“Hey…” Rhea reached over Zoe’s shoulder to turn down the flame. “If you’re going to obsess, I’m gonna pack up my tent and leave.”
“I’m not obsessing.”
“You’ve burned the onions, you pulverized the carrots. Jenny was my daughter, Zoe. If I’m not angry—”
“Okay, okay.” Zoe shook her head. “I’m not angry.”
“I said if you’re going to obsess.”
“I’m not obsessing.”
“Yes, you are.”
“What am I obsessing about?”
“It happened, Zoe.” Her voice cracked. “Look, I know you wouldn’t purposely do anything to hurt me, but I’m trying very hard to deal with everything and your anger doesn’t exactly help, okay? I mean, God, it’s difficult enough—”
“Rhee, I’m so sorry.” Zoe set down the spoon she’d been using and wrapped her arms around Rhea. “I’m sorry, really, I just get on these rampages and…look at me. What can I do?”
Rhea gave a weary smile and shook her head. “Nothing. Just go on being Zoe, but…maybe a teensy bit less angry at the world?”
Later after Rhea left, Zoe cleaned the kitchen and set out cereal and bowls for Brett’s breakfast tomorrow. It was hard not to get angry. She and Rhea had gone over the whole thing so many times. Cried together over innumerable cups of herbal tea, wept over bowls of flax muffin mix, talked themselves hoarse into the wee hours. Rhea, Zoe could tell, was moving toward an acceptance of Jenny’s death that she personally couldn’t master. She was angry, furious. Did Jenny Have To Die? That was the title of the front page article in the paper today. No, she wanted to scream. Not if Dr. Phillip Barry had been there to do what doctors are supposed to do. Reason told her that this was flawed, simplistic thinking, but reason was no match for furious, impotent anger.
CHAPTER TWO
A SWOOSH OF THE AUTOMATIC DOORS announced Phillip’s arrival in the operating room. His hands and forearms dripping, he dried them with a sterile towel, unfolded a gown and slid both arms through the sleeves. Without a word, one of the circulating nurses tied the gown behind him; a scrub nurse removed a pair of gloves from their paper-wrapped package and held them out for him.
“Your handmaidens,” his ex-wife used to call them.
His first surgery of the day was an eight-year-old boy who had been sleeping in the back seat of his father’s pickup truck. The truck had stopped for a red light just as a couple of rival gang members were shooting at each other from opposite sides of the road. The stray bullet had torn through the side of the truck, ricocheted off the floorboard and penetrated the boy’s brain. In the blink of an eye, half of his right brain had been destroyed.
The human nervous system is an amazing, even elegant, structure, Phillip often pointed out to patients and their families. It allows us to feel, move, see, hear, smile and taste. It allows us to experience pleasure, as well as pain. It is essentially the organ system that defines us as human beings. And, by and large, we take it all for granted—until a bullet rips through it.
Or, as in the case of his daughter, Molly, something seems to go suddenly and inexplicably awry.
“I’m fine now, Daddy, really,” she was reassuring him as they walked along the beach below his Seacliff home that night. “I learned my lesson, I swear I’ll never be that stupid again. Why are you wearing shoes to walk on the beach?”
“Shoes?” Phillip glanced absently at his feet, sockless but in a pair of old Topsiders. “No idea.” He put his arm around her shoulder and squeezed her close. Molly had attempted suicide just over six months ago. Her second try in a little over a year.
“You really need to loosen up,” Molly said. “Quit working so hard. Go barefoot once in a while.”
Phillip took a moment to appreciate the irony of what his daughter had just said. And, briefly, to register the glint of orange light on the windows of the houses on the cliffs above them. The tide was out, the sun low in the sky. The evening was cool and gray—a California weather phenomenon TV weather people called June Gloom. Both he and Molly wore heavy sweaters and jeans. Molly, barefoot, held her sneakers in one hand.
By the time he’d arrived at the hospital, Molly was having her stomach pumped. A fleeting sense of relief that paramedics hadn’t taken her to Seacliff, where everyone knew him—her boarding school had been too far away for Seacliff to have been an option—left him with a dull guilt that still hadn’t entirely disappeared.
His ex-wife, Molly’s mother, had been similarly relieved. Ever since her latest self-help book, My Daughter, My Best Friend, had begun climbing into the lower reaches of the New York Times extended bestseller list, Deanna lived in constant fear of bad publicity.
“I’m serious, Daddy,” Molly was saying now. “When was the last time you had any fun?”
“I don’t know, Moll.” He heard the impatience in his voice. “Let’s talk about you first.”
“I’ve figured things out, I told you. I mean I can’t believe I tried to end my life just because some stupid boy made such a mess of his own life that he’d totally lost touch with reality,” Molly said. “I swear to God, never again. From now on, I’m taking charge of my own life.”
Phillip thought about the first boy to set Molly’s life adrift. Spirit, who Phillip had tracked down one bright summer morning, at work—the sidewalk spot where the kid drew whales and sea horses in pastel-colored chalk for the coins and occasional dollar bills dropped into the coffee can next to his box of art supplies—in the slim hope that he could shed some light on why Molly had set fire to the bed in her dormitory. Phillip had guessed that Spirit, who had green hair and wore a nose ring, was probably in his late twenties.
“I don’t know, man…” Spirit’s gaze had drifted somewhere beyond Phillip’s left shoulder. “No offense or anything, I mean I know she’s your daughter and all, but Molly is one seriously weird chick.”
Molly’s story had been that Spirit, with whom she was “like totally, totally in love,” had given her an ultimatum: sell everything she owned and take off with him to Belize, or the relationship was over. It was anger over the unfairness of his demand, she’d explained, that had caused her to set fire to her bed.
But Spirit had claimed at first that he didn’t even know Molly. Only after Phillip produced a picture from his billfold, did the kid remember that, “Yeah, I’ve seen her like a couple of times, hanging out at this coffee place.” Once she’d dropped a five-dollar bill into his coffee can and tried to give him her emerald ring, which Spirit, astoundingly and to his credit, had refused to accept.
“I figured she was, like, strung out on something,” he’d told Phillip, “and I didn’t want problems with, you know, like stolen merchandise or something.”
The ring had been handed down to Molly from her great-grandmother.
Molly had been on medication ever since and, until this latest attempt, had been doing fairly well. This time they’d taken her to see a psychiatrist in Santa Barbara. Far enough away from Seacliff to feel comfortable that they were unlikely to run into anyone they knew. The psychiatrist, who had Art Garfunkel hair and round eyeglasses, had offered Phillip a preliminary diagnosis. Affective schizophrenic disorder, the term set out there like a bomb.
“Bull,” Phillip had responded. Okay, she was going through a weird period, she had a tendency to overdramatize—as did her mother—but this was his daughter. Bright, pretty, resourceful, a great kid. Everyone loved Molly. She had her life ahead of her. The psychiatrist had leaned back in his chair, the faintest suspicion