Pretty Amy (25 page)

I was tempted to tell him I was on heroin, if only to end our annoying appointments once and for all. But then there really wouldn’t be anyone besides Aaron who listened to me.

“Fine. I’m not hiding heroin in my mattress, but if my mother asks, don’t tell her that.”

“I don’t tell your mother anything you say to me.”

“What have I said to you?” It was a serious question. I couldn’t remember where my thoughts ended and my words began. What he knew about me and what I let him know about me.

“You need to stop diverting attention away from what you should really be focusing on.” He looked at me like he was a cat and I was a mouse he had been chasing, and he had finally been able to back me into a corner.

“I know, I’ve heard, turning on Lila and Cassie,” I said.

“Yes, making the decision whether or not to testify,” he said.

“It’s not a decision, it’s a mandate, and I’ve said no. It’s not good enough.”

“Why did you choose to say no?”

“Because Lila and Cassie would hate me forever,” I said.
Because Aaron would think I was weak
, I didn’t say. I looked at Daniel’s shirt, each circle of purple a little darker than the one inside it, like the layers of a Gobstopper.

“Don’t you care about what happens to you?”

“Of course,” I replied, but as I said it, I realized it was more a reflex than a statement with much feeling behind it.

I guess he realized it, too. “There is very little I can do if you won’t let me help you.”

“Fine, help me, then,” I said.

Help me like you help your daughter
, I thought.
Tell me what you tell her to make her smile the way she does in her softball picture, to make her want to play softball, to make her want to get out of bed every morning.

I waited. He had to know something, to be able to share some little scrap of knowledge that would make everything better.

He shook his head. I’d finally asked him for help and he couldn’t even respond. I thought about AJ looking at me silently the day before. Maybe no one knew the secret.

“Your fly is open,” I said. It wasn’t, but I wanted him to look in any direction but at me. If he couldn’t help me, I didn’t want him staring at me, studying me, analyzing me.

“I know it’s hard for you to believe that people care about you, but they do.”

“They care about what I’m going to do.”

“That’s the same thing.”

“It really isn’t,” I said, feeling my throat catch, close up. Feeling the rest of the words I didn’t want to say fall back down it, the letters scrambling in my stomach like Scrabble tiles.

“Whether people care about you or not isn’t really the issue,” he said, and he took off his glasses. “The issue is whether you care enough about yourself. So, do you?”

“Signing that paper doesn’t prove anything,” I said.

“That isn’t what I asked,” he said.

“Fine. I care about what happens to me.”

“They’re just words, Amy. I can say anything and pretend I mean it.”

Maybe
he
could. It wasn’t like that for me. I lived in a house without words. He had no idea what hearing them meant, what saying them meant, even if they didn’t actually mean anything.

But maybe he was right. Was caring about myself the secret? But even if that were true, how was I supposed to get there?

He looked at me, his eyes going little-girl sad. “I know you’re having a hard time without your friends.”

“What do you mean? I’m fine. I just talked to Lila,” I said, fast, fast, fast, so I didn’t have time to think it wasn’t true.

“That’s a lie,” he said.

How he knew this I wasn’t sure, but I hoped he hadn’t seen me flinch when he said it.

…

The minute I got home I tried to call Lila again. Well, not the minute I got home—first I had to deal with my mother slamming the front door in my face and telling me I could sleep on the street with the other junkies.

After having a cigarette and deciding that dealing with my mother was in fact better than holing up under the nearest underpass, I went inside, though I did reconsider when I found her in the basement ripping apart my mattress with a steak knife.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Getting that monkey off your back.” She picked up a handful of stuffing from the inside of the mattress and compared it with a book in her hand. It was called
Heroin: Not a Horse You Want to Ride
. She must have gotten it from the library while I was at my appointment with Daniel.

“Mom, this is ridiculous,” I said, taking AJ from his cage.

“I’ll tell you what’s ridiculous—that you would put poison into your body. That you would bring”—she paused and turned the page—“that Lady H into my house.” She picked up another pile of mattress stuffing, studying it.

Lady H
, AJ squawked.
Lady H
, he squawked again.

“Where is it, AJ?” my mother asked, like he was Lassie or something.

“Mom, there’s nothing in there. It was a joke,” I said. I thought about Daniel’s claim that he didn’t tell my mother anything I said. Well, apparently he’d told her about the mattress.

She pulled out another handful of stuffing and compared it with her book.

AJ perched himself on my shoulder and bit at my hair.
Snow
, AJ said,
snow, snow, snow.

I knew he meant the white beads of stuffing my mother was throwing into the air as she searched, but luckily she didn’t hear him, or she probably would have thought I was on cocaine, too.

“Why don’t you just buy yourself a microscope?”

“Don’t tempt me,” she said, dragging the mattress up the stairs, the corner of it smacking each step, so she could do in private whatever tests she needed to do.

I closed the door behind her, put AJ back in his cage, got underneath my heap of blankets on the floor, and called Lila. My hand glowed green from the buttons on the cordless phone as I dialed the number. I didn’t really know what I was going to say, but I needed to hear her voice. I needed to hear her words, whether she meant them or not.

But instead of her voice on the line, or even the phone ringing and ringing and ringing, I got the punch in the stomach of a recorded operator telling me the number I had dialed was no longer in service and no other information was available. The only way I could reach Lila no longer existed.

