The Venus Fix (16 page)

“I promised everyone in the group. Nothing anyone ever says will ever leave the room. I’ll never break a confidence. That’s my job.”

“Yeah.”

“Why don’t you believe me?”

“It’s not that.”

“Then what is it?”

She shrugged.

I took a chance.

“I really would like to see some of your artwork.”

She nodded, seemed to be thinking about it. “Why?”

“I love art. I told you I sculpt a little. I think that making art is one way we explore our feelings. We can say things in a painting or sculpture that can be hard to put into words.”

“Photographs, too.”

I nodded. “Do you take photographs?”

“Yeah. And I make shorts.”

It was quiet in the hallway; the voices and footsteps of the other kids had faded away. Her words lingered, not quite an echo, more like a piano note fading away.

“Short films?”

She stepped back, frightened.

“Amanda? What is it?”

She shook her head.

“I don’t want you to tell me anything you aren’t ready for. But I want you to take this. I know something is bothering you and that it’s something that seems overwhelming and impossible.”

“How?”

I smiled at her. I would have preferred to reach out and take her in my arms, but I couldn’t do that. “It’s what I’m trained to do, Amanda. I can help you straighten it out. Not make it go away. Not even make the pain go away. But help you put it in some kind of perspective, so you aren’t controlled by it.”

She shifted. A shield came down. She backed up. “Yeah, like you’re helping the guys to get control over how much they go online? They still can’t stay away. You’re not helping them.”

“We don’t know that yet. It takes a long time to break an addiction.”

“Amanda?” It was Ellen calling out; she was at the end of the hall. “You ready or what?”

“I have to go.”

I was still holding the card. “Take it.”

She stared at it for a few seconds.

“The secrets get bigger and bigger the longer you keep them.” I extended it so that it was even closer to her. It almost glowed in the darkened hallway.

“Amanda?” It was Ellen again.

She turned with most of her body, broke eye contact with me, but somehow reached out with her left hand and took the card, as if it was an afterthought and didn’t matter.

But it did. Very much.

M
y mother had a snow globe that sat on her battered dressing table in our dingy apartment downtown. Inside was a theater marquee with the words
The Lost Girls
on it, along with my mother’s name spelled out in what looked like tiny yellow lights.

Now that globe sat on my dresser, among perfume bottles and picture frames. When she was growing up, Dulcie had loved it as much as I had, and would sit and play with it for a long time, enchanted by the way the snowflakes fell over the marquee.

I was having one made for her next birthday—with her marquee and her name and the title of the play she was appearing in. When my taxi pulled up to the theater, the marquee was indeed brushed with snow just like the scene inside the snow globe. Dulcie and I were still talking, albeit cautiously, but she’d accepted my decision about her not doing the audition.

For the first time in hours, I forgot about the kids from Park East and the strange sense I’d had that Amanda and Timothy knew something I needed to know—the sooner the better.

Inside, the doors to the theater were shut. Harold, the usher, saw me, smiled and let me slip quietly inside.

I stood in the back, behind the last row of seats, and looked at my daughter on stage. No matter how many times I watched the play, I was still surprised each time I saw Dulcie in the footlights. There was always a first rush of shock that she was there, on Broadway—not in her junior high school auditorium, not at a summer camp production, but a professional, performing for strangers every night.

At the same time that I was incredibly proud—the audience had burst into applause as Dulcie finished up her second-to-last song—I felt the rise of a low-lying anxiety fluttering up from under my ribs. She was so vulnerable. And as the play moved ahead to its finale, I saw the teenager on stage not as my daughter, not as my mother’s granddaughter, but as a wholly independent creature—like the kids I’d been working with earlier. They each had secrets inside of them that their parents, their teachers and their families didn’t know about, couldn’t guess.

What secrets did Dulcie have from me? From Mitch?

I wouldn’t know, even though I’d had secrets, too. Kept them close to me and away from my father, from my stepmother, and from Nina.

