“Who says that? Who’s everyone?”
She had caught me exaggerating. With an adolescent, I should have known better. “Uh, well, her mother said that, I guess, mostly.”
She looked up at me, smiled, and winked. With definite joy in her tone, she asked, “Merritt’s not talking to you either, is she?”
“I can’t really tell you what she’s saying or not saying. I’m just not allowed to.”
She intertwined her fingers around her sweating frappucino. “I knew it. She’s not talking to anybody, is she? Nobody. This is rich, so rich. What about her stepdad? Is she talking to him?”
“I can’t say.”
“I bet she isn’t. This is sooo cool.”
“What is?”
“Nothing. You don’t know anything, do you?” She scrunched up her nose and smiled, disbelieving, like I had just told her I was giving her free backstage passes for Smashing Pumpkins.
“What do you mean, Madison?”
“Nothing.” The smile endured. “So, what did you want? Why did you want to talk to me?”
“Why did you mention her stepdad in particular? Why him, and not, well, her mom?”
Small head shake. “He’s normal. She’s a star. What did you want?”
Suddenly I was much more interested in what she thought I wanted than in sharing what I really wanted. “Well, what do you think I want?”
“She’s really not talking?”
I shrugged. This adolescent was getting the best of me and I didn’t like it.
“Cool.”
“I’m trying to find out why Merritt might have wanted to kill herself.”
With the straw of her iced coffee already touching her lips, she said, “I guess she was real upset about her sister. I guess that was it.”
She said it without conviction, as if she was guessing at an answer in class, and hoping for some good fortune from the high school gods. “You may be right. It may be that she’s worried about her sister. As a psychologist, though, I find sometimes that it’s too easy to look at some awful event in someone’s life and say that because of X a person has a good reason to kill herself. The hard question to answer, usually, is, ‘Why now?’ See, I don’t know why Merritt did it the day she did it. Why then and not the day before? Or why then, and not two weeks from now? If she was so upset about Chaney, what was different the day she took the pills?”
Her eyes more wary than confused, Madison asked, “What’s X mean? What did you mean when you said X gives somebody a reason to kill herself?”
“It’s just a shorthand way of saying ‘something that might be upsetting her.’ You know, like moving, or changing schools, or Chaney’s illness. That kind of X.”
“It’s like math?”
“I guess.”
Madison shrugged. Mollified by my response-or my apparent ignorance about something else, I wasn’t sure-she again seemed remarkably uninterested in doing anything other than checking out the latest customers who were walking in the door of the coffeehouse.
“She have a boyfriend?”
Madison tried on a facial expression that I interpreted as a mixture of serious disgust and total amusement and said, “Noo. She isn’t there.”
“Trouble with friends?”
“I’m her friend. We’re cool. Were cool before this, anyway.”
“Anyone else she might have had trouble with?”
“Nope.”
“School going okay for her? Problems with teachers or classes?”
“Merritt slides. The teachers like her. And everyone cuts her extra slack now because of Chaney. It’s like a get-out-of-jail-free card for her.”
I thought that Madison sounded almost envious that Merritt had a terminally ill sibling and she didn’t. Before I could figure out a way to respond, someone apparently walked in the door behind me who rated a smile from Madison that was warm enough to reheat my tepid coffee. I was tempted to turn and check to see who had come in, but I didn’t. I guessed it was a male person.
“So, what do you think? What was it that got her to take those pills? You know her better than anyone. You must have a theory.”
“Like I said: Chaney. She hated what was happening to Chaney. The hospitals, the publicity, the hassles, her parents’ being so…”
“So?”
“Whatever.”
I waited. She browsed the room. I wished we were in my nice, boring, nondistracting office. “Had she talked about suicide?”
“No…”
“Were you going to say something else?”
“She…she had thought about going to live with her dad. Thought she could travel with him, help him out, be like his assistant or something. Oh, God, I shouldn’t have told you that. Now she’ll really be ticked.”
“Why? Why will she be ticked?” When I ask “why” questions in situations like this, I know I’m lost.
She appraised me as though she couldn’t believe what a dullard I was. She said, “Work on it.”
“Nothing else?”
“That’s all I know.”
With what I hoped was a deft move, I changed direction. “The day you found her after she took the drugs, she was upstairs in her bathroom, right?”
Madison nodded as she fished around in the frappucino foam with her straw, hoping to discover a pool of untouched slush. She knew something I didn’t know, and she knew that in this match she had me on points.
“See anything else, anything unusual, when you were in the house that day?”
The straw stopped in mid-swipe.
“Like what?”
It was my turn to shrug and act indifferent. I’d been paying attention to the technique, and I thought I did a pretty good job. “Like anything.”
“What do you mean, ‘Like anything’?”
I leaned forward, closing the space between us. “Merritt’s in a lot of trouble right now, Madison. I’m wondering whether you saw anything when you were there that might explain any of it.”
“Trouble? What kind of trouble?”
“What did you see?”
“Why is she in trouble?”
I sat back on my chair and drained my coffee. “She screwed up.”
Her voice betrayed some anxiety. “Screwed up how? I don’t know what you’re talking about. All I can tell you is that it was all too weird. Finding her like that. I don’t remember anything but how dead she seemed. I thought she was dead.” She shivered.
I thought the shiver might be an act, but I wasn’t really sure. Madison was pretty good. I asked, “You didn’t wait for the ambulance to come? Is that what I heard? Do I have that right?”
“I freaked. Totally freaked.”
“You freaked?”
“You see someone you think is dead, you freak, you panic, you do stuff you shouldn’t do. Ever done that, just walked in on somebody and thought they were history?”
“Yes, I have. Earlier this week, as a matter of fact.”
She wasn’t really interested in my experience with dead people. Her question had been rhetorical, and my answer, to her, irrelevant.
“Maybe I should have stayed. I don’t know what difference it would have made. Tell you what, next time it happens, next time I walk in and find a dead person, I’ll try and do better. How’s that?”
Few things in life are more unpleasant than an irritated adolescent. Maybe aggravated cobras and perturbed grizzly bears would offer a good approximation.
I used my confrontation voice from the office, firm but burrowing. “But you thought she was already dead when you got there?”
She was staring at the dregs of foam in her cup. She said, “Yes, I think I said that. I thought she was already dead. She was laying there all unnatural, like one of those rubber dolls you can bend any way you want. And I didn’t think she was breathing. I thought I was way too late.”
“But you called the ambulance anyway?”
“I called 911. The ambulance was their idea.”
“Why did you call 911?”
“It’s what you do when something messy happens. Don’t you watch TV?” The sarcasm was inflated.