One Last Song Part 16

"I let him in." Mum came striding in, her eyes moving between Drew and me. Something glittered there, something dark and amused. It frightened me.

Drew smiled wider, his expression heartbreakingly innocent and unsuspecting. He was some harmless creature-a ladybug or a gra.s.shopper-that had wandered into the web my mother and I had spun. I hadn't intended for him to get caught in it, but now that he was here, there was absolutely nothing I could do but watch him get trapped.

"It was a pleasure meeting your friend, Saylor." She kept that glazed smile on her face, toying with me.

I couldn't look at Drew or my mother. So I stared down at the IV tube in my arm and fiddled with where it was taped to the back of my hand. The pain helped me focus. It helped me remember I was the victim, that I had a legitimate reason to be there. But that was just on the surface. Underneath, I had the feeling my world was turning into insubstantial cotton, ready to float away on the first big puff of air to leave my mother's mouth.

But just as I was becoming resigned to this, she sighed. "Well, nice as it has been to meet one of Saylor's friends, I'm afraid I must run. I have a cla.s.s to get to."

Her drunk-driving cla.s.s. "Oh, right." I forced a smile, my heart speeding up again. Was she really leaving? Or would she drop the bombsh.e.l.l on her way out the door?

But she extended her hand out to Drew and let him shake it.

"It was nice to meet you, Mrs. Grayson."

"And you, Drew." She smiled, held his eyes for a moment longer, and then turned to me. "I'll be by later."

I nodded, and we were quiet as she walked out the door.

Drew turned to me. "She's really nice." When I didn't answer, he said, "Pierce was in the ER last night when they admitted you. I texted you late last night and this morning, but when you didn't answer, I came over." He frowned. "Are you okay with this? Me being in here, I mean. You seem kinda freaked."

I was more than kinda freaked. This was bad. As a rule, no one came to visit me in the hospital because that just led to messy questions and messier answers. The only people allowed were my parents, and that was only because I had to have someone take care of me after. "Um, yeah... it's just, I don't like people seeing me like this."

He nodded. "Sick, you mean. I can understand that." A pause, during which he came forward and smoothed the hair back from my forehead. "But, you know, you're not alone in this."

Questions cl.u.s.tered at the base of my throat, making it hard for me to breathe. I extricated one delicately. "What, um, what did my mother tell you? About why I'm in here?"

He shrugged. "She didn't. All she said was that they were monitoring you, and that I could ask you for details."

Mum had covered for me. I knew better than to think it was because she cared about me being embarra.s.sed; it was her own reputation she was concerned about. "Oh, okay. Did you tell her you were from the TIDD group?"

"No. Just that I was your friend." He smiled again. "I thought it might be premature to call myself your boyfriend, since you haven't officially called me that yet."

Relief coursed through me. TIDD hadn't come up. And then another thought: Drew thought of himself as my boyfriend? I had a legitimate boyfriend. I wondered if my hair looked horrible, if my breath smelled bad. Then I wondered when I'd gotten to be one of those girls who worried about stupid s.h.i.+t like that.

"You can tell people you're my boyfriend," I said. "I won't mind."

Only a small part of me also thought: If you introduce yourself that way, there won't be a need to mention TIDD.

"Oh, um, is Pierce okay? Why was he in the ER?" Now that I was certain my secret was safe, I was free to worry about other people. It was weird, this feeling of caring. It was sort of like taking off your sungla.s.ses and seeing the world in its correct hues: jarring and discordant, but also right somehow.

"Another complication from the sarcoma." Drew sighed. "He was spitting up blood, but they got him stabilized."

The nurse bustled in then, a pleasantly plump young woman with long, wavy black locks. She smiled at the two of us. "Just coming in to take your vitals," she said to me. "How you feelin' this mornin'?"

"Um, I'm okay." I glanced at Drew. He seemed to get the message.

"I was just leaving," he said, planting a kiss on my forehead. "Talk to you later?"

"Yeah."

He took two steps before his feet tangled together. I watched him try to lift his left foot, then overcompensate with his right when it didn't lift as much as he expected. The result was that he fell in a twisted heap, the arm that was holding his cane tucked under his torso.

"Oh!" The nurse left my side and hurried over to him. I jumped out of bed, was overcome with a wave of dizziness, and sat back down abruptly. The nurse looked at me.

"Stay in bed," she ordered. "I got him."

With her help, Drew picked himself off the floor. His jaw was hard, blue eyes ablaze. He refused to look at me. "Thank you," he said to the nurse. "I have Friedreich's ataxia."

