I wouldn’t open it, even with the key.
I sat there for a while, my back to the bed, and when I got tired of that I lay on the floor and looked at the ceiling. I guessed the maid was gone by now; it must have just been her downstairs day or something. I didn’t hear her anymore, but from a couple barks I knew Dobey was still out back on the deck.
I just lay there thinking, the diary still in my hand.
I had all these weird ideas.
I don’t really know where they came from, but after looking in the box, I just sort of had them, and I lay there just trying to add them up.
I didn’t want to read her diary—I mean it.
But maybe I wasn’t very serious about that, because I started looking around the room again—just sort of looking around—trying to think of where she might have hidden it.
The key, I mean.
Of course, I’d already looked everywhere.
In every box and drawer and everywhere else.
So I just sort of skimmed the room, trying to see if there was any place I’d missed.
And then I laughed because I saw something funny.
My mother’s damned book.
It was right there under some papers on Laura’s computer desk, on one of the narrow shelf spaces beside where Laura’s beautiful legs would be when she was sitting in the swivel chair there, doing her homework or something.
I couldn’t see the cover, but I knew I was right just from looking at the way the pages were all worn and stained from being read a million times. I could recognize that.
What was funny is that it was hidden.
I mean, that’s what made me laugh.
Even in her room she’d hidden it, stuffed there in the papers like it was some kind of crazy secret she didn’t want anyone to see.
She knew I wouldn’t see it, because we’d broken up, and even when we were together there wouldn’t have been any chance of my ever spotting it lying around, because she’d never let me come into the house—I told you all about that.
But it was hidden anyways.
I guess it was so private she had to hide it.
Maybe she didn’t want anyone to see it, her mom probably most of all. I kind of had the idea it was something she’d never want her mom to know she had read and liked so much.
I wondered if I should take it and bring it back to my mom. But I knew Laura would notice it was gone, and she wouldn’t know who had taken it, and I didn’t want her to freak out about finding it missing.
Still, I sort of felt like taking a look at it.
So after a minute I pulled myself across the floor and took it out of the papers.
I looked at the cover.
I turned it around and read the back cover for about the million and first time.
God, what a depressing book.
Of course she didn’t want her mom to know she liked it. She would never talk about it with her mom, because it was a book about a girl who had nothing but trouble with her parents, so what good would it do to talk about it?
But she’d talked about it with me.
Well, she tried to.
She tried to talk about it with me, and all I did was kind of go off on her, and then tell her that crazy story about the country club, because I guess I just couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stand hearing her praise the book and relate to it, and even just holding it in my hands made me feel kind of very nervous.
The book really bothered me. I admit it.
I guess it really bothered me to talk about it, even though maybe everybody in the whole world can relate to it because maybe sometimes the lid really does come down, and maybe I really should have read it, because, you know, “everybody in the whole world” I suppose includes me, too, but I’m sorry, I still can’t talk about it, and I just don’t want to ever read it.
Because I can’t accept that.
I mean the thing about the lid.
I mean, maybe the lid’s been down on me my whole life.
Maybe it’s been down on all of us our whole lives, but I can’t accept that.
I hate that.
I mean, if I had a motto, I think it’d be “Ignore the lid.”
And even if I haven’t exactly lived up to that motto, I’ve at least done a pretty good job of pretending the lid isn’t there, because I just can’t stand hearing about such stuff and actually find it kind of incredibly disturbing.
But Laura didn’t mind hearing about it.
She liked hearing about it.
She wanted to talk about it.
But I sort of didn’t let her.
I still had the book in my hand and I hadn’t even moved in a while , but the funny thing is, I was sweating. It was crazy. I was sweating like I’d run around the block, and I was breathing, too, pretty heavily, and I figured I had to calm down. I mean, I really had to calm down.
Because I must admit, even just thinking about the book still made me a little mad at Laura. I mean just for ever even bringing the damn thing up, and I wished my mom had never loaned it to her, and I wished the lady who wrote it had never written it and had just thrown it away; I really couldn’t stand it. And all Laura ever wanted to do was sort of shove it in my face, just like my mom always had, and make me just sort of hear all about it and accept everything it said.
I couldn’t believe I was mad at Laura again, because after seeing her wrecked paintings and all the ripped-up photographs, I felt nothing but sympathy for her, knowing what I now knew, because it was just too sad and depressing, and I’d thought
