Try Not to Breathe (3 page)

I stumbled to the bank, fell onto the moss, and closed my eyes. Water dripped off me into the moss and mud.

“I hear it’s real cold under there,” a voice said above me. “And kind of dangerous.”

I opened my eyes. Nicki stood over me.

“I’ve heard that, too,” I said.

She sat near my head. She smelled of sunscreen. And tangy, like oranges. I had to roll my eyes upward to see her.

“Are you just going to lie there?” she said.

“Is there something else I’m supposed to be doing?” Trying to see her from that angle gave me a headache. I let my eyes roll back to their natural place. The waterfall pounded onto the rocks in front of us, churning up foam.

“I want to ask you something,” she said.

I remembered that moment in my basement when she’d mentioned the hospital. She was finally going to take my dare. “Ask away.”

“Why do you come here?”

“To the waterfall?” Okay, so that wasn’t the question I’d expected.

“Did you ever . . . dream about this place? Or feel like you were meant to be here? Or did anything weird ever happen to you here?”

I sat up. “What are you talking about?”

She sighed; at least, I thought so. It was hard to tell, so near the roaring water. “One time,” she said, “the waterfall knocked me down so hard my head went under, and for a minute it was like I was hovering above my body, looking down at myself lying there in the water. And then the next thing you know, I was standing up. I was coughing and, you know, back inside my body.”

“It probably knocked you out for a second.”

“Did you ever have anything like that happen?”

“No, but—” I told her about the book I was reading. I’d finished the Pacific raft story, and now I was reading about a guy who’d been climbing one of the highest mountains in the world when he got stranded in a storm. He got so exhausted and disoriented that although he was alone, he thought someone else was with him, someone guiding him down the mountain. He even talked to the person—or whoever, whatever, it was. I’d read about cases like that before, where people alone in deadly situations had the sense of another person being with them.

“That’s exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about!” Nicki said. “What do you think he saw?”

“I think he was hallucinating. He was dehydrated and probably hypothermic, too.”

“And you think I was hallucinating?”

“Well, it sounds like you did smack your head.”

“I would think you of all people would believe in—” She froze; her lips stopped in midcurl.

You of all people
. Nicki wasn’t the only one who froze; a glacial sheet covered my skin in an instant.

“What do you mean by that?” I asked as soon as my mouth thawed enough to let me. At the same moment she began, “I didn’t mean—” Then we both shut up.

Nicki stared at the water, but I was watching her now. She rubbed the hem of her shorts.

“Me of all people, meaning what?” Whatever she wanted from me, I needed her to spit it out. I was tired of weighing every word she said, tired of trying to figure out why she’d started talking to me in the first place.

She spoke to the waterfall. “Did you really try to kill yourself?”

Yeah, that was the question. I’d dared her to ask it yesterday, but now I was having second thoughts. There was something in her I didn’t trust, a pressure, an urgency. “Why do you want to know?”

“I—there is a reason. I’m not just being nosy.” She dragged her eyes away from the water and met mine. Freckles dusted her face.

“What reason?”

“It’s . . . complicated.”

I stood up and veins of water ran down my legs from my wet shorts and T-shirt. She scrambled to her feet, too. “Why do you want to know?” I asked again.

Actually, it had been easy for people to figure out the truth about me. Right after I’d disappeared, the school had had a suicide-prevention assembly. And for some unknown reason my mother had gone to pick up my assignments and clean out my locker in the middle of the day, instead of after classes. And so everyone knew, even without me saying a word.

Nicki tilted her head skyward, as if the answer might be hanging from the trees or spiraling down from a cloud. “It’s hard to explain.” She turned her head toward the woods, leaving me to stare at the side of her face. She picked at a purple scab on her leg. I wanted to run out of there, to lock myself away from her questions and the gossip that was apparently going to follow me for the rest of my life.

But one thing held me back, a prickle of worry or conscience.

“Look,” I said. “Sometimes when people ask me about this, it’s because they’re thinking about trying it themselves.”

Nicki shook her head.

