The receptionist asked me to wait. Eventually a shrink took me into a courtyard garden. Amid the music of bubbling fountains and the heady scent of oleander bushes that were probably pruned by lobotomized men with fingernail clippers, the shrink told me many things that were ironic, perfect as punch lines, even better than the chicken that crossed the road. I walked to the hospital exit reviewing the punch lines over and over in my head so I could repeat them to Doug exactly the right way.
When he saw me coming across the parking lot, he got out of the police car—door open, crutches out first, then his good foot, heaving himself upward. He crutched around the open door and slammed it shut with his hip. Then he rounded to the front of the car and hopped onto the hood, sliding his butt around to find a comfortable spot in a way I knew was meant to piss his brother off. He patted the hood beside him. I looked to Officer Fox for approval to sit on his police car, but he stared up at the roof as if praying for strength.
I slid onto the hot hood beside Doug. Though the night had settled, the air warmed me now that I wasn’t hanging out in a wet bathing suit. And the hospital corridors had been refrigerated like they needed to preserve their human specimens for study. I relaxed into the hot hood defrosting my ass.
Doug watched me.
I recited the punch lines I’d memorized. “The doctor said at first they thought my mom was depressed, since she attempted suicide. So they put her on an antidepressant, but it pushed her into a manic episode, which causes people to do things like escape from the psych ward and jerk their daughters out of pools when they are winning a heat. And do you know why the drug pushed her into a manic episode?”
No, why? Doug was supposed to say drily, setting me up for the next punch line. Instead, he only watched me with his big sea-green eyes and shook his head.
I delivered my line anyway. “Because my mom isn’t just depressed. She has bipolar disorder. It took them a week and a half and a jailbreak to figure this out, when I could have told them in the first place. I mean, I didn’t know what was wrong with her, but I could have told them she’d been depressed for a few weeks and then so high for a few weeks that she’d gone to the doctor to get a prescription for sleeping pills, which of course came in handy when she got depressed again and needed to commit suicide. They could have figured it out before now.”
This time Doug knew his line. “Why didn’t you tell them before?”
“They didn’t ask me. They wouldn’t let me see her. They told my dad that when people attempt suicide, their families are part of the problem, so they don’t let the crazies see their families while they’re being treated.”
Doug didn’t laugh or even gape at me in disbelief. He just kept staring at me. He got the highest grade in the class on every English test, yet he didn’t understand the exquisite irony of this situation. I knew he didn’t understand when he said, “They didn’t mean you helped make her crazy. They meant your dad screwing his employee. But they don’t know stuff like that when a patient first shows up. They have to keep everybody away from the patients just in case.”
“You’re not getting it,” I said. “If the doctors had given me some credit instead of viewing me as a bothersome child when I came to the emergency room with her, I could have prevented this whole problem!”
Now Doug watched me with his chin down like a librarian or a badass nanny examining me through bifocals. He was passing judgment on me. Worse, with his chin down he was looking up at me through his long black lashes. He was passing judgment on me in a very sexy way without even meaning to. And I had a boyfriend back home who hugged me only when prompted.
Sliding down from the hood, I grumbled, “I shouldn’t have told you anything.”
“Hey.” He grabbed my hand before I could step out of his reach. “I’m not acting like you wanted me to act. What did you want me to do?” He leaned forward and his grip was strong. Unless I read him wrong, he was serious.
I shook my hand loose and folded my arms on my chest. “I wanted you to laugh with me and be outraged with me and do something other than sit here and stare at me and feel sorry for me.”
Still he stared at me, not understanding.
“It’s hereditary,” I continued in a rush. “The doctor told me what the warning signs are. Depression . . . that’s obvious. Then people cycle to mania. They’re workaholics. They want to take care of everything.”
“But you’re like that naturally.”
“They’re impulsive,” I added.
Doug cocked his head. “Like what? Having sex on the first date?”
I squealed, “Brandon and I are in lo—”
Doug reached out and put two fingers over my lips. “You had sex with Brandon the same night your mom swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. To me that doesn’t sound like you have bipolar disorder. It sounds like you’re just run-of-the-mill screwed up. Not crazy.”
“She is crazy,” Officer Fox rumbled from inside the police car.
12
I squinted at Officer Fox, but I couldn’t see him clearly through the windshield reflecting the lights from the hospital. This was probably the fourth thing I’d ever heard him say. I wanted to double-check that I’d heard him correctly before I disrespected a police officer by cussing him out.
Apparently he had said what I thought he’d said. Doug smiled. “My brother thinks that you’re crazy and you need to get checked out yourself.”
I closed my eyes, took a deep breath through my nose, opened my eyes. “Why?”
Doug spoke in his usual sarcastic tone. If I’d listened to him without watching him, I wouldn’t have known anything was wrong. But as he spoke, he held his head still, like he balanced on a tightrope. “When you found your mom that day, you were very calm. You didn’t cry.”
I hadn’t thought about it. But now that I allowed myself to consider it . . . A seventeen-year-old discovered her mom after a suicide attempt, and she didn’t even cry? That did sound crazy.
