The Half Life of Molly Pierce (8 page)

After lunch my headache’s gotten so bad I skip class and visit the nurse. She’s notoriously stingy with the pain pills and I have to beg her for two ibuprofens. She gives them to me with a look of obvious distaste, but let her distaste me all she wants. I have the pills.

Then she does something I’m not expecting. She watches me take the pills, gets me the glass of water and everything, and when I’m done she puts a hand on the side of my face. Not checking for a temperature, exactly, maybe just checking for a pulse. For warmth. The giveaway signs of life.

“Are you all right, Molly?” she asks.

“Fine,” I say. I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m fine.

“Would you like to call someone?”

She lets me use the phone in her office and Alex answers with a mouth full of food. Lunchtime. I find myself unable to properly articulate my words and after a few seconds of grunts and heavy sighs, I manage a strained hello.

“Molly? Is that you?”

I hear him swallow and wait for me to answer him.

“Yeah, it’s me.”

“Is everything okay?”

In one year of steady meetings—three times a week for the first four months and now just on Wednesdays—I have never, ever called Alex. I’ve had his number memorized since that first week and I have dialed it on two separate occasions but I hung up before it was able to connect.

No.

Not everything is okay.

In fact, I can think of absolutely nothing that is deserving of the label “okay.”

I can’t answer him. I turn my back to the windows that line one wall of the nurse’s office and I stare blindly, seeing nothing.

Lyle and me sitting underneath an oak tree.

But I’ve never met Lyle before
, my mind screams.

“Molly?”

“Alex,” I say, and his name catches in my throat.

“When can you get here?” he says.

I mumble something into the phone. I can’t remember what I mumble. I’m forgetting everything as soon as it happens. I say something to the nurse and she lets me leave, but I can’t remember what I say to her. I go to my locker and I get my coat and my keys and I have the vague idea that I shouldn’t be driving. I shouldn’t be driving, but Clancy won’t be sixteen for another few months and I can’t call my parents. What would I tell them?

I can’t ask Erie or Luka to skip classes.

Pull yourself together, Molly. You can drive to the doctor.

It’s sunny but cold outside. I make my way to the car and the air outside helps clear my head a little, lifts me up from the constant dreams of drowning. For a minute I entertain the idea of finding Sayer leaning against my car again, without the umbrella this time, a slow smile spreading across his face when he sees me.

But of course nobody’s there.

I drive slower than usual and I keep the windows rolled down, and the breeze hitting my face leaves me red cheeked and puffing, but I’m glad for it. It keeps me here. It keeps me present.

It’s a short drive to Alex’s office and he’s waiting outside for me. I didn’t expect that. I think back to how I must have sounded on the phone and I’m sure I scared him. I haven’t talked about suicide in a while, but it was there once. That was the entire reason I started going to him, wasn’t it? An offhand comment made to Clancy, overheard by Hazel, related quickly to my parents. And there I was. Dumped unceremoniously in Alex’s office. He wasn’t like any therapist I’d seen on TV or imagined for myself. He listened when I talked and it seemed like he actually cared about what happened to me. He became a sort of friend, didn’t he? He had become a presence in my life. Someone to call when there was no one else. If I had asked him to come pick me up at school, he would have, wouldn’t he? It hadn’t occurred to me but he would have. Of course he would have.

I haven’t gotten out of my car and after a few minutes he comes over and opens the door for me. I realize I’m crying. I’m losing tiny bits of my memory at a time. I don’t remember turning my car off. I don’t remember covering my face with my hands. I’m living disjointed. I’m living in bits.

I have to tell him or it will never stop.

Maybe I’ve finally realized that.

I get out of the car, declining his help, and I trip and almost fall into him but I still won’t let him hold my arm. I sniff until I stop crying and I walk ahead of him, leaving him to lock up my car, make sure I’ve taken my keys, my purse. He shuts the door. Follows me.

In his office I fall down into the armchair and he sits on the desk.

The rest of the memory wasn’t anything special. Lyle and I stayed underneath the oak tree for a while and we were friends. We talked. And a few times there was almost an air of forced calm, of purposeful peace between us. A tension we were trying hard to move past.