“It’s fine, I mean, I’ll give you my doctor’s number. She’s on vacation until the end of the month, but there’ll be somebody in her office.”

“That’s not it, I swear.”

“I don’t mind. I’ve done it before. I gave her number to some kid at school I barely even know.” This guy had come to me because I was the only person at school who’d tried to kill himself—at least, I was the only one everybody knew about. Anyone else who’d tried had kept it a better secret than I could. I gave him the number for my doctor and the suicide hotline, and I also told the school counselor about him. As far as I knew, he was still alive, though I had no idea if he’d used the numbers.

Nicki did look at me then. “Some kid at school? Who?”

“I’m not going to tell you that.”

“Well—I’m not planning to kill myself. That’s not why I asked about you.”

“Do you have a phone with you?”

She sighed. “I really don’t need this, but I can see you won’t shut up about it.” She handed over her phone and let me enter the number. “Give me yours, too. And your e-mail.”

“Why?”

“I want to send you something.”

I hesitated, then typed in my information, my hand shaking. “Don’t send me those joke messages that get forwarded to fifty thousand people,” I said. What I was really thinking was:
Don’t tell me you want to kill yourself.

“I don’t send that junk.” Her voice softened. “I want to tell you something, but I can’t say it when I’m with you. So I’m going to send it instead. Okay?”

“Okay.”

If she was suicidal, I would forward her message right to my doctor. Not that she seemed suicidal to me, but why else would she care about my past? What could she possibly have to ask me?

• • • • •

The thought of Nicki stayed with me as I walked home, as I climbed up to my room to change out of my wet clothes. I had the weird sense that she was following, or rather leading, me through the house all over again. I tried to see my room the way she’d seen it: the desk clear of everything but the computer, my bed with its smooth covers, the rug with fresh vacuum lines in it. I decided she must have concluded I was an anal-retentive neat freak.

Val’s painting was the only thing in my room that you wouldn’t have found in a hotel room: those violent purple and blue swirls. My mother had hovered the whole time I hung it up, unhappy not only that I was driving a nail into her precious walls but also that I was polluting her decor with mental-institution art.

And there was one other thing in this room that was different, not that Nicki had seen it or would recognize it if she had. I opened the closet door, not wanting to but having to, hating the impulse that led me to get that bundle in the first place and then made me keep opening it up and looking at it, an obsessive jabbing and digging at the sorest spot I had.

I hooked an arm up and swept it off the shelf, caught it as it fell. Taking a full breath, I opened one end of the brown grocery bag.

The sweater was still in there, soft pink fabric. I couldn’t tell if the faint scent of perfume was real or just a memory of how it used to smell when I first got it. I stared into the bag but didn’t touch the sweater. I had the sense it would leave a poisonous film on my skin, and yet part of me wanted to touch it.

I wondered what it would be like to open this closet and find that the package had vanished, bag and all, where I would never have to look at or think about it again. I knew I should get rid of it. But I would’ve found it easier to yank out my own spleen.

Somehow it seemed the sweater should’ve changed more in the months I’d had it. The perfume was fading, but I thought the fabric should be rotting, unraveling, disintegrating. I wished it would. Every time I looked, though, it was as bright and soft as ever.

I closed up the bag and shoved it back onto the shelf.

THREE

When I got
on my computer that afternoon, I was looking for messages from Val and Jake. I had one from Jake—he’d found twelve more dollars for his billionaire telethon—but nothing from Val.

I replied to Jake: “Heard from Val lately?”

He answered immediately. I didn’t think he ever disconnected from his computer; he might as well have implanted it into his head. “She’s busy with that student orchestra stuff.”

I pictured Val back at the hospital, talking about music: leaning forward, hands flying, the words racing out of her mouth. She played piano, flute, and violin (not all at the same time). She’d even given a concert at Patterson once, in the dayroom.

