Songs Without Words (14 page)

“Hurt herself. Did she—not make it?”

Liz brought the little pillow to her face. She breathed in and out, the familiar smell of Tide. She said, “You knew she hurt herself?”

“Brody called me. He said you wanted him to tell me. Wait—you didn’t know that? That’s what you were going to tell me? And she’s—OK?”

“Brody called you?” Liz said.

Sarabeth was silent.

“When?”

“Yesterday,” Sarabeth whispered. “He left a message.”

“So you already knew.”

“I was going to call you.”

“But I beat you to it.”

“Yes.”

“I have to go,” Liz said, and she hung up the phone.

In seconds it rang, and for some reason she answered it. “I’m so sorry,” Sarabeth said. “I’m incredibly sorry. Can’t we talk? I don’t even know what happened to Lauren. What happened? How is she?”

“Here’s what happened,” Liz said. “She slit her wrists, took most of a bottle of Tylenol, and is now about to spend her first night in the psych ward of the hospital.”
And you knew for an entire day and didn’t call me.
“I can’t talk right now.”

“Liz.”

“I can’t talk right now. I can’t talk to you now.”

She hung up and lay back on the bed. She closed her eyes, then rolled onto her side. She felt for the little pillow, down near her hip where she’d left it; she brought it up and put it over her ear. Large pillow below her head, small above. She imagined a wedding cake, with her own sideways face in place of the middle layer. Something to slice.

13

S
arabeth opened her front door and stepped onto the porch. It was very cold, and she shivered and crossed her arms tightly over her chest, but she didn’t go back inside. She had wept and wept in there, moving from room to room, from couch to bed to floor. She had come out here to stop.

…slit her wrists, took most of a bottle of Tylenol…

Quickly, she crossed the porch and braced herself against the post. At the Heidts’, all the upstairs lights were on, and she focused on the bright windows, imagined Bonnie and Rick up there putting the children to bed. Chloe, Pilar, Isaac. Girl, girl, boy. At the Castleberrys’ it had been boy, girl, boy.

…slit her wrists……slit her wrists, took most of a bottle of…

She pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes and wiped them on her pants. She took a deep breath. There was wood smoke somewhere, faint and far away.

What had happened to Lauren? She remembered Lauren abruptly leaving her bedroom when the two of them were talking last time. She remembered thinking Lauren was dressing differently, that Lauren was a little spacey. And what did she do? Recommended a book. Recommended a book that had ultimately caused Lauren trouble. Oh, and had a small tantrum over the condition of the cheese rolls she’d brought.

She put her face to the cold post.
This isn’t about you,
she said to herself again, but it was baritone deep this time: wobbly, distorted, vanishing. She was worthless. All day today she had told herself she would call, but she had not called. All day today she had thought she should drive over with food, but she had not driven. And again, now, still: she wasn’t driving. Liz had saved her, saved her a thousand times over—it was the central truth of her life. Had it been inevitable that she would one day fail Liz?

A blade across the tender, pale skin. She pulled back her sleeve, felt the tendons where they surfaced close to her hand. Taut chords, strings on a violin. She found a tendon just to the side of the base of her throat and turned her head so she could pinch it between her fingers.

Lauren couldn’t have meant it. Liz couldn’t bear that.

Liz couldn’t bear this.

She made her way down the steps to the little scrap of walkway that led to the Heidts’ driveway. She paused. To her left was their garage, to her right their driveway and their car. The wind shifted, and she thought she felt a drop of rain on her forehead. She backed up and sat on her bottom step.

She should have taken food.

On Cowper Street, the day after her mother died, so many people brought so much food she couldn’t get it all into the refrigerator. She remembered finally giving up and just randomly stowing it: in cabinets, drawers, the cold oven. Then when people finally left, even Liz and her parents gone home, she retrieved the improperly stored dishes and scraped into the garbage creamy chicken and noodles; broccoli and rice; thick, tomatoey rafts of lasagne. She left the empty dishes in the sink until, in bed at last, she thought better of it and went back downstairs to wash them, thinking that she didn’t want her father to come upon them in the morning when he sought the small solace of a cup of coffee.

