Girl on the Line

by Faith Gardner

  “I can’t believe a suicide hotline person spun out in a violent rage at one of your poor callers,” Marisol says as we sit on used couches, trying them out.

  “Well,” I say. “First off, it’s a crisis hotline, it’s not just for suicide. Second of all, it’s always the mentally unstable who are drawn to helping the mentally unstable.”

  “You think you’re mentally unstable?”

  “You think I’m mentally stable?”

  “I don’t know,” she says, petting the rip in my jeans where my knee pokes through. “You’re just Journey to me.”

  As usual, I don’t know the answer to me, either. I’m too stable to be unstable; too unstable to be stable. I lose my mind and go into a catatonic state and draw lipstick spirals on my mirror and break my phone on purpose, and then, the next day, I’m sorry at my impulsivity. I snap out of it and apologize. I spray my mirror, shine it silver, and research how to fix my phone.

  My problem is, I can’t commit to either.

  Lydia still doesn’t respond to my email, and I notice an intense rage swelling up at her in the days after my call with JD. I know it isn’t fair, but I’m disgusted with Lydia for being a mess. I’m repelled. I never want to be like her. In another way, I’m envious, like she’s more authentically herself than I am myself for suffering a complete public breakdown and ending up hospitalized again. There are no words for this mixture of feelings, all opposite. Just a faint malaise. Just a bunch of pointless questions like is she sorry? What is her diagnosis? Did she regret it?

  Did she wish she could undo it?

  What was a nervous breakdown like for her?

  Was it like it was for me?

  I know what they mean about suicide being contagious because even after just the faintest whiff of it—someone else’s hospitalization and breakdown—I catch myself thinking of suicide like this logical option again. I’m late to work and that old voice says, Kill yourself. I get a pang seeing Marisol’s pics of her new roommate. Kill yourself. I stub my toe, I don’t get into the class I want, I’m in a bad mood for no reason at all. Kill yourself. I don’t mean it. The annoying voice buzzes around my ear like a fly I bat away. But occasionally, in dark moments, I catch myself thinking, if I were to do it, how? A gun and one bullet, a body of water with bricks tied to my feet, pills, razors, a bridge . . . I hate these thoughts, but they are familiar, and they park themselves in my brain and make a home as I perform life, buying furniture, autographing leases, signing up for classes. I should be so happy. Everyone keeps asking how I’m doing and I say fine.

  Fine can also mean a very small particle, you know.

  This summer is so lovely. I can smell the ocean from my new apartment and I’ll be living there in less than two weeks. School starts again in four. I look up at the nonsensical clouds and the flame-blue sky and it’s amazing how beyond them there is a universe scattered with so many stars they outnumber every grain of sand on every beach in this wide, unknowable planet.

  I am a very small particle.

  I force myself to keep going, a millimeter from madness. Blink open my eyes in the morning and enjoy a moment of quiet, pleasant blankness before the bad news comes in like brain rain: Marisol is moving away; I was kicked off a volunteer crisis line; I ruined my high school graduation; I will never fall in love; I am a joke no one is laughing at. Everything I ever thought I was, all those moments of joy, were fake and/or fleeting.

  I hear myself. I hear how dramatic I’m being, and I know it’s impossible it’s all that stark and true. But the thoughts are so loud. They ring throughout breakfast, behind the chatter. Badger me while I go on my last driving lesson. I catch myself in the same patterns of thinking of death like a sweet vacation again, like I did back before I tried to off myself. How glad I am my driving teacher, a ponytailed surfer dude named Hal, cannot hear my thoughts.

  “That driver’s test’s about to get aced,” he tells me as he drops me off at my dad’s.

  “Thanks!” I say, smiling, waving, acting human.

  I go upstairs and faceplant on my bed and hurt, from the inside out.

  “No,” I say. “No.”

  I thought I beat it. Lies. How I will ever escape the death-spiral thoughts without giving in to the death spiral is beyond me.

