Secret for a Song Read online

  “Hey! There’s my girl!” He came forward and patted my shoulder. I could tell it took him aback, how tall I was now. The gesture wasn’t as easy to do anymore. Dad hadn’t really paid attention to me in a long, long time.

  “Hey, Dad. How was Phoenix?” I saw my mother dart me a glance from behind him, a warning. Watch your fucking mouth. Except she’d never say the “f-word.”

  He set his briefcase down and adjusted his tie. “Ah, it’s much too hot down there. Felt like September instead of January.” He brushed by me into the kitchen and opened the fridge. “What do we have to eat in here?”

  Ignoring him, Mum went back to her dollhouse and her tea. I sat down on a barstool and watched him rummage through the shelves.

  “So, Dad. Aren’t you going to ask how I’m doing with therapy? Or did Mum already fill you in?”

  “I’m sure what needs to be done is being done,” he said, without turning around. “I trust your mother.”

  I couldn’t help it. I coughed out a laugh. “But don’t you want to know more? Don’t you want to be involved in my healing process? You know what the shrinks say: a sick child means a sick family.” I’d been through enough therapy sessions to have the lingo down pat.

  “Thankfully, you’re not a child anymore, Saylor.” He turned around, a piece of fruit and a bottle of water in his hands, and used his foot to close the fridge. “Well, I better get going,” he said, glancing at the clock on the wall. “My next flight’s due out soon.”

  I glanced at my mother, but she was busy sanding a part of her dollhouse. She didn’t even look up. I turned back to my dad. “You’re leaving already?”

  “Criminal lawyers in great demand have to travel, Saylor, you know that!” he said, still so ridiculously jovial. And no, I didn’t know that. Weren’t laws different from state to state? Why would he be needed in other states anyway? “Flights in and flights out. I just wanted to come by to see my beautiful girls for a minute.”

  “Are you leaving because I brought up therapy?” The question came out sounding desperate and whiny. I wanted to pummel myself. What was wrong with me? I was usually adept at keeping a handle on these things. Dad was like a skittish fucking deer in some respects—too much emotion and he ran.

  “Don’t be absurd,” he said, heading back to the mudroom as quickly as he could without running. “I told you, I need to catch a flight.”

  I turned around in my barstool, but didn’t go to him. He slipped on his shoes, his shades, and his briefcase and again he was in costume, ready to take on the legal world.

  “Right... See you later, Dad.”

  Chapter Five

  Four days later, as I struggled to the surface of wakefulness, I was aware of multiple sensations. One: there was a deep ache in a spot on my chest. Two: My skin hurt. And three: my stomach felt like I’d eaten too much and then got on a roller coaster ride.

  I sat up and pulled the neck of my sleep shirt down. The area I’d been injecting looked raw, turgid, and shiny, like an overripe berry. It was slightly swollen, too, but not as much as I wanted. I pressed my knuckles into it and winced.

  After I’d grabbed my syringe from my nightstand, I padded into the bathroom and closed the door. Going through the process of spitting into the syringe and injecting it, I thought about the weird parallels between my life and that of a junkie’s.

  We both closed ourselves into the bathroom first thing in the morning, syringe gripped in our sweaty little hands like it might be the nectar to life we’d been searching for. We stabbed ourselves willingly for a momentary high, for that rush that made life less boring, made it more like something we’d been promised by a steady diet of angst-y teen dramas on TV.

  But I guess that was where the similarities ended. A junkie wanted to stay well and avoid the pains of withdrawal. I wanted to stay sick, to force my body to its knees, to make it cry and beg for mercy. If a parent had a chance to choose between a junkie or me, who would they choose? If I was honest, I knew it’d hardly be any choice at all. Who wants a fucking nut job who longs to be cradled in the scabby, rotting arms of disease? Send a junkie to rehab and she’d get on with her life. Send me to the hospital and I wanted more.

  Once my heart had stopped banging against my chest, once my mind knew my body was once again besieged with bacteria intent on breaking my immune system’s barriers, I was free to think about other things.

