* * *
My eyes shot open. In the shadows, I reached for my phone, turned it on, and held it right up to my face so the light wouldn’t wake up Brian, who’d come home by then. 2:52 a.m.
For the longest time, I tried to make myself nod off. I couldn’t. I kept thinking about all that had happened in the previous eight years. About the day I’d come home to find Mami and Papi missing. About how much effort it took for me to lie there and keep breathing. This shit is way too hard.
I slid from beneath the covers and wedged my feet into my white slippers next to the bed. Without turning on the light, I staggered my way to the living room and creaked open a closet door. I pulled out my long, black wool coat and put it on. I then tiptoed to the front door, turned the handle, and stepped out into the hall.
Our building had eight floors; Brian and I lived on the first. I walked over to the staircase that led to the rooftop and slowly climbed. When I emerged onto the terrace, the icy air stung my face; my sockless feet trembled. I zipped my coat all the way to the top and clutched my arms around my chest. Light flakes, a nearly imperceptible twinkling stardust, layered fresh snow over the gray cement. I looked out over the neighborhood. Eerily silent and beautiful.
I shuffled toward the building’s edge and stopped when I came within a foot. No wall or barrier enclosed the landing. I lowered myself onto the ground and inched forward until my feet dangled over the side. I poked my head over the ledge and stared down. A parking lot, one with only a few cars in it, was below. I visualized my body, ashen and paralyzed, lying across the gravel. Am I going to do this?
I’d come close before to ending it all. Once when Brian and I were traveling out of town together, we had a heated argument. I was so distraught that I dragged a chair up to the balcony wall and climbed atop it so I could hurl myself over. “Nooo!” Brian shouted as he darted from the room to yank me back. “Diane, stop it! You can’t do this!” After he’d calmed me down, he tried to reason with me. “Can you imagine how it would hurt me and your family if you took your life?” he asked. “You’re fucking crazy if you give up.” He had temporarily restored my senses—because when you spiral into desolation, you’re no longer rational. In fact, you already feel dead; the suicide act is a mere formality.
This night wasn’t like the one on the balcony. I faced a simple choice about whether to jump, and no person was there to pull me back from the brink. Am I really ready to do this? The spool of thoughts that had been running through my head for weeks started up. I’m useless. I’ll never amount to anything. I’m not smart enough to get through college. How can I help Mami and Papi when I can’t even help myself? The world would be better off without me in it.
I’d been telling myself that things would turn around, that tomorrow would be brighter. But it wasn’t. Maybe if I’d been older, maybe if I’d had a template for overcoming crisis, I might’ve realized that things would eventually improve. That a better existence was possible on the other side of the anguish. But I didn’t yet have the perspective that only years of wading through horrendous circumstances can bring. At twenty-two, all I could see was darkness. I peered down at the lot. As I did, my left slipper fell from my foot. I tried to catch it by squeezing it between my toes, but it got away from me.
As I sat contemplating the end, I wasn’t scared. A peace I’d never sensed settled over me along with the snowflakes. My lids grew heavy with exhaustion. With my legs still swaying over the ledge, I lowered my upper body onto the cement and dozed off. I don’t know how long I was out, but a strong wind gust awakened me.
Where am I? I pushed up onto my elbows and gazed around, confused about why I was on the rooftop. Then all at once I remembered, and my precarious position spooked me. My God, what am I doing? My stomach sank. I scooted backward and tried to get up, but as I rose, I felt disoriented and groggy. I lost my balance and almost fell over. I then slid off the ledge.
My heart hammered away in my chest. I clasped the pavement with my palms and struggled to maneuver my whole body back onto the ledge; it was windy and I was weak. But with every cell in my body, with every ounce of strength I could conjure up, I hoisted myself to safety.
