Thicker Than Water (2 page)

MOST DAYS, I'M UNIMPRESSED WITH THE SCHEDULE OF EVENTS.
There should be a maximum number of therapeutic interventions one person should have to endure in a twenty-four-hour period. On Monday, the day I'm scheduled to start individual therapy, I request to speak to the social director. Dr. Barnes doesn't think I'm funny.

“Group first. Then you'll meet with your new therapist.”

“Great. You know, this is like Sunday school after church. Back-to-back isn't always the way to go when you're attempting to convert me.”

“I'm not attempting to do anything, Cecelia. I believe your lawyer explained the situation—you'll be seeing Dr. Galinitus as part of your rehabilitation.”

God, I
wish
this was rehab. Then I could chain-smoke and tell stories about my fictional promiscuity and imaginary abusive ex-boyfriends. Instead, I've had to find a way
to function in my own skin.

“One of the guards will escort you from group to the E-wing. Dr. Galinitus will be waiting for you there.”

Like any good doctor, Barnes wants to find an answer, a cure for my ailments. That's the only way he can really be successful. Medicine isn't about baby steps; it's about miracles.

In group, everyone has to play a role. There are those who are ready to talk and those who want to be introspective. There are the angry ones, the friendly ones, the distracted ones. The ones who are quiet fall into two categories—introspective or brooding. I like to brood. It gives me an excuse to glower at people and pretend to be surly when I'm actually just counting the pinholes in the ceiling panels in an effort to make the time pass more quickly.

Today's topic is regret. This is a shit topic. Talking about our regrets makes everyone feel worse than they did an hour ago. We're supposed to leave group every afternoon when there's nothing left to say. Topics like regret leave us with nothing left to believe in. Regret forces us to relive the moments we hate the most—the moments that drove us into spiraling downfalls, the moments where we stopped living and started surviving.

I sit next to Aarti today. Tucker is on my other side. He's seventeen, like me, and his hair and eyes are the exact same color as the carpet—industrial brown. Unlike the carpet, though, his hair looks soft and silky in a way that makes me want to touch it. When he looks up at me and smiles, his eyes crinkle like he's actually happy to see me. I grind my
teeth and turn away. The last thing I need to do here is start seeing something beautiful in the disaster around me.

Cam is our group monitor—despite the fact that Dr. Barnes is technically in charge, Cam facilitates discussion and, in general, annoys the shit out of all of us. She's an “alumna”—her word—of the program, which somehow does not have the same distinction as being an alumna of Harvard or even Bumfuck Nowhere Community College. Cam seems to think that her time here should make her trustworthy or admirable or something.

Cam is an idiot.

“So, Aaron. Give us one regret. Something you wish you'd done differently.”

Cam looks at Aaron. Everyone else looks at Aaron. I look at Aaron's hair. It's very distracting—white blond, the kind that only little kids have. Aaron is seventeen, and tries to look tough, but he usually just ends up looking like an angry fifth grader. I try not to watch his eyebrows as he talks. When his mouth moves, they go up and down like albino caterpillars.

“I regret being born.”

“Aaron,” Cam says slowly, like she's talking to a child, “you can't regret something you didn't do yourself. Your birth is someone else's decision to regret.” She pauses. “Or not regret,” she adds hastily.

“Yes, you can,” I say.

“Ah, Cecelia,” Cam says, leaning back in her chair. “Does this mean you're going to start contributing in group?”

I ignore her and look at Aaron. “You can regret the actions of others. At least, when they're responsible for your actions. When your actions are just
re
actions.”

Aaron's pale hair sways as he nods. I bet he's Swedish.

“If I'd never been born, I'd never have made bad choices in the first place,” he says. “I'd never have chosen to drop out or start stealing cars. I wouldn't have beaten the shit out of that guy and landed myself in here. I wouldn't have had the chance to.”

Cam looks irritated.

“What about you, Cecelia?” she asks.

I shake my head. “I'm passing.”

