That’s all people are, she thought as she looked at the windows above. We’re just frames gazing at frames.
* * *
“Hello, darling,” George said, his shoes crunching on the gravel. He crouched next to her and wrote his name in the loose rocks while she cried until she was dry-heaving. Every sob shook her whole body.
“Are you done yet?” He looked up at her.
Sadie couldn’t speak. She was still as stone, like a miracle statue doomed to weep blood as evidence of a higher power. And all the people would come to see her cry and say, “It’s proof of God,” but no one would ever ask how it felt to cry for eternity.
George reached up and wrapped his fingers around her clenched fist. His hands were so much larger than hers.
“You know I’d bring you a star if you’d let me. But we have to get out of the driveway,” George said softly. He stood and put his arm around her. They walked into the backyard to the old bench swing. The waterproof pads were wet and slick, and when she sat down the whole contraption screamed.
“What’s wrong?” George asked, as though he didn’t know.
“I’m all alone,” Sadie choked out. George sat in the grass with a weary thump. Sadie lay sideways on the swing, hypnotized by his eyes. He pushed the swing, drawing her closer and farther away, to and from him.
“Darling. Don’t cry,” George said. “Come on, Sadie. Where’s somewhere you’ve always wanted to go?”
He stopped the swing and put his hand over her eyes.
“We can go anywhere. We can do anything. Just you and me. Let’s go.”
She kept her eyes closed, and the whole world disappeared. The whole world, except for George and the constellations above.
I’m not awake. Not really. I’m somewhere else. But I can feel myself being drawn back. Down the hall, I hear them calling: Eleanor. As people pass by my open door, I hear her name standing out from the muffled static.
I open my eyes, and for the first time in a few days, I feel like I’m seeing through them. It’s strange to be back.
It’s happened before. The world passes over me like I’m underwater, looking up from the bottom of the ocean.
I want to see Eleanor so badly that I rise to the surface again. I feel George’s fingers slipping out of mine, and I promise I will return. I leave that safe half-state of dreams, back into the ache of existence.
I wheel myself down to Eleanor’s room before anyone thinks to interrogate me about my return to wakefulness. She’s sitting up in bed, but right away I can see that something isn’t right.
She’s tied up in a hospital gown, her shark costume nowhere in sight. Her hair is falling out. When she looks at me, she turns her head slowly, pivoting with an almost audible ache.
“Eleanor?” I ask, but she doesn’t look up.
“Eleanor, it’s Sadie,” I try again. “Remember me?”
“No, I don’t remember you. I’m sorry.” She speaks so quietly I almost don’t hear her.
She lies down facing me, watching me with disinterest like a screen saver.
“What happened to you?” I ask. “Where did they take you?”
“ECT,” she says.
“What?”
“Electro…something.”
“Like…shock therapy?” I shriek. Is she telling me the truth? It would be like her to lie. She looks bemused at my horror, and for a moment I see her rise from wherever she’s hiding in her mind.
“I know you,” Eleanor says. “I do sort of remember you. How long have you been here?”
“Almost two weeks,” I tell her.
“It’s usually the recent things that vanish, so that explains it. ECT sounds worse than it is, so don’t freak out if that’s what you’re here for.”
“It’s not.”
“It’s not usually what I do either. But nothing else works. It can help.”
I feel like I’m choking.
“You’re not Eleanor,” I say.
“Of course I am. Look at the door. Mary Eleanor Smith.”
“No, you told me they’d change you.” Tears well up in my eyes.
She leans toward me, teeth bared. “I am me. This is who I really am. That other person…she’s crazy. She’s ruining my life. I hate her. The girl you know? That Eleanor? I hate her.”
“But you…are her,” I say.
“Sometimes it feels like I’m two people. I’m me. And then I’m the version of me I hate, who does these things that I hate. It hurts so much to remember what I do and not understand how it’s possible that someone could behave that way. How is it possible to feel so out of control? I have to believe that I am someone else when I get that way. And I’m so happy to kill her, you know? I want her to die.”
She looks at her arms mournfully.
“Maybe that’s how I keep ending up this way,” she says. “If I have to be both, I’d rather be neither.”
“What are you saying?” I ask. Her eyes fill with tears.
“If you can get well,” she says, her voice breaking. “If you can get well and get out of here, do it. Listen to this version of me.”
She takes a deep and crackling breath, wiping her eyes.
“You told me he hurts you,” she says. “I remember now. Your boyfriend hurts you.”
“No, that wasn’t it. George doesn’t hurt me. He can’t,” I say, racing to cut off the spiral of her thoughts. “He loves me, remember?”
“Oh. I remember,” she says, leaning back into her pillow. She seems relieved. Then that strange look comes over her eyes, like a glimmer of the old Eleanor.
“I met a boy named George here once,” Eleanor says.
“What did he say?” I whisper.
“He was so scared. He said all of this isn’t real. He said they’ve got it backward…that they’re killing him.”
