Diary of a Witness

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  “They didn’t mean for me to go down the stairs.” “Okay. Assuming you’re right, which I’m not sure of … did they bother to give you a reason why they tripped you?”

  “It had something to do with my telling Lisa Muller she’s a horrible person.”

  “You said that?”

  “Not in so many words. But she seemed to take my meaning.”

  “So in other words, you were sticking up for me.”

  “Maybe. I guess. Yeah.”

  “Don’t you know that only makes it worse?” He said it with this little teasing thing in his voice. Reminding me that I was the one who knew that. That I was the one who usually tried to tell it to him.

  It hit me that I wanted to talk about what he did. And that we weren’t talking about it. That we were talking all around it. And I wanted to change that, but I didn’t know how to start.

  So I just said, “Yeah. I don’t really know where my head was with that. I kind of lost it. My head, I mean. I kind of lost my head.”

  I expected him to make some little toss-off comment about that, but instead he looked straight into my eyes and said, “Why didn’t you just let me die?”

  Then he got up and started walking around my room. Touching everything. The model airplanes flying from the ceiling. The frame around the picture of me with the eighteen-inch rainbow trout. Even things that have no real feel to them, like my autographed poster of Jerry Rice, from way back when he was still a 49er. Just walking around touching everything, and not looking at me.

  “That is, like, the weirdest, dumbest question. I don’t even know what to say to a question like that. Why would I sit back and let my best friend die? Who would do a thing like that?”

  “What if I wanted to die?” he asked, still not looking at me. Still touching. My fishing books. The top of the TV.

  “You didn’t.” I said it with that same weird calm I remember from when I was losing my head and confronting Lisa Muller.

  He looked at me for a split second, then quick looked away again. “How can you say that? You don’t know that.”

  “Will. You messaged me and said goodbye. You practically told me what you were going to do before you did it.”

  “So I was supposed to die without even telling my best friend goodbye?”

  “If you’d really wanted to die, you’d have written me a note thanking me for being your friend. You’d have written me a goodbye note. And then I would’ve gotten your message, but only later, when it would be too late.” He didn’t answer, even though I waited. What could he say? I was right, and we both knew it. “Look, it’s not an insult. I mean, the part of you that wanted to be saved, that’s a good thing. That’s how we know you’re marginally sane.”

  “I don’t feel marginally sane,” he said.

  It got quiet after that.

  I thought about school. And how I couldn’t stay home forever.

  “I told my mom I was too sore to go to school,” I said. Somebody had to say something. Somebody had to change the subject. At least somewhat. “Not entirely true.”

  He came back and sat on the chair beside the bed. Leaned his chin on his fists. “I don’t want to go back there, Ernie. And I have no idea what to do about that.”

  It felt so good to hear him say that. It’s so nice not to be the only person on the planet who knows how a thing like that feels.

  “Yeah. I know. Believe me, I know. Me too. It’s gotten really bad. It’s gotten so much worse all of a sudden. It’s like you almost get used to the insults. The verbal stuff. The fish imitations. I mean, you don’t, but … you deal with it. You get to a point where you just deal with it. But then they turn up the heat on you. I mean, just since I last saw you there was the tripping incident and also they played a game where they tried to hook me like a fish and I ended up with the hook in the back of my scalp.”

  “Really? Where? Let me see.”

  I had to ask him to help me pick up my head, but then he parted my hair. Touched the little scab gently. Weirdly gentle. Didn’t say anything, though.

  “Don’t say anything in front of my mom, because she doesn’t know.” I just stopped talking for a minute and listened to the silence, echoing around. Will set my head back down, really carefully. “You know that thing they call PTSD?” I asked.

  He shook his head.

  “Post-traumatic stress disorder?”

  “Oh. Yeah.”

  “I feel like I’ve got something like current-traumatic stress disorder. Something that’s not post. Mid-traumatic stress disorder. MTSD. How does that sound?”

  “Like a city bus company or something. But I know what you mean.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But I’m going to do something. I’m going to do something about it. Something permanent. You don’t deserve this crap. You don’t deserve any of this. I’m going to find a way to put a stop to this once and for all.”

  I didn’t ask what he meant. I figured he was just upset. I wasn’t sure he meant anything by it, really. Maybe just blowing off steam. It’s nice to talk from a power place, like you can do something. Whether it’s true or not.

  Neither one of us could seem to think of anything more to say, so Will turned on the TV and found a really bad soap opera. Sometimes we like to goof on weird stuff like that. It’s just funny, even if it doesn’t mean to be.

  I wanted to ask him if he had to see a shrink now. I wanted to ask how this had changed things. What his life was going to be like from now on. But I didn’t know how to bring it up. And I didn’t know if he wanted me to. So I never did.

  Besides, it was nice, anyway, just sitting there watching TV.

  After about two hours of bad television Will said, “I miss fishing so much. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to bring myself to do it again. And I really hate that. Because I need it. It used to help me blow off steam somehow. We should go hunting.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “Oh, come on, Ernie. It’d be good for you. You’re too softhearted. You need to take command a little more. You’d like the way it makes you feel. And you eat meat, right? So what’s the difference? I mean, if you get it from the store or shoot it yourself. It’s still an animal.”