I stumbled to the rooftop’s center and dropped down cross-legged. I was breathing heavily. Holy shit! Did that just happen? Hours before, I’d been desperate to take my life, but only if I could do so on my terms. In that split second when the decision slipped out of my control, my impulse for survival jolted me from despair. A vision of my mami and papi, doubled over in grief after hearing I was dead, flooded my head. They’d endured so much heartache. They’d put it all on the line to come to this country so I’d have a chance to make something of myself. With another centimeter, with the slight turn of my wrist to the left or right, all they’d given up would’ve been for naught.
The same deep love that can wound us beyond repair also has the power to preserve us. When we’ve lost the determination to continue breathing, when we have no will whatsoever to soldier forward, our care for others is the one thing that can keep us marching onward. We stay alive for one another, often with more resolve and fight than we could ever muster on our own behalf. I don’t know what I thought I owed myself, but I did know I owed at least two people—my parents—more than this. They’d paid too great a price for me to discard my life so senselessly. It wasn’t time for me to go. Not like this.
Makin’ dat money.
CHAPTER 13
Turnabout
A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it.
—JEAN DE LA FONTAINE, poet
By some estimates, you and I will cross paths with as many as eighty thousand people during our lifetimes. Many of the folks we’ll encounter will be passing acquaintances. Others will be family, friends, and coworkers who remain in our lives for decades. If even one of those people has a lasting impact on us, we’re fortunate. Lorraine was my one.
I met my therapist shortly before the suicide attempt. I was still hurting myself, which is what led me to her doorstep. I did most of my cutting in private, but as I spiraled deeper into depression, that shifted. After a horrible fight with Brian, for instance, I’d pull out a blade right there in front of him and drag it across my forearm. “No, stop!” he’d scream, leaping to grab the razor from me. He was terrified.
Though he had his own issues, Brian was a good person. The guy did his best to pull me from my crisis. But it’s hard to help someone who won’t help him- or herself. Because of the state I was in, I wanted Brian to be more than a boyfriend to me; I wanted him to be my therapist, my savior, my knight who galloped in on a white horse to rescue me, the way it happens in a Disney fairy tale. That ridiculous expectation put even more weight on our fragile relationship. “You need to see someone,” he’d tell me. “This shit is getting really scary.” I agreed, but I sure as hell wasn’t going back to that Jackie O wannabe. So one evening when I was particularly desperate, I Googled “low-cost clinics in Boston.” Near the top of the results was the name of a center in my area. I called and made an appointment.
The next day, I showed up at the clinic and took a spot in the waiting room. I sat down next to this young Asian dude who was glued to his BlackBerry; across from us sat a blond girl flipping through the pages of an old Cosmo. They both looked normal and cool. I prayed the same was true of this experience.
Seconds later, a Latina woman stepped out of a swinging door. She was around five feet three, probably in her midforties, and rocking cute skinny jeans and a fitted blazer. Ringlets of short black hair framed her round face perfectly. She had on a pair of stylish glasses. Nice, I thought. This might work.
“I’m Lorraine,” she said. Her eyes were bright, her expression warm. She seemed cordial, but not that perky, Pollyanna kind of friendly that makes you want to puke. “You must be Diane,” she said. I nodded, stood, and followed her back through the swinging door and down a long hall. We settled into a corner office.
“So what brings you in today?”
I stared at her. The usual crap, the type I’d given the first counselor, swirled around in my head. Before I could dish it out again, I caught myself. No point in yelling for a life preserver if you’re not going to take it. I cleared my throat and sat up.
“Well,” I said, “things have been tough lately.” I glanced down at the rows of fresh cut marks on my brown skin. She looked too.
“What’s been happening, hon?” she asked.
“I’ve been hurting myself,” I told her. Before I could continue, tears tumbled from my lids and down onto my shirt. It was the first time I’d heard myself say those words out loud, and as I did, the realization of how close I’d come to dying swept over me.
Lorraine didn’t appear to be taken aback or surprised by what I told her. In fact, she scooted closer to me.
“Why do you think you cut yourself, Diane?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I sniffled. “I guess it feels better than all the other stuff I feel.”
“What other stuff is that?”
