Mr. Ingman keeps wondering why I’ve been missing our after-school college sessions. He’s excited that I got a 29 on my ACT. If I didn’t feel like absolute garbage, I would probably be excited, too. I try to avoid him, and when I do run into him, I tell him that I have to work with my mom in the evenings. My history teacher, Mr. Nguyen, often asks how I’m feeling. He looks worried, but what can I tell him? How can I begin to explain? I just keep relying on the trusty old period card.
In English class today, we discussed one of my favorite Emily Dickinson poems, and it felt as if something were splintering inside me. When we got to the part about the bees, my eyes ached from holding back tears.
Instead of walking home after school today, I take the bus downtown. I’m not even sure where I’ll go or what I’ll do—I have no money or destination—but I can’t bear another evening locked up in my room. I don’t care about the repercussions. I give up.
I finally decide on Millennium Park because it’s the closest thing I can get to nature and because it’s free. It’s still freezing, so of course no one is around, only a few annoying tourists who, for some stupid reason, thought it was a good idea to come to Chicago in the winter. The cold here feels barbaric, inhumane. Why would anyone want to come to a place like this?
The snow is pretty when it falls, but it hasn’t snowed in about a week. All that’s left now is slushy and gray, or yellow from all the dog pee. I wish winter would pack its bags and get the hell out already.
The amphitheater is completely deserted, so it’s almost peaceful. The silver architecture looks kind of ridiculous to me, like a spaceship and spiderweb fused together, but everyone always takes pictures of it like it’s some sort of masterpiece. I smile when I remember the time Lorena and I came to a summer concert here. We didn’t even like the music—some kind of folk band from Serbia or some shit—but it felt great to be outside under the moon and three sad city stars. I thought maybe Connor and I would come here in the summer, too.
I walk toward the ice-skating rink as the sky begins to darken. I wish I had a few dollars for a cup of hot chocolate, but I barely have enough to get back on the bus. I’m tired of being broke. I’m tired of feeling like the rest of the world always gets to decide what I can do. I know I should go back home, but I can’t seem to move. I can’t keep going like this anymore. What is the point of living if I can’t ever get what I want? This doesn’t feel like a life; it feels like a never-ending punishment. My body shivers, and the thoughts in my head become hot, confusing swirls. I can’t seem to breathe right.
“Go home, go home, go home,” I tell myself, but I just stand there, watching a blond boy with ruddy cheeks skate in a tiny circle until his mother yells that it’s time for them to leave.
SEVENTEEN
I wake up in a hospital bed, with Amá peering over me. I have a headache so deep it feels like someone pummeled my brain with a meat tenderizer. For a few seconds, I’m confused about what I’m doing there, but then I look at my wrists and remember what I did last night.
“Mija,” Amá whispers and touches my forehead. Her fingers are cold and damp. She looks terrified. Apá stands near the door, looking at the floor. I don’t know if it’s because he’s ashamed, sad, or both.
I don’t know what to say. How could I possibly explain this? I begin to cry, which gets Amá started, too. I’ve never been very good at life, but, man, was this a stupid thing to do.
A short man in his twenties and an older lady with light brown hair and green eyes come in and stand at the foot of my bed. Even with her clipboard and white coat, she looks like she should be in Vogue or something.
“Hi, Julia. My name is Dr. Cooke, and this is our interpreter, Tomás. He’s going to tell your parents what we’re saying. Do you remember me from last night?”
I nod.
“How are you feeling?”
“I’m okay. I have a headache, but that’s it.” I wipe my eyes with my gown. “Can I get out of here now? Please?”
“No, not yet. Sorry. We’re going to have to keep you for a bit just to make sure you’re okay. Maybe we can let you out tomorrow morning.”
I feel a little disoriented by all the translating. My head keeps throbbing. Too many people are talking at once. I guess they didn’t trust me to interpret for my parents. I don’t blame them.
“I swear to God, I’m fine. I’m not going to do it again. I realize how dumb this was. I don’t even know why I did it.” Of course I know why I did it, but I don’t think that’s going to help my case.
Dr. Cooke smiles apologetically. “This is really serious, Julia. And we have to figure out a way to help you.”
“It’s not going to be like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, is it? Because I’ll bust out of here, in that case, just like Chief. I’m not joking. I will lift a drinking fountain or sink or whatever with my bare hands, and break a window and run off into a field, and no one will ever see me again. The end.” I rub my temples with my fingers. “Why does my head hurt so much? Did you give me a lobotomy?”
Tomás doesn’t know how to translate what I said, so he just looks at us perplexed.
Dr. Cooke smiles again. “You haven’t lost your sense of humor. That’s a good sign.”
“Look, I know what I did was crazy. I won’t do it again. I swear to God.”
Dr. Cooke turns to my parents. “We’re going to conduct some more evaluations to make sure she’s all right. And we’ll figure out a plan from there. We’ll see if we can release her tomorrow.”
Amá nods and says, “Thank you.” Apá exhales loudly and doesn’t say anything.
“The nurse will let you know when to come down to my office. Shouldn’t be more than an hour,” Dr. Cooke says to me as she and Tomás walk out the door.
