Carry the Ocean: The Roosevelt, Book 1 (9 page)

I gave him time to read. I’d said a lot. I reread what he’d said about oceans and what I wrote. I don’t always understand analogies very well, but I liked this one. It made sense. My autism isn’t wet and doesn’t have any fish, but it is big and difficult to carry, and most people think it’s too complicated to deal with. I could see how depression would be the same way.

I tried to imagine a bucket big enough to hold an ocean, and I realized the bucket was the earth. Which meant Jeremey and I were trying to carry the whole planet’s water. It’s not fair, but Dad says little about life is.

Jeremey typed back to me.

I like you a lot, Emmet. I’m glad you introduced yourself to me. I wish you could come over. But I’m too tired to fight my mom. Sorry.

I wished I could go over too, but I didn’t want Jeremey any more upset than he was. He seemed better—he used whole sentences and capitalization now. But probably he should rest.

Jeremey, I’m going to stop texting now, but I will text you later. Don’t feel sad and don’t kill yourself. If you need me, you can text me. I will remember your codes, and if you want me to talk so you can listen, we can do that. Even if it’s not on our schedules. I will change the settings on my phone so you can always go through. Even if it is during my do-not-disturb times like sleeping or appointment, I can talk to you. If it’s a bad time, I will type X and text as soon as I can. And if I text when you need to rest or it’s a bad time, you use the X. Do you agree with this plan, Jeremey?

Y. T.

Then he made the sign < and a 3. At first I started to do math, but then I remembered. That was code for sideways heart. It’s meant to be right-side up, and Emoji will do that for you, but he doesn’t have Emoji installed in his phone. I knew, though, that basically he was hearting me.

I laughed and hummed as I hearted him back.

The week after Mrs. Samson caught Jeremey and I kissing was very stressful. I wore my Dalek shirt so much I had to wash it every other night. If you wear a shirt more than two days in a row it’s gross, and people say you smell. Everyone could have used a Dalek shirt, though, because everyone fought at our house. Mom and Althea fought with me. They fought with each other. My dad fought with them and took me to get so much ice cream I started to not like ice cream. We switched to watching
The Blues Brothers
instead, which made my tummy less upset.

I loved my dad before that week, but I loved him more after because he kept defending me to Mom and Althea. When I complained they weren’t treating me fairly, he said he agreed with me.
How could you, Doug,
Mom said, and Althea glared, but he shook his finger in their faces.

“You can’t tell him he’s as normal as everyone and then act like he’s retarded.” Usually when my dad says the R word, I tell him he’s supposed to eliminate it, but he had a red face and it wasn’t a good time to interrupt.

I told him he shouldn’t use the R word when we were watching the movie later. He laughed and tweaked my nose.

Jeremey and I texted, but he didn’t always answer, and I could tell he was getting sadder all the time. He still said I couldn’t go over, and my mom wouldn’t let me go, either. Even my dad said no. It wasn’t until my appointment with Dr. North that everything started to get better.

Dr. North is a medical doctor, but he’s also a social worker. He was a medical doctor first, a psychiatrist, and then he went back to get his social work degree because he thought they did a better job than psychiatrists. He’s been my doctor for a long time. We didn’t live in the same town as him when I was younger, but when we were trying to decide where I should go to school and Mom found out Dr. North was working at the Ames hospital, Mom said this was the perfect setup.

Mom says a lot of doctors at the hospital call him a crazy old hippie, but whenever Mom says that, she smiles. I guess she enjoys crazy old hippies. I like Dr. North a lot, so I enjoy crazy old hippies too.

I see Dr. North every six weeks. I enjoy talking to him, and it’s good to do maintenance on the brain. The same as changing the oil in a car, except there is no exchange of fluids. That would be gross. My last appointment had been just before Memorial Day, so I had a lot to tell him.

I told him all about how I’d rehearsed the meeting and used my social skills, and how well that had gone. I told him about Jeremey’s depression, how it was bad. I talked about how I had helped him clean his room, and how we’d kissed, and then about Mrs. Samson, about Mom and Althea and Dad and the R word, and how I still couldn’t see Jeremey. I talked so fast he had to tell me twice to slow down and enunciate because he couldn’t understand me, and I hand-flapped the whole time.

