The Winters in Bloom (18 page)

This was what she’d come to ask the psychic. The doctor had assured her that premature ovarian failure wasn’t life-threatening; it didn’t mean the rest of her body was failing, too. But she still felt like something serious was going wrong inside of her. Her heart had settled down a little, but she felt herself disconnecting from the earth, day by day, even hour by hour, and she just wanted someone to tell her how long she had. Before she died, she had to talk to David. She needed to hear him say, “I forgive you,” even if she had to beg for the words.

“No, dear,” the psychic said. “Because you’re going to live.”

Her smile was so gentle. If it was also a little patronizing, Courtney didn’t notice. She wouldn’t have cared anyway. If the psychic thought her fears were ridiculous, then maybe they really were.

When she got home, she put on her pajamas, flopped down on the couch, and turned on the TV; then she flipped the channel until she found
Law & Order: Criminal Intent
. The show was her obsession since she’d lost her job, but she’d seen every episode many times. It wasn’t distracting enough to keep her from thinking about what the psychic had predicted. Was it possible that it was true? Her life wasn’t over? She wasn’t about to die? She recognized the feeling in her chest—hope—though it was something she hadn’t felt in a long time. It scared her how much she wanted her life to change.

SIXTEEN

April 8

Dear Mother,

So it turns out that my first letter to you didn’t actually count for my assignment. My psych doc didn’t like that I wrote an imaginary conversation between me and you. (Yeah, I was stupid enough to tell him about that.) He shook his head and said that I “fell back on my habit of inventing reality” so I wouldn’t have to talk about what happened to me. I promised him I would try harder, so here goes.

It was September, school had started a few weeks before, and I had just turned seventeen. Dad kept calling me “sweet seventeen,” and though I shrugged like I was annoyed—I’d already had a year of being “sweet sixteen”—it was pretty close to true. I was a very innocent girl then. I’d spent the first three years of high school being quiet and getting straight As. I knew the popular kids considered me a dork, but I had two great friends: Leah, who was one of the smartest girls in our grade, and Kevin, who was so hilarious that I felt sure he was going to be a famous comedian someday. I also had friends in my youth group at church. You could say I was very sheltered, though of course I didn’t know it then.

Because she will turn out to be important in the story, I should also mention Renee. I have known Renee since we sat in the same row in Mrs. Applegate’s kindergarten class. She was my best friend for almost eleven years, but then in the middle of tenth grade, she stopped hanging out with me. She became one of the cool kids, probably because she’d grown up to be the prettiest girl in school. She looks a little like Angelina Jolie. Everyone says she could be a model if she wants, and I hope it’s true. Her family is really poor. They could use the money.

The doc has asked me a bunch of times how I felt when Renee dropped me, though I’ve told him over and over that I was OK with it. I even told Renee, when she disinvited me to her tenth-grade party, that I understood. She was having the party while her mother was out of town and all the cool kids and wild kids would be there. None of them really knew me or liked me, and Renee desperately needed them to like her. She never said this, but I felt like I knew it, the same way I knew that she was afraid of a stuffed turtle in kindergarten.

Wait. I’m supposed to remind myself that what I just said about her being afraid of the turtle isn’t
reality
. That’s what my shrink said. It’s a good example to show you how my stories used to work, though.

First I’ll tell you what really happened. I was five years old, and I brought the stuffed turtle you gave me to class for show-and-tell. The teacher told me to pass the turtle around and let everybody see it. When the turtle was given to Renee, she looked into its eyes for a minute and then she threw it on the floor and said it was dumb.

Then I realized why she did it. She thought the turtle’s eyes looked mean, which they kind of did if you didn’t understand that the turtle was supposed to be thinking hard, because he was a very wise turtle. She was afraid of those eyes, I told myself, and then before I knew it, I had spun this fear into a bigger story where Renee wasn’t the person who kicked people out of her way on the playground, but instead, a regular girl who didn’t have a bicycle or very many toys and felt sad a lot, but who was pretending not to be sad or scared.

According to the shrink, if I’d only thought all of this might be true, it would be OK. But I was convinced it had to be true, and because I believed my story, I was friendlier to Renee, and she was friendlier to me, and pretty soon, she wasn’t kicking people out of her way anymore. So the doc says it would have been understandable if I’d believed this particular story had changed reality, except that I never thought of it that way. I thought the story had always been the truth, and most people couldn’t see it.

I don’t see it anymore, either, but it’s not the shrink’s fault. This happened before I even met the doc. When Brad Jeffers called Kevin a “faggot,” because Kevin is gay, I had no story to explain Brad’s behavior. So instead I scratched his face until it bled and I got suspended from school, and that’s how I ended up at the psychiatrist’s office in the first place. It was my dad’s idea. He didn’t know what else to do for me.

But let’s get back to before. Back to last September, when my teachers loved me and I got great grades and had two good friends and my goal was just to be a nice person and get into a top-ranked college. Though my shrink says this Little Miss Perfect phase couldn’t have lasted forever (as opposed to those
phases
that do last forever, I guess—the doc is a good guy, but he’s always saying weird things like this), I don’t know if that’s true. Even now when I see no reason to continue with my life, I still wish I knew how to get back to my stories. Sometimes I think if only I could see you, I would be transported back to where I used to be, and everything would make sense again. Other times, I think that girl was a fool who believed something even most preschoolers know is crap: that people are basically good.

My birthday, as you know, is September 14. That morning, Dad surprised me with a car: a 2002 Honda Accord, gray, manual transmission. I was already an experienced driver and I think Dad was tired of me borrowing his Ford Explorer. The Honda is important, because if I hadn’t had it, I wouldn’t have been able to go to the party that night. But it’s not the car’s fault. It took me away in the end, for which I will always be grateful to the car, even if it is just an object.

