But over all that were the words. They leaped out in bold type: black, white, red and other colors. GO FOR IT! HOT. GONE FOREVER. STOLEN MOMENTS. FEAR. YES, NO, MAYBE. LOST. THE RIGHT STUFF. WHAT’S IN/WHAT’S OUT. FLASH, COLOR, CURVES, SPLASH, JUST DO IT! And many more…
Words as typical as the pictures, but interesting because they seemed important to a young woman who lived in a house where there wasn’t a single book, unless you counted her school texts and her mother’s stacks of mostly unread paperbacks on self-improvement.
Now, I’m no intellectual giant. I scraped through Berkeley by the skin of my teeth, and for years afterwards all I could make myself read were shop-and-fucks. I still don’t read what passes for literature these days, but I do get mighty uncomfortable in a place where aren’t any old dust-catchers-as my grandmother used to call them-lying around. Apparently Adrian was fond of the written word, too.
Tacked, nailed, and glued to the words-but never completely covering them-was the junk. A false eyelash, like the hairy leg of a sci-fi spider. A lacy red bra, D-cup, with the nipples cut out. A plastic tag like the stores attach to clothing to prevent shoplifting. A lid from a McDonald’s carry-out cup, Coke-stained straw still stuck through the opening. Broken gold neck chain, pair of fake plastic handcuffs, card with ink smudges on it that looked like fingerprints. Egret feather, dismembered doll’s arm, syringe (unused). Lottery ticket with 7s rubbed off all in arrow, $2.00 value unclaimed. And much, much more…
Not your standard teenage memory wall. A therapy wall, as Adrian’s mom had put it? Maybe. I didn’t know anything about therapy walls. The grandmother who raised me would have treated me to two years of stony silence if I’d trashed my room that way.
Donna Conway was standing in the door behind me. She must have felt my disapproval, because she said, “That wall was Adrian’s only outlet for her pain. She adored her father. After he left us, she needed a way to begin healing.”
So why didn’t she hire out to a demolition company? I thought. Then I scowled, annoyed with myself. Next thing you knew, I’d sound just like my boss, Sharon McCone. The generation gap wasn’t something I needed to leap yet.
Donna was watching my face, looking confused. I wiped the scowl off and said, “Just thinking. If you don’t mind, I’d like to spend some time alone with the wall.” Then I started to blush, hearing how truly stupid that sounded.
She didn’t seem to notice. Maybe because her daughter had put a private part of herself into the wall, it had become a sort of being to her. Maybe people who were “rediscovering and healing” themselves, as she’d said she was, were either too sensitive or too vulnerable to make fun of other people who expressed sudden desires to commune alone with inanimate objects. Whatever, she just nodded and left, closing the door so the wall and I could have complete privacy.
I sat down on Adrian’s brass daybed, kicked off my shoes, and drew my legs up on the ruffly spread. Them I took a good look at the mess on the wall. It had been a long-term project. Adrian started it, Donna had told me, the day the divorce papers were served. “We made an occasion of it,” she said. “I had champagne and caviar, Adrian had coke and a pizza. We painted. I guess it was the champagne that made me paint the edges of the rug and ceiling.”
Now I replayed that. She hadn’t painted the rug and ceiling because she was drinking champagne; the champagne had made her do it. So perfectly in tune with the philosophies of some of the books I’d glimpsed in passing. This was a household where little responsibility was ever assigned or acknowledged. Not healthy for an adult, and definitely bad for a teenager.
Back to the wall, Rae. You should be able to decipher it-after all, you were a psych major.
First the purple paint. Then the layer of pictures. Idealized, because she was trying to look beyond the bleak not to a better future. Next the layer of words. She was trying to talk about it, but she didn’t really know how. So she used single words and phrases because maybe she wasn’t ready for whole sentences. Hadn’t worked through her feelings enough for whole thoughts.
Finally the layer of junk. Pretty ordinary stuff, very different from the pictures. Her feelings were more concrete, and she was trying to communicate them in concrete form. Unconsciously, of course, because doing it deliberately would be too sophisticated for a kid who’d never been in therapy. Too sophisticated for you, Rae-and you have been in therapy. Too bad they didn’t encourage you to make a wall like this. Now, that would’ve given them something to eyeball at All Souls…
Back to this wall. She’s gone through a process of sorts. Has piled concrete things and real words on top of idealized pictures and vague words. And then one day she’s through. She walks out of this room and goes…where? To do what? Maybe if I knew what the very last thing she added to the wall was…
I left the room and found Donna in the kitchen, warming her hands around a cup of tea. “What were the last things Adrian put up on her wall, do you know?” I asked.
For a moment she looked blank. Then she shook her head. “I never looked at the wall before she left. It was her own private thing.”
“You never talked about it?”
“No.”
“What did you talk about?”
“Oh…” she stared down into the teacup. “I don’t know. About the healing process. About everyone’s potential to be.”
I waited for her to go on. Then I realized that was it. Great conversational diet for a kid to sink her teeth into: healing process, potential to be.
What happened when Adrian was worried about an exam? When she hurt because her favorite guy didn’t ask her to the dance? When she was scared of any one of all the truly scary things kids had to face in the city, in this world? Where did she retreat to lick her wounds?
I was getting mad, and I knew why. Like Adrian, I’d grown up in a home where everything was talked about in abstractions. In my case, should and shouldn’ts, what-will-people-thinks and nice-girls-don’ts. I knew where Adrian Conway retreated: not to a nest of family affection and reassurance, but into a lonely lair within herself, where she could never be sure she was really safe.
I wasn’t mad at Donna Conway for her arm’s-length treatment of her daughter, though. I was mad at my dead grandmother, who raised me after my parents were killed in a car wreck. Donna Conway, even though she wasn’t able to deal with emotion, had said she was willing to spend her last dollar to get Adrian back. Grandma wouldn’t have given two cents for me.
I wanted to go back to All Souls and talk the case over with Sharon, but when I got to Bernal Heights, where the co-op has its offices, I made a side trip to our annex across the triangular park from our main building. Lillian Chu, one of the paralegals who worked our 800 line, lived in Diamond Heights, and I thought she had a kid at McAteer. Maybe there was something going on with Adrian Conway that the classmates the police and I had questioned couldn’t or wouldn’t tell.
Lillian was just going off shift. Yes, she said, her son Tom was in Adrian’s class, and he was due to pick her up in about five minutes. “We’re going shopping for new running shoes,” she added. “The way he go goes through them, I should have bought stock in Reebok.”
“Could I talk with Tom for a few minutes?”
“Sure, I’ve got to run over to the main building and check about my payroll deductions. If you want, you can wait here and I’ll send Tom in.”
I sat in Lillian’s cubicle, listening to phones ringing and voices murmuring on the 24-hour legal hot line. After a while a shaggy-haired young guy with a friendly face came into the cubicle. “You Rae? Mom says you want to talk to me?”
“Yes, I want to task you about Adrian Conway. Her mom’s hired me to find her.”