Sparrow Read online

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part 2

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Part 3

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  For Jasmine, of course.

  White room. White walls. White ceiling. White sheets. White gown. Clear tube dripping who knows what into my arm. Whatever it is, it’s making me stupid. I feel like I’ve been asleep for a week. Maybe I have been. In the hall, a white doctor in a white coat is talking to Mom in a hushed, cold voice.

  “Do you have any idea what might have caused the attempt, Ms. Cooke?”

  “It wasn’t an attempt,” I croak. It barely comes out as a whisper. My mouth tastes like cotton and sandpaper. It’s just as well. It’s not like I could explain what I was attempting to do.

  “No, Doctor, she’s a very happy girl.” The only sign that my mother is in any distress at all are the sunglasses perched on top of her head. They should be in her purse, in their black carrying case with the special cloth.

  “Have you considered therapy for her?”

  “No.” Firm.

  Ugh. I can see Mom going to the secret part of her brain where she’s filed therapy, in a file she’s supposed to be too evolved to have: White Girl Stuff, right there with eating disorders, country music, and vegetarianism. The Cookes don’t do therapy. The Cookes can handle it on their own.

  “Well, I’m afraid that’s the best option for Sparrow. She’s past the obligatory stay for suicide watch, and she hasn’t been responsive to our questions here.”

  Thanks for selling me out, Doc. I wasn’t being unresponsive; it’s just that everyone kept asking me why I’d tried to kill myself. Every time I explained that I didn’t try to kill myself, the doctors, nurses, shrinks, they’d all say, “So, what were you doing on the edge of the roof?” And then I’d have nothing to say. They’d start talking about denial in their horrible, even voices like they knew they were right all along. Unresponsive.

  “We can look into a longer-term facility for her, until she’s cooperative, or we can recommend a therapist and release her to your care.”

  If it’s possible, my mouth goes even drier. The Cookes don’t do this. Don’t need help. Don’t end up in a hospital at fourteen. Please, Mom. Just take me home.

  “I’ll be taking her home, thank you.”

  “Very well. They’ll set up an appointment for her at the desk with Dr. Katz. She’s very good.”

  We take a taxi home, which seems very official. It’s better than an ambulance, but clearly, Mom does not trust me near subway tracks. The ride isn’t more than fifteen minutes, but I wake up in front of our house, my head resting easy on her shoulder, my feet curled up underneath me. It’s the most comfortable I’ve felt in days. I don’t look at her face; if there’s worry on it (of course there’s worry on it), I don’t want to see it right now. I want to be Mom & Me; we’ve ridden in taxis like this since I can remember, my head, her shoulder, her arm around me. Her arm is around me now, but when she feels me stir, she takes it off.

  We live in the top two floors of a brownstone, and I check to see if George, our first-floor tenant, is home. His yellow bike is usually chained to the iron gate, but it’s gone—he’s at work. Where my mother should be. The guilt comes in with the waking up, and through the fog inside me, I feel terrible that I’ve made such a mess. When the taxi stops, I get out as Mom pays. It’s a strange feeling coming home from the hospital; I haven’t done it since I was a baby, of course. My mom tells that story all the time. My tininess, how Aunt Joan and Grandma and Grandpa came and stayed with us off and on for weeks. They said it was to help out; Mom says it was because they just couldn’t get enough of my baby smell and my baby hands and my baby self. She says she named me Sparrow because I was so small and brown, almost breakable, but so strong. Tiny but mighty, she said, that’s my Sparrow.

  It was just me and Mom; it always has been. Don’t look for some sad tale of the father figure I’m missing or how he left when blah, blah, blah. Mom didn’t want a husband; she wanted a baby. So she had one. You know. Sperm-bank style. She picked someone who was tall, skinny, and smart, like her. So, basically, I’ve got a double dose of my mom. I’m not one of those kids who spend a lot of time wondering about who Pop might be. Obviously, I have other things on my mind.

  I look at the brownstone and it’s like I’m seeing it for the first time, even though it was just the other day that I was here, that the sun was shining just like this, that I was bugging Mom for bagel money and trying to get out the door. She handed me five dollars and told me to have a good day, and she watched me walk down the stairs and go out through the gate like she has every single day since I was old enough to walk to school by myself. Now, standing here in the faint February sun, I can hear the same stupid things that we said to each other that morning, that we always say to each other. I’m standing here in a chorus of have a good day you too love you you too do you have money for lunch yeah don’t forget your homework I didn’t I’m working late I know don’t stay up late I won’t love you you too. It feels like years ago. It was Tuesday morning.

  I could sink to the ground right here on the sidewalk. It seems easier to do that than it does to climb up these stairs that I have climbed every single day since I was a baby. I’ve run up these stairs crying, I’ve hopped up them because I was so excited to be home, I’ve jumped from the fourth to the first when my mom wasn’t looking, I’ve sat out here and read for hours, spread out on the bottom two, my mom on the top two, only getting up for more tea.

