted I was. Perhaps now I could finally collapse.

Tiffany looked just as she had when I’d left her: fully clothed and sprawled out on top of her pink bedspread. There was just enough gray light leaking through the warped metal Venetian blinds to allow me to grope my way around the room. I should have been tired, but I’d passed the exhaustion mark long ago and continued to feed off my adrenaline buzz. I looked at my hard little bed. I hated it. Never, ever did I want to sleep there again. My first impulse was to simply run for it: pack up my computer and a few other essentials and hit the road. In two hours, I could crawl between my cold Egyptian cotton sheets, stroke the dense, natural weave of my comforter, and fall into a long, deep sleep, uninterrupted by shouts, music or carnal encounters. Later I could sneak back for the rest of my things, perhaps when Tiffany was out (for all her unseemly behavior of late, she never missed a class).

My laptop and I got halfway down the hall before I recognized the stupidity of this plan: better to sleep now, pack later and make a clean, final break. Later, I would wonder what would have happened if I had followed my impulse to flee.

I took my plastic bucket down to the bathroom, where I scrubbed my teeth and washed my face. Free of makeup, my face looked suddenly older, and I wondered if any of my dorm-mates had ever noticed the fine lines around my eyes. They were tiny but hardly invisible and fully inexplicable on the face of an eighteen-year-old.

Back in the room, I shrugged into my barely-there nightgown, the only thing I could stand to wear in this chronically overheated building. Suddenly the exhaustion that had been crouching in the corners of my body leapt out. My eyes and limbs ached with fatigue. I wondered how long I’d have before Tiffany, an incorrigible morning person, popped out of bed and opened every drawer and door until she was sure she had awakened me. It was with that black thought that I took one last look at her before slumping onto my bed. I wanted to see if her sleep was showing any signs of lightening, how long I had until she’d wake up.

The room was brighter now, the light for once more yellow than gray. I’d sometimes thought that Tiffany was prettier asleep than awake, her complexion all pink and white and smooth, her rosebud mouth free of tension, her too-small eyes peacefully closed. But something was wrong. I should have noticed it earlier. Tiffany was not the sort to pass out on her bed. Tiffany was the sort to arrange her pillows just so, to place a glass of cold, clear water on the bookshelf behind her bed, to smooth her sheets around her until there was barely a wrinkle. The light was no longer gray, but her face still was.

I crept over to her bed. Hardly breathing myself, I bent my ear next to her mouth. I thought I heard something, but I couldn’t be sure.

“Tiffany?” I whispered. Louder now: “Tiffany?” Nothing.

I grasped her arm, gently at first, then harder. “Tiffany? Wake up!” I was shaking her now, squeezing her arms and rocking her from side to side. She was warm, I noticed in some corner of my brain. Still warm.

Hours later, at the small local hospital where Tiffany had her stomach pumped, they let me see her. She was still sleeping but noticeably pinker. On my way out, I recognized a guy from the emergency crew who had come to our room with a stretcher. I asked him what I’d said when I’d called. I honestly couldn’t remember. “You said your roommate had killed herself,” he told me.

“I thought she had.”

There should be a lot more to say: about the outpouring of sympathy, about Tiffany’s recovery, about my acceptance of responsibility or at least of deeper empathy. I should be able to tell you about a later encounter, a nice lunch, perhaps, when a more-mature Tiffany made her peace with a more-mature me. Maybe I should tell you how we became friends, with me acting as the big sister I never was and that Tiffany never had. But the truth is, I never saw her again. And though I was almost giddily relieved that there still was a Tiffany not to see, once I’d sent a short, sympathetic note to her parents’ house in Buffalo, where Tiffany was sent for “psychological healing,” I felt downright euphoric at the idea of a Tiffany-free future.

Still, it is hard to put her out of my mind. There are times when I am driving, or grocery shopping, or trying to fall asleep, and the what-ifs shoot uncontrolled through my brain. What if she’d taken prescription sleeping pills instead of the over-the-counter kind. What if she’d used a razor blade. A noose. A gun. What if I’d driven away, or fallen asleep. What if I had simply been her friend.

Statistics tell us that, while four times as many women as men attempt suicide, four times as many men actually succeed. I tell myself that Tiffany didn’t really want to die, that her act was a cry for help. The alternative scenario is just too cruel: that the botched attempt was simply one more of Tiffany’s failures.

