“That’s your goal. We need to take a few weeks off, because of the holiday, and I want you to come back here having done one of two things. You need to resolve things with Jack – or you need to reach out to Dave. Can you do that?”
“Yeah,” I whisper.
“Are you sure?”
I shrug. “Not at all.”
She reaches over and pats my hand. “You’re making progress. That’s the first time you have been totally honest with me without my pushing.”
“Thank you,” I say, but it’s all I can say. I need to get out of here. I need to go home and sleep and forget what it feels like to be alive. I need to remember what was and stop hoping for something that can never be. For a moment there, I almost sensed what it would be like to have a relationship – a normal one, with a guy who loved me and was happy to be with me. And then I remembered who I am again. I don’t say a word to Melinda, though, because she’s right. I am just not sure I’m really ready to face it. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe tomorrow I can change.
24
Saying goodbye wasn’t new to me, so I don’t know why it felt so different this time. Before he left, Dave drove me to the beach so we could talk. I didn’t go to the beach much. Even living close to the ocean wasn’t enough to motivate me to put on a bathing suit and go out in public. I didn’t like the way people looked at me, and I didn’t like the way it made Dave uncomfortable. Jack had never liked the beach anyway. Jack didn’t like anything that involved people or socializing and so it was easy. With Dave, he struggled to get me to open me up, to get me to look at things a little differently. As always, I clung to Jack and refused to change the way I saw the world.
However, since Dave was leaving in a few days, I agreed to go this time. We went to a quiet part of the shore that was owned by the government. Because of that, there were few people around. If you couldn’t blare music or eat hot dogs or act like an asshole, apparently the beach held little interest. I liked it here, though, because the salty air stuck to my body but it felt both overwhelming and refreshing. I loved that even the air didn’t know what it was trying to do. If the air didn’t have answers, why should I feel bad if I didn’t?
Dave had packed a picnic, because he always did these things that made no sense. Since we had started dating over a year earlier, he had stopped drinking almost entirely, even when I was too drunk to stand up. He was kind and genuine and he put up with all of my bullshit. The only time I had even seen him upset was after Prom, and it wasn’t anger. It was pain. I felt uncomfortable with him, because pain was something I didn’t know how to handle, and I definitely couldn’t handle kindness. Jack was sweet, but in the broken way of the two of us. Dave was just… good… and good was terrifying.
“I wasn’t sure if you’d be hungry,” he said and he unwrapped several sandwiches.
“Thanks,” I said and took a peanut butter and jelly one. I still hate peanut butter and jelly because it’s a reminder of that day, and that day bothers me more than I’ve ever told anyone.
“Alana, I love you.”
“I know,” I said. “I love you, too.”
He smiled, but it wasn’t the same smile he usually wore. There was something darker behind it. “You don’t. That’s okay. I knew from the start that you wouldn’t ever love me, not the way I love you. But I just couldn’t stop the way I felt. I still feel bad that I didn’t stop things when they got physical, because I shouldn’t have let you do that with me, not when you didn’t mean it.”
“I meant it,” I argued.
“Tell me the truth. Please. I’m leaving and I don’t know if I will come back here. Just tell me the truth.”
“What truth?” I dropped the sandwich and it fell into the sand, but I had lost my appetite anyway.
“Tell me you don’t see only Jack when I touch you. Tell me that you could love me and be happy.”
“I don’t-” But I didn’t finish the sentence, because he was right, and I realized how much he’d ignored, all because he really did love me.
He smiled and shrugged. “Anyway, I didn’t come here for that. I just wanted to enjoy this, to enjoy being with you this last time.”
“Last?”
“I don’t think it makes sense for us to pretend this is something more than it is, do you? I don’t want you to feel obligated to wait for me, when you are only being nice in the first place. I know I love you, but I’ve always let myself be happy that you even talked to me. I would rather leave with good memories than worry about what could happen.”