But that didn’t make it any easier for me to accept when it came to my own daughter. At thirteen, her secrets might still be innocent and harmless, but with each piece of knowledge that she hid from me, afraid that I would not understand it or that I would interfere, she moved farther away from me. She was at the age when the chasms appeared. And I knew, because I had counseled patients about this—about how important it was to love your child for who she was, for who he was, to not be disappointed about whom your child didn’t turn into. That the best a parent could do was to listen, be sensitive, not
give up. But when it came to my daughter, following my own advice was far more difficult than I’d imagined.

The orchestra played the first notes of the finale. Dulcie found her position. She finished her line, took a breath, segued into her last song of the evening. Her voice, like liquid gold, poured into the cavity of the theater. The richness of it, the purity of it, melded with the orchestra and rode just on top of the music, merging but never getting lost. She carried the song for the first twelve stanzas and then was joined by the others.

When the song ended, the notes and the voices died out, and all that was left was the reverberation in the air. Finally that, too, was gone. Silence held for ten, fifteen seconds and cracked open as the applause swelled. I joined in, more excited than I thought I could be, more moved than I wanted to be, more caught up in Dulcie’s moment—and feeling her excitement—than I was prepared to be.

Feeling her happiness should have pleased me. It would have had I not also realized that standing up there made my thirteen-year-old so much happier than anything else in her life had. I recognized the look in her eyes as she took her bow. I’d seen it before.

I knew better than to merge them like this. My mother. My daughter. They were two separate beings. Thirty years separated the last time I had seen my mother and tonight when I was seeing my daughter.

How could I begrudge Dulcie adulation because of my failing and my insecurity?

Mitch told me I was too protective of our daughter. So did Nina. But when I was in that state between sleep and wakefulness, when I talked to my mother in my head, she told me that I was right. That Dulcie was too young. That I needed to keep my daughter from the things no one had kept her from.

After the crowd thinned, I walked down the center aisle and onto the stage and then behind the curtain and into the wings. I knocked on my daughter’s dressing room door and waited to hear her response.

No answer.

I knocked again.

Maybe she was in the bathroom. I opened the dressing room door and then instantly regretted doing that. She wasn’t a baby anymore. I couldn’t barge in on her.

“Dulcie? I’m sorry. I knocked, but—”

She wasn’t there.

I walked over to the small bathroom. The door was shut. I knocked. No answer. I knocked again. Still no answer. This wasn’t like her. Even when she was angry, she responded, her voice dripping with her effort at adult fury.

Finally, I tried the door. It wasn’t locked. The bathroom was empty.

She must have gone into someone else’s dressing room; I’d sit down and wait. Normally, she didn’t linger when the play was over. None of the kids did. They were tired and hungry and had been with one another all day. But that didn’t mean it never happened.

After a few minutes more of waiting, I went out into the hall to search for her. The car and driver the theater arranged for every night would be outside waiting and it was getting late and God knows how much more snow had fallen while I’d been inside and how bad the traffic on Broadway would be.

I asked everyone I ran into, but no one had seen her since the last curtain call.

Finally, I found Raul, the director, talking on his cell phone by the back door. At first he didn’t get off the phone, but when I didn’t politely go away, he cut the call short.

“Something wrong?”

“Have you seen Dulcie? I can’t find her.”

“Not since the last curtain call. Did you check in the car?” He’d suggested the most logical place, and as I went back into the dressing room to grab my coat, I felt foolish. Of course. She didn’t know I had been in the audience. I didn’t always come inside. Dulcie had probably been in such a hurry to get home that she’d raced out of the dressing room and was waiting for me, wondering where I was.

T
he black town car was not where it always was.

I looked across the street.

No, it wasn’t there, either.

The panic started deep in my chest.

I ran as fast as I could in the snow, twenty yards up the street, then backtracked in the other direction.

No car.

