The First Time She Drowned (23 page)

Before I can say good night, he kisses me quiet, moving me backward into the room.

I pull away. “Zoey will be up soon.”

“Just for a minute?” he says, between kisses. “I don’t want to leave you yet.”

I start to say no, but then I realize that it would only be because I’m afraid and I don’t want to be afraid, want to prove to Liz, to myself, that I’m normal, that I can let my guard down. Besides, it feels so good and natural that I realize I don’t actually want to say no. The room is dark, and we almost trip over Zoey’s overnight bag before Chris gently lowers me onto the bed, cradling my back and head all the way down. He moves on top of me, and there is that whoosh in my stomach again as he looks into my eyes.

“You okay?” he says.

I nod yes and he brushes my hair away from my face with his hands. He looks at me all tender and sweet, and even though I know it’s not, it feels like love the way his eyes flicker with light as they look into mine. I put my hands on his back, surprised by how strong and wide it is, surprised how his weight on top of me is not threatening but securing, anchoring me to this moment, to the earth. He moves over me and all of my thoughts recede as my body takes over. My breathing changes and soon I find it hard to separate his chest from mine.

“I like you so much,” he says, smiling.

I want to say,
You too,
am trying to make myself say it, when his hand glides slowly down my waist. For a second I stiffen. I tell my body to relax, to go back to how it felt a moment before, but my nerves start to jangle. I focus on the smell of his cologne and the feel of his back under my hands, the way it feels when he looks into my eyes.

The jangling quiets, and it’s okay again. I am in the moment again, and maybe it doesn’t feel so bad to have his hand on my waist. He smiles at me and I smile back and wonder if he can see the strain.

“Still good?” he asks, and I say yes, because more than anything else, I
want
to be good, want to be okay. His other hand moves, climbs up my leg. I squeeze my eyes shut, and there is a strange flash in my head like the deadly zap of a bug light. A woman’s voice in my head calls my name.

Caasssieeee.

For a split second I lose all sense of where I am. I open my eyes.

Chris is breathing harder now. His hands are everywhere. I want him to stop, but I don’t want him to think that I’m weird or a prude. I think of how Zoey wouldn’t be scared of any of this, how she would enjoy it.

Sounds become heightened. The tick of the clock and the muffle of voices through the wall next door grow deafening. Footsteps in the hallway, and I pray that it is Zoey, that she will open the door and save me.

Chris’s fingers touch the hem of my dress. He pushes the material up slightly. The air hits too far up my exposed legs. I try to move beneath him but his weight has me pinned.

Where is Zoey?

His hands move higher still, and I close my eyes so tightly that I can hear the wind it creates in my head. He’s not even Chris anymore—just a weight, a trap, a shadow of something I don’t want. His fingers touch my underwear.

“Stop!” I shout, pushing him off of me.

He rolls onto his side. “What’s wrong? What happened?”

I sit up. My mind spinning. A flood of thoughts without words. “You need to leave,” I say, yanking down my dress.

“What? Why?”

He reaches his hand toward my arm and I jump off the bed like it’s burning.

“Don’t touch me!” My voice is shaking. “Just get away from me!”

Even in the dark I can see the stunned look on his face.

He stands and places his hands in the air in appeasement. “I don’t understand,” he says. He moves toward me. “What did I do?”

I back up.

He keeps coming.

“Talk to me,” he says.

I’m against the wall now. He’s between me and the door.

“Cass.”

I glance at the doorknob, willing it to turn, for Zoey to appear. My need to escape is so big, so necessary to my survival that I’d do anything to make it happen.

“Leave!” I scream. “Or I’m calling the cops!”

His mouth drops. “Are you serious?”

“I am totally fucking serious!” I point to the door. “Get out!”

He shakes his head, stops and then shakes it again. “This is crazy,” he says. He looks at me in complete disbelief. “
You’re
crazy.”

Zoey’s hairbrush is on the dresser beside me and I pick it up and hurl it past his head. “GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY ROOM!” I scream so loud that I feel like I’m going to shatter.