  Mom appears by my side. “Come on, honey,” she says quietly. She links her arm through mine. I lean my whole weight on her to get up the stairs, like some part of me is broken, which I guess it is. When we get inside, she heads straight for the kitchen. Our kitchen is the best room in the house. The windows go all the way from the ceiling to the floor, we hung a bird feeder on the back porch, and in the mornings when I get up, I fill the feeder, make a cup of tea, and wait for them. They always come. The kitchen is white and blue, kind of like the sky. There’s no table, just a big wooden island in the middle with two stools: one for me and one for her. There’s a dining room with a big table for when Aunt Joan and my cousin, Curtis, come over, but the kitchen is for us. Just two stools at our island. Mom heads straight there and starts making a cup of tea. I sit on my stool, wrapping my legs around the steel ones. I remember when I couldn’t get up on it by myself. She goes to the cabinet and gets my favorite mug, the green one with the black owl staring at you from the natural history museum. I got it during a field trip in second grade. I think I’ve used it every day since then. Other kids have ragged security blankets or a beat-up favorite teddy bear. I have my chipped owl mug from the history museum.

  The red kettle starts to boil, and she pours me a cup of chamomile, pours herself a cup of English Breakfast. That’s when I realize that it’s morning. I look at the empty bird feede
r. I want to get up and fill it, but my legs won’t let me. Maybe later. Definitely later. I don’t want them to think I forgot about them.

  These few moments with Mom sitting next to me, her big red mug—the tea lover’s equivalent of a Big Gulp—and my owl mug, steam, sun through the windows, it feels really close to normal. If it weren’t for the weird blanket of fog and fatigue that’s settled itself on me since the hospital—it’s the drugs they gave me, I think—and the fact that I can’t quite get myself to meet my mother’s gaze, this would seem like a typical Sunday morning at the Cooke house. Except that I’m not in my pajamas and I’ve got a bracelet on my wrist from the hospital. Except that WNYC isn’t playing on the radio. Except that my mom’s not reading the paper; she’s staring at me.

  “What happened?”

  I have no idea how to answer this question.

  “Sparrow, honey, I just want to help. Tell me what’s going on.”

  “Nothing’s going on.” This is true.

  “I just picked you up from the hospital, Sparrow. How can you say that?”

  “They thought I was trying to kill myself. I wasn’t.”

  “Then what were you doing up on that roof?”

  Her voice is rising, not like she’s yelling, like she’s scared. Like she’s trying to reach me through my fog. I look at her. “Mom,” I start. That’s as far as I can get. Mom, let’s go read on the porch. Mom, carry me upstairs and put me in bed. Mom, let’s watch a Law & Order marathon until I fall asleep. But none of that is the answer to the question she has.

  “Sparrow, you can tell me—it’s me. I love you. I love you like I did the day I brought you home from the hospital. I love you like I did Tuesday morning. I love you. Talk to me.”

  I want to. I know that most girls my age have had it with their mothers. The truth is, I don’t have much of anyone else. She’s the person I tell things to. But there is no way to start this conversation. I look at her with wide eyes, see her eyes staring back at me full of love, full of come on you know you can talk to me, full of please tell me you’re okay.

  “I’m okay.”

  “Honey, I just picked you up from the psych ward. I love you. I trust you. But you’re not okay.”

  “I wasn’t trying to kill myself, Mom.”

  “Then what were you trying to do?”

  This could go on for days. I break away from her gaze and stare straight through the window. I’m crying, but the tears won’t come. I just have the lump in my throat, shoulders heaving. My face is completely dry. I walk through the back door onto the porch.

  “Sparrow, come back, we have to talk about this.”

  I close the door behind me. I fill the feeder to the brim and the seeds spill out on the ground. My hands are shaking. I steady myself against the railing, looking out over the damage that February has caused the backyard. The bushes are covered in snow, dirty from George’s dog, Roger. The grill is covered in snow and seems to have nothing to do with the hot dogs and hamburgers we made last summer. The ground is so dark and wet that it seems very unlikely there are actual flowers under there ready to burst through in just a few more weeks.

  I wait. They come. A little stint, a couple of pigeons. They’re all friendly enough, but it’s the yellow-billed cuckoo that gets my attention. I stare right at him, and he stares back. Of course it’s a cuckoo, here to rescue a crazy person. I close my eyes and think takemewithyoutakemewithyoutakemewithyou. Then I’m gone.

  Dr. Katz’s office has magazines that seem like they’ve been collecting dust there for years. They’re mostly boring: People (about people I don’t know) and The New Yorker (which seems to have nothing to do with the city I’ve lived in my whole life). The waiting room is painted some terrible color that needs two words to describe it: off-white, burnt ivory, eggshell. The borders at the top and bottom are lilac. I don’t normally notice these things, but I do today because I am staring at the upper right-hand corner, where a cobweb has gathered above the door that will swing open any minute now and reveal the mysterious Dr. Katz, who, no matter what, is better than a mental hospital. Or at least I hope she is. I am staring at this spot where the egg-ivory-off wall and the lilac trim meet the popcorn ceiling because I can feel Mom’s eyes on me again. She hasn’t stopped looking at me like I’m a stranger, like an alien has taken possession of her baby girl. She is looking at me waiting, waiting for me to explain it away, to go back in time, to fix it, to give her back her perfect daughter who never gave her a moment’s trouble. All that in two big brown eyes that follow me around the house, constantly trying to hide the fact that they are about to drown. I want to fix it. I want it to be easy, like making her a cup of tea when she has a headache, finding her keys when she’s late, doing the clasp of her favorite necklace for her before a big presentation at work. But there is no tea for this. I’m useless, and there she is with those big Help Me eyes, so alarming in a woman like my mother, all polish and smooth edges, never a hair out of place, not even now. I’m scared that if I look into her eyes, something in me will break forever and there will be no fixing it. So I stare at the ceiling. She taps her freshly manicured nails on her BlackBerry case.

