Try Not to Breathe

by Jennifer R. Hubbard

  “Ryan!” My mother ran in and slammed everything shut. She never liked outside air, with its dirt and pollen; she preferred filtered air. “What on earth were you thinking?”

  “I was cooling off the house.”

  “The air conditioning’s on. What’s the matter with you?”

  Rain thundered down, hammered on the roof and the window glass, drummed on the deck. The living-room windows turned liquid.

  Mom ran her finger around the edge of a windowpane, as she often did when it rained, testing for leaks. We hadn’t had any problems since moving back in after the repairs, but she kept testing anyway. “What have you done with yourself all day?” she asked, with strained cheerfulness.

  Let’s see: stood under a waterfall, went to see a phony psychic, relived the worst night of my life, fought with Nicki. “Not much.”

  “You might say . . .” Her eyes searched my face. “You might say you haven’t done much since you finished your schoolwork last month.”

  “It’s vacation.”

  “Ryan,” she said, taking the dustpan and broom out of the kitchen closet, “I think it’s time you started doing things again. Your father and I have been very patient; we haven’t kept you on a short leash. But—”

  “‘Leash’?” I said. “What am I, a dog?”

  “I didn’t mean that.” She held out the broom and dustpan. “Come clean up this vase.”

  I swept up the fragments. “I’m not on a leash.”

  “That was a poor choice of words,” she said. “My point is that you need structure. We didn’t want to pressure you into taking on too much too soon, and we thought something like camp or a summer class might be too much, but now I wonder. I worry about you drifting, not having any goals—”

  “I have goals.”

  “Such as?”

  “I’m going to start running again.” I dumped broken glass in the trash.

  “That’s very nice.” Her tone dripped syrup. “But I’m thinking about more than just a hobby.”

  “Will you stop talking at me like I’m five years old? I was a mental patient, not a moron.”

  She sucked in her breath. “You like saying that, don’t you?”

  “Not really.”

  She gripped the kitchen counter where the vase had stood. “You like shocking me.”

  “Why should it shock you? That’s what I was.”

  She shook her head. “You like saying it in the ugliest way possible. Dr. Briggs says it makes you feel that you’re in control.”

  I hated when she talked like that, as if she were looking me up in a manual and reading a section titled “How to Respond When Ryan Reminds You He Was in the Nuthouse.” I threw the broom and dustpan in the closet, instead of hanging them on their special little hooks.

  “Ryan—” Her face creased, and I knew I needed to stop, to pull back, because it never took much to make her crumble. But my nerves were stretched tight, on the verge of snapping, and I wasn’t sure if it was because of what she’d said, or if this tension was left over from my scene with Nicki. I only knew I needed her to shut up.

  She didn’t.

  “You can’t hold your illness over our heads for the rest of your life. It doesn’t excuse you for rudeness. It doesn’t—”

  “You’re the one holding it over my head.”

  Her face collapsed, and she stood sobbing in the middle of the kitchen. Guilt knifed through me. I opened the closet door and hung up the dustpan and broom. But she kept crying, with her hand at her face and her shoulders quivering.

  I should’ve tried to hug her or at least touch her shoulder, but I couldn’t. It was like watching someone drowning, and worrying that if you stuck your arm out to help them, they’d drag you under, too. I tapped the sides of my legs while she choked, tears pouring over her fingers. Finally I managed to pull a paper towel off the roll and hand it to her.

  “Thank you,” she murmured, blotting her face. “Why don’t you just go upstairs.” Her voice was calm now, thick from crying, and she wouldn’t look at me.

  • • • • •

  In my room, I went right to the computer. Val wasn’t around, but Jake was.

  “What are you up to?” I asked him.

  “The Mom wants me to go outside. I told her there’s nothing out there I need to see. Then she gives me a guilt trip about mowing the lawn.”

  “Join us out here in the world where they have marvels like this.” I sent him a picture of an eggplant whose owner claimed it looked like Albert Einstein. After all the drama with Nicki and Mom, it was a relief to focus on vegetables that supposedly resembled famous scientists. I could halfway understand why Jake never wanted to leave his room.

  “See, I would go outside if they had eggplants like that in my yard, but it’s just a bunch of boring GRASS that needs to be mowed,” Jake wrote. “I don’t know why the Magnificent One can’t mow it. Just a touch from his golden fingers and the grass would probably mow itself.”

  “Hey, if your brother doesn’t have an Einstein eggplant, he’s not that magnificent.”

  Jake went silent then, for so long I thought he might’ve dropped off. I was about to check when he typed, “What’s it like for you at school?”

  “Not bad,” I wrote, thinking of the way I floated through the halls like an iceberg, people steering around me. “Not great. Not bad.”

  “For me it’s bad.”

  “How’s that?”

  Silence, the cursor blinking on my screen. Then Jake came back on.

  “It was always bad last year. But now I hear EVERYONE knows I was at Patterson.”

  “Well, me too. They knew when I went back in May. So what?”

  “What did they do to you?” he asked.

  “Mostly they stayed away. Like I was carrying Suicide Plague.”

