Try Not to Breathe (7 page)

• • • • •

Nicki and I sat awhile longer. At one point I got up and brought in a bowl of nuts and sunflower seeds and cranberries. We gorged on it, licking the salt off our fingers.

“This isn’t—bird food, is it?” she said once, pausing in midcrunch.

I laughed. “What if I said yes, now that we’ve eaten half the bowl?”

She squeaked.

“No,” I said, grinning at her, and she swallowed. “It’s just this healthy-snack crap my mother likes to buy. Anyway, I’m eating it, too, right?”

“Yeah, but you have a death wish.”

I laughed again. Her face had frozen the second after she said it, as if she wanted to bite the words right out of the air and take them back into her mouth. But I was okay. In fact, I wished more kids at school would say things like that to me, instead of sneaking glances from twenty feet away like they usually did. Not that I knew how to let them know it was okay.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the session at Andrea’s, the weird
waiting
while we’d tried to contact Nicki’s father. “What was your dad like?” I asked. I lay on the couch, while she sat on the floor scooping up the last nuts and berries.

She stopped with her fingers in her mouth and stared at me. Then she pulled her hand free and said, “I had this doll that used to be Kent’s. Well, it was a boy doll; Kent called it an action figure. I named him Slade because I thought it was the coolest name ever.” She ran her fingers along the bottom of the bowl, coating them with salt. “One day I left Slade down in Seaton Park, and I didn’t realize it till we got home. I was hysterical. Matt and Kent told me he would get stolen or rained on or chewed up by wild animals. And my dad drove down to the park to get him, even though dinner was ready. That’s the kind of person Dad was.” She put her fingers in her mouth again, to suck off the salt. I watched her lips.

She seemed to be waiting for me to speak, but when I didn’t, she took her hand out of her mouth and shook it, drying it in the air. “He used to bet on the horses at Sandford, and sometimes he took me. I love seeing the horses run, especially when they run right past where you’re standing, like thunder. We used to plan what we’d do with the money he won, except he hardly ever won any. Once he won, like, a hundred bucks and we had a big dinner and I ordered crème brûlée for dessert.” She laughed. “I didn’t even know what it was. I called it ‘cream brooley.’”

I rested my chin on my hands. “What else?” I felt a little like Dr. Briggs. It was nice to be the listener for once, not to have to scrape things out of my own brain to talk about.

“He used to fight with my mom. About money, and how late he stayed out with his buddies.” She tried to spin the bowl, but it didn’t work well on the carpet. “He never talked about suicide. As far as I know.”

I’d never talked about it, either—at least, not beforehand.

She looked up at me. “He shot himself in the woods behind the house. My brother Matt and I found him.”

My stomach jumped. I squashed down mental images of blood and brains, shattered bone. I could not imagine how horrible that would be, to find anyone who’d shot himself, let alone your own father. Especially since she’d also seen that kid drown at the waterfall. God, how had she made it to fifteen without her mind cracking, without ending up at a place like Patterson? “That sucks. I’m sorry, Nicki.”

“Easy for you to say. Who would’ve found
you
?”

“We’re not talking about me.”

“I just want to know why he did it.” She held her eyes steady on mine. “Why did
you
do it? And don’t tell me you’re not my dad. I don’t care. He’s not here to ask, and you are.”

“You should ask your mom,” I said. “After all—I didn’t know your dad, and she did.”

“She can’t talk about him. If the subject ever gets
near
to coming up, she gets this sick look on her face. And anyway, you do know him. I mean, you know what it’s like to feel the way he felt.”

“It’s not the same for everyone,” I said. “In my Group, at the hospital, everybody’s stories were different.”

“That’s not what I mean. I want to know how you get to the point where—killing yourself is something you can take seriously. Where you think, ‘Yeah, I can do that.’”

I closed my eyes so I wouldn’t have to look at her anymore.

“Tell me,” she said.