She nodded. "You okay? Why don't I get a doctor to check you out? Make sure you didn't hurt anything?"

"No, thank you," he said. "I'm fine. I have to leave anyway."

"Wait," she said, putting her hand on his arm as he began to walk again. "At least let me get an aide to take you down in a wheelchair."

He turned to her, and in that moment, I didn't recognize him. He looked lean and mean, a little like a fox fighting over a sc.r.a.p of food. "No, thank you. I can walk."

He took his time, but he walked out of the room by himself. He didn't say good-bye.

They discharged me later that day. My liver might still suffer the consequences of my actions, but only time would tell for sure. Other than that, I was fine.

The process was always the same: The nurse unhooked me, the doctor came in, told me I needed to see a therapist, and finished up our talk with a "G.o.d help you" look. Pinched mouth, raised eyebrows-it was always the same.

They told me they'd spoken with Dr. Stone's receptionist, who said she'd have the good doctor call me himself. This was the hospital's version of hot potato. No one wanted the douchebag patient who wanted to stay sick-I was the dregs of society relegated to the shrinks. The shrinks would take anyone.

Mum was waiting downstairs for me, sipping a coffee. I started to wonder if it really was coffee, and then stopped myself. I wasn't going down that road. When she saw me, she closed her newspaper and stood. "Ready?"

"Why are you here?" I asked. "It's not like you can drive me home."

Her face closed off, went blank. She was like an Etch A Sketch; jar her too much and she erased herself. "They wouldn't discharge you without someone here to see you home."

I smirked and jingled the car keys. "It's a case of the sick leading the sick."

She didn't respond.

Back at home, she melted away into the shadows of the house, and I went to my room to get my cell phone. Drew had said he'd texted me last night; I was curious to see what he'd said, how worried he'd been.

I had four missed texts and two missed calls.

R u ok?

Pietce said you're in ER. Pls text me back.

Don't want to bug u but wprried.

Ctl me.

I guessed the last one was "Call me." I read the texts over and over again. He had had a hard time getting the words out. I wondered if he'd been embarra.s.sed about the mangled words, but too worried to delete them and try again. My heart hurt for him, for his pride and for the inevitable encroaching evidence of his disease. I listened to his voicemail.

"Hey Saylor, it's Drew. Um, I've been texting you. Don't mean to bother you, but Pierce said he saw you in the ER and I'm worried. Really worried. Okay, just call me when you get this and you have a minute, okay? All right."

I felt a deep warmth radiate through me at the concern in his voice, as if I'd been wrapped in a heated blanket. I liked that he worried about me-worried so much, in fact, that he wasn't afraid to look desperate about wanting to hear from me. I liked that a lot. I stared at his texts again, at the words he'd tried so hard to form, and an idea began to form in my mind.

Chapter Thirty-Three.

Five days pa.s.sed, five days in which I didn't talk to my mother and during which she didn't talk to me. I couldn't tell if it'd been a conscious attempt on her part to avoid me, or an unconscious attempt on mine.

I slunk into Dr. Stone's office and plopped onto the pinstriped couch that was becoming a little too familiar. How many appointments had we had now? How many times had I come in here and sat quietly while he tried to get me to open up?

"I'm glad you came to see me. I know you probably still don't feel ready." His tone was kind, in spite of the fact that I'd rescheduled twice already in the past five days. But still, even in the face of his compa.s.sion, fury ripped through me like some snarling beast. I wasn't even sure why.

I bit my lip and stared out the window at the empty parking lot, cloaked in snow.

"I'd like to hear the reasoning behind the Tylenol incident." The Tylenol incident. I liked how that sounded, like some sort of PR spin. "You weren't trying to commit suicide. Is that an accurate statement?"

He knew. He knew exactly what I'd meant to do, that people like me didn't try to kill ourselves. I looked at him. "Yeah."

"So what was it? That put you over the edge? That made you want to take so many of those pills so you could wind up in the hospital?"

His question was nonjudgmental. He was merely trying to identify a solution to a problem. But he didn't understand. My life was a jumble of problems, like a jumbled old ball of yarn. Untangle one thread, and a dozen more would be there behind it. "Take your pick. Was it that I'm the biggest f.u.c.kup in the history of mankind, so much so that my dad can't even stand to be around me? Or even better, how about the fact that my mum's a f.u.c.king alcoholic because of me? Because she can't deal with the idea of living life with me as her daughter." My voice threatened to break at the end, but I flashed him a big grin to show I was fine. I was completely, 100 percent f.u.c.king fine.

His carefully groomed eyebrows knitted together. "She's an alcoholic? What happened to bring you to that conclusion?"

