The Beautiful Lost Read online

  I trained them on the Home. Billy’s room was on the second floor, all the way on the right. At night, when the lights were on, I could see him clearly. The Home had always pierced my heart. Even before I knew him I would turn off my lights before bed, kneel by the window with binoculars pressed to my eyes, gaze at the Home, and whisper good night to the parentless kids.

  Nine months ago, the night before school started in September, I looked up and spotted a boy I hadn’t seen before. He stood at a window—second floor, all the way to the right—staring over the hills with unbearable longing. I kept the binoculars on him for a long time. He was tall and lanky with such tension in his body I felt as if he might fly out the window, to wherever—or whomever—he was thinking about.

  The next day a new kid showed up at school: the boy I’d seen in the window. It was Billy Gorman. He had no idea, but I’d claimed him that night. The more I watched him—not that I got to know him, he never let anyone in—the more I cared. I’d see him in that upper right window, sleepless just like me, staring out with a silent yearning that matched my own.

  Only mine was for him, and his was for … I had no idea. His terrible story was on the news, whispered in huddles outside lockers.

  Billy’s mother had been murdered. By his father.

  It was in all the papers, and on TV, and talked about by everyone in school, town, all through the state. Billy had grown up on the Connecticut Shoreline, but after what happened, he got sent to Stansfield.

  Our classmates acted one of three ways toward him: as if he were a celebrity and they wanted to get close to him and learn all the dirt; as if he were a wounded bird and they wanted to heal him; or as if he were a pariah and they were afraid the crime and his tragedy would rub off on them.

  But Billy was quiet and kept to himself. He didn’t react to any of the kids who sidled up to him or spurned him. Girls of the “wounded bird” school of thought circled around, wanting to draw him close. Clarissa called him “poor Billy.” Other kids called him “the murderer’s son” behind his back. It made me mad because it reminded me of things kids said after my family fell apart and I wound up in the bin. But Billy just did his schoolwork.

  As the school year went on I begged my father—could we adopt him? He needed a real home; could it be ours?

  Shocker: The answer was no.

  One day in December, just before the first Christmas without his mother, Billy and I stood next to each other in choir. Our music teacher had arranged everyone according to the way we sang harmony. So Billy and I being side by side was accidental, and no one had any idea what it made me feel inside. Not even Gen and Clarissa.

  Music books rustled as we prepared to sing “The Birds’ Carol.”

  The audience was packed with parents. My dad and Astrid were there. Billy’s arm accidentally brushed mine. I blushed like mad and forced myself to stand stiff instead of leaning into him.

  I wanted to say: I miss my mother so much. Christmas is hard. It must be for you, too.

  Mrs. Draper, the music teacher, rapped on the podium to get our attention, shot us a raised-eyebrow glare to get us to start singing, so we did.

  “From out of a wood did a cuckoo fly …”

  “Ha, cuckoo like Maia,” Jason Hollander said under his breath, and he and a few other kids snickered as the song went on.

  “Crazy girl!” Pete Karsky said.

  Billy cleared his throat—was it a chuckle? My heart practically stopped. It was bad enough being teased by stupid Jason and Pete, but having Billy join the mental-patient bashing made me want to disappear.

  My mouth moved, but no words emanated.

  Then Billy did something strange. He stared at me with such intensity I felt it in my blood.

  “Don’t let them get to you,” he whispered, looking stern, almost angry. He didn’t look away until sounds came out of me again.

  Had he been mad at me for screwing up the song by shutting down? Or was he reacting to the boys’ meanness, their borderline bullying?

  I thought about all that now, in my room, revving up to leave.

  My dad was very protective of me. Especially when it came to boys. I’d never even been on a date. He’d been that way since my mother left—when I was thirteen, prime time for me to start really liking boys. He didn’t mind my going to dances or the movies with groups, but he kept saying he didn’t want me getting hurt.

