Secret for a Song (9 page)

W
e
decided outside Zee’s car that of the two of us, Drew was probably better
qualified to drive me home. I was beginning to shiver in the cold, so he helped
me get in the passenger seat, closed the door, and then went around to the
driver’s side. When he was safely sitting, he draped his heavy jacket over me.

I
opened my mouth to say something teasing about his quaint chivalrous gesture,
but nothing came out. I liked that he did that, that he was taking care of me, and
I didn’t want to ruin it.

“I
don’t like this car,” he said, adjusting the seat so it was pushed as far back
as it would go. “I swear they made it for midgets.”

“Hey,”
I said, my voice thready and hoarse. “I like it.”

“Exactly
what I mean,” he muttered, and then we set off.

I
dozed while he drove, my body slamming hard against the seatbelt occasionally
and jolting me awake. Every time, Drew’d mutter, “Sorry, so sorry,” and I’d
drift off again. Finally, I felt his hand on my knee. The car was completely
still and quiet underneath us. We were in my driveway.

“Home
sweet home.” He smiled at me.

I
smiled back, feeling a little goofy. Really well taken care of, soft and cozy
in the way only guys you really like or your dad can make you feel. Not that
I’d felt that way with my dad in a long time. “Thanks for the ride.”

“Is
your mom home? Maybe I should let her know you’re back so she can monitor your temperature.
Just in case you need to go to the hospital.”

“Bunco.”

“What?”

I
pried my dry lips apart and forced my burning eyes to focus on him. “It’s Saturday.
She has Bunco on Saturday nights. She won’t be back for a while.”

“What
the hell’s Bunco?” He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. Let’s get you inside.
I’ll stay till she gets home.”

We
hobbled indoors together, and I led Drew to my room, suddenly more aware and
self-conscious. Had I left anything incriminating out? I felt my pocket—the
syringe was safe in there. Mum had thrown away the rest of my things and I
hadn’t replaced any of them yet, so I thought it would be okay.

“Nice
place,” he muttered as we passed a giant oil painting of a sea turtle at the
head of the stairs.

“Thanks.
My room’s right here.” I went in and turned on the light.

I
felt sick enough to crawl to my bed, but I settled for limping instead. Drew
was right behind me. He pulled the covers back—and froze.

When
I’d changed that morning, I’d flung my thong and pajamas on the bed and just
pulled my covers over the top. I moved quicker than I’d moved in a long time.
Snatching the offending undergarment in one hand and the pajamas in the other,
I wheeled around and headed for the bathroom.

“Um,
be right back.” I tossed them into the hamper, closed the door, and sat on the
bed.

Drew
smiled. “Ready to get in?”

I
kicked my boots off and lied down. “You don’t have to stay with me,” I said.
“I’ll be fine.” My eyes were already slipping shut.

“Thanks,
but I’d rather make sure your fever goes down. And if you puke in your sleep,
you’ll need someone to turn you over so you don’t choke.”

“Ha
ha,” I whispered. “There are books in that book case over there. No CDs,
sorry.”

He
chuckled. “I’m sure I can amuse myself.”

I
fell asleep mid-sentence.

When
I woke up, the room was almost pitch-black. I turned my head and saw Drew
sitting in a chair by my bed, surfing his cell phone.

“Hey.”

He
looked up, smiled. “Hey yourself. How are you?”

I
reached over and turned on my tiny bedside lamp. “Better. I think my fever
broke.”

He
came forward, limping, and felt my forehead. “You’re right.” Gesturing to my
night table, he said, “I brought you some water and fruit from your kitchen
downstairs. Hope it’s okay that I went in there.”

I
shrugged, even though my heart was beating hard. Had he seen Mum’s awful
dollhouse stuff in her nook? I decided not to ask. “You can leave if you want,
you know.”

He
gave me a smile, one corner of his mouth higher than the other. “Jeez, Grayson.
If I didn’t have such a big ego I’d think you were trying to kick me out.”

“No,
it’s not that,” I insisted. “I just don’t want you to feel like you have to
stay here with me. I’m sure there’s other stuff you could be doing right now.”