  There is a razor in my shower and a ticking vein in my wrist. I keep returning to the thought of those two things, obsessively—razor. Wrist. Razor. Wrist. I can see how bloody the scene would be and it makes me sick and it also feeds something horrible in me, something embedded deep in me, but which cannot be removed.

  This again.

  I swear.

  This monster in my head.

  If I don’t find a way to stop it, it’s going to stop me.

  I dial six out of seven numbers for the hotline and stare for a long time before entering the seventh and pressing the green button for go. This shouldn’t be so hard. I was on the other end of the line. I don’t judge people for calling. Or do I. Or maybe it’s something like I don’t think I’m crazy enough to ask for help.

  Or is it that I don’t think I’m deserving enough.

  “Santa Barbara crisis hotline, this is Julie speaking,” a woman says.

  I don’t know Julie. She wasn’t part of my training group and she wasn’t part of my shift. I breathe a sigh of relief and close my eyes, let them burn for a moment, before talking.

  “Hi, Julie,” I say. “Thanks for answering the phone today. Thanks for being here and all you do. I’m just going to verbally dump on you, and I apologize in advance. My whole life, I’ve had these big feelings. Since life. Since memory begins. If I felt, I felt big. Sometimes these big feelings make everything wonderful and Technicolor, and sometimes they make everything a parade of horrors. Sometimes I’m part lunatic and people threaten to call doctors and other times I’m passing classes and making people laugh. I’ve had lovely people fall in love with me. I’ve screwed that shit up real bad. Sometimes I’m behind the line, sometimes I’m on the line, sometimes I think I need help, and sometimes I think I’m the helper.” I’m breathless. “What do I sound like to you? Like you’re probably flipping through your binder right now. Honestly. What page are you flipping to? Be real. What do I sound like?”

  Julie answers after a short static pop of silence between us. “You sound human.”

  I have not seen Wolf since the renovation, which took much longer than expected. The moment I step into his office, I think maybe I’m in the wrong place. This place is painted with an ocean mural, plants everywhere, fountain tinkling, a couch made of some kind of basket material, a couple hammocks. There are still books lining the walls, but otherwise, it’s transformed. I take a tentative seat on the basket couch and Wolf sits in a basket chair across from me.

  “This is different,” I tell him.

  “I’m sharing an office with another therapist now,” he says. “She made some . . . choices.”

  “Are we supposed to be on the beach?” I ask, pointing to a potted palm, then the hammock. “Do you have a coconut phone somewhere?”

  “I forgot how funny you are,” he says, although he’s not laughing. “How have you been?”

  “I called a crisis hotline a few days ago.”

  I fill him in on Lydia’s breakdown, on how it shook me, on my own morbid thoughts and how it’s all so tangled I can’t pull it apart sometimes.

  “Suicidal ideation is not the same as suicidal intent,” he says to me.

  The swell of relief I feel when he says that could move a mountain.

  “You have been through trauma,” Wolf says.

  Ugh. Trauma.

  “I hate that word,” I say.

  “Trauma?” Wolf asks, surprised. “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “Do you hate the word grief?” he asks.

  “Also not my favorite.”

  “You are grieving,” he says.

  “Grieving what? Some woman I hardly know having a nervous breakdown?”


  “You were in a very close, intense situation with her. But I’m not just referring to her—you were already grieving,” Wolf reminds me. “There’s been a lot of grief this past year for you; not just the suicide attempt, which I know you regretted. You mourned your parents, your family, your first love.”

  I break my “no crying in therapy” vow about three minutes in. I’m already on my second tissue.

  “It’s okay to grieve,” he says. “It’s okay to experience trauma. In fact, it’s one thing we all share.”