It’s okay to hand-flap with Dr. North. He says it’s a flap-safe zone.

“We talk every night, but always on text or IM, and it’s not the same thing. I can’t kiss him in texts. I know about putting X and O, but that messes the code.”

He asked about the code then, and I had to explain.

“But he’s using the code all the time now. He hardly ever uses capital letters, and three or four times in a conversation I have to repeat it back with proper punctuation and grammar for confirmation so I know I understand what he said. And we don’t talk long. I can’t see him because his mom thinks Jeremey has to be normal. He can’t be normal. Even if normal were a real thing, Jeremey has bad depression. But he doesn’t have any modifications or facial charts or any behavior therapies. His mom just says
you have to be normal now
and then they both get upset. It makes me so angry. I want to see Jeremey, and Jeremey wants to see me. He’s eighteen years old, and I’m nineteen. We can do what we want. We’re adults.”

Dr. North is a good listener. He sat still while I said all this, and when I was done, he held his beard for a minute to make sure I was finished talking. “This does sound like a serious situation, Emmet. I understand how this makes you frustrated. May I tell you that you’re doing a good job keeping your emotions in check during a stressful time? I daresay you’re doing better than most of the adults in your life right now.”

He always said things like that,
may I tell you something nice.
It always made me laugh, which is maybe why he did it. “Yes, you can tell me that.”

“You’re doing a very good job, Emmet. An excellent job. The behavior and accessibility modifications you’ve given your friend—”

“My boyfriend.” It’s rude to interrupt, but I was getting tired of nobody believing we were boyfriends.

“Pardon me. You’ve given your boyfriend some good advice and some excellent tools of accommodation. I hope you feel proud of yourself for being such a good friend
and
boyfriend.”

I smiled. “I do feel proud. Thank you.”

“Jeremey’s depression, as best I can understand it through your description alone, seems severe. And no, it isn’t something he can snap out of. Depression often requires therapy and sometimes medication for proper management.”

“We have to help him, Dr. North. We have to help Jeremey. I’m worried. He says sometimes he wants to kill himself. I don’t want Jeremey to do that. I can make him laugh and smile—I’m good at it—and people who are laughing and smiling don’t usually want to kill themselves. But I can’t tell if he’s smiling sometimes in a text.”

Dr. North wore his thinking face, so I waited and let him think.

“Emmet, you remember I told you everything you say to me here is confidential, that I won’t tell your mother or father or anyone else anything we’ve talked about?”

“Yes. I remember.” I loved that part. My mother is bossy sometimes, and I enjoy keeping secrets from her.

“With your permission, Emmet, I want to request we spend some time talking with your mother today about this subject of Jeremey. For one thing, I would like to validate your independence and your right to have a boyfriend if you and Jeremey wish it, and to encourage her to follow up or facilitate your follow-up of this situation.”

I smiled. My mom would
have
to listen to Dr. North. “Yes, you may tell her.”

“May I give you some advice also, Emmet?” When I nodded, he said, “I would encourage you to keep texting your boyfriend and attempting to see him, with or without your family’s help. You know I don’t care to give you direction, that therapy is about self-exploration and discovery, but in this instance I believe it’s important.”

I felt confusing emotions. Proud because I’d been right about everything, but nervous because Dr. North definitely had his worried face on.

He spent twenty minutes talking to my mother. I counted the ceiling tiles, the stripes in the wainscoting, and the pages in all the magazines, and I still had to configure pi in my head when I ran out of things to count. I was too edgy to do pi for too long, though, so I murmured
The Blues Brothers
script under my breath.

I was all the way to Mr. Fabulous when Mom finally came out of Dr. North’s office. She was quiet, and she kept looking at me as if I had something on my face. I didn’t have anything on my face, though. I checked, and it was clean.

That night we had a family meeting, which was great. Everyone apologized to me, even Dad who apologized for using the R word. Mom told me she’d call Gabrielle and talk to her about not letting me see Jeremey and about how serious his depression was. We
all
went for ice cream at Hickory Park, which is the best place for ice cream in the world. Althea didn’t eat any because she’s vegan, but she came with us anyway and had a pineapple soda.