But then he said something and I said something and he didn’t like what I said. He got up and left. Maybe he asked me something, but I can’t hear what he asked me and I can’t hear what I answered. But he didn’t like it. Whatever it was, he didn’t like my answer and he looked at me for a couple of seconds and I looked down at my hands and then he got up and left.

Well, that would make sense.

The next time we saw each other we fought, didn’t we? He told me he loved me at some point. I told him I couldn’t think about him that way. Those things, at least, had fallen into place.

Alex is waiting for me to say something. I look up at him and there’s that look again. That look I’ve been seeing on everyone’s faces lately.

It’s like they’re waiting for something.

It’s like they’re waiting for me to do something.

“I haven’t told you everything,” I say. I don’t know where it comes from, this sudden desire to tell Alex the truth, but it’s like I’ve reached the genius conclusion that he can’t help me if I’m not honest with him. I’ve pretended I was okay. I’ve been an idiot.

“What haven’t you told me?”

“Last year. When I told my brother I was thinking it would be easier. On everybody. To, you know.”

I can’t bring myself to say it.

To kill myself.

To end my life.

To walk out into the ocean or slit my wrists in the bathtub.

“When your troubles started,” Alex supplies.

“My troubles, yeah. Something else started back then, too.”

He raises one eyebrow and then lowers it. His face is covered with that look. I don’t know what that look means, but to be fair, he’s marginally better at hiding it than everyone else is.

Marginally.

He moves a hand. Continue.

“Sometimes I can’t remember things,” I say. My voice is all wrong. Too quiet. Too angular. The words are hard and the edges are sharp. They hit my teeth and my head aches with the resounding click of them.

“What kind of things can’t you remember?”

It seems stupid, right, asking me about what I can’t remember. But it’s like maybe he knows. It’s like maybe he knows that all these things I’ve lost, they’ve started to come back to me.

“Blocks of time,” I begin. “I’ll be doing something and then a couple hours have passed. Or a couple minutes, even. Or half a day. I’ll sort of . . . wake up, somewhere. With no idea of what I’ve been doing. Where I’ve been.”

I’m struggling to keep my breathing even. I’ve never spoken this aloud before and it feels like I’m divulging some dirty, awful secret.

Alex lowers his eyes.

I’m expecting him to say something, but he doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t even look at me.

“Alex?” I say.

He raises his eyes slightly, not his head. “Yes, Molly?”

“Did you hear me?”

“Yes, I did.”

“And you’re not saying anything. You don’t even look . . . surprised, really. And that boy who got killed, the one who knew my name. I’m remembering things about him. I think I knew him. I think all this time I’m missing has something to do with him.”

Silence again. Alex gets up. Goes over to the window. Moves the blinds aside and looks out over the parking lot.

What the fuck is his problem?

“Alex!” I say, sharply this time. He turns around. Looks at me. “Can you say something? I just told you something sort of . . . I mean, I’m missing time, Alex. For a year. Blackouts. Minutes, hours . . . just gone.”

I’ve prepared myself for a lot. For disbelief. For doubt. For questions. For hesitations.

I have not prepared myself for what comes out of Alex’s mouth next.

“Molly,” he says. “I know.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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I
squeak.

I mean I actually squeak. I open my mouth to say something and nothing comes out except a pathetic, mouse-like exhalation. I’m looking at Alex like he has two heads, like he just breathed fire, like he sprouted fangs and proclaimed the existence of vampires and then sprinted across the room and tore my jugular out. Like he’s literally dangling my jugular in front of my face. The pendulum on a clock. Swinging it back and forth. My jugular dripping blood onto the carpet, onto my shoes.

I’m stuck now because I realize I don’t know what a jugular looks like. I’ve always imagined it as a sort of spring, but I doubt that’s right. It’s a vein, isn’t it? Just a normal vein.

He moves away from the window.

“Molly, listen,” he begins, wringing his hands in front of him. Is he nervous? He looks nervous. I’m confused. I can’t seem to shut my mouth. “Listen, Molly, there’s a lot we should talk about.”

“We should talk about . . . a lot. There is a lot we should talk about.” I repeat this sort of like a robot, which to me seems a fair step above rodent.

