Forget You (2 page)

I gestured toward the emergency room doors. I thought he would know what I meant by this. When he raised his eyebrows in expectation, I realized I would have to explain even this to him: that I didn't want to leave her. I opened my mouth and had no words for any of it.

"They won't let you see her anyway," he said. "The loony bin won't let you see her either. They say it's to protect you from her, and to protect her from you. To remove her from the environment. They'll let her call you when she's ready to see you."

He was saying what I'd been thinking. I'd been blaming myself and hoping that self-blame was natural in these circumstances but ultimately silly. He was telling me it was not silly. Even the mental hospital thought it was my fault that my mother had done this. I still didn't want to believe any of it, but I felt myself falling down that slope without anything to grab to save myself, except this:

I whispered, "When I first got here, they told me maybe I could talk to the hospital psychologist about what happened?"

"They don't need you to diagnose your mother," my dad grumbled.

"I mean"--I swallowed--"for me? To talk about me?"

He huffed out a sigh and leaned one shoulder against the glass wall of the vestibule. "So now you're crazy too? You're not going to a psycho-anything. You see how much good it did your mother. They'll just give you the drugs that you can OD on later. There's a reason we call them
shrinks.
Let's go."

I stood, only then realizing how sore my back was and how long I must have been sitting in that seat, staring at the closed emergency room doors. I followed my dad through the vestibule and into the night.

We didn't have far to walk. He had parked his Benz in a handicapped space just outside the door. The backseat was filled with large boxes with laughing babies on the labels. A high chair, a bouncing swing. I slid into the passenger seat and lost myself in an argument inside my own head.

I did not want to believe my dad was right. My mom had not OD'd on medicine a shrink had given her. She had OD'd on sleeping pills her regular doctor had given her. She had never gone to a shrink, probably because of my dad's opinion of them. I had overheard him saying something like this to her during one of their fights last spring.

I could have pointed this out to him, but he would not have listened to me, any more than he had listened to her. And though normally I might have obsessed about this point of contention and reviewed it over and over, trying to find a way to present it to him that he would understand and accept, tonight it slipped away from me as if captured by the undertow.

In my mind I was back in my mother's bedroom at our apartment, trying to fix everything. I was the lifeguard, but I couldn't give her mouth-to-mouth because she was still breathing, and I couldn't give her CPR because her heart was still beating, faintly. What could I do to help? When the paramedics arrived, I could tell them exactly what she'd taken. Holding my cell phone to my ear with one hand because the 911 dispatcher had ordered me not to hang up, I walked to the bathroom and found her prescription bottle in the trash. Empty.

"Aren't you going in?" my dad asked.

I looked over at him in the driver's seat. He thumbed through the messages on his phone. He'd parked the Benz in front of the apartment, between my mother's hybrid and my battered Bug. He'd just bought Ashley a convertible Beamer. I drove this ancient Bug because he made me use my own money from working at Slide with Clyde for my car, insurance, and gas. He'd told me before that growing up a spoiled brat was what was wrong with my mom.

"Come to think of it," he said, still scrolling, "I'll have to help you. You need to get everything. Even after she's released, the judge won't let you live with her. You might not be back here for a while." Behind us, the trunk popped open to receive all my belongings. He stepped out of the Benz.

I followed him into the parking lot. The apartment building was the nicest one in town, which wasn't saying a lot. Everyone who could afford a house lived in one, which left the apartments for the transients. Mature palms and palmettos softened the lines of the weathered wooden building, but a huge air-conditioning unit filled the late summer night with its drone, and the scent of the community garbage Dumpster wafted from behind a high fence.

My dad noticed the smell too, nostrils flared in distaste as he stood waiting for me at the front of the car. I wondered why he didn't go ahead to the apartment. Then I remembered he didn't have a key. I pulled my key chain from my pocket. Still, he didn't move. He didn't know which apartment was mine, after I'd lived here for three months.

An instant of anger at him propelled me forward, onto the sidewalk. I inserted the key into my lock. But now I had to turn the key. Now I had to go in.

My dad was watching me. I couldn't let him see me hesitate. That would make things worse on my mom, to admit to my dad that what she'd done made her less of a person and worthy of his disdain. I shoved inside and flicked on the light.