She narrows her eyes. “You've passed for the last six weeks.”

“I've only
been here
for six weeks.”

“So why is it that you can comment on other people's contributions but can't make some of your own?”

“I have a regret,” Tucker interrupts, leaning forward and resting his hands on his knees.

My head whips around. Cam glares at me before turning to Tucker. I watch Tucker, too, unsure whether he is trying to save me or steal the spotlight. Either way, I'm grateful.

“I regret my bad decisions.”

“Such as?”

Tucker shrugs. His hands are squeezing his knees methodically and I start feeling warm and nauseous.

“What decisions have you made that were bad?” Cam presses.

“I did a lot of things to my parents. To make them not
trust me, I mean. To disappoint them.”

Leslie, a sixteen-year-old with curly hair, rolls her eyes.

“Please. Who here
hasn't
disappointed their parents?”

Tucker's voice sharpens. “I bet you didn't drive your mom's car through the side of the house. Or steal five grand from your sister's college fund.”

Leslie shrugs. “Only 'cause my folks didn't have that kinda money.”

Everyone looks at Tucker. He looks down at his hands.

“There's nothing I can do about it. It's done, it's over, and I'm here. I just have to find a way to move on.”

Cam looks satisfied, nodding at Tucker like he's said the right thing.

“Good. Now
that's
a revelation. You can regret things as much as you want, but it's the acceptance of those things, the understanding that you can't or don't need to change them, that makes a regret something smaller—that makes it a memory.”

How can a memory possibly be small? Mine overshadow all my thoughts.

Leslie is next on the Regret Train, but I'm distracted by Tucker's hands, still grasping his knees. His fingernails are bitten down and raging, but not actually bleeding. I watch his fingers press and release, press and release, the red rushing to the tips before fading back toward his knuckles. It's almost as though his blood is trying to get out. As though it's running for the exit and, like the rest of us, hoping somehow to escape.

I'm sitting in one of the private therapy rooms when I meet my new therapist. Dr. Trina Galinitus is a slip of a person. She's barely there. Meeting with her is almost like talking to myself. When I squint, I can't see her at all.

“Jennifer tells me you're having some trouble reconciling your role in your brother's death.”

I take a deep breath. “I just don't want to talk about it.”

Trina pushes her glasses farther up the bridge of her nose. Her hair is tied back tight.

“Well, one of our goals is to make you want to talk about it—or at least to make you comfortable talking about it, and about anything else you want to share with me.”

I squint. Now she's bald, glasses-less, and pale as chalk dust.

“I have an idea for you,” Trina says. “A strategy for you to try.”

“Is it time travel?”

She reaches into her bag, pulls out a black-and-white speckled composition book and a freshly sharpened pencil. The pencil says
Parsons Cognitive Therapy Group
in white letters up the side.

“We're going to do some visualization techniques.”

I frown. “Jennifer said this wasn't a hypnosis thing.”

“It's not. Visualization is something you do while you're completely present. It's something your conscious mind is responsible for.”

I don't need to squint this time for my vision to blur. Soon there are two Trinas, and I don't like either of them.

“I can't do this.” Terror runs through my body like water or blood. It circulates, then condenses into a hard lump in my chest.

Trina looks genuinely surprised.

“Why not?”

I stand up and there's a sudden movement through the window by the door. Tom is hovering there, watching me.
No worries, Tom. I'm not going to kill her
.

I walk over to the wall, placing my hand on the cool blue surface.

“Visualization is a therapeutic way to find insight,” Trina says to my back. “To find closure.”

I shake my head. My eyes are almost completely closed.

“I know it won't be easy, Cecelia. All I'm asking is that you give it a shot.”

I turn around and look at her. She reminds me of a guru. A yoga instructor. I bet she's one of those biodynamic, raw-food vegans who eat nothing but sprouts and grasshoppers.

“Fine,” I finally say. If nothing else, it'll give me an opportunity to zone out and imagine a place completely unlike this horrible, claustrophobia-inducing room.

