Nowhere Girl (33 page)

“Oh, Cady, I wish you wouldn't call him Dr. Honey. It's not polite.”

“But, Mom, he can't tell any of us apart, so he calls us all
honey
.” Did severely depressed, suicidal teen girls possess some common trait that made us look alike to our shrink?

She rolled her eyes, but I could tell she was trying not to smile.

“Dr. Holley says you
are
ready,” my father said. His voice was so strong I wondered if he'd been practicing in front of the mirror. Clearly, my mother had been kicking him in the ass to man up and convince me to come home.

“I'm too much trouble,” I told them. It was true. At least if I bought the farm on Dr. Honey's watch like the girl two rooms down did when she'd soaked a roll of toilet paper in the sink and eaten it, they couldn't possibly feel like it was their fault.

“Cadence.” My mother twisted her rings. “You're our daughter. You're never any trouble. We find strength in each other.”

The noise that came out of me was something between a snort and a laugh. “I've been nothing but. Really, Mom, don't you want to keep sleeping through the night?” In the few weeks between me trying to off myself and landing here, they'd been sneaking into my room every night to make sure I was still breathing.

Crimson crept up her neck and spread through her face like it did when she'd had too much wine. “We're up, anyway. Really, it's no trouble to check on you.” My mother had always outwardly supported me and done so with a fierce protectiveness, but she had a script she thought we should all follow. Even before Savannah, she gave me one less cookie for dessert, and she'd pushed David to study, to reach his potential. No child of hers was going to go to community college. The joke was definitely on her when I never got any skinnier, David never tried any harder, and Savannah got herself killed.

“Oh, Mom, don't you get it?” I said. “That's the thing. I hate it that I'm the reason you can't sleep. Just a little while longer, and I promise I'll come back good as new.”

They came every week after that. Sundays at noon. At first, they brought boxes of my and Savannah's stuffed animals from when we were little and photos of the two of us together. I'm sure they thought I'd find some comfort in these things, but I quietly slid them under my bed. After two months of visiting and noticing that there were no pictures on my desk or tattered stuffed rabbits on my bed, they gave up and stopped bringing me things that only made me want to kill myself all over again.

Still, they didn't stop asking me to come home. My parents were as confounded by my wanting to stay as Dr. Honey and Stevie were. All the other kids in my ward were counting the days till their release. They borrowed foundation from each other to cover up self-inflicted bruises. They made up elaborate stories about how their wrists got cut. They didn't report that they were still so depressed they couldn't get out of bed without psyching themselves up for group or a visit from their parents.

It was the food that finally drove me home. Meals sucked at Sound View. My parents were both great cooks; they had to be, owning a restaurant. And so the crappy food made me want to leave. The canned vegetables and frozen pizzas were so awful I'd stopped eating. I could tell by how my jeans slid down my hips that I was losing weight. I didn't want to. That'd been the only way anyone could tell Savannah and me apart. She had always been lean, athletic; I got called
solid
and
big boned
. And even though I had wanted to look like her when we were younger, since she'd gotten killed, I didn't want to be beautiful. Not after what happened to her.

I stayed with Dr. Honey and Stevie at Sound View until our insurance benefits ran out. My parents told me they'd have to mortgage the restaurant if I wanted to stay. They'd already lost a child; I couldn't let them lose Sotto Sopra too. So after another round of personality testing and answering questions like
Do you close the bathroom door when you pee even if no one is home?
, I met one last time with my group, smiled as we ate surprisingly good red velvet cake, gave Stevie a Steve Miller CD, and pulled all of Savannah's stuff from under my bed.

I was hoping I wouldn't have to go back to school. The tutors at Sound View were really good and had told my parents I was the equivalent of a college freshman. The way I saw it, I could slack off in the safety of my house for another year. “Really, Mom?” I asked on the way home when she said David could drive me on his way to his classes the next day. “Are you seriously going to make me go back to that place? Why can't I have a tutor like I did at Sound View?”