It would have been the perfect day. Except as we went to our car to go home from Hickory Park, I saw I had texts from Jeremey.

sorry

I’m so sorry

i miss you

i love you E

sorry

s

s

bye

I tried to text back, but he wouldn’t answer. I started rocking and humming, and when I started flapping my hands too, Althea asked what was wrong, and I showed her the phone.

Althea read the texts, and she got a scared face. She showed my Mom.

Mom didn’t have a scared face. She had the flat face she gets when she’s being a doctor. She opened the dialer and pressed three numbers.

Nine, one, and one.

Chapter Ten

J
eremey

I
don’t think people understand about suicidal thoughts. They act as if everyone who makes an attempt is looking for attention. There aren’t enough words in the English language for me to explain how untrue that is. It’s using the wrong language to talk about it at all.

To start, when someone is depressed, really depressed, their thoughts are messed up. There’s the dome I told Emmet about, keeping people out but sealing stimuli in. What I didn’t tell him was sometimes I like the dome. Sometimes it feels good, because nobody can get you. The problem with being left alone, though, is you’re in there all by yourself. You’re in there with your own brain, and a depressed person’s brain does some seriously crazy shit.

When I saw the Harry Potter movies and the dementors came on screen, I thought, that’s how I feel all the time, except I don’t have a Patronus and chocolate doesn’t do much to make me feel better. In fact, when I’m especially depressed, all food tastes dull and gross, and people have to yell at me to eat at all. Depression is having a crowd of dementors live in your head twenty-four/seven. They are
always
inside the glass dome, and they can whisper bad things at you whenever they want. Sometimes I can tell them to fuck off, but a lot of times I start to get confused about what’s real and what isn’t. Sometimes I don’t know if the whispers in my head were echoes of something I saw or heard or something the depression said. It feels
so real
to me that if I’m able to see I was wrong, sometimes I stand there and blink, freaked out over how badly I was fooled—by my own brain.

I don’t know why my brain says such nasty things to me, why it’s so incredibly mean, but it is. My brain is a bully who never leaves. My depression will tell me things are bad, really bad, and I can say I don’t believe it for a while, but at some point it’s the same as the game you play with kids, where you say “yes” and they say “no” and after a few rounds the adult switches but the child doesn’t catch on and ends up saying yes because they were tricked.

Sometimes my depression tricks me. The day Emmet’s mom called 911 on me, it tricked me so well that if she hadn’t called, right when she did, I would be dead.

Ever since my mom yelled at Emmet and kicked him out of the house, the voices in my head had been off-the-charts bad. Emmet texted me every day, sometimes several times a day, but basically if he wasn’t texting me, my personal brain bullies told me he wouldn’t ever text me again. He didn’t want to hang out with a loser who had a bitchy mom, a guy who couldn’t stand up to her. The bullies told me I was ugly. They told me my mom was right, except Emmet was fine and it was me who was awful. I tried to fight them. I tried to listen to Emmet. But the bullies live in my head, and Emmet could only talk to me in text. I became convinced Emmet was just making me feel better, that he didn’t like me, didn’t want to be with me and wished I would go away and leave him the hell alone.

My brain whispered, all day, every day, how I could make alone happen for good.

The sad truth is I think about ways to kill myself the same way Emmet counts things. I don’t tell anyone because they’ll think I’m weird or lock me up, but it’s true. Usually thinking about suicide is almost a game, like when people talk about where they’d store a body if they killed someone. They don’t mean it, and neither do I. Except I think of ways I could kill myself every day. I’ve researched them. I know not to use an overdose of Tylenol. It’s horribly painful and awful and long and impossible to correct. We don’t own a gun, and I don’t think I could handle the noise—which is dumb. Obviously done right I’d only have to hear it the one time. Blood squicks me out, so no wrist-cutting.

But the car in the garage. If my mom and dad knew how many nights I sat for hours in the car, the keys in my hand and my gaze fixed on the garden hose, they would have torn the garage down.

Of course, then I would have routed the exhaust into the basement and blocked the door to the upstairs so they wouldn’t die with me.

I’d decided long ago when I killed myself—in my head it was so absolute that it
would
happen eventually—I would do it by funneling the exhaust from the tailpipe and asphyxiating myself. That night, I climbed into the car with the garage door shut. I got the engine running, and I put the hose in through the driver’s side window. Even as I did it part of me was aware, like a match flare in the back of a dark room, that this wasn’t right. You weren’t supposed to kill yourself, no matter what the bastards in your head said. But I felt so miserable, and everything was so heavy, all I could think was I couldn’t do this anymore, and the next thing I knew, I was in the car.

