All Unquiet Things (5 page)

Instead of the requisite pink, Carly’s room was done up in hues of light blue and green. Everything was perfect, as if it was
a professional job, which, I reasoned, it probably was. Later, Carly would tell me that before marrying her father, Miranda had been an interior decorator at a well-respected design house in San Francisco. She seemed as proud of that fact as Miranda seemed of her daughter’s fourth-grade dressage trophy—that is, hugely.

Carly’s bedroom was practically the size of the living room in my mother’s house. She had a large four-poster bed, which was covered with a blue, green, and white patchwork quilt and piled high with pillows. There was a light green love seat pressed up against the wall in one corner, and a matching armchair with an ottoman. Carly had a large white rolltop desk with what looked like a brand-new laptop and state-of-the-art speakers sitting on it, and a smaller white vanity with a large mirror that was littered with female mysteries. The walls were painted sky blue; I’d find out later that it was the only room in the entire house with carpeting.

“My sanctuary.” Carly was standing in the doorway, shoulder mashed against the doorjamb, arms crossed and eyebrow lifted. “Are you lost?”

“N-no,” I stammered, trying to think up a good excuse for being in her bedroom uninvited. There really wasn’t one. “Yes. I’m lost.”

She shook her head and smiled. “I don’t believe you. It’s nice, huh?”

“Uh, sure.”

“I hate it,” she confided. “It’s like a Laura Ashley catalog threw up in here. But my mother insisted. She thought it was
so me.”

“It isn’t?” The room was bright and confident and perfectly collected, which was how Carly seemed.

“Oh, God no. This is Easter on morphine. Pastel paradise.” She shuddered.

“Why don’t you say something?” I asked.

She shrugged. “My mother really loved the idea. She designed the whole room. It’d break her heart if I told her I hated it.”

It struck me how kind and mature that sentiment was, abnormally so for someone our age. I fought with my mother over everything, from school to the intramural sports she was constantly trying to sign me up for to what brand of hot dogs we bought at the supermarket. It never occurred to me to shut up and deal with some things in order to protect her feelings or make her life more bearable.

“You’re nice,” I said, lamely. But it was how I felt.

“Thanks.” She grinned. “Now get out of here. I can’t believe I caught you snooping.”

When my father picked me up that night, I could tell he had had a martini or two and was feeling affable. As I climbed into the car—he hadn’t bothered to come to the door, preferring to honk instead—and buckled my seat belt, he asked, “How was it? Did you have fun?”

“Yeah,” I said, when what I really meant was,
I never want to go home again
.

Senior Year

T
he school psychiatrist’s office was a fascinating spectacle of ego in bloom. The good doctor, who insisted we call her Harriet (“Like all the other teachers”), kept her office impeccably neat. Her books, all academic texts and journals, were arranged alphabetically by title on frequently dusted shelves; her walls were covered with every diploma, certificate, award, and letter of recognition—framed—that she had ever received in her short career; every object in the room was turned ever so slightly toward the one chair that sat on the opposite side of the desk. It was as though Harriet wanted the student, her patient, to feel like he or she was the center of everything. It might have reassured some, but I found it vaguely unsettling, so when Harriet’s back was turned I liked to subtly shift a few of the items to take off some of the pressure.

Harriet had no photos of friends or family to indicate that she had a private life, but whether it was a matter of personal taste, or an effort to make herself seem a little more human for our comfort, or just a sad attempt at cultivating an eccentricity, every spare inch of Harriet’s desk was covered with seashells. I would guess that, on average, Brighton students spent eighty percent of their time staring at the seashells and wondering if their presence was some kind of test.

“Are you still having nightmares, Neily?” Harriet tilted her head slightly and gave me a tight smile.

I’d been seeing Harriet more or less regularly since Carly died. Everybody, from my parents to the principal, insisted on it. They said I needed therapy to help me cope with the tragedy, with everything I saw. By the time she died, I hadn’t spoken to Carly in almost a year, but by discovering her body on the
bridge that night, I had accidentally stumbled into the middle of something devastating, and people were worried.

“They’re not nightmares,” I told her. “They’re just dreams.”

“The dreams, then—are you still having them?”

I shrugged. “Sometimes.”
Every night
.

“And the sleeping pills I prescribed for you aren’t helping?”

“No.” They did me no good sitting in the back of my medicine cabinet, hidden behind a box of Band-Aids.

“Are you even taking them?”

I hesitated. “No.”

Harriet sighed heavily, like I’d let her down. “Why not?”

“I don’t want to become dependent on them. That happened to a kid I knew.”
On television
.

“I wouldn’t have suggested you take them if I didn’t think they would help you,” Harriet said. “If you take them responsibly and don’t abuse them, then there shouldn’t be a problem.”

