CHAPTER ONE
There must be some mistake. Simone stood before a chain link fence tipped with spiked points. Plywood barricaded some windows; the piercings in the wood looked like bullet holes. Black bars striped other windows, either to keep local people out, or patients in. At her feet: shattered glass. This wasn’t a hospital; it was the set for a horror movie.
Oakhill Hospital Day Treatment Center, the sign had originally read, but the i had been spray painted to read Oakhell. This was not the part of Oakland she had expected, the region of prosperous hills. She was in its crime-infested flatlands. Probably not just the hospital’s windows but its patients were bulletbait. What was she doing here?
She picked up one of the glass shards from the sidewalk. It stank of whiskey. She considered slashing her wrists. Then she wouldn’t have to worry that she was not going back to her classroom to teach any time soon.
She stared at the hospital’s four trailers, grouped in a loose square, all of them the brown of dead flowers, bare and squat and drab. Fog drifted over them, as if the hospital were smoldering after a patient riot. She had nowhere else to go. Sighing, she smoothed the loose blouse she wore over leggings because she was tired of men staring at her breasts and started picking her way through the broken glass to the front trailer, its door the only part of the hospital not barricaded behind the fence. Locked.
She knocked, waited. The door opened to an Asian man wearing jeans and a pink T-shirt emblazoned with a chest-sized Tweety Bird.
“Hi,” he said, smiling. “Can I help you?”
“I’m supposed to be visiting the program.”
“You are?”
“Yes.”
“No. I mean, who are you?”
“Oh. Sorry.” Way to go, idiot. “Simone Dupre.”
“No problem. Welcome. I’m Jun Gambia, one of the counselors.”
Tweety Bird gestured to a gate in the fence that barricaded the complex. “Members enter there.”
“’Members’?” Simone asked.
The man smiled, or didn’t; Simone wasn’t sure. “General meeting starts in five minutes. I’ll explain our outpatient program right after the meeting. Just wait out in back with the others. The gate combination is three-two-one.” He closed the door.
Simone went to the gate. A small brown bird with a black head like an executioner’s hood that she hoped wasn’t an omen perched on the fence, watching her try to work the lock. She forced herself to take a deep breath. She could do this. After lining up the right numbers, she entered the compound.
A huge black man, arms flailing, lumbered toward her, yelling words—all Simone could make of his rant was aliens and Jesus and Eddie Murphy. Panic gripped her. She stepped back. He kept coming, his eyes on her now. She stepped back again, but he was almost within striking distance. She pivoted, ready to run and scream. The flailing man veered away from her, heading back behind the front trailer. She could still hear him, still smell his sweat.
Heart pounding, she lingered at the gate, hoping someone sane would appear. No one came to save her. Finally she walked hesitantly forward. As she neared the corner of the front trailer, she detected murmuring voices behind it and followed them, emerging into the glare of a dusty courtyard that held a scattering of round concrete tables with concrete benches, a volleyball court, and a basketball hoop.
Some two-dozen people seated at the tables turned and stared at her. Their conversations stopped as if her presence had flipped a switch. They were black, all of them. Expressionless, they scrutinized her. Smoke curled from their cigarettes, dispersing into the fog. Simone yearned to be that smoke.
“Hi,” she made herself say in a full voice. She slid onto the concrete seat of the nearest table; the two women sitting there regarded her as if she were three-headed. “I’m Simone.”
The woman across from her scowled. Her hair stuck out jaggedly from her head. Her purple sweatshirt stretched against her sides. She wasn’t fat, Simone decided, just big, a fullback of a woman.
Simone refocused her attention to the other woman at the table, who was slight with curly hair and an unsettling grin. She gave the woman her best first-day-of-school smile. “Hi.” The woman’s face barely changed. Simone felt more alone than she did when she was by herself.
“All right, y’all, who’s gonna cover my bet?” demanded the big woman in the purple sweatshirt.
“What odds you giving, Satch?” asked a skinny woman with long, pointed earrings seated at the next table.
The woman named Satch ran her eyes over Simone and snorted. “Three to one against.”
“Ten.”
“Five,” Satch said. “Bet’s a dollar.”
“What are you betting on?” Simone asked.
“Count me in,” said the woman with the large earrings, their tips touching her shoulders.