He
shrugged. “Yeah. But I like being here with you.”

We
looked at each other for a long time. I’d never done that before, just looked
into a person’s eyes to try and see who they were, what they meant when they said
something. It was like gazing skyward. I felt like I could look and look and
still never be done looking. What was it about him?

“What
happened, earlier?” I heard myself ask. “With the CD player? It looked like it
really upset you.”

He
blinked and looked away, the moment gone. And then he was back in the chair,
the distance between us unbreachable.

I
tried to swallow past the lump in my throat. Why the hell had I asked that? Why
couldn’t I have just enjoyed whatever was going on between us?

But
then he looked back at me. Sighed. A great big “weight of the world on my
shoulders” sigh. “It’s another fucking symptom of my FA. It’s getting worse.”

His
words rushed at me, taking me by surprise. I had an inkling that’s what it was,
but I hadn’t expected him to say it so plainly. Especially not after he’d try
to play off his weakness that afternoon. I didn’t know what to say, couldn’t
think of a single fucking thing.

“FA’s
an insidious bastard,” he went on, oblivious to my awkward mental floundering.
“It twines around your legs first, causing you to trip and fall like you’re a
baby learning to walk. You think you’re being clumsy, maybe you didn’t get any
sleep the night before, maybe you’re just tired. Then you get diagnosed, and
your life tears down the seam right there.

“You
go on, waiting for the next symptom, but when it comes you hope it isn’t really
what you think. It’s slight enough—a fumbling of the hands, a rogue twist of
the wrist—that you can convince yourself to ignore it for a couple of months.
But soon, soon you realize it’s not so slight anymore. You try to put a CD into
the fucking CD player and can’t.” He looked at me, his eyes bright. “I’m losing
my hand coordination. I guess that’s next.”

I
shook my head slowly. “I’m sorry.”

“No
point in you being sorry,” he said, grinning suddenly. It was the same
painted-mask grin from the afternoon. “If anyone should be sorry, it should be
the Big Man upstairs, right? He’s supposed to love me, or so the story goes.”

“Do
you believe that?” I asked. “In a god, I mean?”

When
I was little, I loved going to Catholic Mass with my mother and grandmother. The
cathedral felt like this big, safe vault, where nothing I said or thought or
did could ever leave and permeate the outside. It was as if time was suspended
while I sat in there, inhaling incense and watching the candle flames dance.

I
loved the way my mother and grandmother would go into a little box and come out
looking so much happier and freer. I loved saying
Hail Mary, full of grace
over and over. It felt like a rhyme that’d keep the bad stuff away. When I was
in the cathedral, I felt invincible, or damn near it. When my grandmother left,
we stopped going.

I
never figured out if it was because the cathedral reminded Mum too much of those
outings, or if she genuinely eschewed the Catholic faith after Grandma went
away. I also didn’t know if
I
missed it because being in the cathedral
was a way for me to connect with Mum, or if I actually missed having a
spiritual outlet.

Did
I believe in an omniscient being? Not usually. To be honest, I didn’t spend a
lot of my time even thinking about the possibility of him or her.

“I
don’t know if I believe in the Christian ideal,” Drew said. He passed his cell
phone from hand to hand as he talked. “When I lived in the apartment building
with my parents in New York, we used to have these guys come around sometimes.
They wore, you know, the button-down shirts and khaki pants, carried Bibles and
handed them out. They always asked me if I wanted to be saved.” He stopped, a
breath of a chuckle escaping his mouth. “Finally one day, I said yes. I mean,
saved
?
Which sober person in that neighborhood would say no? So anyway, they took me
along to this little church about a block away for a service one day, dunked me
in a big pot of water.” He looks at me, an eyebrow slightly raised. “Did you
know, Grayson, that that’s all it takes to be saved? A fucking bath.”

I
adjusted myself against my pillows. “So what happened? Did you stay? With the
church, I mean.”

“Sure.
I went back a few times for services. Sometimes it helped, mostly because I
loved the idea of my parents going to a Hell where they cooked rotisserie-style
all day long.”