He dodges the brush and stands back up, wide-eyed. Then he marches out, slamming the door behind him as he goes. For one second I am relieved, can breathe again. Then all at once I start shaking like I’m going to die. I have no idea what the hell is wrong with me. I just shake and shake and wait for Zoey, but she never comes.

My mother was right. About all of it. No one can love me. I am crazy.

IT’S BEEN HOURS
since I kicked Chris out of the hotel room and still Zoey does not return.

The shaking does not stop. It worsens. It is an earthquake, rattling my internal beams and supports. I pace the hotel room, back and forth, trying to escape it. My thoughts spin and bang into each other like a crowd running for the exits, finding them blocked. It’s a trap. The whole place is a trap. There is no way out of me. My nerves trill like a fire alarm, triggering a flood of sprinklers, all that water spilling everywhere, and nowhere for it to go. I drown in my own panic. Back and forth, back and forth, rubbing my arms up and down, filled with the sickening surety that I am going to die, that my mind will break up into pieces at any moment.

Exhaustion takes over just when it seems it never will. The same nightmare I’ve had since I was a child returns, the one that woke me up so many nights in the hospital, the one that Dr. Meeks tried to press me to talk about. It sucks me down into its terror. I try to resist, to wake myself up, but just like always, the nightmare wins.

I am playing hide-and-seek with my friends in an old haunted house. I find a good hiding spot in a closet and crouch down low, wait quietly for the hunt to begin. After a while, I realize that no one seems to be looking for me and I start to get worried.

I hear footsteps approaching and someone calling my name. It’s someone I know, but I can’t picture their face. Whoever it is is counting: twenty-six, twenty-seven. But the voice changes as it counts, becomes inhuman, ghostly and threatening.

I hold my breath, hoping the ghost won’t hear me, but then I think that if I’m too quiet, my mother won’t know that I need her, and I want desperately for her to come find me.

I start to scream for her. I scream for my mother as loud as I can and I am afraid she won’t come, certain she won’t come, but then all of a sudden she flings open the door to the closet where I’m hiding and smiles at me. “There you are!” she says.

“Mom!” I say, so relieved and grateful. “Thank God it’s you! There’s a ghost after me!”

She smiles again, only now her teeth are old and broken. “I know,” she says. Then she turns, still smiling, and calls to the ghost, “Yoo-hoo! She’s in here!”

I wake with a gasp, waves of panic slamming me, pinning me to the bed. Even with my eyes wide open, the dream feels alive, harassing, demanding my attention. There is something in it this time, something I can’t shake. I can feel it just out of reach like a name at the tip of the tongue. The voice. It’s familiar. I lie very still, hardly breathing, trying not to feel anything. Every itch or tingle or ache in my body triggers another surge of terror as if my body itself is the threat, as if I have swallowed the ghost and now it is possessing me.

I think of all the foolish hope I had when I left the hospital, how I stood before the ocean trying so hard to believe that I could start over, that I was fine, that I wasn’t what they said I
was. I stare at the colorless dawn outside the window and think of all my friends who are still locked up. I imagine them looking out on the same bleak morning, trapped in time and yet, unlike me, still able to hold on to the dream that it’s possible to really be free from our pasts.

And now, just as in the hospital, in spite of everything my past has taught me, I can’t stop myself from longing for my mother.

• • •

I wake up around 10:00
A
.
M
., leave the hotel without bothering to check out, call a cab, return to the dorm and immediately start packing. The room seems strange to me. What once looked messy and lived-in now has the quality of sudden, unexpected disaster about it. I pick my clothes up off the floor and stuff them into my suitcase without bothering to fold them. My hands shake so badly, I keep dropping things.

I’m almost finished when Zoey rolls in, still in her homecoming dress, now wrinkled with what looks like chocolate dribble down the front.

“What are you doing?” she says when she notices my entire side of the room has been cleaned out.

“What does it look like I’m doing?” I put my pillow on top of my suitcase.

“It looks like you’re leaving.”

I walk past her into the bathroom, check the cabinet for anything I might have missed. She follows me.

“I don’t understand. Did something happen? Why won’t you look at me?”

Her presence makes the hollowness in my stomach ache.

“You’re not going to talk to me?” she says.

