Smoke and Mirrors (16 page)

“Oh, I see. Emily Littleton moved to Stockton.”

“Right,” I lied. “I was a friend of Emily's.”

Logic again reminded me I should leave. It said I could come back at another time. At least then her parents would feel a little more comfortable with me when I returned.

Her mother was opening up the curtain that surrounded the bed. Then she opened the blinds on the window. “I think we should let her have more light,” she said. But it was a cloudy day, brighter by far in the room than outside.

And then suddenly it felt incredibly crowded in the room. I found it hard to breathe and I didn't know why. I felt the presence of many, many others. No faces, no bodies, no voices. But I was aware of them. The people who had died in this room.

“Are you all right?” Andrea's father asked. He saw the look on my face.

“I need to go now,” I said. I shuffled my feet towards the door, but the others in the room were assaulting me. Some seemed to be pleading for me to stay, others insisting I go. No distinct words, just the conflicting pushing and pulling that was going on inside. It made me slightly dizzy, but worse yet, I was afraid I was going to throw up.

“Are you sure you are all right?” her father asked again.

I nodded.

Whatever I thought I had set out to do, it was clear I had done nothing. I had found her. And she was dying. Possibly already beyond any medical means of recovery. So many months in a coma probably meant she was brain dead. According to the paper, if the machines were to be turned off, her body would not keep her alive. She would be dead within minutes.

I regretted having come here. I had solved the mystery of who Andrea was, but maybe I would have been better off not knowing. Now I would be burdened by what I knew. I could not help her and, as it turned out, she had been of no real help to me. It seemed to take forever to go down the stairs, walk out of the hospital, and make my feet find their way down the street.

I walked past the library, past the bus stop, and out of town until I came to the abandoned rail line, the hiking trail that would take me towards the river and east, back home.

Taking a long hike home is always a good time to do some serious thinking. When you are young and being swept about in great stormy seas with rogue waves of emotion, you are not in control of yourself. I was beginning to understand that if I went back on the medication, these emotional responses, these great monster waves that overpowered me as they tried to pull me down and drown me, would subside.

It was stress, one of my many doctors had argued. “Stress is all it takes and the mind of a young man can react in extreme ways. Emotional roller coasters. Sleep disruption. Lack of concentration. Auditory or visual hallucinations.”

It had been pointed out to me before by these levelheaded, pill-pushing, over-educated, boring doctors that the various inexplicable things I saw and heard simply
were not there. If I wanted to be normal, I would have to stick to the solution that science had to offer.

I decided that I would ask my mother to set an appointment for a check-up. Like a kid with crooked teeth going to an orthodontist on a regular basis to get his braces tightened, maybe I needed regular tune-ups for my head. The kid with uneven teeth would one day have them straight and perfect. And me? Maybe if I just followed the plan, I would end up with a straight life.

I stopped by the bend in the river where Andrea and I had once stopped before. It was there she appeared.

“You were there in the room, weren't you?” she said.

“Could you see me?”

“No, and I didn't even sense you were there until you became so frightened.”

I wouldn't tell her what I was feeling. About the others, the ones who had died there. “Why didn't you tell me who you really were?”

“Trina, you mean. Well, when I was six, I decided I wanted to go by my middle name, Andrea. My parents went along with it for a while but insisted I go back to being called Trina. I don't know why, but it was something we fought over. So, with you, I at least could use the name I wanted.”

“Why did you stop coming to see me?” I asked.

“You didn't need me anymore.”

“So you just drop in and out of a person's life?”

“Sorry.”

“Besides, my life sucks now. I'm back to where I was before I met you. Only now it's worse. And now that I know who you are — where you are — I want to be with you. But I'm not even sure I can go back there. To that room, I mean.”

“Maybe that's not really me. It's just what's left of my body. Maybe I've already left that behind.”

“Well, maybe that's the part that hurts me the most,” I said, feeling angry now. “It's almost like you reeled me in like a fish on a hook. I took the bait, I got to know you, decided that I cared for you, and now you are just going to go away. For good.”

“It wasn't supposed to turn out this way. You weren't supposed to find me in that hospital bed.”

“Tell me what happened. How did you end up there?”

“No,” she said and stared straight into the water.

I expected her to be gone. This time for good. I was pushing her to take me someplace she did not want to go.

The water flowed on. The sun split through the clouds but only for an instant, as if offering hope and then taking it away in a heartbeat. The trees leaned over the river, as if listening to it, or us, as if waiting for something to happen. Big, green, silent hardwood trees — patient, tolerant. Ready for the good weather and the bad. Oaks. Maples. Black locust. Ash trees.

“My parents decided to split up after all,” I said. “They did it
because
they thought I was doing well. So they figured the time was right. It would be easier on me. Easier on us all. Some people look for the easy way out.” It was meant to be a kind of accusation.

And it had its effect. I turned away from her. And when I looked back, she was gone. Again.

Lydia was obviously stoned when I arrived at her apartment. I didn't particularly like her when she was that way. Door open as usual. Anybody could walk in. Amazing, since she'd been busted once — simple possession. But she continued to smoke. Never tobacco, of course. She called tobacco the devil's toolbox for some reason. But she argued that marijuana was a spiritual herb, a sacred plant.
Ganja
.

Lydia was listening to a CD of Gregorian chanting. I had to ask her to turn it down. Her eyes were a little glazed. “It's all about living in the present,” she said without a word of hello. “The past is what imprints itself on you and makes it hard to move on to the next moment of time. If we could eliminate any memory of the past, I think we could live in the perfect present.” The stoner's logic.

“If we couldn't remember the past, we wouldn't know who we were,” I said. “We would be a new person at every minute.”