  “I wish they would stay away from me.”

  Before I could answer, he wrote: “The Mom’s yelling at me to get off the computer. See ya.”

  • • • • •

  I sat for a minute, wondering why Jake had asked me about school and what he meant by “bad.” I could imagine fifty thousand shades of bad, fifty thousand ways that school could go wrong. Maybe Patterson should’ve given us all a special course in reentering the world. Not that I knew what they could’ve taught there. They tried to prepare us; they made a “transition plan” for each of us. But maybe there was no way to escape the weirdness, no way around the rumors and stares and sneers—no way except to live through it.

  When my counselor at Patterson had told me I was leaving, the first thing I said was, “I’m not ready.” Even though I’d always said I couldn’t wait to get out of there.

  “You are ready.”

  “But I’m not—I mean, I’m still—” I gave up and started a whole new sentence. “I thought I would feel a lot better than this by the time I left.”

  “You’ll have to continue your medication, and I’m referring you to Elizabeth Briggs for therapy. But you don’t need hospital care anymore. At this point you’ll improve more when you’re back home, living your life again.”

  Now I wondered if they’d told the same thing to Jake. Because sometimes “living your life” was the whole problem.

  A message from Nicki popped up on my computer. Just what I needed.

  “in case you’re wondering i did NOT make it home before the rain. do you believe fake psychic called & said she’d received a message for me from my dad? i didn’t believe her but i had to know what it was. i’m such a sucker. it was some bull about making the most of life & being happy, blah, anyone could’ve made that up. you didn’t do much better when we were at her house & you were trying to channel my dad but at least i give you credit for trying.”

  I didn’t answer her. I thought of her alone, drenched by rain, calling that psychic. Calling, probably, before she’d even dried off. Holding her breath just in case Andrea had something meaningful to say—and the thunk in her stomach when she realized that it was another false alarm. B
ut even thinking of all that, I couldn’t make myself reply to her. I couldn’t get past the burning in my throat, the wall that had come up between us.

  • • • • •

  “Ryan i guess you are still mad at me but i don’t care. go ahead be mad all you want. what do i care.”

  I didn’t answer that one, either.

  • • • • •

  “by the way i’m glad you didn’t kill yourself. now go ahead & go back to being mad at me, i’m kind of mad at you too now.”

  Or that one.

  • • • • •

  I opened the closet, took down the package, and unfolded the paper bag. The draw to touch this bundle was always there, but now it filled my brain, and I wouldn’t be able to relax or think about anything else until I got this over with.

  I stuck my hand in and rubbed the pink fabric of the sweater. It had been soft the first time I touched it, but it was rough now, as if I could feel every fiber and thread.

  The roughness jolted me out of whatever trance I’d been in. I wrapped up the sweater and thrust it back on the shelf, pissed that I’d gotten sucked into touching it again. Guilt like concrete filled my stomach, my chest, even the inside of my head.

  EIGHT

  That night my father came home for dinner. He was a salesman, but not the kind that knocks on doors or works in a store. He sold industrial equipment to factories. His passport had stamps from all over the world. When I was little, I made myself a passport like his, with hand-drawn stamps from made-up places. I didn’t realize until I was in second grade that not everyone did this, that the other kids thought it was strange to play with fake passports and old baggage-claim stickers.

  Dad kept promising to take me with him, but whenever I asked about a specific trip, he’d say, “I’m booked solid with meetings. I wouldn’t have any time for you.” I’d told him I could sightsee on my own—I saw myself running through the streets of foreign cities, bouncing along in a river of languages I didn’t understand, free—but neither of my parents liked that idea.

  When we all sat down to eat, my mother gave me a quivery smile, so I guessed I was forgiven for breaking the vase earlier. She divided her fish into equal sections, never letting it touch her carrots or green beans.

  “There’s a game on tonight,” Dad told me. “Want to watch?”

  “Okay.” I never knew if he did these father-son nights out of obligation or because he wanted to, but I didn’t mind. It wasn’t like I had other plans.

  Mom went upstairs to watch something else because she said baseball was maddeningly slow, and we settled on the living-room couch. The way baseball announcers talk is very relaxing. It’s like they have nothing to do with the rest of their lives besides watch whatever game is in front of them. Not that I listened to every word. I just liked the sound of it, the stream of facts and numbers and stats and names. It pushed everything else out of my mind.

  “Your mother mentioned that you want to start running again,” Dad said during a commercial.

  “Oh—yeah—I did say that.”

  He paused before he spoke again. For the past few months, he always seemed to digest my words, weigh and analyze them. Or maybe he was weighing his own words, trying not to set me off on another trip to Crazytown. “Don’t forget, the treadmill is downstairs, anytime you want to use it.”

  “I know. But I want to try the trails around here.” The treadmill had become my mother’s thing. I no longer wanted to run indoors. I’d been walled in, cushioned, since coming out of Patterson, and now I wanted to push myself again. To find the edges of things.

  “Good for you,” Dad said, a little too heartily. I wondered if either of my parents would ever completely relax around me again.