“You’ve been missing chunks of time. Ending up in places and not knowing how you got there.”

“That’s what I just said. I just said that.” Now my voice is hollow. My voice is like a tipped-over tree that’s hollowed out. A family of raccoons lives in my voice.

“You’ve told me before,” he says gently. He sits down on the desk again. He looks at me.

“I’ve never told you that before.” The family of raccoons eats garbage for dinner. Garbage for lunch.

“You have. You just don’t remember,” he clarifies.

Oh.

I guess that makes sense.

I’ve missed our appointments before, haven’t I? Or I’ve blacked out in the middle of them and woken up hours later, doing my homework or brushing my teeth.

But if I’ve told him before, why hasn’t he ever brought it up again? Ever reminded me?

I’m about to ask him this when he says, “I’ve tried to tell you. When you’re yourself. But you never remember. I’ve tried to remind you what you’ve told me, Molly, but you block it all out.”

Oh.

I guess that makes sense.

Does it make sense?

I’ve been having a hard time lately, figuring out what makes sense and what doesn’t make sense. What I should question and what I should accept.

“Tell me now,” I demand. “Tell me what I’ve told you.”

“I don’t think it works like that,” he says. “I think I understand it now a bit better. I think you have to work it out yourself.”

Oh my god.

I’m crazy.

“I’m crazy.”

“You are
not
crazy, Molly. Okay? Molly? You’re not crazy.”

“I’m not crazy.”

I’m not?

I feel crazy.

I feel like I’m losing it.

My handle on reality.

I never thought I had a particularly strong handle on reality, but I guess you can only evaluate something like that once it’s threatened.

“Why is this happening to me?” I whisper.

“I don’t think I can tell you,” he says. “I don’t think you’ll remember.”

“But you know.”

“I know, yes.”

“What if you write it down?”

“You’ll lose the paper.”

“What if you sneak up on me and yell it in my ear?”

“I’ve tried telling you. Molly. I think you have to work it out on your own. You said you remembered something? Something to do with Lyle?”

“Do you know Lyle?”

“I’ve heard about Lyle.”

“He’s dead. I saw him die.”

“I know.”

“I knew him. We were friends.”

“I know.”

“You know?”

“Yes, I know you were friends.”

“How do you know that?”

“You told me, Molly. Tell me what you remembered.”

So I tell him. I tell him about the warehouse and the whiskey bottle and I tell him about the oak tree. About sitting underneath the oak tree by the graveyard by the ocean. After a storm. The smell of salt. How I told Lyle something that made him angry—that made him leave. How I can’t remember exactly what I told him, but I think it has to do with not being in love with him. That’s a guess, but that’s what it feels like.

“Now tell me,” I say. “Tell me why this is happening.”

“It won’t work,” he says.

“I can stop it. I can stay here.”

He sighs. I can tell he doesn’t want to tell me. But he has to. I can stay here now. I can listen. I can remember.

“Call me later,” he says. “Anytime. Let me know you’re okay.”

“Fine, fine,” I say, anxious. “Tell me.”

Watching TV. That is what I’m doing when I wake up. Hazel is on the couch next to me and she looks at me with mild interest when I pull myself, irritated, to my feet.

“The phone is there,” she says, pointing to the coffee table.

“How did you know—”

“You’re supposed to call Alex. It’s late.”

“He said I could call him whenever,” I snap.

“So here,” she says, picking up the phone and handing it to me, “call him.”

“Are Mom and Dad home?”

“Nope.”

“Clancy?”

“Upstairs,” she says.

There are tricks to keeping it a secret.

You wake up hours later sitting in front of a TV and you gather whatever facts you can about whatever it is you’ve been doing.

“And, um, what are we watching?” I ask.

Hazel smiles. It’s a sad smile. She looks at me like she wants to hug me, but she doesn’t move.

“
Criminal Minds
,” she says. “You like this show.”

“I know,” I mumble. “I know I like this show.”

I take the phone to the backyard and dial Alex’s number. It’s his office number, the only one I know, but after so many rings it connects directly to his cell phone. He’ll be able to see it’s me calling. My family’s name on the caller ID.