In the Company of Crazies (14 page)

And that was all.

* * *

“Is that your file?”

I looked up. “Yes,” I said. I wasn't afraid. It suddenly seemed odd that I ever could have been.

“It's not nearly as interesting as you thought, is it?” Gretchen asked me.

“No. It's boring.”

Gretchen stood at the doorway.

“That's good,” she said. “Boring is good. Did you find what you were looking for?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I think I did.”

I noticed Gretchen was using a cane. She was not the type to slouch or lean against a door frame. But you could tell it was difficult for her to stand.

I was still sitting on the floor with my folder in my hands. I looked down as Gretchen made her way into the tiny office and lowered herself into a chair by the desk.

“Mia, don't worry so much,” she told me. “You'll find your way.”

She rested her cane next to her. I had never been this close to her. Her skin looked loose, almost soft, so pale. Her eyes were blue. I don't think I noticed that before.

“I'm not sure,” I said.

“I'm sure,” Gretchen said. “I've seen plenty of young people in my day. I'm older than I look, you know.” Was Gretchen making a joke?

Sitting on the floor, I had to look up to see her face. She was smiling. Really smiling, almost laughing.

“How old are you?” I asked her.

She laughed. “Old enough,” she said. “Old enough to be sure. And old enough to know most things you have to learn for yourself.”

Then Gretchen put her bony hands on the sides of the chair and started to lift herself. I got up quickly and put my hand out to help her.

“But now remember, my dear. Don't try so hard. You'll see. In life you move toward the things you like and away from what you don't,” Gretchen said.

“It's that easy?” I asked her. Her arm was so skinny and fragile, but I could feel her weight like determination.

“Yes, it's that easy,” she said. Then she laughed. “The hard part is to just keep moving.” She took her cane and, with just the slightest movement of her elbow, I knew she wanted me to let go.

And then very slowly, one step and one click of her cane at a time, Gretchen headed back to her chair in the living room. I waited until she was gone. Then I picked up my file from the floor, slipped it back into the cabinet, and shut the drawer tight.

Part Three

Mountain Laurel.

This is going to be my last journal entry. I'm going home. But you can keep this journal and my pictures if you want.

I didn't have that much to say. Did I?

If was more about listening.

* * *

My mother came to pick me up from Mountain Laurel the day before Thanksgiving. It was snowing pretty hard. My mother hates to drive in the snow. She doesn't like to drive over bridges. Tunnels, forget it.

Maybe it's all part of her nervous, crazy, overprotective personality.

But she got here.

My mother didn't talk for nearly the whole first half hour of our drive—unheard of for her. My mother has a hard time with silences. I knew she was keeping quiet for me. I knew she had a hundred questions. A million things she wanted me to say. She also knew I didn't want to talk. Not yet.

For the first time in forever, I was the first one to speak.

“Are we going to stop and get something to eat?” She jumped right on it. Maybe a little too quickly, but it was okay.

“Are you hungry?” she asked me.

It was snowing a lot less here. The sun was even beginning to shine. She was a little more relaxed. She had stopped gripping the steering wheel with her two fists.

“Sure,” I said.

“I think there's a place around here. I saw it when I was driving up.”

It looked to me like we were in the middle of nowhere. For the last twenty minutes we had passed nothing but trees and highway exits that seemed to lead to more nowhere.

“There,” my mother said. She pointed. It was a sign, just a little smaller than a highway billboard. It looked handmade, and it was nailed to a phone pole.

JUST ANOTHER ROADSIDE ATTRACTION, it said. That was the name of the place. You could see the little restaurant just off the highway, like a log cabin almost.

My mother said, “It's cute, isn't it?”

I agreed.

She pulled the car into the parking lot. There were only a couple of other cars. When we walked in, the two people at the counter looked up at us and then went back to their breakfast. We had our choice of booths. They were all empty. We both plopped down on either side of the table. The waitress came by, poured my mother some coffee, and asked if we needed a little more time.

“Yes, please.”

We both looked at our menus for a while, and then I thought I heard a little giggle come from my mother's side of the table. She had the menu covering her face.

“What?”

“Remember when…my mother began. “No, it's silly. Forget it.”

“No, what?” I reached over and pulled her menu down. “What?”

She was laughing again. “Well, I was just thinking. Remember when you were really little and you'd eat everything on your plate in a certain order and you'd have to eat everything of that one thing before you'd move on?”

I did that. “I remember,” I said.

“Well,” she said. “I just remember that I used to think you were eating the thing you liked the most first.”

But that wasn't true.

I always ate the thing I liked least first. I got it out of the way. I did what I had to do, and then I rewarded myself.

“So for the longest time, for years,” my mother went on, “I thought you were this wonder child who loved vegetables. I remember you'd eat up all your broccoli really fast. Remember?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“So I kept making broccoli. Every night, remember?” She started laughing again. “For years!” she blurted out.

“I hate broccoli,” I said.

“I know!” This time she laughed so hard her coffee almost came spitting out of her mouth.

I handed her a napkin. “God, Mom. What's so funny?”

“I had it all wrong,” she said. She suddenly looked more like she was going to cry. “I didn't know. Isn't it kind of funny? I had it all wrong.”

She was laughing and crying at the same time. Then she said quietly, “I didn't know.”

