Second Star (22 page)

I hear Jas each time I resurface.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“I love you,” he says.

“I’ll spend the rest—”

Then I don’t hear anything anymore.

34

I’ve been awake for a while now, but I haven’t opened my eyes yet. I’m not sure I want to open my eyes ever again. I try to force myself back to sleep, but it’s so noisy that I wonder how I ever slept here at all. There is the beep of some machine near my head that seems to be registering my pulse, the sound of footsteps, an echo of laughter, and, from somewhere nearby, an urgent call for a nurse.

I’m in a hospital. That much is obvious. I can feel an IV stuck into my left arm. My entire body aches, and my neck feels so stiff that I don’t think I can turn my head; I’ll learn later that my collarbone is broken, along with several ribs.

It’s my lungs that give me away; I try to take a deep breath and instead begin coughing violently. My lungs still feel like they’re full of water.

I wonder just how close I came to drowning. I hear footsteps rushing in, a nurse coming to check on me.

I open my eyes.

“Well hello there, sleepyhead,” the nurse says in an overly cheerful voice. Her scrubs are pink with little teddy bears running down the middle. Maybe I’m in the pediatric unit.

I open my mouth to speak, but I can’t stop coughing. The nurse hands me a plastic cup of water, and I shake my head. Water is the last thing I need. I need someone to stick their hands down my throat and wring out my water-soaked lungs. But that’s not, obviously, an option, so I reach for the cup. That’s when I discover that my arms are in restraints. Loosely, but still. I look accusingly at the nurse, sweat beading up at the back of my neck despite the fact that the room is cool.

“I’ll untie that for you,” the nurse says obligingly, undoing the restraint around my right arm. She watches as I drink. I empty the cup slowly, scared that the minute I finish she’s going to tie me back up.

But instead she says she’s going to get my parents. Her tone seems to imply that she’ll be back in just a minute, so it’s not worth my trying anything. I get the feeling this is some kind of test to see what I’ll do with my new freedom. So I don’t untie my other wrist.

My parents come in, walking in step like soldiers marching into battle. They don’t rush to hug me; instead they stand at the foot of my bed, like they’re scared that if they touch me I’ll break.

“Where am I exactly?” I ask. I don’t bother saying hello.

The water is the last thing I remember. Jas’s arms around me. He must have gotten me back to the boat somehow; they must have made it back to the harbor and rushed us to the hospital. I must have swallowed too much water, lost consciousness.

“You’re in the hospital,” my mother says.

I glance at my left arm, still tightly bound by restraints. I don’t think I’m in the pediatric wing after all.

“Where exactly in the hospital am I?” I ask.

My mother glances at the nurse and bites her lip.

“Mom?” I prompt.

It’s the nurse who speaks, but by the time she does, the answer has already become clear: I’m in the psych ward. She calls it “the psychiatric unit,” but we both know that’s just a euphemism.

I try to sit up, the loose hospital pajamas I’m wearing rustling like they’re made of paper. “Why am I tied up?”

“You kept trying to run away,” my mother blurts out, then looks apologetically at the nurse. The nurse comes and sits on the edge of my bed and takes my hand in hers. I have to resist the urge to glance accusingly at my parents; this is their job, not some stranger’s, to sit beside me and comfort me.

“You’ve been unconscious for days. We think you were having something like nightmares. Do you remember what you saw?”

I shake my head.

“You called out names, insisted that you had to go back and make sure they were okay. You kept trying to get up. We finally had to restrain you, just to help you stay put.”

She laughs as she says the last words, like she’s trying to make the restraints seem cute. Like I was a kid falling out of bed and they didn’t want me to hurt myself.

“Do you remember what names you called?”

I shake my head, though I can guess. Belle is probably somewhere in this hospital, too, her leg wrapped in bandages, crisscrossed with stitches. Maybe Jas is waiting outside; maybe they wouldn’t let him in because he’s not family.

“Can I see them?” I ask finally.

“See who?”

“Belle,” I say, wincing at the memory of the bloody gash in her leg. “I’ll go to her room if she can’t be moved. And Pete and Jas.”