“Excellent.” She opens the composition book and jots a few notes. “Okay, sit down and close your eyes.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes, seriously.”

When I sit facing the window, light floods in and my
eyelids look pink and soft from the inside. I take a deep breath at Trina's request.

“Okay,” she says, her voice low and calm, “I want to start with a memory.”

My body has a physical reaction to that idea—every part of me stiffens in protest.

I guess Trina notices, because she says, “Not a bad memory. A good one. A memory that makes you feel connected to your family. That makes you feel like part of a whole.”

I think hard for a minute, but come up with nothing. Trina can tell.

“All you need is a moment, CeCe. A place you went together. A time you were happy and safe.”

And suddenly, I do remember something—a time my dad and I went to test-drive cars a few months after my mom died. Dad wanted something new to replace his beat-up Subaru. I remember standing in the chilly reception area of the Chevy dealership while he checked out the charcoal interior of a yellow Camaro. It was summer, but cool—too cool for the air-conditioning that was blasting above our heads.

“Want to take a spin?” he'd asked me, eyebrows raised.

“Dad, you can't be serious. A Camaro?”

He shrugged, then grinned. It was the first smile I'd seen on his face in a long time.

We both slipped inside and the car sort of settled, as though our combined weight brought it down to Earth. I rested one
knee against the glove compartment and folded my body in thirds: ankles to thighs, knees to chest. Dad put the car in reverse and we slid through the doors, slow and determined, as a salesman guided us out with hand signals.

What I remember now is how it felt fishlike, like we were gliding through a river. It was a time when I was sure that Dad knew where he was going, that he knew where he was taking me.

I open my eyes. Trina's watching me intently.

“Can you tell me about what you saw?”

“Um . . . it was just—just a time with my dad.”

“How old were you?”

“Fourteen.”

“And how did that memory make you feel?”

What does she want me to say? That thinking about my family and remembering the past feels . . . unnatural? That good memories feel like a dream and the bad far outweigh the good anyway? I shake my head.

“That memory made me feel stupid.”

“Stupid?” Trina's eyebrows furrow.

“Stupid.” I nod. “Stupid that I believed him when he said that everything would be okay.”

It was an uphill battle through Mom's cancer—it lasted for years and it was painful and heartbreaking. But after? After she was gone, it was all downhill—quick and fast to the ditch of shit at the bottom.

“CeCe.” I hear the reproach in Trina's voice. I shake my head, willing the tears away.

“Visualization isn't going to work for me—it's not going to do what it's supposed to. I'm not crazy. I know what I did, and I did it on purpose. I don't know what part of that you and Jennifer don't get.”

The way my hands are shaking is almost like a shiver. I consider standing up, walking out, but the constant vibration is making me unsteady. Even if I wanted to remember the good things, it's like my body is rejecting the idea.

So, I remember all the bad things instead.

IN THE BEGINNING, THERE WAS MY FAMILY. AND MOST DAYS, MY
family smelled like smoke.

Dad's was from the trash he burned in the yard, a pastime acceptable only out in the sticks where we lived. My stepmom's was from dinner; she was constantly trying new recipes. They were all heavy on the Cajun seasoning, which translated to charred. And I got the hint of something else. She might have been back on her Camel Filters.

But my brother, Cyrus, had a smoke all his own. It clung to him like a shadow. If someone tells you Oxys burn clean, are odorless, they're lying. That smell is like a plastic lid melting at the bottom of the dishwasher or hair that's gotten too close to the blow-dryer. It's the unmistakable scent of ruin. Eau de Fuckup.

“Cecelia?”

I knew he was coming—not by the smell, but by the
plodding. The heavy sound of a money-grubber treading down the hall toward my last twenty bucks.

“Hey, CeCe.”

He was leaning against the door jamb. I didn't look up from the computer screen. One of the few luxuries in my world was an internet connection on a twenty-acre farm in Nowheresville, Virginia.

