“What’s going on?” I do my best to focus on her words, to take in her body language. She’s exhausted, not clamoring to change the lite rock radio station.
“It’s not so much things going on externally as it is things going on in my brain. You know? I could lie awake all night and experience a hundred emotions without ever moving a muscle.”
“Yeah, I get that.”
“Do you?” She’s sitting all the way up now.
“I’m trying to.” I’m also trying to banish any thoughts of Marcos’s ugly words. Cass is finally opening up to me and I want to listen carefully. “The more you tell me, the more I can understand what you’re going through.”
She snorts. “You sound like my therapist. Therapists, I should say. I needed to get out of my own head for a while.”
I make a right onto Salisbury Street. The engine whirs beneath us, creaking a little during the turn. It’s not nearly as loud as Marcos’s.
“How’s everything going with your parents?”
A small shrug. “We’re going to therapy together, which is so uncomfortable that it makes me want to scream. I think they’re starting to get me, though.”
“That’s good, right?” I latch onto that. “They’ll pressure you less.”
She examines her nails. “They’ll probably always pressure me in their special way. I think it’s ingrained in them. Dad wouldn’t be Dad if he didn’t make some backhanded remark about how art is a hobby and not a career.”
I frown. That doesn’t sound helpful. “Maybe things will be better next year when you’re not living with them.”
“You mean when we move to the city?” Her lips quirk up.
Don’t say it, don’t say it–“Or Providence.”
The tiniest crease between her brows. “I thought you hurt your ankle.”
“It’s fine,” I say. “I did some research and RISD looks like a really good school.”
“I’m aware.”
“And there’s this thing where the city sets the river on fire–”
“Okay.” Her voice is clipped. Done with the topic.
“It sounds cool,” I finish. “I think you’d like it.”
“It doesn’t matter where we go.”
I can’t feel elated by this admission the way I want to. She sounds as defeated as that morning she spent hiding in her bed as I tried to coax her to come back to school.
“Look,” she says, “what I’ve learned from the doctors is that it doesn’t necessarily matter what’s going on around me, or how nice my parents are, or how much I love Mr. Riley. Which I don’t, for the record. It doesn’t matter if we’re in precalc or on Mt. Everest. Sometimes I’m just going to feel like shit, and it’s all because of my brain chemistry.”
“That makes sense,” I say. “Are the antidepressants helping?”
She tenses a little at the question. “They’re all right. They make me feel blah, which is the worst part, but I guess that’s better than feeling like you want to die, right?”
“Juliana told me about you taking yourself off the pills this summer,” I say. The ones I didn’t know you were on.
It’s the wrong thing to say. Her blue eyes are immediately cold. “You guys hang out and discuss your crazy friend Cassie?”
“No.” I hastily turn onto Towson Boulevard. “You know we don’t think that. Hell, we don’t even hang out.”
“You and Juliana don’t even like each other,” she adds.
I think we kind of, slightly do now. There’s a grudging respect. “I talked to her because I didn’t know what to do or what to think.”
“Why?” Her knees are drawn up on the seat.
“Because I felt guilty.” My heart hammers in my chest.
She tilts her head, genuinely confused. “Really?”
“I felt like I’d missed something.” I feel unburdened, finally telling her this. This might be what’s been holding us back from truly being on the same page since she returned to school. If I can get this off of my chest, we can move forward together. “I felt responsible for not seeing the signs. If I’d known, I could have stopped you.”
She sighs. “You’re as bad as Marcos with the hero complex.”
My fingers tighten on the wheel at the mention of Marcos. “What does that mean?”
“God.” She’s irritated. What did I do? “This is why I didn’t tell you about the pills in the first place. You want to fix everything. You would have run to my parents and made sure they administered the exact dose at the exact same time each day.”
“Why is that bad?” I’m trying not to feel hurt. She’s finally being vulnerable–
She throws up her hands. “Because I don’t want that! Juliana doesn’t try to fix me. She’s not about to give me a gold star because I did my lab report. She just lets me be.”
