Sing You Home

VANESSA

I haven’t given much thought to Zoe Baxter until I find her drowning at the bottom of the YMCA pool.

I don’t know who it is, at first. I am swimming my laps at 6:30 A.M.-just about the only exercise I can drag myself out of bed for-and am midstroke doing the crawl when I see a woman slowly floating down to the bottom, with her hair fanning out around her head. Her arms are outstretched, and she doesn’t look like she is sinking as much as just letting go.

I jackknife and dive, grab her hand, and yank her through the water. She starts fighting me as we approach the surface, but by then the adrenaline has kicked in and I haul her out of the pool and kneel over her, dripping on her face as she coughs and rolls to her side. “What the hell,” she gasps, “are you doing?”

“What the hell were you doing?” I reply, and as she sits up, I realize whom I’ve saved. “Zoe?”

It is quiet at the Y. Pre-Christmas, the lap lane occupants have dwindled down to me, a few elderly swimmers, and the occasional physical therapy/rehab patient. Zoe and I are playing out this little scene on the tile edge of the pool without anyone really paying attention.

“I was staring up at the lights,” Zoe says.

“Here’s a news flash: you don’t have to drown to do that.” Now that we’re both out of the water, I’m shivering. I grab my towel and wrap it around my shoulders.

I heard, of course, about the baby. It was horrible, to say the least, to have the guest of honor at a baby shower rushed to the hospital to deliver a stillborn. I wasn’t even planning on going to the shower, but I’d felt bad for her-what kind of woman has so few friends that she has to invite people who’ve contracted her music therapy services? Afterward, naturally, I felt even worse for her. I’d helped her bookkeeper clean up the restaurant, after the ambulance screamed away. There had been little baby-bottle bubble wands at each place setting; and I’d collected them on the way out, figuring that I’d give them back to Zoe at some point in the future. They were still somewhere in my trunk.

I don’t know what to say to her. How are you? seems superfluous. I’m sorry seems even worse.

“You should try it,” Zoe says.

“Suicide?”

“Once a school counselor always a school counselor,” she answers. “I told you, I wasn’t trying to kill myself. Just the opposite, actually. You can feel your heart beat, all the way to your fingers, when you’re down there.”

She slips back into the pool like an otter and looks up at me. Waiting. With a sigh, I throw down my towel and dive back in. I open my eyes underwater and see Zoe sinking to the bottom again, so I mimic her. Twisting onto my back, I look up at the quivery Morse code dashes of the fluorescent lights, and exhale through my nose so that I sink.

My first instinct is to panic-I’ve run out of air, after all. But then my pulse starts beating under my fingernails, in my throat, between my legs. It’s as if my heart has swelled to fill up all the space beneath my skin.

I could see why, for someone who’s lost so much, feeling this full could be a comfort.

When I can’t stand it anymore, I kick to the surface. Zoe splashes up beside me and treads water. “When I was little, I wanted to be a mermaid when I grew up,” she says. “I used to practice by tying my ankles together and swimming in the town pool.”

“What happened?”

“Well, obviously I didn’t become a mermaid.”

“Classic underachiever…”

“It’s never too late, right?” Zoe pulls herself out of the pool and sits on the edge.

“I just don’t know what the job market’s like these days for sirens at sea,” I say. “Now, on the other hand, vampires are absolutely to die for. There’s a huge demand for the undead.”

“It figures.” Zoe sighs. “Just when I’ve rejoined the world of the living.”

I stand up, and hold out a hand to pull Zoe to her feet. “Welcome back,” I say.

Because it is a YMCA, there’s no fancy juice bar, so instead we get coffee at a Dunkin’ Donuts, which are scattered so frequently through Wilmington that you can stand in the doorway of one and spit into the doorway of another. Zoe follows me in her car and parks in the spot beside me. “Quite the license plate,” she says, as I get out of the car.

Mine reads VS-66. It’s a Rhode Island thing to have a low-numbered license plate. There are people who bequeath two- and three-digit plates to relatives in their wills; at one point a former governor made fighting plate-number corruption part of his electoral platform. If you have your initials and a low number-like me-you’re probably a mob boss. I’m not a mob boss, but I know how to get things done. The day I had to register my new car, I brought each of the clerks a six-pack and asked them what they could do for me.

“Friends in high places,” I reply, as we go into the coffee shop. We both order vanilla lattes and sit at a table in the back of the store.

“What time do you have to be at work?” Zoe asks.

“Eight. You?”

“Same.” She takes a sip of her drink. “I’m at the hospital today.”

The mention of that place feels like a net thrown over us, a memory of her being whisked away by ambulance from her own party. I fiddle with the lid of my cup. Even though I counsel kids every day, I am uncomfortable here with her. I’m not sure why I asked her to grab a cup of coffee, in fact. It’s not like we know each other very well.

I had hired Zoe to work with an autistic boy several months ago. He had been in our school district for six years and had never, as far as I knew, said a word to a single teacher. It was his mother who’d heard about music therapy, and asked me to try to find someone local who could work with her son. I am the first to admit I wasn’t expecting much when I met Zoe. She looked a little misplaced, a seventies child who’d been dropped into the new millennium. But within a month, Zoe had the boy playing improvised symphonies with her. The parents thought Zoe was a genius, and my principal thought I was brilliant for finding her.

“Look,” I begin, after a long, weird silence, “I don’t really know what to say about the baby.”

Zoe looks up at me. “No one does.” She traces the edge of her fingertip around the plastic lid of the coffee cup. I think that is just going to be that, and I’m about to look at my wristwatch and exclaim over the time when she speaks again. “There was a death coordinator at the hospital,” she says. “She came into the room-afterward-and asked Max and me about where we wanted the body to go. If we wanted an autopsy. If we knew what kind of coffin we wanted. If we were going with cremation instead. She said we could take him home, too. Bury him, I don’t know, in the backyard.” Zoe looks up at me. “Sometimes I still have nightmares about that. About burying him, and then the snow melting in March, and I’d walk outside and find bones sitting there.” She blots her eyes with a napkin. “I’m sorry. I don’t talk about this. I’ve never talked about this.”

