Better Than Perfect (12 page)

“Oh,” I said. “Well, that's . . . you must like that.” My mom had gone to the same summer camp practically her entire childhood, first as a camper for a million summers, then as a counselor for about a million more. She'd seemed a little disappointed when neither my brother nor I was especially into the summer camp we went to.

I had one question and only one question that I wanted to ask my mother.
Did you mean to do it?

But the words stuck in my throat.

There was silence. It was an awful silence, something cold and dark with tentacles that were pulling me down into it.

“Mom?” I whispered. “Mommy?”

I looked at my mom. She was facing me, but her eyes were focused on something just above my head, as if she were looking into the eyes of a taller version of me.

I reached out and touched her hand. It was dry and cool, and I was startled to see that she wasn't wearing her wedding band or her engagement ring. Her engagement ring was a huge
diamond, and she took it off to play tennis and wash dishes, so it wasn't weird to see her without it on, but I'd never seen her hand without her wedding band, a thin ring of diamonds set in platinum that she'd kept wearing even after my dad moved out. Had she had it on the night of her . . . the night we went to the hospital? I tried to picture her hand that night, but all I could see was the blood on the floor, her thigh, naked up to her underwear.

“Mom,” I said quietly. “What happened that night? What . . . happened?” I repeated vaguely.

If she heard me, she didn't indicate it. The minutes ticked by until it became clear that if I wanted an answer I was going to have to repeat the question. I opened my mouth to ask it again and almost immediately closed it. This was insane. The woman sitting here was not my mother. She didn't know any more about what my mother felt than I did.

Time seemed to have stopped, and when I finally saw Grace out of the corner of my eye, I felt as if decades must have passed since she'd left me at the door to the glassed-in room.

She came over to where my mother and I were sitting. “I hope you had a nice visit.”

My mother turned her eyes to Grace and gave a vague smile. I recognized it.

It was the same smile she'd smiled at me.

I stood up. “Mom,” I said. “I have to go.” I reached down and took her hand. She gave me an anemic squeeze back.

“Thank you for coming,” she said, as if I were a guest she'd just met at a cocktail party.

I could feel tears burning at the corners of my eyes, and I just turned and walked out, several feet ahead of Grace until I got to the locked door, where I had to wait until she punched the code into the pad.

At the front desk, the woman smiled at me. “I hope you had a good visit,” she said.

“Not really,” I said. I pressed my fingers to my lips to stop their shaking, then added, “My mom's pretty out of it.”

“I'm sorry,” she said, and she seemed genuinely sorry.

“Thanks,” I said, and I raced out the front door so she wouldn't see me bawling.

As soon as I got outside, I dialed Kathy's number. She picked up on the first ring.

“How'd it go?” she asked.

“She's like a zombie.” I was crying hard enough that I wasn't sure if my aunt would understand what I was saying.

“I'm really sorry, honey. I'm so sorry you had to see her like that. The doctors are trying to get her medication right, and it's tricky. Psychotropic drugs are an art, not a science.”

“What does that even mean?” I wailed. “What kind of fucking art does that to a person?”

“It's going to take a little time,” said Aunt Kathy. “Why don't you wait to visit her again until I'm back? I don't know
how much she'd really get out of it, and it's just going to upset you. Okay?”

I nodded, and Kathy said, “Juliet.”

“Sorry,” I said, wiping my eyes with my knuckles. “I was nodding. Yes. Okay.”

“I'd really like you to think about seeing Dr. Bennet.”

“Why don't you understand that I
can't
,” I almost shouted. “I can barely do everything I have to do as it is.”

Aunt Kathy wasn't flustered by my yelling. “Sometimes we have to make time for things that are really important.”

When I got back to Jason's house, I was sorry to see Grace's car in the driveway. The last thing I felt like doing was pulling myself together and interacting normally with anyone. But when I walked into the kitchen, Grace took one look at the expression on my face, put down her iPad, and came over and gave me a hug. I'd thought I was all cried out, but as soon as she put her arms around me, I started to sob.

