The Bitch Posse (28 page)

He squeezes my shoulder for a minute, a little too hard. Then he turns his face to the side and says, “Goddamn it.”

It’s not the answer I expected, and I sit up and pull a cigarette from the table. “Did you hear me? So, you love me, I love you, we’re in love.”

He sits up too but won’t look at me, runs his fingers through his hair. “Oh, Rennie, it’s gotten so complicated. I hoped you wouldn’t get wrapped up this way.”

“What? You told me you loved me. I can’t tell you?” I’m panicking now, my guts are spinning through me, curling inside themselves. Maybe I’ll even be sick.

He snaps a cigarette from the pack and lights it. “I guess now’s as good a time as any to tell you.”

“Tell me what?”

He whistles out some smoke. It streams from his mouth in one perfect line, a knife blade. “Dawn’s pregnant.”

She’s going to have a baby?

That was supposed to be
my
baby.

“So we’re going to have to stop seeing each other.”

“But . . . ” But we’re in love, you said we’d get married someday, after Stanford and I had time to grow. Tears spring to my eyes.

“I need to pull things together, Rennie. It’s been a good time, I think you’ve enjoyed it too. I’m sorry to see it end, but it’s just not in the cards.”

My tears coil up inside my eyes and harden, and I will never let them slip out again. “Why’d you let me give you a blow job before telling me that? Were you going to tell me this all along?”

He won’t look at me, still.

I have never felt this much anger, bubbling steaming like a pool of blood inside me. I feel betrayed at a spiritual level. “And you said you loved me? Didn’t you have any compunction about whispering that in my ear knowing full well you were going to dump me?”

“Don’t say it like that.” He reaches for my arm, but I shake his hand away. He sighs. “You know I love you, but things have gotten too complicated.
You’ve gotten too involved emotionally, and it’s dangerous, Rennie. I can’t lose Dawn, now that she’s going to have our baby.”

Our baby.

I hope she has a miscarriage.

I pull on my clothes, tears clinging just behind my eyes. I will not cry in front of him. I should slap his fucking face.

He just stares into nowhere. The two glasses of Pinot Noir or whatever he poured are glaring at me from the table. I stub out my cigarette, pick them up, one in each hand, and throw them into the wall. Ten million shards crash to the floor, and the wine trickles down the wallpaper, red red red.

I wish they were pieces of his heart. I hate him, I will never hate anyone as much as I hate him right here and right now.

“Rennie . . . I’m so sorry . . . ”

I grab my purse and keys. “Fuck you.”

He stands up, tries to follow me.

I slam the door in his face. I want something, anything to fill the emptiness inside me, the hunger I can’t indulge, the big lonely spot that’s growing ever larger. Christina’s words tumble through me:

When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me.

I start the car and I have no the fuck idea where I’m headed.

May 2003
Freemont Psychiatric Hospital

Cherry lights a cigarette and blows out smoke, alone in her and Josie’s room, where she’s retreated for the afternoon to try to write some poetry. If the poetry doesn’t work out, there’s always the tapestry. Her project’s coming to an end, and now she’s filling in the red, green, and blue triangles with a royal purple background, a special yarn with some silver and gold mixed in. It’s going to be terrific, but today she’d rather write.

Josie’s gotten permission to walk around the grounds of the hospital, a bench pass they call it, and even though her mom’s stood her up, Josie’s taking advantage of the ticket out. Her mom sounds more and more like Marian all the time. It was almost a relief when Ms. Mainliner OD’d. Just as Cherry had predicted, rigging coke turned into shooting smack turned into a death sentence in a motel room in Las Vegas. The
news stabbed Cherry in the stomach two years ago, and maybe she should be sadder about it, but mostly she’s pissed. Anyway, she was an orphan all along, wasn’t she?

Josie’s so lucky to have that bench pass. There are lovely grounds here, several acres, and woods. A pang of loneliness shoots through Cherry, even though it’s good for Josie to get out.

She felt a stammer of hesitation knowing of Josie’s recent suicidal ideations, but she put a bug in the ear of every hospital person she could think of, and Josie, when Cherry asked her last night, said vaguely, “No, I don’t think of that anymore. I’m doing just fine.”

I
always was good at therapy.
Cherry presses open her spiral-bound notebook. What is there to do here but write, smoke, complain? She’ll write a poem for Josie, give it to her tonight after dinner, after Josie’s enjoyed her nature wanderings and hopefully been healed by the environment around her. Cherry’s had a few bench passes lately, even though no one visits her either, and it’s fun to follow the twisting winding paths through the woods, listen to the birds chirp, smell the flowers, touch the tree bark, and just be amazed that all of this was created somehow, brought to Earth and living. And to realize she’s living too, part of it all, and all that surrounds her is beautiful, so that means she is beautiful too. That thought makes her happy even in the memory, and she reminds herself to work extra hard for a bench pass.

She doesn’t think about publishing her work anymore, sending it out, competing with the stellar Wren Taylor, only now she catches herself thinking about it and says aloud, “Fuck the publishing industry.” Her stuff’s not about that anyway, getting attention or positive pats from people, six-figure advances, literary awards. No, Cherry Winters’s stuff is just for her, just to work shit out, real stuff. She uncaps her pen.

In the Forest’s Pale Light
for Josie
Your smile
gleams fresh as a fern
growing tall in shade.
Strong stalk, backbone
supports fronds. Like feathers
on a bird’s wing, your leaves shelter
toadstools. In this damp forest,
your green light
shines like elfin hair.

Damn. She still can’t get rid of that nagging suspicion that something isn’t right with Josie. She flips her notebook over. An envelope’s taped to the back, something she never noticed before. She opened her notebook just this morning, so the envelope’s definitely new. On it’s written CHERRY.

