I never told anyone the details of my mom’s death, not Kara, not even Cassie or Wes. If I talked about it, I’d visualize it and live that day all over again. But I guess I might as well write it all down now because thanks to Christian, it’s been all I can think about for the past four months.
My mother killed herself the way most women attempt it, with pills, a cocktail of Prozac, Xanax, trazodone, and a bunch of similar drugs. She succeeded where most women fail ’cause she’d been planning it for years. She collected prescriptions, going to her shrink, saying she wasn’t feeling so happy, was anxious, couldn’t sleep, could she try this pill she’d heard about? She’d go back a couple months later, saying nope, that’s not working, and her doctor would suggest something else. After she died we discovered that she’d squirreled away the leftover pills until she had a cornucopia of them. A pharmacopoeia.
And one night in October, she went to the bathroom and swallowed nearly a hundred of them. Then she crawled into bed beside my father like nothing was amiss. She even set her alarm, radio tuned to NPR, set to go off at 6:30 a.m.—fifteen minutes before my dad got up and thirty minutes before I did, so she could have coffee ready for him and breakfast for me. When it sounded, she always turned that alarm off lickety-split, so Dad didn’t wake, but not that morning.
That morning I went into the kitchen and no one was there, so I ran to my parents’ bedroom with an awful, sick, I’m-too-late feeling. I started crying before I even opened the door because I heard both of their clocks blaring, the steady fire-drill buzz of Dad’s overpowering the soothing radio voices of Mom’s. I found Dad hugging Mom to his chest. Her cold, dead body faced away from his ’cause she’d turned her back on him as she settled down to die. Turned her back on both of us.
That morning when Grandma came over, it was the first time I’d seen her without makeup. She always said it was the duty of a well-mannered woman to assure that no one ever saw her without her face. My grandmother had style, and not blue-haired old-lady style either. She covered the gray with her natural honey blond color and kept her short hair fashionably cut. She didn’t wear a ton of makeup, but when she showed up without the usual mascara and pink hue to her cheeks, it was disconcerting. And even worse, when she tried to convince Dad to unclamp his arms from my dead mother and call the coroner, she seemed to have forgotten all of her wisdoms. She didn’t have consoling words for either of us. Like everyone else, “I’m sorry” was all she could say.
Dad blamed himself. “She never was happy in Florida and I kept her here,” he kept repeating in the days after she died. My parents met while attending school in Chicago, my mother’s hometown, but when they married, Dad asked Mom to move just north of Fort Lauderdale where his mother lived.
And yes, my mom missed her sister, and for some reason, Chicago winters, but the truth of the matter is that my mother was never happy, period. She had sad genes. Her mother had ’em, her sister has ’em, and I’ve got ’em, too. They’re buried deep down inside, waiting for the opportunity to strike. For my mother that time came when she had me. That was about a year after the move to Florida, which may be why my dad gets mixed up about when her sadness hit. Or else it’s just easier to blame Florida than me.
My mom sunk into a depression right after I was born. She medicated heavily, but was always distant. That’s why my grandmother was more of a mother to me than my mom. She taught me everything, how to use a slingshot, how to walk in high heels, and most important, how to draw. And when Dad decided we were moving to Chicago after my mother’s funeral, well, leaving Grandma was like facing death all over again.
Since my dad was convinced that my mother hated Florida, he’d had her buried at her family’s plot in Chicago. On the plane, he told me he’d put in for a transfer to his company’s Chicago office.
The day after we buried my mother, I dyed my hair red for the first time. Black would have been more mournful, but I needed red. You see, I decided then that if I was gonna kill myself, I’d do it the hard way, by slitting my veins open, and I’d do it in the bathtub ’cause I hear the warm water eases the pain a little bit. So I bought that red dye and when I got in the shower to rinse it out of my hair and it streamed down my body, I pretended it was blood. I even plugged the drain, let the tub fill, and sat with my eyes closed in the fake bloody water for an hour.
