I nodded tearfully. “When do I go?”
“Tomorrow,” my mother said.
I whimpered and looked at my father. Tomorrow?
“It’s not a bad place, Ruthie,” he said softly. My mother shot him a savage look around Father Grady’s head and he cleared his throat. “But since you are seventeen, in order to be admitted, you need to agree to go voluntarily.”
I frowned. “So I don’t have to go if I don’t want to?”
Father Grady finally spoke. “No. You don’t. However, Issaquah Catholic is not an option for you until you’ve been evaluated by a psychiatric professional.”
“Can’t I go to the public school?” I asked—no, begged—my father. I saw his features tighten once, then slacken, like it was too much effort to hold the anger he was meant to hold against me.
“Remember what you said last night,” my mother cawed at him.
My father closed his eyes a moment, his nose reddening and running. When he looked at me next, it was with a cold detachment that blindsided me. “You are lucky, Ruth, that this is all we are asking of you. We could kick you out of the house. We could call Rebecca’s parents. We could never speak to you again.”
My lungs felt bruised; it hurt to take anything but the shallowest of breaths.
“Please, Ruth.” My father was the one to beg me then, so pitifully I cringed. “Help me out here.”
When he submitted to my mother—that was the one thing he did that always made me angry. Be the man, I wanted to say. I wanted to humiliate him, to tug, tug, tug on the thread that would unravel the murky suspicions I’d always harbored about him. Why we were so well matched in every aspect, why he seemed to understand me on a level no one else did. I know what is wrong with you, I could have said, because you passed your sickness on to me.
But I couldn’t do it. Not then, at least. I went upstairs and I packed my bags. It was never an option to say no to someone who needed my help.
* * *
Tina rested my journal in her lap, splayed open to my last line. We were lying in her four-poster bed, our feet intertwined, wearing sheer lace nightgowns. Tina’s mimosa-yellow kimono hung on one post, designed by Norman Norell and featured in the 1965 issue of Vogue. Every night, the housekeeper set out matching white cotton slippers on either side of the bed as if this were a hotel. Tina lived urbanely, like someone was following her around and writing a profile about her and she didn’t want to give them one negative thing to put in print.
“Well, I’m proud of you,” Tina said.
I rolled my eyes.
“You did the best you could do under those circumstances. You have a very superficial mother, Ruth, who is much more concerned about appearances than your well-being.”
I pictured my mother’s bowl haircut, her everyday walking shoes with the thick slabs of foam on the soles to protect her knees. I could not square her with such an impeachment. My mother, superficial? She terrified me, sure, but right then she was likely watching television all alone, minding the electricity bill by keeping a single lamp on, so unneeded by anyone in our dark, empty house.
“You feel bad for her,” Tina observed.
“She’s all alone now.”
“But it’s not your responsibility to make sure she’s okay. Nor was it to help your father out by succumbing to your mother’s wishes.”
I shrugged. Sure.
“Do you know what an empath is?”
I laughed, it was so obvious. “Someone with a lot of empathy?”
“It’s when you care so much about others that you take on their feelings and experience this compulsory urge to help them. A lot of women are like this, and society is all too happy to exploit it.” I must not have looked properly incensed, because Tina began listing, in an outraged tone, examples of how this quality had sent my life off the rails. “You ended up marrying someone you didn’t even want to marry to make your parents feel good! You dropped out of high school to go to a mental institution to appease them!”
I lifted my hands impotently. “I guess I just don’t see what you want me to do about it now.”
“I want you to get mad! You should be mad!”
I reached for my journal and snapped it shut. “I did get mad. You read it yourself.”
“And it lasted for approximately one evening, when you were seventeen years old, and then you just went along with everything your family wanted you to do.”
“You’re actually wrong,” I said, because she did not yet know how my father died. “And now I’m getting mad.” I reached over and shut off the lamp on the bedside table.