Try Not to Breathe (23 page)

“Do you ever—still think about killing yourself?”

“No,” I said automatically, because that’s what I always said when Dr. Briggs asked me. It’s what I told my parents whenever they asked.

Then I said, “Sometimes.” I paused. “Yeah, I do.”

After all, who was I kidding? I’d been thinking about it less than an hour ago.

“Why?” she asked.

“I don’t know. When things get rough, it kind of flashes through my mind. I haven’t been serious about it for a long time, and I’m nowhere near doing it, but I think about it.”

I had never admitted that to anyone. I was scared that if I told my parents or Dr. Briggs, they would lock me up again. My parents, for sure, would never trust me. They barely trusted me as it was. But it was always an option—an option I’d moved very far down the list, but which sat in my back pocket like the emergency bus token I used to carry around West Seaton. Just in case.

Nicki touched my back, at first so lightly I could barely feel it. When I didn’t move, she let her hand rest there more solidly. I closed my eyes, savoring the sun on my skin. And Nicki’s touch, the way the two of us were separated only by the thin cotton of my shirt.

• • • • •

My father came home that night, and he fell asleep while we watched another baseball game. He didn’t even wake up in the eighth inning, when I called for a walk on a star batter. The batter hit a home run.

“Told you to walk him,” I said to the TV, fishing the last of our popcorn out from among the hard unpopped nuggets. Dad snored on.

He woke up at the top of the ninth, during a pitching change. “Who’s winning?”

“Tie score.”

“Oh.” He rubbed his face, which was gray with stubble, then took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Looks like I woke up just in time.”

One of the beer commercials showed a guy jumping out of a plane. “I’m going to do that for my eighteenth birthday,” I said.

Dad put his glasses back on. He had gotten a special kind of glass that didn’t reflect, so I could see his eyes as if the frames were empty, as if the lenses didn’t exist. “You’re still thinking about that?”

“Yeah. I looked it up again—you have to be eighteen. So I’ll do it then.”

“You’ll give your mother a heart attack.”

“That won’t be
all
my fault.”

I didn’t think before I said that. The words seemed to smack my dad’s face in slow motion. They surprised me, too.

“What do you mean?” he said.

“You don’t think she has problems?” I’d been thinking of myself as the sick one for so long that it was only now I let myself acknowledge how close to the edge my mother lived, tightly controlling everything, for fear of—what? I thought of her treadmilling in the middle of the night, chopping her food symmetrically. It wasn’t just about me and that night in the garage. She’d been this way ever since I could remember. “She’s kind of . . . tightly wound.” I couldn’t believe I had to explain. He must’ve noticed.

He frowned. “Your mother is a worrier. She’s always been an anxious person.” And I hadn’t helped—I’d given her something to worry about, all right. “But she’s always been there for you. You’re the main reason she took a job where she could work from home.”

“I thought it was so she could have quality time with this house.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. She did it for you.” His voice had a weird edge, rough like a serrated knife. “She thought—after Patterson—that I should travel less, spend more time here.” He paused, then said the next words so carefully I could almost hear him picking them, shaping them in his mind. “But she decided to work at home, and I thought it wouldn’t be good for us to smother you. I thought it would be better if my schedule went back to normal.”

“You were right.” Not that I would’ve minded seeing my father more. But if they’d both spent the summer hovering over me, watching every breath I took, I probably would’ve been back in the hospital long before Jake.

On the other hand, if Dad stayed home more, would Mom relax more? How come
she
had to be my full-time babysitter? Wouldn’t she like the chance to get away from here sometimes, to fly across the ocean herself?

But I couldn’t imagine her relaxed, without the tension that made the air practically twang whenever she was in the room. I told Dad, “All I’m saying is, maybe she should spend less time worrying about me, and more time worrying about herself.”

The game had come back on, the announcers deep into their soothing drone. The count was two and two.

“Ryan, your mother has always been high-strung. But she never stockpiled enough drugs to kill herself. She never started a car in a closed garage.” He pushed his glasses higher on his nose. “And she’s not the only one who’s concerned about this skydiving idea. I think you should talk to Dr. Briggs about it. About—why you want to do it.”

