If You're Lucky (8 page)

“No. I'm drowning in it. Thanks.”

I poured boiled water into the mug.

“Fin's awfully nice, don't you think?” she said.

“I suppose.”

She caught something in my voice. She looked over at me from the sink.

“Have you been taking your meds?”

“Yes, of course I've been taking my meds. Why?”

“Nothing. You just look a bit pale, that's all.”

“I'm fine. I just have a headache. And yes, I took some aspirin.”

“Okay. Anyway, I think he's very nice.”

“But you don't really know him, do you?”

She paused a moment, thinking. “You know, I guess I don't know him at all but I feel like I've known him for years. Isn't that strange? Has that ever happened to you?”

I shook my head. I wasn't sure I wanted this conversation to go any further.

“It's like he exudes this consoling vibe.” She shook her head. “Maybe I'm just imagining it because he was close to Lucky. Maybe that's it.”

“Could be. Is there lettuce? I was thinking about making a salad.” I went to the fridge to check. My mom seemed not to have heard me. She was gazing into the pot she just filled with water and smiling slightly like she was remembering something pleasant. I stood behind her and squeezed her shoulder. She patted my hand absentmindedly. I looked out the window, squinting past our reflection in the glass.

Fin's truck was still in the driveway with the motor running. His shadowy figure was sitting in the dark, watching us. He seemed to know that I'd seen him because he quickly put the truck in gear and backed out of the driveway.

Dr. Saul watched me impassively from his cracked leather chair.

“I'm getting more headaches,” I said. “It's the meds.”

He stroked his beard and blinked behind his little silver-rimmed glasses. This was not the first time I'd complained about the meds. We'd tried several different ones: Clozaril, Geodon, Risperidone, and now Seroquel. We'd also tried combinations: a bit of this, a bit of that, but the meds were always problematic. There were side effects: lethargy, dry mouth, depression, suicidal thoughts, weight gain, weight loss, nausea, appetite loss, and headaches. I'd experienced all of them.

“I was reading about Famotidine online. It looks promising,” I said.

“It's still in trials for schizophrenia. It won't be approved for years.”

“So, now what?”

“I'll adjust the dosage again,” he said.

I sighed heavily. I was so tired of this adjusting, changing, adding in, taking out. “I don't want to adjust the dosage. I want off them. Can't we just try? Just to see what happens. I've been fine for ages. Maybe I
am
fine. Maybe I'm better. Hey, Doc, maybe you've healed me.”

“It doesn't work like that, George. We've talked about this. I hope I don't have to tell you again. I'm sorry.”

I looked out the window at the alpacas cantering around the paddock. Dr. Saul's wife, Peggy, raises them for the wool, which she spins herself on an old wood spinning wheel and sells from a little workshop on the other side of the property.

Dr. Saul is an unconventional psychiatrist. He and Peggy are Deadheads. They met at a Grateful Dead concert back when they were young hippies and they spent years following the band all over America in a VW microbus. Dr. Saul's office is an old log cabin. Any wall space that isn't taken up with bookshelves features Dead posters from all the shows he and Peggy have been to. Also, colorful drums from their weekly drum circle are stacked up next to the fieldstone fireplace. The room smells of wood smoke and incense.

I started seeing Dr. Saul right after the fire. Back then he took scribbled notes when we spoke. My mom came along with me at first. Dr. Saul asked me what kind of a kid I remembered being and I blurted out, “Gifted, creative, maybe a bit emotional.
”
Then he had a private conference with my mom and I'm sure she filled in all the blanks about me: Prone to hysteria and fits; suspicious, paranoid, and possessive; a loner, quiet, withdrawn, and moody but capable of flying into an unprovoked rage. I really hoped she didn't use the word “dangerous” because I wasn't, even though I'd heard it whispered behind my back.

School was very difficult for me; some days it was impossible. I couldn't seem to make friends and there had been incidents, lots of them. Dr. Saul took me off Ritalin, which Dr. Garcia, our family doctor, had put me on years ago. Once I was off the drugs I felt better for a time, but then I began to notice some changes in myself. I felt like there was a committee in my brain. They took every thought I had and fed it through a device that twisted it or fouled it up or misconstrued it and then fed it back to me. I wasn't in control of my own thoughts anymore. I started coming unglued. I was sure that I was being followed. I read secret messages meant only for me in road signs and billboards. I was convinced that some of my classmates wanted to kill me. I believed I had killed people with my thoughts.

Right after I turned sixteen, Dr. Saul sent me to San Francisco for some tests at a clinic in the University of California. They were very nice to me there. They gave me a CT scan so they could look at my brain and an EEG so they could chart my brain waves. They asked me hundreds of questions about myself and they did blood and urine tests and they took some spinal fluid, which was horribly painful. They asked my mom about our family, her parents and my dad's parents, aunts, uncles, everybody. My mom took me to Chinatown for Chinese food when we were done. I remember having a nice time with her that day. I still have the fortune from my fortune cookie in my jewelry box:
You will soon uncover a happy secret,
it said.

