Thicker Than Water (19 page)

Other stuff happened, too—things no one could see or hear. But I felt them. I felt them like something that was physical and painful—they knocked the wind out of me and made me gasp. As the world fell apart around me, my will
to live slipped through the cracks in the tiles on the floor. My heart forgot its own name. Likewise, my name forgot its own heart. They passed each other in my body like strangers. Then something deep in my body began to crack.

IN MY HOLDING CELL, I MADE A LIST OF THINGS I KNEW FOR SURE.
It's something my mom taught me to do when I got nervous or scared. Usually, she meant it as a test-taking strategy. If I got stuck on short-answer questions, Mom said I should picture them as multiple choice.

“Write down your options first,” she suggested. “Then you can choose the right answer from the wrong ones.”

It never worked all that well, but I didn't tell her that. I never liked to look at Mom's ideas as flawed, particularly after she died. When you have a dead parent, you want to believe that all their theories are insightful or true or important.

But sometimes Mom was wrong.

Like when she would tell me to wear a jacket or I'd get sick—because I never wore a jacket and I never got sick.

Like when she said that we'd all be okay after she was gone.

My list of things I knew for sure was short. It didn't really feel like a list so much as a pair.

When I squinted, the bars of the cell faded into something blurry and solid that could almost pass for a wall.

My brother died yesterday.

Other than that, things seemed pretty uncertain.

My lawyer, Jennifer, didn't blend in with the bars and the cement and the mint-green paint foreshadowing my future. Her taupe suit and over-powdered face made her look like a giant tongue depressor. The guard buzzed open the barred gate and pulled my arms behind my back with something less than a light touch. He half forced me out of my cell and down the hallway until we reached a sparsely furnished room with two chairs and a small square table.

“Good morning, Cecelia,” Jennifer said, setting her briefcase down on the cleanest patch of floor. “How are you feeling today?”

“Shitty,” I answered. Better to be honest than polite. “And it's CeCe, not Cecelia.”

“Okay. CeCe.”

Jennifer picked the briefcase back up and laid it on the table. When she snapped it open, it almost sounded like someone cocking a trigger. Both of my cell mates from the night before had moved on to the Land of the Drunk Tank; had they been here, I wondered if they would have ducked.

“I've spoken with the DA and I've managed to convince him to let you out of lockup,” Jennifer was saying. I jerked back, a little dumbfounded.

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.” She smiled, then pulled out a stapled packet of papers. “We'll be transferring you over to Piedmont's Behavioral Therapy program this afternoon.”

Ah. So that's the catch.

“Great. I should probably start sharpening the end of my toothbrush now.”

Jennifer ignored me, scanning the papers and avoiding eye contact with me. What a novel strategy—someone should make this chick a spy or something.

“The Behavioral Therapy wing at Piedmont Juvenile Facility is a revolutionary program,” Jennifer said. I could tell she'd given this spiel before, which made me either furious or nervous as hell.

“Sounds an awful lot like jail to me.”

She crossed her arms and stared at me before speaking again.

“Behavioral Therapy, or BT for short, isn't jail. It's like rehab. You can keep your clothes, you get a bedroom, you aren't locked up. There's a common area. You have access to all kinds of stuff that's contraband in prison. It's almost like college, if you think about it.”

I don't think Jennifer meant to hurt me, but hearing her compare a psych unit to college was like getting punched in the stomach. College used to be a goal and a dream. Now it's more than improbable; it's
unattainable
.

“Getting you into the program wasn't easy, CeCe,” she said, lowering her voice. “With these kind of charges, it's
very rare that the judge lets anyone out of county at all.”

“So what makes me so special, then?”

Jennifer gave me a tight, closed-lip smile. “You're a minor. You have a history of trauma in your life. You don't have any prior convictions. Believe it or not, you're at an advantage compared to many others.”

It had been a long time since I'd been at an advantage. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised. Really, at this point, there was nowhere to go but up.

We all have preconceived notions of places like Piedmont. The razor wire, the extra-tall chain-link fencing, the somber expression of the officers as they wave you through the gates—they all supported my theory about this place. It was a place for trouble and the troubled. It was like that Eagles song Dad likes so much—you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.

