Better Than Perfect Read online

  I was seventeen years old and my mother might have just tried to kill herself. How would anything ever make me happy again?

  The hostess asked if she could help me in a way that made me think she’d asked more than once. I snapped to attention and asked if she had the number of a cab company.

  “Island Taxi’s right around the corner, hon. You’re probably better off just going over there rather than calling.” I must have looked like a crazy person, because she offered to get somebody to take me, but I thanked her and said I was okay. She didn’t seem convinced, and she watched me as I headed to the door. I thought maybe there was blood on my tank top, but when I got onto the sidewalk and checked, I didn’t see any.

  The cab dropped me off in front of my house. I paid the man and got out, then stood on the lawn trying to force myself to go inside. I was usually pretty self-disciplined—in swim meets, if the stakes were high enough, I could push myself past the point where my lungs felt like they were going to explode, and even though public speaking terrified me, I was one of the best debaters on the team. But standing on my front lawn, which was damp from the early evening sprinkling it automatically got every other day, I knew there was no way I could take my key out of my bag, put it in the front door of my house, and walk through it.

  Because what was I supposed to do once I got inside my house—clean my mother’s blood off the bathroom floor?

  I took my phone out of my bag even though I wasn’t thinking about calling anyone. Jason’s email was still unopened. I’d gotten it only a few hours earlier, but thinking back to that moment in my hallway when I’d decided to open it after waking my mom was like remembering something that had happened to someone else. Still, I automatically clicked on it and started reading.

  J, I love you and miss you more than I can say. But right now I am digesting an unbelievable meal and I have to admit that it is making the pain of your absence easier to bear . . .

  I hit reply without bothering to finish reading what he wrote.

  Dear Jason, I have something very bad to tell you. Last night or early this morning, my mother might have tried to . . .

  But then I stopped typing. Had she or hadn’t she? I deleted might have tried to and instead wrote swallowed some pills. The words looked bizarre. And anyway, my mother had been swallowing some pills all summer. What she’d done last night was swallow too many pills. But how many? One too many? Two too many? A bottle too many?

  And how was I supposed to put what I’d just seen in an email anyway? I tried to imagine Jason, his stomach full of some insanely delectable meal, sitting on the terrace at the villa the Robinsons had rented and getting an email from me in which I said my mother might or might not have tried to kill herself. There was just no way. I had to call him.

  But he didn’t have service on his cell phone in Europe. Neither did Grace. Mark had service on his work cell phone, but I didn’t have that number. My mom’s phone might have it, though. I reached into my bag for my keys, but once I had them in my hand, I couldn’t bring myself to put them in the front door. Opening the door would mean going into the house. Going into the house would mean going upstairs to get my mother’s phone. Getting my mother’s phone would mean going into her room and seeing . . . everything.

  And anyway, Jason had been sitting on the terrace after dinner hours ago. By now his family was sound asleep. You didn’t call people up in the middle of the night in the middle of their vacation and tell them your mother had taken too many pills. You just didn’t do something like that.

  I put the keys back in my bag and walked across the lawn to the driveway and got into my car. I put my hands on the steering wheel and turned it gently from side to side, like I used to do when I was a little kid and my parents would let me pretend to drive. I wanted to be someplace—anyplace—that wasn’t my house, and I turned the ignition and backed out of the driveway, not even sure where I was going, just desperate to keep moving.

  Deciding to find Sofia at the club happened when I’d already been driving in the opposite direction for almost twenty minutes. There was nobody behind me and nobody coming toward me, so I made an illegal U-turn so sharp my tires squealed in protest and headed toward the Milltown Country Club.

  It was hot in the car, so I rolled the windows up and put the air conditioner on, but that only increased the sensation I had of being trapped, so I lowered the windows and left the air conditioner on. I cranked the volume up on the radio, but I couldn’t find a song I could stand listening to, and I turned the music off. Then it was too quiet in the car, and I turned it back on and plugged my phone in, glancing down at the screen and searching for something to listen to, then looking back up at the road, then back at my phone. I was skimming through a bunch of random titles when I flew past the sign for the Milltown Country Club. Keeping one hand on my phone, I made a hard left into the driveway.

  I didn’t see the driver of the van that had been coming from the opposite direction and that was also making a turn into the Milltown Country Club’s driveway. There was the sound of honking and of rubber screaming against pavement as he spun his van far over to the side of the driveway, narrowly missing one of the enormous oak trees that lined the drive. My stomach hit my throat as I slammed on my brakes and braced my arms against the steering wheel. But instead of the crunch of glass and metal, there was only the sound of a guy cursing his brains out.

  I leaped out of my car. “I’m so sorry,” I said. My voice and my hands were shaking. “That was all my fault. I’m really sorry.”

  “Jesus, woman!” said the driver. He had his head against the back of the seat, so I couldn’t see him until I got up to the side of the van and put my head near the window. He was a little older than I was—maybe in college. He was also odd looking; it was almost as if his face was made up of different people’s faces—nose from one person, lips from another. His eyes were very blue.

