Keep Your Mouth Shut and Wear Beige (29 page)

But we eventually got ourselves and our unifying diagonals there. Zack and Finney were in slacks and blazers with ties carefully knotted by Mr. Finney himself.

“Cami is here for one hour,” Rose said firmly. “Her friends are arriving later today, and she needs to catch her breath. Jeremy is coming to get her in sixty minutes.”

“Oh, it won’t take that long,” Claudia said.

But it did.

The session was easy for me. The unifying diagonals on my dress were at my back or at the hem. In every pose, my back was to the camera or I was climbing up a staircase with my hem visible behind someone else’s ear. My makeup job was wasted. I’m not sure that my face was in a single picture, and that was also fine with me.

But Cami was already weary from the session at the house; her smiles were stiff and frozen, and within minutes Rose’s were as well. This made Finney uneasy. He wanted to hold Rose’s hand and press close to her. Unfortunately, her unifying diagonal was a wide line of ivory crossing down the front of her deep chocolate dress. Whenever Finney got close to her, he interrupted the diagonal.

“I thought these people had modeling experience,” the photographer grumbled to his assistant, not caring if we heard.

Claudia had worked hard on these dresses and this article meant the world to her, but nobody else cared. I thought longingly about a clambake on the beach.

Jeremy came to pick up Cami, and the manager took that as a sign to start dismantling the table.

“No, no,” Claudia protested. She didn’t have the shots she wanted.

“You were supposed to be done at one thirty,” he said. “They got here at one thirty.”

“But—” Claudia had obviously been about to say that that wasn’t her fault, but she knew that wouldn’t change anything. A waiter picked up the centerpiece and tried to give it to her. She shook her head, refusing to take it.
No, no, I’m not done, it’s not right yet. It’s not perfect.

Zack stepped forward and took the centerpiece.

“We still have tomorrow night,” Rose reminded her. “These were only the supplements for those.”

But nothing was perfect yet, and it had to be perfect. “What about taking some outside?” she asked the photographer.

“Sure, but it will take me a couple of minutes to set up.”

Claudia went out to scout sites. The photographer and his assistant began gathering their equipment.

Zack was still holding the centerpiece. “I guess I’ll go put this in the car. Hey, dude, do you want to come?” he said to Finney. “You can carry this thing for me.”

Finney detached himself from Rose’s side and put out his hands for the centerpiece. He concentrated hard as he walked, not wanting to spill any of the water. A minute later Zack returned, glancing over his shoulder, obviously keeping his eye on Finney.

“Finney wants to wait in the car. Is it okay? I’ll roll down the windows and make sure that we can always see the car. And he wants to know if he can take his blazer off.”

Rose nodded a
yes
to all those questions, and she and I followed Zack back outside. Claudia and the photographers were setting up under a linden tree.

Even though the photographer had to know that Claudia’s goal was to get group shots, he called Annie over to pose by herself. Zack went back to the cars to hang out with Finney. Claudia hovered near the photographer while Rose and I went to sit on a pretty wrought-iron bench, but then we remembered our dresses and so we stood.

The photographer was telling Annie to concentrate, to focus.

Rose’s cell phone rang. It was Guy. She put the phone on speaker so I could hear. I had to move close; as pretty as this garden was, we were close to the highway, and the summer traffic made a lot of noise.

Guy reported that the flower situation had been resolved.

For about twenty minutes, the florist had declared herself off the job, which had not flustered Guy in the least. “She was bluffing,” Guy said, “because she thought I was. But I wasn’t.”

“What would we have done if she hadn’t been bluffing?” Rose asked. “What if we hadn’t had a florist?”

“We would have figured something out,” he said cheerfully.

I leaned forward. “Do you have interns who can arrange flowers?”

He laughed. “If they couldn’t today, they’d be able to by tomorrow.”

Rose was thanking him when the photographer’s sharp voice drew our attention.

“You aren’t concentrating!” he snapped at Annie. “You aren’t—”

Rose flipped her phone shut and stepped forward. “I think we’re done here.”

“No, Mom.” Annie pressed her fingers to her forehead for a moment. “I can do this. I can.” Then she looked at her fingers and realized she had makeup on them. “Just let me wipe off my hands and get a drink of water.”

“I’ll get you some,” Claudia said, clearly relieved that Annie was willing to continue.

Annie found her purse, took a tissue out, and then, when Claudia brought her the water, put something in her mouth first.

She noticed me watching her. “It was a piece of candy,” she explained, sounding almost guilty. “I thought a little sugar would help.”

“It probably will,” I agreed.

She went back to work. Rose and I continued to watch. “Annie’s being such a good sport,” I said softly.

“I’m so proud of her. And look at Zack . . . he’s being so great with Finney.”

That was true. Finney was sitting in the backseat of Rose’s Mercedes, but Zack had squatted in front of the open door, and they were obviously doing something together. Last fall Zack had been uncomfortable around Finney; now he treated him with an easy brotherliness.

“That’s a little better.” The photographer had moved Annie closer to the tree. “But get some energy in those eyes.”

Rose turned her back. “I can’t watch this. Give me something else to think about.” It was the first time since California that she’d spoken to me without constraint.

“I’m burnt out on my job.”

I don’t know where that came from. I hadn’t intended to say that. It had just come out.

Rose was as surprised as I was. “At the hospital?” she asked. “How do you know? What are the signs?”

“Oh, you know . . .” I felt like a jerk. What a horrible time to bombard her with my problems. “The usual.”

“Have you stopped caring?”

She wasn’t being polite. She was interested and engaged. Maybe this wasn’t such a bad time. She was probably sick of being a mediocre event planner and ready to do something she had once been very good at—friendship.

“Actually, it’s that I’ve started to care about the wrong things.”