And that's what I decided to do—I checked out. I squinted through the passenger's-side window the entire drive there, allowing the world around me to blur like Monet was in charge of all my realities. Everything was a version of itself, but not itself. Just like me. Just like Cyrus.

Getting inside Piedmont Juvenile Correctional Facility was a multiple-step process, and all those steps were humiliating. Jennifer waited in the other room while a female officer had me strip down to my underwear. She searched my clothes, and then my body; worst of all, she held my arms out away from my sides so I couldn't cover myself. The
modesty-bordering-on-embarrassment I'd always felt about my body was the first thing they took away at Piedmont.

I was surrounded by stacks of folded gray jumpsuits, but the officer let me put my jeans and T-shirt back on. When we met Jennifer out in the hallway, her eyes betrayed the pity I didn't want her to feel.

“It's fine,” I muttered. “I'm fine.”

At the entrance to the Behavioral Therapy wing, a wiry man with graying blond hair and annoyingly sympathetic eyes stood waiting. When my eyes met his, he reached out a hand and I forced myself not to recoil.

“You must be Cecelia? I'm Dr. Barnes.”

I nodded. “CeCe.”

I shook his hand and tried to ignore the waxy texture of his skin. His handshake was limp and that made me like him even less. Still, he seemed kind to me. You could see it in his face, which made me wonder if he was really genuine or full of shit. Everyone is judging everyone else from just below their skin. Under our human shields, we're all just human.

Dr. Barnes unlocked the door behind him and led us inside a dimly lit hallway. At the end of it, two women in hospital scrubs were waiting.

“CeCe, this is Molly and Carla. They run the floor from noon to midnight.”

The short one, Molly, smiled at me. Her hair matched her eyes, or vice versa. Carla had a tight ponytail and sharp eyes. When she tried to meet my gaze, I looked down at my hands.

“Welcome, CeCe,” Molly said. Her voice was husky and low. “Let's go ahead and take your bio-pic, okay?”

“My what?”

“Your bio-pic—it's a picture that hangs outside your room.”

I literally couldn't think of anything worse than getting my picture taken. What could I possibly want to capture right now? What would I want to remember about this moment and this place and this life?

But when the old-school Polaroid camera was directed right at me, I couldn't help myself. I smiled. It was like a reflex; all of it had an aching familiarity.

“You're right on time for a group session, CeCe,” Dr. Barnes said, still smiling.

I felt the panic-turned-bile begin to churn in my stomach. Molly and Carla were moving folding chairs into a semicircle. I tried to take deep breaths. It was like the first day of school—nausea and nervousness took over my body like some kind of cancer.

People started coming into the room and I sat at one end of the semicircle. Most of them were my age, give or take a few years. There were fewer girls than boys. Once everyone was seated, Barnes sat in a wheeled desk chair and slid over toward the group.

“Okay, folks. Let's begin—Serenity Prayer first.”

The voices in unison were like thunder, but the far away kind. The kind that can't be a threat until it gets close to you.

God, grant me the serenity

to accept the things I cannot change;

courage to change the things I can;

and wisdom to know the difference.

Dr. Barnes began with introductions.

“Everyone, this is CeCe. She'll be with us for the next few months. How about we go around the circle and introduce ourselves?”

I'd always been good with names and faces. Because I'd started squinting and blurring my vision, though, it was going to be impossible to keep track of them. I just watched and nodded as the others identified themselves for my benefit. One of the girls—I think her name ended in a “y”—kept looking at me. She was Indian or Egyptian or something, and her face was so beautiful, it almost hurt to think about what she'd done to get here.

Barnes ran group therapy like some kind of soft-spoken, really nice drill sergeant. People answered questions. They participated. When they hesitated, he pushed them gently. When they got defensive, he redirected their attention. He was the Dalai Lama of therapeutic intervention.

When he got to me, I tried to convince myself that I could be honest—that I could tell my story, the abbreviated version, and feel some kind of release. But there was something about the way they all waited to hear my truth—like they were eager for it. Like if I told them what I'd done, they could somehow feel better about themselves.

So instead I said, “I'm not ready.”

Barnes cocked his head. “You don't have to say anything you don't want to tonight, CeCe. But you might feel better if you do.”

I didn't know what to say. I opened my mouth, then closed it. Someone to my left cleared his throat. When I looked over, my vision cleared and my eyelashes parted like curtains.

“I have a revelation.”