“Shhhh,” she whispered. “It's okay.”

Standing there, smelling her clean hair and the perfume she wore—light and floral, like a bush of lilacs in the beginning of summer—I let myself fantasize that she was my mom. I imagined I was standing in my own kitchen, having just come home from visiting some crazy aunt. I remembered my first night at the Robinsons'. Bella had said,
Now we're like sisters,
and Jason had joked,
I think we're getting into a gray area.
The
memory made me laugh a little, and Grace pulled away and nodded approvingly.

“That's better,” she said, pushing some hair out of my eyes. “As long as you can laugh, everything is going to be okay.” Then she reached over to the counter and handed me a tissue from the pale gray box on the counter. It was a slightly lighter gray than the granite counter and a slightly darker gray than the glass backsplash. Even the tissues were a pale, pearly gray, and the blouse Grace wore had a band of gray piping around the neck. It didn't surprise me. Everything about the Robinsons matched perfectly.

Grace went to the cabinet and took down two glasses, then filled them with water and ice from the door of the fridge. I wasn't thirsty, but I accepted the glass.

“Thanks,” I said. I took a deep breath.

“You're welcome. Want to talk about it?”

I shrugged. “I don't know. My aunt said they're trying to get her medications right, but she seemed pretty out of it.”
Pretty out of it
felt like a bit of an understatement considering my mother's near catatonia, but I couldn't bring myself to be any more explicit.

“Well, Roaring Brook's got an excellent reputation, and I'm sure she's getting wonderful medical care.” Grace shook her head. “You really got dealt a bum hand, didn't you?”

“I sure did,” I agreed. We both smiled. I was starting to feel better.

“Just remember, Juliet. Your mother made her choices, and you'll make yours. You're your own person.” She took a step closer to me and put her hand on my shoulder.

Grace's confidence in my mental health should have made me feel good, but instead it made me mad. What did she know about my mother? What did she know about me?

She squeezed my shoulder and smiled at me, then turned back to her iPad. Over her shoulder I could see she was looking at a website with a recipe. I stared at her back.

“Dinner's at seven,” she said, half focused on me, half focused on what she was reading.

On the counter beside her was a slab of butcher block with slots for knives. There was an enormous cleaver that I'd used once when Jason and I were cutting watermelon. I imagined taking it now and cleaving her head in two, leaving her perfect kitchen spattered with her perfect brains.

“Maybe you'll help set the table,” she continued, making a note of something on a gray Post-it.

“Sure,” I said carefully, almost as terrified by what I'd been thinking as Grace would have been.

As I walked through the foyer, I heard the tinkling of the ice in my glass, and I realized my hand was shaking. Grace was so confident I wasn't like my mother.

But wasn't I?

I had Latin first period Monday, and I completely bombed a quiz. After, Jason kept telling me I'd probably done better than I thought I had, and even though I let him think I believed him, I knew he was wrong. I couldn't get my head into anything, and even Mr. Harris, my history teacher (who never yelled at anyone), snapped at me for checking my phone in class. I'd been looking to see if Kathy had talked to my mom's doctors and called to tell me about it, which was pretty dumb considering it was seven a.m. in Oregon and she probably hadn't even tried to reach the doctor yet. At swim practice, I could not find my rhythm at all. Coach Kalman kept blowing her whistle and shouting things at me, but it was like she was speaking Swahili.

I finished a lap, surfaced, and found myself face-to-face
with Coach Kalman. “Newman, where's your head?”

“Sorry,” I said automatically.

“Yeah, well. Sorry's not good enough,” she said. Then she blew her whistle. “Okay, that's it for today. Let's hit the showers.”

I stayed in the water and let myself sink down, down, down until my feet were touching the bottom of the pool. All I wanted was to stay down here, to not have to make any decisions—not about my mother, not about my father. Not about swimming or debate or college. If I could just let everything slip away. It would be so easy. . . .