At least the apartment was extremely clean, the way I'd left it. It didn't
look
like an insane person lived here. But viewing it through my dad's eyes, the apartment building's standard-issue furniture made it look like she had sunk low. I didn't want him venturing farther inside, judging.

I faced him. "Why don't you watch TV while you wait? I won't be long. Can I get you something to drink?"

He grunted and stepped outside, reaching into his pocket for his cigarettes--a strange habit he'd taken up last May when the water park opened for the season and he hired Ashley.

I watched him until the door closed behind him, then dashed through the apartment, double-checking that it was neat. As I passed back and forth in front of my mother's desk in the living room, her suicide note stared up at me, the most obvious crazy item:
Zoey, I just couldn't see doing it all another day. I love you. Mom.
If I put it in the desk drawer, I would be putting my mom away. I settled for squaring the notepaper perfectly against the corner of the desk. Again.

In the kitchen I peered into the refrigerator. I would take anything perishable to the Dumpster so my mom wouldn't have a mess to clean up when she came back. I was surprised to find no fruit, no milk. My mom had cleaned it out already.

In the bathroom I selected all my toiletries, leaving my mom's. In my bedroom I grabbed armfuls of clothing from my closet and my dresser and shoved them into my suitcases. At first I went for the summer clothes only. Then I pulled out a light jacket in case I was still living with my dad when the nights got cool. As I reached the sweater box under my bed, I stared at the cotton and cashmere, heartbeat accelerating into panic, wondering just how long my mom would be gone, and what she would do in the loony bin all that time, and what they would do to her, and whether they would ever let her out, and whether a judge really would keep me from living with her my entire last year of high school.

The smell of smoke startled me. I hoped my dad wasn't smoking in the apartment, because my mom was allergic. I shoved the sweater box back under my bed, zipped my suitcases, and hauled them into the den.

The apartment door was wide open, letting the air-conditioning out, making room for the warm night air my dad had just smoked. He stood over my mom's desk, reading her note with his nostrils flared again.

"I'm ready." I left one suitcase for him and wheeled the other past him and out the door, hoping to distract him from what he'd already seen. He followed me. I pulled the door shut behind me and locked it. When I turned around, he held his hand out.

I looked up at him, puzzled. "The key? Why?"

"Because you're a teenager," he said, "and I'm your father."

I didn't like the finality of it, or the implication that I was a wild child who couldn't be trusted with the key to an empty apartment. But a part of me was grateful my dad was taking charge. I wiggled the key off the ring and held it out to him. He didn't notice. He was looking at the screen on his phone.

"Dad."

He pocketed my key but kept his phone in his hand as he wheeled my suitcase around to the open trunk of the Benz. After hefting both suitcases inside and slamming the trunk, he opened the driver's door. He nodded toward my Bug. "You're bringing your car, right? I'll see you at home."

Home. He meant the house on the beach. I hadn't been back there since my mom and I had left. He had joint custody of me, but I figured we saw enough of each other every day at work. Besides, Ashley had gleefully warned me that if I ever did want to visit, the house was a mess. She was having the kitchen remodeled.

I did not want to follow my dad back there right now. I pictured myself in my old bedroom, staring out the window at the ocean I couldn't see in the black night, wondering what was happening to my mom. I had stared at white emergency room doors for hours tonight. Panic at what she had done rushed through me like pain to my numb fingertips when I warmed them inside on a rare cold winter day. I could not sit in that bedroom tonight, wincing at my heavy heartbeat. There was just so much I could take.

"Actually," I said, "if you don't want anyone in town to know about Mom, there's a beach party I need to go to tonight, the last blowout of the year. If I'm not there, my friends will want to know why." The Slide with Clyde employees had thrown beach parties all summer. Tonight's party was special because today, Labor Day, had been our last day of work. Slide with Clyde had closed for the season. This much was true.

It was not true that my friends expected me at the party. They expected me to stay home with my mom. Some days when I came home from work, she seemed energetic as ever. Better, even. But most days she hardly ate dinner, and she went to bed early. In the last couple of weeks she'd complained that she couldn't sleep. I'd suggested that she didn't need twelve hours. Her response was to ask for those sleeping pills from her doctor. Now I wondered whether she'd had suicide in mind all along. I had worried about her all summer, so I'd stayed home from my friends' parties, not that it had done any good.