  “I know. I’m not saying it’s wrong.”

  “So you’ll go with me?”

  “What about trout fishing?” I was hoping to change the subject. “You could bring yourself to do that, right?”

  “I guess. I don’t know.”

  “I might get to go up to my uncle Max’s cabin for Christmas vacation. Maybe you could come.”

  “He won’t let me.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He won’t. I know he won’t. Nobody wants me around. Except you. Nobody likes trouble. And that’s me. I’m trouble.”

  “Sometimes Uncle Max’ll surprise you.”

  “If we get to go up there, will you try going hunting with me once?”

  I think maybe you should be willing to try everything at least once, so I said, “Yeah, I guess.”

  After that we really didn’t talk much again for the rest of the day. But it was nice, anyway, just sitting there with Will, watching TV. It was the best day in as long as I can remember. I wanted to do nothing but that for the rest of my life.

  December 8th

  I went back to school today. Will and I both did. I hated it, but I did it. Because I’d already taken the whole week off. Plus the weekend. If I hadn’t been better by this morning, my mom would’ve taken me to get my whole body x-rayed or something. And that’s not fair. We can’t really afford that, and I know I didn’t break anything. I just didn’t want to go back to school.

  Will and I had the best week home. It was incredible. It was like a vacation from my whole life. My mom. School. Bullies. Going out into the world and seeing how people look at me. Everything. Escape from everything. It was heaven.

  It was just me and Will, in my room, all week long.
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  We watched TV, played video games. We even played Monopoly once. And Scrabble three times. And he taught me how to play gin, and we played about a million games of that. One day he even brought some rented movies from the video store.

  We ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches until they were coming out of our ears, because it’s something I knew how to fix for us.

  Sometimes we talked, but nothing really earth-shattering.

  Once I asked him if he was seeing a shrink, and he said yes and no. He said he was supposed to be, but he was blowing off the appointments, and so far nobody was calling him on it. His mom didn’t care enough to check.

  On Wednesday I called Uncle Max to ask if Will could come up for Christmas vacation. If my mom even let me go, that is.

  “Yes,” he said. Just like that.

  “Wow,” I said. “That’s so cool of you. I thought maybe you’d mind because you said it should be just you and me.”

  He said, “Actually, what I meant is that you might need a vacation from your mom now and then. Is Will’s mom going to let him go on Christmas?”

  “I think she likes it better when he’s not around. I think he makes her think about Sam.”

  Sure enough, after I was done talking to Uncle Max, Will called his mom and asked her. He looked a little unhappy, so I thought she might be saying no. I couldn’t tell from his end of the conversation. All he really said was, “Uh-huh.”

  When he hung up the phone, he said, “She’s thrilled. She just could not be more thrilled. Now she gets to go back down to L.A. for the holidays and not walk past Sam’s old room anymore. She didn’t say that but I know that’s what she means. I’ve never heard her sound so happy.”

  “Great,” I said. But I knew that was a mixed blessing for Will. She could have at least sounded like she cared about him. She could have pretended to care. She didn’t even care that she didn’t care. It was sad.

  “Know what she said when I got home from the hospital?”

  I shook my head. Of course I didn’t know. But I knew it would be bad.

  “She said, ‘I needed those pills. Now what the hell am I supposed to do without my sleeping pills all month?’”

  “That’s it? That’s all she said?”

  “Oh. Well, no. That’s not the only thing. She screamed and cried for about an hour and said I was the only son she had left and I had no right to take that away from her. How dare I try to take her only remaining son? And then when she was all cried out, she got this weirdly stony look on her face and said that thing about the pills.”

  I think I just said something like, “Wow.”

  Anyway, back to today.

  Wait, no, I have to back up again. I’m sorry. I’m leaving important stuff out.

  Thursday I told Will that I’d have to go back to school Monday morning. Otherwise my mom would start to freak.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll go with you, so somebody has your back. You won’t have to worry. I’ll be covering your back.”

  “How?”

  “Leave that up to me.”

  The next day he came over with this canister of pepper spray he’d stolen from his mother’s purse.

  I said, “Will, if we ever used that on them, it’d be all over. As soon as they could see again, they’d kill us.”

  “Me,” he said. “They’ll have to kill me. You won’t be using it. You’ll just be minding your own business. They’ll have to come after me.”

  It seemed like a plan with some holes. Not to mention being a little … what am I trying to say? It’s like when you say they’re going to kill you, you don’t mean they’re going to kill you. And pepper spray seemed more like something you use on somebody who’s actually going to kill you. It felt weird, like the whole issue was not exactly life or death except in Will’s head. Like he took it and made it that way, and I couldn’t stop him.

  I felt like I was in the middle in this weird way that’s hard to explain. I wasn’t going to try to excuse those guys. Because they were plenty bad enough. But they weren’t as bad as they were in Will’s current brain. And I knew it.

  Just not what to do about it.