This is where I really wish I could stop. But it’s OK, because you’re not reading this, and even if you were, you could handle it, right? My dad can’t, but you are different. You have your own crime. In my favorite story of you, you like sad books and dark movies. You have amnesia about the past, which is why you haven’t contacted me, but you still feel the past’s influence. You wear black, live in New York, and sit in coffee shops chatting with people you don’t know. You are unafraid to talk about the worst parts of the world: the brutal murders and devastating earthquakes and all the broken children.

So, September 14. It was around 8:30 in the evening when my cell phone rang. Renee hadn’t called me since the day after Thanksgiving, sophomore year, so of course I was very surprised when I heard her voice. She wished me a happy birthday, and asked what I was doing. I told her the truth: that I’d just settled down to watch a movie with my dad and the girls. “The girls,” as my stepmother always calls them, are Natalie and Nicole, her daughters from a previous marriage, who are twenty and twenty-one, respectively, and who live in their own apartment near the strip mall, where they both work as hairstylists. Even though I’ve known Natalie and Nicole all my life, no one has ever thought it was strange that we didn’t play together or act like real sisters. Part of it was that they were older than me, but mainly it was that they always had each other. It didn’t help that they were gone on the weekends and most of the summer, visiting their real dad. My stepmother was always a little irritated that her free weekends were never actually free, because I was always there. I used to wish that she and my dad would have their own kid, so I wouldn’t be the only one home all summer, and so I’d have a brother or sister who might want to hang out with me—but that doesn’t matter now.

By the time I’d taken the phone into my room, Renee told me she had a surprise for me. “Ian wants you to come to his party tonight.” She paused. “He thinks you’re really cute.”

Ian was one of the stars of the basketball team. Pretty much every girl in school had a crush on him, including Leah. I took some pride in being the exception, but I was obviously not as much of an exception as I thought. My heart was jumping out of my chest at the mere possibility that someone like him could notice me. “I don’t believe it.”

“He asked me to call and invite you.”

“For real?”

“Yeah. It starts at 10:30. Are you coming or not?”

I said I’d think about it, and she said OK and hung up. I let out a long breath and went back into the living room, where my dad was sitting with the DVD paused. Natalie and Nicole were on the love seat, gossiping about some friend, waiting for the birthday cake that my stepmother was frosting. Chocolate with white icing, same as every year. Two of those chunky number candles: 1 and 7.

Back when Renee and I were friends, my stepmother used to say that Renee’s family lived on the “wrong side of the tracks.” We don’t have any tracks in Summerland; we’ve never even had a train. Our idea of public transportation is the school bus, or someone with a car who doesn’t mind letting other kids have a ride. But it’s true that Renee’s family lives on the other side of town, farther away from the river and nearer to the factories. Ian lives in our neighborhood, though, only five or six blocks away. I’d known him long before he became the school’s personal god. His older brother Brett had taken Natalie to the senior dance. When Ian and I were kids, we used to splash each other in the neighborhood pool. I let him play with my cool yellow beach ball.

What if he really did like me? Even though I was a senior now, I’d never had a boyfriend. I’d never even been kissed. Leah and Kevin were in the same boat, so I didn’t feel like a freak, but it did bother me. Leah and Kevin were both thin. My secret fear was that I was too fat for any boy to like.

I was five-five and I weighed 132 pounds. According to the health charts, I was normal. But I was heavier than most of the girls at school who had boyfriends, which wasn’t hard to be: a lot of those girls were so skinny they looked like they’d never smelled a hamburger. Sometimes I tried to diet, but it never worked, partly because I liked food too much, but mainly because my stepmother got offended if everyone didn’t eat huge helpings of whatever she cooked for dinner. But Natalie and Nicole were chunkier than me, and they’d always had boyfriends. And Leah and Kevin told me I was pretty all the time. My dad said I took after your side of the family, Mother, and since you were beautiful, I know this meant I couldn’t be a downright woof-woof.

I felt like I’d woken up inside the plot of a movie. A very cute boy said I was cute—on my birthday. It was a truly magical development. I’d been invited to Ian’s party. Of course I was going!

I told my dad, and he said fine. I think he was relieved that I had something to do for a change. My stepmother said something about Ian’s father being too lazy to keep up his yard, but this was typical for her. She’d said Renee was “white trash” and Kevin was “strange,” and Leah was the worst, because “she thinks she’s so smart.”

In case you’re wondering, I did have a story that explained my stepmother. I actually worked with my shrink to separate what was true and what wasn’t about her. We wrote it all down in a grid.

Story: She grew up so poor she had to eat Cream of Wheat for dinner every night. Truth: She was from a somewhat poor family, but the detail must have come from my own hatred of Cream of Wheat.

Story: Her first husband left her for his secretary. Truth: Her ex did get remarried awfully quickly, but I really have no idea why.

Story: She can’t have any children with my dad for some biological reason. She’s devastated by her infertility. Truth: She has never discussed this in my presence, but I still say it’s probably true, as I know my dad wanted a son and yet they never had a kid. Unless my dad is the infertile one? (This possibility makes me so nervous I can’t think about it. I bet you know why, Mother. You’re the only one who could, right?)

Story: She’s gotten quite old-looking in the last ten years, and she worries that my dad regrets marrying her. Truth: She’s six years older than my dad and she looks it, she says so herself. But I’ve only sensed this worry. So maybe it isn’t real. I don’t know because I
can’t know
. My shrink emphasized this.

Story: She wishes her daughters had done better in high school and gone to college. Truth: Again, I can’t know, but I sure would wish this, if I were in her shoes.