“I said I don’t want to talk about it!” Jesse grabs the round, crocheted throw pillow from under her head and clamps it down over her face.
“Well, too bad. You had your twenty-four-hour reprieve. You convinced your father to let you stay home from school. Now you’re gonna talk.”
“Leave me alone!” Jesse shouts, muffled. “I’m sick!”
At this Fran chortles. “You are not sick. Believe me, I know sick, and this is not sick.”
“I might not have cancer,” Jesse snaps from under the pillow, “but I’m still sick.”
A fine, high-pitched silence takes over the room. Jesse hears her mother exhale dangerously. Then she hears her father say, low and soothing, “Hey. Take some space. Go to the gym or something. Let me handle this.”
When Jesse drags the pillow down her face a couple inches to peer over its edge, her mother is gone, and her father is sitting in the armchair opposite the couch, his elbows propped on his knees, looking at her.
“Is she mad?” Jesse asks.
Arthur smiles a little. “I believe she is.”
“I shouldn’t have said the cancer thing.”
Arthur nods, but he doesn’t absolve her. He just waits.
They sit there together, not talking, for a while. Across the room on the silent TV, a man’s hand buffs a car door with a poufy white cloth. After a minute, Jesse’s racing heart subsides.
“You know… ?” she begins tentatively. Her father nods, listening. “You know how sometimes… you really wish that someone would just… be themselves? And then they are themselves, and it’s, like, so disappointing?”
Arthur nods thoughtfully. “Say more.”
“I don’t know.” Jesse feels tears sting the corners of her eyes and fights to suck them back in. She doesn’t make eye contact with her father, looks down at her lap. “I’ve been doing, like, this really bad thing. I hated doing it, but I kept doing it because I also loved it. I still sort of love it, and I still sort of wish I could keep doing it, but I can’t. And also I hate that I did it. I don’t know.”
“You have conflicted feelings about something,” Arthur offers.
Jesse nods. “I guess.”
Arthur leans forward a little in his chair. “It’s not drug use, is it, honey? I need you to tell me if this is drug use you’re talking about.”
At this Jesse cracks up a little, ruefully. “No,” she says. “No.” But then she thinks about it a second, about how Emily took her over physically whenever they were together, filled her with desperate craving when they were apart, made her forget her principles and sell out her friends. And gave her the most intense high she’s ever experienced. In some ways, yeah, Emily Miller is a drug. And Jesse just went off her, cold turkey. No wonder she feels so hung over. “Don’t worry, Dad, okay? I would totally tell you if I was doing drugs.”
“I hope so.” Arthur’s expression is shaded with worry.
“I would. I swear to God I’m not doing drugs.”
“All right. I believe you.”
“It doesn’t matter what it is. Forget it. It’s nothing.”
“I have my own theory about what’s been going on with you,” Arthur says. “If you don’t mind my sharing it.”
Jesse shrugs: okay.
“We talked about your mother’s illness a lot while it was happening. But we haven’t talked about it so much since she started to get better. One thing I’m wondering is if you’re still thinking about it now. I wonder if you’re realizing, now that she’s healing, just how close we came to losing her.”
Jesse stays very still, keeps her voice perfectly calm, when she says, “No. I’m not thinking about that.”
“Okay.” Arthur nods, and waits. He never expects Jesse to finish what she’s saying in only one sentence.
“She’s too tough to die,” Jesse observes.
Arthur smiles. “That’s funny, and she is very tough, but we both know that’s not really true. That’s the kind of thing we say to comfort ourselves when we’re feeling worried.”
“I’m not feeling worried,” Jesse insists, sharper this time.
“Okay. Well, I’ll speak for myself, then. I’ve noticed that lately I feel a lot of confusing things about Mom. Sometimes right in the middle of doing something unrelated to her, right in the middle of feeling perfectly fine, I’ll suddenly feel very angry or sad. Just out of nowhere, I get a big burst of sadness or anger. And I think to myself, Ah, this must be a little bit of those feelings that I had to put to the side when we were so focused on her treatment, coming back to haunt me now. You know what I’m talking about?”