PAPER DOROTHY

(Age Fifteen)

Mom was still unconscious when the ambulance arrived.

In the hospital they pumped her stomach, which would get rid of some of the alcohol, but wouldn’t help with any medication that was already in her bloodstream.

All we could do was wait. The substances would work their way through, and she would be fine, or not. I had cuts on my legs and arms, and blood on my clothing, and one of the nurses was kind enough to bandage me up, but I hardly noticed it happening.

The waiting gutted me.

Those were some of the darkest, most frightening hours of my life to that point. I could not see there being life past her death. If she died, I would die too. I felt like I was dying already.

And I ran through, over and over, what I could have done differently, and tortured myself with the idea that this was my fault for doing the play, for letting myself get so distracted with my own happiness that she’d walked to the edge and been standing there, and I hadn’t noticed.

Finally, in the early hours of the morning, she woke.

She woke like nothing had happened—sharp and waspish and insistent on getting up and out of bed. She literally pulled the IV out of her arm, and marched/hobbled out of her room. Andreas had to pick her up and carry her back. But they couldn’t legally keep her in the hospital now that she was lucid.

“But you overdosed,” I said, almost shouting. “You almost died!”

“Don’t be absurd,” she snapped. “You two are acting like drama queens.”

I opened my mouth, then shut it again, at a loss for words.

By ten in the morning we were back home, where she refused to go to bed and instead zoomed around, quarterbacking the cleanup of the mess in her room, even going so far as to scold me for damaging the door and breaking the window. We stripped the bed, and Andreas cleaned up the broken glass and put a temporary cover on the window.

“Insurance is not going to cover that, you know,” she said.

“Insurance wouldn’t have helped me much if you had died, either,” I said sullenly.

“Enough with this subject,” she said, but then she started to tremble, and her face turned red, and a single tear made its way down her cheek.

“Oh, Mom.” I melted instantly, and rushed to put my arms around her. “Mom, Mom . . . shhh . . . it’s okay . . .”

She was shuddering, silently sobbing, clutching me close.

“Margot-Sophia Lalonde should never be so foolish, so weak,” she said. “Promise me you will never tell.”

“Sure, sure . . .”

“No!” She pulled back to look me in the face, holding my shoulders. “Not ‘sure, sure.’ Never. Tell. You must promise.”

“Fine, I promise. According to you there’s nothing to tell anyway.”

It was late afternoon and we’d just ordered takeout when the landline rang. Only then, as it was ringing and I realized my phone had been dead for hours, did I see the time and realize . . .

Oh noooooooooooooo . . .

I was supposed to be onstage in twenty minutes.

It was Isaac, of course, calling me in his official role as stage manager.

“I can’t come,” I told him.

“What?”

“Look, Autumn probably knows my part. You’ll have to work it out.”

“Ingrid, are you kidding me? We can’t do this without you. And half the audience is already here. What’s going on?”

“I can’t do the show. Please . . .” Tears were streaming down my face now, but I swallowed, trying to sound normal. “Please apologize for me. . . .”

And then suddenly Margot-Sophia grabbed the phone.

“This is Ingrid’s mother,” she said. “Please forgive my daughter for frightening you. Of course she will be there . . . Yes. No, this was simply a misunderstanding. Ingrid will be there. Thank you. Good-bye, young man.”

She hit End and put down the phone.

“Mom, I can’t leave you. And I can’t go out there and . . . sing about rainbows right now.”

“Are you such a coward?”

“What?”

“You have a bond of trust with your audience. No matter what pain you’re in, no matter what is happening in your life, you must not break that trust, ever. The golden rule is that you show up. Always.”

“Mom, you just—”

“I just nothing! When you are performing, you show up. Unless you are dead, you show up. You are not free to indulge in cowardly emotional weakness when you make a commitment like this. You must be strong. I certainly don’t want you here, sniveling and watching my every move. I am fine. I will not be fine, though, if you don’t go.”

“Ingrid has had a very difficult time,” Andreas said. “She may well be in shock . . . .”

Margot-Sophia waved him off, her gaze both fiery and empathetic, somehow. Because she could do both at once, even less than twenty-four hours after overdosing.

Then she pulled away, marched up to her bedroom, and came back in a fabulous electric-blue dress, flats, and lipstick.

“I for one have paid for a ticket, and I expect to get my money’s worth,” she announced, a slight quaver evident in her voice, but with her chin up. “And I want to see my talented daughter perform. Andreas, my love, get the car.”

Somehow I did it. I couldn’t tell if it was good or bad, and I don’t know what I did differently, but people cried during “Over the Rainbow.”

Not me, though. Inside me was an ocean and I had to funnel it through a straw. This took everything I had—it took even what I didn’t have. Margot-Sophia was out there, and she expected me to do it, and so I got it done.

At the final curtain call, there were flowers, tears, congratulations all around. Backstage, after, was gleeful pandemonium. People wanted me to celebrate, but I was not who I’d been yesterday, or the day before that.

It felt like that girl had died. Like Dorothy before and after the tornado, but worse. So much worse, because I didn’t feel plucky and brave and certain and strong. I couldn’t go back to Kansas, either.

I was like a paper doll, or a bullet-riddled target practice figure, on my feet, standing at the closing-night party only because I didn’t know what else to do.

Andreas and Mom were waiting for me—together at least—and so I didn’t stay long.

Isaac intercepted me at the dressing room door, on my way out.

“You’re going?”

“Yup.” I had an armload of flowers.

“Not staying?”

“Going means not staying last I checked.”

“Ingrid, please . . .”

“If I want a ride home, I have to go now.”

“What happened to your hands?” (My hands were discreetly bandaged, and Isaac was the only person to mention it.) “And . . . what happened? Something happened.”

I stared at him, then shook my head.

“Ingrid . . . we need to talk. I need to explain to you . . . about Autumn and—”

“I don’t care about Autumn right now,” I said, my self-control almost at an end. “And I don’t want to talk to you. I can’t.”

I was about to start bawling right there in the dressing room, and everyone was going to think it was about him, but really I just didn’t have one more iota of energy to give to Isaac at that moment, or to anything else. Maybe I’d overreacted about Autumn, though I didn’t think so, and in normal circumstances we’d have been able to work it out. But not now. Even if I loved him, which maybe I had. In fact, in that moment, I knew I had. That only made everything worse, and more impossible.

I was Paper Dorothy. Flimsy, and full of holes, barely standing.

“Forget it, Isaac,” I said, and pushed past him, jaws tight and lips pressed together to keep me from crying. “Good-bye.”