  After I got depressed, forget it. His overprotectiveness went into high gear. Then it became about stability. I might crash at any moment. I wasn’t emotionally equipped to handle a boyfriend. If someone wanted to come to the house for snacks while he and Astrid were home, that would be fine. Get this: Astrid said we—this imaginary boy and I—could have those little cocktail hot dogs impaled on frilly-ended toothpicks along with Bugles and her famous cream cheese clam dip, the recipe direct from some supermarket magazine.

  I would sooner stick a frilly-ended toothpick in my eye than have Billy come over and sit in the living room while my dad and Astrid sat there summing him up and passing plates of gross snacks.

  It was seventy-two-going-on-seventy-three months since my mother had left and eleven and three-quarters months since my father had remarried. I wanted things the way they’d been when it had been just the three of us, pre-Astrid. Cocktail franks had played no part in our lives. My mother was real, deep, and couldn’t be bothered making recipes from the Food Network.

  Now she wrote me every two weeks, sometimes more often, on cream vellum stationery sealed with red wax.

  I’d just gotten a letter from her. She’d sent a picture of herself outside her cabin, on the banks of one of the only fjords in North America. She looked exactly as I remembered her the last time I saw her: just like me, but twenty-five years older, with straw-colored hair, a slightly long nose, and eyes that crinkled when she smiled. Our need for braces was undisputed—we each had two crooked bottom teeth and a space between our front teeth. I’d gotten braces the week before she left and pulled them off myself a month later.

  I didn’t want my smile to change, to be different from hers.

  I loved her letters, and she always said how much she missed me. Everything should have been fine. There were no major triggers in my life. So why was I going off the deep end now? I’d been seeing Dr. Bouley faithfully, once a week. I took my antidepressant every morning, never missed a dose. But I was crashing.

  Astrid was still on the telephone. Her voice was nasal and grating; it bothered me all the time, even when it wasn’t talking about me to my father.

  “Andrew, just look at the calendar if you need to be convinced. Do you think the timing is an accident? Hello, one-year anniversary, sweetheart.”

  Silence while she listened.

  “Yes, you’ve got it,” she said, continuing her rant. “She wanted to spoil it for us, she couldn’t help herself, and now, well, it doesn’t take Freud to tell us she can’t stand the fact of our anniversary.”

  More silence; my dad must have been talking.

  “Yes,” Astrid said, lowering her voice. “Talking to Gillian, I heard her. Yes, out loud. Come home now. I’ll call Bouley and get things started.”

  She might as well have said she was calling the men in the white coats. Trust me, there was no way I was going back to the Turner Institute. Never, ever again. Ever.

  I knew Astrid would be guarding the stairs, so I locked my bedroom door from the inside, grabbed my duffel, opened my bedroom window, and climbed out onto the roof. My mother had shown me the way when I was seven.

  She and I would sit here at night—it didn’t matter the season, winter, spring, summer, or fall—and she’d teach me celestial navigation. She let me hold the sextant she’d had since grad school.

  “We’re the Whale Mavens and Construction Crew,” she said. “And my fellow whale maven had better learn how to patch a leaky boat and how to steer by the stars. Show me Polaris.”

  I pointed at the North Star, and she gave me a long, strong hug that made
me feel like I’d gotten straight As, discovered a new constellation, and shown her a rare whale.

  “Identification is good, but navigation is hard. Here’s how you hold the sextant,” she said, positioning my hands on the delicate instrument, made of brass, with a handle and wheels and a long scope. She showed me how to rock it, how to bring a sky object down to the horizon. During the day we did it with the sun, and I thought of what an amazing mom I had: She could tame the sun.

  When she had been out at sea on the Knorr, her favorite research vessel, she’d learned how to navigate by the stars at night, shoot sun lines at noon, and determine the ship’s position at sea.

  I couldn’t think about that now. A white pine grew close to the house, thick with long needles and smelling of pitch, and I took a leap and landed in the middle branches. I scrambled down the trunk, my hands sticky with pine tar, and slunk around the corner of the house. Reaching into the pocket of my jeans, I found nothing.

  That’s when I realized: I’d left the car key upstairs, on the bureau next to the binoculars.