“You got any gas in your car?”

I swallowed. He didn't want money. He wanted a ride. I'd wished he'd asked for money.

“I need a lift to Dr. Frank's,” he said.

I typed another sentence of my Edenton University scholarship application essay:

            
When you're little, you learn that medicines make you healthy.

The plasticky clack of the keys was almost soothing. I sighed, then pushed back my chair and turned toward Cyrus. I immediately wanted to wince. He looked like the cross between a homeless person and a cancer patient—loose dirty clothes, hollow eyes, shaved head. He reminded me of one of those actors who look like crap on purpose just to win an Oscar.

Cyrus and I were born barely two years apart and we used to look like twins—the same chestnut hair and chocolate eyes, the same lanky frame and olive skin. Now darkness was our only link—my blue-black dye job was a perfect
match to the bruise-like bags beneath his eyes.

“What time is your appointment?” I grumbled.

“Thirty minutes.”

“No, not how long.
When
is it?”

He scratched his nose. “It's
in
thirty minutes.”

“Cy, are you kidding me? How the hell am I getting to Williamsport in thirty minutes?”

“You won't, but Dr. Frank'll fit me in.”

Yeah, I'll bet he will—considering that he doesn't take medical insurance and every visit costs $250 out of pocket. Out of
Dad's
pocket.

“Fine.”

I grabbed my jacket off the back of the chair. Another glance at Cyrus and I wondered if I should give it to him instead. Lately, he was perpetually cold and sort of filmy. Looking at him made me want to lather, rinse, and repeat until I felt clean enough for the both of us.

We walked out into the driveway. The Honda was the nicest thing my family owned, and that was because it was mine. Dad's truck was forever mud-caked and full of farm equipment. Jane sold her Corvette when she and Dad got married. That money went right into a down payment on the farm.

I squinted up the hill. Dad was tackling some fencing he meant to put up last fall. It was the wire kind, the mesh that bows into parentheses between two wooden stakes. I don't know what he was trying to keep in. Or out.

“Hey, Dad?”

He looked up, shaded his eyes. “Yeah?”

“I'm taking Cy to his appointment.”

“Oh.”

Pause. Wait for it . . .

“Hold up. I can do it.”

There it was. Dad's I'll-give-up-everything-for-Cyrus voice. I shook my head.

“No. You're busy. I can take him.”

“You need money for gas?”

My dad was especially adept at two things—dreaming big and bribing his kids, even when he was practically broke.

I shook my head again. “No, I'm good. We'll see you in a few hours.”

He nodded. From that distance, my dad looked old—in the sun, his hair was more silver than brown. His body was hunched over like a cartoon version of a grandfather.

“You ready?”

Behind me, Cyrus was holding a large envelope with
Medavue Radiology
printed in bold black letters. He was wearing a heavy down vest over his flannel.

“Sure.” I opened my door and breathed deep before Cyrus climbed into the passenger's side. It would be the last breath I took for a while that didn't reek of wasted space. When Cyrus slid in, he groaned. I looked over to see him flex his leg, then rub his knee with his right hand.

“I hate this car,” he grumbled. “It's so damn low to the ground.”

You'd think he would feel comfortable in something with
the potential to bottom out. I bit down hard on the inside of my cheek as Cyrus tapped a Marlboro Menthol from his soft pack and lit it. He inhaled deeply and I thought about stethoscopes. I wondered whether Dr. Frank checked if his patients were actually breathing before breaking out the prescription pad.

“So, what is it this time?” I asked him as we pulled out of the driveway.

“What's what?”

“What's the problem with your knee? I thought this doctor was supposed to be helping you.”

Cyrus shrugged and looked out the side window. “He
is
helping me.”

“By giving you pills?”

He didn't answer at first. Then he said, “It's degenerative.”

“Huh?”

“My knee. The disc. It's breaking down as we speak.”

“
You're
breaking down as we speak.”