“What are you betting on?” Simone asked again.
“Got a dollar say you ain’t coming back tomorrow. White folks visit. Don’t come back.”
Simone put her fist to her mouth and glanced at a table where a balding man, the joints of his glasses bandaged with tape, was cradling three brown teddy bears as if they were his triplets.
“You staff?” another man asked her, his languorous eyes on the smoke rings he was blowing.
“Shit, no,” Satch said. “She come in the nuts’ entrance, just like us. I seen her come round the corner.” Her eyes bored into Simone. “What you doing here?”
Simone wasn’t about to mention her crying jag in front of a roomful of tenth graders, or what her thighs looked like under her leggings, or her principal’s declaration: “I can’t allow you back in the classroom. Get help.”
She shrugged.
Satch narrowed her eyes and curled the corner of a lip crowned by a dark brown mole. “Got to have qualifications to join this club. You schizophrenic? Bipolar? OCD?”
She wasn’t any of those things. But she had to say something, and it might as well be true. “I guess I’m just really tired.”
“Tired?” Satch said, glaring at her. “Oakhill ain’t no spa. Don’t got no hot tub.”
“I know. I didn’t mean…” She really was tired, too tired to finish her sentence.
“Tired!” Satch said. “What right you got to be tired.” She waved at the cadre of faces behind her. “We all tired.”
At first Simone made herself hold Satch’s gaze, but finally she looked away and, in relief, let her eyes follow a tall, umber-skinned woman wearing a batik pants suit and matching red beads in her braided hair.
“Good morning, everybody.” Batik Lady nodded to Simone, who wanted to kiss her feet in gratitude for the greeting.
“Hi, Muslimah,” said the teddy bear man, tucking his head down like a bashful child.
Muslimah smiled at Marvin then turned to Satch. “I’m glad you’re back,” she said.
Satch kept her eyes on the table. “Had the flu.”
“Have you seen a doctor? You seem to get that flu a lot,” Muslimah remarked.
Simone detected the slightest hint of reprimand.
Muslimah straightened the file folders in her hands. Satch didn’t respond. “We’ll talk later,” Muslimah said. She crossed the courtyard to the far trailer.
Simone saw her chance. “Did you get a flu shot? I teach, so I’m around a lot of sick kids, but since I started getting flu shots I never get sick.”
“Fuck you, bitch!”
Simone’s gut cramped.
“If you so damned healthy, why you here?”
“She was just trying to help,” said the slight woman with the unsettling smile.
“Yeah,” agreed the man with the teddy bears triplets.
“White folks always be telling black folks how to live,” Satch said. “And I know you ain’t coming back, ’cause Oakhill ain’t white enough.”
A car screeched down the street, the sound keening into their eardrums.
“Noooo!” screamed the slight woman. She clamped her hands over her ears, scrunched shut her eyes and screamed again, rocking back and forth. “Noooo!”
Satch instantly moved into action; she took the screaming woman in her arms and glared again at Simone, as if she’d done something to cause the screams.
“Noooo!” The woman kept screaming.
The teddy bear man buried his face in their fur.
Simone’s heart beat fiercely. She reached out her hand to touch the woman, to help comfort her, but Satch’s scowl stopped her.
“I got you, Viola,” Satch said gently to the screaming woman. “You safe.” Her dark, blazing eyes never left Simone’s.
The huge man reappeared, his arms flailing wildly.
“Noooo!” The woman kept screaming.
Simone covered her mouth—the screaming was a siren summoning her to scream along and never stop.
Tweety Bird—Jun, that was his name—came out the first trailer door and dashed over to Viola, taking her hand. “Feel my hand, Viola,” he said. His voice was barely audible over the yelling but so steady that Simone decided he was talking to her too. Her pulse ratcheted down to triple digits. “You’re not on the sidewalk. You’re safe.”
“Noooo!”
Another woman, this one with straightened hair flipped up at the ends, stood and clutched her hands to her chest. “I’m having a heart attack!”
Was she? Should Simone do something? Everyone else was ignoring the woman. She must be crazy. They were all crazy. Muslimah hurried over. Satch released Viola, whose screams eventually subsided into tears. The two staff members put arms around her and escorted her inside the trailer. The woman having the heart attack jutted out her lower lip, clasped her shoulders, and sat down.