  Standing by the pine tree empty-handed, tears began leaking from my eyes. That always happened—not actual crying or sobbing, just an inside sorrow pushing itself up through my tear ducts—before I got really depressed, when I stood at the top of the slide.

  That’s how I thought of serious depression, the Real Thing, not just sadness. I thought of it as a big, tall, stainless- steel slide slicked with ice, and once you let go of the supports and started down, there was no stopping or going back till you hit the bottom.

  My dad found me standing by the pine tree. He must have sped home to get here so fast. He wore his office clothes, a tweed sports coat and the striped tie I’d given him for Christmas a few years ago. He was the most mild-mannered dad ever, but his expression was wild. Worry, panic. That made my eyes stream even more.

  “Maia,” he said, freezing in place before lurching forward and grabbing me in a hug.

  Then I really started to cry. He smelled like our family, the way we had been: the woods, a salt marsh, the cabin of a sailboat, and a breaching whale. Having him hold me so close made me think of the three of us, our little unit that was never supposed to break apart.

  “What’s wrong, honey?” he asked. “What happened?”

  I mumbled something, not real words, because there were no words—nothing had happened. Not one thing I could point to and say, “That’s the reason!” If I could, then I could fix it. But this was more like a gigantic, unending, ugly swamp reaching out as far as my eyes could see. I couldn’t tell him that because he’d be driving me to Turner before I knew it.

  “Come inside,” he said, arms still around my shoulders, practically carrying me up the back porch steps and into the kitchen door. When I saw Astrid standing there, in the middle of the room, her hands clasped at her chest as if she was both praying and feeling left out, I closed my eyes.

  My dad made me sit down at the kitchen table. Bad idea, Dad, I wanted to say. There was my mother’s empty chair directly opposite me.

  “My stomach hurts,” I said, bending over so my head touched my knees. “I told Astrid, and that’s all it is. You didn’t have to come home.”

  “She was sitting in the garage, Andrew,” Astrid said. “Talking to Gillian as if she was right there.”

  “Trust me, I knew she wasn’t ‘right there.’ And you don’t have to speak as if I’m not here,” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” Astrid said. “Maia, I just can’t bear to think of you hurting yourself. That’s why I called your dad.”

  “I told you what I was doing.”

  “I firmly believe,” Astrid said slowly, addressing me but with her eyes locked on my dad’s, “that we have to take your cries for help very seriously.”

  “It wasn’t a cry for help!” I said, jumping up.

  “They take such good care of you at Turner,” she said.

  That was so typical, I thought, Astrid wanting to get rid of me so she could be alone with my dad. She probably hoped I’d stay there forever. I pictured those snake pit movies where the patients were in straitjackets and had lobotomies—even though Turner was nothing like that.

  “They do, sweetheart,” my dad said, sitting beside me, taking my hand. “Do you think you should go in?”

  “I don’t,” I said. “Please don’t send me.”

  He was silent. He stroked the back of my hand with his thumb. It comforted me so much the tears began streaming harder—a paradox. I stared at him, his face blurred. He had hazel eyes, curly graying brown hair, and a long nose. That’s something he, my mother, and I had in common: our noses. Seeing the gray in his hair hurt my heart. I didn’t want him to get old.

  “Please, Dad,” I said. He nodded slightly; I saw him relenting.

  “Andrew,” Astrid said in a firm, insistent voice that made me want to scream. As if she knew better than my dad and me.

  My father held up his hand toward her—to make her stop talking. Victory! That actually gave me a small feeling of happiness.

  “I won’t take you right now, Maia,” he said. “As long as you see Dr. Bouley. We’ll do what he recommends. Will you agree to that?”

  I nodded. What choice did I have?

  Thirty minutes later my dad and I were in his Jeep SUV, an off-road relic from his short-lived bachelor days after Mom left. He had dabbled on Match.com where he’d sought out women who, like us, enjoyed sailing the Atlantic or kayaking or cross-country skiing in New Hampshire.

  None of the dates bothered me too much because other than their love of the outdoors they were all wrong: one smoked, one was in the middle of a divorce she wasn’t too sure she wanted, and one had six kids, including a daughter who was a persistent shoplifter, who took up most of her time.

