Try Not to Breathe

by Jennifer R. Hubbard

  I never cried in her office, or had one of those breakthroughs where you suddenly figure out why you are the way you are and how to stop being that way. Not that I expected a miracle in just three months, but Dr. Briggs never bought into big splashy miracle scenarios anyway.

  Sometimes we had a session with my parents—those were the hardest ones. Mom tried to get Dr. Briggs to give her instructions (How to Repair Ryan’s Brain: The Complete Guide), but Dr. Briggs wouldn’t. “Some of the questions you’re asking me, you could ask Ryan,” she said, and Mom pulled back in her chair.

  Mostly Dr. Briggs listened. Sometimes she asked me questions, and sometimes she made suggestions. I told her about the pane of glass, the garage, the painkillers. I told her a little about Amy Trillis. I didn’t tell her about the pink sweater, but I’d never told anyone that.

  When she was getting ready for her vacation, she told me Dr. Solomon would be on call if I needed anything. But when it came to visiting Jake at Patterson, I didn’t have to call anyone. I knew I needed to see Jake, and I knew Dr. Briggs would think so, too.

  • • • • •

  I pushed away from the refrigerator, went upstairs, and put on dry clothes. My mother’s bedroom door was closed. I knocked and said, “I’m ready when you are,” to the door.

  She poked her head out, her hair combed now, a line of lipstick crossing her mouth. “I’ll be out in a minute,” she said. “Your pill is on your desk.”

  “Okay.” I started walking toward my room, turned, and said, “You want me to bring it back here and take it in front of you?”

  She hesitated, gripping the edge of her bedroom door. “Nooo,” she said at last, and I felt in my gut how much that cost her, how she pulled that no out of her by sheer force.

  FIFTEEN

  We didn't talk much on the drive to Patterson. Rain splattered the windows. Mom turned on the air-conditioning, and my eyes and mouth began to dry out. A cold stream of air blasted my chin and neck, but the rest of me was hot. The air smelled like mildew and stale cigarettes, although nobody had ever smoked in this car as far as I knew. I pointed the vent away from my face.

  “Jake will be happy to see you,” she said.

  “Mm,” I said. I wondered if Val would be there, although I didn’t know if she’d even heard about Jake yet. I should’ve called her, but the thought of talking to her made my stomach roll.

  • • • • •

  The first thing that hit me about Patterson was the smell, familiar and unchanged: sweat, bleach, the staleness of closed windows and meals cooked hours ago, the stink of fear. And then I noticed the beeping and buzzing of the locks, the clank of the doors, and the bluish fluorescent glow of the hallway lights. It felt like a hundred years ago that I’d been here, and it felt like just a couple of days.

  I suddenly realized my old room wasn’t mine anymore; someone else lived there now. Someone else slept on the creaky thin mattress and stared at the lightning-shaped crack in the paint above the door. And though I didn’t want to come back to Patterson, that thought slid a slab of ice under my skin. It didn’t make sense, but then, I had stopped expecting my life to make sense.

  They didn’t let us see Jake. We had totally forgotten about the rule that you couldn’t have visitors for the first few days.

  “Well, can you tell him I came?” I asked Marybeth at the desk, while my mother fidgeted, breathing heavily and twisting her purse handle. She’d already protested the no-visitors policy, talking about how far we’d driven, but Marybeth was unimpressed.

  “You could leave a note if you want,” Marybeth told me.

  “That’s a good idea,” Mom said. “There’s a card shop around the corner, Ryan. Why don’t we stop in there?”

  We went to the store, but I had no idea what kind of card to get. Get Well Soon? Cheer Up? Sorry You’re Back in the Mental Hospital? In the end, I got him a card with a farting lizard on the cover. It reminded me of the stupid stuff we e-mailed to each other. My mother bought a huge card with roses and glitter all over it. Which struck me as strange, because she didn’t know Jake that well. I was hazy on how well my mother knew Jake’s, but I was starting to think they’d talked a lot more than I’d realized. I was beginning to see how much I didn’t know. How much went on around me but just offstage, invisible.

