Try Not to Breathe

by Jennifer R. Hubbard

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I heard you were in the hospital.” She looked past me, at an emerald green vodka sign my parents had hung on the wall to give it that bar atmosphere.

  “I was,” I said. “But not for mono.”

  Her eyes flicked back to my face. I felt the question sitting on her tongue. If I tapped her on the back, it would probably pop right out. I ran my fingers over the smooth top of the bar and met her stare, daring her to ask me. And I wasn’t sure why I was daring her, except that the way she’d wormed herself into my house made me curious about how far she would go. From what I’d seen, if anyone had the guts to ask me to my face, this girl would.

  Her eyes fixed on mine, her lashes lifting as if she hoped I would answer without her having to say it out loud. But she broke first, glancing away.

  “Come on,” I said. “I’ll walk you back upstairs.”

  • • • • •

  We stood in the living room, in front of the windowed wall. Her breath misted the glass. “You have the best house.”

  “You should’ve seen it when we moved in. My parents are still suing the builder.”

  “Why?”

  “We were only here a couple of weeks before the windows started leaking. And the roof.” My mother’s hovering during every minute of the construction hadn’t guaranteed a perfect house after all. “We had to move out for a few weeks while it got fixed.” I stopped then, because I didn’t want to talk about what had happened during that move.

  “Do you go to the waterfall a lot?” Kent’s sister asked.

  “Every day.”

  “A kid died there once, you know.” She tapped a rapid, nervous rhythm on the window glass with her fingernail.

  “You can’t believe everything you hear.”

  “It’s not just a rumor.” She shook her head. “I was there. His name was Bruce Macauley. He was, like, eight. I was six.”

  “You were there?”

  “Yeah. Me and my brother. He slipped. Bruce, I mean. Slipped on the rocks.”

  “Oh.” I’d pictured slipping on those rocks many times, the force of the cascade pinning my head underwater, but now I realized I’d never fully believed the rumors.

  She stroked the pane, with her fingertips this time. My mother, who swooped down on every fingerprint with glass cleaner and a lecture, would’ve exploded.

  “I still like the waterfall, though,” Kent’s sister said.

  • • • • •

  She gave me back the towels, the towels with her touch all over them. It occurred to me that I should’ve taken them before; she wouldn’t have had to carry them through the house. “Bye, Ryan,” she said at the door, and I wished again that I could remember her name. I twisted the towels, wanting to say more to her, but she was already gone.

  TWO

  I went upstairs to check my phone and computer for messages from Jake and Val, the only two people who ever sent me anything. We’d been together at Patterson Hospital, and we were all out now. For the past few months we’d kept in touch, though we lived in different parts of the state.

  I had no messages from Val. I wrote her one and then erased it without sending it. I stared up at her painting on my wall, as if I could contact her that way, but my thought waves had no obvious effect on the painting—or my in-box. I went on weeding spam.

  Jake had sent me a link to a video of an ostrich playing football, which was the kind of crap we always sent each other. I sent him back a clip of dancing cartoon walruses.

  “You there?” he sent me. “Where you been all day?”

  “Outside. Then this girl came over.”

  “What girl? Since when do you have a girl?”

  “She’s just a girl. She lives around here.”

  “So what’d you do to her?”

  “Ha. Nothing.”

  “Come on, you can give me some juicy details. Even if you have to make them up.”

  I changed the subject. “What did you do all day?”

  “What I always do. Played games until my wrists locked up. The Mom keeps nagging me to leave my room but what the hell for? If I had a fridge & a bathroom I’d never have to leave.”

  “I don’t think you’re allowed to be a recluse unless you’re also a billionaire.”

  “I’m just $999,999,960.00 short of that goal. Maybe I should start a telethon: HELP ME BE A BILLIONAIRE RECLUSE, AMERICA.”

  I wondered if Jake had even left his house since getting out of Patterson in June, but whenever I asked, he made a joke of it. Val and I told him he would turn into a mole person or get rickets from lack of sunshine—well, okay, I guess we made a joke of it, too. Val and I had serious talks sometimes, but since leaving Patterson, Jake and I never did. I guess he thought it was bad enough, the stuff we could remember about each other from the hospital: the outbursts in the dayroom, the confessions in Group, the way we couldn’t hide anything from anyone ever because we were around each other twenty-four hours a day. Once somebody’s seen you wiping snot off your face after you’ve crumbled and confessed to a circle of mental patients that you hate yourself for wanting attention you can never have—well, then, you’d rather send him clips of ostriches and walruses than talk about that shit.

  • • • • •

  Early the next morning, I went up to the waterfall. It was cold, the air hazy with evaporating dew. Kent Thornton sat there, smoking. At first I thought it was just a cigarette, until the sweet heavy smell hit me. “Heard you saw Nicki here,” he said.

  Nicki, that was his sister’s name. “Yeah.”

  “She’s a nut.”

  My face stung. When people said things like that, I never knew if they meant it to be a dig at me or not.

  “My mom says she’s more trouble than me and my brother put together.” He stared at the cascade, the endless fall of water. “She’s a good kid, but she’s all screwed up since our dad died.”