“You’ll be back in six months,” I reminded him.
“Sure, but only for a few days, and then who knows? Most likely I’m getting sent to Afghanistan. I can’t be anything for you. I couldn’t when I was here. Let’s just leave it like this, when we were young and hopeful.”
I didn’t say anything. He might have been hopeful, but neither of us believed that I was. Still, hearing it, recognizing it, if there had been any hope, it died when he told me that there was nothing worth fighting for with us.
25
I decide to take Melinda’s advice, and I call Dave’s mom. Despite the trouble he had at home, he was always close with his mom. She sounds surprised to hear from me and it’s awkward trying to explain. He left two years ago. Jack and I were Dave’s only real friends, and we should have called. We should have checked in, and I feel it in his mom’s tone while we talk. Still, she doesn’t say anything bad, and she gives me a way to communicate with him. It’s an email address and I feel strange trying to put all of my thoughts into an impersonal message. At the end, I simply send a message saying I would love to reconnect and leave it at that.
I don’t know what time it is in Afghanistan, but Dave replies quickly, even if he lived in town still. We switch to texting, since it’s kind of like talking, and he says he misses me. Misses Jack. He also says he’s coming home, and he wants to see us. I have to tell Jack, but I say okay without checking. It’s a giant step for me – a choice that I make without checking with Jack first. I tell Dave that I’m looking forward to it, and I agree to meet him at the bus station when he comes home.
My room feels stifling as the past and future converge, and the road ahead feels so blurry and unclear now. It’s got to be the right move, but lately, I feel like I’m reliving high school, and I wonder if I will ever move forward. I can almost hear Melinda’s voice in my head: “You’re taking the steps to move forward.” I shrug off the voice and decide to eat something. Food is always a constant, even when the world is a mess.
After I eat, I go to see Jack. It’s strange, this moment we have where it’s clear we aren’t going to be physical, yet it’s evident that the desire is still there on both of our parts. I do want him, but now, I feel like I made the move to leave this part of us behind. I went years in high school trying to balance Dave and Jack, but this step with Dave… well, it’s something that needs to be taken fully. I see in Jack the same doubt; his body reacts to me out of instinct, but even without Lily, he wants to be someone else. He doesn’t want to continue repeating the same cycle.
He’s happy about seeing Dave, but still convinced it’s over with Lily. It’s weird to be the confident one, the hopeful one, but I try. At least for him. Later, in my car, I have the worst panic attack I’ve had since I started seeing Melinda. I pick up my phone to call her, to see if she can help, but I drop it under my seat and going for it seems impossible. I take a handful of pills, although I know it’s too much, and try to catch my breath. It’s not fair. I was trying. I did what I was supposed to. I did something normal, and I’m being punished again. Every time I try to make my life something better, every time I strive to be more, this happens.
Of course, the thoughts run through my head and make it harder to breathe. Somehow, though, I manage to drive home once the attack passes. I don’t call Melinda. I don’t tell my mom or Jack or anyone. I just go into my room and cry, because it’s terrifying to feel so trapped in my own head.
****
> I don’t have normal holidays, which I’ve come to accept. Mom’s new boyfriend, Owen, however, doesn’t understand this, and rather than spending my Thanksgiving drunk with Jack, as per tradition, we have a whole family “thing.” I don’t even know what to call it, because it’s so alien, but we have it, and I go to Jack’s after, but we don’t drink. Everything is different now, and for a girl who has never seen things change, it’s daunting.
Owen is sitting at the kitchen table when I get home. It’s really late, and I instantly bristle at the thought of being alone with him while my mother is asleep. He hasn’t tried anything yet, hasn’t looked at me that way, but seeing him waiting up for me in the kitchen, with only the dim overhead light flickering, I want to vomit. I realize as I watch him warily, neither of us speaking, that if he makes a move on me, the night will end with one of us dead. I don’t know who it will be, but he won’t touch me, and if he wants me as bad as the others have, I may have to die stopping him.