  The first order of business was taking my temperature. The thermometer screen turned a bright red, informing me that I was running a hundred-degree fever. Perfect.

  Next I needed to figure out why my stomach felt so...clench-y. I could tell that it wasn’t just the need to get sick, there was something else. I let my mind wander and then the thought struck me, like an arrow to the forehead. I had a meeting with the hospital administrator this morning, the one Dr. Stone was going to tell about my “issue.”

  I threw on an old t-shirt and a sweater hoodie over it and slid into my jeans. After my syringe was safely ensconced in my pocket, I made my way downstairs. My mother sat in a kitchen chair, poring over the newspaper. From the back, she looked thin and frail and small, like a child whose parents had abandoned her in this giant house and strange life. She looked lost. Why couldn’t she see that I was lost, too? That we could both be everything to each other?

  I cleared my throat and she tossed a glance my way.

  “Good morning, Mum.”

  “You should leave right now if you want to make that meeting on time. Would you like a ride?”

  “No,” I said, as she expected me to. “I can walk.”

  I grabbed an apple, put on my jacket and boots, and slipped out the door.

  Gramercy Hospital was private and only a short two-block walk from the gates of my parents’ neighborhood. The architects had designed it to look like an old Catholic cathedral. I suppose being seen going into a hospital that actually resembled a hospital would be too tacky for its white-collar patients.

  The double doors slid open and the musty cold air wrapped itself around me. If the hospital looked like a cathedral from the outside, it looked like an elite day spa on the inside. They even had New Age Muzak piping from the speakers between pages. I walked up to the receptionist’s marble-topped desk.

  She smiled at me, her teeth a brilliant white. “Hi there.”

  “Hey. Um, I’m here to see Linda Adams. My name’s Saylor Grayson.”

  “Hmm...” She looked down at the clipboard on her desk and her blond hair fell in a curtain to the desk. “Ah, you’re the volunteer!” Another grin. “Super. If you’ll have a seat right there in that chair, I’ll give you a form to fill out. ‘K?”

  I sat down, my head feeling hot and muddled with the fever. I fiddled with the zipper pull on my jacket. How much did this receptionist—I looked at her name plate; Betty—know about me and why I was here? She wasn’t casting too many “discreet” glances my way, which told me that maybe she didn’t know.

  “There you are.” She handed over a translucent pink clipboard and a gold pen. “That’s just a regular volunteer application that all our volunteers need to fill out, ‘k?”

  I nodded and glanced down. The questions looked pretty standard. Name, age, emergency contact...my gaze stuttered over one question at the bottom: special medical conditions. I looked at Betty through the fringe of my eyelashes, but she’d gone back to tapping away at her keyboard. Gripping the pen tight, I tried to think rationally. Dr. Stone had said I didn’t have to tell anyone about the Munchausen except the hospital administrator. Then again, this paperwork was for the hospital’s administrative purposes, wasn’t it? Was I supposed to be honest on this piece of paper? I didn’t want to have to ask Betty. Damn it, where was Linda Adams? Why hadn’t Dr. Stone told me that this might happen?

  My hand shaking, I wrote “M.S.” in the area that asked about medical conditions and handed the paperwork back. Betty scanned it, and when her eyes lit upon the last column, she looked up at me with pity in her eyes.

&n
bsp; “My aunt has M.S.,” she said. “You poor thing.”

  A frisson of pleasure and guilt spread from my scalp to my toes, like warm wax. “Yeah, it sucks.”

  “Well, let me page Linda and she’ll be right down to get you.”

  I sat in the chair, nursing my lie in secret glee.

  Linda Adams came downstairs to get me a few minutes later. She was a short, squat African American woman with her braided hair in a bun high up on her head. She moved with a sort of uneasy grace, as if she used to be much more petite than she was now. When she offered me her hand, it was smooth and dry, her grip much surer than her demeanor.

  “Welcome, Saylor.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Do you want to talk in my office?”

