Passing Strange (13 page)

D
YING WAS NOT PLEASANT.

Coming back wasn’t any better.

I was in the hospital morgue when I returned from my suicide, in a room full of corpses, none of whom would be making the return trip. I was alone.

Really and truly alone. I didn’t see any white lights, I didn’t hear any warm voices or see an outstretched hand. My faith was pretty clear on what was in store for people like me.

The morgue was locked, but only from the inside. Even so it must have taken me an hour to get the door open. My body wasn’t working right; my arms flailed, my hands were bent into hooks. Sounds were coming from my open mouth and I couldn’t stop them. I dragged myself into the hall, but when I reached a stairwell, my body didn’t remember what it needed to do, so I had to crawl. I’d made it halfway up the flight when a nurse saw me and screamed loud enough to collapse the roof.

I was there for quite a while before they found a doctor brave enough to help me the rest of the way up.

I was given a hospital gown. Someone retrieved my information and called my parents.

“They probably won’t come,” I heard someone say.

But they did.

Depression isn’t something that can be adequately explained to someone who has never felt it before, to someone who thinks it can be cured with a hug, a bouquet of flowers, or a pink teddy bear. Bouts of depression can be triggered by external events—and maybe mine was, when I realized that you and I weren’t going to be together—but even this fact, as devastating as it felt at the time, wasn’t the reason I took a bottle of sleeping pills and drifted away in my bathtub. The reason was internal, not external—the pain I felt would never, could never go away. This is what I thought and believed. That pain had been with me before you and I fell in and out of love; sometimes I think it was there before I was even born, a dark twin that preceded me into this world. Pain was the only thing in my life I had faith in.

Dying wasn’t peaceful, either. Imagine someone setting fire to your throat and your lungs and your chest and then you being too weak to do anything but watch and wait. That’s what drowning was like. Nothing romantic about it at all.

Supposedly I’m the only one who has come back from suicide. And now I was the only one that I knew of who was healing. I tried to convince myself that it all must be for a reason. Did my heart really beat?

I was a wreck after my partial confession.

I barely left my tomb for, like, three days. The blue fog returned, as obliterating as ever. There’s no refuge from your problems in death.

When my parents called downstairs to me I wouldn’t answer, and pretended I was far away. My father came down to check on me, once, but whatever he saw in my eyes scared him so much that he didn’t make a return trip, and no doubt he forbade my mother or sister to go see me. I didn’t go to work. I didn’t even move. I was worse than sick. I was dead, and feeling it. I guess it was the closest I felt to the time when I killed myself.

Maybe I should have felt overjoyed. Maybe my heart really did beat. Maybe I wasn’t just healing or regenerating or anything; maybe I was actually
coming back
. But sometimes
almost
feeling alive is worse than not feeling alive at all. When I was depressed, that’s what I felt like, like I was almost alive. And knowing I’d never quite make it the rest of the way.

Three days of having the fog press in on me, surrounding me. I didn’t even want to move.

I think I know why the confession triggered the blue-fog response. I
was
trying to atone, after all—I was trying to exonerate myself and my friends for the Guttridge crimes, I was authentically reconnecting with my parents, I was, in my own way, trying to ask God for His forgiveness. All good things. But there was one essential piece—in some ways the most essential piece—that was as yet unaddressed.

The piece I didn’t get to confess.

The piece about the one I love.

I’ve been thinking about us since I saw Adam kiss Phoebe in the back of Margi’s car. That kiss brought back the memory of all the times we’d kissed, and how each time it felt like something was slipping out of my grasp, because each time brought us closer to the decision we both knew we had to make. You didn’t want to hide anymore, but I couldn’t stop. And because of it I’ve been hiding ever since.

After we said good-bye, we both tried to live our lives as normally as possible. Accent on the “normally.” It took you a while, but eventually we started seeing other people. And then I saw my love kissing someone else.

It wasn’t the kiss that killed me. I did that all myself. The blue fog took me away. Kisses don’t kill; depression does. There aren’t any reasons for most young suicides beyond depression, just triggers.