  I took a step back. If he was going to sit here all morning, I could hit the trails instead. I was hungry to be alone. When I was around other people, I always expected the next thing out of their mouths to cut me. Kent hadn’t said five words to me at school; I wasn’t that anxious for him to start talking now.

  “You be careful with her, though.” Kent swung his head toward me, his eyes webbed with red. “She’s still my sister.”

  Be careful with her? All I’d done was lend her a towel. And let her inspect my house, right down to the broom closet.

  Kent pointed to the thundering water. “You go under there, right?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Crazy shit.” His voice cracked. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”

  Good question, Kent, I wanted to say. How many hours do you have, to listen to the answer?

  “You couldn’t pay me enough to go under there,” he went on. “You could not pay me enough.” He shook his head, then kept wagging it back and forth like he’d forgotten how to stop. I cleared my throat, and he stopped.

  “See you,” I said, and escaped down one of the trails. I came back an hour later, when Kent was gone.

  • • • • •

  That moment under the waterfall when I couldn’t breathe was the best and worst. It scared me, but not in a bad way. The cold shock—the force of the water blasting me in the face—made it impossible to breathe until I moved aside. When I did, that gasp of air hit me like the first bite of food when you’re hungry.

  I stumbled to the bank, fell onto the moss, and closed my eyes. Water dripped off me into the moss and mud.

  “I hear it’s real cold under there,” a voice said above me. “And kind of dangerous.”

  I opened my eyes. Nicki stood over me.

  “I’ve heard that, too,” I said.

  She sat near my head. She smelled of sunscreen. And tangy, like oranges. I had to roll my eyes upward to see her.

  “Are you just going to lie there?” she said.

  “Is there something else I’m supposed to be doing?” Trying to see
her from that angle gave me a headache. I let my eyes roll back to their natural place. The waterfall pounded onto the rocks in front of us, churning up foam.

  “I want to ask you something,” she said.

  I remembered that moment in my basement when she’d mentioned the hospital. She was finally going to take my dare. “Ask away.”

  “Why do you come here?”

  “To the waterfall?” Okay, so that wasn’t the question I’d expected.

  “Did you ever . . . dream about this place? Or feel like you were meant to be here? Or did anything weird ever happen to you here?”

  I sat up. “What are you talking about?”

  She sighed; at least, I thought so. It was hard to tell, so near the roaring water. “One time,” she said, “the waterfall knocked me down so hard my head went under, and for a minute it was like I was hovering above my body, looking down at myself lying there in the water. And then the next thing you know, I was standing up. I was coughing and, you know, back inside my body.”

  “It probably knocked you out for a second.”

  “Did you ever have anything like that happen?”

  “No, but—” I told her about the book I was reading. I’d finished the Pacific raft story, and now I was reading about a guy who’d been climbing one of the highest mountains in the world when he got stranded in a storm. He got so exhausted and disoriented that although he was alone, he thought someone else was with him, someone guiding him down the mountain. He even talked to the person—or whoever, whatever, it was. I’d read about cases like that before, where people alone in deadly situations had the sense of another person being with them.

  “That’s exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about!” Nicki said. “What do you think he saw?”

  “I think he was hallucinating. He was dehydrated and probably hypothermic, too.”

  “And you think I was hallucinating?”

  “Well, it sounds like you did smack your head.”

  “I would think you of all people would believe in—” She froze; her lips stopped in midcurl.

  You of all people. Nicki wasn’t the only one who froze; a glacial sheet covered my skin in an instant.

  “What do you mean by that?” I asked as soon as my mouth thawed enough to let me. At the same moment she began, “I didn’t mean—” Then we both shut up.

  Nicki stared at the water, but I was watching her now. She rubbed the hem of her shorts.

  “Me of all people, meaning what?” Whatever she wanted from me, I needed her to spit it out. I was tired of weighing every word she said, tired of trying to figure out why she’d started talking to me in the first place.

  She spoke to the waterfall. “Did you really try to kill yourself?”

  Yeah, that was the question. I’d dared her to ask it yesterday, but now I was having second thoughts. There was something in her I didn’t trust, a pressure, an urgency. “Why do you want to know?”

  “I—there is a reason. I’m not just being nosy.” She dragged her eyes away from the water and met mine. Freckles dusted her face.

  “What reason?”

  “It’s . . . complicated.”

  I stood up and veins of water ran down my legs from my wet shorts and T-shirt. She scrambled to her feet, too. “Why do you want to know?” I asked again.

  Actually, it had been easy for people to figure out the truth about me. Right after I’d disappeared, the school had had a suicide-prevention assembly. And for some unknown reason my mother had gone to pick up my assignments and clean out my locker in the middle of the day, instead of after classes. And so everyone knew, even without me saying a word.

  Nicki tilted her head skyward, as if the answer might be hanging from the trees or spiraling down from a cloud. “It’s hard to explain.” She turned her head toward the woods, leaving me to stare at the side of her face. She picked at a purple scab on her leg. I wanted to run out of there, to lock myself away from her questions and the gossip that was apparently going to follow me for the rest of my life.

