Lost in Thought (2 page)

Then her career started. And she was
amazing
. Soon, we were traveling all over the country, sometimes the world, while Aunt Tessa did her installations and sculptures. Most of the time we stayed for several months, but sometimes only weeks. Enrolling me in schools was pretty pointless, since we moved so frequently. I had a long string of nannies and private tutors except for an entire semester of my freshman year, when my Aunt served as a visiting professor at a big university in Boston. The university also ran a small private high school, so for the first time ever, I was in regular school classes. I had liked it, though, and I thought my short time there had prepared me pretty well to attend Northbrook.

But I’d never lived without Aunt Tessa before, and when we were living in Boston I had only just started to go crazy.

THE OFFICIAL STORY—the one that everyone but me believed—was that I had severe migraines, precipitated by dizziness and, frequently, fainting. I’d been to six specialists, plus two psychologists, in the last two years. At first, they thought it was an allergy, because the first four episodes occurred while I was in places notoriously full of allergens: antique shops.

I loved antiques. It was weird, I knew. Not something your typical teenager was into. But hey, it wasn’t like I’d had much chance to be a typical teenager. I’d never spent much time of my own thinking about
why
I loved them, but one of my psychologists concluded it was the “lack of permanence in my childhood that led me to an unusual preoc-cupation with objects that seemed to have longevity.”
I
concluded that guy was mostly an idiot with no appreciation for fine things, but he might have been on to something with the permanence.

When I thought about whatever antique I was admiring, I imagined its past, where it had been, what it had been through in its long life.

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That kind of thing. I was fascinated by the idea that these items had years and years of history, that they had stories to tell and a sense of place about them that I guess my psychologist would’ve said I subcon-sciously yearned for myself. Turned out I was right about the stories the objects would tell, but at the time I thought they were the ones I made up in my head.

The first specialist determined that I was allergic to nothing. Nada.

Not even dust. It was a great theory, I gave them that much, and I
wanted
it to be that simple, which is why I let them poke me repeatedly, rub things on my arms, and all around make me miserable for two months straight. In the end though, they couldn’t explain my dizzy/fainting/migraine spells, and the allergist sent me to the nutritionist.

Because I was fairly tall—nearly five foot, ten inches—and slender, their next thought was that my problem was my diet. I needed to eat more, or better, or probably both. I could have told them this wasn’t true, that my parents were both tall and slim, and that I ate plenty and exercised a lot, but I wanted this theory to be right too. Unfortunately, the nutritionist decided the problem wasn’t my diet but caffeine specifically.

Coffee was, of course, my favorite thing, after antiques anyway. I was forced to abandon it for the next month, which would have been the most miserable of my existence if I hadn’t just gone through the allergy testing. But instead of better, I was worse, having more episodes during my coffee-free hell. The nutritionist sent me to the first neurologist.

I went through two of them, followed by the first psychologist, two more neuros and, finally, the last psychologist. I was scanned, I was monitored, I was all sorts of tested however you can imagine. I was asked questions, I was listened to, I was talked
at
, and then finally I

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was simply watched. There was no solid explanation, nor any solid pattern, for what was causing my migraines.

Every one of my doctors tried hard to solve my problem, and in the end I felt bad for them. I wanted to stop the testing after the first two neurologists, but Aunt Tessa absolutely refused to let it go. The problem was not my undoubtedly excellent specialists. The problem was me. I wasn’t honest with them, at least not entirely, because I had hoped they could find a medical reason for my headaches without my having to admit the full truth.

The problem was that I saw dead people.

r more specifically, I saw visions of how they died. Most lasted only a few seconds, a handful were gruesome, and I swore some of them were visions of how people were
going
O to die. They would come with no warning except dizziness, usually right after I’d touched something or someone, and were followed by a severe headache. If I was lucky, I even fainted too, in between the vision and the migraine.

If someone were telling me this story, I’d probably have laughed at them. In fact, I knew I would, which is why I absolutely couldn’t bring myself to tell the doctors and especially not the psychologists. Maybe the psychologists wouldn’t have laughed—they were professionals, after all—but they would have written down immediately what I already knew: that I was crazy, or at least getting there on an express train. Of course, they would never have used the word “crazy,” at least not when talking to me, and they would have tried to blame my condition on something, like my parents’ deaths, or my untraditional lifestyle, and I couldn’t bear that. Ironically, that’s exactly what happened.

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Aunt Tessa and I had been in Baltimore for several weeks, where she was teaching a class at her and my parents’ alma mater. It was the first time we’d been back since the year after their deaths. We were walking through campus one afternoon when a dizzy spell struck. I swayed and put my hand out on the car next to us, a blue Cadillac Coupe Deville that some lucky student had obviously inherited from his parents or grandparents. It was a tank, showing its age in some rust and dents, but still solid and looked like it would run for years to come. I would never forget it.

It was the car that killed my parents.

It was over in a few seconds, the vision and the simple chain of events: an SUV in the right lane came up on a slower-moving bus and changed lanes too quickly, without looking. The man in the Cadillac honked and swerved, causing him to clip my parents’ car instead. Their car spun radically to the right, where the SUV slammed into it and pushed it into the bus, which then rolled over three times before coming to rest on its side across the highway.

I saw this all clearly, as if I were right there, my mother desperately turning the wheel, my father shocked and disoriented from being asleep in the passenger seat, just before the SUV crashed into his door and took them out of my life forever. My parents died, the driver of the SUV died, and nine people on the bus died too. The Cadillac skidded into the grass median and suffered nothing more than a dented bumper.

