Better than Perfect. Melissa Kantor

didn’t end until after ten, and the last thing I felt like doing was driving home. I texted my mom that I wanted to stay, and to my surprise, she texted right back saying that was fine and telling me to have a good night.

      Apparently, I’d been wrong about it being a Bad Day.

      In the morning, Sofia and I took our practice SAT, and then we went to Bookers for coffee. While we were waiting for our lattes, my dad texted to ask how the test went, and I told him I thought I’d done better on the math section than I’d been doing, and he said that was great and he’d see me Wednesday for dinner. My parents had both been really worried when I got such bad SAT scores in June, like it had never occurred to them that their splitting up might have ramifications besides my dad’s needing to inform everyone of his change of address. Suddenly my father had started calling me all the time and asking how I was feeling (which he’d never done when he was living at home and his work schedule meant we sometimes went days without seeing each other). He’d always asked about my practice SATs, though, so it wasn’t like that was new. What was new was that now when he asked if they’d gone up, he’d tell me how proud he was of me and how impressed he was that I was working so hard. I think he was scared that if he didn’t encourage me, I’d bomb the test and he’d have to tell all his friends how his son went to Yale and his daughter went to community college.

      Sofia had to go to work at three. She was the assistant to the under–pastry chef at the Milltown Country Club. Jason and his family were members, and before we’d gotten too busy on weekends with extracurricular stuff, I’d gone a bunch of times as his guest, but I’d never played on the golf course, which overlooked the Long Island Sound and was what the club was famous for. Still, I’d always loved how you just signed for things you ordered. When I was younger, I’d begged my parents to join even though neither of them played golf and we belonged to a club with tennis courts and a pool that was closer to our house. Now that I was older and doing things like working with Children United (albeit ineffectively) for the right of girls in rural Pakistan to go to school, I wasn’t so sure I’d groove on the club. Plus Sofia said that when you were an employee, you found out what a fascist state the place really was.

      When I pulled into the driveway, I saw that the shades were down in my mother’s bedroom. We were having another Bad Day.

      “Mom!” I walked through the first floor, calling for her, but she didn’t answer. I felt myself growing irritated. What had happened to the mother who made me go to school in fourth grade when Sarah Williams and Lucy Broder had kicked me out of the popular clique and I’d tried to convince my parents I was sick so I wouldn’t have to face any of my now-ex-friends? Hiding doesn’t help anything, my mom had said, snapping up my shades and getting clothes out of my drawers. Your problems will still be there when you come out, so you might as well face them and get it over with.

      All I’d wanted was one lousy mental-health day, and she’d forced me to get dressed, eat breakfast, and go to school.

      Meanwhile, here she was taking a mental-health season. What did she think, that if she stayed in bed long enough my father would realize he’d made a terrible mistake and move back home?

      I got to the top of the stairs and flipped on the lights. When I saw that her door was closed, I got even more annoyed. My mom had a beautiful house, plenty of money. Food on the table. Two degrees from Harvard—where she’d gone as an undergraduate and for business school. All over the world were women who would kill to be in her position. My phone buzzed with an email. Since it was almost four o’clock in New York, I knew it was from Jason. Every night, at ten o’clock his time, right after his family went to dinner, he sent me an email. I wanted to open it immediately, but I forced myself to wait.

      Reading it would be my reward for getting my mother out of bed.

      “Mom!” I pushed open the door. It took a minute for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, and when they did, I saw that her bed was unmade and empty. “Mom?” I looked around the room—the door to the bathroom was closed. Could she possibly be taking a bath? My mother loved baths, which she called the greatest luxury of the civilized world. Personally, I couldn’t think of anything more boring than taking a bath. Sometimes I even got bored in the shower. But if it cheered her up, who was I to complain?

      “We went to Bookers, and I got cherry tomatoes at the farmers’ market,” I called through the bathroom door. “Sofia’s mom told me how to make this awesome tomato salad I had at their house.” As I talked, I straightened up my mother’s night table, glad that there were fewer pill bottles there than I remembered seeing yesterday. I hated how many pills she’d been taking lately. As I crossed to the bathroom door, I picked up her robe from the floor.

      “Mom?” I knocked at the door. “Does that sound good to you? Tomato salad?”

      There still wasn’t an answer. My mom had a radio in the bathroom, and sometimes she listened to music while she took a bath, but I couldn’t hear any music playing. I knocked again. “Mom!” I shouted.

      The only sound on the other side of the door was silence, and suddenly I felt uneasy. “Mom?” I snapped my knuckle against the wooden door. For no good reason, my heart started beating very fast, and I felt light-headed, as if there weren’t enough oxygen in the room. “Mom!” There was still no answer, and I knocked harder, hard enough that my knuckle stung. I dropped the robe onto the floor and put my hand on the knob. To my relief, it turned easily in my hand, and as I pushed the door open, I thought of how stupid I’d been to be so scared and how my mom was probably out of the house and had left the bathroom door closed and here I’d been yelling at her and freaking myself out when she wasn’t even there.

      And then the door was open and I was looking at her body lying on the floor in a T-shirt and underwear, her hand and arm smeared with blood, blue pills scattered like drops of rain across the white tile floor.

      

      The emergency waiting room was freezing cold. I shivered in my tank top and jean shorts, totally underdressed for the over-air-conditioned hospital. All around me, people slouched in their plastic chairs; it was impossible to tell who was really ill and who was just sick with waiting. The ambulance driver had told me to go to the desk and fill out paperwork, but I hadn’t been able to answer any of the questions on the form. Even looking at the blank line under date of birth left me confused. March twenty-second. I wrote in the numbers: 3. 22. But what was the year? My mother was how old? She was forty-eight. Wait. She was forty-nine. No. Forty-eight. My father was forty-nine. My mother was forty-eight. So what year was she born? I tried to subtract forty-eight from the current year, but I kept losing track of the numbers. Carry the one, I thought to myself, and then the one would disappear and all I could see were the paramedics pumping my mother’s chest and shooting her full of something and sitting in the ambulance next to her still, still body and the woman asking me who to call, who to call and me just staring at her and thinking, No one. There’s no one to call. Because my brother was camping and was I seriously going to call my father and my mother would never forgive me if any of her friends saw her now and my grandparents were too old to be able to help. Finally I told her to call my aunt in Oregon because my aunt was someone who always knew what to do.

      “Juliet Newman?” My head shot up. A woman with long, braided hair extensions was surveying the room. “Juliet Newman?”

      “Here!” I shouted a little too loudly. A few heads turned in my direction, but most people were too caught up in their own troubles to worry about mine. I made my way down the aisle to the woman.

      “Hello, Juliet. I’m Jordyn Phillips. I’m the social worker. I was just with your mother.” She put her hand on my arm gently.

      My mother was dead. That was the only reason she was holding my arm the way she was: because my mother had died. If I hadn’t slept at Sofia’s, my mother would be alive, but now she was dead. The floor dropped out from under me, and I could feel