I wanted to ask the operator if she knew why, to ask her if Lila had been forced by her parents to disconnect it, or whether she had chosen to disconnect it herself. I kept listening, as if she would give me the answers I was looking for.

I needed that woman in the phone. I needed to know why no other information was available. Why I was in my basement, under my covers with a phone to my ear, and only her recorded voice to turn to.

That day I realized that insanity isn’t just about being crazy; it’s also about being lonely.

I brought the phone upstairs and saw my mother in the backyard through the kitchen window. She was next to the swing set. She doused my mattress in kerosene and then lit it on fire.

As Cassie would have said,
She must be really fucking lonely
.

Twenty-seven

With my mattress incapacitated, I slept on the couch in the living room that night. I sat AJ’s cage on the floor next to me and couldn’t help keeping my hand on it, like a little kid falling asleep holding a stuffed animal.

Throughout the night, I would wake up to AJ’s cage shaking beneath my palm and find him flying around in circles. This was not different behavior for him, but I suppose it was different for me to notice it. Notice it and realize that if I were convicted, I would be just like AJ, flying around in circles in my very own cage.

I smelled my father making breakfast before I saw it, smelled butter and warm batter. I picked up AJ’s cage and brought it to the kitchen table with me.

“Bon appétit,”
he said in a faux French accent. “May I interest you in some cakes made in a pan?” He was standing in front of the stove with a spatula in his hand and wearing the pink-and-white-checkered apron my mother had worn the night Dick Simon had come for dinner.

“I can make them bird sized, too,” he said, trying to flip one in the air like the pros, but he ended up whipping it behind him, where it hit the wall and stuck like a suction cup. “Look,” he said, pointing with the spatula, “wall-cake.”

I smiled. At least he was trying. “Where’s Mom?” Seeing as he was making breakfast, I was hoping the answer was something like
Istanbul
.

“Still sleeping,” he said, turning back to his sizzling pan.

I looked at the clock. It was ten o’clock a.m. Usually if she wasn’t up by seven we were checking her breathing with a spoon. “Guess it’s tiring playing narcotics detective.”

“Let her be. She had a rough night.”

“Not as rough as my mattress,” I said, pointing through the window to our backyard, where my mattress lay like a burned marshmallow. I was sure Joe and his mom had seen it, had smelled it. Bald Britney Spears weird? Um, yeah.

“She just cares about you.” This is what my father said every time my mother did something crazy. My mother’s definition of care was a mental disorder. “Besides, you’re the one who lied,” he said.

“I didn’t lie. I was joking.”

“You say
pancake
, I say
poncake
.”

“I’ve never heard you say
poncake
.”

“I hope you’re hungry,” he said, walking toward the table with a plate piled high.

“Does she know you’re making breakfast?”

“I didn’t make it for her. I made it for us,” he said.

Such was my life: my mother went arsonist on my belongings like I was a felon; my father made me pancakes.

I had to admit, that morning I liked it. It was nice sitting with my dad, eating terrible pancakes and listening to him talk about proper mastication techniques for better dental health. I should have known something terrible was just around the corner.

My mother ran down the stairs, yelling, “What did you do now?” I thought she was referring to the smell of my dad’s pancakes, but then I heard two car doors slam in our driveway.

I found my mother standing at our front window. She had the curtain open a sliver, like a scared old lady.

“Who is it?” I asked, and then answered my own question by coming around behind her and looking for myself. I saw two policemen leaning on the side of their squad car. One was flipping through a wallet-photo-size notebook. The other was looking over his shoulder at our house and nodding.

“What are they doing here?” I asked. Was there some new law I didn’t know about where they could come and haul me away at any time? “You didn’t call them, did you? About the stupid heroin?”

“Why, should I have?” she asked, squinting at me.

“Maybe they’re here about the mattress,” I said.

My father walked up behind us from the kitchen. “What’s going on?”

“Ask your daughter,” my mother said, crossing her arms.

The policemen rang the doorbell and my mother jumped like she had been burned by the sound. I heard AJ squawking from the kitchen. “What is that bird doing at the table?” she asked.

“Aren’t you going to answer it?” I said.

“Why should I? It’s not for me.” She didn’t move.

I matched her stance, a younger, shorter, saner mirror image.

“Which one of us already has a criminal record?” she asked.

“I haven’t been charged yet.”

“Exactly—
yet
.”

My mother and I stood across from each other like two cowboys ready to draw in a duel. Maybe I couldn’t always say what was on my mind, but I could stand and stare like a ninja. The bell rang again.

“Is someone going to get that?” my father asked.

My mother and I didn’t move.

One of the policemen started knocking, loudly, and yelling about getting a warrant. That was enough to make my mother give up. She went for the door like she was the explosive at the end of a fuse their words had lit.

“Sorry, I was in the shower and didn’t hear the bell,” she said, trying to sound her most law-abiding and innocent. Even though it was
so
obvious she had not been in the shower, even though my father and I stood on both sides of her.

“I’m Officer Kavanagh, and this is Officer Teesdale,” he said, indicating himself, then the shorter guy next to him. “Does Amy Fleishman live here?” he asked, looking down at his pad.

“For today she does,” my mother said.