His voice was dark in all the ways a voice can be dark. I was captivated, pulled magnetically by something inside me. I looked around to see if others were drawn, like me, to this boy with the voice like danger. He sounded like Lucas in ways that made me ache.

“What's your revelation, Tucker?” Barnes asked, then looked at me. “We encourage our patients to recognize important moments and epiphanies as ‘revelations.'”

“Right.” I looked at Tucker, who was looking at me. Something sunk down and settled in the pit of my stomach. It landed next to all my self-loathing and the tears that I wouldn't let fall.

I didn't hear Tucker's revelation. Before he began, Carla was behind me, touching my shoulder and motioning me to follow her. There was a strange ringing in my ears as I rose from my chair. Her lips moved, but I couldn't hear anything at first. She was taking me through a hallway, then into an office. When the ringing inexplicably ebbed, I heard her say “evaluation.” A few moments later, I heard “urinalysis.”

When she said, “We have to make sure you're clean,” I couldn't help but bark out a laugh. Irony is difficult to understand unless you're living it. Sometimes it's a catch-22 or a paradox. Other times it's impossible to label.

I'd done so many things in one day that I never thought I'd do: I slept in a cell, I got strip-searched, and I talked to my father through glass far stronger than either of our faltering hearts. Sometimes we start living lives we never expected to live. Other times we pick up where one life left off. In the end, it's not about where you came from, but where you're going.

WHEN THE JUDGE REENTERS AFTER THE RECESS, THE COURTROOM
becomes something other than quiet, something like a motionless ocean: all that potential, all that energy, frozen in place. I think about fish in the winter—do they freeze with the water, then come back to life in the spring?

I notice for the first time that Jennifer has my hand in hers and she's squeezing hard, like she expects it to release an elixir of positivity.

The words come from Judge Collins like a force beyond nature. They fade in and out by order of intensity—the stronger they are, the clearer they get.

“. . . facing very serious charges . . .”

“. . . one of the youngest defendants in my courtroom . . .”

“. . . distribution of narcotics . . .”

“. . . falsifying medical records . . .”

And then, worst of all:

“I'd like to speak to Ms. Price in my chambers.
Without
counsel present.”

It's the first full sentence I've heard. I look up into the judge's solemn face and try to read his eyes. What goes on in judge's chambers? Is it better or worse than the purgatory out here?

Moments later, Jennifer leads me out into the hall. I watch the overhead light travel across the tile floor—a splash of brightness I can't quite catch up to. I'm perpetually running after the reflection.

This time, we head into the ladies' room and Jennifer lets me go to the bathroom. Afterward, when I'm washing my hands, I watch her in the mirror. I'm not much of a gambler, but my lawyer must be, because she took a huge gamble on me. When Cy and I got older, Dad tried to teach us about poker. I never got past the “face” part—I spent every hand of every game watching my brother's eyes and brows and the flare of his nostrils, trying to see what part of him was lying.

“Are you worried about me going in there by myself?” I ask her.

She shrugs. “It's a pretty standard request in situations like this with defendants like you.”

“Defendants like me?”

She clears her throat. “This young. With charges this serious.”

“Right.”

But Jennifer doesn't seem overly concerned about the judge wanting to see me in private, or about the potential
guilty verdict hanging over me, even though its imaginary sparks singe my hair and earlobes and eyelashes. We move from the bathroom to the crowded hall, but before someone can speak to me, Jennifer whisks me in through a side door.

The room is like a library for lawyers—huge volumes with the names and numbers of laws and ordinances I've never even heard of. While we wait, I think about logistics. Like, would it be possible to follow all those laws to the letter—to spend your life never jaywalking and never rolling through a stop sign?

Ten minutes pass. Then fifteen. At twenty-one minutes, the bailiff enters the room.

“The judge would like to address you in his quarters,” he says to me.

Jennifer looks over at me. Her eyes say,
Are you going to be okay?
and mine say,
I'm fine. I can handle it
.

My eyes lie. It's the only part of a poker face I've ever perfected.

The bailiff takes me out a different door, and we seemingly start weaving through the inner bowels of the courthouse. I think about the time I visited Natalie at work last year—she was a cashier at a girly accessories store in the mall, which specialized in fluorescent plastic jewelry. When her break came, she took me through the depressing, messy back room of the store and out into a cinder-block-lined hallway that was sort of like a school and sort of like a jail. Mostly, it just felt buried—cool and damp and utterly empty.

