Last Summer (15 page)

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Authors: Holly Chamberlin

BOOK: Last Summer
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20
J
ane pulled open the door to the dishwasher and slid her empty cup into the top rack. Her afternoon cup of strong black tea was a habit she couldn’t imagine giving up. Her dental hygienist routinely scolded her as she worked to remove tea stains from her front teeth, but Jane was adamant. It was, she countered, her only vice. She had never smoked and she had given up drinking alcohol during the years she had struggled with getting and staying pregnant. Afterward, even a glass of wine with dinner held no appeal.
She began to close the door of the dishwasher when she spotted, on the other side of the top rack, two tall glasses, the bottoms of which were coated with what could only be chocolate milk. She wondered. Maybe Mike had come home for lunch or to pick up something he had forgotten to take to the office. Well, even if he had, that didn’t explain the chocolate milk. Mike was lactose intolerant.
Jane heard Rosie coming into the kitchen and swiftly closed the door to the dishwasher. She turned to face her daughter and hoped her voice wouldn’t betray her internal turmoil and suspicion. “Rosie?” she said. “There are two glasses in the dishwasher. Both have the remains of chocolate milk.”
“So?” Rosie replied with a shrug. “You told me not to leave dirty dishes and glasses in the sink.”
“I’m not worried about that. Was someone else here while I was out?”
Rosie’s didn’t answer at once. Instead she went to the sink and poured a glass of filtered water. “Are you spying on me?” she finally asked.
“Of course not,” Jane protested. “I just want to know if someone came over while I was at the store. I know you would never let in a stranger, so—”
“Meg was here.” Jane could not ignore the note of defiance in her daughter’s voice.
“Oh,” she said calmly, though the flash of anger that coursed through her was intense. She had told Frannie to keep Meg away from her daughter! She had demanded it.
“We’ve been talking a bit lately,” Rosie went on.
“Oh.”
“You don’t sound very happy about it.”
Jane thought that sounded like an accusation. She attempted a little laugh. “Well, I—I’m just surprised, that’s all.” Shocked was more like it.
“I thought you would be proud of me,” Rosie said. “You’re always talking about forgiveness.”
“I know, and I am proud of you, of course I am.” Jane put her hand on Rosie’s shoulder and felt her daughter tense. She took her hand away.
“Then what’s wrong?” Rosie asked.
Be careful, Jane,
she thought.
Don’t blow this conversation.
“Nothing’s wrong,” she said. “Rosie, how do you feel about Meg? Do you want to be friends with her again?”
Rosie paused for a long moment before replying. “I don’t know,” she said. “I think so.”
“As long as you don’t feel forced to do anything you don’t want to do, that’s all that matters.”
“No one is forcing me to do anything,” Rosie said carefully. “I make my own decisions.”
That, Jane thought, was Dr. Lowe’s doing. “Good,” she said.
Rosie picked up a home decorating magazine from the counter and began to flip through its pages.
Jane busied herself with making another cup of tea. The occasion seemed to call for it. She took a fresh cup from the hanging rack and a tea bag from the canister underneath. She poured filtered water into the teakettle and waited for the water to boil. And while she waited, she surreptitiously watched Rosie browsing through the magazine.
Whatever Rosie thought, Jane wished that she, too, could feel confident that Meg was truly sorry. She wished she could fully trust her. How exactly did you encourage your daughter to forgive while at the same time to exercise caution? Real friendship required absolute trust and was incompatible with doubt. Jane didn’t expect easy answers, but she very much wanted them.
But wanting something didn’t mean getting it, like her desire to keep Meg away from Rosie. That wish hadn’t been granted, as maybe it was fated not to be. If you believed in such things, and Jane did though she wouldn’t admit as much to her husband, you might say there was a powerful force working to bring the two families back together whether they liked it or not. Witness what had taken place the day before.
She had gone to Mike’s office to pick him up (his car was in the shop). His assistant was gone for the day, as was the family practitioner who worked from the office across the hall. Perhaps taking advantage of their being totally alone, perhaps suffering from a guilty conscience, Mike had told her that he had approached Frannie about spending time with Petey. Jane was furious with him for having talked to Frannie in the first place, as well as for having kept the conversation a secret from her for so long. Mike retaliated with his knowledge of her having kept from him the fact that she had demanded Frannie keep Meg away from Rosie.