I saw her straighten her back when I said the words
Sound View
. “It's time things got back to normal, Cady.” And I knew from the grim way she'd set her mouth that if I wanted to get out of this, I'd have to appeal to my father, but it was almost as if he wasn't there. He was still as ghostlike as he'd been before I'd left, almost nonexistent.

It was, of course, Gabby who saved me. She came over that night for lobster, and afterward, we lay on my bed painting our toenails black while she told me how terrible it had been without me. She had to sit with the pretty girls at lunch (she didn't mean it the way it sounded), her lab partner farted all the time, and I wasn't there to make fun of the ridiculous teachers who tried to get the kids to like them by saying, “Yo, dog, what's up?” and “Keepin' it real.” She also told me I needed to meet the new history teacher who'd transferred in after Mrs. Jepps had her baby two months early. His name was Mr. Sweetee (Gabby had to show me the newly updated school directory before I believed her). He was skinnier than the cheerleaders who existed on Diet Coke and cigarettes, had more hair than Hannah Delane, who hadn't cut her hair in three years, and every day at the start of fourth period, he'd arrive in the classroom a few seconds after the bell rang, set his Starbucks cup on his desk, and rattle off stupid coffee jokes. “What do you buy coffee with? Starbucks. If you spend too much time in the coffee shop, you'll be latte for work. When my wife spilled coffee on my shirt, I got hot under the collar.” Gabby had memorized so many of Mr. Sweetee's terrible jokes that I suspected she had a crush on him. After she left, I went downstairs, where my mother was making desserts for Sotto Sopra. I sat on the stool and ate sugared berries and told her I'd go back to school after all. And sometimes, walking the hall, feeling unprotected as my new skinnier self, I remembered Dr. Holley's office those afternoons at Sound View, how the radiator clanked and the way the sleet or snow came down in the dying light and that feeling of being totally relaxed because finally I didn't have to pretend. He was someone who was actually asking me to be myself.

That might be why when it came to going to Pepperidge Farm again, I got there early. He was with another client, and I sat there listening to the sound machine outside his door, waiting for Greg.

About five minutes before the hour, a woman came out of his office in a flowered dress, a tight bun, and gigantic sunglasses. She kept her head down, but I suspected by how red her nose was that she'd been crying. A few minutes later, Pepperidge Farm stood in the doorway of the waiting room.

“Greg's not here yet,” I said, taking my seat on the soft leather couch.

He pushed his glasses up his nose. “So I see,” he said.

I crossed my legs, and I felt my foot moving back and forth. I willed it to stop. I was trying to remember when Odion's citizenship test was when Pepperidge Farm said, “So you went to Princeton.”

Dr. Mirando—I needed to start thinking of him as Dr. Mirando, because I was terrified I'd call him Pepperidge Farm to his face—was wearing a pair of khakis and a sweater and beneath the sweater a tie. I imagined him knotting the tie in front of the mirror and checking with his wife to make sure it was straight. “Yes,” I said.

“I did too.” He smiled warmly at me. “Graduated quite a few years before you.” He seemed like a nice man, a man who was a good father and probably had a couple of nice kids. “It wasn't as difficult to get in when I went.” He sounded like he was contemplating something. “You must be smart,” he said.

“I'm not really that smart,” I told him. I wondered where Greg was; he was so set on going to therapy again, and now he was blowing it off.

He gave a little laugh. “You did go to Princeton.”

“Everyone always says that,” I told him, thinking of the raised eyebrows I got whenever I got interviewed and they asked where I went to college. “But I went to Princeton because I studied obsessively as a child. Some girls escape with television or drugs. I escaped by studying. I like learning, but I'm not one of those freaky smart people with a really high IQ.” Now I remembered why I had not wanted to come back here. Pepperidge Farm had the unique ability to make me babble about useless, possibly incriminating information.

“But your test scores must have been very high,” he said.

“We test well, my family. But also I took the Princeton Review. Twice.” My nails were chewed up. I didn't really have that many friends; I had nothing better to do than study, I wanted to tell him. But that sounded sort of victimized and weird.

“What were you escaping from?” he asked.

“What?”

