The First Time She Drowned (21 page)

TWO DAYS LATER
I somehow find myself in the fitting room of Macy’s trying on dresses while Zoey, who has just picked out her semiformal gown, stands on the other side of the door, talking about all the fun we’re going to have at the dance.

“I’m seriously not going,” I say for the tenth time, but Zoey has failed to accept this fact, which is why I’m standing in my underwear going through the motions of dress shopping. “Why don’t you just go with your other friends?” As soon as I say this, I regret it. The last thing I need to do is remind Zoey that she doesn’t need me.

“Because they think they’re too cool to go.”

I poke my head out of the dressing room. “So you’re making me go because I’m the least cool?”

She grins. “Exactly.”

“Fair enough,” I say with a dramatic sigh. The way I see it, I can indulge her until she finds a date and loses interest in forcing me to come along. In the meantime, a little shopping therapy never hurt anyone.

“Do you think I should ask that hot guy in the cafeteria?” she asks. “You know, the one who only has four fingers on his left hand? Or should I just go stag and see what comes of the night? I wonder if Chris is going . . .”

“He is,” I say. “He asked me yesterday, at the library.” I have no idea why I’ve confessed this.

“Well, now you have to go! Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because I knew you would say, ‘Well, now you have to go!’”

“Nobody misses their first college homecoming,” she says. “That would be crazy.”

“That would hardly be crazy,” I say, and then because I hear the defensiveness in my voice, I quickly follow with, “What about Murph? Can’t you go with him?”

Zoey makes a series of barfing noises that goes on so long, I start to worry about other customers in the dressing room.

“That’s not what you said when you had your tongue down his throat at that beach party,” I remind her.

“I was desperate,” she says. “Get over it.”

I put on one of the dresses I’ve chosen, tight and black with a scooped neck and a high slit up the side. Even though I have no intention of buying it, I still enjoy trying it on, if only for the approval I hope to see in Zoey’s eyes when she sees me in it. I step out of the fitting room and do a little spin.

Zoey gives me a quick once-over. “No,” she says with an apologetic head shake.

“No?” I’m completely taken aback. “What’s wrong with it?”

“You’re eighteen, not thirty-five.”

I sigh and step back into the dressing room and stare at myself again, confused. I’m certain that my mother would love me in a dress like this.

“This is so dumb,” I say. “I’m not even going.” Still, I whip off the dress and try on another, now determined to get it right. The
next one is a sophisticated black silk gown with a long open V in the front.

When I step out, Zoey again gives me the thumbs-down. “Sorry,” she says.

“What now?”

“You look like your mother.”

“Okay, whatever. I’m done.” I go back into the dressing room and yank off the dress. I feel like crying.

“I just think they send the wrong message,” Zoey says through the door.

“What message is that?”

“Like you’re trying too hard. You’re beautiful. You don’t have to try.”

“Yeah right.” If I were really beautiful, she would’ve had a different reaction. I feel the ugliness in me leaking out, the chariot ride turning into a pumpkin.

“Hold on a sec,” she says, and disappears for a few minutes. When she returns, she cracks open the door and stuffs another dress into my hand. “Now, I know you’re gonna say no because it’s not black and sexy and mother-approved, but just try this one for me.”

I hold the dress up and look at it. It’s a silvery-pink shift dress, short but loose. My mother would barf at this.

“No,” I say.

“Come on. I really think it will be pretty.”

I sigh and hand her back the dresses she has just shot down. Then, because I know Zoey won’t let me leave until I try it on and because she’s looking at me with those puppy-dog eyes, I close the door to change into the pink thing.

“Do you think this dance will be like prom where they decorate the shit out of everything and hang corny stars from the ceiling?”

I freeze. I don’t know what to say, considering I was too busy being locked up in a mental hospital to attend any high school dances. Then, to my relief, Zoey keeps on talking.

“I don’t even remember my senior prom. I was so trashed, I fell headfirst out of the limo in front of a teacher and then spent the night puking in the bathroom. That’s why I don’t drink tequila anymore, or at least, not straight out of the bottle.”

I slide the pink dress over my head and then look at myself in the mirror. My reflection startles me. The girl in front of me is young and unguarded, maybe even sweet. All the hard edges of my face have been softened by the blush of the dress, and with my makeup slightly faded from the hot lights and all the taking on and off of clothes, I catch a glimpse of a more vulnerable version of myself, a girl I haven’t seen in a long time.

“So what was your prom like?”

“Huh?” I say, stalling. I am still in the mirror, absorbing the face in front of me as I consider how to answer the question. My feet hurt and the lighting is too bright, and all at once I want to sit down on the dressing room stool and tell her everything: that I have never been to a school dance let alone a prom, that I spent my high school years locked up in an institution, that I don’t want to go to this dance, but I don’t want to miss out either, that I am afraid I’ll never be normal, and mostly, that if I tell her all this, she won’t like me anymore.

