Chapter 12 Lindy
Lindy
“This is strange,” David said, in that same odd tone of voice. Inside the musty tent, he was watching his blood seep through
the sleeping bag as calmly as he’d have watched a duck swim past the beach—as if it had nothing to do with him.
“Shut up!” Lindy’s mind felt scrambled as she tried to remember a first aid filmstrip from school last year. She needed to
stop the bleeding. Glancing around the tent, she spotted an extra T-shirt in the corner. She grabbed it, tried to tear it
into strips. It wouldn’t rip. Quickly, she folded it, steeled herself, moved the sleeping bag away from his wrist, and wrapped
the folded shirt around it. She yanked a shoelace out of his nearby sneaker, wound it tightly around the shirt, and knotted
it.
“Hold your arm above your head,” she snapped, imagining she remembered that necessity from the filmstrip, and she half forced
his arm into the position, as he half complied. He still seemed mostly bewildered, calm. In the tent was the tinny smell of
his blood mixed with the musty, damp canvas and lingering smoke of the smoldering campfire.
“Come on. We have to get you out of here.” She wedged herself under his raised arm, grabbed him around the waist, pushed him out of the tent, and pulled him to his feet.
“Keep your arm above your head!” He raised his arm higher again, and now he looked ashamed.
“It’s okay,” she said, because she was sorry for him then, though she was furious with him, too. “You’re going to be okay.”
She tucked herself back underneath his arm and held his waist as they walked, feeling the heat of his skin under her hands
through his T-shirt. A drop of something wet landed on her neck, and she wondered if it was blood or old rain falling from
the trees. His weight was heavy across her shoulders, and his feet were bare, and as she watched them stumble along next to
her sneakers, she thought she should have put his sneakers on for him, even though she’d taken the lace out of one, but she
didn’t want to go back. She didn’t know how much time there would be before he would pass out.
“I don’t want to do this, Lindy,” he said.
“I don’t care,” she said, though she didn’t know exactly what he meant. “You’re doing it.” They didn’t talk anymore after
that. They were both breathing hard, and when Lindy saw the opening in the trees revealing the road, and the basin of the
cove beyond that, her heart beat faster.
When they got to the road, he was very pale. He seemed rueful now, but he still wasn’t saying anything. She thought she could
run to the yellow cottage in about a minute; trying to make him walk would take ten. “Sit down,” she said, and he crumpled
to the ground, as if her will had been the only thing keeping him on his feet. “Keep your hand above your head.”
He looked up at her, a question in his eyes.
“Promise me!”
He blinked, raised his hand higher. Red seeped through the T-shirt around his wrist. “Okay.”
“Don’t you dare move. Don’t you dare do anything!” He gave her another quizzical look, but she didn’t have time to stay and
argue, and there were so many ways she could lose, so many wrong decisions she could make. “Stay here!” she said again, and
she wheeled and took off running, her shoes pounding the gravel road, her heart and throat filling with tears, as the cove
lapped peacefully beside her.
She banged up the porch steps of the yellow cottage and in through the screen door to the living room, yelling for his mother, crying.
White-faced, Mrs. Kauffman grabbed the keys to the station wagon and was gone, peeling out onto the road, sending gravel flying.
Lindy wanted to go with her, but it was too late.
She had barely caught her breath, and Mrs. Kauffman was gone.
Kate came running downstairs, looking shocked. She must’ve overheard what Lindy had yelled to Mrs. Kauffman, because all Lindy
could manage to say was, “David . . . David,” and Kate just came over and hugged Lindy tight, and she was crying as hard as
Lindy was.
“I’m sorry I didn’t warn you,” Kate said a little while later, tugging at a thread on the bottom of her cutoffs. They had
finally collapsed onto opposite ends of the sofa. Lindy still felt short of breath. “My parents told us not to say anything
to anyone. We all just hoped he would be better. He seemed so much happier here. He seemed really happy with you!”
Kate had been telling Lindy about how, for a couple months over the winter, David had had a hard time. First, he’d run away
from home for a full week and, when he got back, refused to say where he’d been. After that, he slept too much, couldn’t go
to school sometimes, carved strange designs in the walls of his bedroom, and even punched a hole in one. Their mother had
taken him to a doctor and everything. David had refused to take any medication, but when spring came, his track coach helped
him get into a routine of running, and he seemed to bounce back, to seem almost like himself. “And then we got here, and he
did seem like himself,” Kate said. “We never dreamed he’d . . .” She shook her head and started biting a fingernail.