“What are you doing here?” I ask, and I hear the chill in my voice before the words are even out.
“Can we talk, Alana?” he says and he gestures to the chair across from him.
I don’t sit, but I nod slightly. Talk I can do. Assuming talk doesn’t turn into more.
“You don’t like me,” Owen says, and it’s a subtle comment yet full of so much hurt. I look at him and I see in his face something that I’ve never really understood – rejection. I don’t get rejected because I never try, and I don’t reject because men take anyway. But Owen is looking at me like I’ve rejected him somehow, and my mind tries to grasp what’s happening.
“I don’t know you,” I point out.
He sighs. “Your mom hasn’t told me much, but I can see it, you know. I see the way you look at me, how you shrink away when I come near you. I get it, Alana. There are some pretty awful people in the world. I can’t do anything but promise I’m not one of them.”
“You’d be the first,” I say and I sit. It’s reluctant, but there’s hurt in his eyes and I don’t see that very often. It’s real hurt, too. Not the games people play to manipulate me with their pain, only to inflict greater pain on me when they’re done.
“I know,” he says and he must see my surprise, because he continues. “I don’t know what happened. I don’t think it would be right for your mom to tell me, but like I said, I see how you look at me. I know suffering and I know pain.”
“Do you? People always say they know pain, but then, they seem to inflict more. I can’t understand how you could inflict it if you know it.”
He nods. “I’ve been through my own share of things that I would rather not remember. I don’t have a solution to the fact that these kinds of people exist. I can’t tell you anything that will make it different and I won’t minimize what’s been done to you by pretending it will change or be okay. What I will do is tell you that people survive.”
“Jack and I… neither of us knows how to survive,” I say, surprised that I’m telling him this.
“The thing is, Alana, you and Jack, you are survivors. But you are also the chains that hold each other back. I don’t know your situation or your whole story, only what I’ve observed. But in that little bit of observation, I realized that, as much as the two of you need each other, you also need to let go a little, too.”
The echo of what’s been running through my head, the conversations with Melinda, even the way that things are changing with Jack, it all comes through in Owen’s voice. I want to hate him, because how dare he tell me about Jack? How dare he come in here and act like he cares about me, when I know what men do and what they think? But when I look across the table at him, anger beginning to sparkle on my tongue, I don’t want to say those things to this man. Under the kitchen light, he’s not a monster. He’s just a sad, somewhat lonely man showing me kindness, without any demand for reciprocity. And that recognition leads me to do something I haven’t done in a long time, except when I am paying someone to listen. I start to tell Owen my story.
26
The machines were too loud in the tiny hospital room and I hated them, even though I knew they were the reason Jack was still with us. I hated the room and the doctors and the nurses. I hated the way his grandmother patted my arm as she left me alone with him. I hated that the only view from the window was of the alley in between wings, and that Jack would wake up to dumpsters and darkness. I didn’t want him to realize he’d failed and then have to look at the way the world was. So while he slept and the machines breathed for him, I drew. I drew a picture of the common, of the place where we had had our first kiss. I drew sunlight and green grass and I could feel the world becoming warmer and lighter as I drew. I felt like a child, coloring a picture in a hospital room, but when I taped it to the window to hide reality, I decided that, for once, I preferred remembering the way things were before I knew what it meant to grow up.
He didn’t wake up that first visit or the second. But when I visited on the third day, he was awake when I got to the hospital. They were saying things to his grandmother about short-term hospitalization as I walked down the hall toward the room; I knew how angry he would be. He needed school, because it was the only thing getting him out of here, but at the moment, all I wanted was to see him alive. I would take his anger if it meant that he was with me.
“This is bullshit.” Those were the first words he said to me after he tried to hang himself in his closet. The picture was gone from the window, but I didn’t know who had taken it down. I told myself that he’d still seen it, but I knew that, probably, someone had cleaned the room and removed it. They did things like that, as if the minutiae was meaningless.