I know why she is opening up to me. It’s the same reason kids come into my office and confess that, after every meal, they make themselves throw up; or cut themselves in the privacy of the shower with a straight-edge razor blade. Sometimes it’s easier to speak to a stranger. The problem is that, once you turn your heart inside out for someone to see, the other person loses her anonymity.

Once, when Zoe was working with the autistic student, I’d observed their session. You have to come into music therapy at the place where the patient is, she explained, and when he arrived she didn’t make eye contact with him or force an interaction. Instead she took out her guitar and started playing and singing to herself. The boy sat down at the piano and began racing his hands over the keys in angry arpeggios. Gradually, every time he paused, she would play an equally forceful chord on her guitar. At first, he didn’t connect what she was doing, and then he began to pause more frequently, waiting for her to musically interact. I realized they were having a conversation: first his sentence, then hers. They just were speaking a different language.

Maybe that was all Zoe Baxter needed-a new method of communication. So she’d stop sinking to the bottoms of pools. So she’d smile.

Full disclosure here: I am the person who buys the broken piece of furniture, sure I can repair it. I used to have a rescued greyhound. I am a pathological fixer, which accounts for my career as a school counselor, since God knows it’s not about the money or job satisfaction. So it’s not really a surprise to me that my immediate instinct, with Zoe Baxter, is to put her back together again.

“Death coordinator,” I say, shaking my head. “And I thought my job sucked.”

Zoe glances up, and then a snort bubbles out of her. She covers her mouth with her hand.

“It’s okay to laugh,” I say gently.

“I feel like it’s not. Like it means none of this mattered to me.” She shakes her head, and suddenly her eyes are full of tears. “I’m sorry. You didn’t come to the Y this morning to listen to this. Some date I am.”

Immediately, I freeze. What does she know? What has she heard?

Why does it matter?

You’d think that by now, at age thirty-four, I’d be less worried about what people think. I suppose it’s just that when you’ve been burned before, you’re less likely to dip a toe into the lake of fire.

“It’s a good thing we ran into each other,” I hear myself say. “I was thinking of calling you.”

Really? I think, wondering where I’m going with this.

“Really?” Zoe replies.

“There’s a kid who’s been suffering from depression,” I say. “She’s been in and out of hospitals, and she’s failing school. I was going to ask you to come in and work with her.” In truth, I haven’t really been thinking of Zoe and her music therapy, at least not in conjunction with Lucy DuBois. But now that I’ve said it, it makes sense. Nothing else has worked for the girl, who’s attempted suicide twice. Her parents-so conservative that they wouldn’t let Lucy talk to a shrink-would just need to be convinced that music therapy isn’t modern voodoo.

Zoe hesitates, but I can tell she’s considering the offer. “Vanessa, I already told you that I don’t need to be rescued.”

“I’m not saving you,” I say. “I’m asking you to save someone else.”

At the time, I think I mean Lucy. I don’t realize I’m talking about me.

When I was growing up in the southern suburbs of Boston, I used to ride my banana bike with glitter streamers up and down the streets of my neighborhood, silently marking the homes of the girls I thought were pretty. At age six, I fully believed that Katie Whittaker, with her sunshine hair and constellation of freckles, would one day marry me and we’d live happily ever after.

I can’t really remember when I realized that wasn’t what all the other girls were thinking, and so I started saying along with the rest of the female second graders that I had a crush on Jared Tischbaum, who was cool enough to play on the travel soccer team and who wore the same jean jacket to school every single day because, once, the actor Robin Williams had touched it in an airport baggage terminal.

I lost my virginity one night in the guest team’s baseball dugout on school grounds with my first boyfriend, Ike. He was sweet and tender and told me I was beautiful-in other words, he did everything right-and yet I remember going home afterward and wondering what all the fuss was about when it came to sex. It had been sweaty and mechanical, and, even though I really did love Ike, something had been missing.

My best friend, Molly, was the person I confided this to. I’d find myself on the phone with her after midnight, dissecting the sinew and skeleton of my relationship with Ike. I’d study with her for a history test and not want to leave. I would make plans to go shopping with her at the mall on Saturday and would breathlessly count down the school days until the weekend came. We’d criticize the shallow girls who started dating guys and no longer had time for their female friends. We vowed to be inseparable.

In October 1998, during my junior year of college, Matthew Shepard-a young, gay University of Wyoming student-was severely beaten and left for dead. I didn’t know Matthew Shepard. I wasn’t a political activist. But my boyfriend at the time and I got on a Greyhound bus and traveled to Laramie to participate in the candlelight vigil at the university. It was when I was surrounded by all those points of light that I could confess what I had been terrified to admit to myself: it could have been me. That I was, and always had been, gay.

And here’s the amazing thing: even after I said it out loud, the world did not stop turning.

I was still a college student majoring in education, with a 3.8 average. I still weighed 121 pounds and preferred chocolate to vanilla and sang with an a cappella group called Son of a Pitch. I swam at the school pool at least twice a week, and I was still much more likely to be found watching Cheers than getting wasted at a frat party. Admitting I was gay changed nothing about who I had been, or who I was going to be.

Part of me worried that I didn’t fit into either camp. I’d never been with a woman, and was afraid that it would be as uneventful for me as fooling around with a guy. What if I wasn’t really gay-just totally, functionally asexual? Plus, there was an added wrinkle to this new social world that I hadn’t considered: the default assumption, when you meet a woman, is that she’s heterosexual (unless you happen to be at an Indigo Girls concert… or a WNBA basketball game). It wasn’t like certain girls sported an L on the forehead, and my gaydar had not yet been finely tuned.

In the end, though, I shouldn’t have worried. The girl who was my lab partner in biochemistry invited me to her dorm room for a study session, and pretty soon we were spending all of our free time together. When I wasn’t with her, I wanted to be. When a professor said something ridiculous or sexist or hilarious, she was the first one I wanted to tell. One Saturday at a football game we shivered in the stands underneath a wool tartan blanket, passing a thermos of hot cocoa laced with Baileys back and forth. The score was close, and during one really important fourth down, she grabbed on to my hand, and even after the touchdown, she didn’t let go. The first time she kissed me, I truly thought I’d had an aneurysm-my pulse was thundering so loud and my senses were exploding. This, I remember thinking, the only word I could hold on to in a sea of feelings.

