Anna is standing in front of the school talking to friends when Ray pulls up. She says bye all around, jumps in the car, takes her cell phone from her backpack, places her backpack on the floor beneath her legs. With the punch of a button, she tunes the car radio to a pre-programmed frequency and her cell phone immediately begins broadcasting music to the car's stereo system. Radiohead.
"Well? How was your meeting?" she asks.
"It was OK."
"Was it brutal?"
"Not too bad."
"It was brutal wasn't it? I can tell. Don't ask me how. I just can."
"It was scary for a while, but things worked out."
They are passing through a residential area when someone runs a stop sign and Ray instinctively jams on the brakes to avoid a collision. The other driver honks at him and races away. He looks in the rearview mirror. The street behind them is empty. He puts the car in park and looks at his daughter. She is unfastening her seatbelt so she can retrieve her cell phone from the floorboard. He waits for her to re-fasten her belt before he puts the car in gear. Safely through the intersection, he continues their conversation.
"Are you OK?"
"Yeah, I'm fine."
"Automobiles. What a concept."
"You mean human beings, what a concept."
"So, . . . how was your day?"
"It was OK."
"Was it brutal?"
"No. It was great, actually. Lizbeth is back."
Lizbeth. Ray has strong reservations about Lizbeth. Lizbeth has been a friend of his daughter since second grade. When the two girls were little, Lizbeth would spend nearly every weekend with Anna, playing games, watching TV, packed side by side in the back seat of the car whenever the family took its weekend trips to the grocery store, the mall, the restaurant, the movies. She was a healthy, happy little girl. Smart. Sometimes precocious. Very much like Anna. In junior high Lizbeth began to have emotional problems and by high school her problems were so severe that Ray began to worry about the influence she might be having on his daughter.
"Back in school?"
"Yes, sir. Back in school."
"I didn't know she was out of school."
Anna looks at her Dad. "She's been out for two weeks. She went off her meds and lost it. That's what she told me."
Ray's first inclination is to change the subject. He ignores it, stays silent and lets his daughter talk.
"She was doing OK, but then she got into an argument with her boyfriend and he said she was fat and she said 'Where am I fat?' and he couldn't think of anything because she's so, you know, beautiful, so he said she wasn't so much fat as she was thick. She said, 'So where am I thick?' He said her mind was thick and her soul was thick and her heart was thick. That's when she lost it. She went home and flushed all her lithium down the toilet. She didn't tell anybody. About a week later she stopped swimming at the bottom of the ocean and started swimming in the stratosphere. That's how she put it. One morning she swam into her Dad's office and wrote a couple of checks from his checkbook made out to her Mom and went out and cashed them and nobody said anything at the bank since her Mom writes checks to herself from her Dad's checkbook all the time. Then she took the money and left and went to Las Vegas where she almost got raped and murdered but didn't. She paid some guy to check her into a cheap hotel where she spent a whole week lying in bed reading Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton and Virginia Woolf and deciding whether or not to kill herself. When her money ran out she thought she might sell her body for money, but she didn't really want to or even know how, so she called her Dad and told him what was going on and he told her not to move, just tell him where she was and he would come get her. She said she didn't want to wait that long so he bought her a plane ticket online and paid a limo service to pick her up and take her to the airport. Now she's home and back on her lithium and wants to know if she can come over this weekend."
"Wow."
"I know it sounds bad. Really bad, probably. But I'm happy that she's home safe and sound. Usually, when she's gone for a couple of weeks that means she's in the hospital. Look, I didn't know where she was. I never lie to you and you never lie to me. That's our deal. What else am I supposed to say? I'm not leaving anything out, that's for sure. I know she's depressed and on lithium, but it's Lizbeth, Dad. Please don't put her on the 'bad influences' list and tell me I can't see her anymore. Tell me it's OK to want her to come over and hang out and maybe have some fun."
"I need to talk it over with Suzanne."
"OK. That's fair. . . . I was going to tell Suzanne, myself."
"You can tell Suzanne anything you want, but I need to tell her, too. She and I have the same deal you and I have."
They ride in silence for several minutes.
"Dad."
"Yes?"
"There's no place like home."
He enters the house to find Suzanne in the kitchen putting up groceries and Allison on the floor sucking air from an empty bottle. He picks Allison up over his head and wiggles her a little. She lets out a squeal. He sits her on the counter top where she immediately grabs a nearby banana and starts playing with it. While Suzanne continues to put up groceries and he plays with the baby, Ray repeats what Anna told him about Lizbeth and asks if spending the weekend is a good idea.
Suzanne's voice is both soft and certain.
"It may be a bad idea."
"So the answer is, No?"
"That's not what I said. I said it could be a bad idea."
"So should we tell Anna, 'No', or not?"
"We should let Anna decide."
"But we're the parents."
"And she's Lizbeth's best friend."
"But what if something happened?"
"Like what?"
"You know. If someone hurt themselves or someone else."
"Do you really think that's a possibility?"
"I don't know."
"What does Anna think?"
"I didn't ask her."
"Did you think of it while you were talking to her?"
"Yes."
"Why didn't you ask her?"
"I don't know."
"Tell me, Ray. What are you really thinking?"
"I'm thinking that if Lizbeth does all these things and her parents don't know about it until afterwards, what could Anna be doing that we won't know about until afterwards."
"Do you think Anna might be doing those kinds of things?"
"Of course not."
"Do you think Anna would want her friend to come over if there was a chance she might hurt herself or someone else?"
"No. Of course not."
"I'll talk to her tomorrow when I pick her up after school."
Ray grabs Allison under her arms and holds her high over his head. Viewed against the ceiling with her arms and legs stretched out, she looks like a baby astronaut floating in space. He asks her, "What is it about you small humans? You start out so well. Beautiful and talented and happy. Then you turn into grownups." As she grins from ear to ear, a long string of drool, captured by earth's gravity, falls from her mouth and into Ray's eye.