Songs Without Words (16 page)

On the couch again but sitting up now, she surveyed the things on the floor. This was her life, a life of talismanic objects. Or it had been. The truth was that the pillow with the amateurish embroidery was nothing. The wire-and-mesh Eiffel Tower was nothing. Billy’s abalone shell, Liz’s pink dish—they were neither Billy’s nor Liz’s, they were her own, and they were nothing. What did these objects know? They had been endowed with meaning, even power, but to do what? They were entirely empty now—so much matter that didn’t matter. Not even worth the effort to kick or destroy. The company she keeps—was that a book title? The company Sarabeth kept was a collection of inanimate objects she kept for company, and she saw now with a mixture of disgust and grief that they’d been empty all along.
No,
she should have told Pilar,
I haven’t made any friends.
She had feared, always, that at some moment she would understand that she was not a sprightly gal in a little house, a free spirit, creative and bohemian, but rather an eccentric, a crank. Here it was. The moment was upon her, it was now. She had a floor full of junk, and she watched people.

16

A
t meals all week, Lucas sat with Lauren. He talked to her and talked to her, telling her his story: how since he was twelve he’d been drinking and doing drugs—“for fun and profit.” Sometimes, all of a sudden, he’d get silent or crabby, but mostly he talked nonstop. He told her about the night not long ago when, after a period of wakefulness that had lasted two days, he found himself walking the sound wall on 101 at 2:00 a.m., cars rushing below him, wind in his face. It was incredible up there, the perfect balance his feet found on the narrow wall, the impenetrability of his glee. Cops came to both sides of the wall and shone Maglites at him, though, and now here he was, locked up. His parents didn’t give a fuck, he told Lauren, though she was sure they did.

It was Saturday now, and for some reason he hadn’t been at breakfast or check-in. Because of the weekend there was no morning school, so people were just hanging out, in the lounge or in their rooms. Lauren was in her room. She was on fifteen-minute checks now, and she’d just been checked, so she headed for the bathroom. People used bedsheets to hang themselves—Lucas said it was the only way. Lauren thought you ought to be able to drown yourself in a toilet, but you’d need a lot of willpower. She had no desire to kill herself, but she couldn’t get anyone to see that, so she was stuck. Last night she’d met with Dr. Lewis and her parents, and it had been awful, her mom looking petrified, Dr. Lewis saying, “It’s hard to acknowledge problems” and “Maybe you can each start by saying how you feel right now.” Her dad sitting there like he’d rather be anywhere else.

The drug was making Lauren really thirsty, and she turned on the water and used her hands for a cup. Outside the bathroom she paused, then headed to the lounge to see if Lucas was around yet. Sometimes he switched subjects—from himself to the other kids—and that was interesting, too. At bedtime one night Abby had told Lauren that she shouldn’t hang out with Lucas, but then she’d refused to say why. Abby pretty much didn’t talk to Lauren.

In the last bedroom before the lounge, she saw through the open door that Callie was in there making out with Turner. Callie looked up just as Lauren passed, and she ran her tongue over her upper lip and gave Lauren a sick smile. Total time-out if they were found, but they probably wouldn’t be: everything here was at the wrong speed. According to Lucas, Callie had been sexually abused for years. Whatever, she was gross.

In the lounge, Abby and the other anorexics were folded onto the couches in the corner. It freaked Lauren out to look at them, but at the same time she was always staring. They were tall and short, blond and brunette, but for some reason none of that really registered. What registered was their likeness to one another. Their bony bodies.

Casey and another girl who cut herself were playing cards with Ivan, one of the non-nurse staff people. He was tall and green eyed, and Lauren thought Casey was in love with him.

Lucas was sitting alone, reading something. Lauren crossed the room and sat opposite him. He was wearing a T-shirt with a bloody face pictured on it, along with the name of a band. He looked up, then looked back at his book.

“Where were you at breakfast?” she said.

He didn’t respond.

She waited a bit, but he read on, not looking at her. She said, “What are you reading?”

Again, he remained silent, but he raised the book so she could see the cover:
Ramona the Pest
by Beverly Cleary. She laughed, but rather than laugh with her, he looked up and gave her a quick, mean look, then returned to the book.

“What?” she said. “I’m sorry.”

He stayed slouched, face lowered. Lauren had read
Ramona the Pest
in first grade—he couldn’t be reading it for real, could he? She wouldn’t have laughed except she thought that was what he was expecting.

“I always loved that book,” she said, but he still didn’t move.

