Premeditated (10 page)

Don’t touch. Don’t speak. Don’t see. Don’t say. Don’t dare.

Don’t breathe.

I came to the conclusion years ago that she didn’t really want a family so much as she wanted a diorama to drag out when people visited. That way, she could pull us out, say “look at my perfect daughter and husband,” and then shove us back in the cupboard when she was done. We weren’t supposed to
move or talk or do anything other than serve as a conversation piece for whoever she happened to be speaking to.

And since when is “screw up” inappropriate language?

“Is Claire any worse?” she asked.

“She’s the same,” I said, not bothering to mention that most people would have asked if she’d gotten better. “They said it might be weeks.”

“Your father told me a few days.”

“Mom, you let them put me in school for the semester. They’re hoping she’ll wake up tomorrow or the next day, but she’s still got to go through all the counseling and rehab stuff.”

“The only reason I agreed to let you stay was because it wasn’t going to be more than a few days.”

“If she wakes up in the next few hours, they say her chances of recovery are better.”

“And if she doesn’t?”

“No one knows for sure.”

“And, of course, you think this nets you an extended vacation.”

“What?”

“She stays in the hospital and you get to lounge around your aunt and uncle’s house doing nothing.”

I should have left my phone off and told Mom I slept at the hospital. She was keeping this up an awfully long time; I wondered if she had an audience of sympathetic parents in the room patting her back for taking the “tough love” approach with her “difficult” daughter.

“Dad already told you. Once she’s awake and out of—”

“It’s been days, Dinah. Chances go down the longer someone’s in a coma, not up, and if you’ve got some silly notion in
your head that she’s going to be the exception to the rule, you need to grow up.”

“MOM!”

“Don’t raise your voice to me!”

“Then don’t say things like that!”

“Claire did this to herself, and it doesn’t do anyone any good to make themselves sick hoping she’ll get better. Even if she does, she’ll just turn around and do it again and again until she manages to kill herself for real.”

“MOM!”

“It’s what people like that do, Dinah. They get off on the high of someone feeling sorry for them, so they keep trying to find ways to get pity. I expect you back here in a month. No more.”

“I’m not leaving until something happens with Claire.” One way or the other.

“You’ll do as I say.”

“Where’s Daddy?”

“He’s out tinkering with that piece of junk he lugged all the way out here.”

“It’s not junk. It’s a classic.”

Dad had been fixing up a 1965 Cobra—for me. It’s seriously the coolest car on the planet, and was his favorite when he was a kid, because his next-door neighbor had one and let Dad drive it in and out of the driveway, even though he was way too young.

“… so you can forget crying to him about how mean your mother is. One of us has to have some sense. I can’t even imagine what he was thinking leaving you there. I won’t let your aunt and uncle kill my daughter along with their own.”

I wish I could say that it was an unusual conversation, or that my mother only got so awful under high stress, that she didn’t know what she was saying, but I used up my lying quota on the “pretend to be nice to the killer” leg of the race. Mom’s like that all the time. High drama, with her in middle of the brightest spotlight. She only cares about anything so much as it relates to
her
, helps
her
, inconveniences
her
.

When Nonie was still alive, there was a photograph that sat on her side table. It was the year Aunt Helen was born, at Christmas, and they were introducing Mom to her new sister. In the photo, Aunt Helen’s asleep in her bassinet and Mom’s screaming with a bright red face and running nose. On the back, Nonie wrote “But I wanted a playhouse!”

It would have been cute if Mom weren’t still throwing that same fit.

“All this fuss over Claire and her mental problems … I guess I can look forward to you trying the same thing when you get home. Well, it won’t work, Dinah Rain. I’m not going to coddle you the way—”

“I’m hanging up, Mom.”

“If I find out you girls cooked this whole thing up so you’d have an excuse to—”

“I’m hanging up. Dad gave me permission to be here. I’m not truant, and I’m too tired to listen to you doing an ‘is she dead yet’ countdown. find another audience.”

I ended the call and switched my ringer off, which did nothing to stop it from lighting up as another call came in immediately. Then another. And another. I stuck the phone under a pillow and left Mom to rail at empty space.

Uncle Paul and Aunt Helen hadn’t always been the kind of rich that meant one phone call and three days’ notice could create exceptions at one of the most exclusive private schools in the country. They hit that point about eight months ago. Six months before that, they were our neighbors in a part of town not nearly so nice or gated as their current address.

The world can change a lot in the space of two miles and a run of luck.

Back then they lived in a two-bedroom house with green siding and a basement that flooded ankle-deep anytime it rained. My house, which had one wall of brick in the front and beige-ish siding everywhere else, sat close enough that if I leaned out my bedroom window, I could lay my palm flat against their outer wall. Our basement didn’t leak, but there was a brown spot on the ceiling in the hall where water dripped through. One week, Dad would help Uncle Paul fix the basement windows to protect his computer equipment; the next, Uncle Paul would be on the roof with Dad, replacing shingles that were never in quite the right place to stop our drip. In the back, their yard ran into ours without even a fence between them.

We’d lived like that forever. Dad worked on cars; Uncle Paul worked on computers. Aunt Helen did stuff for our school’s parent organization and cleaned houses on the weekends, and Mom pretended she was happy so long as our house was the
only one of the two with brick on it. Somehow her forced contentment was such an effort that she didn’t have the time or energy for an actual job.

So maybe you can understand the paradigm shift that happened when Uncle Paul’s brainchild became an online hit because some actor out in Malibu happened to sit down with his son one afternoon, stumble across it, and spend the next six hours immersed in “a virtual world of myth and mayhem.”

