"They won't let you see her anyway," he said. "The loony bin won't let you see her either. They say it's to protect you from her, and to protect her from you. To remove her from the environment. They'll let her call you when she's ready to see you."
He was saying what I'd been thinking. I'd been blaming myself and hoping that self-blame was natural in these circumstances but ultimately silly. He was telling me it was not silly. Even the mental hospital thought it was my fault that my mother had done this. I still didn't want to believe any of it, but I felt myself falling down that slope without anything to grab to save myself, except this:
I whispered, "When I first got here, they told me maybe I could talk to the hospital psychologist about what happened?"
"They don't need you to diagnose your mother," my dad grumbled.
"I mean"--I swallowed--"for me? To talk about me?"
He huffed out a sigh and leaned one shoulder against the glass wall of the vestibule. "So now you're crazy too? Y ou're not going to a psycho-anything. Y see how much good it did your mother. They'll just give you the drugs that you can OD on later. There's a reason we call them shrinks. Let's go."
ou I stood, only then realizing how sore my back was and how long I must have been sitting in that seat, staring at the closed emergency room doors. I followed my dad through the vestibule and into the night.
We didn't have far to walk. He had parked his Benz in a handicapped space just outside the door. The backseat was filled with large boxes with laughing babies on the labels. A high chair, a bouncing swing. I slid into the passenger seat and lost myself in an argument inside my own head.
I did not want to believe my dad was right. My mom had not OD'd on medicine a shrink had given her. She had OD'd on sleeping pills her regular doctor had given her. She had never gone to a shrink, probably because of my dad's opinion of them. I had overheard him saying something like this to her during one of their fights last spring.
I could have pointed this out to him, but he would not have listened to me, any more than he had listened to her. And though normally I might have obsessed about this point of contention and reviewed it over and over, trying to find a way to present it to him that he would understand and accept, tonight it slipped away from me as if captured by the undertow.
In my mind I was back in my mother's bedroom at our apartment, trying to fix everything. I was the lifeguard, but I couldn't give her mouth-to-mouth because she was still breathing, and I couldn't give her CPR because her heart was still beating, faintly. What could I do to help? When the paramedics arrived, I could tell them exactly what she'd taken. Holding my cell phone to my ear with one hand because the 911 dispatcher had ordered me not to hang up, I walked to the bathroom and found her prescription bottle in the trash. Empty.
"Aren't you going in?" my dad asked.
I looked over at him in the driver's seat. He thumbed through the messages on his phone. He'd parked the Benz in front of the apartment, between my mother's hybrid and my battered Bug. He'd just bought Ashley a convertible Beamer. I drove this ancient Bug because he made me use my own money from working at Slide with Clyde for my car, insurance, and gas. He'd told me before that growing up a spoiled brat was what was wrong with my mom.
"Come to think of it," he said, still scrolling, "I'll have to help you. Y need to get everything. Even after she's released, the judge won't let you live with
ou her. Y might not be back here for a while." Behind us, the trunk popped open to receive all my belongings. He stepped out of the Benz.
I followed him into the parking lot. The apartment building was the nicest one in town, which wasn't saying a lot. Everyone who could afford a house lived in one, which left the apartments for the transients. Mature palms and palmettos softened the lines of the weathered wooden building, but a huge air- conditioning unit filled the late summer night with its drone, and the scent of the community garbage Dumpster wafted from behind a high fence.
My dad noticed the smell too, nostrils flared in distaste as he stood waiting for me at the front of the car. I wondered why he didn't go ahead to the apartment. Then I remembered he didn't have a key. I pulled my key chain from my pocket. Still, he didn't move. He didn't know which apartment was mine, after I'd lived here for three months.
An instant of anger at him propelled me forward, onto the sidewalk. I inserted the key into my lock. But now I had to turn the key. Now I had to go in.
My dad was watching me. I couldn't let him see me hesitate. That would make things worse on my mom, to admit to my dad that what she'd done made her less of a person and worthy of his disdain. I shoved inside and flicked on the light.