The nurse cocks her head to the side, the same way Nana does when she doesn’t know what I’m talking about. Evidently, the names have no meaning to her, beyond being the names I cried out in the night.

“Come on,” I say, begging. “The people who brought me here. The people who were on the boat with me.”

“What boat, Wendy?”

“
The
boat. The only boat that was stupid enough to go out on the water.”

My parents look desperately at the nurse, as though they believe she has all the answers. I narrow my eyes, staring at her. Nurses wear name tags, and this woman doesn’t. I don’t think she is the type to have forgotten it at home.

I sit up, the remaining restraint tightening around my left wrist, the muscles in my back aching in protest. “What’s your name?” I ask.

“Mary,” she answers.

“Are you a nurse?”

She shakes her head. “No,” she says. “I’m your doctor, Wendy. Your therapist.”

I nod; I think I knew that.

“Wendy,” Mary continues, her voice frustratingly calm, a perfectly rehearsed monotone. “You were found on the sand near Pebble Beach; you’d tried to swim out into the storm, but the water was just too rough.”

I shake my head. “That’s not what happened,” I begin to say.

But Mary continues. “You were found just down the beach from where the police found your brothers’ surfboards. Were you looking for John and Michael?”

“Yes,” I say too quickly. “I mean, no. I mean, when I went there, I thought that maybe I could find them.”

My parents exchange a look. Each time I glance their way they seem more stricken than the last.

I shake my head. “But I know that they drowned out there. I understand that now.”

Mary lowers her achingly calm voice like we’re about to share a secret. “Did you think you could join them?”

I open my mouth to say no, but I close it before any words can come out. Because I remember being in the water, shivering in the cold, believing that I might be able to find them still, if I just let myself sink.

“Wendy,” Mary says, “we don’t have to cover everything today. You’re awake, you’re coherent, you’re not trying to run.” She leans over and unties the restraint, but my left arm stays resting on the bed. “That’s better isn’t it?” she says, like she’s done me some huge favor.

“Wait,” I say, desperate. Somehow Mary took control of this conversation, changed the subject on me. I try to get it back on track. “Belle, Pete, Jas, the captain—where are they? The boat made it back to the harbor, didn’t it?”

Mary looks at me blankly, barely even blinking as the words tumble out of my mouth. I try to explain: I went out with my friends that day, to watch them surf. Conditions were rough. Belle got hurt. I got thrown overboard.

My heart is pounding in my chest.

Mary just shakes her head firmly. “No boats were allowed out on the water that day,” she says. “The Coast Guard shut the harbor down.”

“I know,” I answer. “We shouldn’t have gone out there.” Maybe I just need to sound contrite. Maybe they’re just mad at me for taking the risks I took.

But then a realization washes over me, just another wave crashing over my head.

“You said I was found on the beach? No one brought me here?” Mary nods, smiling, pleased that I’ve begun to understand. But I know that
she’s
the one who doesn’t understand.

I must have drifted away somehow, far from the boat and Jas and Pete and Belle. The current carried me back to shore. That’s why I was shouting for them in my sleep, begging to go back and find them.

I sit up quickly, so fast that it startles Mary, who backs away from me, her hands out in front of her as though she thinks I might hurt her. But instead I stand. My broken bones shoot pain through my body defiantly and my legs wobble underneath me, as though the muscles have forgotten how to hold me up. I wonder just how long I was lying in that bed.

“Where are my clothes?” I ask, looking not at Mary but at my parents. “Come on,” I plead. “We have to go. They haven’t even looked for them. They might be alive.” Surely my parents at least will spring into action once they understand: a boat is missing with four people on it. Send out the Coast Guard, search and rescue, the National Guard, whoever takes over at times like this.

But my parents avoid my gaze, and I don’t see Mary press the little yellow button she wears tucked into the waistband of her pants. Later, I’ll learn that it’s called a panic button. Today, I just learn that when she presses it, people much stronger than I am enter the room and force me back into the bed.