  • • • • •

  After we dropped off the cards, I sent Val a message from my phone about Jake. I found myself listening so hard for the return ring that my ears ached, so I clicked off the phone.

  Mom took me to lunch at a diner, where she arranged her food in the usual patterns. I squeezed ketchup out of a greasy plastic bottle and mashed a fry into the red blob on my plate, trying to ignore her geometric exercises. Her lips never touched her fork as she ate her fruit salad. She bared her teeth for each bite.

  “I’ll be glad when Dr. Briggs gets back,” she said.

  “Why? Need help controlling your crazy son?”

  I said it without thinking. It was the kind of thing I could say to Val or Jake or Nicki and they wouldn’t even blink, but she winced like I’d jammed my pickle into her eye.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  She set her fork down. “Maybe you didn’t know this, Ryan, but your illness hasn’t been easy on me.”

  “I didn’t think it was easy.” I rubbed crumbs off the edge of my sandwich.

  “Do you have any idea what it did to your father and me to see you so sick?”

  I thought of how her mouth trembled whenever she looked at me, the screaming phone fights she’d had with the insurance company about covering my treatment, the sigh she didn’t seem to realize she made whenever she dropped me off at Dr. Briggs’s office. I thought of my father’s face when he’d caught me in the garage, and the line between his eyes whenever he inspected my mouth to make sure I swallowed my pill.

  I had once overheard part of a fight, my mother screaming, “Of course I didn’t know he was in the garage!” and my father saying, “I’m not blaming you—” I’d plugged music into my ears to avoid hearing the rest of that.

  Now she said, “Do you know what it was like, having to leave you in that place and drive away? Trying to figure out what we’d done wrong?”

  “It’s not about you,” I said to my plate, to my half-eaten BLT.

  “What?”

  “I mean, it’s not your fault.” I looked up, into her face. Blotches stood out on her cheeks.

  “Do you know what it’s like to have a son who wants to kill himself? Because I’ll tell you.” The words pushed out of her mouth as if they had a force of their own, as if her lips couldn’t hold them back any longer. The people in the nearest booth glanced at us, but she plowed ahead, for once oblivious to who was around us, who might overhear. “It’s the worst thing you can imagine. You can’t concentrate on work. You can’t sleep.”

  I squished a cold fry into a puddle of pickle juice, willing her to stop, to shut up. I wasn’t ready to hear this yet. Especially not now, not on top of Jake going back into Patterson and Val pulling away from me and Dr. Briggs on vacation.

  But I listened to Mom, because I knew I had it coming.

  “You want to shake him and make him promise to get better. And then you hate yourself for thinking that way. You want to fix him, but you can’t. And worse than that, none of the so-called experts can guarantee to fix him, either.”

  Salt had spilled on the tabletop. I pressed my fingers into the white grit, thinking about the word “fix,” rolling it over in my mind. Ice formed on my skin.

  “You cry all night and then you go see him and he won’t even speak to you.” Her voice splintered. “Or if he does speak, he says he wants to die. You ask him why, and he curls up in a ball.”

  I fought to stay with her, to keep listening because I owed her. The sound of my own breathing echoed inside my head, and the cold headed for my bones.

  “You search his room and find he’s hoarded enough pain medicine to kill an elephant. When you try to talk to him, he
just scratches his head or his arms. The doctors tell you he’s depressed. Never mind that you’ve done everything for him, that you used to change his diapers and clean up his vomit in the middle of the night. That you gave him everything he ever wanted. Apparently it wasn’t enough. The best you could do wasn’t enough.”

  She was gasping for breath now, or maybe she was on the verge of crying, her voice snagging in her throat. “He’s depressed. Why is he depressed? The doctors can’t tell you. He won’t tell you.”

  I sprinkled pepper next to the salt. She brought her hand down on mine, and I jumped. Her hand was cool and moist, a film smearing from her skin to mine, and it made my neck itch. “Ryan,” she said.