Tonight I would go.

My dad nodded absently, sinking into the driver's seat of the Benz.

"I may be out late," I warned him. "Is that okay? I know I have school tomorrow--"

He closed the door of the Benz and started the engine, already thinking of someone else.

2

My friends' beach parties were as starlit and romantic as the ones on TV and in movies, except there was no bonfire. Fires and bright lights weren't allowed on the beach because they disoriented the endangered sea turtles. Dozens of teenagers invaded the city beach park, guzzling beer in the sand and heavy-petting in the parking lot, but as long as they didn't mess with the turtles, nobody seemed to care.

I'd popped in and out of a few of these with my friends Keke and Lila when we were younger and didn't dare stay long at a party full of seniors. Now we were the seniors. I parked the Bug in the crowded lot near Keke and Lila's rusty Datsun and Brandon's laughably large 1980s Buick. I was curious, but I tried not to peer through a few steamed-up windows in familiar cars. Then I crossed the wooden bridge over the scrub and sand dunes to the beach.

Ours was not the only party. Circles of teenagers stood in the sand or sat on towels in the darkness, sipping beer. I recognized the Slide with Clyde party by Keke and Lila's laughter cackling above the roar of the ocean and the wails of a boy band on a radio. I kicked off my flip-flops at the foot of the wooden stairs, crossed the sand glowing white in the starlight, waded into the surf, and put one hand on each of their backs.

They turned around with wide eyes. "Zoey!" they both squealed at once as they rushed me, splashing water up on my shorts. They both jumped up and down and hugged me too but Lila stopped soon and gave me some air, whereas Keke did not let go until I said, "Okay," and pressed her shoulders to stop the bouncing. It was clear to me which one was drinking tonight and which was the designated driver. They were twins--not identical, but they might as well have been, the way they finished each other's sentences. They did look similar, both petite with bright red hair, but from there they diverged.

Keke put on the first clothes she found on the bedroom floor, whether they were hers or Lila's, dirty or clean. I had seen her do it. Lila handled the personal upkeep better, though she obsessed about it until she looked like a parody of a girl. Tonight her hair was hot-rolled and pinned and overfixed for a windy beach party. I had told them they both looked so extreme because they were trying to differentiate themselves from each other. If they'd relaxed and settled for the happy medium, even if that meant looking alike, boys would have asked them out more. They did not listen to me. If there had been one of them, they might have taken me seriously, but it was hard to give unsolicited advice to two people at once, because they could drown you out with protests. They told me they could never be as pretty as me, so my advice meant nothing. I started to explain that looking like I did took work, and my mother had taught me this in turn--but they shut me down.

Tonight it was impossible to tell there had ever been any tension or unwanted advice between us. "I can't believe you're here!" Keke squealed. "It took the whole summer, but for once the whole swim team is at the Slide with Clyde party!"

She gestured to the circle standing behind her--Stephanie Wetzel and the other three junior girls on the team, plus lots of boys. They all waved at me and called, "Zoey's here!"

"Wait," Keke said. "We gained you, but we lost--"

A distant boat horn cut her off. The lights of a fishing boat and their reflections skimmed parallel to each other across the blackness of the ocean and the sky.

"Doooooug!" the other swim team boys cheered and clapped from the darkness.

"Awww," Lila said, "Doug's with us in spirit."

"Is that really Doug?" I asked. Lost in thoughts of my mom, I'd almost forgotten seeing him an hour and a half ago at the emergency room. Now that anxiety came swirling back. At least if he was stuck on his dad's fishing boat, he wouldn't be showing up here tonight.

"Yep," Lila said. "He honks every time he misses a party for one of his dad's night charters."

"He was here earlier, though," Keke said, "searching for you, Zoey." She poked me on the breastbone. "Why does Doug hate you so much?"

I took a sharp sniff of ocean air. I'd known Doug wouldn't miss an opportunity for revenge on me.

"Doug doesn't hate her," Lila reprimanded Keke. "Don't freak her out." She turned to me. "Nobody hates you, Zoey. Who could hate you? You're so beautiful."

"And blond," Keke offered.

