Текст книги "Where It Began"

Автор книги: Ann Redisch Stampler

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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

XXXVII

MEANWHILE, MR. HEALY KEEPS CALLING ME ON THE phone. No introduction, he just launches right in.

“Isabelle Frost says you’d be more comfortable with intensive therapy than AA?”

“Yup,” I say, “Because—”

But he doesn’t even want to hear about it.

I don’t know. Maybe all us girls who threaten to gorge ourselves on the entire refreshment table at Brentwood Unitarian AA, stab ourselves with plastic butter knives that aren’t even serrated, and thrust our hands and forearms into Brentwood Unitarian’s boiling hot forty-eight-cup industrial-size coffeemakers are a lot more comfortable with therapy than AA.

“All righty,” he says. “I think I should talk to your mom for a quick sec. I think we need a change of plan here to a heavier-duty therapist, all right?”

“I guess.”

“Someone objective-looking with big, bad credentials . . . hmmmm . . .”

After this, the frequency of Mr. Healy’s phone calls increases exponentially.

He keeps reminding me that I’m not supposed to be driving a car or hanging out with undesirables, by which I assume he means Billy (thank you, Agnes Nash), and to see if anything has changed. . . . Pregnant pause.

The only upside to the whole situation is that whenever I need to talk to Billy, apparently it’s all right to message him constantly in his new role as legal consultant. He actually seems interested. Even when I don’t message him, he keeps chatting me with questions eerily similar to Mr. Healy’s.

It is starting to feel as if I exist again, at least a little, in a tiny corner of the outskirts of Billy World. Sort of.

So this is my life:

Lisa is texting me to see if it would be okay to go to Fling in her mother’s arguably vintage acrylic cardigan that has sequined sombreros shading little napping men (No, not even close to okay. Tell her that you can’t wear racist outerwear to Winston School social events. Tell her anything) and me chatting online with Billy to get pointers on how I can stay out of jail.

gabs123: how did u get out of residential? big lawyer says residential is the worst case scenario if therapy doesn’t work out. i will DIE in residential.

pologuy: went to this outward bound thing in the rockies summer of 9th after pot in locker room at loyola match. did ropes course. listened to crap about personal responsibility. took other people’s ritalin

gabs123: no way.

pologuy: way. no booze no weed. what’s boy to do?

gabs123: i will not do a ropes course. just not happening.

pologuy: no worries. u need to knock over lots more trees before ropes course. that’s after 4th offense. not now. lawyer’s just scaring u so you’ll go all o mr. lawyer man, my hero when nothing bad happens to u

gabs123: 4th offense!?!?!?!? u are a very busy boy.

pologuy: what r u wearing right now?

gabs123: i’m going to be wearing a day glo jumpsuit if u don’t get me out of this.

And I say to myself, Gabriella, you have a whole team of highly skilled, high-priced professionals getting you out of this. If you don’t stop bugging Billy Nash, he’s going to pretend he’s offline. You have to stop whining like a big freaking baby and step away from the computer.

But I don’t.

Meanwhile, Vivian keeps slamming in and out of my room without knocking. When she sees that I’m chatting online with Billy, she is somewhat happier.

But Vivian, it turns out, is extremely annoyed about my failure to embrace kiddie Twelve Step.

“Everything was going fine!” she says, tight-lipped. “But could you get with the program? No you could not.”

“Mr. Healy says it’s fine if I get heavy-duty therapy instead. Billy even said so. What’s wrong with that? It’s not as if I have a drinking problem.”

“Of course you don’t!” Vivian snaps. “That’s not the point. But I’m not going to stand here and watch you shoot yourself in the foot.”

“Yeah, well I’ll be sure to take off your ugly Coach clown shoes before I do the deed, so you don’t have anything to worry about.”

“I am worried. I want this to work out for you, but you have to get with the program. What were you thinking? And now it looks as if you have to go back to that child psychiatrist you don’t like, and if that makes you want to cut yourself and tear out your hair and eat it, I just don’t want to hear about it.”