“Oh, my prom? It was stupid,” I lie. “All dances are stupid. Also, there is no way in hell I would ever wear this dress.”

I open the door and Zoey stands back and gasps. “Oh my God, look at you!” she says, and I’d swear she almost looks teary. “That’s the one.”

“Seriously?” I say.

She nods vigorously.

I turn back to the mirror and take another look at myself. “Fine. Whatever. Let’s just get it and go.”

• • •

Zoey and I bring our shopping bags back to our room, and then I run up the campus hill because I realize I’m late for my appointment with Liz. When I notice I’m running, I stop. I don’t know why I care about getting there on time—or getting there at all, for that matter.

I reach the counseling center and pause to smooth down my hair so it won’t look like I was rushing. My heart is still beating too fast when I sit on the yellow waiting room couch, and I don’t know if it’s because of the running or the unsettled feeling I’ve had since my shopping spree with Zoey. I think about the dress she talked me into buying, about my face in the mirror when I tried it on, how it felt like looking at a memory.

“Sorry I’m late,” I say when Liz comes to get me in the waiting room and ushers me into her office. “I was shopping for a homecoming dress.”

“Oh, exciting,” she says as she sits and blows on the cup of tea she inevitably won’t bother to drink.

“I’m not going.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Ah! Thus, the buying of the dress. It’s all falling into place.”

“It’s just to get my roommate off my back. She keeps pressuring me to go. As soon as she finds a date, I’m returning it.”

“Seems like an awful lot of effort,” she says. “Is there maybe some part of you that wants to go?” She tilts her head and her eyes twinkle like she’s trying to weasel the truth from a child.

I hesitate.

“Aha!” she says.

I start to laugh and she smiles at my laughter. Our eyes meet.

“You look happy,” she says.

I suppress the laughter, shrug and look away. The room feels too small, Liz’s chair too close.

“What happened just now?” she says.

“Nothing.”

“You were happy and now you’re not happy.”

“I wasn’t happy.”

“You were smiling . . .”

I sink deeper into the couch, fold my arms across my chest. “Whatever.”

“No, not whatever. Was it something I said?”

“Was what something you said?”

“Well, you were smiling and laughing and then suddenly you stopped. So I’m just wondering why.”

“I don’t know. I don’t spend my time remembering and analyzing every little thing that happens, every nanosecond of my life.”

She doesn’t say anything, but I can feel the weight of her stare.

“What do you want me to say? You want me to make something up?”

“Sure,” she says. “Make something up. Whatever comes to your mind first.”

I look out the window, angry with myself for having brought on this line of questioning. Just beyond the highway, a haze of sun smothers the sea, although every once in a while, the light catches in a particular way and the ocean sparkles gold. “You know what? Never mind. Forget it.”

“Cassie.”

“What?”

“I don’t want to forget it. That’s what you do. You want to sweep everything under the rug, pretend like the things that happened in your life don’t affect you.”

“I’m not pretending. I’m just over it. People do get over things, you know.”

“Just like that?”

“Yeah, just like that.”

“Okay,” she says.

We sit in silence for a long, tense moment. “All right, you really want to know?” I say. “I’m not buying all this therapy bullshit. I don’t trust you. I don’t trust this. I know what you’re trying to do.”

“What am I trying to do?”

“Be all nice and mirroring and validating. Trying to make me feel good. Make me think you care.”

“You think it’s just an act that I could be happy to see you smile. Why would I do that?”

“To suck me in. Make me think it’s okay to lower my guard.”

“What would happen if you did that?”

I glare at her. “Nothing good.”

She nods and leans back. “So if you keep your guard up all the time, nothing bad will happen?”

“Something like that.”

“Where do you think that belief came from?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is that true?”

I look to the window again. The sun is too white, too bright. I turn away from the glare. Something is nagging at me, something elusive and swimming just below the surface ever since I saw myself in that dress. The uneasiness returns and my mind is all fuzzy, like I have the flu. I feel strangely displaced. Time passes. I don’t know how long Liz sits quietly watching me, waiting.

“My uncle Billy told my mother he was worried about me,” I say finally. “When I was little. He said he thought something was wrong. I don’t know why. Or what that has to do with anything. It’s just something I remembered after our last session.”

She leans forward. “What do you think he meant by that?”

“I don’t know. He was a drug addict. My mother didn’t seem to take him seriously. I’m sure it’s nothing. I don’t even know why I mentioned it.”

I glance over at the clock. Liz stays fixed on me.

“We still have a few minutes,” she says.

“I’m done talking about it,” I say and look toward the door.

“Okay. Well, how about this,” she says, suddenly sitting forward. She grabs a business card from the table beside her and writes something on it. She hands me the card. “That’s my cell
number on the back,” she says. “If you need to be in touch again before our next session, I want you to feel free to call me, okay?”

