Seventy-Five
In retrospect, there are always reasons for what we do, if we stop and examine them. Following Amanda that afternoon was not something I stopped to think about. Now I know that I went after her because I knew she was deeply troubled, and I was afraid for her. Also because of her age. She was just a few years older than my daughter, and I wanted to protect her the same way I wanted to protect Dulcie.
It was some sort of karmic exchange. If I took care of Amanda, then someone would take care of Dulcie if she were ever in this kind of distress. But it was also the horror on her face when she saw the trapped butterfly on my office wall that made me get up and follow her. What made her respond like that? What kind of trouble was she in that she had made her way all the way to my office to talk about something and then left?
By the time I reached the street, she’d reached the corner, walking west toward Fifth Avenue. I hurried to catch up to her, forgetting for the time being about my wrist and the doctor’s admonition to be more careful on the treacherous city sidewalks.
“Amanda!”
She turned, saw me and was about to run, but the light changed and she was trapped.
I was at her side in four steps and put my left hand on her shoulder, not actually holding her back, but suggesting it.
“Can I walk with you?” I asked.
“I guess.”
When the light turned green, we crossed Madison Avenue and continued west, walking in silence, passing the Rita Ford music box store, which was one of my daughter’s favorite places in the city. Amanda’s teeth were chattering, either from nerves or the cold. Her coat wasn’t buttoned up, she wasn’t wearing gloves and her head was bare.
Halfway down the block, we reached a set of wide doors. “Come in here for a while. You can warm up. We can just sit. You don’t have to talk about anything. I’ll just keep you company.”
Amanda followed me through the doors, into an unimposing lobby.
“Have you ever been here?” I asked.
“It’s where I went to Sunday school,” she said.
We turned left and went through another door and into the main sanctuary of Temple Emanuel.
“I went here, too,” I said. And my daughter goes here now, I thought but didn’t say. As much as I wanted Amanda to feel comfortable with me, I didn’t want her to think of me as a parent, but rather someone she didn’t have to keep her secret from.
The sanctuary is almost the whole width of a city block and has a lovely stained-glass rose window above the entrance that washes the interior with soft red and blue light. I slid into one of the pews not far from the altar and looked up at the familiar golden doors that protected the Torah. Amanda took the seat beside me.
The quiet and emptiness of the temple was soothing, and I hoped it would calm Amanda.
We had only been there two or three minutes when the first sonorous tones of the organ wafted out and surrounded us. Someone was practicing, but flawlessly and as Beethoven’s music filled the space, Amanda became less tense.
“It’s really peaceful here, isn’t it?”
She nodded as she started to play with the zipper on the knapsack she was once again hugging to her chest.
“Is there something in there you wanted to give me?” I spoke softly, hoping my words would meld with the music and not alarm her. She didn’t respond. As if talking to a three-year-old who needed to be cajoled, I said, “Why don’t you let me have it, Amanda.”
She looked at me. I attempted what I hoped was an encouraging smile. Finally, Amanda unzipped the knapsack and pulled out a clear plastic square. Now the satchel was abandoned, useless, no longer important to her. The thing clutched in her hands held all the value.
“Do you know who Simone is?” she asked.
“No.”
“None of the guys told you about her?” She seemed incredulous.
“No. Is she a friend of yours?”
“We were best friends.”
“Did something happen to her?”
Amanda sighed and then sucked her lips in so that they disappeared. “They said that it was an overdose.” The weight of the words defeated her and she slumped down farther in her seat.
“What kind of overdose?”
“Pills and vodka. But the thing is she never…we never did drugs.”
“When did she die?”
“Last June. It wasn’t an overdose. Well, it was, but it wasn’t an accident the way it was reported.” As hesitant as she had been to speak before, now she was in a rush to get it all out. I was having trouble understanding all the words over the music.
“What do you mean it wasn’t an accident?”
“She’d been depressed and miserable for like a whole year, and she finally told me that she was going to do it. She even told me what the note was going to say. All the day before, I tried to talk her out of it, but I couldn’t. I didn’t know what else to do, so I threatened to go to her mother. I told her I’d help her find someone to talk to. I told her I’d get the name of a therapist that a girl in our class was seeing. She said okay. She promised me that she wouldn’t do it. I called Robin that night. I got the therapist’s number. The therapist even gave me an appointment for the next day and said he’d give me a break on the price. He was only going to charge me fifty dollars and I had way more than that in my savings account. I called Simone back-it was still only seven at night. She sounded much calmer. She promised me that she really was okay. That she’d go with me.” Amanda had started to cry.
I felt more maternal than was good for me if I was going to be her therapist, but I didn’t want to keep asking her questions and remain at a distance. I wanted to gather her up in my arms and promise her that I’d help her, and do whatever I could to make her pain go away.
“What was bothering her, Amanda?”
She looked down at the thing she still held in her hands. “This. What we did. It got around. Her mother found out. She was so embarrassed.”
“With the other kids?”
“No. With her mom. She just wanted her mom to, y’know, to try to listen or understand what had happened or something…” She was running her finger up and down the spine of the plastic case.
“Do you want me to play it?”
She nodded but didn’t hold it out to me yet. “Before… first…I have to explain.” She took a deep breath, as if she were getting ready to dive underwater, and then launched into her secret, speaking now at an even faster pace so that her words blurred the way scenery does when you pass it by on a train going more than one hundred miles an hour.
“We just wanted the guys to see that we could do what the other girls did. I knew how to use the digital camera. I’d made movies before. It didn’t seem like it would be too complicated. We decided that we needed to watch what they were watching and copy it. You know, we’d just do what those girls did and then we’d send it to them. They’d see that we could do the same stuff and they’d want to be with us. Simone liked Timothy. She wanted him to, y’know, be with her. I wanted… well, that doesn’t matter. So we had to watch first to know what to do, y’know? It was a little gross when we first tried to copy the Web-cam girls, but the more we did it, the easier it got. And the more we liked it. And then…when-” She broke down again and I let her cry, watching her shoulders heave. I put my hand out and rubbed her back.
“It took us a while to get, comfortable with each other. It was hard at first to be naked. And it was weird to touch each other. But then we got into it.” Big sigh. “We liked it. And we didn’t know what that meant.” She stopped. I thought this was the end of the confession. I could see the two girls, playing at being lesbians for the sake of the camera and discovering that it felt good.
“It means that people can give each other pleasure. That if we open ourselves up to it, many of us would discover that some things just feel good no matter who does them to us.”