“What child psychiatrist?”

“That woman at Valley Mercy with the odd hair. The one you said was so annoying.”

“Wendy!”

“Not Wendy. Wendy is a playologist. Dr. Berman. With those dowdy Ferragamos.”

“Ponytail? Ponytail Doc is a neurologist.” But she does have bad shoes. Really expensive bad shoes with bows on them.

“Nuh-uh, she’s a child psychiatrist and she went to Harvard, and Mr. Healy has read every word she wrote about you in the chart and it’s all good, if you can believe it.”

“Why can’t you believe it?”

Vivian just glares at me. “That’s not what I said. Can’t you see that I’m trying to help you? What I said is she’s some kind of hotshot who can get you out of this if you’ll just cooperate. Can you do that, Gabby? Can you just cooperate?”

As if she somehow doubts that I want to get out of this, short of going to AA all the time. As if she doesn’t even know who I am, even though my lying like a rug about my fictional cutting and puking to get out of AA is apparently no secret.

Which is beside the point. The point being that I have to go see Ponytail Doc who is apparently a hotshot shrink in the Valley, which kind of makes you wonder. Like Vivian is going to hop into the car and drive me through the Sepulveda Pass to some strip mall in Tarzana with a Popeyes chicken and a Dunkin’ Donuts and a tacky medical building. Fortunately for Vivian, Ponytail, not being completely devoid of taste and discernment, also has an office on the Westside by UCLA, presumably hoping that someone in the B’s will notice what a hotshot she is and rescue her from strip mall hell.

XXXVIII

gabs123: whatcha doing?

pologuy: nothing. SAT words. heavily armed warden with flash cards. what’s up?

gabs123: i have to see the therapist later.

pologuy: no worries. jackman is harmless. tries to teach u deep breathing. very relaxing

gabs123: not ur therapist. big honcho girl therapist. the one from the hospital. supposedly she likes me, which is going to make it so so easy to just spill my guts.

pologuy: as long as u don’t plan to spill ur guts

gabs123: i think i have to. nobody came out and said it but i think if i pass, no residential. if therapy works out is what the lawyer said. how can u tell if therapy is working out?

pologuy: didn’t ur lawyer tell u what to say on this one either?

It occurs to me once again that people who write large checks to the mayor, or whatever it is that Agnes actually does every time Billy screws up, get a lot more help from their lawyers.

gabs123: i’m screwed right?

pologuy: ur lawyer is lame. he needs to tell u these things. court ordered therapist tells EVERYBODY what u say. judge, DA, police. very sneaky. uses everything against you. DO NOT TRUST THERAPIST!

gabs123: what do i say? i have to pass or i’m going to rehab jail in the high desert!!!! what do i say???

pologuy: cry a lot

gabs123: a person can’t just cry forever. physically impossible. and she already knows me. i can’t just pretend to b somebody else.

pologuy: stick to the plan ok? complete denial. followed by maybe u do have the problem. then u pretend to work on it once a week until your record gets expunged ok?

gabs123: how do u pretend to work on it? what words come out of your mouth when u do that?

pologuy: ok like this. oh no dr jackman i have a restless urge to drink, smoke, and have meaningless sex. yet i know all this fun stuff my wicked peers are pressuring me to do is self destructive. oh no dr. jackman what should i do? hey i know, what if u put on the cd with the jungle bugs and bird calls and i relax in this nice zero gravity chair?

gabs123: no way.

pologuy: way. and be sure to tell her how much u hate yourself

gabs123: what if she doesn’t buy any of this? she’s not completely stupid. is there a backup plan?

pologuy: dude u don’t need a backup plan. just tell her how u sit in ur bedroom and hate yourself while drinking up ur dad’s glenlivet

gabs123: y is everybody making such a big deal about that? it was just that one time.

pologuy: don’t tell her that

XXXIX

BACK IN THE HOSPITAL, PONYTAIL WAS JUST AN irritating interruption of Gabriella Gardiner Presents Scenes from Teen Life in the Three B’s. She was a lot less annoying than when she is sitting in her office in Westwood.