I make a scoffing face. “Why would I do that?”

She shrugs. “Maybe you wouldn’t.”

“But why would you even want me to?” I sit up even further, my body angling toward the door. “You’re doing it again. Trying to make me think you give a shit.”

“You really think I don’t care for you?” she says. “That I wouldn’t be there if you needed me?”

“I think you’re doing a job.”

She tilts her head and stares at me. The room changes, seems strange and unfamiliar, like I’m seeing it for the first time. Liz, too, looks strange, or maybe it’s just that I’m really looking at her face today, taking in her features, seeing the whole picture.

A pressure starts in my head like I’m in a crowded, unfamiliar place and I don’t know where I’m going and I can’t understand the signs. I wonder if it would be weird to just leave. I suddenly sort of want to leave. The silence seems to have its own heartbeat, tense and watchful. It reminds me of childhood games of hide-and-seek, of listening so hard for footsteps. The game seems darker in my memory of it: the sense of being hunted, waiting to get caught, afraid of both being found and never being found.

“I should go,” I say.

“Have I upset you?”

“Not at all.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yup. I’m fine.”

She looks at me with concern, like she knows—as I do—that I’m lying, but she doesn’t want to push it.

“Like I said before, I just don’t like being messed with.”

“You still think I’m messing with you?”

“Kinda, yeah!”

She appears taken aback, or maybe even sad. She looks down at her tea and stirs it as she thinks. “Well, I guess that’s the story you know, isn’t it?” she says. “Nobody can ever really care for you. People are untrustworthy and manipulative. Bad things happen and no one is there.”

“It’s not like I’m making it up.”

“No, but maybe that’s an old story. Maybe now, you can start to write a different one.”

I shrug, lean over, look at the clock.

“Do you have somewhere you need to be?”

“Just making sure I don’t overstay.”

She leans forward abruptly. The sun is reflected in her eyes. “Do it,” she says.

“Do what?”

“Overstay.”

“Why?”

“Just as an experiment. Kick off your shoes, sit back and overstay.”

“I don’t get it.”

“It’s a risk, Cassie. This fear you have is not about what
could
happen but what has
already
happened. And now the ways you
protect yourself are the very things that continue to cause you pain. You might not be so afraid of life if you could see that you aren’t alone in—”

“I’m not afraid.” I stand. “Time’s up.”

I leave without saying good-bye.

THE SUN IS
just beginning its retreat when I exit the psych building, and there’s no warmth to the remaining light. It’s the hour of day I like best, when the weather seems slightly removed, without intrusion or demands. Even now, after almost five weeks in college and out of the hospital, there are moments when my freedom is a wonder, when the air on my skin feels like touch to a newborn.

I think about what Liz suggested, that my fear of letting my guard down is not about what will happen but what has already happened. Then my mind wanders to the memory of the day my parents had me locked up, perhaps because of what Liz said, or perhaps because I have avoided looking at it for so long. I have tried to block it completely from my thoughts ever since my mother came back into my life, not wanting to revisit all those awful feelings, not wanting to reignite them. But the memory is insistent tonight, demanding to be looked at. And I sense now that the only way out of the labyrinth is to know where it started, to remember the path that led to where I’m now standing.

Everything seems so vivid and immediate: that seemingly
endless drive, the ropes too tight around my wrists and ankles, the sound of my own voice sobbing and pleading for Gavin to help me. And then even worse than the drive, the moment, hours later, when the car finally stopped.

• • •

My father and Matthew untied me in the parking lot and led me toward a large brick building with beautiful grounds empty of people. I knew it was useless to fight them, and I didn’t have any energy left to try. We entered a reception area paneled with dark, heavy wood. My mother sent Matthew and Gavin back to the car, and a moment later, a middle-aged man appeared and introduced himself to my parents as Dr. Meeks. He barely glanced at me. Meeks led the three of us into an office where two female doctors were already seated. They were obviously expecting me. When I walked in, they greeted me by name.

The three doctors invited us to take seats in the remaining chairs that had been set in a loose half circle around them.

“Cassie,” Dr. Meeks said, looking at me finally. “I want to start out by telling you that we’re all here to help you.”

“That’s right,” my mother said, her hands folded primly in her lap. She had an expression of deep parental concern on her face that I had never seen before.

“This is ridiculous,” I said to Meeks. “I’m not crazy. I have no idea why I’m here.”

Meeks gave me a condescending smile. “We just think that maybe you’re having some trouble . . . coping.”

“Well, I don’t know what you’ve been told to make you think that, but I would urge you to consider the source.” The sound of
my voice so calm and mature and reasonable reassured me. “I mean, I may not be getting along too great with my parents right now. Which I can work on. Which I
will
work on—at
home
with them. But—”

“We understand that you tried to kill yourself in the school cafeteria,” Meeks said, glancing at my parents and back to me. “Is that true?”

