The Unlikely Hero of Room 13B (3 page)

Adam thought about her smile, her voice, her legs, her black hair and her sky-blue eyes. It was a checklist:
eyes, legs, smile, voice, legs, hair, eyes
.… He thought about her so much that he’d been semi-mute during the last two Groups. Both sessions were painful, except for the looking-at-her part. And he wasn’t the only awkward one. Four sessions in and everyone still seemed weirdly shy or something. So far, Group had all the esteem-building properties of your first middle-school dance—the one that was held in the
small
gym. Wolverine was the only one who consistently stepped up to the plate. Problem was, he stayed there
and
emitted a full-on masculinity vibe while whinging about his bat-shit hypochondria. “Did you know that almost one hundred superbly conditioned young male athletes die every single year from hidden cardiovascular diseases like hypertrophic cardiomyopathy? I’m sure I should be on some kind of diuretic.” He just
had
to be crazier than Adam. Unfortunately, Wolverine also moved and looked like the hockey player he’d been before he’d convinced himself that the off-gassing in the ice rink would kill him. Worse yet, Adam was convinced that Robyn was in Wolverine’s sightline. Even worser, he was tall.

Today would be different. “My kid’s a talker,” Adam’s mom always used to say. “He could talk a cat out of his pajamas.” It was time. He would say stuff. For sure.

Adam used his walk over from school as a time to test-drive topics. Walking took twenty minutes longer than the bus, but the added exercise had the advantage of making him feel righteous,
plus
he could scroll through possible talking points along the way. On the one hand, he wanted
to be helpful. So far, Green Lantern rarely said anything and Captain America looked seriously preoccupied. Thor could only be counted on to growl randomly when he wasn’t catching up on his sleep. Even Snooki and Wonder Woman were pretty much comatose, and Adam would’ve pegged the both of them as talkers. This left the therapist in a lurch with Wolverine. Adam was uncomfortable with lurches and very uncomfortable with Wolverine.

He liked Chuck. They all liked Chuck, and not simply because he was the only psychiatrist in the city who specialized in adolescent OCD issues. Adam had to make this work for Chuck. And he had to do it while looking tough and tall and badass.

He considered bringing up the letter. The new one that had come last week. It was for sure some twisted thing because it had freaked out his mom even though she’d tried to keep it a secret again. But it was his mother’s letter, so this was complex. It was
her
problem, right? But the letter had upset her, and therefore it had upset him, so in the end it was
his
problem.
No
. He knew things like that now, the whole separating-of-issues issue. Still, Adam worried. But at least now he knew that he shouldn’t. He also knew better than to discuss anything that had to do with his mother. A badass does not talk about his mom.

So he had come up with five mom-free potential topics by the time he got to the clinic.

Wonder Woman, Wolverine and Robyn were in the lobby waiting for the ancient elevator.

“Hey, Batman!” the girls called out at the same time. Wolverine nodded, barely.

“Hey, guys. Connie—I mean, Wonder Woman—Robyn, Wolverine.”

Wonder Woman gave him a tight smile and returned to tracking the elevator indicator. It was on the fourteenth floor. It would take more than forever to descend. Wonder Woman was perspiring. Adam stepped in behind her, noticed little beads of sweat forming on the back of her neck. Even more telling, she was straining to maintain a breathing pattern. In for five beats, hold for three, out for six.

Adam’s stomach pitched in an instant recognition of fear.

“So what’s up, Batman?” said Robyn.

Even her voice made him crazed. He turned and caught her smiling right smack at him with that shiny, fabulous mouth.

“Not much. You?”

Adam needed to walk right up to her, throw his arms around her, kiss her and claim her in front of everybody. Now,
that
would be badass. Instead he glanced back at Wonder Woman. She was examining the floor indicator as if it held the key to the universe. The elevator descended to the eleventh floor, then the tenth. Her skin was slick and clammy.

“Hey, you know what, guys?” he chirped. His voice was definitely chirpy. Adam cleared his throat and tried for a lower register. “As of last week, I have this serious new get-into-superhero-shape resolution.”

Ninth floor, eighth floor—she was going to puke, he could feel it.

