Try Not to Breathe

by Jennifer R. Hubbard

  Since Seaton High was still pretty new to me, too, I didn’t fit anywhere. I stumbled through the days always a little lost, a little behind. Because I didn’t know the team schedules, I missed baseball tryouts. When I talked to the coach, he agreed to let me come to practice and show him what I could do. But before I made it, I got the worst sore throat of my life, with chills and fever.

  It turned out I had mono, and I was so sick I could just about crawl to the bathroom. I used to stop at a certain spot midway down the hall, where my mother had plugged in a nightlight shaped like a scallop shell. I would lie there with my face against the carpet, inhaling crumbs and dirt specks the vacuum had missed, staring at the plastic shell and gathering my strength to make the second half of the trip. Mostly that’s what I remember from two weeks of sickness: that nightlight.

  The coach sent me a message to forget about baseball. He said I was only a sophomore anyway and could try out next year, but I found it hard to believe I would ever play again. I’d also had to stop running—the running I’d done for fun, not for a team. I never tracked my times or distances but did it because I liked it, because it sent the blood racing through me and made me feel less like I was living behind a pane of glass.

  • • • • •

  “What do you mean by a pane of glass?” Nicki asked.

  “It’s like I can see and hear everyone, but I’m not really there with them. It comes and goes—I mean, it always did. Until last year, when it stuck around.”

  Dr. Briggs once asked me how long I’d felt it. I thought maybe it started when I was eight, the first time I went off the high dive at my swim class. Nobody else had acted scared of the diving board, so I marched right off it like it was nothing. I only got the shakes afterward, in the locker room.

  “There’s a numbness that goes with it,” I told Nicki. “It’s like being dead but not officially dead. I mean, that’s the way I always thought of it.”

  She nodded as if that made some kind of sense, touching my hand. I forced myself to look through her, to keep talking, because if I stopped and let myself feel her hand on my skin, I was never going to get through the part about the garage.

  • • • • •

  This hollow numbness seemed to go on forever. My mother was obsessed with the house. The contractors kept stopping work on the roof and windows for no reason, disappearing for days and leaving things half done, tarps flapping in the wind. My father went on the road, came back, and said, “They’re not done yet?”

  It never seemed to stop raining. I had no friends at school. I was over the mono—at least I could go to classes again—but I couldn’t run. I came home from school every day and went to bed.

  There’s nothing like mono exhaustion. It’s not like being tired after a good workout or missing a night of sleep. With those kinds of tired, you’re spent, but as soon as you stop moving, you start filling back up. With mono, you don’t recharge. You feel like you never had energy and never will. This would be scary, except it takes energy to care and you don’t have energy.

  I didn’t know how to change things. All I knew was that everything felt wrong, and I felt wrong, like I shouldn’t even exist. I hated getting up in the morning. I hated slogging through the motions at school. I hated my mother’s anxious nagging and my father’s disappearing. I hated having nothing to look forward to, ever.

  Our rented house had a garage. One night I went down to start my mother’s car. She had gone to bed; my father was out at a late meeting. I didn’t have a license or anything, but I knew how to start an engine. I rolled down the car windows and left the garage door closed. I had heard that in just a few minutes you could fill a garage with fumes strong enough to kill. I turned the key and let the engine chug for a minute, maybe less.

  I turned it off because I suddenly remembered something else I’d heard, about the fumes getting into the house, too, and killing people there. I got out of the car, found a sheet that someone had used as a drop cloth, and spread it along the crack under the door that led from the garage to the house.

  I got back into the car, but this time I couldn’t turn the key. What if the sheet wasn’t enough? It was just cotton, probably not gas-tight. What if the fumes got through? What if I killed my mother?

  And did I really want to do this to myself?

  I couldn’t think of anything else I wanted to do, any way that life was going to get better, any way this dead blackness was going to leave, but at the same time turning the key seemed like a lot of trouble.

  I sat there arguing with myself, my hand on the key but not turning it. I sat there and sat there and sat there.

  Finally the garage door rumbled open, and my father drove in. He got out of his own car and began to cross in front of my mother’s. “What the hell are you doing?” he said when he saw me. “You don’t have a license, mister. What are you doing in that car?”

  I just blinked at him. He thought I was getting ready for a joyride. He might’ve gone on thinking that if he hadn’t seen the sheet under the door. When he saw it, his head swung back to me, took in the open window, the sight of me in the driver’s seat. His eyes flicked back to the garage door, which had been closed until he opened it.

  • • • • •

  Nicki squeezed my hand, crunched down on it, and I almost stopped speaking. But having come this far, I figured I might as well go the rest of the way. Tell everything.

  • • • • •

  “Did you start this car?” my dad said. “Don’t you know you can’t run a car in a closed space?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know that.” It was the closest I could come to telling him the truth. We stared at each other. I think he was waiting for me to tell him I wasn’t trying to do what we both knew I was trying to do.

  “Did you run the engine?”

  “Only for a minute,” I said.

  “Where the hell is your mother?”

  I pointed at the door to the house.

