Where It Began(43)

“You’re sure you can do this?” he says, setting the phone on his lap. “You get it, right? You stick to the plan and you don’t talk to anyone but me?”

“Completely.” I am looking at the stairs that lead to the middle floor where my bedroom is. I am thinking about how close my room is and how John might as well be in Greenland and Vivian isn’t going to leave the sale at Neiman Marcus until she’s escorted to the door by security because they want to clock out for the night. I am thinking about how I want to feel and who can make me feel those particular feelings.

But Billy is looking at his vibrating phone and then at his Swiss precision underwater watch. He kisses me all along my collarbone, gentle where it is still bruised, holding the vibrating phone against my back. “I want you,” he says, as I tilt my head toward the staircase. “You know I do. But I can’t do this anymore. I have to bounce.”

And he bounces.

Leaving me with the new, improved Billy Nash plan to lie my way out of the whole mess, a hickey that means I am going to have to extend the opaque makeup all the way down the left side of my neck, and no boyfriend.





XXXI


AS SOON AS BILLY LEAVES, VIVIAN, WHO WAS apparently only at Neiman’s in her new role as Highly Organized Mother, shows up, her shoes clunking around the kitchen floor overhead and then down the stairs, waving her BlackBerry in a new, snazzy Prada case.

“You’re not doing laundry, are you?” she says.

Unlikely, given that teaching me things like how to work a washing machine and cook food beyond microwaving California Pizza Kitchen frozen pizzas is not on the list. If there is ever a national emergency so severe there’s no takeout or housekeepers, I am going to starve to death in smelly clothes.

“I’m looking for my good jeans,” I say, pretending to rub my neck at the relevant spot.

“No jeans,” she says. “We’re going to Isabelle Frost. She’s the social worker. I put your clothes on the bed.”

“I can dress myself, you know. As God is my witness, I can put a skirt and blouse together.”

Vivian does not look convinced. “I was thinking French schoolgirl, not Scarlett O’Hara,” she says. Which should at least preclude the matted Amish sweater and the six-inch pleated skirt. Which, for reasons clear only to Vivian and some unscrupulous salesgirl dying to unload the Neiman buyer’s more heinous mistakes, involves black linen pants with a waist so high it threatens to meet the underwire of my bra and a tan silk shirt with cuff links.

Think a funny-looking French schoolgirl with no taste.

“I am so not tucking this blouse into these pants. I’ll look ridiculous.”

Oh yes I am.

I am wearing the outfit with a pair of Vivian’s ugly Coach flats, and I am getting into the car with Vivian and John, who has somehow been suckered into wearing a navy blazer with the family crest subtly embroidered on the pocket. We look like a complete joke.

But not as big a joke as Isabelle Frost, social worker to the rich and infamous.

Billy wants me to read my helpful professionals and figure out what they want and give it to them, but it is hard to tell if Isabelle Frost is Botoxed to the point that it limits all forms of facial expression or if she is just trying to look extra stern.

After about five seconds, it’s obvious she thinks that I’m some poor depressed alcoholic girl with bad self-esteem craving liquor to drown her alcoholic sorrows.

And she wants me to know that she totally and completely understands poor depressed alcoholic girls such as myself because she had exactly the same Problem when she was addicted to prescription pain pills following an unfortunate series of surgical procedures that you have to assume involved sucking all the fat out of her body and inserting Teflon in places it is embarrassing to look at unless the thought of armor-piercing breasts appeals to you. John would appear to be examining his fingernails, but Vivian is gazing up at her as if she knows the secret of eternal youth.

I still haven’t said anything, but after another five minutes, it is also obvious that the only way to get out of this with half a life left is to pretend to be some poor depressed girl with bad self-esteem craving liquor to drown her depressed, alcoholic sorrows.

Just like Billy said.

Isabelle Frost has a great many ideas for how I am going to—in a handy two-fer—get my Problem cured and impress the shit out of the Probation Department, with which she is going to personally interface. (Interface? Lobby? Bribe? Blackmail? Threaten? Wave a tiny photo of Agnes Nash in the form of a cross? It’s difficult to visualize exactly how this is supposed to work.)

“What Mr. Healy wants me to make sure of,” Ms. Frost says in between fits of pretending to understand me so so well, her speech slightly slurred because her lips have a limited range of motion and seem to pucker spasmodically all on their own, “is that we have you all set up before the Probation Department even knows your name. They’ll see how you’ve taken responsibility for your Problem and cleaned up your act and you’ve self-procured treatment and your family is straight out of Leave It to Beaver and bingo!”

Bingo?

My mother, by this point, is pacing around Ms. Frost’s office picking up and putting down knick-knacks and shredding the tissues. My dad is sitting there stone-still, his eyes half-closed, so you can’t tell whether he’s super-upset or asleep.