Some part of me pulls toward her, longs for repair, for the familiar comfort of my friend, but it’s like I’ve gone far into the back of my head and closed the door, and even if I wanted to, I know I’ll never be dumb enough to open it for her again.

“Nothing to talk about,” I say flatly. “You left me. Now I’m leaving you.”

“What? How did I leave you?” she says, and the fact that she doesn’t know only makes it worse. “Because I didn’t come back to the room last night? Is that what you’re all mad about?”

She says this like it’s a small thing.

I go to the closet and grab the last few pieces from their hangers. I chuck the rest of the hangers into the trash. Zoey no longer exists in this room. I have made her disappear.

“Don’t you think we should talk about this?” she says.

I try to zip my suitcase.

“I mean, I get that you’re pissed and I’m sorry I didn’t come have a burger with you or whatever, but this is a little ridiculous.”

The zipper won’t budge so I sit on the suitcase to flatten it down.

“You know, honestly, I’m kinda sick of the way you’re always mad at me about something,” she says. “I shouldn’t have to babysit you.”

The suitcase finally closes and I stand. I turn to Zoey, steeled with cold hatred. “Well, don’t worry,” I say. “You’ll never have to see me again.” I walk out the door and slam it shut. Behind me, I hear the door open again.

“Cassie!” Zoey calls.

I turn the corner, bounce my suitcase down the stairs and leave.

• • •

I begin the long trek to the bus stop, but take a detour to the beach one last time, knowing it could be years, if ever, before I see it again. The ocean is choppy and empty of surfers. The water is icy gray; it looks like the kind of cold that cuts. Little white peaks break and shatter. The wind is bigger here, the sun strained. A stormy tide retreats, leaving only wreckage and debris—the bones of the sea.

I think of my surfing lesson with Chris, how far away it seems, like I was a different person then, like we were both different people. Some part of me, small and wiser than my feelings, knows that the difference is only in my mind, that the experience of last night feels bigger, worse, more twisted than it actually was, but I can’t stop it from feeling so big, and I don’t know why it does, and obviously I must be crazy and Meeks was right—I am not ready to be in the world.

I sit on the beach for a long time, taking in these last hours of freedom, and then I go to the pay phone in the parking lot. I need to call James and let him know that I’m coming back to the hospital. It kills me to have to admit that he was wrong about me, wrong for believing in me, that we were both wrong about that. I tell myself he’ll understand, that he will forgive me for my failure. He has to forgive me. He is all I have left.

I look at my watch. It’s just after dinnertime there. Most of the patients will be in the TV room. Shelly will be playing Scrabble with herself just outside the group. James will have claimed DJ
status over the small stereo by the pool table, pausing between shots to strum the pool cue as if it’s an electric guitar. I can see them all in their respective places like a still life. I recall how exciting it was when the pay phone rang on the unit, a novelty in the long, unchanging days. I can practically hear James saying, “If that’s the White House calling again, tell the prez I’m busy.”

I dial and the phone picks up. It’s Shelly.

“Hey,” I say, and there is relief in the pure fact that she’s okay, that she’s still alive. I remember the foreboding I felt on the day I left, staring at her scarred wrists. “It’s Cassie.”

It takes her a beat too long to remember. But then she calls to the others that it’s me, and I want to sit down on the ground and curl up in a ball, both comforted and horrified by the sense of belonging this brings me. Trish jumps on the phone and fires off a half dozen questions about life on the outside, wanting to know how great college is, how happy I am to be free. I avoid my own face in the warped mirror of the pay phone.

“Would you mind putting James on a sec?” I say finally. “I need to talk to him.”

There is a pause.

“Oh, shit, you didn’t hear?”

“They didn’t already discharge his crazy ass, did they?” I say, suddenly remembering that James said he’d be getting out soon.

Another pause.

“Cassie, James killed himself.”

“What?”

“They let him out last week and he . . . shot himself.”

I clutch the phone between two hands, holding myself up with
it. I try to speak but all the wind is knocked out of me, knocked out of the sky.

“Cass, are you still there?”

