“Are you ready for Monday?” I ask at last.
“For my appointment with Dr. Bloom?” she says. “No, not really.”
“I’ll be with you every step of the way,” I promise. I don’t know what else there is to say.
The next day, while Marah is in the meeting with Dr. Bloom, I move impatiently, pacing back and forth in the waiting room.
“You’re wearing a groove in the carpet. Take a Xanax.”
I stop dead in my tracks and turn.
A boy stands in the door. He is dressed all in black, with painted fingernails and enough macabre jewelry to fill a store on Bourbon Street. But he is strangely handsome beneath all the goth-ware. He moves forward in a gliding Richard-Gere-in-American-Gigolo way and slouches on the couch. He is holding a book of poetry.
I could use something to occupy my mind, so I go to him, sit down in the chair beside him. This close, I smell both marijuana and incense on him. “How long have you been seeing Dr. Bloom?”
He shrugs. “A while.”
“She helping you?”
He gives me a sly smile. “Who says I need help? ‘All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.’”
“Poe,” I say. “Kind of cliché. I would have been really surprised if you’d quoted Rod McKuen.”
“Who?”
I can’t help smiling. It is a name I haven’t thought of in years. As girls, Kate and I had read a lot of lovey-dovey-feel-good poetry from people like Rod McKuen and Kahlil Gibran. We had memorized “Desiderata.” “Rod McKuen. Look him up.”
Before he can answer, the door opens and I lurch to my feet. Marah comes out of the office looking pale and shaken. How can Johnny not have noticed how thin she is? I rush toward her. “How was it?”
Before she answers, Dr. Bloom appears beside her and asks me to step aside with her.
“I’ll be right back,” I say to Marah, and go to the doctor.
“I’ll want to see her twice a week,” Dr. Bloom says quietly. “At least until she starts school in the fall. And I have a teen grief support group that might help her. It meets on Wednesdays. Seven P.M.”
“She’ll do whatever you suggest,” I promise.
“Will she?”
“Of course. So how did it go?” I ask. “Did she—”
“Marah’s an adult, Tully. Our sessions are private.”
“I know. I just wanted to know if she said—”
“Private.”
“Oh. Well, what should I tell her father? He’s expecting a report.”
Dr. Bloom thinks carefully and then says, “Marah is fragile, Tully. My advice to you and to her father would be to treat her as such.”
“What does that mean, fragile?”
“Webster’s would say damaged, delicate, brittle. Easily broken. Vulnerable. I would watch her carefully, very carefully. Be there for her. She could all too easily make a bad decision in her current state.”
“Worse than cutting herself?”
“As you can imagine, girls who cut themselves sometimes cut too deeply. As I said. Watch her carefully. Be there for her. She’s fragile.”
On the way home, I ask Marah how it went with Dr. Bloom.
What she says is, “Fine.”
That night, I call Johnny and tell him everything. He is worried—I can hear it in his voice—but I promise that I am taking care of her. I am watching her closely.
* * *
When Marah goes to her first teen grief therapy meeting, I decide to work on my book. At least, I try to. The blue screen bothers me so much, I walk away for a minute. I pour myself a glass of wine and stand at my window, staring out at the glittering nighttime cityscape.
The phone rings and I jump on it. George, my agent, is calling to tell me that he has had some interest in my book idea—no offers yet, but he thinks there’s hope. Also, Celebrity Apprentice wants me to be on the show.
As if.
I am telling George how offended I am by this offer when Marah comes home from her meeting. I make us two cups of hot cocoa and we sit together in bed, just as we used to when she was little. It takes a while for the truth to come out, but finally Marah says, “I can’t talk about my mom to her.”
I have no answer to that, and I can’t insult her with a lie. I have been urged to go to therapy several times in my life, and I am smart enough to know that my recent panic attacks are the result of more than a hormonal imbalance. There’s a river of sadness in me; it’s always been there, but now it is rising, spilling over its banks. I know there’s a possibility that if I’m not careful, it will become the biggest part of me and I will drown in it. But I don’t believe that words will make it back down; I don’t believe that swimming in my memories will save me. I believe in sucking up, in going on.
And look where it has gotten me.
I put an arm around Marah and pull her close. We talk quietly about what scares her; I tell her that her mother would want her to stay in therapy. In the end, I pray I have done some good, but what do I know about what a teenager needs to hear?
We sit there a long time, both of us thinking of the ghost in the room, the woman who brought us together and left us alone.
The next day, Johnny arrives and tries to get Marah to change her mind about Seattle, to come home to Los Angeles, but she is firm in her resolve to stay with me.
* * *
“Are you looking forward to the UW?” I say on the Friday afternoon after Marah’s second appointment with Dr. Bloom. I am leaning against Marah. We are on my sofa, tucked together under a cream-colored cashmere throw. Johnny has gone back to Los Angeles and she and I are alone again.