Party Girl_ A Novel - Anna David [49]
My overwhelming feeling is one of disappointment. Why, oh why, hadn’t the mixture of coke and Ambien and alcohol and K conspired to kill me? Why hadn’t I been one of the lucky ones who got taken away accidentally, who never had to live on in people’s memories as a “suicide” but who was relieved of all her problems just as instantaneously as one? I know that these are incredibly depressing thoughts to be having and I want to cry over them, but I feel like that, too, probably wouldn’t be worth the effort.
And then, just as suddenly as I’d felt alert, I become incredibly exhausted. I feel the way I would if I were watching a movie late at night and really wanted to see what was going to happen next but had to surrender to fatigue, all the while knowing that I was never going to find out how the movie ended.
Later that day, Mom and Dad show up with a man who seems to be about Mom’s height (five feet) and introduces himself as Dr. Ronald Rand. By this time, not only am I fully conscious and moving around the room, but I’ve also been briefed on the recent turn of events, and they’re neither pretty nor surprising. Essentially, after I passed out for the final time by the Dumpsters, one of the valet parkers called the paramedics and they came and brought me here to Cedars, where I had a file, thanks to my Cedars gyno. When Mom got the your-daughter-O.D.’d call, she got in touch with Dad and this height-challenged shrink, and brought the two of them down from San Francisco to help save me.
“Mom, can I talk to you alone, please?” I ask as soon as the three of them turn up in my room. I feel overwhelmed by the triumvirate and a little like I’m being ganged up on as I fall back into bed and pull the covers around me. Mom looks more nervous than I’ve ever seen her and she seems to be looking at me quizzically, like she’s trying to reconcile the concept she has of “daughter” with the one she has for “girl who overdosed on drugs.” She glances at Dad and Dr. Rand, and says, “I think I’d like Ronald to stay.”
So Dad leaves the room and I sit up in bed. Dr. Rand clears his throat.
“Why don’t I explain why I’m here,” he says and I nod. “Well, my work typically involves helping parents whose kids have joined certain religious groups, or cults.”
“You’re a deprogrammer?” I ask. This guy I met at a party once told me that his parents sent him to one after he decided he didn’t want to be a Scientologist anymore.
“Technically, I’m a behavioral psychologist,” says Dr. Ronald Rand, “but I have been quite successful at reuniting children who have been lost with their parents.”
“But I didn’t join a cult,” I say. “I’d never join a cult. I just had a bad night because I took too many drugs.”
I can’t look at Mom when I say the word “drugs,” even though I know that she knows I do them. A few years ago, I met my mom and stepdad in Paris when they were doing a house trade with a Parisian family at Christmas for a month, and I managed to infiltrate the sleazy underbelly of Parisian party life rather easily. The coke in Paris was so pure that I regularly returned home from a night out just as my mom and stepdad were going out sightseeing for the day. But we sort of operated under the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.
Dr. Rand looks thrilled that he’s been able to extract the word “drugs” from me. “Drugs!” he shrieks excitedly. “Yes, drugs!” He glances at my mom like he thinks she should be handing him a medal and then gazes at me. “I understand you like to do a toot now and then.”
“A toot?” I ask. Who the hell was this Dr. Ronald Rand, and why on earth had Mom thought he might be the right person to talk to me about drugs? “Is that, like, a line?”
“A toot, a line, powder,” he says, trying to appear casually hip.
“Look,” I say, glancing