Girl on the Line

by Faith Gardner

  My astronomy class begins with a single slide. It’s a comic. A cartoon man gazes at Earth from a spaceship.

  The caption reads, Warning: the universe may threaten your sense of self-importance.

  That’s just what I need, I think to myself, not even the least bit sarcastically. At least some part of my suicidal ideation must be rooted in a tendency to take myself much too seriously. Is it any wonder the poem “Soliloquy of the Solipsist” was written by a woman who ended her own life by sticking her head in a gas oven?

  How’s your first day?? Marisol texts me later as I sit waiting for my first Philosophy 101 class to start.

  Good so far! I text back. I want to say more. There seems so much to say—how wide and pretty the campus looks in the morning, how I drank a black coffee for the first time and I didn’t hate it, all these grown-ups who seem to be accepting me as one of them even though I feel like an impostor—but I don’t know how to sum it up in a text.

  I can see the ellipses that mean she’s typing.

  “Don’t stop believin’, hold on to that feeling,” someone starts singing so loudly people shift to look at her. I look up and an immediate grin pulls at my face. Etta—the girl from the hotline—has slid into the empty seat next to me.

  “Hey!” I say.

  “That’s right, here she is, the dropout from the crisis hotline,” she says, leaning in. “I’m such an asshole, right?”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “I feel so bad but I just couldn’t swing that intensity.”

  “No big deal. It’s not for everyone.”

  “Do Willa and Francie and Davina totally hate me now?”

  I don’t even have a chance to answer.

  “I can’t believe you’re in this class!” she says. “This is going to be so fun.”

  At this moment, the man I assume is our professor is just finishing writing this quote on the board: It is certain that we cannot escape anguish, for we are anguish.

  “Is it, though?” I ask Etta, pointing to the quote.

  “Fair enough,” she says. “Maybe fun is the wrong word. It’ll be meaningful.”

  We watch as our professor writes the words You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.

  “I’m going to stop talking now,” Etta says.

  I hope she never stops talking, though. Both times, when Etta walked into the room I was in, she shifted the dull atmosphere into some kind of magic simply by being there.

  I really hope she sticks around this time.

  Past

  By the time I get discharged, the shame has rolled in. I wish I were dead from embarrassment alone. The clouds have lifted in the gray, the rain paused, and Dad gives me a ride to Ventura, where the facility that I will “voluntarily” commit myself to is. His car is older than him. It’s not a classic; it’s just a piece of junk. But something about the duct-taped vinyl and the many, many sun-bleached little trees hanging from his rearview feels like home. I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve spent riding in here at my dad’s side.

  I wipe tears from my eyes and roll down the window, welcoming the cold air on my face. The freeway makes my heart speed up, makes me tense up and tighten my seat belt. I tried to die and here I am bracing myself for a crash, afraid of dying.

  Nothing makes sense.

  Dad doesn’t speak, but I know I’ve hurt him. I’ve hurt everybody. God knows if or what they told my little sisters, who for some reason think I’m the coolest thing since ice cream. What kind of example would it be setting for them, to die like that? How selfish would I be to leave them? What is wrong with me?

  “I’m sorry,” I say in a shaky voice, but my words get lost in the highway wind.

  “Sorry?” Dad asks, like he didn’t hear me.

  I roll up my window. “I said, I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “What is this, an Abbott and Costello skit?”

  He doesn’t laugh. Neither do I. Even humor is broken right now.

  “What are you sorry about?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” he says. “That you felt the need to do that. That I didn’t help prevent it from happening.”

  “Isn’t your fault.”

  “It definitely is.”

  The difference between my parents couldn’t be better illustrated than by their reactions to today’s events. My mom insisted this was all a cry for attention and everything would be fine. She left early to go talk to my teachers, straighten everything out. My dad stayed with me every second, sighing and fighting tears and taking all the blame upon himself with frequent mutterings of, “All my fault.” Which gets annoying, too. Everything is about him. He can’t believe that this happened for reasons that extend far beyond the radius his parenting touches.