“You said some girls escaped with television or drugs. What were you escaping from by studying?”

My mouth felt dry. “I think you know,” I said. There was no turning back now. “The thing I do the most is count.”

“Count?”

“Yeah,” I said. “You know, standing in the grocery store, I'll count the number of items in people's carts and do the square root of them, or I add the numbers on license plates together and divide them by the number of people in the car.” Jesus, would I please shut up? But I had to keep going. “Or for instance, I know how many days—”

And then the door opened, and Greg came in, and for some reason, we both stood up. Greg's hair was messy and his shirt untucked. He shook Dr. Mirando's hand, and I was worried the doctor might tell Greg what had flown out of my mouth about counting, but we settled back in our seats, and Greg said, “Sorry I was late; a client got admitted, and I had to be there.” Greg crossed and uncrossed his legs and spent the next thirty minutes telling Dr. Mirando about the last few weeks, how I'd gone to yoga with him and he'd gone to a Thursday dinner with me.

When we were done discussing the time Greg and I had spent together lately, our therapist pushed up his glasses and said to me, “Cady, is there anything specific that you want to discuss?”

“I hate our house,” I said.

I felt Greg staring at me. “What did you say?”

“Um, I don't really like our house.”

“Okay,” Dr. Mirando said. “Tell me what you don't like about it.”

“Our house is lovely,” Greg said defensively.

“It's sterile,” I said. My hands burned; they were chapped from going to the barn every day and taking care of Bliss. “And too big. And the acoustics make me wish I were deaf.” I paused for a moment but then started speaking again. “And the whole thing is a gross display of wealth.” I patted Greg's leg. “Greg likes money.”

He threw up his hands. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Dr. Mirando seemed to be studying me.

“I mean that's one of the things I was attracted to, initially. You have really great taste.” I touched the Rolex on his wrist. “High culture, upscale. I grew up in a small colonial, very middle-class, and it was exciting to be with someone who knew about architectural design and the symphony.” Here I was again, talking like someone had wound me up. I turned to Dr. Mirando and spoke directly to him. “His parents live on the Upper West Side, and they are both so lovely, and they know Paris inside and out; in fact, they are there now on sabbatical, and they go to places like Tangiers and wander the medinas, and I mean that's the kind of person I wish I could be, but I'm really not.”

Greg started to say something, but to my surprise, Dr. Mirando put up his hand like judges sometimes do in court when they want a witness to keep talking. He leaned forward. “What kind of person are you, Cady?”

Greg was watching me, his eyes piercing.

A flash of heat was crawling up my back. I felt like I might break out in hives. “I don't know. I mean, I write mysteries—” All of a sudden, the motor cut out, and not one more word wanted to pop out of my mouth.

Dr. Mirando seemed to know I was done talking, and he sat back in his seat. One of his almost nonexistent eyebrows was up, it seemed, permanently. No one spoke. I smoothed my skirt. I hated my legs. I hated how they spread out so wide, the thighs, it reminded me of the day so long ago when Mrs. Wilcox was typing away while I was waiting for Savannah.

Finally, and I'm not sure where this came from, I said, “I don't like the wall of windows in the living room. I can't get away from them.”

“Why would you want to get away from them?” Pepperidge Farm asked quietly.

The therapist's perfectly knotted tie had flip-flops on it. I wondered what his wife did for a living. I imagined she stayed home during the day and cleaned and cooked dinner and ironed the sheets. “They look out over the reservoir,” I said. “And I mean, what's out there?” I made a sound like a laugh but not quite. “In the winter when it gets dark early and before Greg gets home, I sometimes can't move. It's like I stand at the windows, and I'm stuck.” I was talking quickly. I felt chilled suddenly. “It goes on for miles and miles that land. I mean, anything could be out there, and I stand in the living room and can't move.”

“Can't move?” Pepperidge Farm leaned toward me again. “But what do you see there?”

“I don't see anything. Just my own reflection.”

Dr. Mirando leaned back. He tented his hands and watched me. “If you see your own reflection, then you are seeing something.”