I knew this time was real before I closed the door. Not just because I’d hooked up the hose—I’d done that before too—but because I brought my phone. When I texted Emmet goodbye, told him I loved him, it was the last flare of light. I cried while I texted him. I cried so hard I had snot running down my face. When I sent the last text, I almost wanted to change my mind.

But Mom would never let me see him again, and I was too weak to fight for him, and it made me feel sick. Emmet had only put off what I’d been planning to do since graduation. He’d be better off without me. He should get a boyfriend who wasn’t so fucked up.

I wished I could have had one last kiss. I gave him texts instead. Then I smashed my phone so I couldn’t get any messages, and I sat back to wait for the end.

I wasn’t quite asleep when the paramedics opened the door to the garage, but I was groggy enough I couldn’t respond to them when they called my name. I remember being dragged out of the car and put on a stretcher with a mask on my face. I remember being wheeled out of the garage and into an ambulance.

I thought I saw Emmet getting out of his car, maybe coming up to me, but after that I don’t remember anything until I was in the hospital.

I woke up feeling as if someone had made me crazy drunk. I felt flat and floating. I don’t want to say it was good, since words like
good
and
bad
were too descriptive. I didn’t feel as heavy as I usually did, and I didn’t feel like crying. I didn’t feel anything at all. When the nurse stuck a needle in my arm, I didn’t care about the blood. I just watched. She could take it all, if she wanted it. For a long time they had a mask on my face too, but at some point they took that off and put this nose thing in instead.

Obviously I was on drugs, which were handy when my mom came in all hysterical and weeping. For once she didn’t upset me when she did that. I was thinking how I wanted a box of this medicine to take home. But then after a few hours—I think it was hours, I wasn’t sure—Emmet came in, and I hated how flat I felt. Inside I jumped for joy and smiled at him, holding out my arms, but all I could do on the outside was stare at him like a zombie and blink and sort of lift my hand.

Though in a way it was funny. I understood, maybe, what it was like to be Emmet. He’d told me he felt more than his face showed, but now I got what it was to feel things and not be able to express them.

Except I had one thing I had to express to him. One important thing. I tried to say it, but I felt like lead. I scrambled for ways to talk to him, wishing for my phone. Then remembered I had one way to use our codes.

I made the American Sign Language letter T, and then the S. I did it over and over.

Thank you.

Sorry. So sorry.

“What’s he doing? What’s wrong?” That was my mother, but I ignored her, just kept signing to Emmet.

He caught my hand. “Not sorry. It’s okay.”

“What—what is he doing to Jeremey?”

God, Mom.
I dragged my gaze to her so I could glare, but I was pretty sure I was still a zombie.

Emmet answered for me. “I’m not doing anything to Jeremey. We’re talking. He’s trying to tell me he’s sorry, but he doesn’t need to apologize. I don’t know why he’s thanking me, though.”

I thanked him because he’d helped save me, and I didn’t actually want to die, especially now that he was here. Especially not on these drugs. I didn’t think I wanted to feel this flat all the time, but if I could get a doggie bag of zombie meds, I was willing to stop thinking up ways to kill myself to pass the time.

Of course, the side effect of these drugs was that all I could do was blink at Emmet and keep saying
thank you
and
sorry
over and over again.

Wait. I had one more thing I could say.
Needed
to say. And I was high enough that signing
I love you
didn’t make me feel so nervous I wanted to vomit.

I knew Emmet-face well enough that despite his limited facial expression and me drugged to my eyeballs, I could tell I’d moved him. Even before he signed
I love you
back and held my hand tight.

“But what does he mean he’s talking to him?” my mom asked.

“We use sign.” Emmet stared at my mouth. I wondered if it was because it was as close as he could get to my eyes or if he was thinking about kissing me. “It’s difficult for Jeremey to talk sometimes. When we have our phones, we have shortcuts for words, but he’s using ASL now because he doesn’t have a phone. Also I think they drugged him too much to type.”