After that, I could look back with twenty-twenty vision and see that I never had boundaries with my female friends. I wanted to see their baby pictures and listen to their favorite songs and fix my hair the same way they fixed theirs. I would hang up the phone and think of one more thing I had to say. I wouldn’t have defined it as a physical attraction-it was more of an emotional attachment. I could never quite get enough, but I never let myself ask what “enough” really was.

Believe me, being gay is not a choice. No one would choose to make life harder than it has to be, and no matter how confident and comfortable a gay person is, he or she can’t control the thoughts of others. I’ve had people move out of my row in a movie theater if they see me holding hands with a woman-apparently disgusted by our public display of affection when, one row behind us, a teenage couple is practically undressing each other. I’ve had the word DYKE written on my car in spray paint. I’ve had parents request that their child be moved to a different school counselor’s jurisdiction, parents who, when asked for a reason why, say that my “educational philosophy” doesn’t match theirs.

You can argue that it’s a different world now than the one when Matthew Shepard was killed, but there is a subtle difference between tolerance and acceptance. It’s the distance between moving into the cul-de-sac and having your next-door neighbor trust you to keep an eye on her preschool daughter for a few minutes while she runs out to the post office. It’s the chasm between being invited to a colleague’s wedding with your same-sex partner and being able to slow-dance without the other guests whispering.

I remember my mother telling me that, when she was a little girl in Catholic school, the nuns used to hit her left hand every time she wrote with it. Nowadays, if a teacher did that, she’d probably be arrested for child abuse. The optimist in me wants to believe sexuality will eventually become like handwriting: there’s no right way and wrong way to do it. We’re all just wired differently.

It’s also worth noting that, when you meet someone, you never bother to ask if he’s right- or left-handed.

After all: Does it really matter to anyone other than the person holding the pen?

The longest relationship I’ve ever had with a woman is with Rajasi, my hairdresser. Every four weeks I go to her to get my roots dyed blond and my hair trimmed into its shaggy pixie cut. But today Rajasi is furious and punctuating her sentences with angry snips of the scissors. “Um,” I say, squinting at my bangs in the mirror. “Isn’t that a little short?”

“An arranged marriage!” Rajasi says. “Can you believe it? We came here from India twenty years ago. We’re as American as it comes. My parents eat at McDonald’s once a week, for God’s sake.”

“Maybe if you told them-”

A hunk of hair flies past my eyes. “They had my boyfriend over for dinner last Friday,” Rajasi huffs. “Did they honestly think I’d ditch the guy I’ve been dating for three years because some decrepit old Punjabi is willing to give them a bunch of chickens for a dowry?”

“Chickens?” I say. “Really?”

“I don’t know. That’s not the point.” She is still cutting, lost in her rant. “Is it or is it not 2011?” Rajasi says. “Shouldn’t I be allowed to marry whomever I want?”

“Honey,” I reply, “you are preaching to the choir.”

I live in Rhode Island, one of the only states in New England to not have recognized same-sex marriage. For this reason, couples who want to get hitched cross the border into Fall River, Massachusetts. It seems simple enough, but it actually creates a thicket of issues. I have friends, two gay men, who tied the knot in Massachusetts and then, five years later, split up. Their property and assets were all in Rhode Island, where they lived. But because their marriage was never legal in the state, they couldn’t actually get divorced.

Rajasi stops. “And?” she says.

“And what?”

“Here I am going on about my love life when you haven’t mentioned a single thing about yours…”

I laugh. “Rajasi, I have a better chance of hooking up with your Punjabi than anyone else right now. I think my romantic pool has gone bone-dry.”

“You make it sound like you’re sixty,” Rajasi says. “Like you’re going to sit home all weekend crocheting with a hundred cats.”

“Don’t be silly. Cats are much better at cross-stitching. Besides, I have big plans for the weekend. I’m headed to Boston to see a ballet.”

“Isn’t it supposed to snow?”

“Not enough to stop us from going,” I say.

“Us,” Rajasi repeats. “Do tell…”

“She’s just a friend. We’re celebrating her anniversary.”

“Without her husband?”

“It’s a divorce thing,” I say. “I’m trying to get her through a rough spot.”

Zoe and I had become pretty good friends in the weeks since our encounter at the Y. I must have called her first, since I was the one who had her home number. I was going to be picking up a painting from a frame shop near her house, and did she want to meet for lunch? Over deli sandwiches, we talked about the research she was doing on depression and music therapy; I told her about broaching the topic with Lucy’s parents. The next weekend, she won two tickets to a movie preview on a radio giveaway, and asked me if I wanted to go. We began spending time together, and in that bizarre exponential way that new friendships seem to snowball, it grew hard to imagine a time when I didn’t know her.

We’ve talked about how she found out about music therapy (as a kid, she broke her arm and needed a pin put in surgically, and there was a music therapist in the pediatrics wing of the hospital). We’ve talked about her mother (who calls Zoe three times a day, often to discuss something completely unnecessary, like last night’s Anderson Cooper report or what day Christmas falls on three years from now). We’ve talked about Max, his drinking, and the rumor mill that now puts him at the right hand of the pastor of the Eternal Glory Church.

Here’s what I hadn’t expected about Zoe: she was funny. She had a way of looking at the world that was just off-kilter enough to surprise me into laughing:

If someone with multiple personality disorder tries to kill himself, is it attempted homicide?

Isn’t it a little upsetting that doctors call what they do “practice”?

Why are you in a movie but on TV?

Isn’t a smoking section in a restaurant a little like a peeing section in a pool?

We had a lot in common. We’d grown up in households with single parents (her father deceased, mine running off with his secretary); we had always wanted to travel and never had enough money to do it; we both were freaked out by clowns. We had a secret fascination with reality TV. We loved the smell of gasoline, hated the smell of bleach, and wished we knew how to use fondant, like pastry chefs. We preferred white wine to red, extreme cold to extreme heat, and Goobers to Raisinets. We both had no problem using a men’s room at a public venue if the line for the ladies’ room was too long.

Tomorrow would have been her tenth wedding anniversary, and I could tell she was dreading it. Zoe’s mom, Dara, was away in San Diego this weekend at a life coaching conference, so I suggested that we do something Max would never in a million years have wanted to do. Immediately, Zoe picked the ballet at the Wang Theatre in Boston. It was Romeo and Juliet, Prokofiev. Max, she had told me, never could handle classical dance. If he wasn’t remarking on the men’s tights, he was fast asleep.