All it took was that description in one interview and one post to his fan page, and suddenly the servers were overheating from too much traffic.

Sponsors poured in. Subscription fees poured in. Merchandising offers poured in. And in less than a year, a brick-front house wasn’t enough for Mom anymore, because it took less than a year for Uncle Paul and Aunt Helen to move to a new tax bracket.

As far as Dad was concerned, it was time to celebrate. For Mom, it was time for hysterics. If she couldn’t outdo her sister, then she’d move so far away no one knew it. And rather than argue, Dad did what he always does: he let her have her way to stop the screaming, and door slamming, and plate breaking. I took my cat and hid at Aunt Helen’s until the storm was over, just in case Mom decided she wanted to actually hurt something. The next morning, my parents announced we were moving out of the state as soon as I was done with school for the year. Mom had tried to convince Dad to pack up and leave on the spot, but he refused to make me switch schools before summer.

The grand irony of it all was that Aunt Helen and Uncle Paul had intended for us to make the social climb right along with them. When Uncle Paul’s business was getting off the
ground, Dad gave him three thousand dollars he’d saved up, without telling Mom, so Uncle Paul could move to an actual work space other than his basement.

As soon as the game took off, Uncle Paul offered Dad a quarter of the company. He wasn’t even going to ask him to pay for the shares because Dad’s so good at fixing things. Uncle Paul handled the coding with his brain trust of supergeeks, but Dad kept the machinery working. The papers were drawn up and ready for Dad to sign, but Mom couldn’t get over the “three-thousand-dollar lie,” as she called it. She never missed the money, and we never went hungry or had the power turned off. All Dad did was put off buying some of the cosmetic pieces for the Cobra.

Even after hanging up on her, it was hard to get my mom’s theatrics out of my head. I don’t know why people think big houses are so great, because all that extra space did was remind me how empty the place was. I wandered down the hall to Claire’s room and did a backward flop onto her bed.

The first night after Dad and I got in, we stayed at the hospital, sleeping smushed into plastic chairs with bars between them that meant no one could stretch out. It didn’t really matter, because Claire had gone three full days in a coma by that point, and we all knew it was worse than just a bump on the head and a little blood loss. There wasn’t any way to rest, between the nerves and worry, and the beeping machines that blinked with constant updates on patients’ conditions. After they moved Claire from the ICU, the plastic torture seats became ugly green recliners that supposedly doubled as guest beds.

Any night that wasn’t spent on vigil at the hospital, I slept in Claire’s room, curled up in a ball on one end of her bed in my
clothes, in case we got a call to get back to her in a hurry. I was the one who dragged out the bleach and hand towels and cleaned her bathroom floor, because Aunt Helen and Uncle Paul were too preoccupied with keeping Claire’s heart beating to remember she’d left red puddles on the tile. Between the smell of dried blood and the fumes off the bleach, it wasn’t a shock when I ended up retching into the toilet.

No one knew what had happened, or what was going on in Claire’s head, and I’d never felt so absolutely helpless in my life.

Then I realized there was something I could do. Claire might have been unconscious, but that didn’t mean she was mute. She’d kept a diary since she was ten, so her reasons for doing what she did were somewhere in her bedroom. All I had to do was find them. My only thought was that if we knew why she had cut herself, we could fix it.

Claire was never the girl who wrote with glitter pens or kept her inner thoughts under lock and key in a book with pages, and she wasn’t stupid enough to keep her journal on a blog where anyone with Internet access could read it. She kept everything on a two-centimeter square tucked into the back of a snow leopard with rainbow spots.

When most people see a pile of stuffed animals on a girl’s bed, they might roll their eyes and say she’s too old for toys, but they’ll shrug it off as cute and let it go. What they don’t realize is that those fluff balls with the sound chips in their stomachs are the perfect place to hide little things like jewelry or cash or a memory card. They’ve already got a hard box inside them; all you have to do is open the zipper and tape what you want to hide to the bottom of the speaker. The toy will work perfectly and no one’s the wiser.

I should know; I was the one who taught her to do it.

When you’re fourteen, telling a twelve-year-old how to sneak her private thoughts under her parents’ radar isn’t something you think will ever become an important enough detail to share. You sure don’t think of it as something that will come back to bite you, or nearly kill the kid you were trying to help.

I shook all the toys on her bed until I found one with a voice box, then nearly stripped the zipper trying to get it open. I almost hoped it wouldn’t be there, because the idea that the explanation for Claire’s misery was close enough to touch made me want to run for the toilet again. But it was there—one tiny, benign-looking piece of blue plastic. I pulled it out of the snow leopard’s gut and snapped it into Claire’s laptop.

I don’t know what I was expecting, but it sure wasn’t what I found. I bypassed the folder labeled “Diary” and clicked on “Dinah stuff,” surprised to see my name on anything

Dodo was Claire’s nickname for me, the way I called her Cuckoo. It was one of those inside jokes that wasn’t very funny but stuck. Dodos are extinct, and cuckoos leave their eggs for someone else to raise—we were a couple of birds who didn’t belong. When we lived next door to each other, Claire would barge in and unload on me whenever she needed to talk. Once I moved, she apparently made a digital Dinah to talk to.

Freeman’s Point is the all-purpose (and often only) free gathering place for kids during the summer. Equal parts lake, fairground, and time warp, it’s one of those weird places where it doesn’t matter what part of town you come from; everyone mixes. And no matter how the world outside evolves, the Point manages to keep itself exactly as it was in 1962, when the drive-in movie theater was shut down.

They took out the parking lot but kept the screen, and when school’s out, they play old movies on the weekends. You can either watch on the grass, if you want to hear the movie, or head for the lake and use the film as background lighting to make out.