He looked over his shoulder at the wall near my mom. “Jeremey is sick, Mrs. Samson. He needs to have modifications. You have to stop trying to make him be normal. There’s no normal. You can ask Dr. North. He said I gave Jeremey good behavior and accessibility modifications. He said I was a good boyfriend. He has four degrees, Mrs. Samson. You don’t have four degrees. You should listen to Dr. North.”

My mom started to sputter angrily, and I laughed. Well, I would have laughed, but all I could do was smile. Right at Emmet, who smiled at me and squeezed my hand.

A nurse came and changed my IV, and everything got muddy. Time sort of floated around. There was a doctor, there was a nurse. Sometimes my mom was in the back of the room, sometimes she wasn’t. Once I thought I saw Jan, but I wasn’t sure.

Emmet was always right beside me, holding my hand. A few times he would lean close and tell me in his whisper which wasn’t a whisper at all that he had to use the restroom, or he had to let go of my hand to eat, and a few times the nurses needed my hand, but otherwise he was always there. It felt as if he was there for days, but when it got dark, I realized it was the first time it had been dark since I’d come to the hospital.

He leaned close to my bed, focusing on my ear as he spoke.

“It’s 9 p.m. I have to go home. I wish I could stay, but I can’t.”

I panicked. I should tell him to go home, but I didn’t want him to leave. When he was with me, I was still depressed, but I had an anchor in my big ocean of emotions. I didn’t want to sleep in the dark alone in the hospital on drugs. In fact, as I thought of it too much, I felt tears in my eyes.

Dragging his hand to my lips, I brushed a dry kiss against his knuckles as a tear slid down my cheek. “
Please
,” I whispered. “Stay.”

He squeezed my hand tight, and he hummed, and he waved his hands in front of himself, as if he were trying to shake off water. He stared at my lips. “I have to go home. It’s not okay for me to stay here overnight, and I don’t think my autism would let me. I’m sorry. But I can stay another few minutes.”

I wanted him to stay all night long. I
needed
him to stay, but I understood he couldn’t.
Just a little more.

A hug.

A kiss.

I motioned to Emmet. Some of the heavy drugs were wearing off now. I patted the space beside me.
Lie with me. Cuddle me.

He frowned and rocked on his heels. “There isn’t room. And you’re full of IV lines.”

I was too worn out to argue, so I pulled back the covers and waited.

After a little more rocking and a lot of humming, he got in. He fumbled with the rail and knocked the TV remote on the floor, and he grumbled, but he got in, nesting so close to me our bodies touched.

“They’re going to arrest us,” he murmured.

I draped the blanket over our bodies. I touched his face, a firm touch the way he liked, and I pressed my lips to his.

I opened my mouth over his, licked the seam of his lips. He jolted and murmured “
You licked me
,” but then he opened his mouth and let me inside.

I couldn’t get an erection with all the drugs, but I felt his pressing against my groin. His kisses were clumsy and tentative, but when I was bold, he met me stroke for stroke. He gripped my shoulders and breathed heavier and heavier until he pulled away. When he spoke, his voice trembled.

“Jeremey, if you keep kissing me, I’m going to get semen in my underwear.”

I smiled but didn’t kiss him anymore, only nuzzled his cheek. It had the finest bit of stubble, and it felt good. “Thank you. For calling 911. For staying.”
For being you.

“It was my mom who called. But she used my phone.” He nuzzled me awkwardly. He wasn’t much of a nuzzler. “Please don’t do that again, Jeremey.”

I wished I could promise him I wouldn’t. I wished I could say as long as he was with me, I wouldn’t think about killing myself. That would be a lie, though, so I only brushed one last kiss across his lips, shut my eyes and snuggled against him.

When the nurse came in, she didn’t yell, but she did make Emmet go. I wept silently as he left, but before the sadness could take too much hold, the nurse gave me another injection of some drug, and I drifted off to sleep.

The next morning I woke up feeling much less groggy. It turned out I’d had a much stronger reaction to the sedatives than they’d anticipated, which was why I felt so woozy so long, but now, though I still felt flat, I was able to sit up and walk and move. After checking my oxygen levels, they took me off all the tubes and IVs, and they gave me a big breakfast.

Emmet got a breakfast too, because he was back as soon as I was awake. He ate in silence, and afterward he stood over me and all but spoon-fed me to get me to eat.