When he got the results of all the tests, Dr. Saul told me that I was most likely suffering from chronic paranoid schizophrenia. He told me that I didn't need to worry, that there were good drugs and we would keep it under control. He said that I could live a normal life, or almost normal. That's when he started me on meds. I am nowhere near normal.

Dr. Saul's golden retriever, Jerry, asleep at Dr. Saul's feet, made a whimpering sound and flicked his paws like he was dreaming about running. Out the window I could see Jerry's sister Janis in the paddock, annoying the alpacas.

“My brother died and all I cared about was getting my lemon tarts right for the party,” I said, still looking out the window.

“That's perfectly normal. It's a coping mechanism.”

“And I haven't cried yet.” I looked at him.

He blinked and said nothing.

“I'm sick of it. I'm sick of feeling shitty or feeling nothing.”

“I understand, Georgia.”

“I haven't had an incident in a really long time. How will I ever know if I'm okay if I never get off the meds?”

“Georgia, you know better than that. The drug has built up in your system. If you stop taking it, the results could be disastrous, and then you'd have to start all over again.”

“That's okay. I don't mind. I promise I'll start again if it doesn't work. Can't we just try?” I looked at him pleadingly.

“I'll lower your dosage. It might help with the headaches, but I want to see you in two weeks for an assessment and I want you to call me immediately if you notice any changes. I know that these sessions are private, but I want you to let your mom know what we're doing, okay? She needs to know to keep an eye on you.”

“Deal.”

“And this is a trial only.”

“I know, I know, I know.” I smiled.

Dr. Saul scratched a prescription onto a pad.

This was the best I could do. I knew I could never persuade Dr. Saul to take me off my meds completely. But if I could cut back a bit at a time, and he could see an improvement, maybe eventually I could get him to let me stop taking them completely. I just wanted a chance to see who I could be without them. Maybe I could be normal. Maybe I could be happy. Maybe someone like Fin could love me.

The next morning I took my first pill of the day with a sip of water. It was the first day in a long time that I would take two pills a day instead of three. I wanted it to feel like the start of something new for me. I wanted to feel hopeful. I brushed my teeth and looked at my face in the bathroom mirror from all angles. My expression was pensive. Pensive was my default face unless I consciously arranged my features otherwise and stayed completely focused. I would have to try to remember to smile more. Why was smiling so hard for me? I produced a wide confident smile and started a conversation with the mirror. “Hi! My name's Georgia,” I said. “Great to meet you. Fine, thanks. How are you?” I tried to look like the carefree, fun-loving girl in the deodorant commercial on TV. I turned around and looked back over my shoulder at the mirror. I swung an imaginary tennis racket and bashed my knuckles on the glass shower door. “Damnit!” I squeezed the pain away with my other hand. I looked in the mirror again. I was back to pensive.

After breakfast I went to my bedroom and sat cross-legged on the rug next to my bed. I closed my eyes and tried to clear my mind. I took a deep cleansing breath in through my nose and out through my mouth. I repeated this ten times. I opened one eye. Rocket was panting warm dog-food-scented breath onto my bare leg. He wanted to go for a walk. What he really wanted was Fin, but Fin hadn't been around for several days and I was a very distant second choice for a beach-walking companion.

I looked at Rocket's eager face. “Sure. I bet he can throw a stick pretty far but does he know where the dog treats are kept? Does he?”

Damnit. I was thinking about Fin again. That was not supposed to happen today. I abandoned the cleansing breaths and grabbed my laptop off the floor. I checked my e-mail as though I were someone who got e-mails. No new mail. Lucky was really the only person who ever e-mailed me. Rocket stood up and barked once.

“Okay, okay. Let's go.” Rocket ran for the back door. I clipped his leash on and let him drag me out the door and down the hill toward Sonia's house. I hadn't talked to her since our awkward phone call. There was a spiral of woodsmoke curling out of her chimney and her mom's car was gone. I stopped along the way and picked a bunch of blackberries that had just come ripe, the first of the season. I pulled a plastic bag out of my pocket, meant for Rocket's poop, and filled it with berries. Rocket watched me with interest. I knocked on Sonia's back door and when she opened it I held up the bag of berries.

“Look.”

She smiled. Her hair, which was honey blond the last time I saw her and all her life, was now the color of the berries in the bag. I'd never known her to dye her hair before.

“Wow. Your hair.”

She touched her hair. “Yeah, it's a bit dark but it'll fade.”

