“I can’t tell you, Amelia,” I said honestly. “I’m just really, really glad she didn’t. Not then, and thanks to you, not today. I need both of you too badly.”
As I stood up, waiting for Amelia to dump out the rest of her fries, I wondered whether the psychiatrist we would take you to would tell me that I had irrevocably damaged you. I wondered if the reason you’d slit your wrist was that, in spite of all the vocabulary you knew, you didn’t have the words to tell me to just stop already. I wondered how you even knew that slitting your wrist was one way to check out of this world.
As if she could read my mind, Amelia spoke. “Mom? I don’t think Willow was trying to kill herself.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Because she knows,” Amelia said, falling into step beside me. “She’s the only thing that’s holding our family together.”
Amelia
I wasn’t left alone with you until three hours after you woke up, when Mom and Dad went out into the hall to talk to one of your doctors. You looked at me, because you knew that we wouldn’t have very long before everyone else descended again. “Don’t worry,” you said. “I won’t tell anyone it was yours.”
My knees nearly gave way underneath me; I had to hold on to that weird plastic crib rail on the side of the hospital bed. “What were you thinking?” I said.
“I just wanted to see what it was like,” you said. “When I saw you-”
“You shouldn’t have.”
“Well, I did. And you looked…I don’t know…so happy.”
Once in a science class my teacher had told a story about a woman who went into the hospital because she couldn’t eat anything, not one bite, and the doctors operated only to find a hair ball the whole size and shape of her stomach inside her. Later on, her husband mentioned that, yes, he’d seen her chewing on her hair every now and then, but he never imagined it had gotten so out of control. That’s what I felt like now: sick to my stomach, full of a habit that had grown so solid I couldn’t even swallow anymore.
“It’s a stupid way to be happy. It’s what I did because I couldn’t be happy the normal way.” I shook my head. “I look at you, Wiki, with so much shit raining down on you, and you never let it get you down. But me, I can’t even be satisfied with all the good stuff in my life. I’m pathetic.”
“I don’t think you’re pathetic.”
“Oh yeah?” I laughed, but without any humor; it sounded flat as cardboard. “Then what am I?”
“My big sister,” you said simply.
I could hear the door open a crack, Dad’s voice thanking the doctor. Quickly I swiped a tear from my eye. “Don’t try to be like me, Willow,” I said. “Especially since I was only trying to be like you.”
Then my father was in the room, and my mother. They glanced from your face to mine and back again. “What are you two talking about?” Dad asked.
We did not look at each other. “Nothing,” we said, for once in unison.
Piper
“I don’t have to go to court tomorrow,” I said, still reeling, as I put the phone down and turned to face Rob.
His fork stayed suspended in midair over his plate. “You mean she’s finally come to her senses and dropped this lawsuit?”
“No,” I said, sitting down beside Emma, who was pushing her Chinese food around on her plate. I wondered how much to say with her present, then decided, if she was old enough to deal with this trial, she was old enough to hear the truth. “It’s Willow. She cut herself with a razor blade, apparently, pretty badly.”
Rob’s silverware clattered to the table. “Jesus,” he said softly. “She was trying to kill herself?”
Until he said that, it honestly hadn’t crossed my mind. You were only six and a half, for God’s sake. Girls your age were supposed to be dreaming of ponies and Zac Efron, not trying to commit suicide. But then again, all sorts of things happened that weren’t theoretically supposed to: Bumblebees flew; salmon swam upstream. Babies were born without the bone structure to bear their weight. Best friends were pitted against each other.
“You don’t really think-Oh, Rob. Oh, God.”
“Is she going to be okay?” Emma asked.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I hope so.”
“Well, if this isn’t a giant cosmic hint for Charlotte to set some priorities,” Rob said, “then I don’t know what is. I don’t even remember Willow ever complaining.”
“A lot can change in a year,” I pointed out.
“Especially when your mother is too busy wringing blood out of a stone to pay attention to her kids-”
“Enough,” I murmured.
“Don’t tell me you’re going to defend that woman.”
“That woman used to be my friend.”
“Used to be, Piper,” Rob repeated.
Emma threw her napkin on the table, a red flag. “I think I know why she did it,” she whispered.
We both turned to her at once.
Emma was nearly white, her eyes bright with tears. “I know friends are supposed to save each other, but we’re not really friends anymore-”
“You and Willow?”
She shook her head. “Me and Amelia. I saw her once, in the girls’ bathroom. She was cutting her arm with a pop top from a soda can. She didn’t see me, and I turned around and ran. I was going to tell someone-you, or the guidance counselor-but then I sort of wished she would die. I thought maybe her mother deserved it, you know, for suing us. But I didn’t think-I never wanted Willow-” She broke down, crying. “Everyone does it-cuts. I figured it was just something she was going through, like the way she used to make herself throw up.”
“She what?”
“She didn’t think I knew, but I did. I could hear her, when I slept over at her house. She thought I was asleep, but she’d go into the bathroom and make herself sick-”
“But she stopped?”
Emma looked up at me. “I can’t remember,” she said, in a very tiny voice. “I thought so, but maybe I just stopped hanging around with her to see.”
“Her teeth,” Rob added. “When I took off her braces, the enamel was worn down. It’s the kind of thing we attribute to either soda…or eating disorders.”
When I was still practicing, I’d had a patient with bulimia who’d been pregnant. As soon as I managed to convince her to stop making herself vomit for the sake of her fetus, she started cutting. I’d consulted a psychiatrist and found out that the two often went hand in hand. Unlike anorexia, which was about being perfect all the time, bulimia was rooted in self-hatred. Cutting was a way of not committing suicide, ironically; it was a coping mechanism for someone who couldn’t control herself any other way, and like bingeing and purging, it became a dirty little secret that added to the cycle of anger at herself for not being who she really wished she could be.
I could only begin to imagine what it was like to live in a house where the subliminal message was that daughters who did not measure up should not exist.
It could have been a coincidence; Emma might have happened upon the one and only time Amelia tried to hurt herself; Rob’s armchair diagnosis might have been far off the mark. But all the same, if the warning signs were present and you noticed them, weren’t you obligated to offer the information?
For God’s sake-that was the crux of this whole lawsuit.
“If it were Emma,” Rob said quietly, “wouldn’t you want to know?”
I blinked at him. “You don’t seriously think that Charlotte would listen to me if I told her her daughter was in trouble?”