Simone felt like she was breathing air through a pinched straw. She stood and squeezed her arms around herself. She might dissolve in front of a classroom, but she had a life—and a car that could take her away.
“Figure I’m gonna win my bet,” Satch said, studying Simone with a withering smile. “Leaving now and ain’t coming back tomorrow, huh?”
Simone fled out the gate.
CHAPTER TWO
Simone cut through every yellow light, threading her way back through the Caldecott Tunnel, back to the sunshine and her home in safe Talaveras, fifteen miles east of Oakland. She stabbed the lock to her condo and felt the relief of the paroled prisoner when she slammed the door shut behind her. Then she hurled her purse against the wall. No way she belonged at Oakhell. She would call Kathleen, her principal, and demand she be allowed to return to her classroom where she belonged. Her students were twenty-first century kids; they understood stress. It was 10:13. The students would be changing classes for two more minutes, Kathleen patrolling the halls. In five minutes she’d call.
She paced the one room that, with the bathroom, constituted her home. Breathing hard, she realized the place smelled like rotten broccoli. The reason sat on the stove. The plants in the kitchen windows drooped, begging for water. Dirty dishes tottered in the sink, and trash erupted from the wastebaskets. She’d been a neat person ever since she was old enough to demand her diaper be changed. How had she let her place get so filthy? Even the ceramic mask collection on one wall looked dirty. She would clean that very day. Everything. Even if it took all night. It was not like, at age forty, she had other evening plans.
If only Michael hadn’t moved out, hadn’t moved to Los Angeles to become a rich and famous screenwriter. She would have gone with him, even though it would have meant giving up her teaching job, not to mention this freshly bought condo, but he hadn’t wanted her. She had watched herself turn thirty-eight, then thirty-nine with him, convinced that if she just loved Michael a little harder he would happily marry her.
She needed a plan. She would spend at least four nights a week researching potential suitors on Match.com or meeting up with them for drinks. And she would throw herself into her students, who liked and needed her. If she didn’t have children of her own, at least she had that. When Carl, one of her best students, had cried over his first low grade on Monday, he had somehow triggered her own hysterical tears. One minute she was in the hallway comforting him, assuring him he was bright and talented and didn’t have to be perfect, and the next she was collapsed at her desk sobbing. She didn’t understand that, but it didn’t really matter because all that mattered now was what she did from here on.
She grabbed the phone to call her principal, Kathleen, who sounded as if she was speaking from the distant end of a long pipe. Though she seemed reluctant, when Simone mentioned filing a grievance against her, Kathleen agreed to see her that afternoon. Simone then put in a call for the benefits counselor to get a referral for a therapist in order to satisfy Kathleen’s demand she get help. Unfortunately the benefits counselor, who had referred her to Oakhill, was out for the day, but she wouldn’t need to tell Kathleen that. If only her skirt hadn’t slid up when Meghan had had to guide her to the office. If only Meghan and Kathleen hadn’t seen all the lines she’d cut on her thighs.
After several hours of triumphant cleaning, Simone redid her fingernails, choosing polish to go with the powder blue dress, which would brighten her eyes and make her look like the accomplished professional she was. In the bathroom she reapplied eyeliner with a surgeon’s care. She made herself look frankly at the razor blade she’d last used to cut herself two days before. It rested in a small pool of water in the seashell-shaped soap holder.
Cutting was something else she had to change. Gingerly she rubbed her finger across the cold blade and considered using it, one last good cut. No. She slid the blade into the discard slot of the small blue ten-pack she’d bought the previous week and took it with her to her car. She hefted the lid of a rusting trash bin and tossed in the box of blades. As the lid dropped, she felt her chest expand. Oakhill was a phenomenally effective program: she’d been there less than an hour and she was practically cured.
Simone stopped as she entered Kathleen’s office. Meghan was there, too. Meghan seemed to shrink away from her, Simone thought, stunned to realize her best friend seemed afraid of her.
“Sit down,” Kathleen said. The principal wore a yellow dress that clung like it had been sewn from whipped butter. “I asked Meghan to join us as the school’s union rep.”