I explained about the machine and the monitors and how, in a crisis, that’s what I thought about, not the patients. “I’m not sure I can wall myself off like that anymore,” I explained. “I’m afraid I’m going to start loving ninety percent of the patients and hating the other ten.”

“I couldn’t sleep sometimes if Guy couldn’t place a manuscript that I loved, but if that manuscript had been someone else’s child . . .” Rose shook her head. “How concerned are you?”

“If I let myself think about it, I’d probably be scared out of
my mind. I can’t imagine myself not working in a hospital. But I’ve got to figure something out. I can’t be doing this until I’m sixty-five, it’s too demanding physically.”

“What are your options?”

I told her about wanting to get more involved in nursing education, but that I would need a Ph.D. “I could do the course work, and I might like the research, but writing a dissertation?” I shook my head. “I don’t see how I could close myself up in a room and do nothing but write for months and months. That really scares me.”

“It doesn’t have to be that bad.”

“That’s easy for you to say.”

“Yes, I’m good at that sort of thing. And that’s what’s going to make it easier for you. I can save you weeks and weeks by making you stick with a decent writing process. If your outline’s solid, you can draft quickly. Then it will just be the sentence-level revisions, and that’s really fun.”

“Is it?”

“To me it is. And don’t ask me if I would do this. I would be happy to start this very second. Where’s a pen? Do you have a pen?”

“Don’t act like it’s a joke,” I protested. “If you really can schoolmarm me through this, then I may have a future.”

“I’m very serious. I love working with people on their writing . . . or at least I used to.”

Zack’s normal writing style was stilted, and the early drafts of his college essays had been nearly unreadable. The ideas were the same in the final draft, but he had manage to sound like himself. The essays were relaxed and natural with his dry wit coming through just as it did when you were talking to him.

Last Thanksgiving he had spent an afternoon in the library with Guy; they were supposed to be unpacking books. At the end
of the weekend, few books had been unpacked, but Zack’s essays were complete. I’d never asked, but I’d assumed that Zack’s essays sounded so much like Zack because Guy had rewritten them.

So if Guy could do that for my kid, Rose could do it for me. It really could work. I could become “Dr. Van Aiken” before Jeremy did.

“You’re not looking at anything.” It was the photographer again, barking instructions to Annie. “You’re not trying.”

Rose and I looked up, and in an instant we were moving. Something was wrong with Annie, very wrong. She was flushed, swaying. I reached her first. I caught her, my fingers automatically seeking the artery in her wrist. Her pulse was racing so fast. I didn’t like it.

“This isn’t my fault,” the photographer cried. “You can’t blame me for this.”

“Annie.” I took her shoulders, forcing her to look at me. “When you went to your purse, what did you take?”

“A Tylenol.”

She’d said it was a piece of candy. “No, no, it wasn’t.”

Her eyes darted toward Rose.

When will kids learn that there are far, far worse things than having their parents find out what they’ve done?

Rose was automatically, instinctively trying to take Annie in her arms. Any mother would have. But I lifted my hand, stopping her. Her face was pinched, and her eyes, brown with those green flecks, were anxious. I tried to send them a message:
You have to trust me.

She blinked . . . but then she didn’t even ask what was wrong. “What can I do?”

“Get lots of water and a bucket or bowl. I think she’s accidentally ingested something.”

Zack had come racing across the parking lot. I held up my left
hand clawlike, as if I were gripping a phone, and punched at it three times with my right forefinger.
Call 911.

He understood. He was pulling his phone out of his pocket.

I eased Annie to the ground. “Okay, sweetie, it’s just you and me. I’m not going to get mad, but I need to know what you took.”

“He told me to concentrate, to focus . . . so one of those pills I got at school . . . from the other kids . . . it was my last one. . . .”

Suddenly it made sense—sickening, horrifying sense. I knew why she’d done so well during the last weeks of school. She’d had meds. But if there’d been a proper diagnosis, I would have heard. “Annie, have you been buying ADD medications?”

“For school . . . not to get high, just for school.”

She must have overheard Rose and me at the hotel after graduation. She must have heard me say that I thought she had ADD.

“And what was this one?” I couldn’t think of any ADD med that would cause a reaction like this.

“I don’t know . . . I checked the others on the Internet, but I couldn’t find this one. . . . that’s why I didn’t take it.”

“What did it look like?”

“Pink . . . and round, a pill. Kind of big. Pinker than the Adderall.”

A lot of pills were round and pink. Birth control pills, but they were small and wouldn’t cause such a reaction. Amitriptyline, aripiprazole . . . I wasn’t sure, but maybe they would. Amitriptyline is a tricyclic antidepressant; aripiprazole is an antipsychotic. I didn’t know enough about it.

Rose came back with bottles of water and a big bowl. “Is she going to be okay?”

“Yes, but I think she should go to the ER. Zack’s called an ambulance.” I put the bottle up to Annie’s mouth and tilted her head back, forcing the water down her throat. It was cherry-flavored and smelled sickly sweet.

“Can you make yourself throw up?” I asked.

She shook her head. “No . . . I’ve tried .. . some girls at school do it every day.”

“Try. Chug some water and try. Hit the bowl if you can.” The emergency room might want to analyze her stomach contents.

She bent over the bowl. She coughed and gagged, but didn’t regurgitate. Rose knelt next to her, scooping her hair out of the way.

People had gathered around: Zack, Claudia, the restaurant manager, and Finney, little Finney. He was terrified. His eyes were wide, and his face was so pale that his freckles stood out.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” I snapped at Claudia, “take him inside. He doesn’t need to see this.”

Annie gagged again and then gave up, collapsing against Rose. “Oh, Mom . . . I don’t feel good.”