He cracked the window, spit, rolled it back up.

“I don't need a lecture, Cecelia.”

“I know. What you need is rehab.”

Cyrus faced forward and glared at the windshield. “I'm not an addict. It's a prescription for my pain. I don't get why you have to pull this holier-than-thou bullshit every time we talk.”

“Don't you miss your friends?”

He didn't say anything.

“Don't you miss soccer?”

No answer to that either.

I watched the mile markers tick past and wondered why I agreed to do this drive again. I remembered who Cyrus used to be. My big brother, the star of the soccer team, the one headed straight for the World Cup. He was a force so fiery, he lit up the whole house. With Cyrus around, it was hard to feel anything but happy to be near him. But my brother,
that
brother, had disappeared.

In his place, he left a depressed, injured high school athlete who poor-me'd his way into Dr. Frank's office. Then the athlete and the high school parts of him went up in smoke. And what was left of my brother inhaled it.

The first time I heard of Dr. Frank Bethany was the day after Cy hurt his knee during practice. It was last year and we were all worried about the upcoming season. Coach Bryant wanted Cyrus to see a specialist. Dr. Frank came highly recommended.

“Coach says he's the best,” Cyrus said that night at dinner. “Apparently, Dr. Frank treats a bunch of NFL players—I heard the Redskins quarterback has been going there for years.”

Dad took a bite of his salmon. “If he's had to go there for years, this Dr. Frank doesn't sound like that great a doctor.”

“C'mon, Dad. Seriously.”

“Why do his patients call him Dr. Frank, anyway? Isn't that his first name?”

Cyrus shrugged. “I guess he's, like, laid-back or whatever.”

“
Hmph
. I don't know if I trust a doctor who is ‘laid-back or whatever.'”

It was a rare moment of clarity. It didn't last. Dad made Cy an appointment with Dr. Frank the next day. He'd been going there once a month ever since.

Bethany Pain Management was just over the state line. Different street signs. Different speed limits. Different laws. That's the only way I could figure that Wacko-Quacko still had his medical license. BPM was what people called a “pill mill”: just your average, everyday strip mall, but with X-rays, an ID, and cash, you could get just about any meds you wanted. And for most people, it was Oxys they wanted.

When we pulled into the parking lot, Cyrus looked at me.

“You wanna come in or stay here?”

I raised an eyebrow. He rolled his eyes.

“I'll be out in a few minutes.”

Everyone who came to see Dr. Frank was wasted in one of two ways—wasted as in high or drunk, or wasted as in they were hardly there at all. Not a single one of them was even the slightest bit athletic. If there were NFL players visiting Dr. Frank, it didn't happen on my watch. While I waited in the car, I watched a handful of people stumble through the tinted-glass double doors. They all looked the same—thin, pale, and half dead. Here's the only difference—when they walked in, they looked desperate. When they walked out, they looked relieved.

And when Cyrus came out twenty minutes later, he'd had that same relief plastered across his face. He was holding his
MRI and a prescription. I wanted to set all three of them on fire and drive away.

“You give him cash?” I asked when he opened the car door.

He looked at me blankly. “A check.”

“Dad's check?”

“Jesus, Cecelia, what the fuck is your deal?”

I shook my head, anger starting to build in my throat like lava-phlegm.

“You know how tight money is right now. Why are you coming all the way out here, out of state, to give a doctor two hundred and fifty dollars when you could give someone else a fifteen-dollar co-pay?”

Cyrus sighed. He was tired. He needed a fix.

“You know why, CeCe.”

He was right. I did know why. I looked down at the small white piece of paper, half crumpled in his hand.

            
240 OxyContin. 60 mg. 1 tab 4x daily.
Generics acceptable.

I read it again and I wanted to puke.

“Two-forty? What do you need that many for?”

I looked up at Cyrus, but he was staring out the window.

“Look on the bright side,” he said to the glass. “Now I don't have to go back for two months.”