This was like that, but not. It was behind the scenes, but it was also dry and uncomfortably warm, like sun on wool or jeans right out of the dryer, when the snap sears your belly button and the legs feel like vises made of rug burn. We stop in front of a nondescript door. The bailiff knocks, a sharp staccato shock to my system. A voice says to come in and the bailiff opens the door.

Just inside the room, the judge sits behind a desk, which, like the bench in the courtroom, is something solid still dividing us. Now, though, he looks a lot smaller. Not weaker, but at my level, a little more human.

“Ms. Price.”

It's not a question or anything. Just my name. I blink, then nod.

“I've asked to see you because I'd like to talk to you about the medical examiner's findings.”

“Okay,” I say, not sure if I should be responding. I nod again, just in case.

The judge turns his chair and puts two fingers against his lips, like he's thinking or smoking an imaginary cigarette.

“There's also someone else who'd like to discuss those findings with you, Cecelia,” he says, then gestures past me to the back corner of the room.

I close my eyes, thinking it might be Mason, then take a breath. I want to bolster myself up with the air we're all using. I want my share before he starts spouting off and taking more than is fair.

But it isn't the prosecutor.

It's my dad.

And that's when my knees buckle.

Seeing my dad is the last thing I expected. That goes without saying. A surge of emotions spouts off into the stratosphere of my frontal lobe. I try to sort through them as I examine his face. He looks inexplicably older since I saw him three months ago through that thick glass window at the county jail.

For a second, we just stare at each other. Then the judge's manners flare up.

“Cecelia, would you like to sit?”

He gestures to a wingback chair that's sort of next to, but sort of facing, my father. It's the world's most awkward furniture position. Who sits like this?

But I sit down, because it's what I'm supposed to do. Following the rules has become easier since my time in BT. I perch at the edge and wait.

“CeCe.”

Dad's voice is dry and crackly, as though it might burst into flames. I force myself to look at him again and then, with every fiber in my being, I force my lips to bend up into a smile.

“Hey, Dad.”

We're stuck here now. The words he could have said before we got to court—words he could have shared at Dr. Barnes's family sessions or with Jennifer or with Trina—those words
are a waste. They're no longer needed. He can't offer anything but a window facing backward, a rearview mirror reflecting an enormous, irrevocable disaster.

“Mr. Price,” the judge says, his voice soft, “I'm sure you will agree with me that the medical examiner had some very interesting things to report about your son and the medications he was taking.”

Dad clears his throat. “Yes. I—er—the other pills caused a problem. Problems.”

“Right. Without them, I believe that your son might still be here today.”

Despite the gentleness of the words, they slice through the two remaining Price family members like something sharp and icy cold.

But Dad sits still. Really still. He listens as the judge and his robes and degrees and unfortunate receding hairline practically croon “Coulda Shoulda Wouldas.” How the quantity of drugs in Cyrus's bloodstream was from a single incident—the fatal choice made in one afternoon. How my mistakes were mine and were legitimate and deserved to be addressed. How you can't go back in time. How there is no such thing as retribution without victims. How life goes on.

“CeCe,” Dad tries again. “I want—I want to tell you something.”

I blink hard. “Okay.”

“I want . . .” He runs a hand over his head, the gray hair thinner than I remember. “I want you to know that I'm still a father.”

He stops and I wait, confused.

“That I've lost a child, but I haven't lost both of them. And that I'm still your dad.”

This could be a moment with some kind of heart-wrenching reunion embrace. But it isn't. It's my dad telling me something I know in my head. It's my dad telling me something my heart had almost forgotten. Between the two of them, I'm never sure anymore who to trust.

“Ms. Reinhart tells me you've made a lot of great progress at the Behavioral Therapy program, Cecelia.” The judge looks at me encouragingly, so I nod because I know he wants me to.

“Um, yeah. It's been good, I think. I do a lot of group therapy and stuff like that. Dr. Barnes is really supportive.”

“Do you like it there?”

My brows furrow involuntarily. It's not a question I'd ever asked myself. I hadn't liked something—really
liked
it—in a really long time. But the truth was simple.

