Hugh whistled. Barry joined in.
Amanda winced.
Timothy glared at both of them and hissed, “Shut the fuck up.”
I was surprised. Real emotion. A protective streak.
I watched a tear fall from Amanda’s eye and get lost in her jeans. Another. She did nothing to wipe them away.
Timothy got up. He walked across the room, knelt down in front of her, put his hands on the arms of her chair, and whispered something to her that I couldn’t hear. I don’t think anyone in the room could. She didn’t respond but another tear fell, this one landing on Timothy’s hand. He looked down and stared at it but didn’t brush it off.
“Amanda?”
They’d all left the session and were walking toward their lockers to get their things. She turned, said something to Jodi and walked back toward me.
“I wanted to give you this,” I said, and held out my business card.
She didn’t take it.
“You left it on the seat three weeks ago when you joined the group. All the guys have my number and address. And the other girls took it.”
“Yeah. So?”
“So who knows. It doesn’t mean you have to call me, but if you don’t take it, you won’t have the choice.”
She was staring at it. I was certain there was something she needed to talk about but that she was afraid of. Otherwise, taking the card would be meaningless. If she had it, she might be tempted, and something about opening up was scaring her.
“I promised everyone in the group. Nothing anyone ever says will ever leave the room. I’ll never break a confidence. That’s my job.”
“Yeah.”
“Why don’t you believe me?”
“It’s not that.”
“Then what is it?”
She shrugged.
I took a chance.
“I really would like to see some of your artwork.”
She nodded, seemed to be thinking about it. “Why?”
“I love art. I told you I sculpt a little. I think that making art is one way we explore our feelings. We can say things in a painting or sculpture that can be hard to put into words.”
“Photographs, too.”
I nodded. “Do you take photographs?”
“Yeah. And I make shorts.”
It was quiet in the hallway; the voices and footsteps of the other kids had faded away. Her words lingered, not quite an echo, more like a piano note fading away.
“Short films?”
She stepped back, frightened.
“Amanda? What is it?”
She shook her head.
“I don’t want you to tell me anything you aren’t ready for. But I want you to take this. I know something is bothering you and that it’s something that seems overwhelming and impossible.”
“How?”
I smiled at her. I would have preferred to reach out and take her in my arms, but I couldn’t do that. “It’s what I’m trained to do, Amanda. I can help you straighten it out. Not make it go away. Not even make the pain go away. But help you put it in some kind of perspective, so you aren’t controlled by it.”
She shifted. A shield came down. She backed up. “Yeah, like you’re helping the guys to get control over how much they go online? They still can’t stay away. You’re not helping them.”
“We don’t know that yet. It takes a long time to break an addiction.”
“Amanda?” It was Ellen calling out; she was at the end of the hall. “You ready or what?”
“I have to go.”
I was still holding the card. “Take it.”
She stared at it for a few seconds.
“The secrets get bigger and bigger the longer you keep them.” I extended it so that it was even closer to her. It almost glowed in the darkened hallway.
“Amanda?” It was Ellen again.
She turned with most of her body, broke eye contact with me, but somehow reached out with her left hand and took the card, as if it was an afterthought and didn’t matter.
But it did. Very much.
Forty
My mother had a snow globe that sat on her battered dressing table in our dingy apartment downtown. Inside was a theater marquee with the words The Lost Girls on it, along with my mother’s name spelled out in what looked like tiny yellow lights.
Now that globe sat on my dresser, among perfume bottles and picture frames. When she was growing up, Dulcie had loved it as much as I had, and would sit and play with it for a long time, enchanted by the way the snowflakes fell over the marquee.
I was having one made for her next birthday-with her marquee and her name and the title of the play she was appearing in. When my taxi pulled up to the theater, the marquee was indeed brushed with snow just like the scene inside the snow globe. Dulcie and I were still talking, albeit cautiously, but she’d accepted my decision about her not doing the audition.
For the first time in hours, I forgot about the kids from Park East and the strange sense I’d had that Amanda and Timothy knew something I needed to know-the sooner the better.
Inside, the doors to the theater were shut. Harold, the usher, saw me, smiled and let me slip quietly inside.
I stood in the back, behind the last row of seats, and looked at my daughter on stage. No matter how many times I watched the play, I was still surprised each time I saw Dulcie in the footlights. There was always a first rush of shock that she was there, on Broadway-not in her junior high school auditorium, not at a summer camp production, but a professional, performing for strangers every night.
At the same time that I was incredibly proud-the audience had burst into applause as Dulcie finished up her second-to-last song-I felt the rise of a low-lying anxiety fluttering up from under my ribs. She was so vulnerable. And as the play moved ahead to its finale, I saw the teenager on stage not as my daughter, not as my mother’s granddaughter, but as a wholly independent creature-like the kids I’d been working with earlier. They each had secrets inside of them that their parents, their teachers and their families didn’t know about, couldn’t guess.
What secrets did Dulcie have from me? From Mitch?
I wouldn’t know, even though I’d had secrets, too. Kept them close to me and away from my father, from my stepmother, and from Nina.
But that didn’t make it any easier for me to accept when it came to my own daughter. At thirteen, her secrets might still be innocent and harmless, but with each piece of knowledge that she hid from me, afraid that I would not understand it or that I would interfere, she moved farther away from me. She was at the age when the chasms appeared. And I knew, because I had counseled patients about this-about how important it was to love your child for who she was, for who he was, to not be disappointed about whom your child didn’t turn into. That the best a parent could do was to listen, be sensitive, not give up. But when it came to my daughter, following my own advice was far more difficult than I’d imagined.
The orchestra played the first notes of the finale. Dulcie found her position. She finished her line, took a breath, segued into her last song of the evening. Her voice, like liquid gold, poured into the cavity of the theater. The richness of it, the purity of it, melded with the orchestra and rode just on top of the music, merging but never getting lost. She carried the song for the first twelve stanzas and then was joined by the others.
When the song ended, the notes and the voices died out, and all that was left was the reverberation in the air. Finally that, too, was gone. Silence held for ten, fifteen seconds and cracked open as the applause swelled. I joined in, more excited than I thought I could be, more moved than I wanted to be, more caught up in Dulcie’s moment-and feeling her excitement-than I was prepared to be.
Feeling her happiness should have pleased me. It would have had I not also realized that standing up there made my thirteen-year-old so much happier than anything else in her life had. I recognized the look in her eyes as she took her bow. I’d seen it before.