  “Not everything’s about you,” I tell him.

  The sunset is flamingo pink, flamboyant, and I resent it. Tell me how my ugly feelings can coexist in the same world as that sunset.

  “I am responsible for this,” I tell him. “Me. Me and my stupid big feelings. Not your divorce or the fact you spanked me once as a kid or whatever you sit around feeling guilty about.”

  “I should never have let you stay out that night you got in the crash,” he says.

  He weeps with no sound. But right now it’s Niagara Falls all over his Hawaiian shirt.

  “I’m going to be okay,” I tell him as he pulls into twenty-minute parking in front of the facility, whose name translates to “View of the Sea.” There is no view. There is no sea.

  In my journal, I keep a list of words that don’t exist in English but should. Like yuputka, the Ulwa word for a ghostly feeling of something crawling on your skin. Or gumusservi, the Turkish word for moonlight gleaming on water. In Arabic, there’s a term for when you love someone so much you hope to die first so you never have to see them die: to’oborni, which literally translates to “you bury me.” I loved Jonah like that. I loved him to’oborni. Or, let’s be honest, love, present tense, because such a thing can’t switch off as soon as someone says it’s over on a phone call or after a bottle of acetaminophen.

  There should be a word for what I feel at the mental ward—being afraid to die and wishing I were dead at once. But if there is one, I don’t know it.

  I keep thinking of my sisters. How Stevie—so little, nine, with portraits she drew of unicorns all over her neon walls—has stars in her eyes for me. And that letter she wrote that she brought home from school that said I’m her hero. She drew my picture on it with my purple hair in her composition book and showed it to her class. And Ruby—thirteen, sullen since my parents’ separation, who now wears all black and listens to her headphones every waking second—told me I was “the person she hates least,” which was her special way of saying she adores the crap out of me.

  My sisters hole up in my room when our parents fight.

  My sisters rock my hand-me-downs.

  My sisters, my darlings.

  Imagine if I’d died—a giant girl-shaped shadow cast over their entire lives. Just another person who fucked them up.

  I’m glad Mom is pretending everything is fine at home, because I’d never want my little sisters knowing their big sister is such a basket case. I think of their sea-big, river-hazel eyes and drown in shame.

  As surprised as I am to find myself in a mental ward, there’s actually nothing surprising about this place. It’s mundane. It’s every movie I’ve ever seen about mental wards. It’s appointments and quiet meals with strangers and TV and waiting, waiting to go home, waiting to talk to Jonah, waiting for life to feel like it’s either beginning or ending again.

  “Hello,” Dr. Anglin says, glancing at a file folder. “Journey. What an interesting name.”

  Dr. Anglin’s office is so blazingly white it hurts the eyes. The linoleum floors, the stark walls, blinding. I sit in a hard chair near a potted plant so healthy it looks fake shining under the fluorescent lights. I touch a leaf. Huh. Real. “My parents are rock and/or roll
fans.”

  “How neat,” Dr. Anglin says, putting the folder down on her desk. She is tan, muscular, smile-wrinkled—like someone who does fifty-mile bike rides on the weekends and gardens. “So let’s talk about why you’re in here.”

  “Yeah, the whole trying-to-off-myself thing,” I say.

  I expect her to laugh, but she continues her serious stare. Here it is, the chance to delve into my feelings with a capital F. You know, the big ones. The ones that used to be cute. The ones that, after the accident, confused me and ate my life up and shifted everything I knew and loved around like a terrible hurricane. The ones that drove me to medication and a diagnosis. The ones that made Jonah think I was too much, no fun, not worth it.

  Every time I even utter his name, those two syllables throb like a heartbeat of hurt. I tell her I don’t know when exactly suicide went from an escape fantasy to really wanting to die. That I had thought about suicide before, but I never thought I had the guts to do it until I stood staring into the mirror the night Jonah broke up with me over the phone. Before that moment, I didn’t believe I had it in me. But suddenly I knew I did.

