Try Not to Breathe (6 page)

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But I heard the lie in my own voice.

“Were you making fun of me?”

“No.”

She sobbed. I sat her down on a low crumbling wall in front of a warehouse.

“She was so bad I couldn’t even pretend to believe her.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“I bet.”

“No, I mean—I thought it would turn out like this, but I didn’t
want
it to. I wish you’d gotten what you wanted.”

I let her wipe her face on my T-shirt sleeve. She turned runny pink eyes on me. “Why did you feed her that stuff, anyway?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you think you were fooling me? I’m not stupid!”

“I didn’t think it through. It just—came out.”

“Now I’ll never know why he did it.”

“He probably couldn’t tell you that even if he was right here.”

She sniffled. “He could’ve left a note or something. Why didn’t he? God!”

She rubbed my damp sleeve. I was thinking about
why
, and how complicated that question was, when she spoke again.

“Did you write a note?”

“What?”

“Did
you
write a
note
?”

The steamy weather wrung sweat out of me, but somehow my mouth was dry. “No.”

“Why not? Why the hell not?” She got up and paced in a tight circle, kicked the wall I was sitting on.

“Look, this isn’t about me.”

“You made it about you, didn’t you? You sure as hell made it about you in there.” She pointed back at the psychic’s house.

“I wanted you to get something out of going there. Andrea was flopping like a dying fish. I told you, I didn’t think it through.”

“Yeah, you sure didn’t.” She wiped her face with the bottom of her T-shirt, giving me a flash of dark-blue bra. She didn’t seem to notice or care. “So you gave my father—excuse me, the imaginary ghost of my father—all
your
reasons.”

“Who says they were my reasons?”

She snorted. “What else would they be? You didn’t pull all that stuff out of nowhere.”

Everything drained out of me then; I could hardly hold my head up. I bent over and rested my elbows on my knees. She frowned, turned away, and kicked a chunk of brick down the sidewalk. I didn’t let myself think about whether she was right, whether the words I’d put in Andrea’s mouth had been my own. After all, Nicki’s father couldn’t possibly have made the same mistakes I’d made, couldn’t have lugged around the same shame I carried. Maybe he’d felt what I’d felt—that bleak pit of numbness—but he hadn’t had an Amy Trillis or a Serena. He’d never hidden a pink sweater in his closet. He hadn’t done the things I’d done; I would bet on that.

FIVE

We had another
half hour before Kent picked us up. Nicki bought a grape juice and I bought a Coke and we sat on a bench outside the post office, watching people run in and out. The corners of Nicki’s mouth turned purple from the juice, but the pink in her face and eyes was fading. She would look normal by the time Kent met us.

I wanted to ask about her father, to know more about the person whose spirit we had tried to raise, but I didn’t want to set her off again now that she’d stopped crying. I couldn’t picture my own father not being around. Even though he traveled all the time, at least I knew he was somewhere on the planet, walking around and talking and thinking. Somewhere he was in a business meeting, pushing his glasses up his nose and smoothing his tie, or else he was sitting in a foreign restaurant clearing his throat and blinking the way he did when he had to eat food he didn’t like. Or maybe he was in an airport, checking baseball scores from his computer—he was supposedly coming home today. But if I wanted to hear his voice, all I needed was a phone. I didn’t need psychics to call him up.

I looked sideways at Nicki. She tilted her bottle, and the last purple inch of juice rippled back and forth.

“I can’t believe school starts in a couple of weeks,” she said. “You’re gonna be a junior, right?”

“Yeah.” If she wanted to back away from talking about dead fathers, that was okay with me. Val and Jake and I used to do that at Patterson, let one another talk about nothing when something was too much. You could hear it in people’s voices, when they got close to breaking: a tight strangled sound in the throat, their words coming out thin and wooden. Maybe that tightness was what made Nicki gulp down all that juice.

“Did you miss a lot of school when you—you know—went in the hospital?” she asked.

“Yeah, but I made it up. I came back in May, and I did extra work until July so I wouldn’t get held back.”

“I’ll be at the high school, too, this year. Who do you hang out with there?”