  “I don’t know why I was depressed.” It wasn’t just because Amy Trillis had hated me—or, worse, thought I wasn’t worth hating. It wasn’t just because I’d lost almost everything I ever cared about: baseball, running, my old neighborhood, my old school.

  “Do you think that’s what I’m asking you now? Why don’t you listen to me?”

  Wasn’t that exactly what she was asking? If she didn’t want an explanation—the same explanation Nicki wanted from her father—then I didn’t know what she wanted.

  She swallowed, her lips clacking dryly, and continued her story. “Then your son comes back from the hospital. You take a job where you can be home with him all the time, even though he slips away into the woods every chance he gets. You’re terrified to let him out of your sight, but you do it because he needs to get out in the world and have a life. At least, that’s what his father says, and you hope he’s right. The problem is, you can’t ever stop walking on eggshells.”

  I ducked my head the way Val often did, but my mother went on. And on. She said everything she must’ve wanted to say to me ever since that night in the garage. Her voice ground over me, pounded me, the way the waterfall pounded me when I stood under it. I counted salt and pepper grains on the table as her words hit me, no longer able to absorb their meaning, feeling them pit my skin.

  Mom stopped with a gasp. She looked around the restaurant as if she’d been plunked there by aliens and had to figure out where she was. Then she turned back to me.

  “Are you still with me, Ryan?”

  I couldn’t speak.

  “Damn it. I wanted to wait until we could do this in Dr. Briggs’s office.” I hadn’t heard my mother curse since the day they’d taken me to Patterson, but the novelty of that didn’t even dent the invisible shield around me now. She nudged my water glass closer to me. “Take a drink. Are you all right?”

  I stared at the glass, thinking, Water, water, reminding myself what it was. Wishing for the waterfall to shock me alive. Remembering that Dr. Briggs had talked about having a special session with my mother, maybe in September.

  “I did this all wrong.” Mom clawed a stray hair away from the side of her face. “I just wanted to tell you—that I wish we’d known what to do—that we did our best and—I wanted to say it the right way and—then all this with Jake—being back here at Patterson—”

  Mom planted her elbow on the table and clamped her forehead in her hand, so I couldn’t see her face. Finally she lifted her head and tried to pull napkins out of the spring-loaded silver dispenser. The holder had been overstuffed, and the napkins tore. She struggled with the shredded paper, scratching at it.

  I pressed on the dispenser so she could pull a wad of napkins free, keeping my mouth shut. I’d fucked up enough as it was. I could only guess how many years I’d chopped off my mother’s life already; anything I said now might bite away more.

  Wiping her mouth, she blinked wearily at me. “Are you ever going to forgive me?”

  “Forgive you?” I said, startled because that wasn’t the question. That wasn’t the question at all.

  • • • • •

  The check came, interrupting us, and then she went to the ladies’ room. When she returned, neither of us had an appetite for answering the questions we’d asked.

  While we walked back to the car, she put her arm around me for a stiff hug. I stumbled and didn’t hug her back. My feet on the sidewalk were silent. Car horns beeped faintly through the layers that muffled me. I couldn’t hear my mother’s voice.

  • • • • •

  Mom and I avoided each other the rest of the day.

  I went for a run and stood over the edge of the quarry. I leaned over the rusted remnants of the wire fence, panting, not sure the wire would hold. I willed my mind to go blank, because no matter who I thought of—Val, Jake, my parents—I hit a sharp edge that threatened to slice me.

  • • • • •

  I went to bed early, but I hadn’t fallen asleep yet when my phone beeped: Val.

  “Yeah,” I said, lying in the dark with the phone at my ear.

  “You didn’t get to see Jake? Do you know how he is?”

  “No. All we could do was leave him some cards.”

  “God, I was afraid he would do something like this. Just yesterday—”

  “I know. I remember.”

  A long pause; I pressed the phone closer to my ear.