  “Get out of the car.”

  But I couldn’t move. I put my head down on the steering wheel and he ran inside, calling for my mother.

  • • • • •

  “I wonder if my dad put his hand on the trigger first without pulling it,” Nicki whispered. “If he started to and stopped, you know.”

  I didn’t know. But if I had to bet, I would bet yes. He may have sat there with his finger on the trigger as long as I sat in that stupid garage with my hand on the key.

  • • • • •

  My father took me to the emergency room, where they checked me out for carbon-monoxide poisoning. Which, of course, I didn’t have. But the nurse asked me if I had tried to hurt myself.

  “Yes,” I said. “But I’m not very good at it.”

  My own words struck me as hilarious, the funniest thing I’d heard since the night we ran around trying to plug up our leaking house, but the nurse didn’t laugh. She called for other people to talk to me. They asked me more questions like that and then they told my father I couldn’t go home because I was a danger to myself.

  “I don’t feel dangerous,” I told someone, a nurse or intern or whoever it was. But they checked me in anyway.

  I told the psych resident who saw me the next day that I hadn’t even really done anything; I had only turned the key for a minute. She told me my parents had searched my room at home and found ten bottles of painkillers, way more than I would need for any headache, and way more than I would need to kill myself. She asked me why I had it.

  I knew the medicine could kill me. I’d bought it because it made me feel better every time I bought a new bottle. A little better, for a little while. But I hadn’t used the bottles because I knew an overdose would destroy my liver, and if I failed I didn’t want to be alive with a screwed-up liver.

  Not that I told the psych resident any of that. She asked me why I had all that medicine and I said I kept forgetting I already had it, and buying a new bottle. She asked why it had been hidden under the bed. I said it w
asn’t hidden; that was just where I wanted to keep it. She managed not to roll her eyes.

  Later that day, after my parents had telephoned God knows how many hospitals and the insurance company, they found a place for me at Patterson, which was only an hour outside of Seaton.

  “We’re lucky they have such a good facility for adolescents right here,” my mother said as we waited in the hospital lobby for my father to bring the car around, so they could drive me over there.

  “Yeah,” I said. “We’re lucky to have so many screwed-up teenagers close by.”

  She whirled on me, her hand raised. Neither of my parents had hit me since I was about five, when they used to give me a swat on the butt for such crimes as drawing on the walls with ketchup. I closed my eyes, waiting for the slap, but it didn’t come.

  She didn’t say a word. When I opened my eyes, she was no longer facing me. She stared at a vending machine, at candy bars trapped behind glass and coiled wire, gripping her purse with both hands. She was quiet when my father pulled up, quiet while we got into the car and drove out on the highway. Then she burst into tears and bent over in the front seat—wailing, smearing her lipstick and black eye makeup on her hands and sleeve.

  “Melissa, don’t; it’ll be okay,” my father said, one hand darting over to pat her shoulder. His head swiveled, checking the lanes around us. He tried to pull the car over to the right, but nobody would let him over. They sped past, punching their horns whenever our car edged into the next lane.

  “Damn it,” he said, as another one blared at us. “Help me here. Watch your side of the car and tell me when it’s clear.” His voice rose. “Melissa. I need you to do this.”

  She sobbed and the car kept going forward at sixty-five miles an hour, forward because nobody would let us stop.

  “Can you keep yourself together for a few minutes?”

  “I’m trying.”

  “Can you please—”

  “Forget it!” She straightened her back, black streaks shining on her cheeks. “Nobody’s going to let you over. Nobody gives a damn. Our heads could be on fire, and nobody would slow down for half a minute to let us get off the road. Just keep driving, Harry.”

  “If you need to stop—”

  “I don’t. I’m fine.” She stared out the windshield, the wet smears drying on her face. “Keep going.”

  I watched them and knew I should feel something, but I felt nothing except the old hopelessness. Which I had no right to feel, because I was a healthy kid from a good family. A kid whose mother wouldn’t even slap him when he was stabbing her, a kid whose parents were bleeding money to send him to a place like Patterson.

  • • • • •

  “When you knew you were in trouble—why didn’t you talk to anybody?” Nicki asked.

  “Like who?”

  “Your parents?”

  “What was I gonna say? That I felt like I was behind glass? That would’ve made a lot of sense.”

  “If you told them you were thinking about killing yourself, I’m sure they would’ve been interested.”

  Her voice was full of common sense. I buried my face in my arms and breathed in. The couch smelled faintly like roses; the cleaning woman sprayed something on it every week that would probably give us cancer years from now.

  In spite of the sickly fabric-cleaner smell, I breathed in deep and slow, trying to hold off panic, the shudders that wanted to roll through me. I should’ve known what it would do to me to tell Nicki, how raw I would feel. The last time I’d told this story Val and Jake had had to glue me back together. I wasn’t at Patterson anymore; I couldn’t afford to break myself open like this. Why had I thought I could help Nicki, anyway?

  Nicki rested her hand on my back. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “Seriously.”

  I turned my head so she could see my face. “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry I made you tell me that.”