I don’t know why I was made this way. I don’t know. I may never know. All I know is that when he leaned in and lowered his mouth to yours, his big body blocking all but your eyes, I felt like I was dying, felt it more than when I really did die a few months later. And when your arms went around his neck, it might as well have been your hands around my throat.

I try not to think of those things.

I try to stay positive, you know.

But, Monica, I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.

* * *

My confession, obviously, was incomplete, and with it, my atonement and my absolution. I’d been able to confess to suicide but not to the other piece; faced with the totality of my cowardice again, the blue fog came rushing in. I considered laying on train tracks, immolating myself with gasoline, scarring my body so completely that I couldn’t heal again.

But on the third day I heard Katy crying, and dragged myself upstairs to see what was wrong.

“Caring!” she shouted as soon as she saw me climb the stairs. She ran to wrap her arms around my legs, almost sending us over backward.

“Karen,” my father said. I thought he looked awfully pale, and then I realized that after three days in my basement tomb I was probably a fright to behold.

“Caring, I thought the bad mans got you!” Katy said, cutting him off. For such a peanut she had a mighty grip, and it took me a moment to unwind her long enough to return her hug.

“Oh no, honey,” I said, guilt flooding me. “No bad men are going to get me.” I hoped I was telling the truth.

“Where were you? Where were you, Caring?”

I looked at her. She was like a tiny version of me, but without the scars and sins. As guilty as I felt about frightening her as I had, I also felt something like warmth blossoming inside me. It was as if her face, troubled and fraught with worry as it was, were like the sun, dissipating the blue fog that surrounded me.

“I was somewhere else,” I told her. “But I’m back now.”

And I was. There was no other way to explain it. The blue fog was beaten back, and I approached my new purpose in “life” with renewed clarity. I was going to solve the Guttridge murders, but even more, when it was all over I was going to stop hiding. Stop passing.

And I was going to find Monica, and I was going to tell her the things I had to tell her.

Dad took me for a ride after I crawled up from the tomb.

Or rather, I took him for a ride.

“Feel like taking a drive?” he said, tossing me the keys.

“Where to?” I asked, once I was behind the wheel.

“I don’t know,” he answered. “Anywhere you want to go?”

I thought about it for a minute.

“Yes,” I said. I took him to the Haunted House.

There was police tape across the porch and the doorway. I cut through the tape with my fingernails.

“Who lives here?”

“My friends,” I said. “Well, they used to.”

The front door let loose a nice Haunted House-y creak as I pushed it open.

“So this is where you hang out?” Dad said, peering into the gloom.

“Used to.”

“Comfy,” he said. He took a seat on the battered futon in the living room. “I called your boss for you. I said you were sick and would be out a few days.”

“Thank you.”

“Karen,” he said. “Are you okay?”

“Um, no, Dad. I’m not okay.”

Dad wasn’t as easily brushed aside by flippancy as many people I knew.

“Karen,” he said. “Are we going to lose you again?”

“We,” I said, the word out of my mouth before I could stop it. And once it was out I kept going. “I don’t see any
we
here other than you and me, Dad.”

“Your mother…your mother took your death very personally, Karen. You have to understand that.”

“My suicide, you mean.” I said. I don’t know that I’d ever said the word to him before.

“Yes. Your suicide.”

I
know
he’s never used the word in front of me before. The word, in our house, was like one of those really awful words that couldn’t be said on network television and would get you an instant R rating in the movies. A word with impact. A whispered word. The weird thing is, it hurt me when I said it, but it made me feel better when he said it. I don’t know. I guess I took it as another sign that he was starting to come to terms.

“You have to know, Karen,” he said, “that your suicide is something that we, your mother and I, are having a very difficult time understanding. Never mind accepting.”

He held up his hand before I could speak. “Let me finish. I know, intellectually, that we’re not to blame. My brain knows, but I don’t know if my heart ever will. I might know that the things you did, before you died, weren’t really a reflection on me as a father. I may know that I didn’t
cause
you to be suicidal.