“To what?” I couldn't imagine.

“I needed a change. I just didn't feel like being me anymore.”

“Mission accomplished. Come for a walk?”

Sonia held the door open for us, and Rocket tore off down the hallway. He sniffed the place out while I went into the kitchen and got a bowl out of the cupboard and dumped the berries into it. My hands were stained to match Sonia's hair almost exactly. I rinsed them in the sink and watched the deep purple swirl down the drain. Sonia disappeared into her bedroom and reappeared with her hair piled on top of her head. Besides her face, which was now quite pale in contrast to the hair, something else about her looked very different. Her eyebrows. They'd been tweezed into an alluring arch, like a movie star's. Plus, she was wearing lipstick. It was a deep-plum color. I studied her a moment as she pulled on her jean jacket and wrapped a bright-green scarf around her neck. She looked a bit tragic, but very pretty, like a French woman, like she should light up a cigarette and exhale in that exquisite way that actresses in French films do. I was certain that Fin had something to do with the new Sonia. Had he actually coaxed her into changing the way she looked?

Sonia knew I was scrutinizing her but she said nothing. “Shall we?” she looked at me.

“Oui
!
”
I called for Rocket and he bounded ahead of us out the door.

Afterward, we walked over to the Heron for a coffee. We left Rocket passed out on the porch. Not once on our walk had either of us mentioned Fin, the elephant in every room. I was dying to ask her about him, but I forced myself to wait for her to bring him up in conversation. The restaurant was empty except for an older, well-dressed couple in the corner, enjoying a late breakfast. The sun beamed in through the tall windows onto the rustic wooden floor.

“So I guess you heard that Fin's got a full-time gig with The Hot Club.”

I hadn't heard.

“Wow. That sounds kind of permanent.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Are you happy?”
Are you having sex with him? What's that like? What's it like to be naked with him? What's it like to spend the night with him?
That's what I really wanted to know.

She looked away uncomfortably. “I suppose.”

I wondered when I would get up the nerve to ask her what she knew about Fin that she wasn't telling me. Obviously he wasn't just a friend of Lucky's who was holding her hand through this. Now that some time had passed, I realized that it had to have been Fin who had chased her out onto the porch at the party that night. Hadn't she said
You shouldn't have com
e
? What was that all about? It was true. She'd still be wearing stained sweatpants and sleeping all afternoon if Fin hadn't arrived with his extraordinary talent and his devilish charm and his extreme sense of goodwill. But there was something more to this. Something had happened in Australia between the three of them.

“Where's he from, I wonder?” I tried to sound like I was just musing. Sonia waved at someone. I turned around. Karl had emerged from the kitchen, his breakfast shift over. He yanked the beer cooler open and put a Heineken down on the bar. He waved at me and grabbed a handful of spiced cashews from a bowl.

“I don't know. Oregon, I think.” Sonia sipped her coffee.

“Really?”
I think?
How could she not know?

“Yeah, why?” she asked.

“No reason, just curious.”

Sonia looked at me like she wanted to say something.

“What?” I said.

“Nothing. It's just that . . . oh, forget it.”

“No, tell me. Please.”

“It's just that I don't want my relationship with Fin to upset you. You seem a little revved up about it. I hope you understand how important you are to me. You're my family. I love you. I would never let some guy come between us. I've told Fin that. He totally understands . . . and I get how you feel. I really do. I mean, he's not Lucky, but you do know that he's not trying to be . . . right?”

“Of course,” I said, but with very little conviction. I looked out the window at the restaurant garden
. I'm
revved up? If Fin were just “some guy” she wouldn't have purple hair right now. I felt silly though. She thought I was looking out for Lucky, even though he's dead. And, in a way, I guess I was. But I was also looking out for myself. I wished more than anything that Lucky had told me about Fin and what had happened between them on that road trip to Sydney. And now he couldn't.

Suddenly Sonia's eyes lit up and fixed on something over my shoulder. She smiled the smile I'd been trying for in the mirror that morning. And then Fin was standing next to our table.

“Two pretty girls. Lucky me,” he said. He leaned over and kissed Sonia on the lips. Her eyes flickered my way and then back to him. Fin straightened and he rested his hand on my shoulder. “Hi, George.”

“Hi.”

He squeezed my shoulder hard. “What are you girls whispering about?”

I looked away. He dropped his hand.

“Sit,” said Sonia. “Join us.”

“I can't. I'm driving up to Petaluma with Miles to pick up a smoker he bought. I'd better go find him. I have to be back for my shift at four-thirty.”

“Okay,” she said.

“I'll see you later,” he said. “Bye, George.”

I smiled thinly.

Fin nodded hello to Karl, who was wiping down the bar, and then he disappeared through the swinging door into the kitchen.