An office in a glass and steel building with a bad metal sculpture in the lobby (convex mother with concave child, only it is hard to tell if the mother is nursing the kid or dropping it).

An office that looks like a set decorator’s idea of a professor’s lair: the antique desk, the leather chairs, the books and journals strewn across the desk as if Ponytail is so so busy doing important research on the Inner Life of Teens that you ought to be grateful when she looks up for long enough to talk to your seriously annoyed self.

“And so we meet again,” she says, settling into her chair.

What, like I was supposed to have kept up with her on Facebook?

“I guess,” I say. It is hard to put a finger on why I want to smack her so much except that, oh yeah, I don’t want to be here.

She smiles at me and makes the kind of piercing eye contact that feels as if the person can gaze into your mind and see things that you don’t know. And I go, Stop it, Gabriella. She can’t see into your mind, for godsake. She doesn’t even know you that well.

But after Billy’s helpful pep talk, I am in a complete state of paranoid terror.

Ponytail, meanwhile, is sitting there looking me over, aka staring, as apparently normal social skills are irrelevant in psychiatry. I am sitting there looking her over, too. I am wearing a perky yet conservative teen outfit that looks really expensive and boring but at least I got to pick it out. A denim skirt and a butter-yellow cardigan. She is wearing her standard issue white shirt and a gray pencil skirt and stubby heels with grosgrain bows.

All I can think of to do is fidget. I start buttoning and unbuttoning the top button of the yellow cardigan and pulling on the ends of the sleeves.

“I notice you’re wearing long sleeves today,” she says.

I am thinking that she is going to turn up her air conditioning when I remember the cutting and the binging on coffee cake and supposedly wanting to plunge my hands into the scalding hot water in Brentwood Unitarian’s giant coffeemaker that got me out of AA and into this comfy leather chair in the first place.

Ponytail looks extremely concerned.

I am afraid she is going to make me push up my sleeves and be righteously pissed off when she sees my uncut, unscarred, unscalded, normal weight arms. Not to mention, she has seen me half-naked and half-dead in the hospital and you have to figure she would have noticed that I didn’t cut.

“Um, I don’t really do any of that stuff,” I say. “I just think about it all the time.”

“Stuff?” she says, leaning forward. You can tell she knows exactly what I’m talking about.

“I know you know,” I say. “Everyone from here to San Diego has read my file by now.”

“I know what your file says,” she says. “I wrote half your file. But I want to know what you say.”

I am pretty eager to get to the part where I deny my Problem so she can help me see the Problem so I can go, Oh yeah, big epiphany, I have a Problem! and then she can cure me and I can get out of there.

“Okay,” I say, in the interest of expediting. “Okay, being at AA and feeling, uh, pressured to talk about myself in front of other people, uh, makes me think about, uh, cutting myself and eating all the refreshments and, you know, the thing with the hot water. But now that I’m not in AA anymore, I’m kind of past it.”

Ponytail says she is glad to hear it. Then she goes back to looking me over. “Was there ever a time when you got past thinking about it, and you cut or binged or hurt yourself with boiling water?”

“Ew. No. Of course not.”

“And you were at AA because—”

“Oh, all right,” I say, in the interest of getting on with it. “If you really want me to say it, I’ll say it. I got drunk at a party and crashed my boyfriend’s car into a tree. And now I don’t remember anything about it. There. Are you happy?”

“Sometimes it’s more disconcerting once you get out of the hospital and back to your life. Having your memories gone.”

“Not so much. It’s pretty obvious what happened. I went to a party. I got drunk. I crashed the car. I grabbed the keys and passed out on the ground. What else is there to know? And it’s not like I’m back to my life anyway.”