Was this what it had been like for my mom? This sense that it was easier to sink down than to swim up? I thought of the Sylvia Plath poem we'd had on our first practice AP exam.
Dying / Is an art, like everything else. / I do it exceptionally well
. Maybe my mother hadn't done it exceptionally well. Maybe she'd really wanted to die, only she'd screwed up the dosage.

Maybe they'd get her all cleaned up and healthy and she'd get home and do it again.

Do it right this time.

By then my lungs were bursting, and it seemed like a force other than my own body pulled me up to the surface. I bobbed, gasping for air, coughing a little when I accidentally swallowed a mouthful of water.

Killing yourself really was harder than it looked.

Walking out of swim practice, I ran smack into Sinead. It shouldn't have surprised me—obviously, if Declan went to Milltown High, so did his sister and Danny. The surprising thing was how long it had taken me to run into one of them. Two thousand students was a lot of people, but it wasn't enough to keep you from running into someone indefinitely. Still, seeing her threw off my already tenuous equilibrium. I hadn't thought about Declan since English, and now it was like Sinead was here to remind me not to forget him.

If I was surprised, Sinead was shocked. She did a double take. “Jules? Wait, this is so crazy.” She was with two girls I didn't know, and they hesitated, clearly unsure of whether to stay or go. “Do you . . . do you go to school here?”

“Yeah,” I admitted. “I'm a senior.”

My saying I was a senior must have decided Sinead's friends, because they scuttled off. “See you later, Sinead,” they called.

“Later,” she called. We stood there awkwardly for a minute, and then she threw her arms around me. “This is amazing! I can't believe I haven't seen you yet. You know, Declan's a senior too.”

I hugged her back. “Yeah,” I said. “I have a class with him, actually.”

She stepped away. She was wearing a short red skirt and a black top. There was nothing particularly special about the outfit, but something about the cut of the skirt looked cool
and British to me. “Serious?” she asked, her accent suddenly very pronounced.

“Yeah. Honors English.” I realized how weird it was that I'd never asked Declan about his siblings. If he and I hadn't fooled around that night, if I hadn't been so eager to avoid him, I would have asked about them. Maybe not Danny, who was just a kid, but definitely Sinead. Not asking about her suddenly felt as suspicious as anything else I'd done with Declan.

She was still looking at me with those blue, Declan eyes. “He never told me that.”

“He probably forgot. I mean, that we'd met and everything.” I was rocking back and forth uneasily, my bag clutched to my side.

“My brother's a total wanker,” she said finally.

“So how are you?” I asked, eager to change the subject and glad to let her blame everything on Declan's absentmindedness. “How are you liking life as an American?”

She shrugged a very Declan shrug. “It's okay. Are you coming to the show on Friday? At the Coffeehouse? Or did he forget to tell you about that, too?”

“I didn't know you were having a show,” I said, struck by how chill Sinead was. She was someone I could imagine hanging out with, maybe even being friends with.

One more thing I'd blown by getting carried away that night on the beach.

“Yeah, bloody Danny's supposed to be putting up posters,
but he's about as reliable as his brother.” Sinead laughed and squeezed my arm. “It was so much fun hanging out with you at the club that night. I was really pissed when Declan forgot to get your number. I had this crazy idea you'd join the band.”

“I wish I could,” I said, which was true in its way. “I'm too swamped to join a band right now. You know, with college and everything. But I had fun hanging out with you, too.”

She hugged me again. I'd had some idea that British people were standoffish, but apparently I was wrong. “See you at the show,” she said.

I hugged her back. “Definitely,” I said, meaning
Not on your life.

On my way home, Kathy called. I knew I shouldn't answer while I was driving, but I did anyway.

“They were trying a new drug,” she said after we'd said hello. “But she didn't respond well to it, so they're taking her off it.”

“Okay,” I said. What else could I say?

“Their goal is to get her off everything and then see where we are,” Kathy explained.

“Okay,” I said again. I turned onto Jason's block. I glanced in my rearview mirror and saw a police car behind me. I thought about hanging up quickly, so he wouldn't see me on my phone, but then I would have had to explain to Kathy that I was talking to her while I was driving, and I knew she'd be
angry. I pulled up in front of Jason's house, and the cop drove on. Apparently we both had bigger things to worry about than my breaking the law.