  “I’m really sorry,” I said again, squinting into the dark van. “I wasn’t paying attention.”

  “Clearly,” he said.

  “Are you okay?” asked a girl from the passenger seat in lightly accented British English. Like the driver, she had bright blue eyes and black hair, but where he was weird looking and bloated, she was beautiful, her blunt-cut bob accenting sharp cheekbones and a delicate chin.

  “I’m okay,” I said, because it wasn’t like I was going to tell a complete stranger that almost killing myself and two other people was hardly the worst thing that had happened to me all day. “Are you okay?” I asked her. “I’m really sorry.”

  “You’ve got to stop saying that,” said the driver. “It’s getting on my nerves.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Sean, she’s trying to be polite,” said a male voice from inside the van. It had an accent like the girl’s. Hearing another person in the van revealed the magnitude of the accident I’d almost just had. That was three people I’d come close to killing. My legs started to shake.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” asked the girl. “You look a little done in.”

  The side door of the van opened, and a boy got out. He must have been in eighth or ninth grade, and he was holding an electric guitar.

  “Hi,” he said. “You okay?” He had the same eyes as the driver and the passenger, and the same black hair. I’d nearly taken out an entire family with my shitty driving.

  “I’m okay,” I said. “And again . . . I’m really sorry. And I’m sorry for saying sorry!” I added before the guy in the driver’s seat could object.

  I went back to my car. It was lucky no one had tried to enter the club driveway in the past five minutes, since I was stopped directly in the middle of it. There were black skid marks leading up to where I’d stopped and more leading to the van’s tires. Just looking at how close they came before veering apart made my stomach rise up.

  “Drive carefully, would you?” the driver called out to me, and even though it was a harsh thing to say and he said it harshly, there was something in his voice
that might have been concern. He watched me get into my car before pulling back onto the driveway ahead of my car.

  Sitting in the driver’s seat, I could feel my whole body twitching. I would gladly have curled up in a little ball in the backseat and lain there, shaking uncontrollably, until Sofia got off work and drove me home. But I was parked in the middle of the road. And Sofia didn’t even know I was coming to see her. She didn’t know anything.

  At the thought of what I had to tell her, I started shaking harder.

  I wasn’t the kind of person who sat in her car shaking too hard to drive it, and the fact that that was exactly what I was doing started to make me angry. “Get ahold of yourself, Juliet.” I said it firmly, the way my mom had talked to me when I’d wanted to stay in bed all day. “Get. It. Together. Now.”

  A few yards up the driveway, the van stopped, and I had the terrible feeling they’d discovered that something was wrong with their car after all. I gripped my hands into fists and tried to get control of my shaking. “Stop it now, Juliet. This is no big deal. If there’s some kind of problem, all you need is your license and registration.” The sound of my own voice made me feel better. I leaned forward to get the registration out of the glove compartment just as I heard the door of the van slide open. When I sat up, I saw that a guy in a white T-shirt and cargo shorts was jogging toward me. I wondered how many more people were in the van. It was turning out to be some kind of fucking clown car.

  The guy bent down and put his head through the passenger-side window of my car. Sofia complained that because I had Jason, I never noticed how hot other guys were, but this guy was objectively hot. He had the same blue eyes as the other people in the van and the same black hair. His shoulders were broad under his T-shirt. If Sofia had been sitting next to me, she would have texted me He’s hawt.

  He gave me a slightly nervous smile. “My sister thought you might need a hand driving.” Like the girl and the younger boy, he had a British accent. “She said she’s always shaken up after a near miss like that. Which should tell you something about her driving. Do you want me to drive you up to the parking lot?”

  “No, I’m fine,” I said. My voice was clipped; I sounded like my mom when she talked to a pushy waiter.

  Neither of us said anything for a minute. All you could hear was the quiet, except for a sound almost like a moth hitting a screen. When I turned to face the front of the car, I saw that my hand, which was holding the car registration, was shaking so much that the card was flapping against the steering wheel. I could tell that the boy was seeing it also.

  “It’s no trouble for me to drive you,” he said finally.

  “Yeah,” I said after another long pause during which I studied the black skid marks on the asphalt. “Maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad idea.”

  My legs were rubbery, so rubbery I wondered if I could stand up, so I slid over to the passenger seat. The guy waited until I was settled, then walked around the car, opened the door, and got in. He slid the seat back, closed the door, and started the car up the hill. Neither of us said a word.

  “I’m Declan, by the way.”

  “I’m Juliet,” I said. I looked out the window. As we crested the hill, the two rows of trees ended and a wide lawn opened up in front of us, topped by the enormous clubhouse. A green-and-white awning swayed gently over the wide porch. There was the tinkle of piano music that I knew was coming from the lounge just on the other side of the veranda. Politics aside, there was something comforting about being at the Milltown Country Club, and I wanted to wrap it around me like a cashmere sweater.

  In front of us, the van wound around to the side of the building, a route I’d never taken before. The guy driving my car—I’d forgotten his name already—followed it for a few yards, then suddenly slammed the brakes. I jerked forward. “Sorry,” he said. “We’re the band for tonight, so I was going to the service entrance. But there must be a members’ parking lot.”