I looked around to see if anyone was watching us, but there wasn't anybody else in the whole place. The two people at the counter must have left. I got up from my seat and sat down next to my mother in the booth so we were both facing the same way. It probably looked really weird.

“Thanks,” my mother said. She wiped her eyes.

When the waitress came by, we ordered. My feet were just starting to warm up. My mom told me little things about Cecily and Dad. She told me Marcella calls every night and asks when I'm coming back. That made me feel good.

“Mom?” I said after a beat.

“Uh-huh?”

“I don't want to go back.”

“You don't have to,” she said. “I never wanted you to go.”

“I thought you did,” I said.

“I didn't know,” my mother said. “I guess I'm still getting it wrong.”

“Not always,” I told her. “You've just got to let me make my own mistakes.”

“It's hard,” she said. But she nodded.

And then our food came, just in time, because I was just about done with this kind of talking. Just as we were finishing, people started showing up and sitting in the booths around us, and the waitress dropped our bill on the table. It was probably getting close to lunchtime.

“Ready?” my mom asked me.

“Definitely.”

My mom started fishing around in her bag for her wallet. She took about a million things out and clunked them on the table. A two-hundred-year-old hard candy with no wrapper rolled off the table and landed on the floor.

God, nobody can embarrass me like my mother.

Finally she got everything settled. She got the money figured out and she got her makeup, used tissues, Chap-Stick, loose change, old receipts, and Cecily's retainer (What was that doing in there?) back into her bag. She was holding the check and her money, waiting for the waitress to come back around. So she could pay. And we could go home.

* * *

I didn't expect to feel the way I did when we drove up the hill and made the turn onto our street. As we came around the corner I saw the sign. It was a red and white real-estate sign swinging from two chains, attached to a sturdy white post. Right on the front lawn.

Debbie Sanders's house was for sale.

My mother saw the sign too, and she looked over at me.

“I know,” she said.

It was so sad. I didn't know if Debbie's family was giving up or moving on. Or just moving. But it made me so sad to see their house for sale.

DREAMING AND NOT DREAMING

I imagine myself walking right into Debbie's house. Somehow, I sneak inside and walk up the carpeted stairs. I just imagine the stairs are carpeted because I've never really been in Debbie's house.

Now I see the bathroom at the top of the landing. It is spotless, and there is even a little candle burning on the sink. Vanilla. I guess they want things to look nice; after all the house is for sale.

The first bedroom on the left is obviously the master bedroom. The bed is made, not too many pillows. There is a little lamp with the light on, next to the bed. The books on top of the TV are neat. There are not too many knickknacks. I bet there was more stuff around before some real-estate agent told them to unclutter:” It makes the house look bigger: It will sell faster, she would have told them.

And that's all they wanted.

Then I walk to the next bedroom and it is a mess. I know at once this is Debbie's room.

It's been almost a year but everything is exactly the way Debbie left it the night she was supposed to go to the volleyball dinner. She was in too big a hurry.

Debbie's bed is unmade. Her faded jeans and sweatshirt are half on the bed and half on the floor: A spiral notebook is open on
her bed, and there is even a pencil right next to it. A math problem halfway to being solved is left on the page.

Her stuffed animals are squeezed between her bed and the wall like she hadn't bothered to take them off the bed before she went to sleep the night before. Another pile of her volleyball practice jersey and sneakers sits in the corner by the door; on their way to the laundry basket, but they didn't make it.

Her life is all around me. Her life is my life. And my life is hers. And I can't tell the difference anymore. She has, I count them, fifteen trophies on her bureau. She has a picture of her and her two best friends, Jamie and Alison, at another friend's birthday party. They all have their arms around one another and they are smiling that huge, totally happy, totally genuine smile of friendship and all possibilities.

I sit down on Debbie's bed because it seems like the right thing to do.

“Mia?” Suddenly Mrs. Sanders is standing in the doorway. “Mia Singer?” But she doesn't seem surprised to see me.

I imagine she looks older than the last time I saw her at school or a game or something. She looks more tired. She sits down right next to me on the bed.

“You were on the volleyball team with Debbie, weren't you?” she asks me.

I nod my head.

And your family lives just up the street, right?”

“Yeah, we do.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I don't know,” I tell her “I'm sorry if I upset you. It's just, when I saw your house for sale…I don't know…It made me sad.”

“Me too,” Mrs. Sanders says.

“I always wanted to tell you how sorry I was. I never got to tell you. I'm so sorry. It must have been the most horrible thing in the whole world”

“It is.”

* * *

I imagine this scene almost every time I drive by Debbie Sanders's house and I see the FOR SALE sign. I imagine this story or some version of it, of Debbie's room and Debbie's mother, but even as I do I know that one day, probably soon, a new family will buy this house and move in. And one day, long after that, I will stop thinking of Debbie quite so often.

But I won't completely stop. Never completely.

* * *

At Debbie's funeral we were pressed shoulder to shoulder, right up to the wall. There were so many of us kids in that outer room that it was really uncomfortable. We all had to stand, and you started to feel guilty that your feet were hurting. Lots of different people spoke at Debbie's funeral, and it was all broadcast through these big, huge speakers hanging on either side of the lobby. Debbie's father was the last one to talk. There is something really awful about hearing a man cry. It shakes you to the core. I could hear the pain in his voice, and I could see it in everyone's eyes around me.