I told the psych resident who saw me the next day that I hadn’t even really done anything; I had only turned the key for a minute. She told me my parents had searched my room at home and found ten bottles of painkillers, way more than I would need for any headache, and way more than I would need to kill myself. She asked me why I had it.
I knew the medicine could kill me. I’d bought it because it made me feel better every time I bought a new bottle. A little better, for a little while. But I hadn’t used the bottles because I knew an overdose would destroy my liver, and if I failed I didn’t want to be alive with a screwed-up liver.
Not that I told the psych resident any of that. She asked me why I had all that medicine and I said I kept forgetting I already had it, and buying a new bottle. She asked why it had been hidden under the bed. I said it wasn’t hidden; that was just where I wanted to keep it. She managed not to roll her eyes.
Later that day, after my parents had telephoned God knows how many hospitals and the insurance company, they found a place for me at Patterson, which was only an hour outside of Seaton.
“We’re lucky they have such a good facility for adolescents right here,” my mother said as we waited in the hospital lobby for my father to bring the car around, so they could drive me over there.
“Yeah,” I said. “We’re lucky to have so many screwed-up teenagers close by.”
She whirled on me, her hand raised. Neither of my parents had hit me since I was about five, when they used to give me a swat on the butt for such crimes as drawing on the walls with ketchup. I closed my eyes, waiting for the slap, but it didn’t come.
She didn’t say a word. When I opened my eyes, she was no longer facing me. She stared at a vending machine, at candy bars trapped behind glass and coiled wire, gripping her purse with both hands. She was quiet when my father pulled up, quiet while we got into the car and drove out on the highway. Then she burst into tears and bent over in the front seat—wailing, smearing her lipstick and black eye makeup on her hands and sleeve.
“Melissa, don’t; it’ll be okay,” my father said, one hand darting over to pat her shoulder. His head swiveled, checking the lanes around us. He tried to pull the car over to the right, but nobody would let him over. They sped past, punching their horns whenever our car edged into the next lane.
“Damn it,” he said, as another one blared at us. “Help me here. Watch your side of the car and tell me when it’s clear.” His voice rose. “Melissa. I need you to do this.”
She sobbed and the car kept going forward at sixty-five miles an hour, forward because nobody would let us stop.
“Can you keep yourself together for a few minutes?”
“I’m trying.”
“Can you please—”
“Forget it!” She straightened her back, black streaks shining on her cheeks. “Nobody’s going to let you over. Nobody gives a damn. Our heads could be on fire, and nobody would slow down for half a minute to let us get off the road. Just keep driving, Harry.”
“If you need to stop—”
“I don’t. I’m fine.” She stared out the windshield, the wet smears drying on her face. “Keep going.”
I watched them and knew I should feel something, but I felt nothing except the old hopelessness. Which I had no right to feel, because I was a healthy kid from a good family. A kid whose mother wouldn’t even slap him when he was stabbing her, a kid whose parents were bleeding money to send him to a place like Patterson.
• • • • •
“When you knew you were in trouble—why didn’t you talk to anybody?” Nicki asked.
“Like who?”
“Your parents?”
“What was I gonna say? That I felt like I was behind glass? That would’ve made a lot of sense.”
“If you told them you were thinking about killing yourself, I’m sure they would’ve been interested.”
Her voice was full of common sense. I buried my face in my arms and breathed in. The couch smelled faintly like roses; the cleaning woman sprayed something on it every week that would probably give us cancer years from now.
In spite of the sickly fabric-cleaner smell, I breathed in deep and slow, trying to hold off panic, the shudders that wanted to roll through me. I should’ve known what it would do to me to tell Nicki, how raw I would feel. The last time I’d told this story Val and Jake had had to glue me back together. I wasn’t at Patterson anymore; I couldn’t afford to break myself open like this. Why had I thought I could help Nicki, anyway?
Nicki rested her hand on my back. “Are you okay?”
“Yes.”
“Seriously.”
I turned my head so she could see my face. “Yes.”
“I’m sorry I made you tell me that.”
“You didn’t make me.”
She frowned at the wall. “I’ve been pushing you to tell me.”