How do you respond to that?
I drive faster down the tidy honeycombed streets with gold Christmas lights wrapped around the porches and electric candles blazing in the windows.
Underneath my shaky breathing and hammering heart lies the truth: I can’t let it be. I am like Marcos, although I use my words instead of my fists. If I see my best friend hurting, I can’t sit back and watch.
But Cassie won’t let me be that person for her, and I don’t know what else to do.
I drive until Cassie says, “All right, Grandma, you’re putting me to sleep,” although I’m going fifteen miles above the speed limit, and so I drive us to my house and drop myself off.
She hangs her head out of the window. “When’s your meet?”
“Eight in the morning.” I try to look at her and see the Cass who would twist my hair into intricate braids and perfect buns in the back of the car on the way to competitions.
“Ah, man. I have an appointment with some witch doctor that my mom wants to take me to.” She rolls her eyes. “Good luck, though, okay?”
“It’s fine.” Another disappointment. She’s never missed a meet.
She waits there for a moment, looking at me.
She’s supposed to be the one who knows the right way to go, despite how many afternoons and nights we’ve spent driving down the wrong roads. She’s always made the plans, offered unsolicited advice (plenty of that), told the stories.
For the first time I can remember, we have nothing to talk about.`
HOURS LATER, I can’t sleep. I can’t stop replaying our conversation in the car, the way Cassie pulled away when I pushed and struck back when I retreated.
That’s not her. That’s not us.
My ankles crack as I slip out of bed and pad over to the wall, where photos of us cascade like a slideshow of my life. There we are as little girls on the beach with soaked hair and sandy sunglasses, sipping Slurpees with blue lips. Next come the countless Halloween costumes, including our classic peanut butter and jelly get-up that included actual peanut butter and jelly (Mom was not amused). In those photos, we’re unified. No hints of the cracks to come.
I look closer.
All right, there were the little things. Tiny jabs at my outfits and out-of-control hair that didn’t stop after I asked her to. There was the way she stuck to my side at birthday parties and avoided my gymnastics friends, although they tried to talk to her. How she wouldn’t speak to me for the rest of the day if she found out I was going over to someone else’s house. By the next morning, though, everything was healed. She’d braid my hair on the bus, cheer me on at competitions, spend hours in my bedroom making bracelets.
Then Cassie began taking the photos, and with each passing year, the colors become crisper, the focus stronger. As the photos progress, we grow taller (at least, she does), my braces come off, we figure out how to put on make-up. There’s Cassie tugging me by the hand to the shore. I remember the gray sky, the warning clouds promising thunder. We were fifteen, old enough to venture to the beach ourselves. Cassie wanted to swim, and the fear in my eyes is palpable.
“There’s lightning,” I’d said right after her camera cl
icked.
“Not yet,” she’d said.
Her grip was strong, but I yanked free. “No.”
For a moment she’d looked at me like she didn’t know me. Like she was disappointed in me.
I’d held my breath. I didn’t often say no to Cassie, but I swore that rumble in the distance wasn’t a truck in the parking lot.
Then she’d set the camera down on the towel. Her hair billowed in the gusts of wind. “Whatever,” she’d said. “Be boring by yourself.” Then she’d walked off into the hissing surf without a look back.
Later, as we raced home through the pouring rain, I’d been the one who apologized. I couldn’t stand the heaviness in my chest from her refusing to speak to me. Why she gave me the photo, I have no idea. But the next time she came over, she wanted to know why it wasn’t up like all the other ones.
She’s strong-willed. I know that. She knows what she wants and she’s not afraid to grasp it, even if the way she holds on makes it hard to breathe. I’d take that over the stifling silence of her being angry with me.
Funny, I don’t feel that incessant tug from Marcos or Emery. Instead, I feel it from within me: a natural desire to be around them, to laugh, to listen. It’s an easiness I’m not used to.
I turn back to the photos. Of course my relationship with Cassie is different; we’ve known each other for so much longer. We have a history.