  “You didn’t make me.”

  She frowned at the wall. “I’ve been pushing you to tell me.”

  “Did it help?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did you get what you wanted?” I said.

  “I—I don’t know.”

  We stared at each other, the pupils small in her gray eyes, small in the light from the windows.

  • • • • •

  Nicki and I ended up outside, tossing a baseball back and forth. One of my old gloves fit her. The sky had paled to a nothing color, the dirty white of old socks. I wasn’t sure how we decided to start playing catch except that we needed a break, needed to pull back from what we’d said to each other.

  Nicki’s aim was okay, but her technique sucked. “Like this,” I told her, demonstrating. “No—bring your arm back like—are you watching?”

  She giggled and tried to balance the ball on her foot. “You don’t have to turn this into a lesson, Coach.”

  I shut up about her throwing. My parents used to do that—try to turn every blasted thing into a “learning experience.”

  “Unless you want me to give you volleyball lessons next,” she went on.

  “Volleyball?”

  “Yeah, I was the setter on my team last year. I bet I make varsity this fall, even though I’ll just be a sophomore.”

  The word “varsity” jabbed me in the stomach. I wondered whether I could’ve made the baseball team if I hadn’t been sick. And whether I would be able to play next spring, after missing a year. But all I said to Nicki was, “Come on, throw the ball.”

  The sky darkened, but the air didn’t cool off. “It’s so hot,” Nicki said as the ball went back and forth between us, smacking into our gloves. “If we keep this up, I’ll have to go back to the waterfall.”

  “Okay with me.”

  “It’s true what they say about you.” She laughed. “You do practically live up there.”

  My throw went a little wild; she lurched to catch it. “Who says what about me?”

  Her face flushed. “It’s just—people know you like to hang out up there. They’ve seen you. That’s how I knew where to find you.”

  She sent the ball back to me. I caught and held it. It had never occurred to me that she’d hunted for me on purpose. I’d always thought our meeting there had been an accident. “You came looking for me?”

  “Well, yeah.” She scratched her arm, staring at my knees instead of my face. “I went up to the waterfall all the time anyway. A couple of times, people said you’d just left when I got there, so I started going earlier. I wanted to talk to you about my dad. Didn’t you know that?”

  “I never thought about it,” I said slowly. “I figured I just reminded you of your dad; I didn’t know you came looking for me.”

  “Well, we talked about him anyway, so what’s the difference?” She raised her eyes, met mine for a second. “Are you going to throw the ball?”

  “No difference,” I said, but it did make a difference, and it made my stomach burn that I couldn’t figure out what the hell the difference was.

  “Throw the ball,” she said.

  I stood there, my mouth drying by the second, the glove hiding the ball in my hand. “So you only used me for my suicide stories, but hey, I knew that all along, right?”

  Nicki shook her head. “That’s not it.”

  Clouds pushed down on the tops of the trees. Pressure built above me, inside me. I tasted panic. I told myself there was nothing to panic about, but I tasted it anyway.

  I hurled the ball. Her hand snapped up, and the ball thwacked into her glove. She pulled her hand out of the glove and shook it. “What, are you trying to knock my fingers off?”

  “What else do people say about me?”

  “Nothing.” She wiggled her fingers.

  “Are you going to tell them all about me now? My lame-ass night in the garage, and how I couldn’t even turn the key?”

  She walked up to me, and I took one step back. I couldn’t stand her being so close, couldn’t believe I’d let
her rest her hand on my skin earlier. The heavy humid air filled my throat, made it hard to breathe.

  “What is your problem?” she said.

  “I don’t like people knowing shit about me.”

  Wind stirred the treetops, not yet reaching us on the ground. She stretched a hand toward me. I smelled my own sweat and couldn’t understand why she didn’t gag from the stink of it. Her fingertips brushed my arm, and I flinched away.

  “Don’t touch me.”

  “Ryan, you’re acting like an idiot. Listen to me.”

  “I am an idiot, for telling you all that shit.” I needed a good dousing in the waterfall. I needed the roar, the smack in the face when I tilted my head upward into the spray. “Why don’t you go have a laugh with your friends? Tell them how I hang around the waterfall, and how I didn’t have the guts to turn the key.”

  “Ryan—”

  “And how I talk too much to the wrong fucking people.”

  She froze.

  “Go on. Get out of here; it’s going to rain any minute.”

  Cold wind rushed through the trees. Her drying shorts blew off the deck railing. The low plants growing around our house, the ferns and bushes, bowed and touched the ground. Nicki eyed the sky.

  “We are not done here,” she said. She tossed the ball and glove on the ground and grabbed her shorts. She ran into the woods, into the dimness of the coming storm.

  SEVEN

  A few minutes after Nicki left, fat raindrops began to splat down. I went inside and raised the kitchen windows to let in the smell of rain on hot ground. I opened the door to the deck, and wind poured in. It blew a magazine off the coffee table and knocked a vase from the kitchen counter. The vase broke but no water spilled, since Mom never put anything in it.