“But you are hurting me,” I said. I started to cry. Everyone everywhere lied.
She plunged the needle into me, there was a tick, and then a tock, and then she cursed. Dr. Muttler said, “All right, enough.” He walked behind me and I heard him open a cabinet door and rustle through it. He came back and stood over me. His hands were behind his back. Maybe they were not behind his back. Maybe everything was front and center. But in the tiny little part of my brain that remembers that day, I swear his hands were behind his back, and that scared me more than anything else.
And then there was a mask dangling above my face and Dr. Muttler told me to count to ten, and Tracy was putting another needle in a vein, but this time it was on my hand, and that hurt so much, it was like being stabbed. I was crying and counting and then, thank God, at last, it was dark.
When I woke, the first thing I saw was my mother. I was lying down on an uncomfortable bed that was covered with a piece of paper, and when I moved the paper made a crunching sound. The paper felt weird against my skin, and I hated that sound. My mother was sitting on a folding chair. She was reading a magazine. Julia Roberts was on the cover. Her lips and teeth were gigantic and her hair was long, as long as she liked.
“You’re a liar,” I said. I said it louder. “A fucking liar.” I did not know if she could understand me, my mouth felt all stuck together. “Everyone knows.” The door opened, and Tracy stuck just her head inside. “How’s our patient?” she said.
“Everyone. Knows. You’re. A. Fucking. Liar.”
The words were just coming out and I could not stop them and I did not care. I could not even see my mother through the haze. I heard her start laughing. It was a nervous laugh. It was the first time I had ever cursed at her.
“It’s the drugs,” said Tracy. “She’ll calm down.” She walked over to me and held my hand. “You did really great,” she said. My mother followed her. She held the other hand. There they were, two women, holding my hands.
“You lied,” I said. I started to cry. “You said it would not hurt.”
“I’m sorry,” whispered my mother.
“You are a liar,” I said.
“You’ll be okay,” said Tracy.
And then there was a shift in my brain, I steered it from one path to another, and I remembered that I loved my mother, that I should show her respect in public, that I was not the kind of girl who cursed, that I was a nice girl, I obeyed my parents, I obeyed the rules, my mother was not a liar, my parents still loved each other, a dentist was just a dentist, his wife was just his wife, and in two weeks I would start high school with a brand-new haircut.
Within two months I had grown an inch and a half taller and my breasts were one cup size bigger. A few weeks after that I met Thomas Madison, and he made me his moon, and I took him to be my stars. I learned how to love. But somewhere in the middle of that—or was it before, I do not know anymore—I forgot how to feel.
15.
I left the house only once during the week after his surgery. Those seven days during his recovery period were some of our finest times together. We grew closer than ever. He was fragile and I tended to him just as I loved to do, as I believed I was born to do, put on this planet to take care of my man. Or at least that was how I felt at that time.
“NOW YOU KNOW THAT you have to take care of you, too,” said Valka. She had ordered up a full bottle of champagne from room service, and a big breakfast, too. I picked at some bacon, and grumbled at her. I did not need to be reminded how wrong I had been. It just made me feel stupid.
“Oh, honey, it’s not your fault. It’s not your fault you love to love.” She rubbed my arm. “I meant no harm.”
The bacon was too salty but I ate it anyway.
HE DID NOT WANT company besides me. He did not want anyone to see him weak, and he did not want to have to lie about why he was sick. We sent the contractors home—the in-ground pool would have to wait a few more weeks—so it was just me and him sitting around. He sat on the couch in his sweatpants, the same pair every day because they were his loosest and he needed room to breathe around his bandages. Sometimes he slept on my lap and I would stroke his hair then, feel the fine flat bangs and the way it thickened into a tough curl in the back at the base of his neck, as if it were an entirely different head.
“Does it hurt?” I asked him.
“Only a little bit,” he said. “Mostly it just feels like it’s different.”
We both read my magazines and looked at all the pictures of the celebrities. I liked to read him the bits and pieces about who was sleeping with who. There was Rio DeCarlo on a yacht with the twenty-sixth-richest man in the world. He also looked like the twenty-sixth-baldest man in the world.
“Couldn’t even break the top twenty?” said Thomas. “What’s the point?”