“Maybe that’s what I should do,” Rajasi muses. “Take this fool my parents are flying in to a place he’ll absolutely detest.” She glances up. “What would a Brahmin hate the most?”

“All-you-can-eat barbecue?” I suggest.

“A heavy metal rave.”

Then we look at each other. “NASCAR,” we say at the same time.

“Well, I’d better go,” I say. “I’m supposed to pick Zoe up in fifteen minutes.”

Rajasi pivots the hairdressing chair toward the mirror again and winces.

When your hairdresser winces, it’s never good. My hair is so short that it sticks up in small, grasslike clumps on the top of my head. Rajasi opens her mouth, and I shoot a dagger look in her direction. “Don’t you dare tell me it’ll grow out…”

“I was going to say the good news is that the military look is in this spring…”

I rub my hands through my hair, trying to mess it up a little, not that it helps. “I would kill you,” I say, “but I actually think you’ll suffer more by being alive to meet the Punjabi guy.”

“See? You’re already starting to like this look. If you didn’t, you’d be too busy crying to make jokes.” She takes the money I hold out to her. “Be careful driving,” Rajasi warns. “It’s already starting to snow.”

“A dusting,” I say, waving good-bye. “No worries.”

Another thing, it turns out, that we have in common: Romeo and Juliet. “It’s always been my favorite Shakespeare play,” Zoe says, once the company has taken its bows and she rejoins me in the sumptuous renovated lobby of the Wang Theatre after a trip to the restroom. “I always wanted a guy to walk up to me and start a conversation that naturally became a sonnet.”

“Max didn’t do that?” I ask, smiling.

She snorts. “Max thought a sonnet was something you ask for in the plumbing section of Home Depot.”

“I once told the head of the English department at school that I liked Romeo and Juliet the best,” I say, “and she told me I was a philistine.”

“What! Why?”

“Because it’s not as complex as King Lear or Hamlet, I guess.”

“But it’s dreamier. It’s everyone’s fantasy, right?”

“To die with your lover?”

Zoe laughs. “No. To die before you start making lists of all the things about him that drive you crazy.”

“Yeah, imagine the sequel, if it had ended differently,” I reply. “Romeo and Juliet are disowned by their families and move into a trailer park. Romeo grows a mullet and becomes addicted to online poker while Juliet has an affair with Friar Lawrence.”

“Who, it turns out,” Zoe adds, “runs a meth lab in his basement.”

“Totally. Why else would he have known what drug to give her in the first place?” I loop my scarf around my neck as we brace ourselves to walk into the cold.

“Now what?” Zoe asks. “You think it’s too late to grab dinner some…” Her voice trails off as we step outside. In the three hours we have been in the theater, the storm has thickened into a blizzard. I cannot see even a foot in front of me, the snow is whirling that fiercely. I start to step into the street, and my shoe sinks into nearly eight inches of accumulation.

“Wow,” I say. “This sort of sucks.”

“Maybe we should wait it out before driving home,” Zoe replies.

A limo driver who’s leaning against his vehicle glances over at us. “Settle in for a nice long wait, then, ladies,” he says. “AccuWeather says we’re getting two feet before this is all over.”

“Sleepover,” Zoe announces. “There are plenty of hotels around-”

“Which cost a fortune-”

“Not if we split the cost of a room.” She shrugs. “Besides. That’s what credit cards are for.” She links her arm through mine and drags me into the wild breath of the storm. On the other side of the street is a CVS. “Toothbrushes, toothpaste, and I need to get some tampons,” she says, as the sliding doors close behind us. “We can get nail polish, too, and curlers, and make each other up and stay up late and talk about boys…”

Not gonna happen, I think. But she is right-to drive home in this would be stupid, reckless.

“I have two words for you,” she says, cajoling. “Room service.”

I hesitate. “I pick the pay-per-view movie?”

“Deal.” Zoe holds out her hand to shake.

There is no real reason for me to fight an impromptu hotel stay. I can afford the luxury of a room for one night, or at least justify it to myself. But all the same, as we check in and carry our CVS bags upstairs, my heart is racing. It’s not that I’ve been dishonest to Zoe by not talking about my sexual orientation, but it hasn’t exactly been a topic of discussion, either. Had she asked, I would have told her the truth. And just because I am a lesbian doesn’t mean that I will ravish any female in close proximity, in spite of what homophobes think. Yet there’s an extra wrinkle here: it would be ludicrous to think that a straight woman would not be able to maintain a platonic friendship with a man… and yet, if she found herself in this situation, she probably wouldn’t be sharing a room with that male buddy.

When I told my mother, finally, that I was gay, the first thing she said was “But you’re so pretty!” as if the two were mutually exclusive. Then she got quiet and went into the kitchen. A few minutes later she came back into the living room and sat down across from me. “When you go to the Y,” she asked, “do you still use the ladies’ locker room?”

“Of course I do,” I said, exasperated. “I’m not a transsexual, Ma.”

“But Vanessa,” she asked, “when you’re in there… do you peek?”

The answer, by the way, is no. I change in a stall, and I spend most of my time in there staring down at the floor. In fact, I probably am more uncomfortable and hyperaware being in there than anyone else would be if she knew the woman in the purple Tyr suit was gay.

But it’s just one more thing I have to worry about that most people never do.

“Oooh,” Zoe says, when she steps into the room. “Swank-o-la!”

It is one of those hotels that is being redone to accommodate the metrosexual businessman, who apparently likes tweedy black comforters, chrome lighting, and margarita mix on the minibar. Zoe opens the curtains and looks down on the Boston Common. Then she takes off her boots and jumps on one of the beds. Finally, she reaches for the CVS bag. “Well,” she says, “I guess I’ll unpack.” She holds out two toothbrushes, one blue and one purple. “Got a preference?”

“Zoe… you know I’m a lesbian, right?”

“I was talking about the toothbrushes,” she says.

“I know.” I run my hand through my ridiculous, spiky hair. “I just… I don’t want you to think I’m hiding anything.”

She sits down across from me on her own bed. “I’m a Pisces.”

“What difference does that make?”

“What difference does it make to me if you’re gay?” Zoe says.