The argument had rapidly escalated into one of the worst, most cruel fights of their marriage. Jane had accused Mike of being a dishonest husband and he had accused her of being a negligent mother. The fight had ended with Jane in tears and Mike stony and silent. If Rosie had noticed her mother’s eyes later that evening, still slightly swollen and red, she had kept quiet about it.
They had apologized sincerely but were both still a bit tender. It seemed that the process of reconciliation had unexpected pitfalls and could cause collateral damage. Somehow, if only for a short while, Jane and Mike had become enemies, fighting on opposing sides of the war that was supposed to be about the two neighboring families. Well, war never made sense and there never was a winner, not really.
Jane took a box of imported Italian cookies out of the pantry; tea with a cookie was more comforting than tea without one. She wondered now if Rosie had told Meg about the cutting. Maybe Rosie hadn’t yet told her but was planning on it. What if Meg repeated her original crime and told those horrible girls Rosie’s latest secret? That kind of a betrayal could be disastrous.
Jane glanced at her daughter. She wondered if she should suggest that Rosie not mention the cutting to Meg. But maybe her saying nothing at all about the issue was best. She didn’t want to put ideas in her daughter’s head, certainly not bad ones. And for the past few months, she thought, so many of her ideas had been bad ones.
The teakettle began to whistle and Jane poured the boiling water into her cup.
“I was thinking about making omelettes for dinner,” she said then. “I bought some nice fresh goat cheese and I’ve got a big bunch of tarragon from the farmers’ market. What do you think?”
Rosie nodded and closed the magazine. “It sounds good.”
Jane smiled and watched Rosie leave the kitchen. If spending time with Meg was going to revive her daughter’s appetite, it couldn’t be an entirely bad thing.
Jane went to the fridge and began to gather ingredients for dinner. Whether she wanted it to happen or not, it seemed that progress was being made toward restoring some degree of emotional closeness between the Patterson and Giroux families. Jane brought the container of goat cheese and the bunch of tarragon to the butcher-block cutting board. She thought again of Mike and of how he wanted to be there for Petey. She supposed it couldn’t hurt to talk to her husband again, especially in light of the development between Rosie and Meg, especially in the aftermath of their own dreadful fight. She really did want to make amends. Mike would be glad that she was trying to be more open and generous. He was a lot more courageous a person than she was, that was for sure. It was one of the primary reasons she had married him, his strength of character. Jane had always felt that she needed more protection from the world than most people. Mike provided that protection. She didn’t know what she would do without him.
Jane took a bite of the cookie—hazelnut—and a sip of tea. Yes, she would tell Mike that she was okay with his spending time with Petey. She pretty much had to. But that didn’t mean she wanted anything to do with his mother. Not yet. Maybe never.
Time would have to tell.
21
March 2012
Dear Diary,
A lot of girls are still ignoring me, but Laura Burdett said hi to me in the hall today. I was expecting her to walk right past me again, like she’s been doing for weeks now, but she didn’t. She actually stopped and said hi. She seemed kind of nervous, like maybe she was expecting me to be mad and yell at her or something for the way she’s been treating me. But I just said hi back and continued to walk to my locker. She didn’t actually apologize, but I think that’s what she meant by stopping when she said hello.
I suppose I should care or be grateful that she said hello, but I feel too dead to feel anything. That doesn’t make sense. I am too dead to feel anything. Anything besides despair. But if you’re really dead, if your lungs aren’t breathing and your heart isn’t pumping, you’re beyond despair. You’re beyond happiness, too, but I’m already beyond happiness. So what’s the big deal about death?
I was wondering. Maybe Mackenzie isn’t behind all the bad stuff that has been happening to me. Or maybe she was, but now there’s someone else who hates me just as much as she does. It seems entirely possible that someone else hates me.
Meg is acting odd around me, too. She hardly looks at me when we’re together and at lunch she eats in about a minute and then says she forgot something in her locker or needs to finish homework and goes off to the library or wherever it is she really goes.