“Nobody special.”

She slurped from the bottom of her bottle. “Don’t you have any friends?”

I knew people, but I wouldn’t say I had friends at this school. I wasn’t sure what stopped me. It was true I was known as the kid who’d tried to kill himself and spent several weeks in the loony bin, which didn’t make me Mr. Popular—but more than that, it was just easier not to risk anything with anyone else. I didn’t need friends at school anyway, since I had Jake and Val. I told Nicki, “Yeah, a couple of kids I met in the hospital.”

“Are they, like, crazy?”

“Right. We get together to drool and whack ourselves on the head. It’s real crazy-people bonding.”

A mail truck lumbered past us, spewing fumes. We held our breath, and when the truck had turned the corner, Nicki said, “I didn’t mean it that way. Are they still in the hospital?”

“No, we’re all out. Val got out first—” I stopped, remembering the time Val had come back to Patterson. The recital she’d given in the dayroom. Her hand on my wrist.

“What?” Nicki said, seeing that I wasn’t fully with her anymore.

I shook my head. “Just thinking of something.” And Kent pulled up then, stopping the conversation.

• • • • •

Nicki played with the radio until Kent barked at her. I leaned my forehead on the car window, still back in that April night at Patterson when Val had come to visit. Seeing her come into the hospital as an outsider, one of Them and not Us, I could barely even speak to her. A ball of acid sat at the top of my throat the whole time she was there. I didn’t want to go to her recital, but Jake had herded me into the dayroom with the others.

“How come we’re using the dayroom at night?” I snapped, but he didn’t hear. He went and sat right up front, while Val warmed up at the out-of-tune piano, grimacing as she always did at the fuzzier notes.

I sat in the back, near the window. I didn’t turn on the lamp next to me, but there were enough other lights on so that all I could see out the window was a reflection of myself, and the dayroom with the other psychos. And even though Val’s music pulled at me like a rip current, even though some of the people around me cried, and my eyes stung and my throat hurt, all I could think was how much I hated her, and I would not look at her and I would not listen to her music. I thought that even as the music filled me.

I had missed her. I’d never stopped looking for her in those halls. There was always a big empty spot next to me in the dining room, in Group, in the dayroom, in the yard. Yet I stayed in my seat when the recital was over, my legs heavy, until I could trust myself to pass her with a blank face. People crowded around her, including Jake. She was talking to them when I slipped out of the dayroom. But she followed me into the hall and tapped my arm.

“Hey, weren’t you going to say hello to me?”

“Hello.”

“What’s wrong?”

“What makes you think something’s wrong?”

“Well, the whole time I played you sat there with your arms crossed, staring out the window. Looking incredibly pissed off.” Her voice softened. “What is it? Talk to me.”

“You don’t get it,” I said, refusing to meet her eyes.

“Don’t get what?”

I focused on the Exit sign across the hall. “It was nice of you to come play for us pathetic shut-ins, but you can go back out to your regular life now.”

That’s when she grabbed my arm, circled my wrist, and my pulse beat against her hand. She said, “I’m still—”

Her touch had glued my tongue to the roof of my mouth, but I wrenched it free and croaked, “Still what?”

“I’m still your friend. God, Ryan, it’s only been a week! Do you think I’m going to forget you and what it’s like in here? Do you think I
want
to forget?”

“Why would you want to remember?”

“Because it’s part of me. Because I love you and Jake.”

I shook my head. It didn’t matter if it was a week or an hour: she’d crossed that line. She was out there now, in the regular world, and I was stuck here, still sick.

“Why do you think I came back here today?”

“Charity?”

She pressed her lips together until they almost disappeared. “Why are you being such an ass?
Charity
, really? Come on.”

“You’re out there and I’m not.” Her fingers burned my wrist while I tried to make her understand. I couldn’t see why she didn’t get it, unless she didn’t want to get it. “You’re having a life.” Now she was spending all day around real guys, guys who were not mental patients, who didn’t obsess about killing themselves, who had never embarrassed themselves in Group.

“Stop acting like I’m up on some pedestal. Anyway, you’re going to be out soon yourself. Don’t you know that?”

