The vestibule door squealed open. "Zoey," my dad called. "Let's go." He stood alone at the threshold to the darkness. He must have chased Doug and Officer Fox away.
I gestured toward the emergency room doors. I thought he would know what I meant by this. When he raised his eyebrows in expectation, I realized I would have to explain even this to him: that I didn't want to leave her. I opened my mouth and had no words for any of it.
"They won't let you see her anyway," he said. "The loony bin won't let you see her either. They say it's to protect you from her, and to protect her from you. To remove her from the environment. They'll let her call you when she's ready to see you."
He was saying what I'd been thinking. I'd been blaming myself and hoping that self-blame was natural in these circumstances but ultimately silly. He was telling me it was not silly. Even the mental hospital thought it was my fault that my mother had done this. I still didn't want to believe any of it, but I felt myself falling down that slope without anything to grab to save myself, except this:
I whispered, "When I first got here, they told me maybe I could talk to the hospital psychologist about what happened?"
"They don't need you to diagnose your mother," my dad grumbled.
"I mean"--I swallowed--"for me? To talk about me?"
He huffed out a sigh and leaned one shoulder against the glass wall of the vestibule. "So now you're crazy too? Y ou're not going to a psycho-anything. Y see how much good it did your mother. They'll just give you the drugs that you can OD on later. There's a reason we call them shrinks. Let's go."
ou I stood, only then realizing how sore my back was and how long I must have been sitting in that seat, staring at the closed emergency room doors. I followed my dad through the vestibule and into the night.
We didn't have far to walk. He had parked his Benz in a handicapped space just outside the door. The backseat was filled with large boxes with laughing babies on the labels. A high chair, a bouncing swing. I slid into the passenger seat and lost myself in an argument inside my own head.
I did not want to believe my dad was right. My mom had not OD'd on medicine a shrink had given her. She had OD'd on sleeping pills her regular doctor had given her. She had never gone to a shrink, probably because of my dad's opinion of them. I had overheard him saying something like this to her during one of their fights last spring.
I could have pointed this out to him, but he would not have listened to me, any more than he had listened to her. And though normally I might have obsessed about this point of contention and reviewed it over and over, trying to find a way to present it to him that he would understand and accept, tonight it slipped away from me as if captured by the undertow.
In my mind I was back in my mother's bedroom at our apartment, trying to fix everything. I was the lifeguard, but I couldn't give her mouth-to-mouth because she was still breathing, and I couldn't give her CPR because her heart was still beating, faintly. What could I do to help? When the paramedics arrived, I could tell them exactly what she'd taken. Holding my cell phone to my ear with one hand because the 911 dispatcher had ordered me not to hang up, I walked to the bathroom and found her prescription bottle in the trash. Empty.
"Aren't you going in?" my dad asked.
I looked over at him in the driver's seat. He thumbed through the messages on his phone. He'd parked the Benz in front of the apartment, between my mother's hybrid and my battered Bug. He'd just bought Ashley a convertible Beamer. I drove this ancient Bug because he made me use my own money from working at Slide with Clyde for my car, insurance, and gas. He'd told me before that growing up a spoiled brat was what was wrong with my mom.
"Come to think of it," he said, still scrolling, "I'll have to help you. Y need to get everything. Even after she's released, the judge won't let you live with
ou her. Y might not be back here for a while." Behind us, the trunk popped open to receive all my belongings. He stepped out of the Benz.
I followed him into the parking lot. The apartment building was the nicest one in town, which wasn't saying a lot. Everyone who could afford a house lived in one, which left the apartments for the transients. Mature palms and palmettos softened the lines of the weathered wooden building, but a huge air- conditioning unit filled the late summer night with its drone, and the scent of the community garbage Dumpster wafted from behind a high fence.
My dad noticed the smell too, nostrils flared in distaste as he stood waiting for me at the front of the car. I wondered why he didn't go ahead to the apartment. Then I remembered he didn't have a key. I pulled my key chain from my pocket. Still, he didn't move. He didn't know which apartment was mine, after I'd lived here for three months.
An instant of anger at him propelled me forward, onto the sidewalk. I inserted the key into my lock. But now I had to turn the key. Now I had to go in.
My dad was watching me. I couldn't let him see me hesitate. That would make things worse on my mom, to admit to my dad that what she'd done made her less of a person and worthy of his disdain. I shoved inside and flicked on the light.
At least the apartment was extremely clean, the way I'd left it. It didn't look like an insane person lived here. But viewing it through my dad's eyes, the apartment building's standard-issue furniture made it look like she had sunk low. I didn't want him venturing farther inside, judging.
I faced him. "Why don't you watch TV while you wait? I won't be long. Can I get you something to drink?"
He grunted and stepped outside, reaching into his pocket for his cigarettes--a strange habit he'd taken up last May when the water park opened for the season and he hired Ashley.
I watched him until the door closed behind him, then dashed through the apartment, double-checking that it was neat. As I passed back and forth in front of my mother's desk in the living room, her suicide note stared up at me, the most obvious crazy item: Zoey, I just couldn't see doing it all another day. I love you. Mom. If I put it in the desk drawer, I would be putting my mom away. I settled for squaring the notepaper perfectly against the corner of the desk. Again.
In the kitchen I peered into the refrigerator. I would take anything perishable to the Dumpster so my mom wouldn't have a mess to clean up when she came back. I was surprised to find no fruit, no milk. My mom had cleaned it out already.
In the bathroom I selected all my toiletries, leaving my mom's. In my bedroom I grabbed armfuls of clothing from my closet and my dresser and shoved them into my suitcases. At first I went for the summer clothes only. Then I pulled out a light jacket in case I was still living with my dad when the nights got cool. As I reached the sweater box under my bed, I stared at the cotton and cashmere, heartbeat accelerating into panic, wondering just how long my mom would be gone, and what she would do in the loony bin all that time, and what they would do to her, and whether they would ever let her out, and whether a judge really would keep me from living with her my entire last year of high school.