I concentrated on Doug’s green eyes. “I knew she was there because her car was in the lot, but when I went in, the lights were off and the air was cold.” I felt goose bumps prick up at the memory of stepping from the broiling afternoon into that cold, dark space.
Doug slid down from the hood and moved toward me, balancing on one crutch.
“I found her on her bed and I knew she was dead. I knew exactly what she’d done. She’d been taking a lot of naps in the middle of the day, but there was something about the way her hand lay on the duvet.” I moved my fingers to that position, duplicating what death had looked like to me, fingers relaxed, palm open and vulnerable.
Doug’s hand covered my palm.
“And then I touched her and knew she was alive,” I told our hands, “so I was relieved. You can’t imagine how relieved I was, and happy. I’m probably laughing on the 911 recording. I felt like the luckiest person alive. I still felt that way when your brother came and I rode with him behind the ambulance to the hospital. It wasn’t until later, sitting in the waiting room at the hospital, that I started to get scared my mom might be stuck this way. Oh God.”
Even before my face crumpled, Doug shifted forward to give me a hiding place. I sobbed into his FSU T-shirt. Once I started I couldn’t stop, and I made a choked noise my mom could probably hear if she were sweeping the paths in the hospital courtyard, pausing over one stepping-stone in particular, sweeping the same stone over and over, spotless.
“Shhhhh,” said Doug. He stroked his fingers at the back of my head until his fingertips penetrated the thickness of my hair and he touched my nape. He looped the other arm half around me at an odd angle so he could keep hold of his crutch too. And he kissed the top of my head.
That made me cry even harder. I was caught in the current dragging me along the ocean floor. I struggled to the surface to gasp, “Why did you do this to me?”
“Shhhhh. I just wanted to make sure you’re okay.”
I cried for a long time. Every few minutes I’d pull away from hi
m, sniffle, and try to dry up. Then I’d look up at his face, the tears in his eyes, and I’d lose it again. At least no one stared at me. The parking lot was empty except for us and Officer Fox, and anyway someone bawling their eyes out was probably an hourly occurrence outside the mental hospital. All this time Doug worked his fingers in circles at the back of my neck.
I took one final sniff and exhaled, exhausted but safe for now. We slid back onto Officer Fox’s hood and held hands.
I stared straight ahead at the low brick building that gave away nothing. “What do I do now?”
“You wait,” Doug said.
“I did that already,” I sighed. “I’m not allowed to visit her, but I’ve known since she got here that she could call me whenever she felt ready. She hasn’t called. She’s only come to my swim meet and freakishly pulled me out of the water and shrieked like the mother of Grendel.”
“Hm.” Doug laughed the smallest laugh. “Now that they know what’s wrong with her, maybe things will be different.” He squeezed my hand.
I wondered which window of the hospital was hers. Whether she had a front window and could see me right now. Whether she had a window at all. “What were the people at the swim meet saying about her?”
“What you’d expect.” With both hands on my shoulders, he turned me toward him and shook me a little. “Zoey, a lot of people didn’t know. No one on the swim team knew. They were”—he chuckled humorlessly—“surprised. But your mom is a public defender. She worked at the courthouse with fifty people. She’s been missing for more than a week. People were going to find out. Your dad could threaten to have Cody fired all day, but he never could have contained this. Now you know people know. That’s the only change. You and your dad never had control over the information. You only had control over the illusion that you had control. And if the illusion is all you want, you might as well be crazy.”
I rubbed my forehead, which had begun to throb. I’d forgotten to take painkillers.
“It’s not the end of the world, Zoey. Yeah, it will be hard for her to go back to work with everyone in town knowing what happened, but what else is she going to do? And she’ll get through it. In three years it will be almost like it never happened.”
“It will?” I asked, because I suspected that he wasn’t talking about my mother anymore. He was talking about coming back from juvie.
Then I glanced at my watch. “Oh, look. My dad just got married.” I’d kept Officer Fox from his duties long enough. I asked Doug, “Are you riding back to town with your brother? I can give you a ride instead.”
His thumbs moved on my shoulders. “Sure. But you don’t have to take me straight home. We could hang out.”
I took a long breath, thinking over how to phrase this carefully. After everything he’d done for me tonight, I didn’t want to piss him off.
Before I could speak, he let me go. “You’re going to Brandon’s, aren’t you.”
I knew it didn’t make sense to Doug. It didn’t really make sense to me either, except Brandon was my good friend from before all this happened. “I need to know whether we’re still together or he’s too horrified.”
“Can’t you just call him or text him or something?” Doug grumbled.
“No, I can’t tell anything from that. I can’t see.”
He laughed shortly. “You can’t see anyway.”
I whacked him lightly on the chest. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“You just want to go parking with him,” Doug accused me.
“Well, what if I do?”
Well, what if I did?
Doug held his arms out toward the Benz: Be my guest.
“Coming with?” I asked. I wished he would come with me, just ride back to town with me so we could talk and make this better.
He shook his head.
I slid off the hood and prodded his good knee with my hip. “Don’t be mad.”
He shrugged and looked away from me, at the moon rising over the mental hospital. It was almost full, missing just a sliver.
I rounded the police car and peeked through the open driver’s side window to thank Officer Fox for all his help. He was snoring.