"She was arrested last week." It felt so incredibly good to say it out loud. I realized, besides my vague confession to Drew, that this was the first time I was truly talking about it. Not being talked to about it, not being shut out, but actually saying the words, letting them go free like a fistful of balloons. "She got a DWI, but my dad was able to get her out of jail."

Dr. Stone shook his head slowly. "How did you feel when you found out?"

I leaned forward, hands on my knees, fingers gripping them with so much force I was afraid they'd break off. "Are you serious? How do you think I felt?"

He didn't answer the question, choosing instead to counter with one of his own. f.u.c.king shrinks. "You said you think she's an alcoholic because she can't deal with having you for a daughter. Is that something she's said to you?"

I sat back and tried to get my breathing under control. "She didn't have to. It's all over her face. It's in everything she says to me, hidden behind her words like some beast no one wants to acknowledge."

"Saylor, do you know why alcoholics drink? Besides all the biological aspects of addiction, how their brains are wired, et cetera, do you know what they're actually trying to accomplish?"

I shook my head.

"Usually, they're trying to mask intense pain. They're trying to forget their own actions, their own pasts, or both. I'd venture that your mum isn't drinking because of you. She's drinking because of herself, her own demons. And I'd bet anything she feels guilty as h.e.l.l about how it's affected you."

I stared at him, wanting desperately to believe his words. Was alcohol Mum's mask, as Munchausen was mine? But it seemed so far-fetched. So utterly unlike my mother, this vulnerable, sad, lost person he was talking about. "I don't believe that," I said quietly, halfheartedly. "You haven't been there, in our conversations, in our house. You're wrong." But even as I said those words, a splinter of hope embedded itself deep in my heart, countering them.

Zee and Drew had set things up with Jack's mom so we were supposed to get to Prescott Park at three p.m. for his birthday party. It was supposed to be an unseasonably pleasant day for mid-March, near fifty degrees and sunny. The perfect weather for a bunch of sick people-and I included myself in that category-to have a party to celebrate life.

At eleven a.m. the morning after my appointment with Dr. Stone, my doorbell rang. Dad was at work and Mum was at her alcohol education cla.s.s; I had no idea who it could be. I peeked out the peephole.

Zee, in a trendy black bob.

I opened the door. "Hi. What are you doing here?"

She gestured behind her, where her car stood with its back pa.s.senger door open. "I need help."

Frowning, I stepped outside in my slippered feet and followed her to her car. She had two cardboard boxes on her backseat, filled with what looked like brightly colored party supplies.

I looked up at her. "You do realize Jack is turning twenty-five, not five?"

She stuck out her tongue. "I have a thing about birthday celebrations." When I raised my eyebrow, she explained, "I like them to be big. And Jack said no presents. So you have to help me."

"Help you do what?"

"Blow these up!" She rummaged in a box and pulled out two giant bags of balloons. "I have the lung capacity of a ninety-year-old man with no lungs. If he doesn't want presents, he's going to at least get a festive community center, d.a.m.n it."

I laughed. "Okay, fine. But you know what you could do? Buy a balloon pump."

She threw her hands up in the air. "Do I look like I could carry a balloon pump from the store to the car? As it was I had to bribe the neighbor kid to put these boxes in when Mom was out grocery shopping. She totally freaks out about me overdoing anything."

I picked up the box nearest to me. "All right, well, let's get you inside where it's warmer. I've got a fire going."

But she was already making her way up the driveway.

Inside, I got Zee a mug of hot cocoa and a throw blanket for her legs. "Thanks," she said, flexing her feet and looking around. "You've got a nice place."

"Can't take any credit for it." I sat cross-legged on the floor next to one of the boxes, pulled out the pack of balloons, and ripped open the package. "My mum's the decorator."

"Your parents at work?" Zee asked, sipping her hot cocoa.

I paused for a second while I considered how to answer. Pulling out a white balloon, I said, "My dad is. My mum's just at a cla.s.s." I began to blow up the balloon to preempt any more questions.

Zee sighed. "You're lucky. You're not at the stage yet when your parents begin to do the hovering hummingbird thing."

I looked at her over the swell of the growing balloon. How could I explain that I'd kill for the "hovering hummingbird thing"? That even a "good morning" from Mum was a hard-won comment, one I'd hug to my chest like a sparkling jewel only to be brought out and examined when no one else was around? I settled for tying the top of the balloon and batting it over to her, a white rubber cloud.

Her eyes lit up. "Look at how fast you did that! Lucky b.i.t.c.h."