—
The office is so full of plants that it’s as if I’m in a tiny jungle. It smells faintly of perfume, which is like a mix of fresh laundry, pear, and spring rain. I’m surprised by Dr. Cooke’s paintings, though; judging from her elegant style, I thought she’d have better taste in art. Some of them appear to have been created to soothe crazy people, especially the one of the giraffe drinking from a pond.
“How are you feeling?” She smiles, but not in a way that shows she feels sorry for me. It’s real and kind of gentle.
“I’m okay.”
“So, what brings you here? What’s going on?”
“I just got a little overwhelmed, that’s all.” I stare at a framed picture of a little girl on her desk. I wonder if it’s her daughter.
“How long have you been depressed?” Dr. Cooke crosses her legs. She’s wearing a tight red dress and black high-heeled boots that look like beautiful torture. Her hair is in a perfect bun, and her earrings are sparkly and elegant. I imagine she’s a rich lady who shops downtown, drinks a glass of wine after work, and gets manicures on the regular.
“Man…I don’t know. A pretty long time. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when, but it got much worse after Olga died. I know that for sure.”
“How long have you thought about hurting yourself?”
“Well, it’s not like I planned it or anything. I just kinda lost it last night.” I remember Apá pounding at my door and feel ashamed. “I didn’t really want to die.”
“Are you sure?” Dr. Cooke raises her right eyebrow.
I sigh. “Mostly, I think. Yeah.” I get a flashback of my blood on my old green sheets.
“Where do you think it’s coming from, that sense of desperation? What triggered it exactly? Did something happen?”
“I don’t know how to explain it. Yesterday it just all added up. I couldn’t take it anymore. I got home last night and was shaky and hungry and sad, and all I wanted was a stupid peanut butter and jelly sandwich, so I looked in the fridge, and the only things we had were a container full of beans and a half gallon of milk. I said to myself, ‘Man, fuck this shit.’ I know that sounds stupid, but it just really pissed me off, you know? Then I couldn’t stop crying.”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Like, why does everything hurt all the time? Even the dumbest things. Is that normal?”
“Sometimes little things are symbols or triggers for much bigger issues in our lives. Think about why that particular moment caused you so much distress.”
I sit there looking at the floor. I don’t know what to say. There’s a black stain on the corner of her rug that looks like a paw print. It’s so quiet I can’t stand it. She can probably hear my stomach growling.
“Take your time,” she finally says. “There is no rush. What’s important is to reflect in a way that makes sense to you.”
I nod and look out the window for a long time. The view is super-depressing—a snowy parking lot. The clouds have blotted out any trace of sunshine. A woman almost slips on a patch of ice.
I take a deep breath. “It’s, like, how can I explain? First, my sister dies, which has been a living hell. And…there’s just so much I want to do, but I can’t. The life I want seems impossible, and it just gets so…frustrating.”
“What is it that you want?”
I sigh. “A million things.”
“Tell me about them.” Dr. Cooke adjusts the hem of her red dress. I wonder if it’s exhausting to look so perfect.
I pause again to gather my thoughts. The question overwhelms me, and I’m not sure why.
“I want to be a writer,” I finally say. “I want to be independent. I want to have my own life. I want to hang out with my friends without being interrogated. I want privacy. I just want to breathe, you know?”
Dr. Cooke nods. “I understand. So how are you going to make that happen? What exactly is stopping you?” She asks in a way that’s not judgmental or anything but really trying to understand. Hardly anyone talks to me like this.
“I want to move away, go to college. I don’t want to live in Chicago. I don’t feel like I can grow here. My parents want me to be a person I don’t want to be. I love my mom, but she drives me crazy. I understand that she’s upset about my sister—we all are—but I feel so suffocated. I’m nothing like Olga, and I never will be. There’s nothing I can do to change that.” I stare at the ceiling, wondering what life will be like when I go back home.
“Do you think you’d ever hurt yourself again?”
“No. Never,” I say, which is not exactly true. How could I ever be sure? But I tell her what she wants to hear. “Can we talk about my mother again? Can we go back to that?”
Dr. Cooke nods. “Go ahead.”
“It’s like she never trusts me. For example, she is always, always opening the door without asking or knocking, and when I tell her I need privacy, she laughs. I mean, why would you laugh at that? And that’s just one example. I can go on forever.”
“What about your dad? What’s he like?”
I sigh. “My dad…he’s just there.”
“What do you mean?” Dr. Cooke looks confused.
“I mean, he’s physically there, but he never says much. He hardly even talks to me. It’s as if I don’t exist. Or sometimes I think he wishes he didn’t exist. It’s weird, though. It wasn’t always that bad. He used to carry me and tell me stories about Mexico when I was a kid. He was always kind of distant, but when I was about twelve or thirteen, he really started ignoring me.” I’m surprised at how much it bothers me to say it out loud.
“What’s significant about that particular time in your life?”
I shrug. “No idea.”
Dr. Cooke writes something in her notebook. “Do you think something happened to make him this way?”
“I don’t know. He never talks about anything.”
“Tell me what his life is like.”
