The Tragedy of Dane Riley

by Kat Spears

  I probe the inside of my head with questions, like poking your tongue at a sore in your mouth to test if the sore is growing or changing. Yes, I am sad about losing my dad; yes, I am angry at my mother and Chuck. But none of that makes me crazy. I am an inconvenience to the people who are trying to pretend as if everything is great. No dysfunction—nothing to see here. We are all normal, well-adjusted, happy people. In fact, the more I think about it, the crazier they all seem. I am the only one who is sane.

  So, why am I here, and they are out there?

  The other people in this facility are all my age or younger, but they seem to have real problems. There are drug addicts, and anorexics, and cutters. I suppose, in their eyes, the real difference is that I am not only a danger to myself, I’m a danger to other people. Which isn’t really fair. After all, the whole thing with burning the coyote is just a projection of my grief.

  In the afternoon we meet as a group for a check-in. We’re supposed to tell everyone what color we are feeling. We don’t have to talk about why we’re feeling that color, or even what the color means if we don’t want to. We just have to say a color.

  I am surprised to find out that the group is coed. I guess I was expecting guys to be separated from girls, like in prison. But when I walk into group that first day there are eight people, and five of them are girls. I recognize one of them—Suzie Landers, the bulimic girl Dr. Lineberger is supposed to have cured. The counselor is a young guy named Ted. He’s old enough to be out of college, I guess, but he dresses like his mom still picks out his clothes. His shoes are brown leather loafers with tassels. I keep my focus on the tassels, which quiver anytime Ted gets animated as he talks. I don’t speak at all during that first session and Ted doesn’t ask me to. I am the only person who doesn’t volunteer a story.

  Ted calls on Suzie to start the group session and you can tell she’s experienced. She doesn’t even seem to care that there are other people listening to her. Suzie chooses the color orange. Then she talks about how when she used to binge eat she would always eat a bag of Cheetos first. That way, when she was vomiting all the food up later, she would know when she got to the bottom because her vomit would turn orange. She sounds as if she misses Cheetos a lot.

  I’m looking around the room, sneaking glances at the reactions of other people as Suzie talks. I’m wondering, does all of this sound bonkers to everyone else? Because it sounds fucking nuts to me. And if I’m in here with these people, then that means Dr. Lineberger, my mom, they must think I’m as out of touch with reality as Suzie is with her color-coded vomit. And that’s not good.

  During group I don’t have to tell my story, but I do have to say my color. I have a hard time choosing what color to say. It’s all I’m thinking about as they go around the room. While people are talking about all the terrible things they’ve done to themselves and to other people and all of their failures and hurt feelings and drug use, I’m just sitting there trying to think which color I should say. Gray seems too obvious, like I haven’t put any effort into my color. But purple or even green seems ridiculous. In fact, any color in the rainbow seems ridiculous, other than maybe blue. And then you’re right back to being too obvious. Blue. Gray. Depressed. But what the hell else is there? Aubergine? It must be nice to feel so comfortable with talking about your feelings that you can say any color that comes to mind.

  My mind is so consumed with the color-choice struggle that I am panicked and my palms sweaty when the circle gets around to me.

  In the end I go with orange, just like Suzie. Ted asks me why I said orange and my answer, which I think is pretty good on the fly, is “Because orange is slightly less angry than red.”

  Ted nods approvingly and lets me off the hook as he moves on to the next person. I spend the rest of the session looking at my hands in my lap, but when I look up I catch Suzie watching me. She doesn’t even try to conceal the fact that she’s watching me.

  Suzie is so small. She’s petite anyway, but with her bulimia she’s so thin that she can curl her entire body into the pocket of her chair. And she looks tired. And weak. And pale. And veiny. And it makes me think of Ophelia because Ophelia is the exact opposite of all those things.

  Really, anything makes me think of Ophelia.

  After group we get to eat lunch. The food is laid out on a folding plastic table in the same room where we had group. There are sandwiches and chips and a salad.