I let out the breath I didn’t realize I have been holding. “Thanks.”

“For what?”

“For… I don’t know. Being who you are, I guess.”

She grins. “Yeah. We Pisces, we’re a special breed.” Rummaging in the pharmacy bag again, she comes out with the box of tampons. “Be right back.”

“You all right?” I ask. “That’s the fifth time you’ve gone to the bathroom this hour.” I reach for the television remote while Zoe’s in the bathroom. There are forty movies playing. “Listen up,” I call out. “Here are our choices…” I recite each title while an Adam Sandler clip plays on endless loud repeat. “I need a comedy,” I say. “Did you ever see the Jennifer Aniston one in theaters?”

Zoe doesn’t answer. I can hear water running.

“Thoughts?” I yell. “Comments?” I flick through the titles again. “I’m going to make an executive decision…” I pause at the Purchase screen, because I don’t want Zoe to miss the beginning of the film. While I wait, I pore through the room service menu. I could practically buy a small car for the cost of a T-bone, and I don’t see why the ice cream is sold only in pints instead of scoops, but it looks decidedly more gourmet than what I might have cooked myself at home.

“Zoe! My stomach is starting to eat its own lining!” I glance at the clock. It’s been ten minutes since I paused the screen, fifteen since she went into the bathroom.

What if the things she said about me aren’t really what she feels? If she’s regretting staying over, if she’s worried I’m going to crawl into her bed in the middle of the night. Getting up, I knock on the bathroom door. “Zoe?” I call out. “Are you okay?”

No answer.

“Zoe?”

Now, I’m getting nervous.

I rattle the knob and yell her name again and then throw all my weight against the door so that the lock pops open.

The faucet is running. The tampon box is unopened. And Zoe is lying unconscious on the floor, her jeans around her ankles, her panties completely drenched in blood.

I ride with Zoe on the short ambulance trip to Brigham and Women’s Hospital. If there is a silver lining in any of this, it’s that being stranded in Boston has put us in spitting distance of some of the best medical facilities in the world. The EMT asks me questions: Is she usually this pale? Has this happened before?

I don’t really know the answer to either question.

By then Zoe has regained consciousness, even if she’s so weak she can’t sit up. “Don’t worry…,” she murmurs. “Happens… a lot.”

Just like that I realize that, no matter how much I think I already know about Zoe Baxter, there is a great deal more I don’t.

While she is examined by a doctor and given a transfusion, I sit and wait. There’s a television playing a Friends rerun, and the hospital is deathly quiet, almost like a ghost town. I wonder if the doctors have all been stranded here by the storm, like us. Finally, a nurse calls for me, and I go into the room where Zoe is lying on the bed with her eyes closed.

“Hey,” I say softly. “How do you feel?”

She swivels her head toward me and glances up at the bag of blood hanging, the transfusion she’s being given. “Vampiric.”

“B positive,” I answer, trying to make a joke, but neither of us smiles. “What did the doctor say?”

“That I should have come to a hospital the last time this happened.”

My eyes widen. “You’ve passed out before from having your period?”

“It’s not really a period. I’m not ovulating, not regularly anyway. I never have. But since the… baby… this is what a period looks like, for me. The doctor did an ultrasound. She said I have a fluffy endometrial stripe.”

I blink at her. “Is that good?”

“No. I need a D & C.” Zoe’s eyes fill with tears. “It’s like a bad flashback.”

I sit down on the edge of the bed. “It’s completely different,” I say, “and you’re going to be fine.”

It is different-not just because a stillborn isn’t involved. The last time Zoe had a health crisis her husband and her mother were at her side. Now, all she’s got nearby is me-and what do I know about taking care of someone other than myself? I don’t have a dog anymore. I don’t even have a goldfish. I killed the orchid my principal bought me for Christmas.

“Vanessa?” she asks. “Can you give me the phone so I can call my mom?”

I nod and take her cell phone out of her purse just as two nurses come in to prep Zoe for her surgery. “I’ll call her for you,” I promise as Zoe is wheeled down the hallway. After a moment I flip open her cell phone.

I can’t help it. It’s a little like being invited to someone’s home for dinner and you go to the bathroom and peek in the medicine cabinet-I scroll through her contacts to see if I can get a better picture of Zoe from the people she knows. Most of the people listed I have never heard of, predictably. Then there are the old staples: AAA, the local pizza place, the numbers of the hospitals and schools where she is contracted.

I find myself wondering, though. Who’s Jane? Alice? Are they friends of hers from college, or professional colleagues? Has she ever mentioned them to me?

Has she ever mentioned me to them?

Max is still listed. I wonder if I should call him. I wonder if Zoe would want me to.

Well, that’s not what she asked. Scrolling up, I find Dara listed, predictably, under MOM.

I dial, but it rolls right into voice mail, and I hang up. I just don’t think it’s right to leave an alarmist message on someone’s phone when she’s three thousand miles away and can’t really do anything to help Zoe right now. I’ll keep trying.

An hour and a half after Zoe is wheeled into surgery, she is brought back to the room. “She’ll be groggy for a while,” the nurse tells me. “But she’s going to be fine.”

I nod and watch the nurse close the door behind her. “Zoe?” I whisper.

She’s fast asleep, drugged, with her eyelashes casting blue shadows on her cheeks. Her hand lies uncurled on top of the cotton blanket, as if she is offering me something I cannot see. Another pint of blood hangs on an IV pole to her left, its contents snaking through the crazy straw tubing into the crook of her elbow.

The last time I was in a hospital, my mother was dying by degrees. Pancreatic cancer was the diagnosis, but it was no secret that her morphine doses grew higher and higher, until the sleep permanently outdistanced the pain. I know Zoe is not my mother, does not have the same illness, and yet there’s something about the way she is lying so still and silent in this bed that makes me feel like I’m living my life over again, reading a chapter that I wish had never been printed.

“Vanessa,” Zoe says, and I jump. She licks her lips, dry and white.

I reach for her hand. It’s the first time I’ve held Zoe’s hand, which feels small, birdlike. There are calluses on the tips of her fingers, from her guitar strings. “I tried your mother. I haven’t been able to reach her. I can leave a message, but I thought maybe-”

“I can’t…,” Zoe murmurs, interrupting.