Simone glanced at Meghan, who took the seat beside her in front of Kathleen’s desk. Meghan’s eyes were half-hidden behind the wavy blond hair that framed her slim face. Simone tried to read her expression, then addressed Kathleen, professional to professional. “I apologize again for my behavior the other day.” This was Wednesday. Was it really only Monday she’d lost control in front of her students? “It was unacceptable. But I’m lining up a therapist. I want to come back.”
Kathleen folded her hands beside a picture of her family of four—irksomely gauzy and perfect—like one of those photos displayed in photography studio windows. Simone had trouble imagining Kathleen taking the time to have children. Maybe she leased them.
“I’m prepared to file a grievance if necessary.”
“It’s symptomatic of a bigger problem,” Kathleen said. “I told you before about the concern expressed in recent weeks by your colleagues, students, and their parents, a concern I’ve shared.” Kathleen leaned toward her. “It goes beyond that. You skipped yard duty Monday morning, before the…incident. Again. That’s the fourth time in two weeks.”
Yard duty was a contractual responsibility. Given teenagers’ propensity to think themselves immortal and act accordingly, it was essential. Simone’s mind reeled. How had she let herself forget four times?
“I sent you a reprimand. You failed to respond. Furthermore, you skipped the last two mandatory faculty meetings, with no explanation, and you haven’t posted your grades on our website. Not to mention your breakdown in front of your students. You’re welcome to file a grievance, but…”
Shame flushed Simone’s cheeks. She clinched her hands, hidden from Kathleen’s view by the desk, and clawed her skin, trying to slow her downward spiral. The union would back her. It had to. She looked at her friend, who gave a single shake of her head that made Simone’s stomach drop.
“As I told you before, you need to take a voluntary leave of absence for the last seven weeks of the year,” Kathleen said. “That way you’ll have time to get yourself together.”
Yes, Kathleen had previously insisted she seek help, but had she really spaced the part about seven weeks? This couldn’t be happening. She had no sick leave; she’d donated it to needy colleagues, her buddy Meghan among them. So much for good karma on that good deed. If she wasn’t teaching, she wouldn’t get paid. The benefits counselor had said it could take two months before disability kicked in. And if she couldn’t make the stiff payments, she’d lose her home. “I can’t afford to take a leave of absence.”
“You can’t afford not to.” Kathleen surveyed her with eyes that could be measuring distances. “You need to get help. Summer school starts June twenty-fifth. If you’re better by then, you can come back.”
“You don’t understand.” Simone gripped the edge of Kathleen’s desk. “I went to the hospital. I can’t go there. I can’t.” She heard her voice break.
Kathleen stood up, as did Meghan. “I have a meeting at the district office.”
Simone stood, too, her legs trembling. “What if I refuse to take a leave?”
“If you refuse, I’ll institute dismissal proceedings.” Kathleen’s voice was straightforward, cold.
Simone willed her legs not to buckle.
“The two of you can use my office. I have to go.” Kathleen left. Steadying herself against the desk, Simone tried to collect her thoughts, but her brain was on a merry-go-round. She turned to Meghan. “Why didn’t you defend me? Isn’t that what a union rep does?”
“You broke the contract in several ways.” Meghan’s eyes fell toward Simone’s thighs, then rose, but not far enough to meet Simone’s stare. “Besides, are you saying you don’t need help?”
“But at the only place I can afford to go, the people are crazy!”
“There must be other options. You’ve got insurance.”
Simone covered her face.
“Simone?” Meghan said.
She made herself meet Meghan’s gaze. “I chose to take the money rather than insurance. It’s the only way I could afford the condo.”
“You dropped your insurance?”
Meghan was wide-eyed, aghast. Her husband was a corporate attorney. She would never have to choose between insurance and a mortgage. “Look,” Simone said, “I’m just strung out from not sleeping. I’ll see a doctor and get something for sleep. I’m getting a therapist. I’m a good teacher. You know that, Meghan!”
“You’re a terrific teacher. The students love you. Kathleen said they get tons of requests to be in your classes. But a person doesn’t hurt herself just because she’s tired.”
Meghan was a math teacher. In her world, things added up or they didn’t. Simone didn’t compute. “I’ll find a therapist. But if I’m going to pay for one I’ve got to be working.” She projected her voice a little to keep a quiver out of it. “Help me get my job back.”