Most of the hall slept through the whole thing. It was Saturday morning, after all. When the emergency medical technicians had left, I considered crawling into bed. But if I’d hated that room before, now it was unbearable. I left behind my posters, the bedspread and some of the duller textbooks. The rest of my things I stuffed into my wooden crates, and, when those were full, into plastic trash bags. I hauled the lot out to my tiny car and sped away through the chilly morning.

I got back to Boston in just under two hours, a new—and final—record. I found a parking spot quickly; Saturday mornings, the streets are emptier than usual. I hauled my stuff up the stairs in three trips. Once I’d locked the apartment door behind me, I made a final call to the local hospital to make sure that Tiffany was going to be okay. They told me that she was awake and that the college had called her parents.

It was ten o’clock in the morning. Jeremy would be waking up just about now. He was the last thing I thought of before I fell into a dull, heavy sleep.

thirty-six

“I hate it,” Richard said. “I HATE IT.”

I stared at him and took a few deep breaths to keep from crying. “It has everything,” I said, my sweaty hands gripping the sides of the molded plastic chair. “Youth, crime, drugs. Class warfare. A chase scene. Even a surprise ending.” My voice quivered like a little girl’s. “It has
everything
.”

He stood up and leaned over his pretentious desk. His cologne assaulted my nose. His nostrils were so close, I could see the curly gray hairs that needed trimming. “It. Has. No. SEX.”

I took another deep breath. And another. When that didn’t work, I chose a focal point: a lighthouse on one of the magazine covers that hung behind his desk. At least I’d taken something from all those childbirth discussions Marcy’s friends were always having. “Perhaps you underestimate the American public. Perhaps they want more than sex.”

He collapsed in his chair and laughed meanly. He rubbed his hand over his face, then shook his head and stared at the ceiling in haughty bafflement. “No one ever lost money from underestimating the American public.” He leveled his gaze. “And you can quote me on that.”

He pushed his speakerphone button, and the dial tone blared. He rifled through his Rolodex, hit the buttons, producing a series of high-pitched beeps. The phone rang once before being answered by a crisp, “Tim McAllister.”

“Tim. Richard here.”

There was a long, pained sigh on the other end, followed by a resigned, “Yeah.”

“You got Kathy’s story,” Richard said, more a statement than a question, though I hadn’t actually told Richard that I’d e-mailed the piece in the early hours of Sunday morning.

“Got it.”

Richard narrowed his eyes at me. “And?”

For a moment I held out hope. What did Richard know? The man only held a position of power because of smarter ancestors. Tim would come through, if not personally, at least professionally. Finally he spoke. “I don’t know what she was thinking. We never talked about any burglary story.”

Richard leaned toward me and tried to hold my gaze. I picked a new focal point, this time a black scuff mark on the wood floor. Richard’s shoes were always too shiny. “And now that you’ve had a chance to read the final version, what do you think? Was it worth all that time and expense?”

Tim’s laugh lacked mirth. “Maybe we can sell it to the
Mercer Weekly Gazette
for twenty bucks. If there is a
Mercer Weekly Gazette
. Seriously, Richard, I don’t know what to say. I thought Kathy could pull this off. Obviously, I made a mistake.”

They said their good-byes, and Richard hung up. My breathing was completely out of control. I was hyperventilating. “I’m sorry that the crime I uncovered wasn’t tawdry enough for you,” I said, finally.

“You were sent on an assignment, and you blew it.” For once, he spoke softly. It was far less wonderful than I’d always imagined. “Seven weeks, and you uncovered nothing.” He shook his head. “I don’t think you even tried.”

“I tried.” My voice trembled, but not too badly. “I asked questions. I tailed people. I looked around dark corners. And I
did
uncover things. Dean Archer is banging half the girls in the senior class.” There. That got his attention. “His wife doesn’t have a clue. The administration doesn’t have a clue, or if they do, they’re pretending not to notice. Don’t you get it?
There is no prostitution ring
. There never was. That girl in Tim’s office was making it up.” I sat up as straight as I could manage and forced myself to look at Richard’s face. “The burglary was all I had to go with. I didn’t write about a sex scandal because there
was
no sex scandal.”

He stared at me. I really, really wanted him to yell. Finally he hit that goddamn speakerphone button again. The blaring tone made me jump. He pushed another button, and eleven tones raced past each other: redial.

“Tim McAllister.”

“I’ve got Kathy here,” Richard said.

“Kathy,” Tim said evenly.

“I was here before. When Richard called you.” My voice did that preadolescent squeak thing again.

He was silent, undoubtedly trying to recall the exact words he’d said. “Ah,” he said, finally.