“Just everything,” I said—and right there, in a torrent of emotion, the whole ugly mess of the previous six years came spilling out: How frightened I’d been in the months following my parents’ deportation. The stress I was under to take care of myself. The financial disaster I was in. My crazy relationship with Brian. The class-ditching, the drinking, the partying. The big responsibility I felt as Mami and Papi’s only hope for returning to America. The guilt I felt for locking out my parents when they repeatedly tried to connect with me. As I told my story, Lorraine never took her eyes off me. She let me completely finish before she spoke.
“You know, Diane,” she whispered, “what you’re feeling makes so much sense.” She sat back in her chair. “When your mother and father were taken from you,” she went on, “you were forced to become your own parent. That’s an enormous load that no fourteen-year-old child should have to carry. It’s time for you to put down that burden.” She handed me a tissue.
At the end of our meeting, she asked me, “Would you like to come back in and see me?”
“Sure,” I said, pulling a stray tissue from my purse to wipe down my face. “That would be cool.”
“You’re going to be okay, Diane,” she reassured me as she walked me back out to the lobby.
I’d love to tell you that our session was enough to immediately straighten things out for me. But I still had thoughts. Lorraine couldn’t wave some magic wand and, poof, make everything work for me. That’s not how it goes for any of us. It’s taken years for me to see that, while Lorraine’s tenderness didn’t keep me off that ledge, it had much to do with why I didn’t ultimately jump. She clearly cared what happened to me—and that gave me one reason to carry on.
* * *
On the evening I came so close to ending my life, I crept back down the stairs, tiptoed into our dark condo, slid under the sheets next to Brian, and cried myself to sleep. I never told him what happened. I didn’t initially reveal it to anyone. The episode hadn’t been a plea for help, a way for me to get the world’s attention by screaming, “Look here—please save me!” Rather, it was a quiet moment between God and me when I had to decide whether I would go on. Part of me wanted the pain to be over; that’s how much anguish I was in. But a bigger part of me knew that if I remained strong for a while longer, my story could have a different ending.
Christmas Day was a blur. I spent it in my PJs, upset as Brian tried to do things to help, like making me a cup of tea. A few days later, at the start of 2008, I dragged myself back into Lorraine’s office and admitted to her that I was still having thoughts of hurting myself; I also told her I’d even been looking at websites that supported such behavior. The whole thing was fucking disgusting, and I was desperate. She listened and offered consolation.
“I’d like for you to go on an antianxiety medication,” she told me. “We’d still have to work through everything, but the prescription would get you stable.” I refused. Given the problems I’d had with the ADD prescription—not to mention my alcohol abuse—I didn’t want to take anything I could get hooked on. I needed to detox. “That’s fine,” Lorraine reassured me. “So we’ll need to focus heavily on behavior changes—because I do believe that you can change, Diane.” Yeah, whatever, I thought. Even as I doubted that, I hoped that she was right.
After struggling through my last semester and failing some courses, I’d had to make them up during the summer. I was disappointed that I didn’t get to walk across the stage with Adrienne and my other classmates. But I did have one thing to celebrate—I’d lived to see my twenty-second birthday.
* * *
They say old habits die hard, but they’re damn near impossible to break when you keep yourself intoxicated. Once school was over, I got a new nightclub gig. I’d gone there to interview for a bartending position but the manager took one look at me and said, “Sweetie, you’re my newest cocktail waitress.” I soon discovered that “cocktail waitress” was code for a skimpily dressed hussy who happens to serve cranberry-and-vodkas. It was the last job in the world I should’ve had—but it was the one way I figured I could earn fast cash every weekend. I was right on both counts.