“You can’t what?” I whisper, leaning closer, straining to hear.

“I can’t believe…”

There are so many things I can’t believe. That people deserve what they get, both bad and good. That one day I’ll live in a world where people are judged by what they do instead of who they are. That happy endings don’t have contingencies and conditions.

“I can’t believe,” Zoe repeats, her voice small enough to slip into my pocket, “that we wasted money on a hotel room…”

I look down at her, to see if she is kidding, but Zoe has already drifted back to sleep.

We’ve come a long way from the days when being gay and being an educator were incompatible, but there’s still a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy in place at my high school. I don’t actively hide my sexual orientation from my colleagues, but I don’t go out of my way to broadcast it, either. I am one of the two adult advisers for the students’ Rainbow Alliance, but the other one-Jack Kumanis-is as straight as they come. He’s got five kids, competes in triathlons, is prone to quoting Fight Club-and he happened to be raised by two moms.

Still, I’m careful. Although most school counselors would think nothing of closing their office doors for a private session with a student, I never do. My door is always just the tiniest bit ajar, so that there can’t be any doubt that whatever is happening is completely legitimate and interruptible.

My job runs the gamut from listening to students who just need to be heard through networking with admissions counselors at colleges so that they put our school on their virtual maps and supporting the kid too shy to find her own voice to logistically juggling the schedules of three hundred students who all want their first-choice English electives. Today I have on my couch Michaela Berrywick’s mother-parent of a ninth grader who just received a B plus in her social studies class. “Mrs. Berrywick,” I say, “this isn’t the end of the world.”

“I don’t think you understand, Ms. Shaw. Michaela has been dying to go to Harvard since she was tiny.”

Somehow I doubt that. No child comes out of the womb planning her high school résumé; that comes courtesy of zealous parenting. When I was in school, the term helicopter parent didn’t even exist. Now parents hover so much that their kids forget how to be kids.

“She can’t let a history teacher with a grudge against her make a permanent blot on her record,” Mrs. Berrywick stresses. “Michaela is more than willing to do any extra credit necessary to get Mr. Levine to reconsider his grading policy…”

“Harvard doesn’t care if Michaela got a B plus in social studies. Harvard wants to know that she spent her freshman year learning more about who she really is. Finding something that she liked doing.”

“Exactly,” Mrs. Berrywick says. “Which is why she joined the SAT study prep class.”

Michaela will not be taking the SATs for another two years. I sigh. “I’ll talk to Mr. Levine,” I say, “but I can’t make any promises.”

Mrs. Berrywick opens her purse and takes out a fifty-dollar bill. “I appreciate you seeing my side of things.”

“I can’t take your money. You can’t buy a better grade for Michaela-”

“I’m not,” the woman interrupts, smiling tightly. “Michaela earned the grade. I’m just… offering my gratitude.”

“Thanks,” I say, pressing the bill back at her. “But I truly can’t accept this.”

She looks me up and down. “No offense,” she whispers, conspiratorial, “but you could use a little wardrobe update.”

I’m thinking of going to Alec Levine and asking him to lower Michaela Berrywick’s grade when I hear someone crying in the outer office. “Excuse me,” I say, certain that it’s the tenth grader I saw an hour ago who was twelve days late for her period, and whose boyfriend had dumped her after they had sex. I grab my box of tissues-school counselors ought to do product endorsements for Kleenex-and walk out.

It’s not the tenth grader, though. It’s Zoe.

“Hey,” she says, and she tries to smile but fails miserably.

It’s been three days since our disastrous trip to Boston. After Zoe’s D & C, I finally got in touch with her mother, who flew home from her conference and met me at Zoe’s place. I’d called Zoe multiple times since then to see how she was feeling, until she finally told me that if I called again and asked her how she was feeling she’d hang up on me. In fact, today she was supposed to go back to work.

“What’s wrong?” I ask, as I lead her into my office.

And close the door.

She wipes her eyes with a tissue. “I don’t get it. I’m not a bad person,” Zoe says, her mouth twisting. “I try to be nice and I compost and I give money to homeless people. I say please and thank you and I floss every day and I volunteer in a soup kitchen at Thanksgiving. I work with people who have Alzheimer’s and depression and who are scarred and I try to give them something good in their day, one little thing to take with them.” She looks up at me. “And what do I get? Infertility. Miscarriages. A stillborn. A goddamned embolism. A divorce.”

“It’s not fair,” I say simply.

“Well, neither’s the phone call I got today. The doctor-the one from Brigham and Women’s? She said they did some tests.” Zoe shakes her head. “I have cancer. Endometrial cancer. And wait-I’m not finished yet-it’s a good thing. They caught it early enough, so I can have a little hysterectomy, and I’ll be just fine and dandy. Isn’t that just fabulous? Shouldn’t I be thanking my lucky stars? I mean, what’s next? An anvil falling on my head from the second story? My landlord evicting me?” She stands up, whirling in a circle. “You can come out now,” she shouts to the walls, the floor, the ceiling. “Whatever shitty version of Candid Camera this is; whoever decided I was this year’s Job-I’m done. I’m done. I’m-”

I stand up and hug her tight, cutting off whatever she was about to say. Zoe freezes for a moment, and then she starts sobbing against my silk blouse. “Zoe,” I say. “I’m-”

“Don’t you dare,” Zoe interrupts. “Don’t you dare tell me you’re sorry.”

“I’m not,” I say, straight-faced. “I mean, if you look at sheer probability-the fact that all these things are happening to you means it’s much more likely I’m safe. I’m positively charmed, in fact. You’re good luck for me.”

Zoe blinks, stunned, and then a laugh barks out of her. “I can’t believe you said that.”

“I can’t believe I made you laugh, when you clearly ought to be railing against the heavens or renouncing God or something. Let me tell you, Zoe, you make a lousy cancer sufferer.”

Another laugh. “I have cancer,” she says, incredulous. “I actually have cancer.”

“Maybe you can get gangrene, too, before sunset.”

“I wouldn’t want to be greedy,” Zoe answers. “I mean, surely someone else needs a plague of locusts or the swine flu-”

“Termites!” I add. “Dry rot!”

“Gingivitis…”

“A leaky muffler,” I say.

Zoe pauses. “Metaphorically,” she points out, “that was the problem in the first place.”