I returned to school the next day, where everyone gawked at me worse than they had the previous spring when Lori made me out to be the town whore. I hoped desperately that since something so awful had happened, Lori would finally let go of her grudge and be the friend I needed. But when I saw her in the hall, she turned to her new best friend and said, “Is Maya a freak or what? Her mom kills herself and she dyes her hair red? Instead of grieving, she’s looking for attention.”
I wasn’t, but now I’m tired of the attention the red hair gets me. Those gossipy freshman girls call me “that redhead.” My hair allows Christian to pick me out in a crowd. And I’ve lost so much in the past two years: Lori, Mom, Grandma, Kara, Liam. So today I dyed my hair black in an attempt to grieve properly for all of it. But it didn’t work. Without my fake blood in the shower, I need the real thing.
I thought that maybe writing all of this down would make me feel better. Grandma always told me, “Secrets lead to sickness.” She said they call it coming clean because secrets and lies make you dirty inside. I hoarded secrets like my mother hoarded pills and I ended up with just as deadly of a collection as she. I imagine that before she swallowed all those pills, she spread them out on the countertop and admired them. Maybe she meant to sweep them into the toilet and flush them away, but she didn’t.
And neither can I.
Please don’t feel guilty, Daddy, Grandma, Cass, Wes, Liam…especially not Kara. Don’t blame yourself. Blame him. We’ve both been lost at sea since Christian happened to us. Please, Kara, swim to shore.
When I looked up from the page, I realized I’d smeared the ink with my tears. I sobbed as I read, overcome with guilt, thinking if only I had opened the notebook as soon as she’d given it to me, I could have stopped her. But the last part made it clear that she’d decided to die when she’d written her ballad and her last sentence made me furious. How dare she ask me to keep swimming after she let herself drown?
I thrust the notebook into my backpack and started rifling through all of its compartments because I desperately needed a line. I hoped I’d forgotten a little baggie of heroin in there at some point.
I was so busy rummaging that I didn’t hear the click of skateboard wheels coming down the sidewalk. I jumped when a familiar voice taunted, “Kara…”
Christian sneered at me in that smug way that Maya had written about, his hazel eyes blistering with scorn. He stepped on the end of his skateboard, snapping it into his open palm, and sauntered across the grass in his self-assured, snotty punk gait. He’d chopped off his hair-or probably had one of his little groupies do it for him-and all the red was gone. It was bleached to an obnoxious yellow and poorly spiked.
“You think you’re so fuckin’ tough, don’t you?” I spat through my tears, whipping my backpack to the ground and getting to my feet, glaring at him. “So you’ve found me alone and you’re gonna intimidate me, huh? Like you did to Maya?”
I flung myself at Christian, fists raised, railing, “You don’t scare me. You’re the weakest person I’ve ever met!”
Laughing, he deflected me with one arm like I was a beach ball. I probably would have swung at him again anyway, but I really lost it when I noticed he was wearing Maya’s Ramones T-shirt. He’d always coveted it, so she’d lent it to him for a month as his Christmas present. Apparently he’d never returned it.
“You asshole!” I screamed. “You drove her to her death. You don’t deserve anything of hers!”
I charged again, punching the air, swiping for his neck with my fingernails, and bringing one knee up, aiming for the prize. I was prepared to bite, claw, and crush his balls to get Maya’s shirt.
&nbs
p; But he lifted his skateboard like a shield and shoved me with it before I connected with skin, bone, or testicles. I landed on the grass so hard it knocked the wind out of me. As I gasped for breath, he fell on me with his full weight. I kicked. I uselessly pounded on his back. I rocked side to side, trying to dislodge him.
Then, suddenly, I was free. Christian was rolling down the hill with another boy, a blur of brown hair and tattooed forearms that I recognized as Adrian’s. They stopped at the bottom with Adrian landing on top. Adrian’s butterfly knife glinted in the light and slashed across Christian’s cheek. Christian howled in pain, shoving Adrian with the same force he’d used on me, but Adrian only shifted to the side slightly. Christian struggled out from under him, holding his bloody cheek with both hands, and took off running.
I dropped my head and buried it in the grass. Within seconds, Adrian was at my side, pulling me into his lap, asking, “Did he hurt you? What can I do? Do you need to go to the hospital? Should I call someone?”