Meghan raised her eyes to Simone’s. “Kathleen already put through the papers for your leave.”
“With your approval?”
Her friend blushed and looked away.
That night Simone swam laps in the condominium complex pool, smacking the water so hard on each stroke that she sent a shower of stars into the glare of the pool lights. Fifteen minutes. Twenty. Nonstop. Thirty-five. Fifty. Back and forth, the crawl stroke, over and over. Sixty-five minutes. Eighty. Finally she could no longer lift her arms over her head and stood in the shallow end in the stink of chlorine.
She remembered swimming underwater with her mother when she was little, both of them pretending to be sharks. Simone had “attacked” her father, but the man whose knobby white legs she’d grabbed turned out to be someone else. A stranger who yelped. She remembered her mother laughing underwater, could picture the bubbles that rose from her mother’s grin, making Simone laugh, too, until she accidentally inhaled water, choked, and shot to the surface gasping.
Could she swim three laps underwater now? She sucked in as much air as she could, then shoved off from the side, kicked hard, pulled herself through the water with spent arms, aimed for the light at the far end, reached it, spun around, kicked off, swam frantically, the air seeping from her body, reached the side, turned, swam the third lap, ran out of air halfway to the light, kept going. If she didn’t make it, if she drowned, it wouldn’t be so bad. It would be easier than having to breathe. Her lungs sent sirens to her heart. She kept kicking and pulling. Touched the light. Staggered to her feet. Stumbled backward. Breathed, or tried to. The night went dark. The stars disappeared. She lay in the water, face up, not awake, not passed out. After long moments of taking in chlorinated air, she pulled herself upright.
She climbed from the pool, lay on the deck breathing hard, then trudged back to her condo. Dripping, she slipped out of her suit and dropped it on the hallway’s tile floor. Drowning or not—it didn’t seem to really matter.
She sat down hard on the sofa, wrapped an afghan around her still-naked body, and shivered anyway. Trickles of water slid down her face, her breasts, and found their way to her thighs, where they slid across the lines of her cuts. She covered her face with her hands and tried to picture happy, splashing ocean surf. She kept seeing blades.
Her head ached. She needed to sleep—she had slept only three or four hours a night for weeks—but the swimming had electrified her. She rushed to fix herself warm milk and then chamomile tea. The tastes calmed her but didn’t make her sleepy. She clicked on the television. The night began, and it felt long already. She gazed at the screen, which swirled in a blur until finally she switched off the set. Weariness assailed her. As she lay on the couch in the dark, she listened but heard no clock, no passing cars, no calling voices, not even her own shallow breathing. She felt like an astronaut floating alone in the vast silent blackness of space, tethered to her ship by a single line. How easy it would be to sever that line and just drift off.
If only she hadn’t dropped her insurance or lost it in front of her students and Kathleen. If only Michael had stayed. Or taken her. She would have to return to the horror that was Oakhill for two months to satisfy Kathleen. If they didn’t let her return to school after that, she’d just do what she did tonight: swim underwater until she ran out of breath for good.
As for how she would pay her bills for the two months until summer school began, she couldn’t borrow against her condominium because she had no equity. She would have to apply for disability and in the meantime cover her expenses with cash advances from her credit cards, though she had no idea how in the long run she’d pay the exorbitant interest rates. She thought about her father, but it seemed inappropriate to ask him for money at her age. Besides, she hadn’t told him of her problems and didn’t want to burden her only parent.
Pathetic. Tears blurred the dark. She flung off the afghan, charged into the bathroom, turned on the nightlight, and stared at her image in the mirror for long, lost moments. Who was this bony-faced stranger? She spat at it. It spat back. Saliva seeped down her reflection. It wasn’t enough. She opened the medicine cabinet and took out her fingernail scissors.
She didn’t feel anything as the sharp tips sank into the soft flesh of her cheek. Blue eyes stared back at her, unblinking. Blood oozed out in a single drop. She pressed the scissors harder. The tips hooked her flesh; it resisted. She forced the scissors downward, ripping a short thin line. A little longer. Make it a little deeper. She studied her handiwork as if she were applying makeup. Then she rubbed her fingers along the jagged seam until blood rouged her cheek. It was better than tears.
There you go, bitch. How does that feel? she heard a voice within her say. And where have you been for the past forty years?