Stephen White - Critical Conditions

Although I’d asked her to come to my office, she had declined. Meeting at the Starbucks at the corner of University and Broadway, close to both Boulder High School and the University of Colorado, had been her idea, but since I had expected her to refuse to see me at all, it seemed like a reasonable compromise.

I handed her the coffee and pastry.

She said, “You didn’t have to call my mom, you know? To set this up. She doesn’t know what I do.” Her tone was at once swollen with dismissiveness and disgust.

“I’m sorry. I…you’re not eighteen, and I felt I needed your parents’ permission-”

“I don’t need my mother’s permission to talk to people. So you sure as hell don’t need my mother’s permission.”

This, I suspected, was an argument I wasn’t going to win. I shifted gears and hoped she would tag along. “You did something wonderful, you know that? You saved Merritt’s life by what you did.”

She sucked on her straw and swallowed before she replied. “Yeah, well, I don’t know. I mean, I’m glad she’s alive and all, but…”

“But what?”

“How does it go? Every coin has two sides.”

I waited. When it became apparent that she wasn’t planning on flipping the coin over so I could see the other side, I said, “Meaning what?”

“Meaning that Merritt’s not especially thrilled about my heroics.”

“She’s angry?”

Madison had just bitten off a mouthful of scone. After she swallowed and chased it with a draw of frozen coffee long enough in duration to induce brain freeze in lesser beings, her voice turned sour and she said, “You tell me. You’re the shrink, right? She hasn’t said a damn word to me since she woke up. She won’t take my calls. I even went to see her once in the hospital and all she did was glare at me. Yeah, she’s grateful. No doubt about that.”

I wondered about the sudden animosity but decided to be reassuring. “People sometimes feel that way initially after a suicide attempt. They believe they still want to die. So at first they treat you like you’re a bad guy for saving them. That will change, believe me. I’ve been there before.”

“With her? She did this before?” She was incredulous, I suspected, not so much that it might be true, but that it might be true and that she didn’t know about it.

“No. With others. I’ve been doing this, being a psychologist, for a while. Unfortunately, I’ve been with a lot of suicidal people.”

Before I finished my sentence I knew I’d lost her; Madison wasn’t paying attention anymore. As I waited for a reaction to what I said, she offered a reluctant wave and a wan smile to someone across the room. She lowered her head, rolled her eyes, and under her breath said, “Dweeb.”

“Excuse me?”

“That guy. He’s so lame. I can’t stand it when he smiles at me like that.”

“Oh.” Madison had just reminded me that I was sitting with someone whose age was on the shy side of seventeen.

As fascinating as a detailed probe of Madison’s social life might have been in other circumstances, I felt a need to try to keep her talking about Merritt. “As I told you on the phone, Madison, I’m hoping to try to learn some things that will better help me understand why Merritt tried to kill herself. Everyone says you were closer to her than anyone else. I hope you can help.”

“Who says that? Who’s everyone?”

She had caught me exaggerating. With an adolescent, I should have known better. “Uh, well, her mother said that, I guess, mostly.”

She looked up at me, smiled, and winked. With definite joy in her tone, she asked, “Merritt’s not talking to you either, is she?”

“I can’t really tell you what she’s saying or not saying. I’m just not allowed to.”

She intertwined her fingers around her sweating frappucino. “I knew it. She’s not talking to anybody, is she? Nobody. This is rich, so rich. What about her stepdad? Is she talking to him?”

“I can’t say.”

“I bet she isn’t. This is sooo cool.”

“What is?”

“Nothing. You don’t know anything, do you?” She scrunched up her nose and smiled, disbelieving, like I had just told her I was giving her free backstage passes for Smashing Pumpkins.

“What do you mean, Madison?”

“Nothing.” The smile endured. “So, what did you want? Why did you want to talk to me?”

“Why did you mention her stepdad in particular? Why him, and not, well, her mom?”

Small head shake. “He’s normal. She’s a star. What did you want?”

Suddenly I was much more interested in what she thought I wanted than in sharing what I really wanted. “Well, what do you think I want?”

“She’s really not talking?”

I shrugged. This adolescent was getting the best of me and I didn’t like it.

“Cool.”

“I’m trying to find out why Merritt might have wanted to kill herself.”

With the straw of her iced coffee already touching her lips, she said, “I guess she was real upset about her sister. I guess that was it.”

She said it without conviction, as if she was guessing at an answer in class, and hoping for some good fortune from the high school gods. “You may be right. It may be that she’s worried about her sister. As a psychologist, though, I find sometimes that it’s too easy to look at some awful event in someone’s life and say that because of X a person has a good reason to kill herself. The hard question to answer, usually, is, ‘Why now?’ See, I don’t know why Merritt did it the day she did it. Why then and not the day before? Or why then, and not two weeks from now? If she was so upset about Chaney, what was different the day she took the pills?”

Her eyes more wary than confused, Madison asked, “What’s X mean? What did you mean when you said X gives somebody a reason to kill herself?”

“It’s just a shorthand way of saying ‘something that might be upsetting her.’ You know, like moving, or changing schools, or Chaney’s illness. That kind of X.”

“It’s like math?”

“I guess.”

Madison shrugged. Mollified by my response-or my apparent ignorance about something else, I wasn’t sure-she again seemed remarkably uninterested in doing anything other than checking out the latest customers who were walking in the door of the coffeehouse.

“She have a boyfriend?”

Madison tried on a facial expression that I interpreted as a mixture of serious disgust and total amusement and said, “Noo. She isn’t there.”

“Trouble with friends?”

“I’m her friend. We’re cool. Were cool before this, anyway.”

“Anyone else she might have had trouble with?”

“Nope.”

“School going okay for her? Problems with teachers or classes?”

“Merritt slides. The teachers like her. And everyone cuts her extra slack now because of Chaney. It’s like a get-out-of-jail-free card for her.”

I thought that Madison sounded almost envious that Merritt had a terminally ill sibling and she didn’t. Before I could figure out a way to respond, someone apparently walked in the door behind me who rated a smile from Madison that was warm enough to reheat my tepid coffee. I was tempted to turn and check to see who had come in, but I didn’t. I guessed it was a male person.

“So, what do you think? What was it that got her to take those pills? You know her better than anyone. You must have a theory.”

“Like I said: Chaney. She hated what was happening to Chaney. The hospitals, the publicity, the hassles, her parents’ being so…”

“So?”

“Whatever.”

I waited. She browsed the room. I wished we were in my nice, boring, nondistracting office. “Had she talked about suicide?”

“No…”