“That's the beauty of it,” she said. “No baggage. Total freedom. No ownership, no possession.”

“Because you couldn't remember from one minute to the next whether that CD player was yours or somebody else's. Is this my house or my neighbour's?”

“Exactly. It would be wonderful.”

“But it's not that way, and it will never be. We have to live with who we are, where we come from, what we've done.”

She lost the hazy smile. “Point made. So, Simon. Give.”

I explained about the queen I was trying to protect. Lydia grew more serious, collected the several leftover snubbed out ends of smoked joints, pinched them with her fingers, and, one by one, dropped them into a little film canister. “Always collect the roaches and keep them safe,” she said, putting the lid on it. Then she shook the plastic film canister. “Never, ever throw away something you may need later.” She touched her fingertips to her lips, then waved her hands over her amethyst crystal and rubbed her palms together.

She pulled her chair closer to where I sat. “Be still,” she said. And she put her hands over top of my head, not touching, just allowing them to hover there. Next she closed her eyes, and a look of great concern came over her.

She opened her eyes and pulled back. “That's a lot of negativity you have there,” she said. “A lot of potential there, too, but you'll have to get past whatever is holding you back. Let me see your hands.”

It was like something my mother would have said when I was little, after I'd been outside playing in the mud with Ozzie or making some of our supposedly magical concoctions. “Let me see your hands,” she'd say before a meal. And they would always be dirty, soiled with the creative artistry of being a curious kid.

But Lydia's intention was different. She held them one at a time in her own. She pressed with her thumb in the centre of both palms. Then she shook her hands in the air, “cleansed” them over her crystal, and ran her thumb down each of my fingers. She did her classic reaction: took a deep breath as if she had just discovered something.

“Focus on what you feel within you and do what your heart tells you to do. Don't look back.”

I almost laughed out loud. This was
so
Lydia. Performing some little silly ritual then offering up something vague like this. Something positive and encouraging but oh so vague. I'd heard her say one of many variations of this line many times before to her paying customers and always they looked satisfied and happy with the decree.

“Now go,” she said, smiling and rather pleased with herself.

The school had phoned. They always called to let my parents know if I was not attending. My mother wanted to know what was going on. So I lied and said I had had some bad headaches (my old stand-by) but that now I was better.

“Guess we both had headaches today,” she said. “You wouldn't believe the people I had to deal with. They were all ready to buy the house. They'd been over every inch of it. And then they announced they found something better. Something perfect. So I wasted all that time.”

“I'll go to school tomorrow,” I said and walked off to my room.

It was back in History of Civilization class that Andrea returned. Mr. Holman was lecturing about the rivalry between the Athenians and the Spartans, a subject for which the entire class had no interest whatsoever. There was a lot of fighting in those days between the two and people died for reasons we found hard to comprehend today.

Andrea appeared here because she wanted to speak to me in a place where I could not respond. I was sitting in the back of the room by the window. I was staring out that window, trying not to think about Athens or Sparta. I was thinking about Andrea and then she was there, silhouetted by the bright light behind her.

“I've made my parents suffer long enough,” she said, “and now I have to set them free.”

I silently mouthed the word
no
. “I had a lot of unhappiness in my life and now I'm ready to leave it behind. I'm sorry things didn't turn out better for you.”

I could not let her make this decision. I raised my hand and asked for permission to leave the room.

Andrea followed me into the hallway. It was empty. “Tell me what happened,” I insisted. I touched her arm. I was squeezing it. She was very real.

“That hurts.”

I was afraid that if I took my hand away, she would be gone so I held onto her. “Tell me how you ended up in that hospital bed.”

She turned away.

I let go of my grip. “Please. I need to know.”

She looked back at me and then down at the floor. “Like you, I was upset about my parents. They said awful things to each other. All the time. I hated being around them when they were arguing. But it had always been like that at home. When Craig came along, he made me feel different. He made me feel better about myself. I began to love my life instead of hate it.”

“You fell for this guy, Craig?”

“Yes. I really did. He was a year older. I met him at
a dance. He'd had other girlfriends before, but for me, he was my first real relationship.”

“But something happened.”

“He was never cruel to me. He didn't want to hurt me. He was a great guy. He just lost interest. He said he was sorry. He said he knew it was a character flaw but he was like that. He couldn't help it. Craig would lose interest in one girl and move on. In this case, he lost interest in me and moved on to a girl named Cheryl. He said he wanted us to stay friends, though.”

“And it made you feel terrible.”

“I couldn't sleep. I couldn't function in school. I became very depressed. My mother took me to our doctor, and he prescribed an anti-depressant and sleeping pills. That night I swallowed them all.”

“Was it really that bad?”

“You know, when you read about these things, when you hear about other people doing this, you always feel like there must have been another way for that individual. You always think that it can't be that bad, or that time will heal if you just give it a chance. Tomorrow will be another day. All that kind of crap. But it isn't like that.”

Andrea was crying now. I didn't know what to do but stand there and listen to her.

“It isn't like that at all,” she repeated. “All I could think about was trying to make the hurting stop. I wanted the pain to go away. And I wanted to punish
my parents, I wanted to punish Craig, and I wanted to punish me.”

I swallowed hard, not knowing what was the right thing to say. “And you did that. You punished everyone. I'm sure Craig felt it. I know your parents do. I saw their faces. But now you have to stop punishing them. Stop punishing yourself. I think you have to forgive them, forgive yourself, too.”

She sighed. “That's why I'm leaving. They can't bring themselves to give the doctors the okay to end life support. I'm not sure the doctors can even do it. I could stay like that for months, years maybe.”