When I finally found my voice, I said, “Just get me high.”
Never one to object to that proposal, Adrian helped me to my feet and down the hill toward the stage at the front of the park, which we’d smoked pot beneath the previous summer. I crawled under first. He pushed my backpack in after me and followed, his own backpack strapped to his back like a turtle shell.
Adrian withdrew his cigar box from his bag and asked, “You have anything to cut lines on?” I got out our old notebook and he tapped brown powder onto the cover without even looking at it. He cut two lines and handed me a straw. “They’re both yours.”
I snorted one right after the other and sat up slowly, eyes closed, savoring the numbness as it spread through my sinus cavities into my brain. When my eyelids fluttered open, I expected to see Adrian bent over the notebook, chopping more lines, but instead he had his belt off, wrapped around his left arm.
He concocted a mixture of powder with bottled water and cooked it in a bent, black spoon over the flame of his lighter. I told myself it smelled like it looked, molasses, or like poppy flowers on fire, but actually it stunk. Still, I watched him suck it up into the needle and said, “I want some.”
“You’ve had some,” Adrian replied through the belt clenched in his teeth.
“I want that.”
“You can’t have it.” He flicked the vein that bulged above the first A in the “Away” tattoo.
“Christian wasn’t the worst thing that happened to me today. I buried my best friend this morning.” The words fell from my mouth tonelessly. I kept my eyes on that needle.
Adrian sighed, set the needle on the notebook next to the spoon, and got out another needle that was still in its plastic wrapper. He slid the belt off and handed it to me. “Find the arm with the bigger vein. Put this around it.”
Suddenly, I was scared like when I got to the front of the line for a roller coaster. But I was determined to ride the ride. I needed a rush that would obliterate my memory of everything that had happened that day. “Are you going to inject me?”
Adrian shot some of the liquid from the first needle back into the spoon and filled the new needle. One needle was a quarter full, the other three-fourths. He held on to the needle with the smaller amount. “Yes.”
I slid the belt around my right arm and tugged it tight. He tapped at the vein. I looked away until I felt the prick. I started to look back, but the shot hit me like a school bus, like snorting five lines at once. “Shit,” I said, and immediately nodded off.
Adrian shook me awake, indicating I should follow him out from under the stage. We crawled halfway up the hill and settled in the grass with our heads resting on our backpacks. We had brief conversations, drifting in and out.
“Where have you been?” I asked him at one point.
“All over. Last night I slept on Quentin’s grave.” Adrian played with his own curls. “I loved him. He was my best friend.”
I nodded off, woke up again, and squeezed Adrian’s hand. When he didn’t respond, I leaned over and kissed his dry lips. He blinked and I told him, “I missed you.”
“I missed you, too.” He seemed to drift off, but then he said, “Kara, I love you. I have for a year now.”
I’d been waiting so long for those words I should have sprung up and done cartwheels across the park. My heart should have done cartwheels, at least, but I was so numb, I couldn’t even feel my own joy. All I could do was snuggle into the crook of Adrian’s arm and say, “I love you, too.”
When I came to again, the park was drenched in sickly gray light. I blinked and took in my surroundings. Was it dawn? Shouldn’t dawn make things look new and bright? Why was everything monochromatic? The grass, Adrian’s hair, his skin-it all looked old and withered. Dying.
Shit.
Adrian’s face seemed as white as Quentin’s had been the night he died. I softly slapped Adrian’s pasty cheeks, chanting, “Wake up, wake up, wake up!”
He didn’t respond. My own shouts sounded far away, like hearing Cass scream at Quentin to wake up through the wall while I made the 911 call. No, I couldn’t handle this. I couldn’t lose Adrian and Maya in the same day.
Bile rose in my throat. I crawled a couple feet from Adrian to avoid puking on him. We met when he was puking. This is sort of poetic, I thought as I gagged. Wait. Heroin doesn’t make me throw up. I’ve taken too much. I’m overdosing.
Panic. My skin flashed hot, then went clammy.
“Adrian, help!” I cried out. “Help, I think I’m dying.”
He didn’t hear me. Probably already dead.
