The Silver Linings Playbook(9)

I have been sleeping in the attic because it is so ferociously hot up here. After my parents go to bed, I climb the stairs, turn off the ventilation fan, slip into my old winter sleeping bag, zipper it up so only my face is exposed, and then sweat away the pounds. Without the ventilation fan running, the temperature climbs quickly, and soon my sleeping bag is drenched with perspiration and I can feel myself getting thinner. I had done this for several nights, and nothing strange or unusual happened at all.

But in the attic tonight I’m sweating and sweating and sweating, and through the darkness, suddenly I hear the sexy synthesizer chords. I keep my eyes closed, hum a single note, and silently count to ten, knowing that I am only hallucinating like Dr. Patel said I might, but Kenny slaps me across the face, and when I open my eyes, there he is in my parents’ attic, his curly mane of hair haloed like Jesus. The perfectly tanned forehead, that nose, that eternal five o’clock shadow and sharp jawline. The top three buttons of his shirt are undone so that you can see a little chest hair. Mr. G might not seem evil, but I fear him more than any other human being.

“How? How did you find me?” I ask him.

Kenny G winks at me and then puts his gleaming soprano sax to his lips.

I shiver, even though I am drenched in sweat. “Please,” I beg him, “just leave me alone!”

But he takes a deep breath and his soprano sax starts to sing the bright notes of “Songbird”—and immediately I’m upright in my sleeping bag, repetitively slamming the heel of my right hand into the little white scar above my right eyebrow, trying to make the music stop—Kenny G’s hips are swaying right before my eyes—with every brain jolt I’m yelling, “Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop!”—the end of his instrument is in my face, pounding me with smooth jazz—I feel the blood rushing up into my forehead—Kenny G’s solo has reached a climax—bang, bang, bang, bang—

And then my mother and father are trying to restrain my arms, but I’m screaming, “Stop playing that song! Just stop! Please!”

When my mother gets knocked to the floor, my father kicks me hard in the stomach—which makes Kenny G vanish and kills the music—and when I fall back gasping for air, Dad jumps on my chest and punches me in the cheek, and suddenly my mom is trying to pull Dad off me and I’m sobbing like a baby; my mother is screaming at my father, telling him to stop hitting me, and then he’s off me and she’s telling me everything is going to be okay even after my father has punched me in the face as hard as he could.

“That’s it, Jeanie. He’s going back to that hospital in the morning. First thing,” my father says, and then stomps down the stairs.

I can hardly think, I’m sobbing so loudly.

My mother sits down next to me and says, “It’s okay, Pat. I’m here.”

I put my head in my mother’s lap and cry myself to sleep as Mom strokes my hair.

When I open my eyes, the ventilation fan is back on, sun is streaming through the screen in the nearest window, and Mom is still stroking my hair.

“How did you sleep?” she asks me, forcing a smile. Her eyes are red and her cheeks are streaked with tears.

For a second it feels nice to be lying next to my mom, the weight of her small hand on my head, her soft voice lingering in my ear, but soon the memory of what happened the night before forces me to sit up—and then my heart is pounding and a wave of dread courses through my limbs. “Don’t send me back to the bad place. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Please,” I beg her, pleading with everything I have, because that’s how much I hate the bad place and pessimistic Dr. Timbers.

“You’re staying right here with us,” Mom says—looking me in the eyes like she does when she is telling the truth—and then she kisses me on the cheek.

We go down to the kitchen, where she cooks me some delicious eggs scrambled with cheese and tomatoes, and I actually swallow all of my pills because I feel I owe it to Mom after knocking her down and upsetting my father.

I am shocked when I look at the clock and see it is already 11:00 a.m. So I start my workout as soon as my plate is clean, double-timing everything just to keep up with my routine.





The Dress-up Dinner





Ronnie finally comes to visit me in my basement and says, “I’m on my way home, so I only have a few minutes.”

As I finish my set of bench presses, I smirk because I know what that statement means. Veronica does not know he has come to see me, and Ronnie needs to keep it quick if he does not want to get caught doing something without Veronica’s permission—something like saying hello to his best friend, whom he has not seen for a long time.

When I sit up, he says, “What happened to your face?”

I touch my forehead. “My hands slipped yesterday, and I dropped the bar on myself.”

“And it made your cheek all puffy like that?”

I shrug because I do not really want to tell him my father punched me.

“Man, you really have trimmed down and bulked up. I like your gym,” he says, eyeballing my weight bench and Stomach Master 6000, and then he sticks out his hand. “Think I could come over and work out with you?”

I stand, shake his hand, and say, “Sure,” knowing the question is only yet another one of Ronnie’s false promises.

“Listen, I’m sorry I never came to see you when you were in Baltimore, but we had Emily, and well, you know how it is. But I felt like the letters kept us close. And now that you’re home, we can hang out all the time, right?”