"And so sweet to all of us." Lila pursed her lips and reached up to pinch my cheek like I was a baby. "Besides, Doug hates everybody." Lila was trying to smooth over what Keke had stirred up.

Keke, as the tipsy one, was also the one who pressed the issue. "No, he stormed in here all dramatic and upset," Keke insisted. "There must be something up between the two of you. What is it?"

"Doug storms everywhere," Lila told Keke, "and he's always dramatic and upset."

I hoped Lila's explanation would satisfy Keke. Maybe I could change the subject to our chances at the swim meet next Saturday.

Then Gabriel splashed past us on his way to the beer stash against the dunes. "Zoooey!" He wrapped me in an alcoholic bear hug. "Doug was here looking for you earlier. What's up between you two?"

"Nothing!" we three girls said simultaneously.

"Ooooookay." Gabriel gave each of us a look that said he did not believe us, but he was so drunk that he would not remember this conversation in the morning. Then he let me go and splashed away.

The way the twins were watching me, I knew I wasn't getting out of this now without a better explanation.

In my mind I was back in my mother's bedroom, trying to fix everything. With two fingers I brushed her blond hair away from her closed eyes so she'd look better to the paramedics when they arrived.

I struggled out of those dark thoughts and back to the reality of the starlit beach, the sound of the ocean, and a shadowy Keke and Lila expecting answers. Of course I had told them my mom was having trouble dealing with the divorce, and I didn't want to leave her alone during the summer nights to come to the Slide with Clyde parties. I couldn't divulge more than this to them. My dad had warned me at the emergency room not to tell "those little twins" what my mother had done, and his instincts had been right. I loved Keke and Lila, but they were not discreet.

Luckily I had secrets to divulge that wouldn't touch on Doug seeing me at the emergency room. Doug had a lot of reasons to hate me. I had not wanted to admit this, even to them, because employee matters at Slide with Clyde were supposed to be private. But they were forcing my hand here, and keeping my mother's secret was more important than keeping Doug's. "He sent in an application for Slide with Clyde along with the rest of the swim team last May, and I told Ashley not to call him in because he's been to juvie. Those records are sealed, so she would have had no way of knowing without me telling her. He probably figured that out when everybody got hired but him."

Doug had spent part of ninth grade in juvie. People in our town did not go to juvie. I'd never heard of anyone else who'd been there. I didn't even know where juvie was. I would have suspected it didn't exist except I remembered when Doug missed two weeks of school to go there. Ever since, he was as likely to be in the principal's office as he was to be in class.

"What did you rat him out to Ashley for?" Lila asked. "He could have saved that three-hundred-pound man drowning in the wave pool instead of me."

Keke nodded. "And we could have stared at him shirtless all summer. God, those abs!"

I did not want to think about staring at Doug all summer. And I did not want to talk about this anymore. I turned toward the horizon, the black sky barely discernible from the black ocean, where Doug's fishing boat had disappeared.

But I could see out the corner of my eye that Keke and Lila both watched me, waiting for my answer as to why I had not wanted to give all of us the opportunity to stare at Doug's taut, tanned swimmer's chest all day every day for three summer months. Finally I stated the obvious, which logically should have overridden even teenage girl-lust: "He went to juvie. He's a criminal. I thought I should warn my family's business against employing a criminal."

"What did you think he was going to do," Keke asked, "embezzle funds? Did he go to juvie for embezzlement?"

"What
did
he go to juvie for?" Lila asked. "He was only in the ninth grade. What could he possibly have done?"

They were making me feel more and more sheepish. I wished I hadn't told them this after all. I wished I hadn't come to the party. "Look," I defended myself, "it wasn't the only job in town. I didn't go all over town and prevent him from getting a job anywhere."

"Yeah, but the job at Slide with Clyde was his only chance to get away from his dad this summer," Lila said, waving toward the spot we all gazed at now, where Doug was helping gung-ho tourists hold the line on big game fish beyond the horizon.

"I heard that from the guys on the swim team," she said. "Lifeguard jobs were the only jobs a teenager could get that paid more than his dad's fishing biz, and the pools around town were hiring college kids as lifeguards. It was Slide with Clyde or nothing for Doug."

"What was so bad about working with his dad?" I asked.