And my vision was blurring, like looking out the window of the “L” as it hurtled at light speed into a subway tunnel. I buried my face in the brittle grass, narrowly missing my own vomit.
Please, Kara, swim to shore.
I thought I heard Maya actually speak those words and when I glanced up, I thought I saw her, sitting cross-legged on top of the metal stage. If I could get there. If I could reach her.
Swim, crawl, whatever it takes, I told myself. Or you won’t meet Stacey’s baby. And Liam won’t have anyone to hold on to at your funeral.
But I only managed to drag myself about six feet before my limbs stopped working. I rolled onto my back, murmuring, “Liam, I’m sorry.”
I felt myself sinking, sinking, sinking.
My heart slowed.
The world went black.
I opened my eyes again because I thought I heard Cass’s voice. All the sounds were muffled, like listening to a TV three rooms away. The distant noise of passing cars was the first thing to become clear. People murmured but their words were indiscernible. I almost drifted off again, lulled by the traffic. Then Cass shouted at full volume.
“Fuck you, Kara, not you, too!”
I saw her tears. I saw the ambulance lights flashing. I saw my mother over Cass’s shoulder. I wanted to tell them that I was okay, but Adrian’s name slipped out.
Cass got pissed, started cursing him, and told me, “He left you here to die and saved his own ass. Just like with Quentin!”
“But I’m not dead. I’m not dead,” I repeated, chuckling to myself.
I couldn’t help laughing. My life was so fucked, I couldn’t even just OD and die. I was going to survive and have to deal with all the losses and all the messes I’d made.
Laughing was the only thing I could do. I closed my eyes again and laughed. I laughed and laughed despite my aching, dry throat. I laughed as my mother and Cass cried over me. I laughed as the paramedics took me away.
GUITAR SOLO
AUGUST 1995
[SUMMER BEFORE SENIOR YEAR]
“If I could start again a million miles away I would keep myself, I would find a way.”
—Nine Inch Nails
1.
“LIAM, PLEASE LET ME IN,” I begged, my damp cheek pressed to his bedroom door.
I’d been standing there for fifteen minutes. Dad emerged from my room, a crate of CDs in hand. He set it down and banged his fi
st against Liam’s door.
“Let your sister in,” Dad demanded in a booming voice. “We’re leaving in five minutes and I don’t want to waste time taking your door off the hinges.”
“Thanks, Daddy,” I whispered as he picked up the crate again and I heard Liam’s lock unlatch.
“Sure, Kara,” Dad replied. “I think this is the last of it, but double-check, okay?”
I nodded dutifully before opening Liam’s door. My brother smoked on the windowsill, staring out at Dad’s Corolla and the small U-Haul trailer attached to it containing my things.
“Thanks, Daddy,” Liam mimicked as I approached.
“Liam, please-”
He cut me off with a cold glare. “Whatever. Here’s your notebook. I assume that’s why you’re here.”
The “Stories of Suburbia” notebook thudded against my chest and I hugged it to me before it could drop to the messy floor. When Liam had arrived at the hospital after my overdose, I I grabbed his hand and yanked him close, quietly instructing, “The notebook in my backpack. Get it and make sure no one reads it.” Ensuring that no one violated my friends’ ballads mattered more to me than anything in the world.
“Thanks for holding on to this for me.” I stood a couple feet away from Liam, hesitant to get any closer.
“I shouldn’t have,” he snapped, “seeing as you’re betraying me and Mom by moving to Wisconsin with that asshole.”
“Mom wants me to go. She knows if I stay here I’ll screw up again. And Dad’s not an asshole. He’s been coming in for therapy sessions with me twice a week and he’s only going to be working part-time, so he can spend more time with me. If you come up Labor Day weekend, the three of us can go camping—”
“Shut up! You’re betraying me!” Liam jabbed his cigarette at his bedroom wall where, beside his Johnny Cash poster and some other graffiti about not having heroes, he’d written “BETRAYER” in big, black capital letters, an arrow pointing toward my room. “You said you were just going to play the game in rehab, remember?”
Ballads of Suburbia Page 29