This makes us laugh even harder, so much so that the guidance department secretary pokes her head in to make sure we’re all right. By then, my eyes are tearing, my abdominal muscles actually ache. “I need a hysterectomy,” Zoe says, bent over to catch her breath, “and I can’t stop laughing. What’s wrong with me?”

I stare at her as soberly as I can. “Well… I believe you have cancer,” I say.

When I came out to Teddy, my college boyfriend, at the Matthew Shepard vigil, the most remarkable thing happened: he came out to me, too. There we were, two gays who had tried to act as straight as possible for the rest of the college community-and now, happily, were coming clean. We still cuddled and hugged but with the utter relief of knowing that we no longer had to try (unsuccessfully) to arouse each other, or to fake attraction. (When I’ve told heterosexual people in the past that I had a boyfriend in college, slept with him, the whole nine yards, they are always surprised. But just because I’m gay doesn’t mean I can’t have sex with a guy-only that it’s not at the top of my to-do list.) In the wake of our newfound same-sexual awakening, Teddy and I went to Provincetown over Memorial Day weekend. We ogled drag queens racing down Commercial Street in high heels and bronze-oiled men in butt floss walking the beach. We went to a tea dance at the Boatslip and afterward went to the PiedBar-where I’d never seen so many lesbians in one room in my life. That weekend, it was as if the world had been turned upside down, and straight folks were the anomaly rather than the norm. And yet, I didn’t feel like I fit in there, either. I have never been one of those gay people who hangs out exclusively with gay people, or parties all the time, or lives a wild and decadent lifestyle. I’m not butch. I wouldn’t know how to ride a motorcycle if my life depended on it. No, I’m much more likely to be in my pajamas by 8:00 P.M., watching reruns of House on the USA network. Which means that the women I run across most of the time are more likely to be straight than to be lesbian.

Everyone who’s gay has had the unfortunate circumstance of falling for someone who’s not. The first time it happens, you think: I can change her. I know her better than she knows herself. And invariably, you are left with a broken relationship and an even more broken heart. The straight equivalent, in a way, is the woman who’s sure that the guy she loves-the one who beats her every night-will eventually stop. The bottom line in both cases is that people don’t change; that no matter how charming you are and how fiercely you love, you cannot turn a person into someone she’s not.

I had crushes on straight girls my whole childhood, even if I couldn’t put a name to the feeling-but my first grown-up mistake was Janine Durfee, who played first base on a college intramural softball team. I knew she had a boyfriend-one who was continuously cheating on her. One night when she came to my dorm room in tears because she’d walked in on him with someone else, I invited her inside while she calmed down. Somehow listening to her cry morphed into me kissing her and ten phenomenal days as a couple before she went back to the guy who treated her like dirt. It was fun, Vanessa, she said apologetically. It’s just not me.

It’s important to point out that I have plenty of straight friends, women I’ve never been attracted to but still like to meet for lunch, movies, whatever. But over the years there have been a few who made a tiny flame fan inside me, a what if. They are the ones I have to actively keep my distance from, because I’m not a masochist. There are only so many times you can hear: It’s not you. It’s me.

I am not a proving ground. I don’t want to be the experiment. I have no interest in seeing if my personal charms can overpower the wiring of someone’s brain.

I believe I was born the way I am, and so I have to believe that someone straight is born that way, too. But I also believe you fall in love with a person; it stands to reason sometimes that could be a guy, and sometimes that could be a girl. I’ve often asked myself what I’d do if the greatest love of my life turned out to be male. Are you attracted to someone because of who they are, or what they are?

I don’t know. But I do know that I’m at the stage of my life where I want forever, not right now.

I know that the first person I kissed won’t be nearly as important as the last person I kiss.

And I also know better than to dream about things that can’t happen.

I am sitting at my desk getting nothing done.

Every two minutes I check the clock in the corner of the computer. It’s 12:45, which means that Zoe should be long out of surgery.

Her mom is at the hospital. I thought about going there, too, but didn’t know if that would seem weird. It’s not like Zoe asked me to come, after all. And I didn’t want to impose, if she just felt like being alone with her mom.

But I wonder if the reason she didn’t ask is because she didn’t want me to feel obligated to come.

Which I wouldn’t have, at all.

12:46.

Last weekend Zoe and I had gone to the art museum at RISD. The current exhibition was an empty room, with cardboard boxes on the perimeter. I’d sat down on one and been shooed out by a museum guard before realizing that I was inadvertently making myself part of the art. “Maybe I’m a philistine,” I had said, “but I like my art on canvas.”

“Blame Duchamp,” Zoe had answered. “The guy took a urinal, signed it, and put it on display in 1917 as a work of art called Fountain.”

“You’re kidding…”

“No,” Zoe had said. “It was recently voted the most influential art by, like, five hundred experts.”

“I suppose that’s because you’re supposed to realize anything can be art-like a urinal or a cardboard box-if you stick it in a museum?”

“Yes. Which is why,” Zoe had said, straight-faced, “I’m donating my uterus to RISD.”

“Make sure you have cardboard boxes, too. And a window. Then it can be called Womb with a View.”

She had laughed, a little wistfully. “More like Empty Womb,” Zoe said, and before she got tangled in her own thoughts, I had pulled her down the street to a place where they make the most amazing lattes, with foam designs on top that truly are art.

12:50.

I wonder if Dara will call me when Zoe’s out of surgery. I mean, it’s perfectly normal that I’d want to make sure she sailed through it. I tell myself that just because I haven’t heard from her doesn’t mean anything’s wrong.

I am the kind of person who imagines the worst. When friends fly somewhere, I check the arrivals online, just to make sure there wasn’t a crash. When I go out of town, I unplug all my appliances in case there is a power surge.

On my computer browser, I pull up the main page of the hospital where Zoe’s having her surgery. I type in the words “laparoscopic hysterectomy” on Google and look on the tab for a list of possible complications.

When the phone rings I pounce on it. “Hello?”

But it’s not Dara, and it’s not Zoe. The voice is tiny, so faint that it’s gone before it even registers. “Just calling to say good-bye,” Lucy DuBois murmurs.

It’s the girl-a junior-whom I mentioned to Zoe weeks ago, the one who has suffered from depression for some time now. This isn’t the first time she’s called me in the middle of a crisis.