She closes her eyes. “He must have been crazy. I don’t even know if he was real.”
“What is real, anyway?” I say under my breath. She glares at me.
“He isn’t real, your George. Is he?” she says.
“No,” I reply. She sits up and looks at me very seriously.
“Then you need to get rid of him. You have to leave him behind.” She says it with the cruel detachment of some adult who has told her the same thing.
“Eleanor, what are you saying?”
“I’m saying exactly what you need to hear. Listen, he’s not your friend. I know exactly what he is: he’s a sickness. He’s not real. You need to leave him.”
“How can you say that? How could I ever leave him?” I squeak, my throat closing with tears. “I thought you understood.”
“I do understand.”
“No you don’t. Eleanor did. So what, he’s not real. I know that. I’ve always known that. But what is so great about real? So what, I have George. So I’d rather be with George. Why wouldn’t I want that when my life is the endless ticking of a clock of suck that will never go anywhere and nothing will ever get better? Why would I want to live in this world when I can be with him?
“We have fallen in love a hundred million times. He is my best friend. He has died in my arms, and I have died in his. And he will never leave. So how could I ever leave him? He’s not my soul mate. He’s me.”
She just looks at me with pity, and the pity makes me hate her.
I want to hurt her.
I want to do something cruel.
“I know you understand,” I say. I take out her journal and hold it out to her. I can see her putting the pieces together, her face growing darker.
“I found it in my room.”
“It’s not mine,” she says. I put it on the bed next to her. She picks it up and throws it across the room, where it lands open a few feet away from the trash.
“Really? Because I’m sure t
he Eleanor I met didn’t write it. This sounds like another version of her. Someone afraid to dream.”
“I said it’s not mine!” she shouts. “What do you know, anyway? What do you know about fear? Do you know what it’s like to be afraid of yourself? To not even be able to trust yourself?”
The question shoots right through me. I feel horrible. I feel mean. Of course I know.
“I’ll go,” I say, wheeling myself away as fast as I can. I wheel myself back out into the hall. I wish I could change what I’ve done. But I can’t. And now I’ll have to live remembering it.
I’m so sorry. I hate myself. Why do I hurt people? Why can’t I fix anything?
But she broke my heart. She hurt me first. She’s been fixed. My Eleanor is gone.
* * *
When I get back into my room, Lucie is sitting on my bed.
“Sweet wheels,” she says, but then she notices I am sniffling. “Bad time? What’s wrong?”
“I just want to go home.”
“Oh, stop whining. You’re coming home in like two days,” she says, rummaging around in my drawers. She unearths some of my trinkets from Henry—a stuffed bison, a tiny plastic flamingo—and makes super-gross barfing noises. Normally that makes me laugh. But nothing seems funny.
“I don’t know if I’m ever coming home,” I say. That stops her.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“There’s nothing wrong with you.”
“No, something is. Something is seriously wrong with me. Sometimes I feel like I’m pretending to be crazy and if I just tried really hard to be normal…all of this would be over. But I can’t stop. Isn’t that what it means to be crazy?”
“I don’t know,” she says.
“Can you keep a secret?” I ask her.
“Yeah, of course.”
“I was in a car crash right before middle school.”
“I know. Everyone knows. You were on the news. I didn’t even live here then and people told me. You’re basically the girl who lived.”
I wince. I think about the opposite: the boy who died.
“But I think…maybe it broke something in me. Maybe I didn’t live.”
Lucie just looks at me and listens.
“I feel like something is wrong, like I’m not supposed to be alive. I can’t explain it. It’s like the person in me who was special died in the car crash, and I’m the leftover shell.”
“What do you mean by special?”
“I don’t know,” I admit. “I think maybe I just mean alive. I don’t feel anything unless I’m reading a book. And I guess I thought if I was in a band or something, like you and Henry, or if I was on an adventure like a character in a story, I would feel alive.”
“You can be in the band if you want to,” Lucie says quickly. I shake my head.
“No, that’s not the point.” What would make her understand? I want so much to carry this feeling out of myself and show it to her. I try again: “Sometimes when I was younger, after the crash, I closed my eyes as tight as I could and wished that when I opened them I would be at Hogwarts. And every time, I thought if I only kept my eyes closed one second longer, maybe this would be the time that the wish would come true. I wasn’t crazy. I knew it wouldn’t happen. I don’t know why I did it, but it was my prayer for years. It’s what I asked God for every spare second I had.”
“Blasphemer!” Lucie shouts in mock outrage. This time I laugh.
“I don’t even know if it’s really the magic that I love so much. I mean, the magic is amazing, and Quidditch, and the whole world…but that’s not it. It’s something else. Something smaller. It’s that a wand can choose you, and a hat can sort you. It’s that you are all set up, on the inside, for everything you don’t know yet. If you die, you were supposed to die. You died for something. And if there’s a prophecy, it comes true. Bad people have bad names, and good people have friendly ones. And everything just…works. I don’t know. That doesn’t make sense.”