All this time later, all these years later. She brought her feet up and wrapped her arms around her shins, then lowered her forehead to her knees. After a while, she felt a drop of rain on her scalp, and then, some time later, another. She looked up again. Invisibly, barely audibly, it was raining. She heard it on the leaves, slow, and on the Heidts’ driveway. It hadn’t rained since yesterday morning, when she’d woken to the sound of it and had for a moment forgotten Billy, forgotten the long hours she’d spent thinking about him Saturday evening, Saturday afternoon, Friday night.

She longed to tell him about Lauren. Why?

Because she knew him, that was why. She knew what he would do. He would hold her, stroke her hair, make it easy to cry. The very things she’d failed to do for Liz.

14

L
auren had to get out—she had to get out. This was all such a mistake, such a nightmare. During breakfast she sat by herself and tried to think of how to explain that this was all wrong, and she tried not to look at the other kids. Her roommate, Abby, was across the room, at a table full of very thin girls. Abby was very, very thin, and though Lauren hadn’t asked, she knew Abby had an eating disorder. She was like a biology lesson on how little of the body was bone. Bone was all she was, and there wasn’t much of her. Her collarbones jutted, and her face looked like a drawing in a kids’ book, pointy, all nose and chin.

Lauren felt like a blimp. Sitting here, she felt her stomach bulge over her jeans, her ass spread across the seat of the chair. The food was horrible—dried-out scrambled eggs and canned fruit. Tonight she would order what she wanted to eat tomorrow; last night, her first, she’d stupidly refused today’s menu. Her wrists hurt, and the bandages were getting raggedy and gray. No one would have to wonder what she was doing here.

She had started taking an antidepressant. You had to build up to the full dose, and there were side effects sometimes and then you tried something else. Nausea could be one. Light-headedness. Those were things she experienced anyway, though, so how would she know? Also, what was it supposed to do? Her life was her life.

After breakfast there was a meeting led by the nurse Lauren had talked to when she arrived, Kitsy. She was this short, round woman with glasses and incredibly frizzy hair. After this meeting, Lauren was going to tell her she was in the wrong place.

Kitsy had everyone pull their chairs into a circle—twelve girls and five boys. It was so much like a movie Lauren wanted to laugh. Besides Kitsy, there were a couple other adults—mental health workers—and Lauren couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to work in a place like this.

Lauren was between Abby and a guy with curly hair. He smiled at her, and there was something about him: something not quite matching between his eyes and the rest of him. She looked away.

“Some of you have met Lauren,” Kitsy said. “She arrived yesterday.” Kitsy smiled at Lauren, and Lauren’s cheeks burned. Turning to a girl with bleached streaks in her hair and inch-long, grown-out roots, Kitsy said, “Would you like to start?”

“Whatever,” the girl said with a shrug. She had heavy black eyeliner circling her eyes and a silver stud in her lower lip. She smiled a weird, almost sexy smile at Kitsy. “I’m Callie,” she said.

“What’s your goal for today?”

“Talk to my foster mom, I guess.”

“That was your goal yesterday,” said a guy across the room.

“Bite me.”

There was a silence, and Lauren waited to see if Callie would get in trouble for this. There were time-outs here, and there was also a reward system for good behavior, like if you were good you could go to the cafeteria and choose your own pukey food.

“Morgan?” Kitsy said as she looked at a big-boned girl with stringy white-blond hair.

“I want my sister to visit me.”

Something ran around the group, shock or something.

“Can your sister visit you?” Kitsy said.

Morgan stared into the center of the circle. As Lauren watched, her face changed: it went from blank, to scared and miserable, to blank again.

“Your sister can’t visit you,” said another girl in a sort of pissy way.

Morgan looked at Kitsy. “I know.”

“It’s very painful,” Kitsy said, and then there was a long silence. Lauren wondered why Morgan’s sister couldn’t visit her. Maybe Morgan had done something awful to her.

“Do you have a more realistic goal?” Kitsy said.

Morgan shook her head, which seemed to be permissible; the next girl ran a hand through her incredibly short, boyish hair and began to speak.

“I’m Casey,” she said, “and one of my problems is I cut myself.” She paused and stared right at Lauren’s wrists, and Lauren felt her face burn. “I’m working,” she continued, “on why I do that. My goal today is to talk to my doctor about it some more.”

Kitsy nodded at Casey and then looked at the guy next to her, a tall, skinny beanpole with greasy black hair hanging to his shoulders. He said he was going to try not to listen to his voices, and Lauren’s stomach lurched: there were crazy people here. What a moron she was, being surprised by this. The guy blinked and then looked into his lap and picked at his thumbnail. The curly-haired guy was next, and then it would be Lauren’s turn, and she had to figure out how to tell them that this was a mistake, that she shouldn’t be here.