I snickered.

“I’m serious, Ryan. You went from hiding under your bed to helping some of the new kids. You and Jake used to go on and on about dying, and now you talk about catching up in school. You used to walk around like a zombie, off in your own little world. Now, most of the time, you manage to stay here with the rest of us.” Her fingers tightened. “Even though you’ve been acting like a jerk all night, you’re still here. I could tell you were angry. So you’re angry; at least you’re something. You’re not
nothing
anymore.”

She let go and I had the wild urge to grab her back, to hang on to her as if she could keep me alive. But I didn’t. I let her go, and when she called me two days later, I was able to tell her that she was right. They were getting ready to let me out, too.

• • • • •

The truth was that when she touched me, it stirred something that had been dead in me for months. The whole idea of girls and sex had burned out, gone to ashes, drifted under layers of black sludge. I’d stopped daydreaming about that or hoping for it or even remembering it existed. I’d forgotten what it was like to want that, forgotten how it felt to trace a girl’s body with my eyes and want to trace it with my hands. I’d been numb until Val’s fingers on the thin skin of my wrist reminded me of that heat, jolted me back into that hunger.

SIX

Nicki wanted to go
to the waterfall as soon as we got back from Seaton. I hadn’t thought about what a hike it was from her house, a much longer way than from mine, and all uphill. We were both panting when we reached the pool. Some little kids were plunking rocks in the water, but they ran away when they saw us coming.

I stripped off my T-shirt. Nicki pulled off hers, too, dropped it on the bank, and plunged into the water. I watched her for a minute, her bra dark blue against the paleness of her back, until she disappeared under the curtain of water. I didn’t know what she meant by tearing off her shirt in front of me: that she didn’t care if I saw her that way, because I was nobody? Or that she was so upset by what had happened with Andrea that she didn’t know what she was doing?

She came out a minute later, gasping, water streaming from her hair. “Did you see this place last spring?” she said. “The water would knock you over, if you were stupid enough to stand under it.”

I already knew this, because I had been stupid enough.

Without answering, I waded in and ducked under the fall, willing it to wash away the china figurines, the bland smile, the rattling air conditioner, and every trace of the great failure of Psychic Andrea. The water hammered down on me and I stood there longer than I’d ever managed before, realizing that Nicki was right: the dryness of August had cut the power of the cascade a little. But when I pulled out, its roaring still filled my head.

“I was getting ready to go in after you,” Nicki said, rubbing her arms. I handed her my T-shirt to dry off with, then put it on damp. She wriggled into her dry shirt and squeezed her hair out over the moss.

“Are you okay?” I asked her.

“No.”

• • • • •

We went to my place. The basement workout room had a closet full of Mom’s gym clothes, and I gave Nicki a pair of exercise pants to wear while we spread her shorts on the deck railing. I dumped my wet clothes in the washer so Mom wouldn’t see them.

My parents knew I swam in the stream, but they didn’t know I stood under the waterfall. When we’d first moved here, they’d told me the waterfall was dangerous, but they had never forbidden me to go under it—I guess because it never occurred to them that I would. I didn’t plan to tell them, either, and the fewer chances they had to see my wet clothes, the fewer questions they would ever think to ask.

Nicki and I sat on the living-room floor with the sunlight, filtered through evergreen needles, shining in on us.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Nicki said, “but I don’t see why somebody who lives in a place like this would want to kill himself.” She glanced at me, but I stared out the window. She probably didn’t realize I’d heard that one, or variations on it, a hundred times before—and that I’d even said it to myself. I often thought I had nothing to complain about, compared to some of the stories I’d heard at Patterson. There were kids who’d been raped by their own parents, kids who’d been beaten or burned or choked, kids whose brains were so fucked up by drugs that I didn’t know how they managed to feed themselves. There were kids who never knew which parent they’d be staying with on any given day, or when they’d be traded for a chunk of money in some divorce fight. Knowing all those stories confused me more, because I didn’t have any of that going on. So I didn’t know why the hell I kept falling into the pit, why I could never see what was pushing me down there.