  “You’re on more than the amount of Depakote we’d normally prescribe for a girl your age and size,” Dr. Anglin says, making a notation in my file. I imagine she’s scrawled something along the lines of patient won’t shut up after my meandering monologue.

  “Yeah, the doctor who prescribed it gave me a quick quiz and then handed me my prescription. He wasn’t the thoroughest.”

  “Mmm,” she says, as if she doesn’t know what to make of this.

  I share with her a thought I’ve had since I got here, since I met the other teens here, many of whom are clearly struggling with so much more than I am. It’s just a nagging little conspiracy theory circling my mind. “Hey, so, um, what if I’m not bipolar?”

  She gives me a look like this is the most ridiculous thing she’s heard all day. “Really.”

  “I mean, I’ve always been a little . . . much, but after I got on medication, I’ve only seemed to get worse,” I tell her. “I mean, I never tried to kill myself before.”

  “We definitely need to adjust your medication,” she says. “I’m switching you to lithium and pairing it with an antidepressant—hopefully that should give you some relief.”

  “Okay. It was just a theory.”

  “If I had a dollar for every time a bipolar patient told me they weren’t bipolar, I’d buy a pony.” She shuts my file folder and smiles at me kindly, her eyes twinkling. “That’s the trick of it—you start feeling better, you think you don’t need your medication, you get off it or let your dosage slide, and then you end up having an episode.”

  “But I was totally taking my medication.”

  “You will probably have many times when you feel better,” Dr. Anglin says, leaning in and putting the file down. “A lot of my patients have their first breakdown in their teens, feel fine for a long time, and end up hospitalized again in their twenties. It’s a long . . . well . . . journey.”

  Not the first joke made about my name in my life, certainly not the last.

  “A lot of adjusting dosages, trying new medications and combinations,” she continues, “but most people are able to live normal lives. Go to college, have meaningful relationships, children. You have a whole life ahead of you.”

  I nod, even though when I picture my future, I see a blank screen like the end of a movie.

  Oh, Dr. Anglin. I can tell she loves her job, that she brings passion to her work, that she reads our files and then tries so hard to see us all as people. But as I leave her office, a new prescription in my file, I feel like she hasn’t heard me. And that makes me even more crazy.

  Day two at the mental ward, the residents’ phone rings. The residents’ phone rings all day long. I would be lying if I said I didn’t get a gross jolt of hope up my spine every time at the sound of it, peppered with self-hatred for having said hope. Jonah, the ring seems to scream. I’ve picked it up a dozen times over the past thirty-six hours I’ve been here and not once has it been for me. More than half the time it’s been for someone named Tony. There’s no one named Tony here.

  I shuffle out in my slippers and pick it up.

  “Nuthouse, resident nut speaking, how may I direct your call?”

  “Journey?” Jonah asks.

  His voice is small and sweet. I crack open at the sound of it.

  “Jonah,” I say, eyes filling.

  “Journey,” he says, sniffling.

  “Jonah,” I repeat.

  I am so raw right now. I am so horribly new. A little pink rat, just born, disgusting, too delicate for this world. I am ashamed of myself.

  “What have you done, babe?” he asks.

  “I made a really stupid mistake.”

  “A mistake?”

  “I mean, I meant to. But—”

  He’s crying. I’m crying. Two girls walking arm in arm down the hall in their pajamas are crying.

  “I’ve been so worried,” he says.

  “I’m fine. No damage.”

  “Why did you do this?”

  I can hear his tone turning, the anger creeping in.

  “How could you really do this to everyone?” he asks. “You were just going to leave me?”

  “You broke up with me. You left me.”

  “That doesn’t mean I wanted you dead!”

  “I know. I wanted me dead.”

  “Journey,” he says weakly.

  “Or I thought I did. I was just . . . It’s hard to explain,” I say. “I’ve been going over and over it in my mind. Like, when did I fall off the deep end? Was I always like this? Was it when my parents split, and everything kind of shattered into a million pieces? Or after the car accident, when death became this . . . reality? Is it the medication I’m on? Is it that I’m not on enough medication?”

