No One Knows Us Here(9)

I had an awful, sinking feeling, the way you do when you know you’re about to hear bad news, something that will change everything.

“I need to take this.” In one quick motion I grabbed the phone and exited the apartment in my stocking feet.

Halfway down the stairs, I put the phone to my ear, and Janet was already talking, her voice thin and trembly. “—don’t know how to deal with her. She’s getting Cs and Ds in all her classes, even English, her favorite. She was on the yearbook staff, writing articles, and she stopped going. It was a class, Rosemary, for credit, and she stopped going, so she’ll get an F. My Jason never got a C in his life, and he did sports after school. That’s what I keep telling Wendy, you’ve got to keep busy. You can’t just bum around all day getting into trouble, you’ve got to keep yourself busy. Basketball, swimming, something—”

I sat at the bottom of the stairs in the lobby, a tight little corridor painted basement gray. One wall lined with a row of metal mailboxes. Beat-up bikes parked under the stairs.

“Janet,” I interrupted. “I still don’t know what’s going on.” And I didn’t care what “her Jason” did to “keep busy.”

Janet heaved a long, withering sigh. “She stabbed her own wrist.”

This shocked me so much I let my hand drop from my ear to my lap. I stared at my phone, barely registering Janet’s voice chirping out of it, a distant, robotic little voice, like something from a cartoon.

“—after school. I’m at work, I can’t watch her every second of the day. That’s what I mean about extracurricular activities. If she had been cheerleading or something, this wouldn’t have happened.”

I returned the phone to my ear and tried my best to focus on her words. This was what Wendy meant when she said she’d find a way. I hadn’t taken it seriously, hadn’t taken her seriously. The next time I had talked to her—two days ago—she had seemed calmer. I had told her she just needed to be patient. Something would turn up eventually.

“She drew a bath, a nice warm bath,” Janet was saying. “A bubble bath. She used half a bottle until the bubbles were a foot thick. She read about this, you know. That you have to do it in a bathtub. She was smart about that. She got into the tub and brought some of the kitchen knives with her. She didn’t know which one would work best, which one was sharpest. That’s what she told me—she wanted options.” I could hear a tremble in Janet’s voice now. She was crying. For the first time during this conversation, I started to feel sorry for her.

“So she gets in the bath, and then she just stabs at her wrist with the knife. Shocked her so bad she couldn’t do the other one. That’s what you’re supposed to do. ‘I meant to do both wrists, Grandma,’ she tells me.” Now Janet was really crying.

“She’s okay?” I asked. “She’s . . . alive?”

I listened while she tried to contain herself. She blew her nose.

“She wrapped towels around her wrist as tight as she could and called 911 herself. She freaked out, is what she told me. Didn’t expect to see all that blood. They called me at work. I rushed straight home, and they were taking her out on a stretcher. What a sight. And the bathroom—it’s like a murder scene in there. I don’t know if I’ll ever get the blood out of the grout.”

I closed my eyes and tried to steady my breathing. She wasn’t trying to kill herself. I knew that. Or—I wanted to believe that. I should never have told her about law school. I had promised her. I had tried to find a new job, I really had. It’s just that as every week went by without so much as an interview, it seemed less likely that anything would ever pan out, and frankly, it was hard for me to understand the urgency. The real threat—the Wicked Prince—was dead and gone. Our mother had perished with him. The worst that could happen had already happened.

“She wants to live with you,” Janet was saying. “She said she needed you. I’m not sure why, she hardly knows you, what with you so much older—”

That got my attention. “I’m her sister.”

“Her half sister.”

Okay, I was beginning to see it, the urgency. “She grew up with me; she’s known me her entire life—”

“I just don’t know what to do, but what choice do I have?”

“I’ll take her,” I said. “I’ll figure something out.”

“What she needs is a stable environment. I’m not sure you understand what it’s like, taking care of a child.” Of course, just then a bunch of college kids had to come barreling down the stairs, whooping and hollering. I scooted over to let them pass, and they charged out the door and onto the street. I could hear Janet’s disapproval over the line.

“You know, Jason never caused me a moment’s trouble. People would say to me, they’d say being a mother was difficult, and I never understood them. It’s a blessing, I would tell them. Every day is a blessing. But now I see what they mean. It’s hard, dealing with a girl like this.”

“She lost her parents, Janet. She’s been through a lot.” If she said one more word about her perfect darling Jason, I was going to lose it. “Let me talk to her.”

“You know, Jason always said that Wendy—”

“I don’t want to hear it!” I yelled. I held the phone away from my face, glaring at it. I was going to tell her everything. I wanted to tell her what her darling little Jason did—what he did to me, what he did to Wendy. I wanted to tell her how it was Jason who “took care” of me when my mom used to work night shifts, how he’d come into my bedroom at night and how I never uttered a word of it to my mom because I was sure it would kill her. I wanted to tell Janet the things Jason used to say to me, the things he whispered to me in his hot Listerine breath.