  I end up at the table next to Suzie, who is holding a plate and looking at the food with an expression of regret.

  “No Cheetos,” I say, then realize that’s probably a terrible thing to say.

  But she smiles and doesn’t seem offended. “Is that the real reason you chose orange as your color, too?” Suzie asks. “Because you love Cheetos so much?”

  “Who doesn’t love Cheetos?”

  “My mom doesn’t love Cheetos,” Suzie says, and I figure she’s not really talking about Cheetos anymore.

  “I chose orange because I couldn’t think of any other color,” I say. “I had to copy you.”

  Suzie smiles at that. “You want to sit together to eat? We could go outside.”

  “We can go outside?”

  “Sure,” Suzie says, shrugging one really delicate shoulder. Her collarbone is so thin and sticks so far out from her neck that I think it could break if I barely poked it with my finger. “It’s miles to the nearest bus stop. They know we’re all too fucking pathetic to walk that far.”

  She’s joking. I think.

  We walk out through a side door that opens onto a courtyard enclosed on three sides. The view through the open side of the courtyard is of a large field with woods beyond. I imagine making a break for it. Like that scene with that girl running from the Nazis in that movie.

  It’s only a twenty-minute drive to my house from here so I figure we can’t be too far from civilization. But I have no money. No phone. After a day without my phone, I don’t reach for it instinctively every few minutes and I wonder what I’m missing in the world. We could have been invaded for all I know.

  Suzie sits down at a round concrete table with benches that are also concrete and shaped like two half-moons. I take the bench opposite her and dig into my food. I’m not eager to eat but the food is a good distraction from the fact that I don’t know what to say.

  “So,” Suzie says, “what are you in for?” The corner of her mouth lifts up into a quirky smile.

  “Um,” I say. That’s it. My entire answer. Where to begin? “My mom and my therapist think I’m a danger to myself. And others, I suppose,” I say, thinking about the fire. “And I see ghosts.”

  “Really? Like that kid in that movie?”

  “No. God. Not like that. I think my dad was reincarnated as a coyote. And my mom’s boyfriend hit the coyote with his car so the coyote is dead now, too.”

  “Oh,” she says as she pushes her food around her plate. Truly, there isn’t much else you could say while still being polite. And Suzie seems like a pretty nice person. It occurs to me that she hasn’t actually taken a bite of her food yet.

  “What about you?” I ask, as if I haven’t noticed that she’s the size of a fifth grader.

  “I have a bad relationship with food.”

  “Yeah. The Cheetos. You mentioned. You actually like throwing up?”

  “Nobody likes throwing up,” she says, but not in a mean way, like it’s a stupid question. “It’s how I keep from gaining weight.”

  “You think that would be a bad idea?” I ask, unsure if that’s a rude question.

  “Let’s talk about your problems. I’m sick of talking about mine. Ghosts are more interesting than an eating disorder.”

  “Or, we could just talk about something else,” I say.

  “Okay.”

  I wait, hoping she will go first. With girls you usually don’t have to wait long for them to fill any silence, and Suzie doesn’t disappoint me.

  “You have a girlfriend?” she asks.

  “No.”

>   “I don’t have a boyfriend,” she says, and I’m worried that she’ll say we’re perfect for each other. You’re crazy, I’m crazy. It’s a good fit.

  My plate is near empty. “You going to eat that?” I ask her.

  “Probably not. Why? You want it?”

  Even though the food isn’t great, now that I have started eating, I realize how hungry I am. I didn’t eat at all yesterday. And I wonder how Suzie goes without food on purpose. “Sure. I’m starving. I didn’t eat yesterday. Won’t you get in trouble for not eating?” I ask as I take her plate and start to eat her food.

  She sighs. “I have a weigh-in once a week. My mom always comes. It’s like she enjoys watching me suffer.”

  “I feel that way too sometimes. About my mom, I mean.”