Maybe I wouldn’t have told her if we hadn’t gone together to Andrea’s house. If I hadn’t tried to help Andrea conjure up the ghost of Nicki’s father, if I hadn’t seen Nicki cry, if she hadn’t just joked with me as if I were a normal person instead of some fragile unbalanced psycho. If she hadn’t been the one to find her father.

But all those things had happened. So I took a breath and began to talk.

• • • • •

We moved into this house, my mother’s dream house, halfway through my sophomore year. I’d never been the new kid in school before. I hadn’t realized how weird it would be when you can’t even find the bathrooms—never mind figuring out the “right” tables in the cafeteria and the “right” seats on the bus. When you’re new, you’re really alone.

And then the house started leaking.

It happened during the storms of February, when a weird thaw hit us with warm rains. Water poured down, gushed over the gutters, and pounded on the roof.

It also dribbled into the house.

The edges of the windows leaked. The roof leaked. One night, lightning flashed like a strobe while we ran around the house spreading pots to catch the rainwater. I laughed because this fancy house, my mother’s obsession for years, had been slapped together so sloppily that it literally leaked at the seams.

“I don’t see anything funny,” my mother snapped, dropping towels to absorb the water that had already puddled on the floors and soaked the carpet.

“It’s crazy,” I managed to say, catching my breath. I couldn’t believe she didn’t see a little bit of irony or gallows humor or whatever in the situation. Here we were running around like maniacs, trying to catch each new mini-waterfall as it sprang to life. I was in my shorts, since that’s what I wore to bed. My parents wore robes over their pajamas, and their hair stuck out all over their heads, and we kept tripping as we raced from one leak to another.

The house was supposed to be perfect, and it wasn’t. Something about that made me feel better than I’d felt in weeks, eased the pressure on my chest. It had been a long time since I’d laughed and it would be a long time until I laughed again, but that night I couldn’t stop.

• • • • •

We rented a house in Seaton while this house got reroofed and recaulked and whatever else they had to do to seal it up. My mother was furious, documenting every step for the lawsuit she eventually filed against the builder. We lived out of boxes and suitcases, with most of our own furniture left up here under plastic tarps. Everything in the rented house was strange. I bumped into walls when I went to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Nothing belonged to me.

Since Seaton High was still pretty new to me, too, I didn’t fit anywhere. I stumbled through the days always a little lost, a little behind. Because I didn’t know the team schedules, I missed baseball tryouts. When I talked to the coach, he agreed to let me come to practice and show him what I could do. But before I made it, I got the worst sore throat of my life, with chills and fever.

It turned out I had mono, and I was so sick I could just about crawl to the bathroom. I used to stop at a certain spot midway down the hall, where my mother had plugged in a nightlight shaped like a scallop shell. I would lie there with my face against the carpet, inhaling crumbs and dirt specks the vacuum had missed, staring at the plastic shell and gathering my strength to make the second half of the trip. Mostly that’s what I remember from two weeks of sickness: that nightlight.

The coach sent me a message to forget about baseball. He said I was only a sophomore anyway and could try out next year, but I found it hard to believe I would ever play again. I’d also had to stop running—the running I’d done for fun, not for a team. I never tracked my times or distances but did it because I liked it, because it sent the blood racing through me and made me feel less like I was living behind a pane of glass.

• • • • •

“What do you mean by a pane of glass?” Nicki asked.

“It’s like I can see and hear everyone, but I’m not really there with them. It comes and goes—I mean, it always did. Until last year, when it stuck around.”

Dr. Briggs once asked me how long I’d felt it. I thought maybe it started when I was eight, the first time I went off the high dive at my swim class. Nobody else had acted scared of the diving board, so I marched right off it like it was nothing. I only got the shakes afterward, in the locker room.

“There’s a numbness that goes with it,” I told Nicki. “It’s like being dead but not officially dead. I mean, that’s the way I always thought of it.”

She nodded as if that made some kind of sense, touching my hand. I forced myself to look through her, to keep talking, because if I stopped and let myself feel her hand on my skin, I was never going to get through the part about the garage.

