Wintergirls (22 page)

I sleep under a mountain of blankets for the rest of the morning.

Jennifer drives me to Dr. Parker’s office without saying a word. I don’t blame her. I wouldn’t talk to me, either, if I were her. I bet she’s afraid that if she opens her mouth, she won’t stop yelling at me for days and that would mess up Christmas on top of everything else.

We stay behind a plow the whole way, the wipers turned on HIGH, her hands gripped so tight on the wheel the knuckles are white. The snow makes it hard to tell up from down or see anything until we are close enough to crash into it.

She finally turns into the office park and pulls up close to the curb.

“So,” I try. “Four o’clock, right?”

She nods once, eyes staring into the storm.

“And, um, I’ll come over Christmas morning? So we can open presents?”

“Have your mother call me.” She turns up the fan to blast the heat.

“Okay.” I open the door.

“Wait.” Jennifer grabs my arm. For the first time since they strapped me on the stretcher, she looks me in the eye.

“David doesn’t want me to say this to you, but too bad. I love you, Lia. When I married your father, I swore to love you like you were my own. But you hurt my little girl.”

She is shaking with anger.

“You hurt her by starving yourself, you hurt her with your lies, and by fighting everybody who tries to help you.

Emma can only sleep a couple of hours a night now. She’s haunted by nightmares of monsters that eat our whole family. They eat us slowly, she says, so we can feel their sharp teeth.”

My heart shifts out of idle into fourth gear, revving like a race car skidding around the track.

“I’m—”

She lets go of my arm and covers my mouth with her hand. “Shush. You go in there and you tell the truth to that woman. Tell her what’s in your head and why you do these things. Tell her there is a good chance you can’t live at your father’s house anymore, so you better figure out how to get along with your mom.”

“I can’t come back?”

“I can’t let you destroy Emma, too. I won’t.”

She turns back in her seat, suburban-stepmom mask bolted firmly in place. “Four o’clock. Maybe a little later, depending on the roads.”

The receptionist, Sheila, isn’t at her desk. Probably left early to cook for Christmas. I put my ear up to the closed door to Dr. Parker’s inner office; someone is crying on the other side. Parker’s voice murmurs, then comes the annoying
ding!
of the session timer.

I keep my eyes on the floor while the crying patient crosses through the waiting room and opens the door to the storm outside, still snuffling and hiccupping with sobs.

Dr. Parker always goes to the bathroom between sessions and sometimes takes a meditation break. It’ll be at least five minutes before she calls me in. I came prepared, armed with my knitting. I need to finish this scarf/shawl/

blanket thing so I can start on something for Emma—a hat, maybe, or a sweater for her stuffed elephant.

I look out the window. A car is stuck in the parking lot. The engine races as the driver spins her tires, pushing the accelerator but going nowhere fast. Plows lum-ber by, chains tinkling, blades sending up sparks as they scrape the ice from the road. Everything is buried in the snow. It looks like a different world.

“Sucks, doesn’t it?” Cassie says.

My heart crashbangs into my ribs.

She’s sitting across the room, feet propped up on the coffee table, the magazine in her lap folded open to a crossword puzzle. She’s dressed for the weather: blue coffin dress, gray ski jacket, knit cap with matching mittens on the chair next to her, damp boots lined with fur.

“They never give you a break. It’s always ‘talk to the shrink, talk to your mother, do what you’re told, why can’t you grow up?’” She fills out a couple of boxes in the puzzle, then erases them. “Thirteen down. Do you know a four-letter word for ‘contract’?”

“Why won’t you leave me alone?”

“I miss you.”

The back of my throat tastes like I might pass out. I lean against Sheila’s desk and pinch one of the cuts between my ribs. The pain lights me up like a taser. “You know what Emma saw, right?”

Cassie writes an answer in the puzzle. “‘Bind,’ that’ll fit. Maybe.”

“I can’t believe I did that to her.”

“You don’t deserve to live.” She says it like she’s telling me which pair of jeans fits better. “Use a bigger knife next time. Cut deeper. Get it over with.”

“I don’t think I want to die.”

She snorts. “Yeah, right. You can’t even eat a bowl of cereal without having a meltdown. Do you honestly think you’ll ever do something difficult, like, say, go to college?