“I don’t understand . . . Are you sure there wasn’t some mistake . . . He wouldn’t—”

“I’m sure. The funeral was a few days ago. None of us were allowed to go. I’m really sorry.”

I can see the ocean from where I’m standing. The sun is not so much setting as fading, the ashy tint of early evening beginning to settle over everything.

Trish keeps talking.

The world looks changed, flattened, like I’m standing outside of it, looking at a picture of it.

She tells me everything she knows, from the group meeting held by the staff to what she read in the newspaper when she was out on a day pass with her parents. I grab on to every detail, as if to know exactly what happened would be to chase it backward, make it unhappen, be with James again so he wouldn’t be alone in that unspeakable, definitive darkness of no one there.

It is only when there are no details left for her to tell that I grasp, for just a moment, that he is really gone. I hang up and walk around the parking lot in circles, my arms outstretched in supplication, struggling to hold something they cannot hold.

James.

Circling, circling. My breath comes in gasps. The one person who knew all of me, who knew the worst of me, the ugly, broken,
mental hospital me. And loved me anyway. Gone now. And I didn’t help him, didn’t stop him, didn’t even know he was in that much pain. I need to do something, put this news somewhere, deposit it like a bomb and run away from it.

James. Please. No.

I can’t. It’s too much. There is no one now. Nothing now. Nowhere now.
Please help me,
I think, but the whole world is empty.

I walk toward the ocean, which pushes and breathes like a living thing. The sky has turned dark, and where the water meets it, it looks like the end of the world. I want to walk out into it, to the place where it all stops. I remember how easy it seemed the last time I was out there drowning to just let go, to stop swimming, to surrender to that lethal watery hug.

I take a step. The water is freezing as it seeps into my shoes. But it is only an intellectual cold. My body feels nothing. The ocean tugs me forward with its promise. Just wade out until it swallows me, until I disappear, until it’s over. The image of the pink surfboard comes to me, the two fish painted on its nose, swimming in opposite directions. It had felt like a choice then: toward life or away. Now that choice seems gone. I have destroyed everything. James is dead. There is nothing left.

You said we would be fine, James. You said the past was the past, that we could start over.
But it just repeats on a loop, pain on top of pain.

I think of my mother. According to Trish, the newspaper said that James had called his mother at work, told her he loved her that afternoon. Had he hoped that she would hear the call of death in his voice, come running, stop him just in time? I recognize
the wish, that deep, ancient longing for mother to hear and to come and to soothe. Did I owe my mother that call, that chance? Would she finally hear my need? Would she finally come to my rescue? I turn and look toward the parking lot. Maybe if I tell her I’m sorry. Maybe if I just surrender to her truth, accept all fault. Maybe then.

The night seems huge and desolate around me as I walk small and stunned back to the parking lot. When I get to the pay phone, I realize I’m out of quarters. I call collect. In my distress, it takes a minute to even remember my home number.

The phone rings. I watch the black, churning ocean and think of riptides.

She answers on the third ring, and the operator asks her if she will accept the charges. “Yes,” she says.

There is a quick pause.

“Cassie?”

I start to speak but nothing comes.

“Hello? Can you hear me?”

The sound of her voice brings none of the hoped-for comfort.

“Hello?”

Only the sense of going under.

“Cassie!”

Of two dark shadows submerged and fighting each other the whole way down.

I look at the ocean. Toward life or away.

Listen to me, soldier,
I hear James say in my head.
Run! Save yourself.

I can’t, James,
I think.
I don’t know how.

“Hello? Cassie?”

I remember myself out in the waves, allowing the riptide to take me back and back and back, trusting that eventually I’d be freed.

“Cassie! Are you there?”

I start to answer when I hear that quiet little voice again: the one that saved me once before when I was drowning. Clear and calm and assured. It is the wiser fish. And I realize that in spite of everything that’s happened, this time that voice—
my
voice—is a little stronger.
Yes,
it says,
I am still here.

I watch myself hang up the phone and then stand there staring at it. I’m not sure what I’ve just done.

On a sudden whim, I dip my finger into the change slot like I did when I was a kid. To my surprise, I pull out a quarter. For all the times I’ve ever tried that, this is the first it’s actually worked.