Six of us worked the nine p.m. to two a.m. shift on Thursdays through Sundays. There were a couple of white college girls from New Jersey, both in the area to study fashion and PR. My girl Amir was in nursing school at the time. Others just partied for a living. I forget what the others did. My favorite was Luciana. She was a sweet girl from Brazil. She was fair-skinned and athletic and had a tiny waist and an amazing J. Lo booty. Her hair swung down past her waist. The first time I saw her, I was like, “Holy fuck—how on earth do you have hair that long?” Luciana’s family had come to the States when she was small, but somehow she still sounded a bit like she’d grown up in the Boston section of Belo Horizonte. Her accent was this weird mix between a Brazilian one and a wicked Bostonian one. She’d be like, “Diane, come out to the cah”—as in “pahk the cah in Hahvuhd Yahd.” Her dream was to become a registered nurse, and she was using the money from this job to pay for school. She was so much fun and a good friend. In fact, she was one of the people who really encouraged me to pursue acting. We were all these young women—at twenty-two, I was the oldest in the group—trying to figure out what the hell to do with our lives.
“You here all weekend?” Luciana asked me one Friday. We were getting dressed in the bar’s green room. On one side of the space was a floor-length mirror, the sort you’d see in a dancer’s studio. On the other side was a short row of lockers in which we stored our belongings. The space was so tiny that we were basically tripping over each other as we struggled to put on our outfits. Every night, I squeezed into a tight corset that pushed my boobs up to my chin. To top off the look, I wore high heels, fishnet stockings, and boy shorts that were basically underwear. Don’t judge.
“Yup, I’m here till Sunday,” I told her as I painted on a thick coat of mascara.
“Is Heath-uh coming in tonight?” she asked. I cracked up at the way she pronounced Heather’s name.
“I think so,” I said. “We’re all on tonight.”
The doors opened at ten, but the party really began popping at eleven. The house music thumped, the customers clustered around the tables, and we girls sashayed around the smoke-filled room to take orders. Each time I shook up a concoction for a guest, I had one myself. Vodka Red Bulls were my drink of choice—that’s how I maintained my energy. It’s also how I kept myself from noticing how sketchy this whole scene was.
“Come here and sit in my lap, beautiful,” some bald, middle-aged white dude with a huge stomach would slur.
“Well hello, handsome.” I’d play along flirtatiously. “Let me know if I can get you a second drink, K?” A large portion of the job was about being super nice to (gross) men who were slobbering all over my tits. Okay—they weren’t all gross, and some were young and handsome but had that Christian Bale in American Psycho look. They would say “Hello,” but
all I would hear is “Do you wanna come to my place so I can cut you up into little pieces?” Then there were the few who really were cool, and to be honest, I thank them all—had it not been for their ridiculous spending, I wouldn’t have had a way to support myself. You could call it my first acting gig—and let me tell you, I was so convincing that I should’ve earned an Oscar. Certain dudes would come back night after night and request me or one of the other waitresses. They felt we had a connection with them. Either that, or they were lonely. Or horny. Or just wanted to party. Or all three.
In between pouring cocktails, we’d get up on the tables or stage and dance to entertain the crowd. If you’d asked me then whether I was having fun, the answer would’ve been yes. Definitely. One hundred and fifty percent. But that’s because I was so super-drunk that I had no true awareness of what I felt. Even as we’d get dressed in the back, I’d already have my clear plastic “water bottle” filled with vodka. All of us threw back so many shots that we could hardly stand up straight by closing time. In my heart, I knew this was a terrible environment for me. I made myself forget that by numbing out.
Behind the scenes, there was drama, and plenty of it. For starters, we all competed with one another for Friday and Saturday nights, the shift when you could make the most in tips; things got nasty whenever a new girl came in and tried to get a spot. Aside from that, arguments erupted over pay. Every evening, one server would stay in the back and collect all the gratuities, and then we’d split the pool at night’s end. “I saw Heath-uh stuff a wad of cash in her bra,” Luciana once whispered to me. “She’s gyppin’ us.” After scoping out the situation for a few days, we realized the others were also pocketing a shit ton of our money. On a night when we should’ve left there with eight hundred bucks, for instance, we’d ended up with half that. When Luciana confronted a couple of the girls, a fight broke out in the locker room. Like I said—drama.
In the Country We Love Page 16
