Try Not to Breathe

by Jennifer R. Hubbard

  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 s
tupid 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.

  • • • • •

  Nicki and I sat awhile longer. At one point I got up and brought in a bowl of nuts and sunflower seeds and cranberries. We gorged on it, licking the salt off our fingers.

  “This isn’t—bird food, is it?” she said once, pausing in midcrunch.

  I laughed. “What if I said yes, now that we’ve eaten half the bowl?”

  She squeaked.

  “No,” I said, grinning at her, and she swallowed. “It’s just this healthy-snack crap my mother likes to buy. Anyway, I’m eating it, too, right?”

  “Yeah, but you have a death wish.”

  I laughed again. Her face had frozen the second after she said it, as if she wanted to bite the words right out of the air and take them back into her mouth. But I was okay. In fact, I wished more kids at school would say things like that to me, instead of sneaking glances from twenty feet away like they usually did. Not that I knew how to let them know it was okay.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about the session at Andrea’s, the weird waiting while we’d tried to contact Nicki’s father. “What was your dad like?” I asked. I lay on the couch, while she sat on the floor scooping up the last nuts and berries.

  She stopped with her fingers in her mouth and stared at me. Then she pulled her hand free and said, “I had this doll that used to be Kent’s. Well, it was a boy doll; Kent called it an action figure. I named him Slade because I thought it was the coolest name ever.” She ran her fingers along the bottom of the bowl, coating them with salt. “One day I left Slade down in Seaton Park, and I didn’t realize it till we got home. I was hysterical. Matt and Kent told me he would get stolen or rained on or chewed up by wild animals. And my dad drove down to the park to get him, even though dinner was ready. That’s the kind of person Dad was.” She put her fingers in her mouth again, to suck off the salt. I watched her lips.

  She seemed to be waiting for me to speak, but when I didn’t, she took her hand out of her mouth and shook it, drying it in the air. “He used to bet on the horses at Sandford, and sometimes he took me. I love seeing the horses run, especially when they run right past where you’re standing, like thunder. We used to plan what we’d do with the money he won, except he hardly ever won any. Once he won, like, a hundred bucks and we had a big dinner and I ordered crème brûlée for dessert.” She laughed. “I didn’t even know what it was. I called it ‘cream brooley.’”

  I rested my chin on my hands. “What else?” I felt a little like Dr. Briggs. It was nice to be the listener for once, not to have to scrape things out of my own brain to talk about.

  “He used to fight with my mom. About money, and how late he stayed out with his buddies.” She tried to spin the bowl, but it didn’t work well on the carpet. “He never talked about suicide. As far as I know.”

  I’d never talked about it, either—at least, not beforehand.

  She looked up at me. “He shot himself in the woods behind the house. My brother Matt and I found him.”

  My stomach jumped. I squashed down mental images of blood and brains, shattered bone. I could not imagine how horrible that would be, to find anyone who’d shot himself, let alone your own father. Especially since she’d also seen that kid drown at the waterfall. God, how had she made it to fifteen without her mind cracking, without ending up at a place like Patterson? “That sucks. I’m sorry, Nicki.”

  “Easy for you to say. Who would’ve found you?”

  “We’re not talking about me.”

  “I just want to know why he did it.” She held her eyes steady on mine. “Why did you do it? And don’t tell me you’re not my dad. I don’t care. He’s not here to ask, and you are.”

  “You should ask your mom,” I said. “After all—I didn’t know your dad, and she did.”

  “She can’t talk about him. If the subject ever gets near to coming up, she gets this sick look on her face. And anyway, you do know him. I mean, you know what it’s like to feel the way he felt.”

  “It’s not the same for everyone,” I said. “In my Group, at the hospital, everybody’s stories were different.”

  “That’s not what I mean. I want to know how you get to the point where—killing yourself is something you can take seriously. Where you think, ‘Yeah, I can do that.’”

  I closed my eyes so I wouldn’t have to look at her anymore.

  “Tell me,” she said.

  Maybe I wouldn’t have told her if we hadn’t gone together to Andrea’s house. If I hadn’t tried to help Andrea conjure up the ghost of Nicki’s father, if I hadn’t seen Nicki cry, if she hadn’t just joked with me as if I were a normal person instead of some fragile unbalanced psycho. If she hadn’t been the one to find her father.

  But all those things had happened. So I took a breath and began to talk.

  • • • • •

  We moved into this house, my mother’s dream house, halfway through my sophomore year. I’d never been the new kid in school before. I hadn’t realized how weird it would be when you can’t even find the bathrooms—never mind figuring out the “right” tables in the cafeteria and the “right” seats on the bus. When you’re new, you’re really alone.

  And then the house started leaking.

  It happened during the storms of February, when a weird thaw hit us with warm rains. Water poured down, gushed over the gutters, and pounded on the roof.

  It also dribbled into the house.

  The edges of the windows leaked. The roof leaked. One night, lightning flashed like a strobe while we ran arou
nd the house spreading pots to catch the rainwater. I laughed because this fancy house, my mother’s obsession for years, had been slapped together so sloppily that it literally leaked at the seams.

  “I don’t see anything funny,” my mother snapped, dropping towels to absorb the water that had already puddled on the floors and soaked the carpet.

  “It’s crazy,” I managed to say, catching my breath. I couldn’t believe she didn’t see a little bit of irony or gallows humor or whatever in the situation. Here we were running around like maniacs, trying to catch each new mini-waterfall as it sprang to life. I was in my shorts, since that’s what I wore to bed. My parents wore robes over their pajamas, and their hair stuck out all over their heads, and we kept tripping as we raced from one leak to another.

  The house was supposed to be perfect, and it wasn’t. Something about that made me feel better than I’d felt in weeks, eased the pressure on my chest. It had been a long time since I’d laughed and it would be a long time until I laughed again, but that night I couldn’t stop.

  • • • • •

  We rented a house in Seaton while this house got reroofed and recaulked and whatever else they had to do to seal it up. My mother was furious, documenting every step for the lawsuit she eventually filed against the builder. We lived out of boxes and suitcases, with most of our own furniture left up here under plastic tarps. Everything in the rented house was strange. I bumped into walls when I went to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Nothing belonged to me.