Val could make music anywhere. She’d taught Jake and me to jam with her in the Patterson cafeteria, with forks and cups and trays, with our hands and feet, with combs. Some of the kitchen staff had liked our sessions. Others cut us short, scared by any initiative we showed, any unpredictability on our part. But Val got some of them into it; she talked the most sour-faced kitchen worker into shaking a pan of uncooked rice as accompaniment. She could thaw anyone if you gave her enough time.

After bullshitting awhile with Jake, I wrote a short message to Val: “Hi, what’s up?”

I almost deleted it, but then I sent it. I was about to log off because I told myself I would not sit there for the rest of the day, checking my messages, waiting for her to answer, when a message came in from someone named nicki_t.

I clicked it open.

“i want to know what it’s like and why you did it because my dad did it and i was hoping you could tell me why you did it and if you remember anything about what it was like. i hope that doesn’t sound bad. i need to know and i don’t have anyone else to ask.”

Her dad? Shit.

For a minute I sat paralyzed, stomach curdling, reading Nicki’s words over and over.

“i want to know what it’s like and why you did it . . .”

She wanted to hear about the worst day of my life.

I had talked about that day exactly twice: to the people in the emergency room right after it happened and to my Group at Patterson. When I was in the emergency room, I didn’t care what I said or whom I told. The second time was different; I’d grown a shell around that day and didn’t want to look inside it. But they cracked me open one day in Group, and I’d poured myself out onto the Patterson Hospital floor like a puddle of raw egg.

It had taken Val and Jake hours to scrape me off that floor. I remembered them hovering, Jake’s hand on one of my shoulders and Val’s on the other. Their voices rambling, soothing, Val stopping once in a while to snap at anyone else who came too close. They both missed dinner that night because I couldn’t move and I asked them not to leave me.

“Of course not, we’re not going anywhere,” Val had said.

“We’re not hungry,” Jake added, though his stomach kept gurgling and groaning.

“This floor is cold,” I said.

“Do you want to get up? The aides will help us if you want.”

“I don’t want anyone else to come near me.”

“Okay,” Val said.

“Just you guys.”

“Okay.”

“Though if you were smart, you’d both run the hell away from me.”

“I hate to break it to you, Ryan, but you’re not even the sickest person in this hallway.”

“I am so fucked up. Can you believe how fucked up I am?”

“It’s okay, Ryan.”

“There’s stuff you don’t even know.”

Val squeezed my shoulder.

“I can’t do anything right. Including killing myself. Don’t leave, okay?”

“We won’t.”

And so it went, for hours, me saying every stupid and pathetic thought that popped into my head, and saying them over and over. I don’t know why Val and Jake didn’t smack me to shut me up. I had no filter, no pride, no dignity. I was a raw nerve, a sniveling bundle of need.

That was the last time I’d talked about it.

I wished all Nicki had wanted was my doctor’s phone number. It would be so much easier to pass her off to the professionals. It would be so much easier if she weren’t asking for this chunk out of me—especially since I had no idea what she would do with it. I was sorry about her father, but did she really believe anything I told her could help?

I sent her the easy reply: “I don’t like to talk about it.”

She sent back: “please.” That word almost got me, those lowercase letters like she was whispering or pleading.

• • • • •

My mother had me bring her dinner upstairs, where she ate in front of her computer. She only had to report to her regular office once a week. Most of the time, she was home. Her job title was something like Branch Supervisor for Contracts Oversight. Whatever it meant, it required her to be plugged into her computer forty hours a week, sometimes more.

“I’m sorry I can’t eat with you, but this project is on a tight deadline. I told them last week we were running behind, but—” She sighed. “Louisa Rossi refuses to stick to the schedule. Why don’t you eat up here, with me?”

“I already ate.”

“You did? Including your vegetables?”

“Yeah.”

She cut each baby carrot into quarters and chewed one bite at a time. I stood in the doorway, up on my toes and ready to bolt, while she ran through her checklist. I supposed I was lucky she didn’t outfit me with a camera or a tracking chip.

“Did you take your medication this morning?”

“Yes. You saw me.”

Mom swiveled her chair toward me and dug her toes into the gray carpet. She wore a skirt, as if she were at a real office, but never shoes.