  “How about you, Ryan? Are you okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure? Because I know things got kind of—awkward—between us. I don’t want you to be hurt. Especially now.”

  I closed my eyes, because that way I could see her clearly, clearly enough to touch—

  Almost.

  There was that almost again, the one inch that separated me from her, the maddening space that kept everything I wanted just out of reach. My voice came out rough, raw. “Come on, Val, what do you think? I’m going to kill myself over you?”

  “No, I—”

  “Worry about Jake, not me.”

  “I do worry about Jake. And you. Worrying is what I do, remember?” Her voice had gone brittle, reminding me of the worst days I’d seen her have at Patterson, reminding me she had fragile spots, too.

  “Yeah,” I said, the anger fading. “I know. How are you doing?”

  “I think I’m okay. Sometimes I’m scared to death and sometimes I’m so upset with Jake I want to cram hope into his brain, but underneath . . . I’m all right. I’m writing music; that helps.”

  We stayed on the phone even though we didn’t say much more—the way we used to sit together on the ugly couch in the Patterson dayroom. We always drew strength from each other, and it drove me crazy that she didn’t want to take that feeling as far and deep as it could go. I hated that what we had was enough for her, that she didn’t have the same hunger I had to make it more. But she’d been the one to step back, to put this space between us, and I wasn’t going to push her. This time I was the one who said, “I should go.”

  “Good night, Ryan,” she said.

  And the click when I turned off my phone was like a thread breaking.

  • • • • •

  I awoke the next day with everything sitting in my stomach like a meal that wouldn’t digest. But I got up, ignoring the heaviness in my gut.

  I couldn’t worry about my mother or Jake or Val or anything else right now. I would take a run and have lunch, and then I had an appointment to talk to a dead guy.

  SIXTEEN

  Nicki met me in her driveway wearing a suit: a jacket and matching skirt. She’d even pulled her hair up into a bun. I almost said, “You’re dressed like my mother,” but bit that back. Instead I said, “Why are you dressed that way?”

  “I want to look older. That last psychic didn’t respect me because she thought I was a kid.”

  I looked at the truck and down at my own jeans and T-shirt. The truck and I were definitely going to spoil the image—even if there wasn’t already something off about the way Nicki looked. “But it’s like—you’re trying too hard. It makes you look even younger.”

  She glared at me, opened the truck door, and began tossing out old paper cups and food wrappers. I came around to her side and pulled the clip out of her hair.

  “Hey!” She gra
bbed at her head, while her curls fell around her neck.

  “You look better this way. Older, too, if that’s what you’re after.”

  She peered in the side mirror. “Well, maybe so.” She pointed at me. “Get over on the other side and clean the trash out of there. I can’t believe Matt piled so much crap in here in just two days.”

  We finished cleaning and got on the road. “Where are we going?” I asked as she swung the truck onto the highway.

  “Somerton.” She handed me a sheet of paper. “When we get to Exit 23, start reading me the directions.”

  • • • • •

  Gas stations and minimarts rolled past the windows. I realized the last thing I wanted to do on an August afternoon was sit in some psychic’s house trying—and failing—to raise the dead.

  And then I asked myself: Why couldn’t we do something else? The sun was out, Nicki and I had the truck, nobody knew where we were.

  “It’s too hot today,” I said. “Why don’t we go to the beach instead?” The ocean was a good two hours away, and if I’d thought about it for half a second I would’ve realized nothing could distract Nicki from her great psychic quest, but for a moment I actually felt a salt breeze on my face. I saw us far away from here, with nothing better to do than dig our toes in wet sand and listen to the rise and fall of the waves.

  “The beach! Where’d you come up with that?”

  “I don’t know. I told you, it’s hot.”

  “It’s hot every day. That’s why they call this time of year ‘summer.’” She paused to change lanes. “I really hope this psychic knows what she’s doing.”

  “Don’t hold your breath.”

  “Look, Ryan, there has to be something to all this psychic stuff, right?”

  “Why?”