“Did it help?”
“What do you mean?”
“Did you get what you wanted?” I said.
“I—I don’t know.”
We stared at each other, the pupils small in her gray eyes, small in the light from the windows.
• • • • •
Nicki and I ended up outside, tossing a baseball back and forth. One of my old gloves fit her. The sky had paled to a nothing color, the dirty white of old socks. I wasn’t sure how we decided to start playing catch except that we needed a break, needed to pull back from what we’d said to each other.
Nicki’s aim was okay, but her technique sucked. “Like this,” I told her, demonstrating. “No—bring your arm back like—are you watching?”
She giggled and tried to balance the ball on her foot. “You don’t have to turn this into a lesson, Coach.”
I shut up about her throwing. My parents used to do that—try to turn every blasted thing into a “learning experience.”
“Unless you want me to give you volleyball lessons next,” she went on.
“Volleyball?”
“Yeah, I was the setter on my team last year. I bet I make varsity this fall, even though I’ll just be a sophomore.”
The word “varsity” jabbed me in the stomach. I wondered whether I could’ve made the baseball team if I hadn’t been sick. And whether I would be able to play next spring, after missing a year. But all I said to Nicki was, “Come on, throw the ball.”
The sky darkened, but the air didn’t cool off. “It’s so hot,” Nicki said as the ball went back and forth between us, smacking into our gloves. “If we keep this up, I’ll have to go back to the waterfall.”
“Okay with me.”
“It’s true what they say about you.” She laughed. “You do practically live up there.”
My throw went a little wild; she lurched to catch it. “Who says what about me?”
Her face flushed. “It’s just—people know you like to hang out up there. They’ve seen you. That’s how I knew where to find you.”
She sent the ball back to me. I caught and held it. It had never occurred to me that she’d hunted for me on purpose. I’d always thought our meeting there had been an accident. “You came looking for me?”
“Well, yeah.” She scratched her arm, staring at my knees instead of my face. “I went up to the waterfall all the time anyway. A couple of times, people said you’d just left when I got there, so I started going earlier. I wanted to talk to you about my dad. Didn’t you know that?”
“I never thought about it,” I said slowly. “I figured I just reminded you of your dad; I didn’t know you came looking for me.”
“Well, we talked about him anyway, so what’s the difference?” She raised her eyes, met mine for a second. “Are you going to throw the ball?”
“No difference,” I said, but it did make a difference, and it made my stomach burn that I couldn’t figure out what the hell the difference was.
“Throw the ball,” she said.
I stood there, my mouth drying by the second, the glove hiding the ball in my hand. “So you only used me for my suicide stories, but hey, I knew that all along, right?”
Nicki shook her head. “That’s not it.”
Clouds pushed down on the tops of the trees. Pressure built above me, inside me. I tasted panic. I told myself there was nothing to panic about, but I tasted it anyway.
I hurled the ball. Her hand snapped up, and the ball thwacked into her glove. She pulled her hand out of the glove and shook it. “What, are you trying to knock my fingers off?”
“What else do people say about me?”
“Nothing.” She wiggled her fingers.
“Are you going to tell them all about me now? My lame-ass night in the garage, and how I couldn’t even turn the key?”
She walked up to me, and I took one step back. I couldn’t stand her being so close, couldn’t believe I’d let her rest her hand on my skin earlier. The heavy humid air filled my throat, made it hard to breathe.
“What is your problem?” she said.
“I don’t like people knowing shit about me.”
Wind stirred the treetops, not yet reaching us on the ground. She stretched a hand toward me. I smelled my own sweat and couldn’t understand why she didn’t gag from the stink of it. Her fingertips brushed my arm, and I flinched away.
“Don’t touch me.”
“Ryan, you’re acting like an idiot. Listen to me.”
“I
am
an idiot, for telling you all that shit.” I needed a good dousing in the waterfall. I needed the roar, the smack in the face when I tilted my head upward into the spray. “Why don’t you go have a laugh with your friends? Tell them how I hang around the waterfall, and how I didn’t have the guts to turn the key.”
“Ryan—”
“And how I talk too much to the wrong fucking people.”
She froze.