But it’s the first time she’s sounded like this. Like she’s underwater and sinking fast.

“Lucy?” I yell into the phone. “Where are you?” In the background, I hear a train whistle, and what sounds like church bells.

“Tell the world,” Lucy slurs, “that I said fuck you.”

I grab the daily attendance sheet, where, prophetically, Lucy DuBois has already been marked absent.

It’s a pretty remarkable thing, to save someone’s life.

Based on the train whistle and the bells I heard, the police were able to focus their search near an old wooden bridge that backs up against a specific Catholic church with a 1:00 P.M. Mass. Lucy was found lying under a trestle with a liter of Gatorade and an empty bottle of Tylenol beside her.

I met her mother at the hospital. Now, after being given an activated charcoal solution to drink, Lucy has been brought up to the inpatient psych ward on suicide watch. It remains to be seen how much damage she’s done to her liver and kidneys.

Sandra DuBois sits beside me on a chair in the waiting room. “They need to keep her under observation for a few days,” she says, and she forces herself to meet my eye. “Ms. Shaw, I don’t know how to thank you.”

“Please, it’s Vanessa,” I say. “And I do: Let me help your daughter.”

I have tried, for the past month, to convince Lucy’s parents that music therapy is a valid scientific tool to try to break through to their increasingly isolated daughter. So far, I haven’t gotten them to agree. Sandra and her husband are heavily involved in the Eternal Glory Church-and they don’t treat mental illness on a par with physical illness. If Lucy was diagnosed with appendicitis, they would understand the need for treatment. But depression, to them, is something a good night’s sleep and a Bible study meeting can cure.

I kind of wonder how many suicide attempts it will take before that changes.

“My husband doesn’t believe in psychiatrists…”

“So you’ve told me.” He’s not even here, in spite of Lucy’s close call-he is traveling for business, apparently. “Your husband wouldn’t necessarily have to know. We could keep this a secret, just between you and me.”

She shakes her head. “I don’t really see how singing songs can make a difference-”

“Make a joyful noise unto the Lord,” I quote, and she blinks at me, as if I have finally spoken her language. “Look, Mrs. DuBois. I don’t know what will help Lucy, but whatever you and I have done so far doesn’t seem to be working. And you might have a whole congregation praying for your daughter, but if I were in your shoes, I’d have a backup plan just in case.”

The woman’s nostrils flare, and I’m certain that I’ve crossed that unwritten line where professionalism and personal belief bleed together. “This music therapist,” Sandra says finally, “she’s worked with adolescents before?”

“Yes.” I hesitate. “She is a friend of mine.”

“But is she a good Christian?”

I realize I have no idea what religious affiliation, if any, Zoe is. If she asked for a priest at the hospital, or even checked off a box on her intake form for any given denomination. Stumped, I watch as Sandra DuBois stands up and starts down the hall, toward Lucy.

And then I remember Max. “I believe she has relatives who attend your church,” I call out.

Lucy’s mother hesitates. Then, before she turns the corner, she looks back at me, and nods.

On the first day I visited Zoe, she was unconscious. Dara and I played gin rummy, and she asked me probing questions about my childhood before offering to read the dregs of my green tea.

On the second day I visited Zoe, I brought a flower that I’d made by sticking three dozen guitar picks into a piece of floral foam in the shape of a daisy. And let me just say I am not crafty, and in fact have a gag reaction when confronted by a glue gun or crochet hook.

On the third day, she is waiting for me at the front door. “Kidnap me,” she begs. “Please.”

I look over her shoulder, toward the kitchen, where I can hear Dara banging pots and pans for dinner preparations. “Seriously, Vanessa. There is only so much conversation about the positive effects of copper bracelets on a body that a normal human can take.”

“She’s going to kill me,” I murmur.

“No,” Zoe says. “She’s going to kill me.”

“You’re not even supposed to be walking…”

“The doctor didn’t have any restrictions against going for a little ride. Fresh air,” she says. “You’ve got a convertible…”

“It’s January,” I point out.

Still, I know that I’m going to do what she asks; Zoe could probably convince me that it’s a fantastic idea to take a vacation to Antarctica in the middle of winter. Hell, I’d probably book a ticket, if she was going, too.

She directs me to a golf course that is covered in snow, a local haunt for elementary school kids who drag their inflatable tubes up the hill and then grab each other’s legs and arms before sledding down, linked like atoms in a giant molecule. Zoe rolls down the window, so that we can hear their voices.

Man, that was awesome.

You almost hit that tree!

Did you see how much air I got on that jump?

Next time, I get to go first.

“Do you remember,” I ask, “when the most tragic part of your day was finding out that the cafeteria was serving meat loaf for hot lunch?”

“Or what it felt like to wake up and find out it was a snow day?”

“Actually,” I admit, “I still get to do that.”

Zoe watches the kids make another run. “When I was in the hospital, I had a dream about a little girl. We were on a Flexible Flyer and I was holding her in front of me. It was the first time she’d ever been sledding. It was so, so real. I mean, my eyes were tearing up because of the wind, and my cheeks were chapped, and that little girl-I could smell the shampoo in her hair. I could feel her heart beating.”

So this is why she directed me to the hill, why she is watching these children as if she’s going to be tested later on their features. “I’m guessing she wasn’t someone you knew?”

“No. And now I never will.”

“Zoe-” I put my hand on her arm.

“I always wanted to be a mother,” she says. “I thought it was because I wanted to read bedtime stories or see my child singing in the school chorus or shop for her prom dress-you know, the things I remember making my own mom so happy. But the real reason turned out to be selfish. I wanted someone who would grow up to be my anchor, you know?” she says. “The one who calls every day to check in. The one who runs out to the pharmacy in the middle of the night if you’re sick. The one who misses you, when you’re away. The one who has to love you, no matter what.”

I could be that person.

It hits me like a hurricane: the realization that what I’ve labeled friendship is-on my end, anyway-more than that. And the understanding that what I want from Zoe is something I will never have.

I’ve been here before, so I know how to act, how to pretend. After all, I’d much rather have a piece of her than nothing at all.

So I move away from Zoe, letting my arm drop, intentionally putting space between us. “Well,” I say, forcing a smile. “I guess you’re stuck with me.”