Wishing that something else would happen, that Doug would change my mind, even insult me to draw this out a little longer, I walked slowly through the silence to the Benz and slipped inside. My mom hadn’t been wearing perfume but I smelled her anyway, something I recognized beyond her usual soap and shampoo, which she wouldn’t have at the mental hospital. The scent of my mother. I turned the key in the ignition.
Nothing.
I was going crazy. I probably couldn’t tie my own shoes anymore either. I took the key out, put it back in, turned it.
Nothing. No dash lights, no radio, definitely no engine.
Looking over at me, Doug knocked on the hood of the police car to wake up his brother.
FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER OFFICER FOX STRAIGHTENED from peering into the engine and let the hood of the Benz fall back into place. “Only thing I can tell you is, my friend owns the garage around the corner. He works late. I’ll call him and ask him to tow it for you. Maybe it’s something simple.” When I nodded, he went back to the police car and spoke into his radio.
Doug had held the flashlight for his brother. Now he turned the beam on me. “I need to lie down. My leg’s swelling again.”
I winced for him.
“Lie down with me.” He leaned so close, I felt the heat of the flashlight beam on my cheek. “You’re tired.”
I was tired suddenly, bone-tired and sore, as if I’d swum a hundred races. Or was this Doug’s power of suggestion?
I couldn’t lie down with him, though. Lying in the back of a police car with him would not be my consolation prize after I couldn’t go parking with my boyfriend. That would make me a ho.
Keeping one hand on a crutch for balance, he put the hand holding the flashlight on my shoulder. I couldn’t see him as well anymore in the dim light of the parking lot, but my other senses took over. His hand was hot through my shirt and his low voice vibrated in my gut as he coaxed, “Come on, Zoey. You look like death. Lie down with me. I won’t try anything.”
I left the keys in the Benz and walked with Doug to the police car. Doug spoke a few words to his brother, who stuffed a couple of pillows through the window between the front seat and the back. Doug must have been using the police car as a sleeping car quite a bit. He had the whole drill down. He put one pillow on the seat for our heads and one at the other end to elevate his leg, and folded his tall frame into the space.
I lay in front of him, just as we’d lain together on the swim team van. Except the police car seat was smaller than the van seat, so we couldn’t lie together without touching each other. We touched. He didn’t put his hands on me or anything obvious like that, but I couldn’t help that the crooks of my knees hugged his knees. His thighs pressed the backs of my thighs. My butt was tucked against his pelvis. His chest radiated heat against my back, and his warm breath whispered in my hair. My headache slowly dissipated. Officer Fox cranked up the thrash metal on the radio and cruised out of the lot.
“Doug,” I said softly.
“Zoey,” he whispered.
“When you ran away, where did you go?”
He sighed into my hair. Chills raced down my neck. Finally he said, “Seattle.”
“That’s a long way.” I tried to picture Doug at fourteen, as innocent as I’d been at fourteen, alone in Seattle. Smaller than he was now, just a kid. His Florida-weight jacket was no match for the wet breeze off the Pacific, and his wallet was empty.
“I went as far away as I could.” He nuzzled the back of my neck—inadvertently, I was sure—as he made a bigger hole for his head in the pillow.
We didn’t say anything else. The car hummed, buildings flashed by. We must have been taking the longer southern route through Fort Walton and Destin, along the beach. Streetlights flashed in and out of the car. And Doug’s breathing at my back fell into a deep rhythm.
He touched me all over, down the length of me, yet his hands touched me nowhere. He didn’t mean to touch me. I shouldn’t touch him either, because I had a boyfriend, and I didn’t want to lead Doug on. But my hand lay along my side, resting on my hip. I wouldn’t need to slide it far to touch Doug in a place I really shouldn’t touch Doug.
The closer to home we got, the stronger the urge grew. Every car we passed swished a sexy Doppler effect: do it, do it, do it. If I did it and he was awake, I would die of mortification. If I did it and he was asleep, it would seem almost criminal, like I was taking advantage of him when he was most vulnerable.
I could not do it. But just thinking about it, I was hotter than when Brandon and I had actually done it.
Familiar landmarks flashed by—Slide with Clyde, the Grilled Mermaid. We were close to home. Doug would wake soon. I would miss my chance. Slowly, slowly, a millimeter at a time, I slid my hand down into the space between my butt and . . . him. Let him think I was asleep and my hand had slipped there. Let him be surprised.
No. I did not dare.
And then, as I watched Jamaica Joe’s flash past out the far window, his mouth took the back of my neck, kissed it like it was my mouth or my ear or my breast. I wasn’t sure where these ideas came from. A boy had never put his mouth on my breast before. The thought frightened me and I loved it. His tongue massaged circles across my neck and made me lose my mind. His hand found my hand and pulled me back against him until I rubbed him as I had imagined, then harder.
The engine and the thrash metal on the radio switched off.
We both sprang up, blinking under the dome light, as if we shouldn’t have been lying down together in the first place. Guilt is a funny thing. If we hadn’t been guilty, I wouldn’t have noticed how pink and swollen his lips were from kissing me, or how glazed his green eyes looked from the way I’d touched him.