We all looked at each other, feet sinking in the sand underwater. A wave knocked Keke off balance and she braced herself against Lila, and still we were quiet. Possibly they were thinking what I was thinking: could Doug's situation with his dad be worse than mine?

I broke the silence. "Okay. For years there has been this weird tension between Doug and me because he asked me to homecoming in ninth grade, right before he went to juvie."

"He
did
?" Keke gasped.

"And you broke up with him because of that?" Lila asked, outraged.

"Of course not," I said. "He was just gone." I flicked my fingers in the air to show that he'd disappeared. "One day he was in junior varsity swim practice with me, hanging on to the side of the pool and asking if I'd go to homecoming with him. The next Monday he was gone. Around the middle of the week somebody had heard he was in juvie. By the time he came back to school a couple of weeks later, homecoming was over."

"He couldn't get a furlough to go to homecoming with you?" Keke asked.

"Not funny!" Lila told her.

"He never even mentioned it to me again," I said. "I went to homecoming with somebody else, and Doug came back from juvie angry at me. Or maybe he was angry at the world, but it felt like me. Y'all don't remember this, but before juvie, Doug wasn't prickly like he is now. Juvie made him prickly."

"I always thought his mother dying made him prickly," Lila said.

I had not forgotten Doug's mother had died in a car accident when we were in eighth grade. It was part of what kept girls staring at him longingly after he snapped at them. With tragedy in his past, they thought he must be vulnerable.

And come to think of it . . . maybe despite all the reasons Doug had to dislike me, he would honor my father's demand that he keep to himself what my mother had done, because he empathized with me. Perhaps I'd misread him at the emergency room--not surprising, considering my state of mind. When he'd started toward me, he hadn't intended to make a snide comment. He'd understood. This interpretation didn't jive with the way Doug had been acting for the past few years. But it did make sense when I thought of him in ninth grade, hanging onto the cement wall in the lane next to me during junior varsity swim practice, making a joke about our awful uniform bathing suits emblazoned with the ugliest dog mascot either of us had ever seen, and asking me to homecoming. His voice was soft and his smile was kind.

"No," I told Keke, "he wasn't prickly before juvie."

"There's something to this," Keke told Lila. "Doug rolls his eyes at everybody, but he has a special eye-roll whenever Zoey opens her mouth. Like this."

Her imitation was shockingly accurate. I laughed and slapped my hand over my mouth in horror at the same time.

"That is so true!" Lila exclaimed. "But I thought he did that because Zoey is cute." She turned to me. "Doug doesn't do cute."

Lila was right. Doug sympathizing with me rather than taking the opportunity to bring the rich girl down--that was wishful thinking, and no genie had granted me any wishes. I would have used them on something else.

"I wonder why he came looking for me here," I mused. "If he's come to these parties all summer, he knows I haven't been to one."

"He definitely thought you would be here." Lila shrugged. "Why
are
you here? How's your mom?"

"My mom," I said slowly, "is good for the rest of the night." In my mind I was back in her bedroom again. I straightened the covers on her bed and tucked her in more tightly, because she looked cold.

I'd come to the party to escape thoughts like this. Now that they'd chased me here, I might as well be home with my dad and Ashley. I felt like I was about to jump out of my skin, and I couldn't
stand
it.

"Zoey."

We jerked our heads toward the beach at the sound of a boy's voice, and all three of us relaxed our shoulders when we saw it wasn't Doug.

It was Brandon. One of the Slide with Clyde employees who wasn't on the swim team, he was the star of our school's football team and looked it, big, blond, and clean-cut like a cartoon superhero. He wasn't a lifeguard either. He sold ice cream and lifted things that were heavy. I'd asked him about this a few times because lifeguards got paid more than the workers at the concession stands. I could have gotten him promoted. He always brushed me off with a joke about staying out of the sun and preserving his complexion.

His lungs were another story. He cupped both hands around his cigarette to take a puff and keep it lit in the wind off the surf. Exhaling smoke, he said, "I heard you were here. I have to talk to you."

"Come into the water." Playfully I kicked a little splash at him.

"Come out of the water," he called. "I have to talk to you alone."

Lila leaned in and whispered, "Do you want us to distract him? He's had a lot of beer, and he's dangerous with that cigarette. He might light you on fire."