I
wondered if it hurt him to talk about them like that, in spite of the
nonchalant bravado he portrayed. What must it have been like, to have parents
who were nothing but rats in a cage, repeatedly hitting the lever for another
hit of crank or ice or whatever? “So why’d you stop believing in the Christian
ideal?”

“Because
the pastor OD’d. A lot of hypocrisy in the church system, apparently.”

W
hen
my alarm went off Monday morning, my chest felt achy and hot. I sat up, pulled
my nightshirt down and saw that the abscess was fully formed. I had a
valid
medical reason
to go to the doctor.

I
swung my legs out of bed, humming under my breath. I swore I could still smell
Drew in the room two days after he’d been here, a mixture of the faded round
notes of cologne and the beach. Trailing my hand along the back of the chair
he’d sat on, I smiled at the memory of him surfing his cell phone while I
slept. Keeping watch, making sure I was going to be okay.

After
I’d changed and brushed my teeth and hair, I went downstairs. Mum was eating
breakfast, a small dollop of cottage cheese and fruit, along with her
ubiquitous cup of tea.

“You’re
up early,” she remarked, turning a page of the newspaper.

“I
have an appointment with Dr. Stone this morning,” I said. “And after, I’ll need
to go to Dr. Daniels.” Dr. Daniels was my regular doctor, the man I’d been
seeing since I was about six.

He
was my dad’s friend, and my parents trusted him more than any pediatrician. He
knew about my Munchausen, but since he and my dad were golf buddies, he was
much more willing to look the other way and treat my symptoms than insist to my
parents that I needed to be under the care of a psychiatrist. It was just one
of the many benefits of my dad being country club friends with the richest men
in the city. They operated on a quid pro quo system that had proved beneficial
to all of them in the past.

Mum
looked up, her mouth bracketed by disapproving lines. “What is it now? Why do
you need to see Dr. Daniels?”

“The
fever from before. I figured out what it was from. I have an abscess.” I walked
over to her and unzipped my hoodie so she could see.

It
was actually a cluster of three abscesses, each the size of the tip of my finger,
each pregnant with pus. The wool of my hoodie kept rubbing over them, inflaming
them further. It was a rich, full feeling, the kind you get after listening to
rousing classical music or eating a really hot, well-seasoned meal when you’re
hungry.

 She
drew away from me, as if I might be contagious. “God, Saylor. What did you do?”

“Nothing!”
I tugged the zipper back up, accidentally hitting the abscess. I had to pause
for a second while I waited for the pain to recede. For that second, that spot
on my chest was the only real thing in my realm of existence. After the pain
died down, I took a breath. “It’s an infection of some kind, Mum. I can’t
exactly make my body erupt in boils.” And for all she knew, that was the truth.
I turned away and got some milk from the refrigerator. “Can we go now?”

Sighing,
she rose to her feet, her eyes wary. She was trying to figure out how I’d done
it, what new item I had in my bag of tricks that she didn’t know about. It was
a game we’d played since I was little, and I knew she’d never win.

The
drive to Dr. Stone’s office was a quiet one. I kept pressing my fingers to the
abscesses, to make them flare up in pain.

 It
seemed to me that pain was the truest of feelings by far. It didn’t matter if
you were giddy and high on life or so depressed you wanted to die. One single
caress from your hot curling iron, one moment of that scorching heat seizing
your fingers, and you stopped living, stopped being. Your thoughts turned
entirely inward, and your only goal in life was to get away from the agony.
There was a reason torture was so effective; even the toughest, meanest trained
killing machines could only stand so much pain.

I
wanted to befriend pain. I wanted to dance cheek to cheek with it, to use its
hand to pillow my head as I slept. I refused to be afraid of it.

Mum
pulled into an empty parking space and remained staring straight ahead, the
windshield wipers hissing as they tried to wipe the snow from the glass. “I’ll
be back in an hour,” she said. “And then we’ll go see Dr. Daniels.”