Lucie nods.
“I guess it’s that there’s somewhere you belong?” she says hesitantly. “Not like people accept you, but like you have a place, and everyone does. Somewhere you fit, that needs you. Is that what you mean?”
“Yeah. And that everything would be certain, even if you didn’t know it yet.”
“You want to know that there’s destiny.”
“Maybe I just want that because then…my choices don’t matter. I wouldn’t have to worry so much anymore.”
Lucie looks all around her, uncharacteristically silent. Uncomfortable. We sit like that for longer than I’ve ever heard her quiet before.
“You wanna know something embarrassing?” she asks at last.
“Always.”
“I was super-disappointed when I didn’t get my Hogwarts letter. Like, legit depressed.”
I laugh.
“But I feel like nerding out with you is kind of like going to Hogwarts. You know? You’re the only one who will read my fan faction.” It is awful. I still love it. “Maybe I don’t get exactly what you see in those books. But we kind of meet in the middle, right? We both love the same thing. So maybe that means that I can see it. I mean, if you start telling me what’s really going on.”
“I’m trying. I don’t know what to do,” I say.
“Maybe you should let your team help you,” she says. “Everyone runs their own race, but we are stronger when we run that race together.”
Now it’s my turn to make terrible gross noises.
“I don’t have a team here,” I tell her through the laughter.
“We’re all your team, stupid! That’s what having friends is. Everyone you know is Team Sadie,” Lucie says. “God, you are such an idiot.”
And it makes me smile: Lucie is my team. For a minute, it feels like that race that wasn’t a race, when we somehow made each other faster just by noticing each other. It feels like getting lost in the present instead of some other world. It is good to have a team, even though you are really alone. And I know she doesn’t understand my race. But then, neither do I.
Sadie counted up and down to eleven. She was eleven years old, and counting it gave her a kind of peace. She thought about her life for each of those numbers: how at zero she had known nothing, but at eleven she knew too much. At eleven she knew how to be afraid. Eleven was two straight lines standing tall: constant and unshakable and parallel and good. Just like her parents used to feel. Then she counted back down from eleven and felt all the knowledge and all the trouble fading away. Up and down, up and down in her head.
Her parents were “stable,” which was funny because she had only ever heard them being accused of being “unstable.” It was unstable to take road trips, to go on adventures, to do a radio show, to have fun. Sadie had liked unstable. Now she wanted nothing more than stability. Sadie sat in the emergency room watching them, fading in and out of the present. The heartbeat monitor kept the moments moving forward, but they were all outside of time. Her parents looked like one of the barely moving photographs in Harry Potter. She imagined them stranded in this moment for all eternity.
Sadie felt a hand on her shoulder, ruining the illusion of stillness. These moments were happening. Who knew what the next moment would bring? She looked up. When she looked back on this day years later, she could remember everything about the scenes that made up the story except the faces. Later, her mind injected George into all her memories, the most comforting face she could think of.
“Your grandparents are coming,” the man wearing George’s face said. “Would you like to stay here?”
Sadie nodded.
“Everything is going to be all right,” he said, and he walked away.
But nothing would be all right. Everything had changed.
Her grandparen
ts came and picked her up, and she was, according to them, miraculously unscathed.
“That must have been so scary,” they said.
“I don’t know,” Sadie replied. “I don’t remember a thing.”
“But that wasn’t true?” asked Dr. Roberts, and Sadie was sixteen and it was the present again and she wasn’t in the story, she was telling the story. She was back in the horrible confrontation of now, two crashes becoming one.
She’d said she was ready to talk about this.
She wasn’t. But she never would be. So she kept moving forward anyway.
“No,” she said quietly. “It wasn’t.”
She remembered the first crash, the long hours in the car upside down, which she’d been told had only been minutes. It didn’t matter. Time had come undone. She remembered how her parents had been in the front seat, bloody and unseeing, bent at unnatural angles into airbags. She remembered the sound of sirens, the smell of gasoline, the Beatles singing, strangely, to the beat of the seat belt warning sound.
A car and their truck had landed upside down side by side, smashed up next to each other. She remembered the other driver crying: “Please help me. I don’t want to die.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” Sadie whispered.
In her memories, the other driver too was played by George: George, who could never die, who would stand up and take a bow at the end of every episode.
But when she tried—when she really tried—she could remember the boy’s real face: his brown eyes, his hair so matted with blood she couldn’t tell what color it was. She could picture his mouth hanging open, screaming and dribbling blood outside her window. The dignified, dressed wounds of film heroes were nothing like this. The boy was soaked in a burnt black gore she could smell. This was no stage makeup. He was unraveling in the car beside her, right through the frame of the broken window, and whoever he had been, he was not going to be that person for long.
Who had he been? She would never know. But she was the only one who knew those moments. They only existed because she remembered.
The Museum of Us Page 17