  “No, I’m not a member,” I said. I purposely didn’t add but my boyfriend is. When Jason and I started going out, I referred to him as my boyfriend about every five seconds. But freshman year, another couple in our group of friends got together, and I had to listen to Bethany say my boyfriend ten thousand times a day. Ever since then, I tried never to say those words. “I’m going to see my friend,” I explained. “She works here. So, I mean, the service entrance is fine.”

  “Great,” he said, driving again. “Maybe you and your friend will come to the show.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so.” I was going to tell Sofia what had happened and then . . . well, I didn’t know what then. But I certainly wasn’t going to sit through a concert.

  The driveway ran between two rows of hedges along the lowest level of the back of the building, a part of the club I’d never seen. I was rubbing my hands against my thighs as if they were sweaty, which they weren’t, and I imagined that the guy was glancing my way and wondering how he’d gotten stuck driving a mentally unstable girl the five hundred yards she was too shaky to drive. When the driveway opened up into the parking lot, he swung my car into a spot next to the van.

  “Here you go,” he said, turning off the car and handing me my keys.

  I took the keys from him, opened the door, and headed for the building, relieved that my legs were holding me up. I’d walked a few feet from the car before I realized I hadn’t even thanked him for the ride.

  He was just closing the door of my car behind him when I got back. “Thanks,” I said, embarrassed by my rudeness.

  “No problem,” he said, and he seemed to mean it.

  “I really appreciate your driving me,” I added.

  “It’s no big deal,” he said.

  There was a loud bang from the far side of the van, and the girl from the passenger seat said to someone I couldn’t see, “Do you have to be such a complete wanker?” In reply, a voice I was sure was the driver’s answered, “Blow me.” Both of them sounded pretty annoyed, but my driver didn’t bother investigating.

  “Look, I don’t know you, but are you sure you’re okay?” he asked.

  “I’m fine,” I said. Immediately, to my complete and utter humiliation, my eyes started to well up.

  He took a step toward me. “Jesus,” he whispered. He patted the pockets of his cargo shorts, and on the third try extracted a couple of napkins. “They’re clean,” he assured me, pressing them into my hand.

  “I’m really . . .” I blew my nose. “I’m really okay.” Since I was still crying, I probably wasn’t making the most convincing case for my okayness.

  “Can I help you find your friend?” he asked.

  I balled up the napkins and stuffed them in my pocket. “I’m just . . . I’ve had a really hard day. I’m sorry that . . . I’m really okay.”

  He studied my face, not rudely but curiously. “Well, okay then,” he said finally. “I hope everything’s . . . okay for you.”

  “Yeah,” I said again. “Thanks.” I suddenly remembered his name. “Thanks, Declan.”

  He gave me a two-fingered salute. “Anytime.”

  Feeling like a total ass for losing it in front of Declan, I headed toward the main house, which rose up over the parking lot like a mountain. There was a sign above the glass-and-wooden door I’d been walking toward that read EMPLOYEES ONLY. I opened it and went inside, where I found myself in a long, low-ceilinged corridor lit by fluorescent lights. It was nothing like the wide, carpeted hallways with their rococo moldings and wall sconces holding faux candles that I knew from upstairs at the club. I passed metal carts piled high with dirty coffee cups, used plates, and crumpled napkins, following the sound of loudly banging pots and pans, and then, pushing through another glass-and-wooden door, I found myself in the enormous kitchen.

  There were at least a dozen people running around, all wearing hairnets and black aprons with elaborate white script Ms on them. At first I didn’t think Sofia was there, but then I spotted her over in a relatively quiet corner, standing in fr
ont of an enormous tray of pastry puffs that she was methodically filling with cream from a pastry bag.

  I crossed the kitchen, half expecting someone to stop me, but everyone was too intent on whatever they were doing to care about who I was. Sofia jumped and spun around when I tapped her on the shoulder.

  “Juliet!” She popped out one of her earbuds. “What are you doing here?”

  Having started bawling when Declan asked me if I was okay, I was surprised that I delivered my news to Sofia without a single tear.

  “My mom’s in the hospital,” I said. “She . . . she swallowed some pills.”

  “Oh my God,” Sofia whispered. She put down the bag of cream she’d been holding and wrapped her arms around me.

  I hugged her back for a long minute, then stepped away. “I’m okay,” I said, even though she hadn’t asked. Suddenly I didn’t want sympathy and I didn’t want to be hugged. “They’re not sure what happened. They won’t know until . . . I don’t know when, actually.” As I realized I had no idea how they were going to figure out what had happened with my mom, I gave a weird laugh, almost like a bark. Were they just going to ask her? Mrs. Newman, you were found passed out on the floor of your bathroom. Did you mean to take too many pills, or was it an accident?

  Sofia watched me with an odd look on her face, waiting for me to explain, but all I said was, “I just . . . I don’t want to go home.”

  “No, of course not.” She started to untie her apron. “We’ll go to my house.”