At least the apartment was extremely clean, the way I'd left it. It didn't look like an insane person lived here. But viewing it through my dad's eyes, the apartment building's standard-issue furniture made it look like she had sunk low. I didn't want him venturing farther inside, judging.
I faced him. "Why don't you watch TV while you wait? I won't be long. Can I get you something to drink?"
He grunted and stepped outside, reaching into his pocket for his cigarettes--a strange habit he'd taken up last May when the water park opened for the season and he hired Ashley.
I watched him until the door closed behind him, then dashed through the apartment, double-checking that it was neat. As I passed back and forth in front of my mother's desk in the living room, her suicide note stared up at me, the most obvious crazy item: Zoey, I just couldn't see doing it all another day. I love you. Mom. If I put it in the desk drawer, I would be putting my mom away. I settled for squaring the notepaper perfectly against the corner of the desk. Again.
In the kitchen I peered into the refrigerator. I would take anything perishable to the Dumpster so my mom wouldn't have a mess to clean up when she came back. I was surprised to find no fruit, no milk. My mom had cleaned it out already.
In the bathroom I selected all my toiletries, leaving my mom's. In my bedroom I grabbed armfuls of clothing from my closet and my dresser and shoved them into my suitcases. At first I went for the summer clothes only. Then I pulled out a light jacket in case I was still living with my dad when the nights got cool. As I reached the sweater box under my bed, I stared at the cotton and cashmere, heartbeat accelerating into panic, wondering just how long my mom would be gone, and what she would do in the loony bin all that time, and what they would do to her, and whether they would ever let her out, and whether a judge really would keep me from living with her my entire last year of high school.
The smell of smoke startled me. I hoped my dad wasn't smoking in the apartment, because my mom was allergic. I shoved the sweater box back under my bed, zipped my suitcases, and hauled them into the den.
The apartment door was wide open, letting the air-conditioning out, making room for the warm night air my dad had just smoked. He stood over my mom's desk, reading her note with his nostrils flared again.
"I'm ready." I left one suitcase for him and wheeled the other past him and out the door, hoping to distract him from what he'd already seen. He followed me. I pulled the door shut behind me and locked it. When I turned around, he held his hand out.
I looked up at him, puzzled. "The key? Why?"
"Because you're a teenager," he said, "and I'm your father."
I didn't like the finality of it, or the implication that I was a wild child who couldn't be trusted with the key to an empty apartment. But a part of me was grateful my dad was taking charge. I wiggled the key off the ring and held it out to him. He didn't notice. He was looking at the screen on his phone.
"Dad."
He pocketed my key but kept his phone in his hand as he wheeled my suitcase around to the open trunk of the Benz. After hefting both suitcases inside and slamming the trunk, he opened the driver's door. He nodded toward my Bug. "Y ou're bringing your car, right? I'll see you at home."
Home. He meant the house on the beach. I hadn't been back there since my mom and I had left. He had joint custody of me, but I figured we saw enough of each other every day at work. Besides, Ashley had gleefully warned me that if I ever did want to visit, the house was a mess. She was having the kitchen remodeled.
I did not want to follow my dad back there right now. I pictured myself in my old bedroom, staring out the window at the ocean I couldn't see in the black night, wondering what was happening to my mom. I had stared at white emergency room doors for hours tonight. Panic at what she had done rushed through me like pain to my numb fingertips when I warmed them inside on a rare cold winter day. I could not sit in that bedroom tonight, wincing at my heavy heartbeat. There was just so much I could take.
"Actually," I said, "if you don't want anyone in town to know about Mom, there's a beach party I need to go to tonight, the last blowout of the year. If I'm not there, my friends will want to know why." The Slide with Clyde employees had thrown beach parties all summer. Tonight's party was special because today, Labor Day, had been our last day of work. Slide with Clyde had closed for the season. This much was true.