“Fine.” From the TV came a crack and a roar: base hit. “I know why I want to do it, though.”

“Why?” He sounded hoarse, strangled, like he had a popcorn kernel stuck in his throat.

“Because it would be like flying.” I turned back to the TV. Just before I punched up the volume on the remote, I added, “I’m gonna pull the cord, you know.”

“What?” he said.

“Nothing.” But I was pretty sure he’d heard me.

TWENTY-TWO

On Saturday Mom
drove me back to Patterson. In the car, I said, “I know about Jake cutting his wrists.”

“Oh,” she said.

“You could’ve told me.”

Her knuckles paled on the steering wheel. I watched them while I waited for her answer.

“That’s not an easy thing for me to talk about, Ryan,” she said. “It hits a little too close to home.”

After a minute, I said, “I know, but I don’t see the point of pretending it didn’t happen.”

“I’m not pretending. I would just rather we focused on more positive things. I don’t think it’s healthy to dwell on . . .”

I waited for the end of that sentence, but all she did was sigh. Then she said, “I want you to have a good environment, good influences. If we can control that—”

“But you can’t control it.”

Again, her knuckles went yellow with strain.

“You can’t control everything I hear and everyone I meet and everything that happens to me.”

For a long time, I wasn’t sure that she’d heard me. But finally she laughed and said, under her breath, “That’s exactly what I hate.”

• • • • •

I sat with Jake in the dayroom, which had been painted a depressing dark mustard color. They’d given me a visitor’s badge at the front desk, and I kept having the strange feeling that I should take it off, that my old counselors would see me and ask who I was trying to fool. And yet I knew I didn’t belong there anymore.

Jake’s arms were heavy with bandages. He picked at the tape, and I thought of the cuts underneath, the rough edges of skin sewn together, the hot red scabs that probably made his arms ache even now. I was glad he was alive, that his body had refused to bleed out.

And I was glad it wasn’t me. Glad my arms were smooth and whole, that I could get up and walk out of this hospital anytime I wanted.

“This new med makes my tongue weigh ten pounds,” he slurred. “Is it swelling up?” He stuck out his tongue.

“Nah, it looks normal.”

He worked his mouth, swallowed. I remembered the dry mouth I’d gotten from my prescription when I first went on it. “You want something to drink?” I asked.

Val rushed in. “Oh my God, look at these walls. This is the ugliest color I’ve ever seen.” She kissed Jake’s cheek. “How are you?”

“Shitty.”

“Ryan’s mother and mine are downstairs. Is it okay if they come up and say hello? They want to see you.”

He hesitated.

“You don’t have to,” I said.

“Good,” he said. “’Cause—I don’t really want to.”

Val sat on his other side. There we were, the three of us in a row, just like the old days. Except everything was different now, and we all knew it.

“Guess I flunk,” Jake said.

“What?” Val asked.

“We all graduated from this place, right? Except I’m the only one who had to come back.”

“It’s not flunking,” she told him. “Don’t you dare think about it that way.”

He turned his face away from her. “I wish I had a cheeseburger.”

“I’ll get you one.” I stood up, relieved at the chance to get away from Val.

Jake gave me half a smile. “With everything on it. Give me something to live for, man.”

“It’s only a cheeseburger,” I said, “but I’ll do what I can.”

I went down the block and got it, along with fries, and a large soda for his dry mouth. I fought off the mothers’ questions in the lobby. My mother didn’t kill me on sight, so I guessed that Dr. Ishihara hadn’t mentioned my visit to Val yet. I could imagine what Mom would do if she heard that Nicki had driven me to Brookfield.

When I came back into the dayroom, Jake was bent over Val’s lap, hanging on her, while she stroked his hair. I hung back, watching, and the way he clawed at her made me wonder if maybe I hadn’t been the only one in love with Val all this time.

Val noticed me first; then Jake lifted his head. “Hey, it’s my reason to live,” he said when he saw the bag in my hand.

I crossed the room. “Well, it does smell pretty good.”