I shrugged. I wasn’t really interested in the sleeping pills. Yes, I was having trouble sleeping, and yes, that was partly due to the fact that I often experienced nightmares, many of which involved Carly and any number of absurd dream-scenarios connected to her death and the memories of finding her body. I didn’t know what the dreams meant—I don’t even know if I believe that dreams can
mean
anything—but I wanted them to go away on their own, I didn’t want to drug them into submission. To me, that just seemed like putting a lid on a problem and expecting it to go away, which in my experience rarely works. That, combined with how I felt the day before when the sedatives from the hospital had worn off, convinced me I was
not the sort of person who would benefit from the use of sleeping pills.

Harriet put down her pen and leaned forward just slightly. “Can I be completely honest with you?”

“Sure.” I doubted that she was capable of complete honesty, but I was eager to hear her evaluation of me. After all, I’d been seeing her for over a year and she had never given me any feedback other than a prescription for Ambien.

“I’m worried about you.”

I scoffed.

“It’s been over a year since it all happened and you don’t seem to have come to terms with the loss in any significant way. That concerns me.”

“Yeah, well, it’s kind of hard to get over something like that.”

“I am aware of that. No one is suggesting that you should just ‘get over it’—trauma like you experienced isn’t commonplace. It takes time.”

“That’s exactly what I just said.”

“The problem is that you’re not trying to work through what happened. Instead you’re trying to bury it inside of you, which is counterproductive to the healing process.”

“Wow,” I said, picking up a seashell from her desk and tossing it from palm to palm. “That’s deep.”

“I’d prefer it if you wouldn’t touch my things,” she said, holding out her hand for the seashell. I gave it over without argument, squinting at her.

“Maybe you could use some therapy yourself, Harriet.”

She ignored me. “I believe I was saying that it’s unhealthy to try to push things deep inside of you instead of letting them
go. You’ll never move on that way.” She took in a deep breath and sat back in her chair. This is how I knew the clincher was coming. “Then again, maybe you don’t want to move on.”

I slumped in my seat and heaved a melodramatic sigh. “There it is.”

“Why do you keep punishing yourself?”

“You think I’m responsible for what happened?”

“No, but it’s obvious that you do.”

“That’s crazy. I don’t blame myself. Enzo Ribelli killed Carly, and he’s in jail. What have I got to feel bad about?”

“Okay, maybe you don’t realize it, but I think that the nightmares are definitely a sign of latent guilt. The sleeping pills are a temporary solution, because you need sleep to live. But if you want the nightmares to stop, you’ll have to face whatever it is that’s causing them to manifest.”

“They’re just dreams.”

“Right.” She glanced at her watch. “It looks like we’re out of time for today. We’ll pick this up again next week.”

“Can’t wait,” I remarked, getting up and slinging my bag over my shoulder. “How long am I going to have to keep coming here?”

Harriet paused. “I don’t know. I’ll have to speak to your parents about that.”

“Great.”

I opened the door and turned to leave, slamming into Audrey on her way in. The contents of my backpack went skittering across the hallway. Audrey and I bent down to gather them up.

“Oh, hi!” she said brightly, but falsely. She handed me a stack of notebooks.

“Sorry,” I mumbled.

She shook her head. “No problem.”

“Everything okay?” Harriet called.

Audrey smiled anxiously and shifted from one foot to the other. “Weekly appointment,” she said.

Harriet appeared at the door. “Hi, Audrey. Come on in.” She shot me an impatient smile. “Class, Neily?”

“Yeah.” I glanced at Audrey one more time and started down the hall.

The last words I heard Harriet say to Audrey: “I’m so glad you decided to start seeing me.”

“So, what words of wisdom did the headshrinker have for you today?” Harvey asked, falling into step beside me as I made my way to my next class.

“Huh?” I wasn’t really listening. I was considering the odds of running into Audrey outside of Harriet’s office. I mean, the school had approximately five hundred students, so the odds of running into anybody anywhere on campus were pretty high if you did the math, but still.

“Blue slip. Harriet the Spy? They should really stop color coding—everybody knows when you’ve been called to her office,” Harvey said.

“Yeah, right. Weekly checkup. Pretty standard.”

“I don’t mean when
you’ve
been called to her office,” Harvey backpedaled. “I mean, you know, anyone. Lots of people get blue slips.”

“Don’t worry about it, man. Hey—what do you think about Audrey being in Carmen’s class with us?” I asked.

“Uh, I don’t know. I wasn’t aware I would be expected to form an opinion.”

“Off the top of your head.”

“It’s weird. Don’t you think it’s weird? Wasn’t she always moping around in the dumb classes, with Cass and Adam and … all them? I mean, we only overlapped for like six months in sophomore year, but wasn’t that the way it was?”

“That’s what I was thinking. Padding the resume in preparation for college applications?”

“I guess. Although I always thought it was a foregone conclusion she was going to USC, since her grandmother donated, like, a
building
or something.”

I shrugged.

“Why?”

“No reason. Thought it was weird.”