“Do you have any feelings or ideas about why you were drinking that much?”

“Because it was a party . . .” I am trying to come up with the right answers here, but speculating about why you did things you don’t remember doing is just not that illuminating.

Ponytail nods as if she were actually listening to me. She is perched on the edge of her seat, deeply fascinated by my every word but so not getting it, patiently waiting for me to enlighten her. “I get that you drink at parties,” she says. “Do you often black out?”

“I never black out! I hit my head against a tree or an air bag or something. That’s not the same as blacking out. If blacking out made me hit the tree, then how did I turn off the car and pull the keys out?”

She just looks at me. More or less as if I’m crazy, which is maybe not that much of a stretch given that I’m sitting in a psychiatrist’s office pretending to be crazy.

“All right,” I say. “All right. I know what you’re thinking, but I don’t have a drinking problem.”

She just sits there.

Really, am I just supposed to repeat this over and over for the entire rest of the session or what? All the time knowing that saying you don’t have a drinking problem is supposed to prove you do have a drinking problem, which basically makes no sense, but okay, whatever.

“My dad is the one with the drinking problem,” I say. I have to say something. “You’ve seen him, right? I swear, the guy basically sits in the house all day and doesn’t actually do anything and I know I’m not a drunk because I’m nothing like that.” She just looks at me. “I’m not.”

“So you’re not like your dad.”

Oh, kill me now. If she’s planning to repeat everything I say and sit there looking deeply concerned and fascinated, I might as well just start searching her office for some sharp object I can pretend I’m thinking about stabbing myself with in the faint hope that Mr. Healy will decide that I’m an even crazier model girl than he thought and send me to an even heavier duty therapist who I can stand.

“I really do not want to sit here and talk about my dad. I just want everything to go back to the way it was before.”

“And you’d be comfortable with that?”

“I would be totally happy and whistling a merry tune if things could be like before, but my life is completely wrecked.”

She nods and looks sympathetic. Really, really sympathetic. Or maybe some shred of Vivian has rubbed off on me through some nasty trick of genetics and I, too, am such a glutton for the smallest scrap of sympathy that a chipmunk would seem sympathetic if it nodded its fuzzy little head at me.

Still, it is hard to believe that Ponytail is going to send me to some residential hellhole in the desert to live in a tent and do ropes courses with gang girls.

“Uh, maybe this isn’t what I’m supposed to be talking about,” I say. I am thinking that this would be the magic moment for her to teach me to gently close my eyelids, take a deep cleansing breath, and relax, like Billy does with his therapist. Because just sitting in her office staring out the window at the view of Westwood is making me extremely nervous.

Then it occurs to me that I’m doing a pretty damned good job of denying the problem so perhaps this is going well.

“That’s the thing, when the courts get involved in treatment,” she says. “You’re supposed to be talking about whatever you want to talk about in this office. This is supposed to be your time. But when the courts are going to be involved, it’s easy to feel as if, if you say the wrong thing, something terrible is going to happen to you, yes?”

This is the part where I cry for twenty-five minutes straight, which is more or less what Billy said I was supposed to do in the first place, so you have to figure it isn’t nearly as bad as it seems.

Which is pretty bad.

The only comforting, affirmative thought I can come up with (Oh Gabby, aren’t you just the most convincing, not-going-to-wilderness-camp patient who ever sat in this big leather chair? is so not working for me) is that at least it has to seem like I’m being sincere, which, strangely, I am. I mean, who can fake crying for that long?

And it isn’t as if I can stop, either.

XL

MY LESS-THAN-FUN SESSION WITH PONYTAIL MUST have shown all over my tear-rutted, unnaturally beige face because Vivian, who is sitting in the waiting room in her recently overused mauve funeral and teacher conference suit, jumps up and says she is going to take me for red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese frosting at Dottie’s Sweeties. Which, given all the calories a trip to Dottie’s Sweeties involves stuffing into your mouth, is an epic offer. Epic and unnerving, given that Vivian never gives me anything resembling a dessert unless someone has died or there’s an earthquake, not to mention it is hard to visualize her traipsing around Beverly Hills with a bruised, smeared makeup, red-eyed, cupcake-chomping kid.