I think she’s afraid that if she hangs out with me too much, Mackenzie and the rest are going to start tormenting her, too. Part of me can’t blame her, I guess. I’m such a loser. I don’t know why Meg ever wanted to be my friend in the first place. I wouldn’t be surprised if she dumped me.
Social contagion. That term just popped into my head. I don’t remember where I heard it, but I think it means when being around a certain person makes other people consider you the same as that person. Maybe that’s not really the definition, but that’s what Meg’s probably afraid of, being considered a loser like me. I am socially contagious, like the lepers in the Bible. I don’t know much about the Bible, but I know about the lepers. Everybody does.
I got another A in history and an A+ in English. Ms. Brown says I’m the best student she’s ever had. At least I can handle schoolwork without being a failure. And as long as I keep getting good grades, Mom and Dad won’t bother me with questions about how I’m feeling. I’m fine! I can say. I’m getting all As! What could possibly be wrong?
I really, really don’t want to play the piano anymore, but I know if I tell that to Mom and Dad they’ll both be sad, especially Dad, who always says he wished someone had given him piano lessons when he was a kid. I guess his family didn’t have any money to spare. Mom had a doctor’s appointment this afternoon and I told her I practiced while she was out. I feel bad about lying to her, but I don’t know what else to do. I just couldn’t bring myself to play a single note.
How did everything get so bad? I feel like everything is totally out of my control. Except for when I cut and then, for about a minute, I feel almost okay. But then the minute passes and everything is chaos again. I wonder if I’m addicted to cutting. I don’t know if you can be addicted to it. But it can be so hard not to do it.
I am so sad all the time, every single moment of the day. I can’t even cry. I want to but I can’t.
Sometimes, I just want to go to sleep and not wake up. Beyond despair.
 
March 2012
Dear Diary,
Something really stupid happened. I mean, I did something really stupid.
It was an accident, I swear, I wasn’t trying to kill myself. I was nowhere near a vein. I don’t think I was. My hand just—I don’t know, I pressed harder than usual, I guess. I don’t really know how it happened, but it did. There was blood everywhere. It got all over my jeans and there was a big splash on one of the towels.
I almost passed out. I’ve always been squeamish. When I got my ears pierced when I was twelve I couldn’t bear to change my earrings for almost a year. Mom had to do it. Anyway, luckily both Mom and Dad were out—Dad was already at his office and Mom had a dentist appointment—because I was in the bathroom for almost twenty minutes and if either of them had been home they might have found out about everything. I got the bleeding to stop and smeared antibiotic cream all over the cut and put a big bandage over it. I hope no one sees the outline of it through my sleeve. I’ll have to wear my loosest blouses for a while.
I packed the stained washcloths and the towel and the bandage wrappers into a plastic bag and stuffed the bag in my backpack. I threw the plastic bag into a Dumpster a few blocks from school. (I had to make up an excuse not to walk or take the bus to school with Meg. I don’t even remember what I told her, and it was only this morning. Maybe I’m losing my mind. Anyway, she didn’t seem to care about walking or taking the bus alone.)
I don’t know what will happen when Mom notices that the washcloths and the towel are gone. Maybe she won’t notice. If she does I’ll have to tell another lie and say that I don’t know what happened to them. It will really bother her that stuff just disappeared from the bathroom and she’ll search everywhere and drive herself crazy. I feel bad about that, but I just can’t tell her the truth.
All day long I thought about what I would have said if someone had caught me. How would I have explained what I was doing? There is no way I could ever explain why I do what I do. My parents would be so horribly embarrassed I would have to run away or do something even more desperate. I still can’t stop thinking about being caught. I should but I can’t.
But I am going to make a declaration. That was the last time I’m ever cutting. Ever. I got so scared when I saw all the blood. I almost threw up, too. I will never, ever do this again. I can’t. Please, don’t let me! Please, if there is a god like Mrs. Giroux says there is, then maybe you can help me.
I think I’m going crazy. Is my life always going to be this way? Is it always going to be so bad? Because if it is, I just don’t know how I can survive. I’m not brave or strong like other people. I’m just not.
I’m going to go to bed now. I know I won’t sleep but I am so, so tired.

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