It was not true that my friends expected me at the party. They expected me to stay home with my mom. Some days when I came home from work, she seemed energetic as ever. Better, even. But most days she hardly ate dinner, and she went to bed early. In the last couple of weeks she'd complained that she couldn't sleep. I'd suggested that she didn't need twelve hours. Her response was to ask for those sleeping pills from her doctor. Now I wondered whether she'd had suicide in mind all along. I had worried about her all summer, so I'd stayed home from my friends' parties, not that it had done any good.
Tonight I would go.
My dad nodded absently, sinking into the driver's seat of the Benz.
"I may be out late," I warned him. "Is that okay? I know I have school tomorrow--"
He closed the door of the Benz and started the engine, already thinking of someone else. 2 My friends' beach parties were as starlit and romantic as the ones on TV and in movies, except there was no bonfire. Fires and bright lights weren't allowed on the beach because they disoriented the endangered sea turtles. Dozens of teenagers invaded the city beach park, guzzling beer in the sand and heavy-petting in the parking lot, but as long as they didn't mess with the turtles, nobody seemed to care.
I'd popped in and out of a few of these with my friends Keke and Lila when we were younger and didn't dare stay long at a party full of seniors. Now we were the seniors. I parked the Bug in the crowded lot near Keke and Lila's rusty Datsun and Brandon's laughably large 1980s Buick. I was curious, but I tried not to peer through a few steamed-up windows in familiar cars. Then I crossed the wooden bridge over the scrub and sand dunes to the beach.
Ours was not the only party. Circles of teenagers stood in the sand or sat on towels in the darkness, sipping beer. I recognized the Slide with Clyde party by Keke and Lila's laughter cackling above the roar of the ocean and the wails of a boy band on a radio. I kicked off my flip-flops at the foot of the wooden stairs, crossed the sand glowing white in the starlight, waded into the surf, and put one hand on each of their backs.
They turned around with wide eyes. "Zoey!" they both squealed at once as they rushed me, splashing water up on my shorts. They both jumped up and down and hugged me too but Lila stopped soon and gave me some air, whereas Keke did not let go until I said, "Okay," and pressed her shoulders to stop the bouncing. It was clear to me which one was drinking tonight and which was the designated driver. They were twins--not identical, but they might as well have been, the way they finished each other's sentences. They did look similar, both petite with bright red hair, but from there they diverged.
Keke put on the first clothes she found on the bedroom floor, whether they were hers or Lila's, dirty or clean. I had seen her do it. Lila handled the personal upkeep better, though she obsessed about it until she looked like a parody of a girl. Tonight her hair was hot-rolled and pinned and overfixed for a windy beach party. I had told them they both looked so extreme because they were trying to differentiate themselves from each other. If they'd relaxed and settled for the happy medium, even if that meant looking alike, boys would have asked them out more. They did not listen to me. If there had been one of them, they might have taken me seriously, but it was hard to give unsolicited advice to two people at once, because they could drown you out with protests. They told me they could never be as pretty as me, so my advice meant nothing. I started to explain that looking like I did took work, and my mother had taught me this in turn--but they shut me down.
Tonight it was impossible to tell there had ever been any tension or unwanted advice between us. "I can't believe you're here!" Keke squealed. "It took the whole summer, but for once the whole swim team is at the Slide with Clyde party!"
She gestured to the circle standing behind her--Stephanie Wetzel and the other three junior girls on the team, plus lots of boys. They all waved at me and called, "Zoey's here!"
"Wait," Keke said. "We gained you, but we lost--"
A distant boat horn cut her off. The lights of a fishing boat and their reflections skimmed parallel to each other across the blackness of the ocean and the sky.
"Doooooug!" the other swim team boys cheered and clapped from the darkness.
"Awww," Lila said, "Doug's with us in spirit."
"Is that really Doug?" I asked. Lost in thoughts of my mom, I'd almost forgotten seeing him an hour and a half ago at the emergency room. Now that anxiety came swirling back. At least if he was stuck on his dad's fishing boat, he wouldn't be showing up here tonight.