“Okay,” she said, and she even managed a tight little smile. But she never did believe him.
“They discharged Sarah from the hospital the next day,” Lizzie said now to Rose. “She was contrite, so apologetic, kept swearing that she would never do anything like that again. So we brought her home. The doctors basically chalked it up to teenage moodiness and drinking. But the next week she started acting weird again—staying up until two, three in the morning, calling her friends in the middle of the night, asking them to pick her up, not saying where she wanted to go, only that she had to. My father insisted that Sarah had to get another evaluation—I remember call after call, appointment after appointment. He made a big stink, the way only he could.” She took a deep breath, remembering.
Sarah would be fine, Lizzie could recall thinking. She had been an intense little kid and was developing into an emotionally volatile teenager; none of this was surprising. Sarah had been hung up on a boy and did something stupid. And now she was being moody and regretful. That’s all this was, Lizzie wanted to believe.
But Joseph was convinced there was more, and he was dogged on Sarah’s behalf. When Lizzie looked back on that time, she recalled her father installed behind the closed door of his bedroom, his voice rising, needling. It was only then that he sounded like himself. In Lizzie’s presence, even after the apology, he rarely spoke. He seemed numbed to everyone around him. She swore she could see him stiffen when she was present. So she tried to be present as little as possible.
“My dad called all these doctors,” Lizzie continued. “He eventually got her in to see this child psychiatrist at UCLA, an expert who was doing research into girls and suicide attempts and he had Sarah admitted to the inpatient unit. She spent a few weeks there. It was awful. But she finally got her bipolar diagnosis. They started her on lithium. And finally it was okay.”
Lizzie remembered waiting in those red plastic molded chairs in the waiting area at UCLA, not wanting to be called through the excruciatingly heavy locked double doors. When inevitably she and Joseph were, they would find Sarah at the art therapy table, her face heavier, wearing sweats and canvas sneakers without laces. Lizzie hated those un-Sarah-like sweats and sneakers with an abiding fierceness. She would thrust a mess of magazines at her—Popular Photography, People, Seventeen. “Thanks,” Sarah would mutter, eyes averted. Lizzie hated everyone there—the competent, omnipresent nurses, the few doctors, the other patients, her sister, her father. She hated them as if hating could actually accomplish something.
“He took care of her,” Rose was saying now. “He did everything he could.”
“Yeah, he did,” Lizzie said, and she bit her lip. She had never needed her father’s care like that. Sometimes she wished that she had. “I never gave him enough credit for it. But he did.”
Later that night, Lizzie lay next to Max, her foot hooked around his ankle. “Did you know that Huntington was married to his aunt?”
“No,” he said. She turned on her side and closed her eyes as he traced the knobby route of her spine. “I did not.”
“It just got me thinking. There are stranger beginnings than ours.”
“Yes,” he said, and he kissed the top of her head. “There are.”
She pulled her arms into her chest, curling up. “Maybe we could do this.” Her afternoon with Rose had had a strangely buoying effect on her. She thought of Rose telling her that sometimes you have to jump. This, she thought, this is what I want.
“Maybe we could,” he agreed.
She put a hand on his chest, a tangle of matted hairs. It was warm, and she could feel his heart. The steady beat of that thick bloody muscle gave her courage. “The other day, you said you wouldn’t mind if I moved in with you,” she said. “What if I did?”
“For all intents and purposes, you have.”
She shook her head. She could make a joke about it—she could pretend—but no. She meant it, and she wasn’t going to feign otherwise. “You know what I mean.”
“You wouldn’t go back to New York.” He said the words slowly. “You’d move here?”
Did she detect a note of incredulity in his voice? Lizzie told herself not to be so sensitive. Give him a chance. “Well, I’d have to go back, for a while anyway: my job, my apartment, everything. But I could come back, network, eventually take the bar. People do move, and I’ve got family, good friends here. It’s not like you’re the only one.” She tried for a playful tone, but couldn’t quite pull it off. “What I want to know is: Would you want me to?”
He didn’t answer for a beat. “These past two weeks have meant everything to me,” he said, and the meaning hit Lizzie at once. She thought, wildly, What a fool I am. “Your dad—”
“No,” Lizzie said. “This can’t be about him. God, this can’t be about him.”
“It’s just moving so fast—”
“Forget it,” Lizzie said. She should have known better. She did know better. Why was she trying to change? “I shouldn’t have said anything. I’m sorry; I’m not myself these days.”
“Please don’t apologize,” Max said, touching her hair, looking at her when all she wanted to do was escape his gaze. “I care about you so much.”
“No,” Lizzie said sharply. “Do not.” She was done talking. Why was there always so much talking? And with that, she rolled over.
8
London, 1948
“Consider Ivan’s words to Alyosha,” Professor Hillman was saying. “‘I don’t want harmony. From love to humanity, I don’t want it. I would rather be left with the unavenged suffering.’”
Rose wrote down “unavenged suffering” in her notebook, struck by the phrase. She loved the Russians, and Dostoyevsky in particular.