• • • • •

This hollow numbness seemed to go on forever. My mother was obsessed with the house. The contractors kept stopping work on the roof and windows for no reason, disappearing for days and leaving things half done, tarps flapping in the wind. My father went on the road, came back, and said, “They’re not done
yet
?”

It never seemed to stop raining. I had no friends at school. I was over the mono—at least I could go to classes again—but I couldn’t run. I came home from school every day and went to bed.

There’s nothing like mono exhaustion. It’s not like being tired after a good workout or missing a night of sleep. With those kinds of tired, you’re spent, but as soon as you stop moving, you start filling back up. With mono, you don’t recharge. You feel like you never had energy and never will. This would be scary, except it takes energy to care and you don’t have energy.

I didn’t know how to change things. All I knew was that everything felt wrong, and I felt wrong, like I shouldn’t even exist. I hated getting up in the morning. I hated slogging through the motions at school. I hated my mother’s anxious nagging and my father’s disappearing. I hated having nothing to look forward to, ever.

Our rented house had a garage. One night I went down to start my mother’s car. She had gone to bed; my father was out at a late meeting. I didn’t have a license or anything, but I knew how to start an engine. I rolled down the car windows and left the garage door closed. I had heard that in just a few minutes you could fill a garage with fumes strong enough to kill. I turned the key and let the engine chug for a minute, maybe less.

I turned it off because I suddenly remembered something else I’d heard, about the fumes getting into the house, too, and killing people there. I got out of the car, found a sheet that someone had used as a drop cloth, and spread it along the crack under the door that led from the garage to the house.

I got back into the car, but this time I couldn’t turn the key. What if the sheet wasn’t enough? It was just cotton, probably not gas-tight. What if the fumes got through? What if I killed my mother?

And did I really want to do this to myself?

I couldn’t think of anything else I wanted to do, any way that life was going to get better, any way this dead blackness was going to leave, but at the same time turning the key seemed like a lot of trouble.

I sat there arguing with myself, my hand on the key but not turning it. I sat there and sat there and sat there.

Finally the garage door rumbled open, and my father drove in. He got out of his own car and began to cross in front of my mother’s. “What the hell are you doing?” he said when he saw me. “You don’t have a license, mister. What are you doing in that car?”

I just blinked at him. He thought I was getting ready for a joyride. He might’ve gone on thinking that if he hadn’t seen the sheet under the door. When he saw it, his head swung back to me, took in the open window, the sight of me in the driver’s seat. His eyes flicked back to the garage door, which had been closed until he opened it.

• • • • •

Nicki squeezed my hand, crunched down on it, and I almost stopped speaking. But having come this far, I figured I might as well go the rest of the way. Tell everything.

• • • • •

“Did you start this car?” my dad said. “Don’t you know you can’t run a car in a closed space?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I know that.” It was the closest I could come to telling him the truth. We stared at each other. I think he was waiting for me to tell him I wasn’t trying to do what we both knew I was trying to do.

“Did you run the engine?”

“Only for a minute,” I said.

“Where the hell is your mother?”

I pointed at the door to the house.

“Get out of the car.”

But I couldn’t move. I put my head down on the steering wheel and he ran inside, calling for my mother.

• • • • •

“I wonder if my dad put his hand on the trigger first without pulling it,” Nicki whispered. “If he started to and stopped, you know.”

I didn’t know. But if I had to bet, I would bet yes. He may have sat there with his finger on the trigger as long as I sat in that stupid garage with my hand on the key.

• • • • •

My father took me to the emergency room, where they checked me out for carbon-monoxide poisoning. Which, of course, I didn’t have. But the nurse asked me if I had tried to hurt myself.

“Yes,” I said. “But I’m not very good at it.”

My own words struck me as hilarious, the funniest thing I’d heard since the night we ran around trying to plug up our leaking house, but the nurse didn’t laugh. She called for other people to talk to me. They asked me more questions like that and then they told my father I couldn’t go home because I was a danger to myself.

“I don’t feel dangerous,” I told someone, a nurse or intern or whoever it was. But they checked me in anyway.