But I’ll never, ever know if I had been there for you more, had watched and listened and cared more, that things might not have ended when and how they did. If I’d just paid more attention, maybe I’d have seen the signs and gotten you some help.”

Watching him cry was not easy, especially since I could tell he was trying as hard as he could to control himself, probably out of some misguided notion that it would heap trauma upon trauma for me to see him cry.

As painful and harrowing as it was, there was a part of me, the part that still wanted to live, that was glad he was crying. My parents had never mourned in front of me.

“I’ve read stacks of books on suicide since you died,” he continued. “Articles, journals, notes.” Here he paused to blow his nose. “Time that I probably should have spent reading about zombies. Or time I should have spent just being with you.”

He wasn’t able to regain his composure for some time after that last revelation. I almost hugged him then, but something held me back, some internal directive that said he really needed to work through all of this stuff before I could give him any type of physical expression of solace.

“I hid the books from your mom for weeks, months, even. Then one day I found one in the magazine bin by the sofa in the living room, and I thought I’d slipped and left it out. But it wasn’t one I’d bought. Your mother was doing the same thing I was. We just didn’t talk about it.”

As sad as that was, I felt a spark of happiness flare up in me. I’d thought my mother had written me off completely. That I was dead to her.

“She…she won’t touch me, Dad.” I didn’t have to tell him that the last time I remembered her touching me is when I told her about Monica. It was the first and only time one of my parents hit me.

“We’ve never talked about it. Your death, I mean,” he said. “I’m sorry if this is upsetting you. I think your mom will come around, but it may take time. There’s no mechanism inside a parent to deal with their child’s suicide, Karen,” he said. “Nothing at all. No way to prepare, no way to assimilate it or understand it or deal with it in any way.”

“It wasn’t Mom’s fault, Dad. It was…” It was the depression, I wanted to tell him. The blue fog. My voice trailed away as he stood.

“I just hope that you can forgive us.”

“Forgive you?” I said. “Forgive
you
?”

I kept saying it. Then we were hugging. I’m not sure who embraced who first, and in the end it doesn’t really matter, all I knew was that it felt good to have my Daddy’s arms around me again, even if the feeling wasn’t quite the same as before I killed myself.

I called Pete. His answers on the phone were curt, monosyllabic. I asked him if he wanted to go out that night. He said he did.

I met him at the top of the street. There was a single red rose on the passenger seat.

“Is that for me?” I said, taking the flower. He nodded, solemnly.

“I was worried about you,” he said. The weird thing is I think he really meant it. “I’m sorry,” I said. So maybe I’m a better liar than he is. “Are you okay? I heard you were sick.” Now that was creepy, because I didn’t tell anyone I was sick except for Craig. I didn’t want to think about him asking questions about me at work. “Let me guess,” I said. “He wouldn’t admit he had a Christie working for him, either.” Pete watched me closely. Thank heaven I only blink at will. “That’s right.” I nodded, smiling. “He lies to every guy that comes in asking for me,” I said. “He thinks it isn’t good for business.”

“A lot of guys come in asking for you?”

“Kind of. Don’t be jealous.”

“Not the jealous type,” he answered. “But your boss is an idiot, because you’re probably the only reason anybody comes into that stupid store.”

“Pete…”

“So where have you been? Are you seeing someone else?”

Good thing he isn’t the jealous type, I thought.

“I needed some time away, Pete,” I said. “Things are moving kind of quickly for us and I needed to think.”

“So have you been thinking?” The scar on his cheek was a vibrant red line; the muscles in his jaw clenched tight.

“Yeah.”

“What do you think?”

“I think I need to see you,” I told him. “Only you.”

I don’t know what made me look down at my wrist at that moment, but I noticed that sometime between slashing myself with the box cutter and lying to Pete, the cut had healed. I could see no trace of the wound, and it had been a deep one. It had been deep enough for me to sink the very long fingernail on my index finger all the way in. There was no scar, and I found myself comparing both wrists to see if I could spot a difference. I couldn’t.