Lindy had been writing to David all winter and had spent nearly the entire summer with him, and she’d never had a clue about any of this.
Over the winter, if a reply took longer than usual to arrive, she’d stew in self-doubt, wondering if he was still interested in her at all, and when it finally appeared in her mailbox, she’d feel redeemed.
Now to find out he’d been . . . unable to write sometimes? On the run from home? Sick? Incapacitated by the workings of his mind?
She didn’t know what to make of this information, or of the terrible turn of events. It was impossible to think that he’d
meant to slice his wrist open, even though, the instant she opened the tent flap, she’d understood that he had. The intent had
been evident in his eyes—mixed though it had been already with regret.
Remembering him with the knife in his hand and the blood pouring from his wrist made her nauseous, yet she couldn’t stop seeing
it, and now she realized there’d been fear in his dark eyes, too. She couldn’t stand to think what would’ve happened if she
hadn’t gotten it into her head to march up into the woods and confront him.
Had their fight the other day been part of the reason why he’d harmed himself?
No, she couldn’t think of that, either.
She wanted to cry and cry and cry—but what good would that do? She blinked and reached for Kate’s hand. Kate gripped her hand
tightly in return, and they sat there, waiting.
Two hours later, the phone finally rang. By then, Josh had come in from a bike ride, and all of them were sitting together,
silent, terrified. Kate jumped up to answer.
She listened for a moment, then said, “He’s going to be okay?”
Lindy instantly started crying. They all did, even Josh, who tried to hide it, wiping his eyes, looking away. “They’re admitting
him to the hospital?” Kate said, wiping her eyes, too. “Okay. Okay. Don’t worry, Mom. I’ll watch out for Josh. We’ll be okay.
Okay. Okay.”
Kate hung up and looked at Lindy, then at Josh. She lifted her chin, even as she blinked back more tears. “I’m in charge now,”
she said.
Lindy didn’t want to tell her parents, but when she walked in the door at Innisfree, they were in the kitchen laughing and fixing up their five o’clock martinis, as a disconcerting Dizzy Gillespie jazz tune blared from the distant stereo in the piano room.
To see them acting so normal was startling.
It also made clear that there was a before and an after, and that her parents were still living in the before.
She wished she could go back there, too—never tell them, keep the horror outside of Innisfree forever—but when her dad, seeing her, grinned and said, “Hey, pumpkin! We were wondering where you were!” she simply burst into tears.
He rushed to hug her, asking what was wrong.
She asked him to go turn off the music, which he did, and when he came back, he hugged her again, and then it all came spilling out into the quiet, through tears she tried and failed to hold back.
“He did what?” Greta said. “And you found him like that?” She was pinching the skin at the base of her throat. She pushed her martini
glass slightly away across the counter, a tiny movement that said, No, I don’t accept this, no.
Lindy wiped her eyes with her sleeve. She had to get a hold of herself. She needed to help David, if she could. “Dad, will
you drive me to the hospital so I can see him?”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Lindy.” Greta’s tone was not unsympathetic, but it was unyielding.
Lindy looked to her father. “Please?”
Tom glanced from Lindy to Greta and back again. It was always this way—him being forced to choose sides, or at least to place
a fulcrum so some sort of balance could be achieved. “Why don’t we call and see if he’s up for company?”
Lindy looked back to her mother, who gave a tight nod.
Her father went to the living room. Lindy leaned her head on her arms on the counter, listening to the sounds of the phone book being pulled out of the drawer, thin pages flipping, the rotary telephone dialing.
Greta picked up her martini and took a big sip.
“Summer shouldn’t have things like this in it,” she said.
“Mrs. Kauffman says it would be better if we didn’t come today, pumpkin,” Lindy’s dad reported gravely moments later. “I’m
sorry.”
After that, he wouldn’t let her out of his sight, insisting on a game of Monopoly in the living room. He was always the hat;
she got to be the dog, her favorite. Today, she sat hunched over, feeling mute and slow. She kept seeing the blood streaming
from David’s wrist, and her dad said he’d be the banker, for a change—a single acknowledgment that things weren’t as they’d
always been.