The curly-haired guy said, “I’m Lucas, and I’m going to try not to punch the wall.” A half laugh ran around the circle, as if he actually might punch the wall, and he turned to Lauren and gave her a bright smile. He was sort of cute, in a totally un-Jeff-like way.

Kitsy looked at Lauren. “Would you like to tell us about yourself?”

Lauren shook her head.

“You have to say something,” said Casey, the short-haired, cut-herself girl. She was staring at Lauren’s wrists again.

“This is a mistake,” Lauren said. “I shouldn’t be here, I didn’t mean to do anything.”

“Yes, you did,” Casey said.

Lauren got up and started toward the hallway leading to the bedrooms, but one of the adults, a guy with black nerd glasses, caught up with her.

“Hey,” he said, not exactly like
hey you
hey, but not exactly hi. She stopped.

“I shouldn’t be here,” she said. “I shouldn’t.”

“A lot of kids feel that way at first.”

“Yeah, well
I shouldn’t.
”

“The thing is, you are.”

She looked down, and to her horror tears streamed from her eyes.

“It feels terrible, doesn’t it?”

Lauren put her face in her hands and sobbed.

“This is our morning check-in,” he said. “You don’t have to say anything you don’t want to say, but I need you to come back to the circle.”

It was the longest day of Lauren’s life. After the meeting there was school, and the woman in charge said she was going to call Lauren’s teachers to see what Lauren should be working on, which made Lauren cry again. Her school couldn’t know! Did everyone in the world have to know? She’d made a mistake. She hadn’t even meant it. The other kids looked at her and whispered.

At lunch Lucas sat next to her and talked almost nonstop—about his schoolwork, his friends, his whatever. His T-shirt said
GOT COCAINE?
but the
COCAINE
had been markered the same color as the shirt, dark blue, and it almost didn’t show up. His shirt looked like
GOT
———? and it only made you want to get closer to see what he was hiding.

“Are you allowed to wear that?” Lauren said.

“We’re working on it.”

“My mom would never let my brother wear a shirt like that.”

“No, here,” he said. “We’re working on it here. I have substance abuse issues,” he added, sort of sarcastically but also like he meant it. “I have bipolar disorder.”

After lunch there was another group thing, and Lauren tried to make herself invisible. This was something she’d been good at for a long time—she was almost completely invisible at school—but here they wouldn’t leave her alone. She told them the truth, that nothing was wrong, and Casey, whom she now hated, said, “Yes, it is.” Fucking bitch, Lauren thought, but it was different from thinking Aimee Berman was a fucking bitch, because with Casey—Casey staring at Lauren, staring at her wrists—there was something weird, like she didn’t just think Lauren was a loser, she actually wanted to prove it.

Some kids went to do yoga, but Dr. Porter wanted to see Lauren, which was a relief because there was no way Lauren was doing yoga. In the other part of the hospital Dr. Porter had talked to Lauren for a while, and to Lauren’s parents, and she’d said she would see Lauren again here in the psycho ward, but now she was introducing Lauren to someone else, Dr. Lewis, and he was going to “treat” Lauren. Dr. Porter was old, like sixty, and she had gray hair that fell to her shoulders and little gold glasses and a white coat. Dr. Lewis was a lot younger, though he had little gold glasses, too, and a white coat, too.

“We’ll find a place to talk,” he said to Lauren, and she shrugged, because what else, that was all anyone did around here. They went into a little room. She was feeling really tired, and when this was over she was going to her room to rest. “Room time,” someone had called it at lunch. One of the thin girls, but Lauren couldn’t remember her name. In fact, there were way too many people here, and Lauren didn’t care what their names were, she just had to get out.

“I’m hoping to help you,” Dr. Lewis said once they were seated at a table. “I’m guessing you’ve been in a lot of pain.”

Lauren looked at the door. There was a little window in it, with a wire grid dividing it into tiny squares. The big windows behind her were covered by bars. All the windows to the outside were covered by bars.

“Lauren?” he said.

“It was a mistake. I didn’t mean to do it.”

“Do it?”

“You know.” She looked at him, but he just sat there waiting. “What I did,” she said, and she lifted her bandaged arms from the table and then let them down again.

“What did you do?”

