“Lie down and close your eyes,” Ben suggests. “Breathe deep. Imagine you’re in Bali. Or on a beach in the Hamptons. Life’s easier to get through that way.”
“I would never be in the Hamptons.” Shelby paces the basement. There are mice down here, but she knows they’re afraid of her. She once stumbled upon three baby mice that froze until she hid behind the stairs, giving them the courage to run away. She happens to catch sight of herself in an old stand-up mirror. She has to get rid of that thing. Frankly, she’s completely shocked by her own appearance. She looks like the kind of girl people back away from on the street, someone who begs for spare change while she curses the world.
“Do I seem different to you than I did in high school?” she asks.
“Sure,” Ben says. “You’re bald.”
“I mean in some definitive way, asshole.”
“That’s definitive. Bald makes a statement. You’re completely different.”
“No I’m not.” Shelby has a crack in her voice. “That would mean I’m subhuman.”
“No. You’re like the weird fucked-up sister of yourself, Shelby. Whereas I’m just an extension of my loser self that anyone could have foreseen. I have followed the path set out before me. You veered.”
He means crashed and she knows it, so she hangs up on him. All he is to her is a drug dealer, anyway. He’s become less geeky and is now good-looking, in a rangy, off-center way, better than anyone would have guessed back in high school. He’s handsome, really, but so what? She doesn’t care about his philosophy. Without getting stoned, it’s harder to sleep fourteen hours at a time. She can feel something coursing through her. She sneaks upstairs to look through her parents’ medicine cabinet. Ativan. That might work. She hadn’t realized her mother was anxious enough to need a prescription like that. There’s also tramadol, which she was given at the hospital. It’s a muscle relaxer that they added to her Valium and lithium. She grabs that as well.
Shelby’s father is sitting in the living room. She usually manages to avoid him. Lately he has kind of a looming presence. Dan Richmond used to be a man who could charm a roomful of people at a party, but he’s changed. Now he goes to work at the men’s shop he inherited from his father and he comes home at six. That’s his life. He watches a lot of TV and doesn’t talk much.
“What are you doing here?” he says when he sees his daughter. If pressed, he wouldn’t be able to remember the last time she’s come upstairs.
“I came to get some milk,” she tells him. That sounds all-American. She goes to the fridge. “Where’s Mom?”
“Nowhere,” Dan says.
Shelby pours herself a glass of milk. She notices her dad is watching the same show she always tunes in to, so she sits down on the couch.
“That guy’s crap,” she says of the contestant she despises. He sings country-western sometimes, and eighties rock sometimes. He has no center, as far as Shelby is concerned.
“Yeah, well, he’s there in Hollywood and you’re here.”
“I don’t want to be in Hollywood,” Shelby is quick to respond. She tries to sound casual, but her father’s remark stings. It’s just another way of saying she’s a nothing. As if she didn’t know that.
They watch together for a while. Shelby is tapping her foot the way she did when she was upset before the hospital, and her father is trying his best not to mention it or even notice it. Thump against the floor. Against the couch. Like she’s wound up.
“I’ll bet she went over to the Boyds’,” Shelby finally says. “Didn’t she? I told her it was stupid and vile and disgusting. I told her not to go.”
“Maybe there’s some truth in what people say. It doesn’t hurt to see.”
“Don’t make me vomit.”
“You’d have to be alive to do that. Living the way you do isn’t being alive.”
Shelby stares at her father. He looks older. He’s a big, unhappy man who clearly wishes he were elsewhere.
“If I wanted to be dead, I would be,” Shelby informs him.
“That’s comforting,” her dad says.
“It is to me,” Shelby says.
She goes back to the basement. She takes two Ativan, then slips on her coat and goes out through the cellar door. She sits down on the picnic table, even though it’s cold outside. The air is like crystals; it hurts just to breathe.
Her mother’s car pulls up and parks. The headlights turn everything yellow, but when they’re cut off the night becomes pitch. All the same, Sue spies her daughter perched on the picnic table. She heads across the yard. “It’s freezing,” Sue says.
“I’m counting stars. That should keep me busy.”
Sue and Shelby lie down on the wooden table. They both look up.
“It’s not the way you think it is,” Sue says. “It’s peaceful over at the Boyds’. She’s peaceful. She means something to the people who come to see her, Shelby.” No one could count all the stars. There are far too many. What’s above them is endless. “It wasn’t anyone’s fault.”