He straightened up, wiped a hand across his face, and took the bag. Val patted his shoulder and said, “I’ll be right back.”

As soon as she’d gone, he bit into a fry. “It wasn’t what it looked like,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“She doesn’t like me that way. She always liked you.”

“Not enough,” I said. “She made that pretty clear last week.” It stung to admit that, but at least it no longer felt like my guts were being scraped out an inch at a time.

He sighed and kept eating. Val came back and sat with us, the three of us quiet, the way we’d learned to be with each other months earlier. It was funny—I wouldn’t want to live at Patterson again, but for a few minutes I missed what we’d had when we all lived there, when we saw each other every day.

Jake finished his burger, slurping up the last bit of onion and tomato. Then he said, “I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know why you and Val figured it out and I can’t.”

“I haven’t figured out anything,” I said. “I’m just making it up as I go along.”

“Me, too,” Val said.

Jake held out the rest of the fries to us. “I always feel like there’s some rule book everyone else got that I never got.”

Val and I laughed. We hadn’t gotten the book, either.

“I’m sick of feeling like crap,” he said.

Val touched his knee. “It gets better.”

“Oh, yeah? When?”

“I don’t know. But it does.”

He crumpled up the empty bag. “For everyone but me.”

I remembered feeling that way, that night in the garage. And again on the way home from Val’s after she’d rejected me. And every time I’d had to look at that stupid pink sweater in my closet. And when I’d found out that Nicki had lied to me. Every time I thought things might be okay, the ground caved in under my feet.

But then, like Val said, things got better. And worse again. And better. I was beginning to see this wave of ups and downs stretching out in front of me forever, beginning to think maybe that was just life.

“If you hang on,” Val said, “I promise you it does get better.”

Jake’s hand shook. He crushed the balled-up bag tighter. “Bull,” he said, but his voice shook, too, and I knew he wanted to believe her.

He turned to me. “Does it get better?”

That was the question, and I owed him Patterson Honesty. And so I gave it to him.

“Yes,” I said.

• • • • •

Late that afternoon, I returned to the waterfall. I didn’t go under the cascade. I dunked myself in the pool and watched water pour over rock. I put everything I knew about Nicki and her father back together, tried to replace the lies with the truth. It wasn’t always easy to remember which puzzle pieces belonged, or to put the new pieces in place of the old.

When Nicki showed up on the bank with four other kids who lived along the highway, I almost ducked under the water, but I knew I couldn’t hold my breath until they left. I recognized a couple of them from the bus stop last year—not that I’d spoken to them. I used to sit alone on a rock, with earbuds on. Some of the time, I didn’t even have any music on. I wore the earbuds because they gave me an excuse not to talk to anyone, and they gave everyone else an obvious reason not to have to talk to me.

Now the kids settled on a clump of fallen trees well back from the water’s edge, talking, smoking. The girl who’d called me the “local loser” wasn’t there. Nicki looked from me to her friends, as if not sure where she belonged.

I splashed out of the water and toweled off, dripping on the moss, feeling their eyes on me. If I walked away without speaking, they wouldn’t think it was unusual. They probably didn’t expect anything else from me at this point.

And what about Nicki?

She had said,
I think I could like you a lot, if you’d let me,
and I had been running those words through my mind, over and over, rubbing them smooth like beach stones. I could’ve said those same words about Val. But every time I saw or talked to Val now, I felt the space between us widening.

I think I could like you a lot.

I met Nicki’s eyes, and she glanced away instantly, the way drops of water ricochet off a hot pan.

I thought I could like her a lot. Maybe I already did.

In spite of everything. Maybe because of everything. Because we both knew what it was like to feel bad and choose the wrong way to cope with it. Because we’d both covered up things we couldn’t stand to admit. Because we both wanted to believe there was such a thing as forgiveness.

I crumpled my towel and walked over to the group. I said hi and they nodded back, made a few jokes about school starting next week, offered me a smoke. I’d forgotten what it was like to talk to people—casually, at least—to bullshit about ordinary stuff. But after a few minutes the rust flaked off my voice, and I managed to sound something like a human being.