  “Sparrow?”

  A woman comes through the door below my spot on the ceiling. I almost laugh, but I’m too nervous, and Mom would be pissed. But I was expecting an old Jewish lady, and she’s anything but that. She’s tall, with light brown skin and a golden afro. She has silver glasses and a sprinkle of freckles across the bridge of her nose. She’s tied her hair back with a purple tie-dye scarf that matches the flowy purple pants she’s wearing. There are a few necklaces under her white T-shirt and gold vest, and they clang a little as she looks into the waiting room. And then I see the high-tops. I guess the sneakers are supposed to put me at ease, make me think I can trust her because she’s young at heart, or not like the other adults I know. Right. I look at Mom as quickly as I can out of the corner of my eye. She’s raised her left eyebrow in surprise.

  “Hi,” I say. We both get up.

  “Come on in,” she says, and then, to Mom, “Ms. Cooke?”

  “Yes,” Mom says, on her way in too. She takes her eyes off me long enough to look at this stranger. Dr. Katz places herself gently between Mom and the door.

  “I’m going to talk to Sparrow for about an hour, and then maybe you and I can talk for a minute.”

  “Of course,” Mom says stiffly. She doesn’t mean it. She means, Get out of my way. She means, Get away from my baby. I hear that hard line in her voice, the same one she gets around new men in the neighborhood, the one that says, Hurt my child and I’ll kill you. That says, Underneath this Burberry coat and silk scarf, I am ferocious. It kills Mom that she has to hand me over to some stranger for help, that there’s something wrong with me that she can’t fix. It kills me to think of her worrying, even for another hour.

  “I’ll be fine, Mom,” I say. I manage a smile. I avoid the Help Me eyes.

  I follow Dr. Katz into her office and she closes the door. There are two armchairs, a little beat-up, like they’ve had a lot of butts plopping into them an hour at a time for years. There’s a small table with a Kleenex box against the wall between the two chairs. Unless I’m allergic to therapy, which seems likely, I don’t think I’ll need Kleenex. I am certainly not about to cry in front of this woman.

  “Have a seat, Sparrow,” she says, indicating the chair facing hers. I’m disappointed; I’d rather have the one facing the window. I sit. She puts her Conversed feet up on a small stool by her seat and leans back into her chair.

  “So, what brings you here today?”

  “My mother.”

  “You didn’t want to come, huh?”

  “No.”

  “So, why did you?”

  “Like I said, my mother brought me.”

  “Why did she bring you?”

  “The doctor said she had to.”

  “Which doctor?”

  “I don’t know his name. Didn’t the people from the hospital tel
l you?”

  “I think hospitals can sometimes miss the point. I’d rather get it from the source.”

  I find a ceiling corner and look there.

  “Why were you in the hospital, Sparrow?”

  I come down from the ceiling long enough to meet her eyes. “They think I tried to kill myself.”

  “But you didn’t?”

  “No.”

  “Why did they think that, then?”

  Answering this question is easy. I go for it. “Because I was on the ledge of the roof at school.”

  “What were you doing up there?”

  Everyone has asked me this question, but there’s something in her voice. Like maybe she doesn’t think she already knows the answer. Like she’s not trying to catch me. It doesn’t matter, though. It’s not like I’m going to tell this total stranger just because she’s wearing high-tops. My eyes find the ceiling again. It’s 3:07. Forty-three minutes to go. I don’t say anything else for the rest of the session. Neither does she.

  Well, I think, we’re off to a great start.

  I sit in the terrible waiting room and try to listen to Dr. Katz’s conversation with Mom. I can’t hear a thing. Which is good, I guess, but I’d certainly like to know what she’s saying. In my head it sounds like

  Your daughter is crazy.

  You’re telling me!

  Does she talk to you?

  No, does she talk to you?

  Not a peep.

  Should we lock her up?

  Probably.

  I’m imagining Dr. Katz calling an ambulance to come get me, teen-sized straitjacket and the works, when my mother comes back out. She doesn’t look like someone who’s planning to cart me off to the hospital; she doesn’t look like she’s hatched a plan. She looks tired. My mother is a problem solver. She’s a person who fixes the things that are wrong. I don’t really understand her job, but from what I can tell, whenever something goes wrong at the bank, she fixes it. I know it’s driving her crazy that she can’t fix me. This time, though, I don’t have to avoid her eyes. She won’t look at me. We take the elevator in silence, walk to the street. I head for the subway. She hails a cab. I hate this.