Alice’s dad met us at Gordie’s car. Her mom was on the phone, pacing near our bench, trying to figure out how to find Izzy’s parents, who were out at a charity gala. Alice and her dad rushed Izzy inside. I imagined the people from the golf club were already playing a mean game of telephone starting with Isn’t that a shame? Another one of our girls on heroin and ending with Damn immigrants holding our kids hostage.
We lingered on our bench in dazed silence until Alice told us that Izzy had been admitted and she was going to stay with her. As the rest of us sat in the farm stand parking lot talking about the trap house, Alice texted a picture of herself eating Izzy’s roommate’s hospital food while Izzy slept. She captioned it Yummy.
Gordie dropped me off last. The whole way home he told me how pissed he was with himself for letting me and Alice go into that house alone.
“We’re not delicate little violets, Gordie. We don’t need a bodyguard to protect us.”
“I didn’t say you were. It just felt really wrong sitting in the car while you and Alice went into that house.”
We talked in my driveway. I didn’t want to leave.
“Gordie, do you think I could get a hug?” I said, my voice cracking.
He smiled. “Yeah. You can get a hug.”
He got out and met me on the passenger side. He scooped me into his broad chest and hugged me for a long time. “Some fucked-up shit, huh?” he whispered.
“Ya think?”
“Can you do me a favor, Sadie?” He stepped back, held my shoulders, and looked down into my eyes. “Can you never go into a trap house again?”
“I have no desire to ever go into a trap house again, Gordie. Trust me.”
“Good. Glad that’s settled.” He squeezed my shoulders. “Good night, Sullivan.”
It was too much. All of it. The smells and sounds and spattered blood of the heroin house. Izzy’s vacant eyes. The diamonds. The ridiculously unclear expectations of an old dead man.
I bypassed my parents’ floor and crawled between them in their queen-size bed. I lay facing the ceiling, playing with Flopper’s tail and thinking wild thoughts amid the weirdly comforting snores and nose whistles of my mother and father.
“Look who decided to grace us with her presence,” Dad said the next night, only half joking.
Grandma Sullivan banged around in the kitchen while Mom set the table and Grandma Hosseini carefully removed teacups from the china cabinet.
“Hey, Grandma, do you know how to make homemade biscuits?” I asked Grandma Sullivan as she salted the boiled potatoes.
“I do.”
“Can you teach me how to make them?”
She eyed me suspiciously. I had never shown interest in doing anything in the kitchen.
“I suppose.”
“Tonight?”
“No. I’m going for lotto tickets after supper.”
“I’ll take you and we can get biscuit supplies.”
“I’ll be too tired.”
“Please?” I gave Grandma Sullivan a pouty lip.
She eyed me again. “I guess we could whip up some biscuits.”
Later, after we’d eaten half the biscuits with vanilla custard and fresh, sliced strawberries, I left a glass container of biscuits with a tiny tub of farm stand honey and a note addressed to Gordie Harris on Gordie’s front step. The note said: Kinky 3, Thanks for introducing me to Keith and Frances. It was really nice to meet them. Hope you’re still craving biscuits with honey. I’ll collect my five cents later. —Cakes
I flipped through my Guide to Northeast Colleges in the dim light of my sweltering room. It was after midnight, still too early for Shay to be back in her bunk, but I tried her anyway. When she didn’t answer, I texted, Should I put Pepperdine on my list? I wondered if Shay even wanted me near her, after her string of avoidance texts, all of which had to do with how busy she was.
I’ll let you know if I ever make it to Pepperdine, she texted back. These campers are driving me crazy. I’m never having kids.
I wrote, Remember when we babysat that kid who wiped his ass with a bath towel and put it back on the rack and you used the towel to dry your hair?
She didn’t write back.
I didn’t want to go to sleep. I was getting anxious at the thought of waking with that deep ache in the pit of my stomach. I considered starting the report Mom had been hounding me to write, but rehashing the incident didn’t seem like a good late-night activity. I logged on to baby Ella’s grandmother’s Facebook page. She hadn’t updated it in weeks. I clicked on the NeighborCare link. The sum collected hadn’t changed. Still $120.
Still not enough.
The only thing I could think about doing in the middle of the night was to remove the fortress of junk I had stacked in front of the suitcase in my already overcrowded closet and dislodge Andy from his garment bag. I extracted the cheesecloth bags from Andy’s dismembered legs and loins and set them on the middle of my bed. One by one, I dumped the contents into the pink plastic barf tub.
Counting diamonds was strangely therapeutic.
FIFTEEN
“YOU’RE WEARING THAT?” Mom said when she arrived at the farm stand to get me for my appointment with Willie Ng’s therapist in Sag Harbor.
“Did you want me to wear my prom dress?”
“How about something that doesn’t have stains all over the front?”
“This is residue from blueberries, because I work at a farm stand. It’ll be a good thing to start with in the therapy session. It’s a metaphor for the stain the incident has left on my psyche, at least according to you.”
“Sadie, why do you have to be like that? I just want to help you process what happened.”
“Mom. I barely even think about what happened. I have no idea why I’ve been so freaked out at night.”
“We’re here to figure out why. Let’s just go into this with an open mind, honey. Can you try not to be so irritable? I just want you to have what I didn’t have.” What Mom didn’t have was any kind of emotional support when all hell broke loose in Iran and her family was forced to flee, which meant no chance of college for Mom.
I crossed my arms in front of me and stared out the window as she sped down the back roads.
“Don’t mention anything about Willie Ng,” she said under her breath before we went into the white clapboard house turned psychiatric wellness center.
Mom stayed the whole session, which went better than I thought it would. I cried, mostly because he got me to talk about the baby and how terrible it was that she had to go through that ordeal. Mom cried talking about how scary it was to see me in the hospital and how anxious she got every time the phone rang. I was beginning to think she needed therapy more than I did. The therapist, an old white guy with thick white hair and a Mickey Mouse T-shirt that had more stains than mine, talked about the effects of traumatic events, and that my bad nights were normal and, basically, that everything was going to be okay.
After we blew our noses, I told Mom I would be willing to see the guy alone next time and that I was sorry I had been cranky. She smiled and rubbed my back.
“Can you imagine Willie Ng in here talking about his porn?” I joked.
“Not funny, Sadie. The Ngs are going through a hard time right now.”
We went for manicures and Chinese food and talked about Mom’s life in Iran before all hell broke loose.
“I wish my mother believed in therapists,” Mom said, her mouth full of noodles.