“Yes. I do—I do like it there. I think . . .” I swallow, looking at my hands and then at my dad. “I think it kept me from doing anything worse after—after Cyrus. I mean . . . I mean, to myself. Worse to myself.”

“Dr. Barnes is an exceptional psychiatrist,” the judge says, nodding, “and I'm certain you are getting excellent care.”

He turns to my dad now, gesturing to me.

“Mr. Price, this may come as a surprise to you, but I believe that healing is always possible, in any situation. It
may not be a permanent ‘fix' or a solution, but it can be a bettering of one's life.”

He stands up and comes out from behind the desk to perch on the front of it. I'm suddenly transported to a principal's office and, for a minute, Dad and I are two students in conflict.

“Cecelia, it was important to me that, before I handed down my ruling, I had a chance to see you interact with your father. If nothing else, I need to know that you are willing to work at your relationship,” the judge continues. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Dad trying desperately not to pick at his hangnails.

“I believe there is something left here to save,” the judge continues, “but it will take time. It will take hard, hard work. Frankly, too many mistakes have occurred
around
your relationship as father and daughter. I'd like to see you find a center again, a place where your wife and son, Mr. Price, and your mother and brother, Ms. Price, can still exist. A place that will radiate from the love the two of you share. If nothing else, I believe in that love.”

I'm baffled. So is Dad. We're still dumbfounded when the bailiff comes back and motions for me to stand up.

“Dad?”

I'm halfway out the door when I decide to say something true. I clear my throat.

“I love you. And—and I'm sorry.”

My father has the best kind of eyes. They are eyes that
can look directly through you when they're angry or busy or exhausted. They are the kind of eyes that would literally “pierce” or “dart” if that were supported by the laws of physics. And when they are aimed right at you, like they're aimed at me now, you can physically feel them—a direct hit.

But he saw nothing and no one else when he said, “I love you, too, Cecelia. And I promise you—no matter what, no one is sorrier than me.”

I consider that—consider whether it's possible that my father really feels the heavy, isolating realization that he didn't help, that he only hurt. That he couldn't save my mother or my brother or me. That he wasn't merely a victim.

And I decide that maybe the word
sorry
is the wrong one. That maybe what he really means is that he was wrong. That he knows he was wrong. And, for now, that's enough.

Back in the courtroom, Jennifer looks at me, then clears her throat.

“CeCe,” she says quietly, “you need to stand up.”

I don't want to stand up. I want to sit here and gaze off into space, letting everything blur and fade until I see nothing by my mother's smile, nothing but Tucker's reassuring gaze as it scans my face and settles on my eyes.

But when Jennifer shuffles a little closer to me, I check back into my body. Then everything goes quiet and the world is watching me again.

Then the world is watching the Honorable Judge Randolph Collins.

“I've given this an inordinate amount of consideration,” the judge begins. He places his hands on the bench in front of him, palms up. Like he's asking for something.

“Cyrus Price was a victim—and so was everyone else in his life. In fact, according to key testimony by more than one reliable witness, it seems as though Cyrus Price was sometimes the catalyst who caused the problem. Sometimes our victims are also our criminals. Sometimes there is no clear-cut happy ending.

“I can't bring Cyrus Price back to life. I can't go back in time and stop him from taking narcotic medication that was, clearly, responsible for his downward spiral. More than that, I can't change biology. And that's what this is, correct? Biology—the makeup of the people involved, the interactions and reactions of their bodies?”

He looks at me and the expression in his eyes is the one I hate most—pity. It's the one that tells me I'm not going home tonight.

“Dr. Carolyn Schafer is a chemistry teacher at the school where Cyrus and Cecelia Price attended.”

I swallow hard. I haven't let myself think about people who might actually still care about me on the outside. Hearing that name reminds me of how much I've been trying to forget.

“Dr. Schafer, in a written statement to me, extolled the virtues and skill and drive of Cecelia Price. Dr. Schafer called her”—he fumbles with a paper on the bench, lifts it up, then peers at the writing—“she called her a ‘born leader
with the determination to be successful and the heart to help the people around her at the same time.'”

I can feel the color rising up into my cheeks. It gets hotter and brighter when the judge pins me with his stare.

“Is that true?” he demands. I blink, then look uncertainly at Jennifer. She nods slowly.

“I—I'm not sure what you mean, sir,” I say. He shakes his head.