Mama just looks at me. “No, of course not.”
I shrug. It seems pretty obvious that Blake’s a jerk, then, since he is blaming me, but I’m not going to press it. I pick up a bagel and spread some cream cheese on it, still balancing Waldo on my knee.
“So,” she says, “Ethan. We need to talk about school.”
“Snow day today, no school,” Gracie says. She bounces in my lap.
“Yes, today. But tomorrow, if there’s not a snow day, everybody needs to go to school again. Like usual.”
I frown and shake my head slightly. I’m not going. I feel the panic rev in my gut. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I say.
“Why? Because of what happened Friday night at the game?”
Duh, I want to say, but I am earnest. “Seriously, I just don’t think I can handle that right now, Mama. This is hard enough.”
“Dad says you need to go to school and that’s final.”
“Dad doesn’t understand,” I say, and I can feel that panic in my stomach come out as a whine in my voice. I set the bagel down.
Mama presses her lips together. She’s hesitating. “Well, we have our appointment this afternoon with Dr. Frost. We can talk about it then.”
I let the book drop, and Gracie scrambles with her jelly toast to get it, spilling a glob of grape on my bare knee. “Watch it,” I say, and it sounds mean. I see her sad face as I wipe it up, and even though I’m still mad, I feel bad.
I don’t want to go to a shrink. I don’t want him tricking me into talking about Ellen.
Unless, maybe, there’s a chance I can get him to back me up. Convince him I can’t go to school. I sigh. “Okay,” I say. “Fine.”
It takes us forty minutes to go five miles to the other side of town in this ridiculous snow. I’m hoping there’ll be another snow day tomorrow. Buy some more time. When we get to Dr. Frost’s office, Mama fills out a bunch of paperwork, and then we get called in. My hands are quivering and my stomach hurts. I don’t want to be here.
Until I see Dr. Frost.
She’s maybe thirty, if that. She’s tall, and she’s got this gorgeous flowing hair, and this rack. Jesus. I’m so distracted I don’t even hear what she says.
“Ethan?”
“Uh, hi.”
“I asked if you want your mother to stay in the room, or should she wait in the waiting room?”
I start fantasizing about what could happen if Mama left us alone. And then I desperately start pinching myself. Thinking about dead puppies. Grandma De Wilde. “She can stay,” I manage to say as I pull out my leg hair through my pockets.
That does it. Having Mama stay in the room is definitely enough to put things back in order.
Dr. Frost talks about herself a little bit, and how she likes to conduct the fifty-minute session, and then she asks me some easy questions—name, date of birth, age at the time of abduction, crap like that. She seems to know some things about me already.
And then she says, “Tell me about Eleanor.” She sits back and shuts up.
I cross my legs. “I don’t know, like, what do you want to know?”
“You lived with her until she abandoned you in Nebraska?”
“Yes.”
“Did you like her?”
I glance at Mama and shift in my seat. Mama stays quiet and looks at her folded hands in her lap. “She was all right.”
“Did you call her Eleanor?”
“Sometimes,” I say. It’s a lie. That’s not even her name.
“Something else?”
I stare at the floor.
Nobody moves.
“Does it really matter?” I ask finally.
Dr. Frost smiles and changes the subject. “How did you feel when Eleanor left you at the youth home in Nebraska?”
I feel that stirring, and it’s not the good kind. “It was fine. It is fine. Because that’s what helped me find my real family.” The words spill out of my mouth like sawdust.
“Yes,” Dr. Frost says. “Still, at the time, you didn’t remember you had another family. So it must have been a little bit hard. Unless Eleanor treated you badly.”
“She wasn’t bad.” I say it too fast. Mama glances at me. “She wasn’t bad to me. She didn’t abuse me or anything. We just . . . we had a hard life.”
Dr. Frost leans forward and doesn’t speak.
It’s quiet again, and I feel pressure to continue. I try to think of something that will satisfy them. Something big. The minutes are creeping by. I start sweating. “She was an escort,” I say. “You know. She hung out with . . . men. For pay. I called her by her first name because she didn’t want anybody to think she was old enough to have a kid my age. She pretended she was my older sister and said our parents were dead.” I pause, my mouth dry. “She got bigger tips that way.”
Dr. Frost nods. “What else?”
I groan and lean my head against the wall. “Sheesh. Nothing. That’s all. That’s all there is. Then she got too old-looking and used up. She couldn’t get work anymore and had to get rid of me.”
Dr. Frost pauses. And then asks, “Are you mad at her?”
“I don’t know.” Hell yes, I am.
“Why do you think she abducted you, Ethan?”
I’ve thought about this a lot over the past year, once I realized what had really happened to me. But I knew. I know. “Because she couldn’t be pregnant. You can’t be pregnant and have that job, you know. That’s what I think.”