But, of course, it turns out that Vivian thinks she’s doing me a favor when she leaves me in the parking lot and runs in herself, given that letting me humiliate myself by risking someone seeing me when I look this wrecked is no doubt right up there in her mind with public flogging.

Sitting alone in the car on the roof of the parking structure, I am completely stumped as to any possible affirmative thing to say to myself.

Losing control and sniveling was so not what I had in mind. If I was going to cry for twenty-five minutes nonstop, I was supposed to be doing it on purpose, not like some out-of-control crybaby who just whimpers on until reaching the point of dehydration.

Not in front of someone I don’t even like, in the world’s dowdiest expensive shoes, who nevertheless has the potential to make my life worse than it already is.

Not when I’ve been planning to tell Billy about what happened and how I pulled it off and how everything is just fine and freakishly dandy. I am so not planning to tell him about this, or at least not what this feels like.

pologuy: how was ur day at the therapist?

gabs123: it beats AA. but not by much. and no refreshments.

pologuy: the better to save u from yourself little girl, with ur brand new eating disorder and cutting problem. she bought it right?

I’m afraid that if I lie too much, he won’t be able to tell me what to do next, and I’ll be doubly screwed. And if I don’t lie enough, it will just be too humiliating.

gabs123: i cried copiously. SAT word. vivian got me the flash cards. u said cry—i cried. that’s ok, right?

pologuy: what did u say?

gabs123: basically nothing. i cried a lot. very emo.

pologuy: excellent. what do u have to say to her anyway? boo hoo and u don’t remember anything right?

gabs123: hence the crying, like you said. no word on when i get to go back to school though.

pologuy: lucky u. stretch it out

Even though Billy might have my best interests at heart, you didn’t see him stretching it out in exile at his uncle’s hacienda in Montecito despite all the excellent surfing off Rincon Point. And even though my life might currently suck, the only way I have the slightest chance of getting it back is going back to Winston. The only way of getting him back.

Which is basically the same thing.

XLI

YOU WOULD FIGURE THAT A HIGHLY TRAINED helping professional like Ponytail would have picked up on the part that I wasn’t really at risk for swimming around in the boiling contents of industrial-sized coffeemakers, but apparently she and Mr. Healy had a little chat and now I have to have another deeply meaningful session ASAP so she can clear me to go back to school.

“That’s what you want, right?” Mr. Healy says, as if he’d missed the part where I said that was what I wanted every time he made another lame phone call to make sure I hadn’t eloped with Billy with me driving.

This seems like a no-brainer until I start thinking about what it will actually be like to slink back into Winston and have everyone looking at me in my current state of being a juvenile delinquent covered with artfully applied beige foundation in a color not approximating human skin all that closely. Gossiping about me as if I were Buddy Geiss coming back to the Three B’s from celebrity rehab in Malibu, back from military school rehab in South Carolina, back from holistic-getting-down-with-therapeutic-farm-animals rehab in the Napa Valley.

I, on the other hand, will be back from wrecking Billy’s car and messing up my life on Songbird Lane. You have to figure that this could be worse than either my prior state of invisibility or being Buddy Geiss.

This time Vivian takes me to Dottie’s for the cupcake beforehand, and when I pull my cupcake out of the little checkered bag, I see that Vivian has paid extra for them to top it with slivers of white chocolate and honey-roasted almonds. In the absence of deaths or earthquakes, it is hard to tell if all the sugary treats are coming my way because she’s feeling that sorry for me, or if she thinks it doesn’t matter anymore if I turn into a pillar of undulating chocolate-and-honey-roasted-almond-filled fat because any hope of me being anything other than a sub-regular girl is smoldering in Hidden Hills with the last fiery, wrecked bits of Billy’s Beemer.