“Like, I’m trying not to eat so much crap, you know? I
even made my mom make a quinoa salad.”
Damn
. He said
mom
and
quinoa
in the same sentence! Adam’s “badass” cred lay in shreds at his feet and still he persisted. “And I’m up for the physical stuff too. Like, uh, I’m walking everywhere, trying out a little jogging here and there. So thing is, I’m going to take the stairs—any joiners?” He sounded like SpongeBob SquarePants.

Fourth floor … third floor.

Robyn looked at him like she’d never seen him before.

“Anybody?”

Second floor.

“I’m in!” said Wonder Woman, heading straight for the stairwell. The elevator doors opened.

Wolverine put his foot on the elevator’s frayed green carpet and held the doors open. “Really? I mean, it’s thirteen goddamned floors!”

Robyn turned to Adam and winked. “I’m in too, Batman. It’ll be a thing—we get all fit and fierce, right?”

Wolverine snorted and stepped back. “Stupidest idea in the history of stupid ideas. Fine, let’s go,” he muttered. “Probably filthy in there, teeming with fungicidal bacteria and God knows what …”

They were dying by the fifth floor—which was fifty-two steps, but who was counting? Wolverine kept taking his pulse and complaining that he was going into arrhythmia. “I can feel my heart fluttering.” Thankfully, the former jock was too winded to talk by the ninth floor, one hundred and four steps. There were thirteen steps per floor; it was nice that they were odd numbers.

“Okay,” said Adam, who was somehow in the lead.
“We’ll take a break every other floor. See, good thing we’re doing this. I gotta say, we suck. But we’ll be superheroes by Christmas!” God, he was doing the SpongeBob thing again.

“We are pretty pathetic,” said Robyn, holding on to the railing.

Wonder Woman mouthed a silent
thanks
every time they paused. The rest pretended not to see.

They were late.

“Okay, so here they are!” Chuck called from his chair in the center of the semicircle. “A little late from crime-fighting, no doubt! Greetings, Batman, Wonder Woman, Robyn and … uh, Wolverine?”

“We walked,” heaved Wolverine.

“Thirteen floors?” squealed Snooki. “Did the elevator go out? That clunky piece of …”

Wonder Woman looked alarmed as she took her place beside Snooki. Was she worried about where this was going?

“No,” said Robyn, panting as she sat down. “Batman thought we needed to get in better shape.”

Everyone else was already there and in their customary seats. Adam glanced at the clock. It was 4:33 p.m. Only in a room full of hard-core OCDers would three minutes be considered late.

They would start the stairs earlier next week.

After the customary circle greeting, Iron Man launched into a long and convoluted story about the people he felt he had involuntarily yet irrevocably harmed that week. This kind of stuff represented a tight turning circle for the group and for Chuck. You can’t constantly be reassuring OCD
kids, because that’s a bottomless pit, but on the other hand, Iron Man was in such obvious pain that everyone ended up doing some heavy lifting in the soothing department. And then they were off. They spoke, cajoled and complained. All of them except for Thor, but even he stayed awake for the entire session.

“You know, Iron Man, you may want to check your Cipralex or whatever you’re on. The dose, I mean.” Everyone turned to Adam as he inhaled. “I’m just saying, because sometimes if the rituals ramp up for, like, no reason, it’s usually because I’ve messed up the doses. It happens.” He exhaled slowly. “Look, I’m your man for screwing up meds. But that’s going to stop right here with you guys, all of it, you know. Week by week, ritual by ritual. I’m going to figure it out here.
We
figure it out here.”

“Right on!” said Captain America, and then, because it was Captain America, he repeated it three more times. Wolverine looked like he was going to hurl, but the rest of the group pondered this as one, especially those on multiple meds.

“Batman may have a point,” said Chuck. Adam could tell that Iron Man was replaying and rewinding his meds consumption even while Chuck spoke. “Iron Man, I want you to start a dosage journal this week. Every day list your symptoms to meds, intake and timing. I’ll review it next week and you can decide whether you want to share or not. Paper and pen, not digital. What do you say?”

“Sure.” Iron Man nodded, relief oozing out of every pore.

Thor glared at Adam. But maybe it wasn’t so much of
a glare as it was … well, something else. The Viking never failed to terrify without saying a word. It didn’t matter. Adam still liked him best.