“Go on. Get out of here; it’s going to rain any minute.”
Cold wind rushed through the trees. Her drying shorts blew off the deck railing. The low plants growing around our house, the ferns and bushes, bowed and touched the ground. Nicki eyed the sky.
“We are
not
done here,” she said. She tossed the ball and glove on the ground and grabbed her shorts. She ran into the woods, into the dimness of the coming storm.
SEVEN
A few minutes
after Nicki left, fat raindrops began to splat down. I went inside and raised the kitchen windows to let in the smell of rain on hot ground. I opened the door to the deck, and wind poured in. It blew a magazine off the coffee table and knocked a vase from the kitchen counter. The vase broke but no water spilled, since Mom never put anything in it.
“Ryan!” My mother ran in and slammed everything shut. She never liked outside air, with its dirt and pollen; she preferred filtered air. “What on earth were you thinking?”
“I was cooling off the house.”
“The air conditioning’s on. What’s the matter with you?”
Rain thundered down, hammered on the roof and the window glass, drummed on the deck. The living-room windows turned liquid.
Mom ran her finger around the edge of a windowpane, as she often did when it rained, testing for leaks. We hadn’t had any problems since moving back in after the repairs, but she kept testing anyway. “What have you done with yourself all day?” she asked, with strained cheerfulness.
Let’s see: stood under a waterfall, went to see a phony psychic, relived the worst night of my life, fought with Nicki. “Not much.”
“You might say . . .” Her eyes searched my face. “You might say you haven’t done much since you finished your schoolwork last month.”
“It’s vacation.”
“Ryan,” she said, taking the dustpan and broom out of the kitchen closet, “I think it’s time you started doing things again. Your father and I have been very patient; we haven’t kept you on a short leash. But—”
“‘Leash’?” I said. “What am I, a dog?”
“I didn’t mean that.” She held out the broom and dustpan. “Come clean up this vase.”
I swept up the fragments. “I’m not on a leash.”
“That was a poor choice of words,” she said. “My point is that you need structure. We didn’t want to pressure you into taking on too much too soon, and we thought something like camp or a summer class might be too much, but now I wonder. I worry about you drifting, not having any goals—”
“I have goals.”
“Such as?”
“I’m going to start running again.” I dumped broken glass in the trash.
“That’s very nice.” Her tone dripped syrup. “But I’m thinking about more than just a hobby.”
“Will you stop talking at me like I’m five years old? I was a mental patient, not a moron.”
She sucked in her breath. “You like saying that, don’t you?”
“Not really.”
She gripped the kitchen counter where the vase had stood. “You like shocking me.”
“Why should it shock you? That’s what I was.”
She shook her head. “You like saying it in the ugliest way possible. Dr. Briggs says it makes you feel that you’re in control.”
I hated when she talked like that, as if she were looking me up in a manual and reading a section titled “How to Respond When Ryan Reminds You He Was in the Nuthouse.” I threw the broom and dustpan in the closet, instead of hanging them on their special little hooks.
“Ryan—” Her face creased, and I knew I needed to stop, to pull back, because it never took much to make her crumble. But my nerves were stretched tight, on the verge of snapping, and I wasn’t sure if it was because of what she’d said, or if this tension was left over from my scene with Nicki. I only knew I needed her to shut up.
She didn’t.
“You can’t hold your illness over our heads for the rest of your life. It doesn’t excuse you for rudeness. It doesn’t—”
“You’re the one holding it over my head.”
Her face collapsed, and she stood sobbing in the middle of the kitchen. Guilt knifed through me. I opened the closet door and hung up the dustpan and broom. But she kept crying, with her hand at her face and her shoulders quivering.
I should’ve tried to hug her or at least touch her shoulder, but I couldn’t. It was like watching someone drowning, and worrying that if you stuck your arm out to help them, they’d drag you under, too. I tapped the sides of my legs while she choked, tears pouring over her fingers. Finally I managed to pull a paper towel off the roll and hand it to her.
“Thank you,” she murmured, blotting her face. “Why don’t you just go upstairs.” Her voice was calm now, thick from crying, and she wouldn’t look at me.