“It’s going to be hard on you, going back to school like this,” Vivian says when I am halfway through my cupcake and all the way to a sugar rush.

No shit.

Although it isn’t clear if “like this” means Billy-less or with a lavender cheekbone and a swollen jawline. Or both.

“It agreed with you to have a boyfriend,” she says. “But I have a lot of faith that you’ll be back to being the New You again.”

“What?”

And I go, Gabriella, give it up. She’s trying to be extra nice. Don’t be a little bitch.

I say, “I hope you’re right,” but I just want to scream, Stop talking about it. Just. Stop. It’s not that I don’t totally want what she is saying to be true. I do. But hearing her say it out loud makes it sound lame and not remotely possible. Because I’m pretty sure the New Me crashed and burned on Songbird Lane.

“You will be, Gabby,” Vivian says. “You can be anything you want.”

Such as the president of the United States, Tinker Bell, and Billy Nash’s girlfriend in public?

“Don’t look at me like that,” she says. “It’s hard for a girl to lose her looks, but you’ll get back on your game. You’ll see. You can get another boyfriend. The swelling will go down and you’ll be fine.”

Then she hands me a little container of extra white chocolate slivers that I pour directly onto my tongue, partly because it tastes like the god of chocolate made it and partly to keep myself from talking back to her.

Even Ponytail has a plate of what look like homemade cookies on her desk, which she pushes toward me as if she thinks I need some edible comfort too.

This time she’s sitting there in a pale-green cashmere sweater, and you want to tell her that even though it might somewhat match her eyes, it is so so not working. I am wearing the highest cut jeans I own to avoid upsetting her with the sight of my thong and an ugly striped shirt with cufflinks that Vivian forced me to wear because apparently she thinks that shapelessness is a good look for the psychologically impaired.

This time, it takes me less than a minute to start crying.

Ponytail hands me a box of tissues, and I notice that this time there is a tiny little leather-covered wastebasket beside the leather chair. The possibility that Ponytail saw this coming, that this is not the result of a slight change in her interior decorating plan, but that she is graciously providing me with someplace to stow my snotty tissues because she knew in advance what was going to happen, completely freaks me out.

After about fifteen minutes of this, she asks me if I can talk about it, and not seeing a downside to telling her the actual truth, I say, “I don’t know.” Then I realize that this is the perfect opening to tell her how much I hate myself, but then I start crying again.

“I’m wondering if you’re feeling reluctant to be frank with me because of your legal situation.”

Duh.

I nod my head and try to look as if I want to be there.

“Weeeeeeellllll,” Ponytail says, filling my silence, “it’s hard for me to imagine anything you could tell me that would harm you in that respect.”

For me, on the other hand, it isn’t all that hard. To imagine what could happen if I tell her something that makes her hate me, for example. To imagine what could happen if I say the wrong thing and she decides that a few months in the desert serves me right.

Billy’s voice telling me not to trust the therapist is playing over and over in my head like a tape loop that won’t quit.

“And all this crying tells me that something’s hurting,” she says.

I just keep sniffling because, basically, I can’t stop, and she sits there saying all these inane things about growing and changing and being a re-potted plant turning toward the morning sun and trying to talk to me about how I feel about going back to school after being out for so long, which I can’t really tell her because I don’t totally know how I feel about it; I just know that I have to do it because not doing it is just going to make my life worse.

“I have to go back to school,” I say. “I have to. It’s like everybody else’s life kept on going but my life stopped and I don’t even exist and” (oh yeah, the magic and completely credible and somewhat true moment to throw it in) “I hate myself.”

Ponytail’s gaze bores through my forehead but is stopped in its tracks by the complete opacity of my completely private mind. She gives me her most sympathetic mmmmmm.

“Are you feeling ready?”

No.

I say, “Yes.”

So it is finally happening.