“You sound mad,” said Kathy. “Which is understandable,” she added quickly. “It's maddening.”

“I'm not mad,” I said.

We talked for another minute, and then Kathy reminded me to call my grandparents and I said I would and we said good-bye and I went inside. Nobody was home, but I could smell something cooking, which meant either Tammy (the housekeeper) or Grace had started dinner before going out to get Bella and take her to tennis. I was starving, but I knew better than to eat. Dinner was in an hour.

And suddenly, standing in the Robinsons' perfect, gray kitchen, I
was
mad. But not at my mother's doctors. I was mad at Grace Robinson. Why did we have to eat at seven? I was hungry now. I wanted to eat something now, but if I ate something now, I wouldn't be hungry for dinner. Then Grace would be all,
Don't you like the chicken, Juliet?
and I'd feel bad because maybe I would like the chicken or maybe I wouldn't. But the point was, I didn't want to eat at seven, I wanted to eat at six, but if I ate at six, I was going to be causing a problem for the perfect family.

I took an apple from the basket on the counter, went upstairs, and flipped open my Latin book.
Do your hardest homework first.
That was what my dad had always told me.
Hardest work first. It's when you're freshest. Leave the easiest for last.
I'd only been doing that for a decade. In middle school, I'd always started with math. Then, when science got really hard, that came first. And for the past two years it had been Latin.

Fucking Latin.

I sat staring at the passage in front of me.
Infelix o semper, oves, pecus! ipse Neaeram . . .

I heard the front door open and, a minute later, Jason's familiar tread on the stairway. I didn't feel like seeing him now—I didn't feel like seeing anyone now—but there was nothing I could do about it, because this was Jason's house, and if he wanted to see me, I was going to have to see him.

“Hey.” He poked his head in the door. “How was practice?”

“It was okay.”

Jason came over and put his hands on my shoulders, rubbing them gently. I leaned back against him. “That feels good,” I murmured, relaxing into his touch.

“How's it going with the Latin?” he asked. I realized he was looking at the textbook open on the desk.

“Fuck Latin,” I said, leaning forward, which had the dual effect of covering up the book and letting him massage lower down on my back.

“You know it makes me crazy when you talk dirty,” he said, kneading my spine with his knuckles. He started to ease my shirt up, and I tensed.

I didn't think Jason had noticed, but then he said, “You okay?”

“Yeah,” I said immediately. “I'm fine.” I felt a little guilty for how not into having sex I was lately, though the truth was, Jason was so busy he barely seemed into it either.

He started rubbing my back again, this time under my shirt, but almost immediately there was the sound of the garage door opening.

“Drats,” said Jason. “Foiled again.”

“Anyone home?” Grace called out.

“We're up here, Mom,” Jason answered.

A minute later, Bella appeared at the top of the stairs. “Mom said you guys should come set the table in five.” She scampered back down the hallway as soon as she'd said it.

“Sure,” said Jason. He kissed the top of my head and headed toward the door.

“Jason!” It came out louder than I'd intended, almost a scream, and he instantly swung around to face me. “Sorry,” I said, smiling embarrassedly.

“It's okay.” He put his hand on his chest. “That's my cardio for the day.”

“I really am thinking about dropping Latin.”

“J, I think that's a huge mistake,” he said, running his hand through his hair. “We'll do the work together. We'll—”

“You mean you'll do the work
for
me.”

He walked back to where I was sitting, shaking his head.
“You think you can't do it, but you can. And it's worth it, J, at least for first semester. You don't want to turn around in April and say,
I wish I hadn't dropped Latin.
”

“What if I turn around in April and say I wish I
had
dropped Latin?”

He grinned. “Not going to happen,” he promised.

I wanted him to be right. Oh, I
so
wanted him to be right.

From downstairs, Grace called, “Guys! Could you come down and help me?”

Jason held out his hand, and we locked pinkies.