  I shrugged and got up to follow her, fingering my syringe in my pocket.

  Linda’s office was littered with papers and manila folders. The fluorescent lights and nasty industrial carpet made it clear that the spa-like quality of the hospital didn’t extend to its employees’ quarters. Noticing me taking in the details, Linda smiled a chagrined sort of smile.

  “Sorry. I usually meet volunteers at the café downstairs, but I’m expecting a call today.”

  “No worries.” I sat in a chair and crossed my ankles under it.

  “So, Betty said you filled out the application. Any questions so far?”

  “When can I start?”

  She smiled. “Eager. I like that. You could start today, if you wanted to. There’s just one thing I feel I have to mention.” The smile slipped off her face and she searched my eyes apprehensively. Cleared her throat. “About, ah, your...”

  She was clearly waiting for me to finish the sentence, put her out of her misery. But I didn’t. I held her gaze. Why? Maybe I just felt like being a bitch. Maybe it was nice that someone else was feeling the shame of saying the words besides me for a change.

  “Munch—Munchausen?” She glanced at a note she had on the front of my file.

  “Yes?” I touched the needle point of the syringe, let it sink its fang into my skin.

  “Dr. Stone said you could be allowed downstairs, where we have the support group meetings, but not into any of the clinical areas. You’ll have a badge that says ‘restricted access.’ Is that okay with you?”

  I shrugged. “Do I have a choice?”

  She smiled a little. “No, unfortunately not. But as long as we’re clear on that, I think we’re good to go.” The phone on her desk rang. “I do need to get this. But my secretary Shelly will take you to get your badge done right now.”

  As if she was listening at the door, a thin, reedy-looking white woman in glasses appeared in the doorway and smiled at me. “Ready?”

  Chapter Six

  The badge process was quick, and the woman manning the counter didn’t ask me or Shelly why I had restricted access. She chatted to her coworker about her diet the whole time she was printing it up, handed it over to me—still warm from the printer—and then turned her back on us.

  “Okay, let’s head to the support group area,” Shelly said, opening the door to the stairway. “It’s in the basement.”

  We went down one flight of stairs, my nose prickling with the scent of industrial-strength cleaner and cigarette smoke. Shelly’s soft-soled shoes made muted shuffling noises, the only sound as we descended into the lowest part of the building.

  When she opened another door, I walked through and found myself in the most stylish building basement I’d ever seen. The floors were a luxurious cream-colored tile and the hallway I was in opened up to meeting rooms with glass walls and comfortable couches and armchairs. The one to my immediate right even had a fireplace and wall-to-wall bookshelves. It didn’t seem like there were any support groups in progress, from what I could see.

  Shelly gestured to the fabric-covered bulletin board on the wall to our left. “See that pink laminated sheet? It lists all the support groups and meeting times and days. If there’s a holiday or a group won’t be meeting for some reason, it’s listed at the bottom.”

  I let my eyes run over the text. “Okay.”

  “Any questions about that?”

  “Nope.”

  “So what you’re going to be doing down here, from what Linda said to me, is setting up the rooms and breaking them down after the members leave. The kitchen is down this way...”

  She led me to a little kitchenette and showed me the basics of coffee-making and how to arrange snacks for hungry members. I was so bored I wanted to yawn. If this was the kind of bullshit I had to do to eventually gain access to clinical information or apparatus, though, it was worth it.

  “I think I got it.”

  Shelly smiled. “Yeah, it’s not too complicated. The next meeting starts at 1:30 in 1A, so you can go ahead and get everything ready for that if you want.”

  “Great.”

  She stared at me for a moment as I began to gather up snacks. I saw her from the corner of my eye, saw her studying my profile, but I didn’t turn. Finally, she said, “Linda said I should stay with you. But she didn’t really say why, except that you had a disorder of some kind? She didn’t seem to understand it very well herself.” She laughed a little, maybe to lighten the mood.