  I close my eyes. The sound of the fountain is soothing, actually. For a moment I don’t feel crazy at all. I feel sad, and older, and a sadness about being older, which there should be a word for. I think of my sister Ruby. I think of how beautiful my mom looked in her purple wedding dress and how I was so miserable that day I never even told her. I think of Nicola, and what a pretty package she is with such a canyon lurking in her soul. I think of Jonah when he first kissed me, the way I kept my eyes open the whole time because I wanted to see his eyes closed. I think of the car accident and the smell of burnt metal and gasoline, the way the glass shone crystal-like under the moon, the ambulance lights swirling. I think of Etta and her sweet voice singing in my phone. Life chokes me sometimes. Too much everything.

  “Julie said I should maybe see a psychiatrist,” I tell Wolf.

  “Maybe you should,” he says.

  “But I thought I was grieving. I thought this was ‘trauma.’ Now, what, you think I’m mentally ill?”

  Wolf doesn’t answer.

  “Am I?” I ask him. “Am I bipolar II? Or do I have a personality disorder or something?”

  “Do you think you’re mentally ill?” he asks.

  “I’m mostly normal,” I say.

  “You do realize even mentally ill people are ‘mostly normal,’” Wolf says, using air quotes. “Mentally ill people aren’t ‘ill’ all the time. I invite you to question what you think of as normal and what you think of as mentally ill.”

  Hmm.

  “We have this fixed idea in our culture of what mentally ill means,” he continues. “The reality is, most people who are mentally ill are functional people almost their whole lives who simply need treatment now and then.”

  “Medication,” I say.

  “Maybe,” he says. “Some. Some people do with therapy. Some people try other methods.”

  “So you’re saying I am bipolar,” I say.

  “If you are,” he asks, “how does that change you? Or how doesn’t it change you?”

  I chew my lip. Now the tears have stopped, but my brain hurts.

  “It’s just so arbitrary, these designations,” I tell him. “Like, we as human beings made up these categories: mentally ill; bipolar I, bipolar II—”

  “We as human beings made up every word in every language,” Wolf says. “Does that give some of them more meaning than others?”

  I try to hold the tears back again, and fail again. Twice in one day, I have broken my no-crying rule. It’s official: I am the worst.

  “I don’t know if I can do this,” I tell Wolf. “I need help.”

  He nods, nudging the tissue box my way. “I really think it’s time for you to set up an appointment with a psychiatrist, to at least discuss the option of a different medication.”

  I take a tissue, dab my eyes. He turns around and grabs a pad of paper, a pen, and writes a number down for me.

  “No pressure,” he says, handing me the slip of paper. “But let’s put one more tool in your toolbox. This is a colleague of mine. She works specifically with adolescents. I think you’ll really like her.”

  I sniff, nod, and even though I want to resist this, I want to hand the paper back—I don’t.

  “Thanks,” I say. “I’ll give her a try.”

  Cleaning out my email in-box one day, Lydia’s name appears and I let out a little yelp of joy at the sight of her response.

  Hiya J, thanks for reaching out. So I gather you heard all about my dramatic exit from the hotline. I’m sure I traumatized Davis and everyone else. What can I say, life is a real pile of shit sometimes. I’ve been having a rough go. Did you hear my dog died? And I threw my back out again? Honestly, sometimes I don’t know why I keep going. But anyway here I am. You’re all not rid of me yet. Maybe we can meet for coffee and I can fill you in soon.

  So Lydia, JD, Beatriz, and I meet up for coffee. It’s at one of those too-hip places downtown, clean as a bank, all six-dollar pour-over coffees and baristas with a crap-ton of ennui. We sit together with our mini white paper cups. I’ve never been outside the hotline with them. Something about this, even though we’re in public in a noisy open space, feels too intimate, like I’ve stepped into a stranger’s house without invitation. I’ve never sat this close to them. I can see their pores.

  Lydia shows up in a tie-dye dress over blue jeans, her hair is pulled into a messy silver topknot. Though I wonder what is really going on behind her unblinking stare, she appears normal as ever, and tells us how refreshing it is to see our “sweet, uncrushed-by-the-weight-of-the-world faces.”