In Josie’s writing.

Her heart thumps, and she sets down her cigarette and tears open the envelope with shaking fingers.

Hey Cherry,

You’re a fantastic woman and you’ve taught me a lot over these last few months. I’m getting rid of a few things cuz I don’t have enough space in my dresser and I want you to have this.

Love you,
Your Josie

So it’s not a suicide note or anything horrible like that, thank God. Josie’s face is fixed in her mind, hair a seashell swirl, chin resting on her
clasped hands, small smile with the sad eyes of a doe. With that pale sequined dress, she would have been Diana.

Cherry reaches into the envelope and pulls out a small Ziploc. Inside the plastic sparkles Josie’s diamond tennis bracelet, the one her mom gave her when she turned thirteen, which as Cherry knows is the year Josie started shooting junk.

Oh . . . she can’t really mean for Cherry to have this. Surely it’s worth at least several hundred dollars. It’s a nice gesture but an erratic one, completely typical of Josie. When she comes back from her walk, Cherry’ll set her straight, hand the thing back to her, and if Josie really insists, she’ll let her give her something else, something small.

Cherry slips the bracelet back inside the plastic bag, and for some reason the terror feelings gnaw at her again. Then it hits her.

Yeah, Josie’s erratic, but you don’t get rid of a diamond tennis bracelet if you’re trying to clear out your dresser. A sweater maybe, even a leather jacket. But a bracelet?

Takes up hardly any room at all.

“Shit.” She drops everything onto the bed and pulls on her coat.

Downstairs, she bursts into the hallway and past the lobby to the front door. “Let me outside!” she screams.

Leigh, who’s appeared from somewhere, holds her, grasps her wrist, twists it.

“Goddamn it, let me outside!”

“Cherry Winters. This is completely against protocol, as you well know.” She clicks her tongue. “And you were doing so well, too. A shame.”

Anger swells in Cherry. “Josie Chapman is out there!”

“Of course, Josie’s earned a bench pass. Something you, sadly, are
far away from.” Leigh’s still holding her wrist. “Now are we ready to calm down, or do we need to take measures?”

And measures are things like what happened to Michael back in March, being put into the quiet room by yourself. Cherry’s been there a few times, a green room with a teensy little mattress and some bull-shit mural of rolling hills and still waters and nothing in there but yourself and your thoughts. She shakes off Leigh’s fingers. “She’s going to hurt herself, I know she is!”

Leigh raises an impossible eyebrow. “Just what makes you think that?”

“She gave me a diamond tennis bracelet. Said she was cleaning stuff out.” The frustration is a suction valve around her heart. Goddamn it, the staff is insane, that’s why this place is so bad. If she and Josie and Michael and Susan ran the place, it’d make sense. At least there’d be people in charge who understood hurting, who didn’t assume that friendships and love and high emotion were bad things, to be numbed, drugged away.

“Josie’s been doing quite well over time. She’s on some of the latest meds. Her doctor wouldn’t have approved the pass if he didn’t feel she was safe. Anyway, what’s there for her to get into trouble with? Just the woods and the clean outside air.” Leigh’s upper lip beads with sweat. “I wouldn’t worry.”

“Aren’t you listening? She’s been talking about how much she hurts for so long! Are you people stupid?”

“Cherry, that kind of attitude won’t get you anywhere. I think it’s time for a little break for you.”

No, no. She won’t let them put her in a room because they don’t want to hear what she’s saying. “She is in all likelihood out there trying to kill herself. And you, all you can do is scold me for my attitude.
Listen to me.
She wrote me a note.”

“Let me see it.”

“I don’t have it with me.”

“What did it say?”

“That she was cleaning out her drawer because she was running out of room.”

Leigh shrugs. “It sounds perfectly natural to me. Cherry, I think you’re overreacting. You’re not getting good sleep. Have you been taking your Carbitral? Or hiding them?”

And that’s a stab. Leigh knows that Cherry hates taking downers, especially after Amy, though Carbitral’s been prescribed and insisted on so Cherry can get “a good night’s sleep.” The fucking stuff’s probably why she has such fucked-up dreams. She just shifts the subject back to the real subject. “A diamond bracelet takes up hardly any room. She wouldn’t have given it away, she would’ve given away something that took up a lot of space. Damn it, listen!”

Leigh sighs. “It’s highly irregular, and we don’t normally respond to this kind of coercion from patients. But we’ll send someone to look for her.”

That’s the best Cherry can do. She sinks into a chair until Leigh leads her to the lounge, and she stares, catatonic, at MTV forever, and hardly notices Michael rubbing circles on her back.

She leans into him, there isn’t anyone else. At least he understands what it is to be
here,
and if she wasn’t so worried about Josie she might try to understand him. But for now she just lets him trace patterns on her back, light her cigarette, lift it from her lips for her, nestling his goatee-bearded chin into her hair.

He whispers, “I’m worried too,” and she turns and sees tears in his eyes, and of course, of course, he’s in love with her Josie. She’s seen the little signs for so long, and her heart feels it’s going to burst. She tucks herself away into his arms and they just sit there as show after show comes on. The more minutes that tick away, the worse Cherry feels. The news can’t be good, they’re just deciding how to tell the patients; and when the cigarette’s done she just lets it melt the plastic foam filter.
She presses her fingertips to the end and pinches it to extinguish it, and the pain helps somehow. She blinks awake and stares at Michael’s empty eyes.

At last, at long last, Leigh shows up at the doorway and says, “We’re having a patient meeting, now, in the main lounge.”