  But maybe it would make Will feel better to carry it. And it would never come out of his pocket if nothing went wrong.

  Maybe I should have said something. But I didn’t.

  So, back to today. Today we went back to school.

  Now, this was the first time any of those people had seen Will since he tried to kill himself. So it was like that silence thing all over again. But a little different this time. Not silent like pity, more silent like fear. Like they were afraid of him. Which I could immediately see was going to work on our side. I just didn’t know how long it would last.

  We never split up. When we had classes that weren’t together, I’d be slow to get up and gather my books, and by the time I got out to the hall, there he would be. Waiting to walk me to my next class. We just stuck together, and everybody left us alone.

  I still had really bad MTSD all day, but nothing happened.

  When we were walking home at the end of school, Will said, “Did you notice something interesting? How respectful everybody was? See, that’s the cool thing about carrying a weapon. You don’t even need to use it. Just carrying it changes you. Gives you more confidence. And then people know to stay out of your way.”

  I had a very different theory. I figured they all had the Lisa Muller syndrome. Nobody wants to mistreat somebody and then find out he went home and tried to kill himself. It’s too weird. It’s like if Will had some kind of brittle-bone disease. Everybody would leave him alone so they wouldn’t have to feel guilty when he shattered into a thousand pieces.

  That was my theory, anyway. But I didn’t share it with Will.

  But maybe I should have.

  But, first off, I could be wrong. Or maybe it was both things, I don’t know. Plus why not be supportive? Why rain on his parade?

  Besides, Will’s confidence was a good thing. Will’s confidence was my salvation. Well. My best shot at it, anyway. My best long shot.

  January 4th

  I didn’t bring my journal up to Uncle Max’s cabin. I wanted to. I really did. And I missed having it there. There were a dozen times I’d have given my right arm to be able to write our whole day down. But I left it home, because of Will.

  See, I’d promised Will I’d keep certain secrets. And I thought it might make him nervous if he knew everything was written down somewhere. Like somebody might find it and read it or something. So I just let the journal be my little secret.

  But now I have to go back and try to remember everything that happened and write it all down. Before I forget it forever.

  I’ll start with the day we celebrated Christmas. It wasn’t really Christmas, it was really Saturday the twentieth. The plan was that my mom would drive Will and me up to Uncle Max’s house in Lemoore, and we’d all celebrate Christmas early, and then she’d go home and we’d drive up to the cabin the next day.

  But there was a flaw in the plan. Will showed up empty-handed.

  I don’t mean he didn’t have clothes and gear. He did. Two suitcases and plenty of outdoor wear and warm stuff. He even brought two of his dad’s hunting rifles. And Sampson. Well, he had to bring Sampson. There’d be nobody home to take care of him. So he brought tons of stuff, but no presents. His mom hadn’t even bothered to send him with any presents. Here we were driving up there to have an early Christmas dinner and open presents. And everybody would have presents to open but Will.

  I pulled my mom aside and asked her about it. Before we left our house. She said she felt bad for him, but she couldn’t really do anything about it, because she’d gotten me one big present instead of a few little ones. She asked if I had something I could give him, but I said Will and I had already agreed not to get presents for each other, because we really don’t have much money, and the vacation together is kind of a giant present anyway.

  So we just drove up there, still not knowi
ng what we’d do.

  When we got to Uncle Max’s house, he was making Christmas dinner. Roast turkey with cranberry sauce and green beans and salad. And fresh fruit salad with chopped pecans sprinkled on top for dessert.

  My mom walked around the kitchen and looked at everything. Like if she just looked hard enough, she would find where all the rest of the dinner was hiding.

  “Well,” she said. “That looks very … healthy.”

  You could tell she didn’t get it, and Uncle Max shot me a bad look. He gave me this look that said, Oh, Ernie. You still haven’t told her.

  He was right. I still hadn’t told her.

  Right before dinner he pulled me aside into his den. I thought he was going to ream me out for not telling my mom I was trying to lose weight. Or wanting to lose weight, anyway. Not really doing so hot, but wanting to. But it was nothing about that.

  He took two wrapped presents out of the big oak chest in the corner of his den. Set them down on his writing desk. We both stared at them like we expected them to do something.

  “Lila tells me Will’s mother didn’t get him anything. And that’s a problem, right? So let’s just say for the sake of conversation that one of these presents is for Will.” I picked one up and looked at the gift tag. It said, “To Ernie, from Uncle Max.” I picked up the other one. It said, “To Ernie, from Uncle Max.”

  “Now, I hate to spoil Christmas surprises,” Uncle Max said, “but one of them is a collapsible ultralight rod and reel. The kind that telescopes down to almost nothing and you can put it right in your backpack. But it’s not stiff, like most collapsibles. It’s a real trout rod. Nice and sensitive. The other is a book on fly tying, with a kit to get someone started. Now, I hate to even ask this of you, but you’re a young man now, and you can make tough decisions. Is one of these a present to Will from our family?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Absolutely. He should have the rod.”

  “You’re sure.”

  The rod was the bigger, better present, and we both knew it.