Except then he refused to buy anything, saying he was saving his money for Park Place, which he never landed on. Lindy dumbly
compiled stacks of properties, built rows of little green houses, traded them in for red hotels. When they stopped for a quick
supper of Greta’s crab rolls, Lindy’s usual favorite, Lindy could eat only three bites, and even that made her nauseous. Afterward,
when Tom landed on Boardwalk and went broke, it was Lindy who felt hollow, done in.
Greta was sitting on the sofa nearby, legs crossed elegantly, reading the latest New Yorker, sipping her fourth martini, when she typically limited herself to two.
She’d put Supertramp’s album Even in the Quietest Moments on the stereo in the other room, and her foot bobbed along to the distant beat.
Lindy wondered what it was like at the hospital,
what David was thinking, if he was lonely, if someone was sitting with him, watching him so he didn’t do anything bad to himself
again. Her dad was putting the game away, the money back in the bank, saying he’d beat her next time. “You didn’t even try,
Dad,” she said, and he looked surprised, as if he’d thought he’d been fooling her. She kissed him good night—the crisp scent
of his aftershave had been blunted by the day—and hugged her mother, who smelled of alcohol and the celery she’d put in the
crab salad, then trudged upstairs to get ready for bed, thinking maybe she’d write David a letter tonight, maybe she’d be
able to see him tomorrow.
Fifteen minutes later, a knock sounded on her bedroom door. She was already in bed, light on, pen poised above a blank piece of stationery, because what did you say to a boy who’d just done what David had?
Both of her parents came in. They hadn’t done this in years, not since she was a little girl, afraid of monsters in the closet.
Her mother sat beside her on the edge of the bed, while her father perched on her little white desk chair, leaning his elbows
on his knees, brow knit above soft blue eyes. He looked this way sometimes when he thought there was about to be a fight,
and Lindy wasn’t in the mood to fight with her mother tonight, but she would if she had to.
“Listen, sweetie,” Greta said, patting Lindy’s hand. Lindy, wanting to cry again, swallowed hard and studied the tiny pink
flowers inside the small white squares of her yellow-bordered quilt. The window was open a crack, letting in salt-scented
air, and she heard the ocean lapping against the rocks in the darkness outside. “Your father and I discussed it.”
Lindy looked up. This did not sound good. Her mother was wearing a tiny, rueful smile.
“We know you care about David,” Tom said.
Greta gave Lindy’s hand a little squeeze, probably intended as sympathetic, but to Lindy it felt like a vise tightening. “But
we think that he’s . . . he’s going to need some time apart from you.”
“Apart?” Lindy sat up straighter. “What does that mean?”
Her father broke in. “When a person gets in a bad state like that, you want to help them, but there’s not really anything
you can do. He needs professional help.”
Lindy couldn’t believe her dad was saying this, let alone anything like it. He had spent all night playing Monopoly with her!
He had spent all night pretending to be her friend. “He needs people who love him!”
“Sweetheart.” The sadness in Greta’s eyes said, Poor child—you poor, ignorant child. “A boy like that, he’s not . . . he’s not going to be able to have a normal relationship. Not right now. Maybe not for a
very long time.”
“We like him,” Tom insisted, as if Lindy had accused them of the opposite. “We don’t want to see anything bad happen to him.
But you’re our first concern, pumpkin. It’s our job to keep you safe.”
In no world had Lindy expected to have to fight with both of her parents. “He’s not going to hurt me!”
Greta shot her another sad look. “Sweetheart, you just can’t affiliate yourself with a boy who’s unstable. You have too much
going for you.”
Lindy looked to her father. “Dad!” But he averted his eyes, got to his feet, and leaned over to kiss her forehead. She wanted
to think it was her mother who was making him act this way. It seemed nonsensical for them to make these pronouncements now,
after they’d gone all night without even talking to her about what had happened or asking any questions. How could they be
so sure of themselves when they knew so little? “Try to get some sleep,” her father said, and it was all she could do to keep
from saying, Ha.
Her mother kissed her forehead, too, then her parents met at the foot of her bed, took each other’s hands, and told her good
night. She folded her arms and frowned. They shot her sad looks in stereo, then went out.
It was final: They had betrayed her. Abandoned her. How could they not understand? How could they say that she needed to let
David go, that she couldn’t help him, couldn’t be with him?
Watch me, Lindy thought, as the door clicked shut behind them.