  My hands trembled a little as I scooped coffee grounds into the filter. Still not meeting her eye, I said, “Um, yeah. It’s sort of stupid. My parents have me seeing a shrink, and he doesn’t think I’m mature enough for my age or something.” I looked at her then, rolling my eyes to show how annoying I thought that was. Shelly didn’t look too much older than me. Maybe, just maybe, I could have her on my side in this whole thing.

  “Oh.” I saw the faint flush of her cheeks as embarrassment took hold. “I’ll just hang out down here, make sure the rooms are in order,” she said, casually changing the subject. “Come get me if you need me.”

  Once the serving cart was set up, I walked back toward the bulletin board and checked to see which group was meeting. Families and Friends. I rolled the cart into room 1A and waited, a sentinel on duty.

  When the people began to arrive, I wondered if I was in the wrong room. These didn’t look like the families of sick people; they looked like the patients themselves.

  First to arrive were three women, their skin stretched too tight over their delicate bones. Their hair was greasy and unwashed, pulled into hasty buns or ponytails. There was also a man who stared off into space and didn’t say much of anything.

  One of the women got a cup of coffee, smiling wanly at me, through me. I could tell she registered by my shape that I was a person, but wasn’t aware enough to note anything else about me. She shuffled back to the chair with her hands wrapped around the Styrofoam cup as if it was her lifeline.

  The leader of the group entered then, a woman in her forties who’d lost a sister and a child to cystic fibrosis. I knew immediately that she wasn’t a participant like the others. For one, she looked alive and took up space in the room. She sat and smiled at everyone, a beaming, encouraging sort of smile that was in stark contrast to the mood in the room. I wondered how long she’d been doing this, how long she’d been smiling at everyone as if she didn’t have a care in the world, and how long she would keep doing it until she broke.

  There was a diabetes support group right after that one. It was an interesting difference; these people laughed and joked with one another, complained mightily about their lot in life, and consumed coffee and cookies like there might be a shortage. I was irritated by their nonchalance. Seriously? If I had a disease that could be as dangerous as diabetes, I’d be much more respectful of its powers. Hypocritical, perhaps, coming from someone like me, but the thing was, I appreciated disease the way it was meant to be appreciated. I courted it because I worshipped its awesome power.

  After the group was done and I’d gathered up the cups and plates, I rolled the cart out into the hallway. Shelly was there, her stance awkward as she smiled at me. Had she been watching me the entire time?

  “All done?” she as
ked, her voice a cheery falsetto.

  “Yep.” I continued on to the kitchenette and she followed me. “Great first day.”

  “Awesome! That’s fabulous.” She set a clipboard by me on the counter. “If you could just sign out so we have a record of you leaving, that’d be great. That’s probably what we’ll do every time you come here. Just sign in and out so we have that to show your psychiatrist in case he asks, all right?”

  My cheeks flamed, but I nodded and kept my expression bland. “Sure.”

  If this was the price to get access to the clinical stuff I coveted, it was worth it. I’d just keep telling myself that. The time would come when they’d slip up, when they’d step back a bit, when other responsibilities besides my well-being took precedence. And I’d be ready.

  Chapter Seven

  Three weeks later, I was on the verge of giving up. I’d been in to see Dr. Stone several times, and each time I’d reported that volunteering was going “fine” and really meant it. Shelly hadn’t left me alone once. She hadn’t looked the other way or forgotten about me. I’d been made to sign in and out every time I went, which was almost every day.

  Then, finally, it happened, like a cloudburst out of nowhere. Betty, the woman at the front desk, waved, trying to get my attention when I walked in the double doors. I went up to her, unsure.

  Moving papers around on her desk, pink nails shining under the lights, she said, “You’re Saylor, right?” She obviously didn’t remember speaking with me the day I’d begun to volunteer.

  “Yes.”

  “Shelly’s at a conference this week and Linda’s absolutely swamped, so she wanted me to give you this.” Pulling a clipboard out from under a pile of forms, Betty set it in front of me. “Just sign in and then sign out when you leave, okay?”