I took my hand from the car, looked at my aunt, and crumpled to the ground unconscious.

WHEN I AWOKE in the hospital, I had a wicked headache and an appointment with my psychologist. Apparently I’d screamed, too, when I collapsed, and had been muttering about my parents, the car, the vision, as I drifted in and out of consciousness for three hours. The psychologist arrived and asked me gently what happened. I told him a

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slightly edited version of the truth: I got dizzy, put my hand on the car, and then passed out, remembering nothing after that. I did not mention what I’d seen.

The details of my parents’ accident weren’t a mystery, so it wasn’t like I’d been babbling about something I shouldn’t or couldn’t have known. My aunt and the doctors were skeptical, especially about the importance of the car, but I stuck to my story of not knowing what had happened. And in a way, I didn’t. I only knew that I was crazy and that the whole crazy incident had made me exhausted.

My psychologist determined that, big surprise, I was exhausted. He went further though, blaming the exhaustion on the psychological stress caused by my constant life on the move and, of course, my return to the city where my parents died. He prescribed three remedies: that I take an antidepressant, I get out of Baltimore, and, lastly and most importantly, once I got wherever I was going, I
stay
there. He did not want me to move again for my last two years of high school.

Whoa. My first thought was I wasn’t prepared for that. I
liked
my life, thank you very much. I was mentally ready to slow down once I went to college, but I thought I’d have two more years to enjoy this wanderlust lifestyle with my aunt. Instead, I kind of felt like I’d been in a car wreck myself, going from moving fast to stopped dead in the blink of an eye.

Aunt Tessa instantly blamed herself when she heard the psychologist’s proclamation—for bringing me here, for not thinking more about how such a lack of stability would affect me, and on and on— and would not be deterred from the plan despite all my protests. She was on the phone immediately with Uncle Martin to discuss our options when he announced the most surprising thing of the day. Given the day we’d had, that was really saying something.

Apparently I had a guaranteed place at a prestigious boarding school—Northbrook Academy, in Northwestern Massachusetts—

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already waiting for me, whenever I decided to show up. My aunt and I took this as a bit of shocking news since neither of us had ever heard of the place.

Uncle Martin’s voice resonated from the speakerphone in front of us. “You see, Tess, Lainey’s trust fund has some unusual clauses, as you know. One of those is for a Legacy placement at Northbrook…”

“But why didn’t we know about this?!” Aunt Tessa interrupted, a little angry. “Could Lainey have been attending that school this whole time? Legacy implies family history there, right? Whose Legacy is she?

From Allen’s or Julie’s family?” Allen and Julie were my parents. “Neither of them went there, I’d remember.”

“I’m sorry this is a surprise, Tessa. To you too, Lainey; I’m sure you’re there listening. It’s not that I didn’t want to tell you. I wasn’t allowed.”

“Huh?” was my brilliant contribution to the conversation. I was sure this Academy would be hugely impressed.

“I don’t pretend to understand all of Allen’s wishes, but most of them have turned out to be quite wise,” Uncle Martin continued. “And regardless, it’s not my place to question them, merely execute them.

His stipulation was this: Lainey was only to be proposed the opportunity to attend Northbrook if she
needed it.
And before you ask, I don’t think Allen planned to send Lainey to the school either. He was very explicit that if and only if a situation in Lainey’s life made her attendance at Northbrook the most desirable course of action was I to present this opportunity. As to what would necessitate her attendance, he left that to my discretion.”

He sighed. “Uncle” Martin was not technically my uncle either, but I loved him nearly as much as Aunt Tessa. He was my trust fund manager and one of my father’s oldest friends.

“Believe me, Lainey,” he continued, “when your headaches began to be a serious concern, I spent considerable hours contemplating if it

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was time to make the offer. But you’ve never seemed unhappy to me, certainly not
depressed”
—he said it as if it were a dirty word, something the psychologist had defiled me with by the mere suggestion, and I smiled for the first time that afternoon—“even with the headaches, and I’ve always thought that with your aunt is exactly where you wanted to be. And you’re right, Tessa. Legacy status at Northbrook is usually established by a family member. Lainey’s, however, is anonymous. The trust says nothing more than it exists, how to claim it, and that her acceptance will be immediate and fully funded, provided she meets academic admissions criteria which, I assure you, she does admirably.”

We all stopped to digest everything Uncle Martin had put out there. It was a lot to take in, not to mention that he always talked like the big time financial manager he was. In my whole life, he’d never treated me like a kid and never apologized for it, which was one of the many reasons I loved him. I also trusted his advice.

“Well…what do you think, Uncle Martin?” I hoped his opinion would confirm the surprising one rapidly forming in my mind.

“I think it’s something you should seriously consider,” he said.

“Naturally, I familiarized myself with the school as soon as I accepted the position as executor for your trust. It’s a fine institution, one of the finest in the country, with many distinguished alumni and a robust academic curriculum. I wouldn’t hesitate to send my own daughter there, and since you’re the closest thing I have to one, Lainey, I wouldn’t hesitate to send you either.”

“This is all happening so fast, Martin,” Aunt Tessa said. “Why don’t we get the literature, and…”

“Okay,” I interrupted.

“Okay what?” My aunt turned to me, confused.

“Okay, I’ll do it,” I said. “As long as I like how it looks once I can check it out. But if it looks okay, I’ll accept. I’ll go there.”

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Aunt Tessa was kind of frantic. “Lainey, there’s no hurry here, no pressure. You don’t have to decide this minute, or even today. Why don’t we take a week to consider your options and really look into the school…”