I
pulled the hood of my winter jacket over my head and got out of the car.

The
receptionist was on the phone when I entered the office, and she motioned with
her free hand to Dr. Stone’s open door. I walked up to it warily. Dr. Stone
looked up from a book he was reading, and, taking his glasses off, smiled at
me. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he wasn’t much older than me. There was
just something about his face, his eyes, that seemed ridiculously young.

“Hey,
Saylor.”

“Hi.”
I walked in, past the picture of the man on the side table, and stood there
awkwardly with my hands in my pockets. I was starting to sweat in my down
jacket.

“Close
the door and take off your coat. Get comfortable.” He set his book on the table
and crossed his legs, still smiling, as if he was getting ready for a good,
cozy chat with a friend. Shrinks were so weird.

I
unzipped my jacket, hung it up, and stamped the snow from my boots before
crossing the room to sit on the couch. I inhaled deeply, loving the fragrance of
winter and expensive candles.

“So,
how have things been?”

My
mind flashed to Drew and Zee, Pierce and Carson and Jack. The TIDD group. The
lies I’d built up into this big dark cloak I wore everywhere, a cloak that gave
me a new identity and a new life. “Fine. I began volunteering.”

“And
how’s that going?”

I
hated the look on his face, a look that said: My promising new client. She
hates the world, but I’m going to show her how giving back can make her feel
one with it anyway. I’m going to make something of her yet!

“Great.
I’ve made some friends.”

Dr.
Stone sat up straighter. “That’s huge. Making friends has been challenging for
you in the past, hasn’t it?”

I
shrugged.

“You
should be proud of this accomplishment. It may not seem like a lot to you, but
from where I’m sitting, it’s fabulous.” He crossed his legs and sat back. “What
do they have you doing?”

“Setting
up and breaking down for the support groups.” I felt a tremor beneath the
surface of my words, like the ground feels before an earthquake rips through
it. I felt the impending doom of revelation. What would Dr. Stone do if he
found out? What would he say when he realized this was all a big lie, that I’d
gone into a place, sought out its most vulnerable citizens, and then decided to
integrate as one of them?

“Important
work,” he said, nodding. “I’m sure you’ll learn a lot about the medical field
while you’re there. And probably quite a lot about the psychology of illness as
well.”

“Yes.”
I looked him straight in the eye. “I imagine I will.”

After
my session, I headed downstairs to Mum’s car. My cell phone vibrated.

How
are you feeling?-Zee

I
texted her back as I rode down in the elevator.

Better,
but have to go to the doctor for an abscess.

Ouch.
Is that an MS thing?

I
think so.

Feel
up to Sphinx Wednesday night? Drew’s going to play.

The
doors opened, and the sunlight streaming in from the large glass doors of the
entrance bathed me in its warmth.

Absolutely,
I replied.

Great.
Pick you up at 8.

Mum
drove quickly, the tires skidding in the ice and snow. When she tried to stop
for a stop sign but only succeeded in rolling slowly past it, I turned to her.
“Do you want me to drive?”

“Why
on earth would I want that?” she asked, making a sharp left turn.

“Because
you’re driving like a blind person. Are you mad?”

“I’m
not the least bit angry.” At the stop light, she took a drink of water from her
plastic bottle. “Should I be?”

“No.”
I fiddled with my zipper, hitting the abscess with the interior part of it.
Pain bloomed in my chest. “I told you.”

The
thing about lying to my mother was that we both knew I was doing it, and yet,
the two of us would go to any lengths to pretend we didn’t know. I’d swear up
and down the street, even after the results came back showing I’d taken the
pills or swallowed the needle or whatever, that
I
had nothing to do with
me being sick.

My
mother would continue to pretend to believe me. She’d ask every now and then if
I had a hand in making myself sick, but as long as I vehemently denied it,
she’d go back to the safe, warm lap of denial. The call from my college
counselor had changed that, had forced her to look right into the face of my
disease for the first time in many years. It was like returning to your normal
life after a hurricane blew through your house: things were overturned and
broken, and it took a while to get everything back to its correct position.