Or get a job, maybe live on your own? What about shopping in the grocery store? Ooooh—scary!”

The toilet in Dr. Parker’s office flushes.

I inch toward the door. “Why are you being so mean?”

“Friends tell friends the truth.”

“Yeah, but not to hurt. To help.”

One instant she’s in the chair by the window. The next, she’s standing in front of me, right up in my face, dropping the temperature below zero. Her skin is rough like a cemetery statue. Her smell is choking.

“You want me to help you, Lia-Lia?”

Can you kill a ghost by driving a knitting needle through her heart? Or least put her back in the ground where she belongs?

“Help you like you helped me?” She stretches out the last word until it rattles in her throat. “How’s this then?

You’re not skinny. You’re a pus-filled whale. Your mom wishes she had given you up for adoption. Your dad secretly thinks you’re not really his kid. People laugh at you when your fat jiggles. You’re ugly. You’re stupid. You’re boring. The only thing you’re good at is starving, but you can’t even do that right. You’re a waste.”

She winks. “And that’s why I love you. Hurry up, okay?”

Dr. Parker opens the door. “Ready?”

She turns on the space heater and gives me an emergency blanket to put on top of the ugly hair afghan. “Sorry it’s so cold. They really need to replace these windows.”

I curl into a ball on the couch, clutching my knitting to my stomach.

She assumes her position behind the desk. “You’ve had a rough time of it. I’m really happy you’re here. I imagine those stitches are hurting.”

This is where I keep my mouth shut for fifteen minutes, pluck the white fuzz on my arms. But my heart is filled with poison and it’s swelling, throwing itself against the bone cage so hard my teeth are rattling and my stitches want to pop.

“It feels like they pumped an entire ocean into me,”

my lips say.

“Because of the IV fluids?” she asks.

“I slosh every time I move.”

“You were very dehydrated. Had you stopped drinking, too, even water?”

I take the knitting out of the bag. Knit, knit, purl. “I don’t remember. Maybe.”

“How are the cuts?”

“The stitches hurt more than the cuts. The doctor put in too many of them. I can hardly move without ripping them open.”

She lets a quiet minute flow by, then asks, “Can I see the stitches?”

“No,” I say. “Not yet.”

She nods. “What else is bothering you?”

“That smell is driving me crazy.”
Crap.
I wasn’t going to say that.

“What smell?”

I put the needles in my lap and watch as the yarn winds itself around my hands. “You don’t smell it, do you?”

She shakes her head slowly, afraid to startle this strange talking girl who is covered in my skin. “Can you describe it?”

“At first I thought it was cookies, Christmas cookies, and that I was smelling it because my stupid brain was trying to trick me into eating. But it’s not that. It’s Cassie. When I smell it, she’s close by.”

“Cassie, your friend who died last month.”

“Ginger, cloves, and sugar, like burning cookies. At first it was nice. It reminded me of her. Now it scares me.”

“I don’t quite understand.”

Oh, God. Oh, God.
I am on top of the highest mountain. The icy ground is shaking, an earthquake, the world beneath me opening up with fire, steel arms ready to pull me down.

I have to move. I can’t stay here anymore.

I throw myself down the mountain and open my mouth.

I tell about Nanna Marrigan’s funeral and the shadows that have hovered on the edges of things ever since. I tell her about seeing ghosts in store windows and old mirrors and how most of them are quite nice, but not all.

As my lips move, the room stretches long and narrow, like the red rubber walls are being pulled by giant hands.

Dr. Parker’s voice shrinks as her desk moves farther and farther away from me.

“Do the ghosts frighten you?”

“Cassie does.”

The yarn tightens around my hands until my fingers are purple.

“Can you tell me about that?”

I tell her. I tell her everyfreakingCassiestory, how she sat up in her coffin, how she watched me at night, how she crawled in my head, haunted every step, made it snow in the drugstore. How I stopped taking my pills, took extra pills, worked out for hours at night, stopped eating, stopped drinking, cut and cut to make her go away, to make everything go away. How nothing works. Rain, rain, rain pours down my face, nearly drowning me.

Dr. Parker keeps her tiny spider eyes locked on mine, coaxing the words out by sitting motionless in the center of her web, hardly breathing. I talk until my throat is empty and I have no feeling in my hands.