Lauren felt sick, and she glanced around to see if anyone was looking. Casey was. Casey was entirely evil—she hadn’t let up on Lauren since the first morning. Now she gestured for Lauren to come to the card table.

Lauren shook her head.

Casey gestured again: a quick, insistent
com’ere
with her arm. Her short hair was going in all directions this morning, and Lauren wondered if maybe she did that on purpose, to look more messed up. Casey was very into how messed up she was. And yet, she was probably leaving soon.

“Lauren,” Casey called.

Now Ivan looked, too. Lauren glanced at Lucas, then got up and crossed the room to their table. Ivan was holding the fourth chair out for her.

“How’s it going, Lauren?” he said.

“OK.”

She waited for Casey to tell her that she
wasn’t
OK, but instead Casey said, “Lucas is down today.”

“Down?”

“It’s his disease. He’s way down.”

“But his medications,” Lauren began. The whole thing with Lucas was, it was treatable. With drugs. “I thought—” She turned and looked at him, and all at once she understood that he wasn’t actually reading the book. She even understood that holding it like that, to look as if he were reading it, was hard work. And, as if to confirm this, he closed the book and slumped deeper in his chair.

“Does Dr. Porter know?” she said.

Ivan scratched the side of his neck. “We’ll let her know when she checks in.”

Lauren stared into the center of the table. They were playing some kind of card game where you discarded into a pile, and the most recently discarded card was the jack of diamonds. She stared at the card, and all of a sudden she was thinking about Jeff Shannon. And that made her think about being in bed at home on a sunny weekend morning, hearing noises downstairs, seeing that line of light around the edges of her curtains. She saw herself in her closet, crying. What on earth was wrong with her?

Liz was at Safeway. She never shopped on the weekend, but she was out of milk, out of Wheaties, so here she was. Brody had taken Joe to a soccer tournament in Foster City—she was going to meet them over there this afternoon. She felt bad about not seeing the whole thing, but sometimes it was just too much. Did it disappoint Joe, her not always being there? In the last week he had been quiet, hard to read. Mute on the subject of Lauren.

“It’s not about your guilt. It can’t be.” This was what Dr. Lewis had said to her and Brody last night, out in the corridor after the session with Lauren was over. Liz had understood him to mean that in order to help Lauren they must focus on Lauren, and she knew he was right. But at home afterward, moving from room to room, all she could think was that this was the place where she’d catastrophically mismanaged things, and they might have to move to recover. She started to say this to Brody, and he looked at her as if she were crazy.

The Safeway was nearly empty—it was the weekend after Thanksgiving; everyone was at the malls. Liz moved down the aisles, grabbing cereal, bread, rice, mayo, salad dressing, and on down her list. Tuna—she took a couple of the no-drain vacuum bags, remembering a funny Sarabeth soliloquy on the new technology of tuna, the breakthrough potential of the new packaging, how if tuna were traded on the stock market it would be skyrocketing. And why did that make her think of the time Sarabeth confessed that she always confused Nasdaq with NASCAR?

She hadn’t heard from Sarabeth since the cell phone calls she didn’t answer Tuesday. “You didn’t want to invite Sarabeth?” her mother had asked over the roast beef on Thursday. Liz had shrugged, but a bad feeling had lingered, and here it was again. She felt in some sense duty-bound to call Sarabeth, but also enraged that it should have to be she who called. So what if this was hard on Sarabeth—what was Liz supposed to do about it?

Tuna casserole had been a great favorite of Joe’s long ago, and she grabbed a third vacuum bag, deciding on the spot that she’d make tuna casserole tonight. She found the soups, added a can of cream of mushroom to her cart, then went back to the pasta aisle and got a cellophane bag of wide egg noodles. Tuna casserole, spaghetti and meatballs, all those dishes from the kids’ childhoods. Had she lost something, setting those recipes aside?

In produce she despaired over the wilted weekend fare. Why pay money for lettuce that looked like that? She found the least objectionable red leaf she could, then skipped fruit altogether, thinking there were a few bananas left at home, some oranges, and she just didn’t have the heart to spend any more time here.

Foster City soccer tournaments were a Thanksgiving weekend staple, and Brody had spent many a late-November weekend exactly where he was now, in his collapsible chair under a crisp blue sky.

Joe had played well this morning, but the noon game had been a disaster, 7 to 1, and Joe had been especially clumsy. Grouped under a small cluster of pine trees before the start of the day’s final game, he and his teammates were being lectured by their coach, and Brody kept his eyes averted lest he see the coach look too often at Joe.