A non-Cassie photo: the sunset over silhouetted trees when I went camping the summer before freshman year with my parents. I’d texted Cassie whenever I found service in the woods. Can we talk? I’m dying. So many mosquitos.
Cassie was evasive: Busy. Maybe later, she’d texted.
I texted her as soon as we left the campground for the world of WiFi and full cell service. No response. I called and she didn’t answer.
The next day, she wrote back: Finally dumped Chris. The worst.
Who’s Chris?
The guy from Galway Beach. I told you.
No, you didn’t.
Asking her in person elicited even less of a response. “It was nothing,” she’d said with a shrug.
There’s the two of us smiling in my front yard before junior prom. She wanted to go to a party after. I was too tired, went home, and didn’t hear from her until the next afternoon. What happened? She wouldn’t say. Another shrug, a smile that said you’d know if you were there. She stepped around me then, and she did it again today.
The same person who held me together through all of my injuries, through Regionals, through Richard’s deployments, is the one pushing me away now. As much as I want to believe it’s the depression speaking, not the Cassie I’ve known forever, I can’t ignore the feeling that there’s something more that I haven’t seen. That I haven’t allowed myself to see.
Push and pull. Ebb and flow. Which one is she? I stare at the photos until my vision blurs, and only then do I see the answer.
She’s both.
This is Cassie. This is who she has always been, long before she walked out of her car with the engine running and slipped into the water under the bridge.
I don’t know how to feel about that.
I WAKE UP Sunday morning ready to puke.
I move quietly in the bathroom so as to not wake up my parents. I’ve kept the details of the competition purposefully vague (that is, they know I’m attending one eventually and nothing more) because I want as few witnesses as possible. I tug on the deep-blue-and-silver leotard and smooth out the glittery mesh sleeves. Already it feels itchy. Strangely, it’s reassuring that the feeling hasn’t changed.
My eyes are puffy, exhausted, and the only kind of competition I look ready for is a sleeping one. I flip my hair over and stick it under the cold running water, then go about the business of spraying almost an entire can of hairspray and unloading a full pack of bobby pins on it. Monica would be proud. She’d go through a pack a meet. For a moment I consider texting a picture to all of my original teammates.
Instead, I have a joint text from Nicola and Erica. GOOD LUCK TODAY! WE LOVE YOU! They competed in last night’s session, and if the online results are any predictor of the future, South Ocean will be well represented in the awards long after Emery and I graduate.
The steps creak as I move downstairs. I rummage through the kitchen and settle on a banana and a handful of cereal. I can’t eat, though, so I sit on the couch and commence waiting for Emery.
There’s a soft thunk on the door, followed by a car rolling down the street. Probably the newspaper delivery.
When I open the door and step into the cool dawn air, there’s an envelope addressed to me in meticulous block letters.
I didn’t think I could feel more nervous. I was wrong. I pick it up, open the flap, and take a deep breath as a wave of nausea hits me. I’ve never been this nervous in my life, not even for Regionals. That day, I couldn’t wait to compete. Today, well, if Emery forgot to pick me up, I wouldn’t be devastated.
From the envelope, I tug out a sheaf of paper. At the exact same moment, a text message arrives.
Marcos: Hey Savannah, hope this doesn’t wake you up. I’m sorry about how we left things yesterday and I know you’re probably still mad. I wrote you this letter to show you where I’m coming from. Well, it was supposed to be a letter, but…you’ll see.
A second text. Good luck today! I’m proud of you.
I set down the phone without answering. If I can’t handle eating breakfast for fear of throwing up, I don’t know that I’m ready for whatever these pages contain. A glance at the time, though, shows that I have least fifteen minutes until Emery arrives.
I take a chance. I unfold the first page and start reading.
IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL we had to write our autobiographies. I had a good time inventing my fictitious history, so much so that I was moved from the bilingual class to the fully English class mid-year. In it, my father was a chef at Niagara Falls, my mother a world-famous diver whom he met one night on a smoke break (really, my teachers ate this up), my imaginary little sister toddling around Dad’s restaurant and charming the stingiest tippers into leaving a few more bills. Andreas says he’s been to Niagara Falls and the food sucks, so what do I know?
In reality, I was born in a town in Texas too small to be mapped. Right after I arrived, Dad went back to our apartment because two-year-old Victor had croup. Victor was born in Guadalajara. It was as if he was warning my parents then: there is nothing to rejoice.
There was always music in Texas, and not that twangy acoustic; I mean rumba and merengue and chumba. Dad washed dishes and Mom waitressed at a restaurant where afterwards there was dancing. I remember clinging to Dad’s leg and watching the high heels and slick black dress shoes spin and stomp throughout the dining room, strobe lights casting irregular dazzles over the floor. I always wanted to run in and join. “Too dangerous, m’ijo,” he said. I took this very seriously, but now I think he meant the stilettos. In the summer, I’d play in the back parking lot with Victor. He’d make up all sorts of stories: “If you climb up that tree, you can see all the way to Russia.”
I turned four the summer of the immigration raids. The whispers ran all through our building. Factories. Bars. Farms. They could happen at any moment.
Dad quizzed Victor before we left for the restaurant and when we arrived home at midnight, one in the morning, Dad was carrying both of us because we were half asleep. “You were born at Austin Memorial Hospital. Can you remember that? Say it with me. You can’t have an accent. You have to say it naturally. Like you never knew Spanish.”
Later: “Where is your birth certificate?”
“Burned,” Victor said.
“With what else?”
“The whole house.”
“Very good,” Dad said.
The night they sat us down, Mom couldn’t stop crying quiet tears that turned her already-running makeup into a stream.
“You’re going to live with Uncle Patrick,” Dad said finally.
“What do you mean?” Victo
r said.
Dad took Mom’s hand. She shook her head. “It’s not safe for Mom and me,” Dad said. “We have to go home.”
“We are home,” I said, but already I could see my life in boxes crammed in the back of a car, the room and apartment and restaurant falling away.
I asked questions. I don’t remember what they were, but I thought that if I asked enough, maybe there would be one Dad couldn’t answer. Maybe he’d realize that they had to stay. Victor said nothing. He already knew these answers. He started to cry, and my mom put her arms around him. Soon the water over my eyes blurred the room into round shapes, and Mom pulled me into an embrace.
I don’t know where I got the image of my life in boxes. I owned almost nothing. Some clothes. The obligatory soccer ball. Mom always asked if I wanted toys, but I said no. I had music and the trees behind the restaurant and Victor. What did I need toys for?
Uncle Patrick’s real name is Jesus, but he took his middle name, Patricio, and made it English. Most often he’s asked if he’s Irish, or at most, Spanish. The elite class of Spanish, with faces that burn in the sun.
Like my father, Uncle Patrick embraced public rejection of his heritage. He spoke only English at home. He named his children Michael and Madison.
He was naturalized before I was born, a process that took fifteen years. He treated us generously: new clothes, karate lessons, an English tutor for me in the early elementary school years because both languages jumbled together in my brain. But I wondered what he would do if anyone questioned him about Victor. Would he give up my brother? The older I grew, the more I believed he might.
Victor sensed it, too. At seventeen, he shook hands with Uncle Patrick and moved into the apartment. Last year, I joined him. We’re lucky to have this place to ourselves. At any moment, it seems as though someone’s house will burst and people will spill out–relatives, friends, strangers.
My first night at Victor’s reminded me of the restaurant in Texas–music, all the time. Conversations, TVs, arguments, laughter. Police sirens. “Bastards ruining it for the rest of us,” Victor says. Early in the morning, trucks with groups of men drove over the broken asphalt. Kids played in the street despite the garbage that built up until the weekly pick-up. One of them had a plastic lightsaber and the others joined the battle with ladles.
Lessons in Falling Page 22