I turned and stared at my mother. “Seriously? That’s what you told them to get me here?” To Meeks I said, “Yes, it’s true that I briefly considered offing myself last
year
. Obviously I got over it or I’d be dead right now.”

I could tell by the expression on Meeks’s face that he was not aware of the time lapse. Point one for me.

“I see,” he said. “Well, nonetheless, your parents are understandably concerned.”

“So concerned that they waited all this time? So concerned that my mother hit me when she found out and called me a stupid asshole and told me she was surprised I didn’t go through with my little suicide plan? Did she tell you that I got the idea from her?”

At that, the other two doctors looked up from their notebooks simultaneously and stared at my mother.

I expected her to deny it, but instead she smiled sweetly at the doctors. “At the time I believed I had a brain tumor. So suicide was the only logical choice.” She held out her hands as if that explained it.

The doctors exchanged concerned glances and I saw that the tables were being turned. They were seeing where the true
problem lay.

My mother seemed to sense it too because her mouth began to twitch. She looked anxiously at my father, whose gaze remained steadily on the floor, and then back to the doctors. She took a deep breath and sat up straighter. She pushed her blond hair, cut short in a suburban bob, behind her ears. She refolded her hands in her lap.

“Obviously I’m not a perfect mother,” she said. “We have our share of problems like all families. I’m sure that Ed and I have made mistakes along the way. But, when she tried to set the house on fire—”

“What?!” I looked to the doctors. Blood roared in my ears.

“—I became concerned for her safety and the safety of my sons—”

“I never set any fires!”

She kept her eyes fixed on Dr. Meeks. “I caught her with a box of matches trying to set the wastebaskets on fire.”

My mind spun, searching itself, trying to make sense of things. I had a faint memory of lighting Wade’s matches in my room after that big fight with my mother, trying to comfort myself with thoughts of my new and only friend. I remembered that the door had been open and my mother had walked by. But she obviously knew I wasn’t trying to set the house on fire. She hadn’t even bothered to say anything about it.

“Are you insane?” I said. “How do you even come up with this shit?”

I turned to the doctors. “Can’t you see she’s just trying to come
up with something on the spot?”

“Cassie,” my mother said in a soft, nurturing tone. “I know it’s hard to hear these things about yourself but trust me, this is for your own good.”

I was out of my chair and across the room in two steps. “You bitch!” I screamed in her face. “You crazy, lying bitch!”

She arched back in her chair as if terrified and turned to Dr. Meeks. “Do you see!” she said. “This is what I’m talking about.”

“Because you’re lying!” I screamed.

“Help me, Dr. Meeks,” my mother pleaded.

Meeks picked up the phone.

I turned to him. “Can’t you see what she’s doing?! She’s just saying whatever she has to to get me locked up. She’s the real problem! And she can’t stand that I won’t take her abuse anymore!”

The office doors banged open. Two large male nurses charged toward me and seized me by the arms.

“What are you doing?” I screamed. “Let go of me!” I tried to shake free. Their grips tightened, rendering me helpless, bound.

A sudden crackle of synapses. A spark of memory like a snapshot. Displacing me for a moment in time. A woman’s voice in my head. Disappearing as quickly as it came. I shake my head to clear my thoughts.

The nurses pulled me toward the door. My screams turned wild, shrieking, as if my voice could become fists pounding and thrashing to escape. “You have to believe me!” I cried.

I turned to my mother. I looked in her eyes and begged for my life. “Please don’t do this to me! I’ll do anything. Just tell them
the truth.”

She shook her head. “This is where you belong.”

“Dad!” I shouted. “Help me! You know I wouldn’t do that! She’s lying!”

He looked to my mother. She stared back at him with challenging eyes.

“Dad, please! You have to believe me!”

His shoulders slumped. He bowed his head. My mother owned him.

She owned all of us.

“No!” I screamed again as the nurses dragged me backward out of the room by my elbows. My mother looked away, leaving me alone once again with the nightmare of what was happening.

• • •

By the time I reach my dorm, my adrenaline is surging with the memory and I hate my mother all over again for what she did, for how she lied, for how she just fucking left me there.

But then I think of my mother now, so different from the mother I grew up with, and it’s all too confusing, too exhausting. It feels so much easier not to hate, not to be angry, to believe that maybe it really was my fault, maybe she really was just trying to help me, maybe that’s why she lied. Maybe everything—my whole life—was just one big misunderstanding. After all, it’s true I wasn’t perfect. It’s true I had been rebellious, even if I felt justified, even if I felt I was saving myself. And it would be so much easier to just believe that it had been my fault. If it was my fault, I could take control now and I could fix it, the bad thing in me, so that nothing like that would ever happen again.

If it was my fault, maybe I could finally have a mother.