  “Lydia, the hotline’s not the same without you there,” Beatriz says, putting her coffee down as her bracelets jangle.

  “And I’m not the same without the hotline,” Lydia says. “I have all this time on my hands now. I’m considering taking up watercolor painting, that’s how empty my schedule is. But you know what? I’ve noticed a surprising amount of relief. Relief it’s over. I didn’t realize how much giving all the time was sucking the life out of me.”

  Lydia worked more shifts a week than anyone else on the hotline. It was probably close to a full-time job when you added it all up.

  “We miss you both,” JD says, looking from me to Lydia. “I keep turning around to ask your advice and—and you’re not there.”

  “Same,” Beatriz says.

  “It’s strange,” JD says. “In these last couple years, I spent more time with you all than I did with my own family.”

  “Right?” Beatriz says.

  I’m overwhelmed suddenly by all this change—by the hotline being over, by my time with this group of people ending. I wipe my eyes.

  “Honey.” Beatriz pets my back. “Let it out.”

  I resent that I, of course, am the one who cannot hold it together, who needs to be consoled by the hotline operators in diminutive terms like honey like I’m a human Chihuahua. I always knew I was on the wrong side of the crisis line. I should have been the one calling all along.

  “It sucks that I won’t be seeing you anymore,” I tell them.

  JD shakes their head. “Okay, come on, we’re not dead.”

  “Not yet, anyway,” Lydia says.

  “Oh, Lydia,” Beatriz says.

  “Don’t even joke about that,” JD says. “You know we’re here for you, right?”

  “Yes, I know. It’s what everyone keeps saying,” Lydia says, smelling her coffee and putting it back down. “You’re all there for me. And I know it’s well meaning, but guess what, darlings? You can’t fix what ails me.”

  “Being there has nothing to do with fixing, Lydia,” JD says. “You of all people should know that.”

  JD has the most beautiful eyes. A deep brown, almost black, lit with a fire behind them that is infectious.

  “You know who taught me that?” JD asks. “You. That night that guy shot himself on the phone with you it was this . . . complete crisis.”

  “Oh, God,” Lydia says, shaking her head, clearly remembering.

  “The ordeal took hours,” JD goes on, turning to me. “The cops got involved. We had to call Davina in. She showed up in her bathrobe at ten p.m. It was the only time anyone calling the crisis center actually, like, died on the phone, then and there. All these people calling for suicide usually just want to be talked out of it, right? Well, this guy had made up his mind and he just didn’t want to die alone.”

  “I haven’t thought about that night in a long time,” Lydia says.

  “That night
was something,” Beatriz says, braiding her hair as she listens. “I’ll never forget it.”

  “It was my third week on the hotline,” JD goes on. “Third shift. Holy shit, right? My mouth was to. The. Friggin. Floor. Lydia swiveled around and told us everything, in detail, after it happened. In gory detail. Didn’t flinch. When I asked how she was doing, you know what she said?”

  “What did she say?” Beatriz asks, fascinated.

  “Yes, what did I say?” Lydia asks.

  “You were there,” JD teases, hitting her arm.

  “Well, I don’t remember every nonsensical thing I say,” Lydia says.

  “You said, ‘I’m honored to have accompanied him.’ You said you felt like Charon,” JD tells her. “The ferryman to the underworld in Greek myths. And then the bird.”

  Lydia hits the table for emphasis, shaking our coffees. “The bird!”

  Beatriz rubs her arms. “Now I have goose bumps, remembering.”

  “A bird—mind you, it’s after ten p.m. when this happened—a bird comes hurling itself into a window,” JD goes on.

  “Like it wanted in,” Beatriz says, eyes wide as if she’s remembering as she speaks.

  “A crow,” Lydia says. “I’m getting goose bumps now.”

  JD leans in. “Lydia, I just remember you looking up and saying, so casually, ‘The bird knows.’”

  “That was such a strange night,” Beatriz says.