Of all the fucking things, why was he torturing her? She moved her arms to her lap. “As if you didn’t know.”

He made a steeple with his forefingers. “I know what I heard about,” he said, “but I don’t know what you experienced. I don’t know how you would describe it.”

He was a freak. How she would “describe” it? Then again, if she told him, if she just said the words, could she go?

“I slit my wrists,” she said, bringing her arms up from her lap and laying them on the table again. “And I took some pills.”

“How did you slit them?”

“With an X-Acto knife.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s like a craft knife,” she said, not believing how weird this was. “Kind of like a box cutter, only smaller, with a smaller blade.”

“Do you know why you slit your wrists and took some pills?”

“I didn’t mean to.”

“You must have been feeling pretty bad.”

“No, I wasn’t,” she said, and she burst into tears and buried her face in her hands. “I wasn’t, I wasn’t!” She let herself go, and now she cried and cried. This fuckhead looking at her, the nurses, the other kids. Everything was completely screwed. She was completely screwed. Last Friday at breakfast, when she said she wasn’t going to school—why hadn’t her mom said she had to?

Liz should have told Lauren she had to go to school last Friday. She should have seen, that day when Lauren was so upset about her English paper, that Lauren was in serious trouble. She should have understood, the first morning Lauren stayed home, that something was really wrong.

She was in the kitchen cleaning out the cabinets. She hadn’t cleaned them in months, or possibly decades. Out came everything, boxes of cereal and cans of tomatoes and coffee mugs and honeycomb candles and beer glasses and dinner plates, and Liz scrubbed the shelves with sponges and 409. Joe was at soccer; Brody was trimming the ivy on the back fence. In an hour they would have an early dinner, the nature of which she couldn’t fathom at this moment, and then she and Brody would go visit Lauren. Without Joe. “It’s better,” Dr. Porter had said, “if siblings don’t have to see the ward. It can be pretty upsetting for them.”

Joe had asked again about going to her parents’ on Thanksgiving, and it had been decided that all three of them would go, and that her mother would make roast beef. It was so absurd Liz wanted to scream. Why was roast beef OK and turkey not? Yet it had been her idea, her compromise. Everything was twisted. Life was full of pretense. How she felt now, the oddness of going on living when it seemed you shouldn’t be able to: it was a little like how she’d felt after 9/11. Each morning that fall she’d pored over the
Times,
reading the newest news and then, when she could no longer avoid it, poring over the “Portraits of Grief” and weeping. The house empty, everyone gone: she did this only when she was alone. Weeping and weeping and weeping. And then folding the paper closed and somehow, impossibly, going about her day. She hadn’t been flying those planes, though. What she’d felt then was pure: pure grief. She hadn’t been flying this plane, either—she’d basically abandoned the controls and taken a seat at the back of the cabin, by the window, through which she’d gazed idly at the passing scenery, not a care in the world—and what she felt now was impure grief, polluted, hellish. She squirted 409 on a bare shelf and attacked the grime as if it were her very self.

Later, at the hospital, Lauren rushed to hug her. She was in hysterics by the time Liz let go. They sat in a corner of the lounge, and Lauren begged through her tears to be taken home. “It was a mistake,” she kept saying. “It was a mistake.”

“Sweetie,” Liz said. “It won’t be for very long. Tell us how it’s going.”

“Everyone hates me.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Because it’s true!” Lauren cried, and she bowed her head and sobbed harder.

Across Lauren’s bent shape, Brody gave Liz an opaque look, and she thought: What? What do you want me to do?

“Did you talk to Dr. Porter?” she asked Lauren.

Lauren straightened up again. “She put me with a different doctor. A man.” The look on her face changed. “Why did you let me stay home?” She turned to Brody and cried, “You’re the one who said school was required!” Then she stood and bolted from the room, and one of the nurses gave Liz a sad smile and followed after her.

“God,” Brody said.

They leaned back in their chairs. Across the room, a girl with very short hair was looking at Liz.

Suddenly her cell phone rang, and she pulled it from her purse to shut it up. It was
SARABETH HOME
, for the third time in the last several hours, and she hit
SILENCE
and then turned the phone off. Sarabeth had called this morning, and they’d talked for a while, but that was all Liz could take. Of course this was hard for Sarabeth—Lauren making a suicide attempt, even a suicide gesture? It was impossible. But Liz
didn’t have time for that right now.