  “I won’t be here much longer. I haven’t been gaining, so they’ll send me back to a residential place that specializes in eating disorders. The last one I went to, a girl actually died while I was there.”

  “Shit. No kidding?” I ask, thinking what I’m not supposed to think, that people who starve themselves are legit crazy—there are much easier ways to leave.

  “Well, she died at the hospital. But they had to call an ambulance from the group house.”

  “She actually starved herself to death?”

  “Heart failure. It’s pretty common. She had been sick for a long time.”

  “You think that could happen to you?”

  “Maybe,” she says with a shrug, like dying is nothing compared to being fat, or even normal size. “Look,” she says with a nod toward something behind me. “The squirrels. They come when they see me because they know I’ll toss most of my food. They’re trained.”

  It’s a surreal moment, her bringing up squirrels like that. I figured I was the only one who thought about squirrels.

  “If you died and were reincarnated, what animal would you come back as?” I ask.

  “God, I don’t know, a dolphin, maybe. I like the water. The idea of being free.”

  “If you like being free so much, why don’t you get better so you don’t have to keep staying in places like this?”

  “Yeah, I guess,” she says, noncommittal. “What about you?”

  “Honestly,” I say, “I’d probably be a squirrel.”

  * * *

  Mom comes to visit me on the second day of my incarceration. We’re going to sit down with Dr. Lineberger to talk after my two nights in the hospital, though I don’t really think of it as a hospital because I’m not sick. I think of it more as a minimum-security prison.

  We meet in one of the generic offices at the residential facility. It’s smaller than Dr. Lineberger’s regular office and there is just a desk and two straight-backed wooden chairs where Mom and I sit.

  When she arrives, Mom kisses me and hugs me and I let her. I know she’s worried because after the coyote and the fire she doesn’t just think I’m disturbed, she knows it.

  There are things she has to say, and I can tell from her expression that she has been trying to come up with the best way to say them.

  Dr. Lineberger starts with an easy question. “How are you, Dane?”

  “I’m fine.” Most of the time when people ask you that question, they really just want you to say that you’re fine so they can go about their day. Today, I will not get off that easily. “I feel … better.”

  “Why don’t you start by telling me about the coyote.”

  “I told you about him. A while ago. I really wanted to think about him as my dad. He had become like a … symbol. And I guess, once the coyote was gone, too, I just…,” I start to say “snapped” but want to avoid any words that imply some kind of psychotic break. Instead I say, “… got upset.”

  “Your mother mentioned that you were cremating the coyote. That you started the fire as a sort of funeral.”

  “Okay,” I say, knowing I have to be careful, “it does sound a little nuts, but I swear I didn’t mean for anything bad to happen.”

  “Were you still thinking of the coyote as your father then?” Dr. Lineberger asks. “Was it like a second funeral for your father?”

  “No. I know it wasn’t really my dad. I just didn’t like the idea of burying him. The coyote, I mean. Maybe my dad, too. I don’t know. Somehow it seemed wrong.”

  Dr. Lineberger waits for me to say more. I’m not sure what else there is to say, so I say the same thing again. “I never really believed the coyote was my dad. It was just something, maybe the idea, that I liked. That he was still there. I don’t know.”

  “Well, it’s good that you can talk about it, I guess,” Dr. Lineberger says, maybe not with as much enthusiasm as I would have hoped. “I’m glad you feel open to experiencing and sharing your feelings.”

  “I’m still sad about my dad. But I wish I wasn’t stuck in this place. I wish I could go out into the world and finally be on my own. Move on to something else.”

  Dr. Lineberger turns to Mom then and asks her how she’s feeling about everything.

  “Scared,” Mom says after taking a long minute to think about it. “I’m scared because I feel like I don’t know my own son. And I should know him better than anyone. And, I guess, a bit angry. With myself, I mean. I feel like I’ve failed as a mother.”