  The Jeep had come in handy for transporting supplies and duffel bags as my dad and I continued our love of chartering sailboats every chance we got. Then he’d settled down with Astrid. She got seasick and had never learned to swim. That meant no more sailing, no more time on the water.

  Dr. Bouley had cleared an hour for me. He always did when I had an emergency, and I felt bad for the patient who got bumped. His office was downtown in an old brownstone behind the library. My dad stayed in the small waiting room with austere black-and-white photos of Crawford on the walls—deserted factories, crumbling smokestacks, the band shell, Walnut Hill Park in winter. The doctor across the hall from Dr. Bouley had taken them.

  Dr. Bouley’s taste was much different. It was warm.

  He greeted me at the door. Tall, skinny, young, with the best smile ever—it filled his eyes and showed his teeth and made him look like a wolf, but in a really good way—he nodded at my father as he let me pass.

  His office was cozy.

  I sat in my usual seat, a brown leather chair across the office from his. A big Navajo rug covered the hardwood floors, and there were rust-red and pueblo-gold geometric images that reminded me of buffaloes with their mothers, herons with their mothers.

  Dr. Bouley always placed fresh flowers on his bookcase. Today he had a tall bouquet of white lilacs. On the walls were framed watercolors he’d done himself: coastal scenes from Newport, Rhode Island, mangroves in the Everglades, and plazas in European towns. He had bright, fluffy blankets—in colors of rose, emerald, azure—folded on the couch in case you got cold.

  “How are you?” he asked. He never just sat in his chair. He folded himself into it, and then leaned forward, elbows on his knees, all long limbs akimbo, as if he were a heron himself. His hair was black, his eyes were brown, and his face was always filled with kindness.

  “Not so great,” I said.

  “Tell me what’s going on.”

  “Didn’t they tell you?”

  “Yes, of course,” he said, his face opening in one of his wonderful trademark wolf grins. But it quickly slid away and was replaced by grave concern. “But that’s them. I want to hear from you.”

  “Well, it’s true, I walked out of school be
fore last period. I have a horrible stomachache.” Although I noticed that, sitting there with Dr. Bouley, the pain was gone, replaced with a wave of guilt, because I knew I wasn’t going to tell him about The Plan. “And yes, I was sitting in the car in the garage. And yes, I was talking to Mom. But I knew she wasn’t there, I wasn’t being delusional. Astrid has no idea what she’s talking about. I just miss my mother and wanted to feel close to her. That was my mom’s car! I wasn’t going to start it or anything. Or do anything.”

  “Do?” he asked. Of course he knew what I meant, but he was going to make me say it.

  “To kill myself. It wasn’t like last year.”

  “It’s almost a year to the day,” he said.

  That shocked me—he was right, and I hadn’t thought of it. I’d heard Astrid mentioning their anniversary, and of course I had that date, June 2, carved into my heart as if it were a piece of granite—a gravestone in my chest. But I hadn’t realized that yes—my suicide attempt had been three weeks before their wedding; I’d done it a year ago tomorrow—May 21.

  “Huh,” I said.

  “Are you having suicidal thoughts?”

  “No. Honestly.”

  “Okay. But how does it feel? Is it really just an upset stomach? Or are you sad? Or does it feel like depression?”

  I shrugged, thinking of the slide.

  “On a scale of one to ten …”

  “I’m not depressed, not really. But I might be on the way there. I’ve got that slipping feeling. So, maybe a five.” Even though it was at least a seven.

  He nodded. “Are you taking your medication?”

  “Yes.”

  “You haven’t forgotten, missed a day?”

  I shook my head.

  “Not once?”

  “Not once.”

  He knew me so well. I hated medication, yet I took, or had taken, antidepressants, a mood stabilizer, antianxiety benzos, and even, when things got really bad last spring, an antipsychotic to help me sleep. And I’m not psychotic, don’t even think that, psychiatrists sometimes go off-label when prescribing—having you take a medicine designed for one thing when it also helps another. It’s legal, I checked.