Wrecked (24 page)

“If Seth cheated on me, I think I’d die,” I tell Jason. He’s stopped weeping.

“Especially if he cheated on you with a guy,” he points out.

“Don’t,” I go. “Do you think he’s gay?” Panicked, I’m remembering all those rumors about Jason and Seth after the accident.

Ellen snorts. “No way.”

“You’d never fool around with him, would you?” I ask Jason. “That would be, like, insanely cruel.”

Now Jason snorts. “No offense, Anna,” he goes. “But no way.”

“So have you guys done it yet?” Ellen asks. She’s finished with the roses. She spins around on her desk stool to look at me. She means have we gone all the way, made it home, gotten busy, done the dirty. Had sex.

But she knows we haven’t. She’s just trying to distract Jason.

“Stop trying to distract me,” Jason goes.

“Fine,” Ellen goes. “You’re sitting on Whitey.” Jason lifts his butt, and Ellen gets off her stool to pull Whitey free. She starts rubbing him over her chin. “I know you know I made a pass at Jason,” Ellen goes to me out of the blue. Then she blushes.

“You told her?” I ask Jason.

“No.” Jason arches his left eyebrow and looks at Ellen. “How do you know?”

“Whitey told me.”

“How would Whitey know?” I go.

Ellen shrugs. “Whitey knows everything.”

When I get home, my parents are in the kitchen. The weird thing is, it’s my mom yelling instead of my dad.

“Responsibility!” my mom’s saying. My father’s sitting at the table in front of a Texas Hold ’Em online game.

“What’s happening?” I ask Jack, who’s in the family room on the L-shaped couch with his DVD paused. Somehow I get the feeling this fight has been going on for a while.

“Mom’s pissed,” Jack says.

“Mom’s pissed?” I can’t remember the last time my mother was the one who was pissed.

“Bullshit,” my father’s saying, only kind of weak.

“You can’t tell anything from two sessions!” my mom yells. “It takes time, Harvey. It takes time and effort!”

“The guy’s an idiot,” my dad says back. “I’m not going to sit in some room with an idiot for an hour a week and pay him for idiocy.”

“This is not a debate,” my mom goes. “This is an ultimatum!”

“Damn it,” my father says. “I had three aces.”

We hear a crash and then silence.

Jack and I look at each other and then race to the kitchen doorway. My father’s laptop is on the floor. Someone knocked it off the table. He and my mother are staring at it.

“You can’t really force someone into therapy,” Jack says into the quiet room. He should know.

“This is none of your business,” my mom answers.

“Bullshit,” Jack goes.

“Yeah,” I say. I feel strangely calm. “Bullshit.”

“Go to your rooms,” my father tells us, still staring at his laptop.

“You can’t make someone go to therapy,” I say. “But you can be really pissed at someone for a long time for not going.” I look hard at Jack when I say that.

“I said,” my dad repeats, “go to your rooms.”

We ignore him. We go back to the L-shaped couch instead. Jack unpauses his DVD. It’s footage of some god-awful band.

“What’s this one called?” I ask him after about three seconds.

“Mystic Circles of the Young Girls. It’s good, right?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Right.”

I hear him crying through the wall in the middle of the night. I kick off my sheet and pull on decent pajama bottoms and the TALK TO MY AGENT T-shirt and leave my room to go to his. In the hallway I stop short, surprised to see my mother, her ear an inch away from Jack’s closed door. She straightens up in her slippers and looks sheepish for a minute. We watch
each other listening to Jack for a while, and then my mom motions for me to follow her. She leads me to the kitchen and makes us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

“Are you taking Jack and me to Paris if dad won’t go?” I ask her.

“We’ll see,” she says.

“Do you think Jack’s going to pick NYU or UCLA?”

She chews her sandwich for a while without answering.

“Mom?” I say.

“NYU,” she tells me. “Please pass the milk.”

Jack won’t do therapy.

“It really helps,” I try to tell him one Sunday afternoon after Seth has left.

“Leave me alone, Anna,” he goes.

“With EMDR, your brain makes these little movies in your head,” I tell him for the tenth time. “I mean, some people’s do. Mine does. Yours probably would. You’d like that.”

“I know,” he says. “You’ve told me about it ten times.”

“Even Dad’s in therapy,” I argue.

“Twice. To some guy he thinks is a moron,” Jack says. “That’s not exactly therapy. And you don’t see him going back, do you? Besides, it’s not a competition.”

“Ellen says it’s totally ironic that out of the whole family you’re the only one not even willing to give it a try.”

“Ellen is too smart for her own good,” Jack goes.

“I heard you crying a few nights ago,” I tell him.

“Shut up.”

“I just want to help,” I say.

He throws his pillow at me. “Yeah,” he goes. “I know.”

• • •

I still haven’t looked at the memorial Web site for Cameron. Frances and I talk some about it and do some EMDR, and it’s not bad the way it used to be, but I don’t want to click the final click. I don’t want to read what everybody has to say about Cameron and how she’s not here. The screaming, stopped, doesn’t haunt me the way it used to. It doesn’t haunt me at all, actually, but the sadness isn’t something you can buzz away. It’s just sad, and even though I know it’s not my fault, it’s still sad.

So it’s not like you live happily ever after. It doesn’t work that way. You still have bad dreams sometimes, only instead of waking up drenched and shouting, it’s more like you wake up really tired in the morning, feeling that sadness and thinking,
That was so awful. That was such an awful thing that happened
. It’s not like my mother doesn’t still spend tons of time up in her study and my dad doesn’t yell at all of us for little things. It’s just more that none of it feels as terrifying and out of control. As lonely.

Mostly you realize you can handle it. You’d rather turn it all upside down and dump it out and watch it scatter and disappear. You’d rather do that, because you don’t want to have to handle it. You really don’t. It’s too stupid and crazy and incredibly, incredibly unfair.

But you do handle it. Because the thing you learn is that you can.

The author gratefully acknowledges and warmly thanks:

Dr. Bennett S. Burns, Dr. Steven Covici, Dr. Mark Klion, and Dr. Kevin J. Mickey for their speedy and thorough courses in ophthalmology and orthopedics;

Gina Colelli for accepting endless requests for information and assistance, and for her sensitive supervision of EMDR;

Ann Griffin for making AP biology a surprising pleasure;

Richard Jackson for encouraging without pushing, and then patiently waiting;

Stephen Lucas for his love, support, and band names;

Dr. Tanya Lucas for her medical expertise and for connecting me with Dr. Covici and Dr. Burns;

Amy Rosenblum for suggesting that Grandma be calmed down and Dad be kept on the beach;

Dr. William Rosenblum for catching blood-alcohol level inaccuracies;

Charlotte Sheedy for so readily supporting the path I requested; and Mike and Anna Stewart for connecting me with Dr. Klion.