  • • • • •

  I had come home from Patterson to this house; the contractors had finished sealing it up while I was in the hospital. I would never go back to the house with the garage, or the room where my parents had found pills under my bed.

  My bed looked strange, my computer and desk as if they belonged to someone I’d known years ago. The first thing I did was hang up Val’s painting, and then I felt a little better. Mom hovered, frowning. “What’s that? Did you paint that? Oh, Val did? Isn’t that . . . interesting. Do you want anything to eat? Or drink? I have some fruit, and crackers—I could make you a sandwich—do you need to take a nap?”

  “I thought I would take a walk,” I said, itching to be outside, with no walls or fences.

  “A walk? Where?”

  “Out in the woods.”

  “Alone? A walk to where? Why?”

  “Just around. To get some exercise. Nowhere special.”

  She’d insisted on coming with me. I had to wait for her to find a sweater, and good walking shoes, and the house keys, and finally we set out. I wanted to be alone, but I knew I shouldn’t push it when I’d barely come in the door. For all she knew, I was planning to off myself in the forest.

  “I’m okay, Mom,” I told her as we walked. I wasn’t completely okay. But I wasn’t on the verge of suicide, which was the part she needed to know.

  She tried to laugh, an I’m not worried lie. “I know, but—”

  I bent to pick up a pinecone. She eyed it in my hands as if it were a clue, a sign of where I stood on the crazy/sane meter. I turned the cone, studying its spiral shape, and tossed it back into the woods.

  We’d barely left the house behind when she said, “How much farther are you going to walk?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We shouldn’t go too far.”

  “We just got started. I need some exercise.”

  “But, Ryan, you have a whole workout room in the basement.”

  “I want to be outside. I’ve been cooped up forever.”

  “Well, we’ve been outside.”

  “Only for ten minutes!”

  “Please don’t fight me on this,” she said, and I let her turn us around. I would get my time alone, I told myself. It would just take longer than I’d expected.

  • • • • •

  Since that day, my parents had loosened their grip on me, but only by inches. During the commercials in the baseball game, my father looked over at me like he wanted to say something, but whatever it was, he didn’t say it.

  Before I went to bed, I rooted around the bottom of my closet until I found the trail runners Dad had gotten me at the beginning of the summer. I’d told him back in June that I was thinking of running again, and he’d driven me into Seaton to get the shoes. “It’s good to see you taking an interest in things again,” he’d said, hanging over me in the store while I’d laced them up, beaming as if I’d brought home an Olympic medal. But I hadn’t used the shoes; buying them had been a big enough step.

  Now I pulled them out of the box, out of the tissue paper, and set them on the floor next to my bed. They smelled of rubber and new plastic. They smelled like the beginning of something.

  • • • • •

  Val was online, answering a message I’d left her earlier. “You rang, sir?”

  I typed back: “Yeah. I had a shitty day. I said several shitty things to people & I’m not even sure why.”

  “Like who?”

  “You know that girl I told you about? She wanted to hear my whole garage story.”

  “Did you tell her?”

  “Yup.”

  “You must be getting pretty close if you’re telling her about the garage.”

  “It was because she told me all this stuff about her father. Next thing I knew I was telling her.” I paused, then typed more: “The weird thing is, when you think about it, I never went that far in the garage. Remember how Alex always said it shouldn’t even count as a real attempt? That I didn’t try to kill myself, I tried to try?”

  “What is this, a competition? Who’s more serious about offing himself? The winner ends up in a box. Some victory!”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Alex was always trying to prove he was more fuck
ed up than anyone else. Like he would get some prize for being the worst one. I think he was jealous of you,” Val wrote.

  “What for?”

  “Because you worked hard. And you knew how to listen to people, which he never did.”

  “No, if he was jealous it was because I had you and Jake.”

  “He was jealous because I never painted his portrait.”

  I laughed at that. Val had painted a lot at Patterson, but one thing she’d done for fun was “abstract portraits” of Jake and me, using finger paint. Jake was a bunch of skinny black lines. I was a blue cloud with orange and purple flashes. The whole thing was kind of a joke—when Jake saw his, he said, “I think of myself more as a green triangle.” It made us laugh, even when nobody else did. That was the thing about Val and Jake and me: we had our own world, our own language.

  “You could’ve cured Alex, turned his whole life around,” I wrote now. “If only you’d painted him, too.”

  The cursor blinked at me. I could almost feel Val on the other end of this conversation, listening. Well, reading, but it was like listening.

  “I miss you,” she wrote. “I miss having conversations like this.”

  “Me too.”

  “I wrote a song. Can I send it to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Play it now, OK?”

  “Yes. Send it.”

  She sent me the link to the music file, and I played it. It was a stormy instrumental: a piano and a guitar, with a few bursts of flute. I liked its roughness, and the way the flute kept surprising me. I typed, “WOW.”

  “You like?”

  “It’s incredible. Which instrument did you play?”

  “Piano and flute. My brother did the guitar.”

  We wrote back and forth about the song, about how long she took to write it and how she recorded it and what her brother said about it. I didn’t want to let her go; I was dreading the moment when our connection would break.