“What is?” I asked. I sat down, because he was mad and I was tired and I felt bad that nothing was different. He’d almost died, but he didn’t understand that my entire life was reforming around me while he complained about something. I didn’t know if he was angry at being in the hospital, or if he was angry that he was still alive. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
“They want to lock me up, make me take meds, talk to people. They have all these names for it, big words they read in a book, like those words fucking define me.”
“You almost died,” I said. It felt like it needed a mention.
“Who gives a fuck? I wish I had.”
Looking back, those four words had more impact on me than probably most of the other shit I had been through. Because even when I had gone through it, even while there was nothing in my life except fear and pain, I couldn’t think about giving up. I didn’t think I was strong and I certainly wasn’t brave. It wasn’t that I thought suicide was stupid or weak or selfish; it was that it had never been an option. And I hated him a little because it was for him. It may have been the fact that I didn’t want to be alone, but I think it had more to do with the fact that I was jealous that he had enough control over himself and his life to make options. Meanwhile, my life was just choices other people made for me. I didn’t even have the power to die.
“I’m glad you didn’t,” I told him.
He paused, suddenly noticing I was there. I mean, he had known I was there, but I could have been anyone. I think it was the first time he processed that it was me, that I was with him, that I was happy that he was okay. He offered me a weak smile, but it was fake and we both knew it. Then he leaned over to the table on the other side of his bed and held up my picture.
“Thank you for this,” he said.
“I’m sorry they took it down.”
Jack laughed then. His vocal cords were damaged and weak from the rope and the laugh sounded broken, but it was a beautiful sound to me. “These people are fucking assholes.”
I nodded. “Aren’t they all?”
“You got that right. They’re all nothing but fucking assholes.”
Maybe in a perfect world, the afternoon would have been meaningful and transformative, but it wasn’t. Jack was forced to go away for a while, and he took classes at the program where they sent him. That
afternoon, we didn’t talk about anything important. He didn’t explain why he had tried and he never said another word about failing. I didn’t mention Dave, even though he was my boyfriend and Jack and I were not even close anymore. Instead, we just pretended that we were sitting in his house and it was any day over the last few years. I waited to cry until I was outside, in the car, and far away from Jack.
27
Between Owen and Melinda, my life lately is a big old talkfest. But it’s nice to have someone listen. Jack’s been struggling so much and I know he’s still longing for Lily. We talk, but I have been trying to pull away, to prepare myself to see Dave again after all this time, to accept what has changed and what I am becoming.
I don’t see much of Jack until his show and I’m running late. I have to tell him about school, about work, about everything, but I haven’t yet. I also need to tell him about therapy, which is where I am before the concert and the reason I’m late. Melinda and I had a long session about my feelings about Owen. Growing up, I always wanted a dad. Not a father. Everyone has one of those – someone who impregnates the woman who births him or her. But a dad. All the kids at school had dads. All the kids on TV and in movies or in books did. Well, maybe not all, but the concept was alien to me nonetheless. And the hardest part was that my father, before he touched me that first night, had been a great dad. He used to take me ice skating and he taught me how to play poker and he read to me before bed. When I was a little girl, he was my hero. And then, I grew up, and he ruined me.
It feels a little bit like a cosmic joke or something to get a second chance at a dad, and it’s also terrifying. But Owen cares for my mom. He is kind and genuine and, despite all of my experiences telling me not to trust him, I really do. I don’t know why. There is something in the way that he talks, in the way that he carries himself, that tells me that he harbors secrets not much different from mine or Jack’s. But I am also scared of feeling anything for him, because even if he doesn’t want to hurt me, there is nothing saying he’ll be around for long. I think that’s why I keep most of my storytelling to therapy; they can’t abandon me unless the insurance company says they have to.
Blue Rose (A Flowering Novel) Page 10