His shoulder was killing him. He got up from his chair and twisted side to side from his waist, then walked toward the tennis courts. There were lots of doubles games going on, plus two serious guys about his age running each other to pieces. A pair of teenage girls made up the only other singles game, and from several courts away Brody watched them until he realized he was studying their bodies, not their strokes. He turned his back and leaned against the chain link. He remembered the smell of girl sweat from the times in high school when he and Andrew Drayson had played mixed doubles, how girls’ sweat smelled different: cleaner, grassier. He and Andrew would smirk at each other across the net: at their superiority to the girls, at their desire and cockiness, at their intimate knowledge of the other’s fear. Later, they might sit on the bench near the girls’ locker room and watch the girls come out, their legs no longer exposed by their little white skirts. Brody and Andrew would pretend they were not on that bench for any particular reason, but the girls would laugh knowingly, say, “Fancy seeing you guys here,” and Brody and Andrew would make stupid jokes and elbow each other, and fail, each time, to ask the girls out.

Andrew was still in the Cleveland area. Brody had seen him only once in the past couple of decades, at the twentieth reunion of his high school class. He and Liz had flown out for the weekend, leaving the kids with Liz’s parents, and they’d had a surprisingly good time catching up with people, dancing under a disco ball, drinking Tom Collinses because that had been the favorite illegal drink of Brody’s youth. Andrew had gotten very, very fat and only laughed when Brody asked if he still played tennis. It made Brody sad now to think of it—not Andrew fat, not Andrew no longer playing, but that he himself hadn’t known until that night what had become of Andrew, hadn’t wondered. Flying home, he’d thought that his best friend had vanished into a fat guy in a huge navy-blue blazer, and he’d wondered if Andrew’s best friend had vanished, too.

A couple fields down, Joe’s team was starting to warm up, and Brody returned to his chair. If only Lauren had played soccer, this probably never would have happened. She had played as a very little girl, but a year or two after Joe started, she stopped. As far as Brody knew, the only exercise she got was in PE. Liz had always been dead set against forcing, or maybe even encouraging, the kids to try things, and as a result Lauren had no passions.
They need to be allowed to make their own choices.
Yeah, but what if they didn’t make any? Brody was certain a sport, or even a hobby, would have made a difference.

“Hey, there,” said a voice, and then Liz was touching his shoulder and unfolding her chair next to his.

“You came,” he said.

“I said I would.”

“And you did.”

The game was about to start, and Joe stood at left halfback, his face flushed from the jog around the field. For a moment he seemed to be looking at Brody and Liz, but from so far away it was hard to tell. Liz waved, and Brody stifled an impulse to tell her not to distract him.

“Your mother called,” she said.

He turned to look at her. She was wearing a zippered fleece jacket that he’d bought for himself and then rarely worn, the color a brighter blue than he liked.

“Hello?” she said.

“I heard you.” He glanced at the field. He’d told his mother and sister on Thursday evening, in a call that had lasted only a few minutes. “What’d she say?”

“She wanted to know if there was anything new.”

“And?”

“And I told her there wasn’t.” She crossed her legs and looked away from him, and he knew he was being an ass.

“I’m sorry.”

“Forget it.”

“Was she still in Cincinnati?”

Liz nodded.

His mother, when she heard the news, had gasped and then fallen completely silent. “Oh, my dear,” she’d finally said. After some confusion Marilyn had come on the line and asked for the whole story, and Brody had thought simultaneously that it was just like her to intervene, and that he was incredibly relieved that she had.

The whistle must have blown, though Brody hadn’t heard it; Joe had the ball and tried for a pass, but a kid on the other team intercepted.

Brody thought about last night, the meeting with Dr. Lewis. Every word out of his mouth had been followed by an equivocation. The Prozac was important, but long-term psychotherapy might be even more important. Talking was vital, but some teens needed medications before they could make use of it.

And if it was all about drugs and therapy, then why was she still in the hospital, five days later?

“I wonder,” he said, but before he could even get the thought out, Liz stiffened beside him.

“We have to,” she said.

“What?”

“Keep her there. Let the setting help her.”

There’d been a time when her ability to anticipate what he was going to say had delighted him, even as it had occasionally frustrated him that he couldn’t do the same with her. Now he found it annoying. Was it so hard to let him finish a sentence? And:
Let the setting help her.
That was Dr. Lewis’s phrase.