  “You didn’t fail, Mom,” I say. “This isn’t about you. The way I feel about Dad being gone…” I stop, knowing what I think but not feeling okay with saying it out loud. But I know I have to be honest or they are never going to let me leave this place. “We don’t share that. Okay? The way I feel about Dad being gone isn’t the way you feel. And that makes me feel lonely. Alone. Sometimes I wish I had a brother or a sister because at least I would have one other person around who knows exactly how I feel.”

  “Do you think it would be helpful to be part of a group?” Dr. Lineberger asks, sounding hopeful.

  “Like group therapy? Like we have here?” I ask skeptically. “No. The problems these people have, they aren’t my problems. It doesn’t make it any easier just knowing there are people more messed up than I am.”

  “I meant like a group in which the other members are kids who have experienced the same thing. The loss of a parent. If your grief makes you feel lonely, maybe you need to be around other people who have had the same experience.”

  “Maybe,” I say, but only because I want to sound as if I am open to Dr. Lineberger’s idea. It wouldn’t be the same. Other people who have lost a parent aren’t people who have lost my dad.

  “We don’t have to decide anything right now,” Dr. Lineberger says. “But maybe you will consider it. There are programs we can access.”

  “Maybe,” I say again, and again, it means no, but I’ll wait to fight that battle later.

  After our meeting, Dr. Lineberger says I’m ready to come home. Everyone seems tentatively able to accept that, despite how crazy my actions seemed, I wasn’t really trying to cause harm to myself or anyone else. But now I am going to be expected to go to therapy twice per week. And Mom has started talking about medication again.

  I’m reminded of a movie I saw about these people who live in a facility, like this one, and they are on a steady stream of medication that keeps them catatonic. The medications made it impossible for them to physically react, or even talk. But probably they are like that guy in that other movie, who was paralyzed and could only blink his eyes to communicate. And what he really wanted to communicate was a primal scream at the horror of being a prisoner trapped in his own mind.

  * * *

  As soon as I get home I ask Mom to let me go hang out with my friends. She agrees, with conditions. I’m supposed to text her every thirty minutes and share my location with her on my phone.

  When I get out to the Mercedes, it doesn’t start, and my heart sinks with disappointment. I head back inside the house, wondering what address I can use to get an Uber to the Wall. Mom and Chuck look up with surprise when I enter the house through the garage door.

  “The Mercedes won’t start,” I t
ell them.

  “That car costs more in maintenance than it would to just buy a new car,” Mom says.

  I open my mouth to speak but Chuck cuts me off before I can say anything.

  “It’s okay,” Chuck says, and puts a hand on her arm. “I’ll call the garage and have it towed in. It’s probably just a bad battery or something.”

  I’m grateful to Chuck for sticking up, if not for me, at least for the Mercedes.

  I text Joe and he arrives about thirty minutes later in his dad’s Toyota Corolla, which rolled off an assembly line sometime in the early part of the twenty-first century.

  “Dude,” he says as he leans over to look at me through the half-open passenger-side window. “I’ve been texting you for days.”

  “It’s a long story,” I say as I climb into the car.

  “Okay.”

  “You got a cigarette?” I ask him as I pull the shoulder belt over my chest.

  “Seriously? I’ve only got two packs left.”

  “I don’t care, man. I need it more than you do. Hand it over.”

  Joe takes a moment, struggling with his inner addict before he concedes, and says, “We can share one.”

  There’s nothing worse than sharing a cigarette, but I’m in no position to argue.

  As soon as I start telling my story, explaining what happened and where I have been, Joe forgets to care about the cigarette. He responds with a low whistle, the only indication that he is listening intently to me, when I tell him about everything that happened before the coyote’s funeral. And he only interrupts me when I tell him about Suzie Landers and her Cheeto-orange vomit indicator.

  “Man, that’s messed up. You think Cheetos taste the same on the way up as they do on the way down?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve heard that only works with bananas.”