A rush of adrenaline set my heart racing and I stood there in the freezing cold, trying to figure out what I was supposed to do first. And then I thought of the phone. I called Dulcie’s cell, and while I waited for her to answer, I tried to imagine her voice, curling at the edges with her smile, calling me Dr. Worry and clearing up the mystery of where she was with one simple sentence.

“Hi—”

“Dulcie where the hell—”

She was still talking. Damn it. It wasn’t her, it was her message, saying she wasn’t available.

“Dulcie? Where are you? Call me. I’m worried. Raul didn’t see you leave. I didn’t—” It was pointless to keep talking. What if something was wrong? What if—

I couldn’t think. The wind was blowing and the snow was getting in my eyes. My coat was open and I was starting to shiver.

What the hell should I do?

Dulcie was old enough to take the car service home on her own but either Mitch or I usually met her. We didn’t want her to be alone after a performance. It was a good time for us to talk, to find out how her day went, to reconnect. If one of us couldn’t be there, she could take the car by herself. But I’d told her I’d be there that night.

I stared at the phone, glowing blue and green in the dark.
Call 911. Tell them
— No, I could do better than that. I punched in Noah’s cell phone number. He answered quickly, listened to me, and then asked me for the name of the car service.

“Hold on, Morgan.”

I could hear him dialing another phone in the background and then he was back. “Hold on, Morgan, we’re calling the driver.”

Now I felt stupid on top of worried. Why hadn’t I thought to call the car service? Why hadn’t I—

“Morgan, she’s fine. The car service just dropped her off at home.”

I couldn’t say anything right away. The relief was overwhelming. Then I thanked him, told him I’d call him later, and dialed Dulcie’s number at home.

This time when the machine answered, I was angry. She was avoiding my call, acting out because of the audition.

“Call me back. Now.”

The bright neon signs and twinkling marquee lights were muted by the snow. Cars moved as if their drivers were unsure of what was happening beyond the windshield. A hush had come over the city. Winter storms mute Manhattan as nothing else can.

I pulled on my gloves, held the cell phone and walked west, figuring eventually I’d find a cab or get to a bus.

On the corner, a homeless man was huddled in the entranceway to a dark and boarded-up theater. All but one section of the theater’s neon sign was covered with snow, but the wind had blown in such a way that a single pink leg wearing a red shoe was exposed. On another night, I’d stop and try to talk him into going to a shelter, but I needed to get home.

I’d gone five blocks without hearing from my daughter. Stepping into the entrance of a busy and well-lit Japanese restaurant, I shook the snow off my hair and dialed the doorman of our building.

“Good evening, Doc. I hope you’re on your way home. It’s nasty out there.”

“I am. But listen, Gus, I’ve been calling Dulcie and she isn’t answering. How long ago did she get home?”

“I haven’t seen her, Doc.”

“How long have you been there?”

“I’ve been on duty since six.”

“But the driver said he had dropped her off at home.”

Gus was talking but what he was saying didn’t register. I ended the call and quickly punched in my ex-husband’s phone number.

My daughter had gone home, Noah had said.

Dulcie had two homes.

Damn. How could I have been so stupid?

“Mitch, it’s me. Is Dulcie there?”

“Yeah, didn’t she tell you she was coming back here tonight?”

“No.” I knew I was yelling into the phone—the patrons at the bar of the restaurant were staring at me.

“She left the theater without telling me. You can’t imagine how worried I’ve been, calling everyone—including the police.
What the fuck is going on? Is this about that damn television show?”

“I think you’d better come over,” he said.

“First tell me, is she all right?”

“She’s not sick or hurt. She’s fine. But it might be better if—”

“I’ll be there as soon as I can. There are no cabs. I’m walking,” I said, and hung up.

A young man and woman were standing out in the street, just standing there, two faces looking up at the sky, letting the soft flakes fall on them, mystified and amazed by the storm.

I was mystified by the storm, too: the one going on within my family.

“T
hat’s impossible,” Alan Leightman said to his doorman through the intercom.