She raised a brow at me. “Really, dickhead? You can’t just spend a few minutes with me before you start asking stupid questions?”
“Do you know where she is?” Please tell me you know where she is.
“No, but Shelly might. She contacted me today. I didn’t get to talk to her, and I’m trying to track her down.”
“What did Shelly say?”
She shrugged. “She didn’t say anything. I just said I didn’t get to talk to her, didn’t I? God, Mason. For a shrink, you’re a terrible fucking listener.”
I was a great listener. I just didn’t want to listen right now. I wanted to find Lynn.
Shelly was a subject I’d hoped to avoid. She was sophisticated and perfect and she wore pink ribbons in her hair. She never left the house when she wasn’t wearing pretty, feminine high heels and a strand of pearls around her neck. To be honest, she intimidated the hell out of me.
“Will you keep trying?”
“I can’t get hold of her right now. I just tried. I’ll keep trying.”
“I want you to stay here until Lynn comes back. Can you do that for me?” If she didn’t agree, I might have to spend every waking second with her, just so I could be sure she was safe. Lynn would want me to be sure Ash was safe while she was in town.
“I’ll stay as long as I can,” she said quietly.
I sat down on the other end of the couch from Ash. She pulled her feet up and turned to face me. “Will you tell me a
story?” she asked. She placed her hands together like she was praying. “You know how much I love stories about you and Lynn. Tell me about the day you met.” She bounced on the seat. “Tell me about the day you knew it would be her forever. Always. Tell me that story. I love that one.”
For all of Ash’s gruff exterior, she was a marshmallow on the inside. The streets had made her tough, but her heart…her heart made her soft and lovable. You just had to dig past the makeup and shove the bad attitude to the side so you could get to the soft, smooshy part.
“I met her on my sixteenth birthday,” I said.
Ash clapped and let out a squeal. “Keep going. I want to hear every fucking thing.”
3
I had no idea of the many ways my life would change that day.
I sat at the kitchen counter eating a bowl of cereal, just like any other day, as my mother bustled through the room, her white lab coat draped over her arm. My father followed behind her, but he’d left his white coat at the office, apparently.
Dad poured two insulated tumblers of coffee, one for him and one for Mom, and pushed the tops closed. Mom reached for hers with a look of worship on her face.
“Not yet,” Dad said. He slapped her on the butt and pointed toward the door. “Once you’re in the car, you can have it. You’re making me late. Again.” He glared at her.
Mom stopped and kissed my forehead, holding my face long enough to make me grimace. “We’ll meet you at the restaurant tonight,” she said. “You can ride with Aubrey.”
She brushed a lock of dark hair back from my forehead. Everyone always said I looked just like my mom. She was tall and slender, and she had jet-black hair. My dad’s was a sandy-blond, and he looked a lot like the quintessential beach bum. He could have had a surfboard beneath his arm instead of a clipboard, and one of those colorful shell necklaces rather than a stethoscope. I looked nothing like him. But my mom said I acted just like him.
“Are you sure you’re okay with me bringing her?” she asked me.
I brushed her hand away from my face. “Mom, it’s fine.”
My parents were renowned psychiatrists, the kind of doctors who helped those who couldn’t be helped. For months, my parents had been working on some special cases with a volunteer they called Lynn. Lynn had her own problems. She was a product of an abusive home, or so they’d told me. She’d been abused, and she understood the needs of the mentally ill better than anyone Mom had ever met. Mom spent a lot of time with her, and aside from work, they’d been to the mall and they’d been to lunch a few times.
Now Mom wanted to expose Lynn to more, and my birthday dinner was apparently a good place to start.
Meeting people from the hospital wasn’t anything new. Ever since I was small, I’d gone to work with my parents, and they often brought their work home. I’d played Legos with a boy who thought he was a twenty-year-old member of a rock band once. He was my age, eight, at the time. I could still remember how odd it felt, because the week before, we’d played Legos and he’d been my age. Then all of a sudden he was an “adult” who was patronizing me by playing with me.
That wasn’t the only time. There were others. There were people so heavily medicated that they couldn’t speak. And there were others who couldn’t stop chattering. Once when my mom took me to the hospital where they both worked, they let me meet a woman who had to be restrained before I could go into the room. She’d begged to meet me when Mom told her she had a son, and she gave me a chocolate chip cookie recipe while I was with her. The next week, I baked them and delivered them to her. I’d never seen a grin like hers. She died a few weeks later of a self-inflicted wound, but in that moment she was happy, and I’d been the cause of it.
I grew up in that world. It was what I knew. So inviting someone from the hospital to my birthday party, well, that was a normal event.