I struggle at first. I call for Belle; she’d be strong enough to escape these guys, even with the gash in her leg. I shout the word
Kensington
, the word
Pete
, the words
Witch Tree
. I try to shout Jas’s name, but the word gets caught behind the lump in my throat, choking me. By the time they’re tying the restraints around my wrists again, I’ve lost the strength to fight anymore.

Finally, I ask, “What do you mean, something
like
nightmares?”

Mary doesn’t blink, doesn’t break eye contact for a second, before she says the word
hallucinations
.

Where the restraints touch my wrists, my skin burns like it’s on fire.

35

It takes a few days for the details to become clear. I was found on the beach near where my brothers’ boards were discovered months ago; the doctors think I made some kind of deluded attempt to find my brothers by joining them at the bottom of the sea.

I was unconscious when they found me, and drifted in and out of consciousness for days, calling for Pete, for Belle, for Jas. The doctors and Mary think those names are attached to people who don’t exist outside of my imagination.

We’ve been through this before
, I want to shout. But instead, I keep calm each time I explain, telling my story over and over again, begging them to call the Coast Guard. I feel like a murder suspect being grilled under bright, hot lights, like they’re trying to catch me in a lie, to poke holes in my story. Which, of course, they are. They think that once they break my story apart, I’ll see that it simply can’t have been possible.

They also can’t agree on whether it was drug-induced psychosis or grief-induced psychosis. It’s a little
which came first, the chicken or the egg
. Did I take the drugs because I was so grief-stricken and then manufacture this world, or did I manufacture this world because I was so grief-stricken and take the drugs to keep the illusion alive?

They say it’s unlikely that I took the drugs only once, like I think that I did. They insist that it’s unlikely it was a single drug; there are still traces of different hallucinogens in my system now—a cocktail of rare chemicals so obscure that they don’t even have street names. They don’t seem to care about where I got the drugs or how they came to be combined the way they did. They don’t believe me that it was only one drug that was made up of all those different ones. They think I took them each separately, over a period of weeks and months, stretching all the way back to my high school graduation, until the drugs all mingled in my system and wreaked havoc on my psyche.

No one believes me about the boat, about the way Pete and Belle and Jas rode the wave, even as the storm threatened to sink us all. They tell me it wouldn’t have been possible for anyone to surf that wave.

I’m embarrassed, at first, to tell them that I was in love with at least one—if not two—of my illusions, but they figure it out. It is their job to be insightful, after all. Something about the way I look when I talk about Pete, about the way my voice catches in my throat every single time I try to say Jas’s name, gives me away. They tell me that these relationships were the biggest illusion of all, because they were the part to which I was most attached. Emotionally.

On that point, at least, I don’t argue.

Because of all my injuries, I go to physical therapy in another wing of the hospital every day, but no one tries to deny that the real reason I’m here is for psychotherapy. After all, I could do the physical therapy as an outpatient. In their soothing voices—I soon discover that Mary isn’t the only one here who’s mastered that aggravatingly calm monotone—they tell me that my delusion was my way of confronting my brothers’ deaths: I was in such deep denial that my subconscious had to create a reality in which I saw, plain as day, the reality of their deaths, a reality in which I not only saw but felt exactly how they died.

In our family sessions, my mother cries that it’s all her fault. She let her one remaining child slip away. Eventually my father, Mary the therapist, and I find ourselves comforting her, reassuring her. I can’t blame my mother for being so shocked; who would have thought that Wendy, her Goody Two-shoes, would have turned out to be a crazy, drug-addled runaway?

The day I refer to my time in Kensington as an illusion is the first time in a long time that I see my mother smile. When I said it, I didn’t actually mean anything by it, didn’t mean to imply that I accepted their theories about my madness. I only said “illusion” because it’s easier to use the same language they use.

But the word makes my mother so happy that I say it again the next time I see her, and again the next. At first, the word tastes sour in my mouth, but slowly the bitterness fades, until the word doesn’t taste like anything at all. I say it so many times that I get used to it, never entirely sure whether I believe it or not, never quite sure that what I believe matters.