Wonder Woman spoke up next. She confessed to an uptick in the food issues as well as a sizable uptick in the claustrophobic issues. On the food front, what little she ate had to be green and eaten in order of how dark green it was. Snooki assured her that it was only because school had started full-on and admitted that she was having a bit of trouble around the eating thing as well. Even Robyn chimed in on that one, but she swore she wasn’t purging. Purging? What the hell? She’d been a puker?

And so it went. Everyone except for Thor said something, admitted something, opened up and shared some little secret. Or …

They could all be lying.

Adam knew he was.

When Group finally ended, Adam helped Chuck stack chairs for precisely seven minutes, which he figured gave Robyn plenty of lead time. He praised Chuck for a great session—“Now you’re cooking!”—and took off barreling down the hall and then the stairwell.

Adam had decided to follow her. Again.

He had followed Robyn last week, and the week before too, cursing his cowardice from an estimated forty-one paces behind. Today, though, he would have to say something or he’d completely creep himself out.

Robyn cut through the Pleasantville Cemetery each time. The cemetery was like a massive park plopped right in the middle of the city. She went in through the Bayfield gates, three blocks from the clinic, and came out the other side through the Main Street gates. Adam had decided that
when she stopped this week—because she stopped every week—he’d accidentally bump into her.

The love of his life seemed to hover near a bunch of graves by a monster willow tree. Last week when Robyn left the cemetery, Adam had run back to where she’d paused. He couldn’t tell, given his obligatory safe stalking distance, which grave it was that had held her attention. There was a killer statue of a winged angel crying over the headstone of a Lieutenant Archibald-Lewis, who died when he was nineteen in 1918. Actually, the whole perimeter around the old willow was ringed with stone angels of various shapes and sizes, the lieutenant’s being the largest. They were all crying, or so it seemed to Adam. And most of the headstones had an inscription, poem or Bible verse carved into them. It was nice. Adam liked reading them. The lieutenant’s read:
Until the day breaks and the shadows flee away
. Poor guy. Still, it probably wasn’t him.

Right beside the lieutenant there were two massive plinth-like things with a ton of people’s names engraved on all four sides of their bases. But most of those people were seriously old when they died,
and
they’d died a long time ago. The first monument was a column with an urn stuck on top and the second was a plain pink granite obelisk that pierced the sky. Well inside the angel ring was a huge pockmarked gray headstone covered with an elaborate carving of a cross entwined with roses. That was for a Marnie Wetherall, 1935–1939:
Until we walk in the clouds together
. Four years old, that sucked bad. But Adam didn’t think it was her either.

Adam figured that Robyn had stopped in front of a
headstone of polished black granite. The mammoth stone swallowed up the light. It was a brooding thing, all modern and sharp angles. The dates made the woman buried there thirty-seven years old when she died, but the last name was different. Robyn’s was Plummer and this woman was
Jennifer Roehampton, May 7, 1971–October 14, 2008
. And nothing else. The black granite was free of poetry fragments. There were no biblical offerings, no soothing sentiments.

It made him sad.

Today he entered the Bayfield gates like a superhero. Adam stopped short near the cluster of headstones by the big willow. Sure enough, there she was.

Okay.

Before he could talk himself out of it, and while he was still blinded by determination, he marched straight to the willow. He stopped on the path right behind her. Robyn stood with her head down in front of the black granite.

Adam cleared his throat as quietly as possible. “Hey, wow, is that you, Robyn? Wow, eh?” Three weeks in front of the mirror and that was his best game-opener? Batman would’ve coughed up a fur ball before spitting out anything that lame.

Robyn smiled as soon as she saw him. “Hey, Batman … uh, Adam. I mean, um, Adam-Batman.” She stepped away from the headstone. Her eyes grew lighter as they settled into the surprise of seeing him. “What are you doing here?”

“Uh …” Right. He hadn’t actually got that far in his prep efforts. There was a lot to learn. “On my way home?” Sadly, that came out as more of a question from a too-short,
too-young kid than an answer from a superhero, but Robyn didn’t seem to notice.

“Wow, me too,” she said.

Adam looked pointedly at the black headstone.

Robyn pointedly didn’t notice. Instead, she locked onto his school jacket.