  But one thing held me back, a prickle of worry or conscience.

  “Look,” I said. “Sometimes when people ask me about this, it’s because they’re thinking about trying it themselves.”

  Nicki shook her head.

  “It’s fine, I mean, I’ll give you my doctor’s number. She’s on vacation until the end of the month, but there’ll be somebody in her office.”

  “That’s not it, I swear.”

  “I don’t mind. I’ve done it before. I gave her number to some kid at school I barely even know.” This guy had come to me because I was the only person at school who’d tried to kill himself—at least, I was the only one everybody knew about. Anyone else who’d tried had kept it a better secret than I could. I gave him the number for my doctor and the suicide hotline, and I also told the school counselor about him. As far as I knew, he was still alive, though I had no idea if he’d used the numbers.

  Nicki did look at me then. “Some kid at school? Who?”

  “I’m not going to tell you that.”

  “Well—I’m not planning to kill myself. That’s not why I asked about you.”

  “Do you have a phone with you?”

  She sighed. “I really don’t need this, but I can see you won’t shut up about it.” She handed over her phone and let me enter the number. “Give me yours, too. And your e-mail.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to send you something.”

  I hesitated, then typed in my information, my hand shaking. “Don’t send me those joke messages that get forwarded to fifty thousand people,” I said. What I was really thinking was: Don’t tell me you want to kill yourself.

  “I don’t send that junk.” Her voice softened. “I want to tell you something, but I can’t say it when I’m with you. So I’m going to send it instead. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  If she was suicidal, I would forward her message right to my doctor. Not that she seemed suicidal to me, but why else would she care about my past? What could she possibly have to ask me?

  • • • • •

  The thought of Nicki stayed with me as I walked home, as I climbed up to my room to change out of my wet clothes. I had the weird sense that she was following, or rather leading, me through the house all over again. I tried to see my room the way she’d seen it: the desk clear of everything but the computer, my bed with its smooth covers, the rug with fresh vacuum lines in it. I decided she must have concluded I was an anal-retentive neat freak.

  Val’s painting was the only thing in my room that you wouldn’t have found in a hotel room: those violent purple and blue swirls. My mother had hovered the whole time I hung it up, unhappy not only that I was driving a nail into her precious walls but also that I was polluting her decor with mental-institution art.

  And there was one other thing in this room that was different, not that Nicki had seen it or would recognize it if she had. I opened the closet door, not wanting to but having to, hating the impulse that led me to get that bundle in the first place and then made me keep opening it up and looking at it, an obsessive jabbing and digging at the sorest spot I had.

  I hooked an arm up and swept it off the shelf, caught it as it fell. Taking a full breath, I opened one end of the brown grocery bag.

  The sweater was still in there, soft pink fabric. I couldn’t tell if the faint scent of perfume was real or just a memory of how it used to smell when I first got it. I stared into the bag but didn’t touch the sweater. I had the sense it would leave a poisonous film on my skin, and yet part of me wanted to touch it.

  I wondered what it would be like to open this closet and find that the package had vanished, bag and all, where I would never have to look at or think about it again. I knew I should get rid of it. But I would’ve found it easier to yank out my own spleen.

  Somehow it seemed the sweater should’ve changed more in the months I’d had it. The perfume was fading, but I thought the fabric should be rotting, unrave
ling, disintegrating. I wished it would. Every time I looked, though, it was as bright and soft as ever.

  I closed up the bag and shoved it back onto the shelf.

  THREE

  When I got on my computer that afternoon, I was looking for messages from Val and Jake. I had one from Jake—he’d found twelve more dollars for his billionaire telethon—but nothing from Val.

  I replied to Jake: “Heard from Val lately?”

  He answered immediately. I didn’t think he ever disconnected from his computer; he might as well have implanted it into his head. “She’s busy with that student orchestra stuff.”

  I pictured Val back at the hospital, talking about music: leaning forward, hands flying, the words racing out of her mouth. She played piano, flute, and violin (not all at the same time). She’d even given a concert at Patterson once, in the dayroom.

  Val could make music anywhere. She’d taught Jake and me to jam with her in the Patterson cafeteria, with forks and cups and trays, with our hands and feet, with combs. Some of the kitchen staff had liked our sessions. Others cut us short, scared by any initiative we showed, any unpredictability on our part. But Val got some of them into it; she talked the most sour-faced kitchen worker into shaking a pan of uncooked rice as accompaniment. She could thaw anyone if you gave her enough time.

  After bullshitting awhile with Jake, I wrote a short message to Val: “Hi, what’s up?”

  I almost deleted it, but then I sent it. I was about to log off because I told myself I would not sit there for the rest of the day, checking my messages, waiting for her to answer, when a message came in from someone named nicki_t.

  I clicked it open.

  “i want to know what it’s like and why you did it because my dad did it and i was hoping you could tell me why you did it and if you remember anything about what it was like. i hope that doesn’t sound bad. i need to know and i don’t have anyone else to ask.”

  Her dad? Shit.

  For a minute I sat paralyzed, stomach curdling, reading Nicki’s words over and over.