She comes out from behind the desk and gently un-winds the yarn. The blood burns back into my fingers. She wipes my tears with a soft tissue and sits next to me.

“Who else knows about this?”

“Nobody. No, wait, that’s not true. Cassie knows.”

“You never told your parents about seeing ghosts?

Not when you were younger?”

“No way. Mom would have told me to cut the drama.

Dad would have suggested I think about majoring in poetry, maybe plan on a PhD in Gothic. They never hear me; they can barely see me. I’m a doll that they’ve out-grown.”

Dr. Parker pulls a cherry cough drop out of the pocket of her cardigan, unwraps it and puts it in her mouth. She clicks it against her teeth for a minute. Outside, the snow piles higher and higher.

Finally, she speaks. “Why are you telling me this today?”

I swallow, hard. I’m already in over my head. Might as well give her everything.

“Cassie’s trying to kill me. She says I’m trapped between the living and the dead, and she wants me on her team. She’s in your waiting room right now, working on a crossword puzzle.”

“You saw her there?” Dr. Parker rubs the back of my hand with her fingertips.

“I told her to leave me alone. She won’t.”

Ding!
The shut-up-now timer interrupts me.

She presses her lips together and stands, slowly, stretching the muscles in her legs and back. “Can you see Cassie now?”

“No, she’s not in here, she’s on the other side of that door. Or she was. Go check the crossword puzzle. She got thirteen down wrong. She wrote ‘bind.’ It should have been ‘oath.’ ”

As I explain, Dr. Parker pours water into a Styrofoam cup and sticks it in the microwave.

“You could check the magazine.” I stuff my yarn into the bag. “I’m not making this up; I am not hallucinating.

It’s as real as the blood on my bandages, or that cough drop in your mouth.”

“There is no way of proving who filled out the puzzle,”

she says.

“But I told you about the mistake she made.”

She takes the cup out of the microwave, sticks a tea bag in it, adds a packet of sugar, and stirs it with a plastic stick. “You could have seen that when you were flipping through the pages or made the mistake yourself.”

“I suppose.”

There are voices in the waiting room, the next patient desperate enough to come out on Christmas Eve day in a snowstorm.

Dr. Parker hands me the cup. “Tea,” she says. “Always helps.”

I sip. It tastes like sweetened pencil shavings.

She sits back at her desk and picks up her pen. “I’m really proud of you, Lia. You accomplished more today than in the last two years.” She makes a note on a yellow pad. “Do I have your permission to discuss this session?”

I blow my nose. “Sure, why not?”

“Thank you. I want to talk to the New Seasons director about this. We may want to develop a different treatment plan. His facility might not be the right place for you.”

I blow my nose. “I can stay at home and be treated as an outpatient?”

She writes down another note before she speaks. “No.

That’s not what I said.”

Something in her voice freezes me, my hand in the air, reaching for another tissue. “I don’t get it.”

“I think we should consider a psychiatric-care facility.”

There is a booming noise outside, thunder in the middle of the snow. The windows shake. She keeps talking like it’s an everyday thing, like she’s in the habit of throwing scared little girls into nuthouses.

“You deserve the best,” she continues. “Skilled people who know how to bring your mind back into balance.

When the hallucinations and delusions are under control, it will be easier for you to work on your self-image issues and the relationships that cause you so much pain.”

“You think I made it up,” I say. “You don’t believe that I see ghosts.”

“I believe that you’ve created a metaphorical universe in which you can express your darkest fears. In one aspect, yes, I believe in ghosts, but we create them. We haunt ourselves, and sometimes we do such a good job, we lose track of reality.” She stands up. “I hate to stop now, but I have another patient waiting. You really should be proud of yourself, Lia. You made a breakthrough today.

How are you getting home?”

“Jennifer.”

She pulls aside the curtain and looks into the parking lot. “Black SUV, right? I don’t see it out there.”

“She hates driving in bad weather.”

“I’m sure she’ll be here soon.”

Excuse me, but did you say two minutes ago that you were recommending I go to a full-on nuthouse, for crazy people, just because I finally told you the truth? “Better late than never.”

I follow her to the waiting room, where a very pissed-off mom is yelling in whispers at her daughter, whose eyes look like murder. Dr. Parker waves them into her chamber.