“He works at a candy factory all day, then comes home, watches TV, and eventually goes to sleep. Seems pretty sad to me.”
“Why is that?” Dr. Cooke uncrosses her legs and leans toward me again. She looks very serious.
“Because there should be more to life than that. Life is passing him by, and he doesn’t even know it. Or doesn’t care. I don’t know which one is worse.” I blink back tears.
“And he and your mother immigrated here, correct? What country did they come from? When was that?”
“Mexico. In 1991. My sister was born later that year.”
“Have you ever thought about how it might feel for him to leave his family and come to live in the United States? I imagine that could have been traumatic for him. Well, for both of them.”
“I guess I never really thought about it before.” I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand. The tears are relentless now. “This is embarrassing.”
“The crying?”
I nod.
“You’re entitled to your emotions. There shouldn’t be any shame in that.” Dr. Cooke hands me a box of tissues. “This is the place to let it all out.”
“It just makes me feel stupid,” I say. “And weak.”
She shakes her head. “But you’re neither one of those things.”
—
Dr. Cooke says I can leave tomorrow if my parents agree to a short outpatient program for fucked-up kids like me. I’ll have to miss a week of school because I’ll be there from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., but I’ll be able to make up part of the work while I’m in there. And it’s certainly better than being locked up in a hospital. Because of my insurance through the state, the cost will be minimal, she says. According to her, it’s set up for poor people like me. Actually, she didn’t use the word poor, she said low-income, but it’s the same thing. I guess it just sounds more polite.
She also wants to see me every week for therapy, and says I need to take medication to balance out my brain. It turns out I suffer from severe depression and anxiety, which have to be treated right away, or else I can end up here again. I’ve had it for a long time, but it obviously got much worse after Olga died. Something in my head isn’t wired right. I’m not surprised—I always knew something was wrong; I just didn’t know what it was, that it had an official name.
I stare out the window of my room, watching the city lights when the nurse taps me on the shoulder. It’s time for my pills. I have to take them in front of her and then open my mouth wide so she can see that I really swallowed them. Dr. Cooke says that it will take several weeks to feel the full effect. My emotions are all over the place right now. One minute I feel like eating a torta; the next minute I want to cry until my eyes dry up.
Suddenly, right when I’m about to turn away from the window to go to sleep, I see Lorena and Juanga standing on the corner across the street. At first I can’t believe it’s them, but when I get a better look, I recognize Lorena’s crazy hair and skinny legs. They start waving and yelling like crazy, but I can’t hear what they’re saying. I have no idea how they found out where I was. Lorena is wearing a puffy pink coat and is breathing into her hands. Juanga does a ridiculous dance that involves shaking his butt and flapping his arms like a chicken.
I imitate the dance as best as I can, which makes them both laugh. I wave and smile. This goes on for a few minutes until the cold ushers them away.
—
Our apartment is tense and silent, as if everything is holding its breath. Sometimes I’m convinced I hear the roaches scurrying. I think my parents are terrified of me. Apá is his usual mute self, and Amá looks at me as if she can’t figure out how I once resided inside her uterus. I feel guilty for making them feel this way. I didn’t mean to hurt them.
That night, after talking to Lorena on the phone for nearly two hours, I unlock Olga’s door and crawl into her bed. It’s one of the only things that can make me feel better. Not even food comforts me right now, which is kind of alarming. And I can hardly read or write because nothing will stay inside my brain.
I miss Connor, but I’m afraid to call him. I dialed his number a few times but hung up before it rang. It’s not like I can see him right now anyw
ay, which was the problem in the first place. I would never in a million years invite him over to our apartment (for so many reasons), and I know there’s no way for me to get to Evanston without freaking my parents out. But maybe I should risk it to get Olga’s laptop to him. What if he’s my only hope for getting it unlocked? Who am I kidding, though? My parents would likely call the police if I left the house. And what would I say to Connor? If I told him about what happened, he’d get all weirded out. Even if I tried to keep it a secret, I would probably blurt it out because I can’t seem to keep anything to myself. I don’t want him to think I’m crazy, because that would definitely scare him away, and I wouldn’t even blame him.
For a second, I think I can still smell Olga in the sheets, but it’s probably all in my head.
EIGHTEEN
During movement therapy, Ashley, the young therapist with the asexual mom haircut, tells us to say what we feel and bounce the foam ball however we want. “The ball is an expression of our feelings,” she says.
I go first. “I feel snacky.” I drop the ball softly.
“Thank you, Julia, but that’s not really a feeling,” Ashley says, as gently as she can.
“It is to me. I’m overcome with a desire for snacks.”
“Okay, snacky it is, then.”
Now it’s Erin’s turn. Erin was molested by her dad and speaks very slowly. Everything she says seems like a drawn-out question.
“How do you feel today, Erin?” Ashley asks, in her best therapist voice. Sometimes she sounds as if she’s talking to a baby or puppy that’s about to die. Erin looks around the room and then looks at the ball for what feels like an eternity.
I want to scream at her to hurry up, but I just look out the window instead.
“I feel…confused?” she finally says, and flings the ball toward the windows.
I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter Page 16