  He doesn’t answer, but I hear him blowing his nose, so I know he’s there.

  “Is it me?” he finally asks. “Did I do this to you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “You threatened on the phone, but I—I didn’t think you’d do it.”

  “You thought I was bluffing.”

  “I thought you were being Journey.”

  “Meaning?”

  “You have a tendency toward hyperbole,” he says.

  “You are the meanest boyfriend in the world,” I tell him, jokingly. My breath catches in my throat. I close my eyes, tight. “Are you still my boyfriend?”

  “Journey,” he says.

  “Oh no, oh no, oh no,” I say, tears hot in my shut-tight eyes. “No.”

  “I’m afraid to have this conversation with you,” he says softly. “Afraid to talk to you honestly, because I don’t know what you’re going to do.”

  “I’m on suicide watch in a mental ward,” I say. “So there’s no safer place. No time like the present to break the news to me.”

  “Now’s not the time to have this conversation,” he says. “Let’s just . . . let’s just focus on you getting better, okay? Because I love you and I want to see you better. And if we were to get back together, you’d need to be better.”

  “So we are broken up,” I say slowly. “But we could get back together.”

  “Just . . . focus on you,” he says.

  My heart thumps. I stare at the wall, where someone wrote BICH and someone else wrote LEARN TO SPELL MORAN! and someone else wrote YOU MISSPELLED MORON, MORON. I look up and close my eyes. The air-conditioning dries the tears on my face and gives me chills.

  “Okay,” I say. “I’m going to get better. I made a mistake. I’ll never do this again, I promise.”

  “I’m so glad you’re alive,” he says.

  “I’m supposed to be home soon. Maybe you could come over—”

  “Let’s take it one day at a time,” he says.

  “Wow, how wise. Did you think of that?” I ask.

  He sighs.

  “I’m sorry,” I say quickly. “Thanks for calling. I love y
ou. I miss you. I’m sorry I’m me.”

  “I’m just so glad you’re okay,” he says.

  “Me too. I love you.”

  “Take care of yourself,” he says.

  I hang up the phone.

  So I’m discharged the next day and given back my shoelaces and my hairpins (apparently the folks who run this place thought I might hurt myself again with these items; self-destruction by hairpin, death by shoelace) and a brown paper bag just like the ones my parents used to send me to school with as a kid.

  Inside are two bottles containing slightly-less-pink pills and some little blue ones to go with them.

  I try to end my life by swallowing pills, and now, to fix this mess, they give me . . . more pills. Why, hello, irony. How’ve you been?

  Why is the answer

  colored pink, bitter

  as little roses?

  Why is the answer

  deadly

  in large enough doses?

  What if

  this isn’t

  the answer

  at all?

  Goodbye viewless, sea-less View of the Sea.

  Stepping outside, automatic doors swishing behind me, the whole world seems more full-color than usual, the air clearer, the clouds freshly laundered. Must be the rain that came and went and washed everything clean.

  This week is Mom’s week for us, but I ask if I can stay at Dad’s for two reasons: One, it’s home, the home I grew up in, and I want to be in the homiest home there is right now. Two, I don’t want to see my sisters or Levi and have to fake anything. So Dad picks me up for an excruciating ride back to his house. Excruciating because of the self-help audiobook he puts on called Self-Hugging for Beginners that is 100 percent serious and also so cheesy-bad that in another context it would probably be the funniest thing I ever heard. The narrator sounds wayyy too into it. “Repeat after me: I love myself. I am worth loving. Love is worth having. I cannot have without love.” Why Dad thinks this will drive me further from suicide and not closer to it, I don’t know. My dad has an endless supply of self-help books and takes a DIY approach to psychology. He’s always been skeptical of me being on meds and having a bipolar diagnosis. He thinks I’d benefit from herbs. Tinctures. Essential oils and the like.