Just Breathe

by Cammie McGovern

  It’s physical at first. A tinny taste in the back of my mouth. A tingling in my hands and the back of my neck. My vision shifts. Edges blur. I can’t read more than a sentence before the letters start to move and lose all meaning. This time around, it feels like I’m having the panic attacks other kids in the hospital described. I have trouble breathing. It’s like my body has internalized David’s struggle for air and now it wants me to know how it feels. I can’t take a deep breath even if I try.

  I feel nothing except the weight of my responsibility for what’s happened to David. I lie in bed and imagine him on a ventilator. My throat closes up, and I almost choke.

  I know my mother isn’t telling me everything. She’s trying to strike a balance—protecting me from the worst news and still keeping me informed. She can’t distract me, she knows, so most of the time we sit quietly, saying nothing.

  After three days, she tells me I have no choice, I have to get in the car. She drives me across town to Rita’s office. She must have called her ahead of time and told her more than I even know, because the first thing Rita says is, “I’m wondering if you can tell me what happened in your own words, Jamie. I want to hear all this from your point of view before we have to get into this business with the police and the lawyer.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  DAVID

  I DON’T KNOW HOW MANY days have passed. Daytime and nighttime are impossible to distinguish in the ICU. Nurses come on duty and leave. Their shifts are twelve hours. This is my only way to measure time.

  I’m afraid of leaving my body alone for too long. If I go too far away, it seems to sense my absence. Every time I return, alarms are going off and people are clustered around me. I’ve experimented a little and discovered I can drift just as far as the lobby without causing a problem. On my first day in the ICU, the lobby was swarmed with kids from school. Most of student council was here—enough for a quorum, I tried to joke, but of course no one heard me. Some people cried, though it wasn’t the ones I would have expected. Sharon looked stunned and numb but dry-eyed. Hannah kept reaching for a Kleenex box.

  I stood there for a while trying to take it all in: This is my world without me in it. These are my people.

  Then it was like my brain fragmented. I looked at some of the faces, and I couldn’t remember their names. I should know them, I understood, but I didn’t. Like my mom, Sharon was holding a cup of coffee, which surprised me. I’d never seen her drink coffee before. She won’t even drink Frappuccinos. Hannah held her hand and rubbed her arm.

  That first day, I stuck around the waiting room, not because I wanted to hear everyone talk about how sad they were, but because I needed information and I had so many questions. Who was my dad talking on the phone with earlier? What, exactly, was going on?

  While I stood there, Ashwin walked in.

  “What’s happening now?” he asked.

  Strangely, he was asking Hannah, not Sharon, though I didn’t know why. Maybe they were trying to give Sharon space.

  “He’s still in the ICU,” Hannah said. “Every time they try to wean him off the ventilator a little, he crashes, so they’re not going to try that again for a while.”

  “Has anyone seen him yet?”

  “No. They’re saying they’ll let us in soon, but only two at a time for five minutes each. He can’t talk or anything, but we can talk to him. Supposedly, hearing voices helps when you’re in a coma.”

  Sharon pulled her hand away from Hannah. “What are you talking about? He’s not in a coma.”

  Hannah nodded. “That’s right, not a coma technically, but what do you call it when someone’s unconscious and they’re on a ventilator that’s breathing for them? It’s not a coma exactly, but it’s something else.”

  And then I knew. I’m in a coma, but no one wants to say the word out loud. That’s why I can stand here watching all of them, unseen and unheard. I really am like the angels in Wings of Desire. I’m hovering in between life and death.

  Everyone looked down at their phones or else at the door.

  Suddenly, it was like I could hear what they were feeling and it was clear: they were all looking for excuses to get away. They thought they wanted to be here, but none of them wanted to see me hooked up to machines. Some started to make calls—to parents, to friends, to anyone who would give them a reason to leave. But how could anyone go with Hannah shooting looks and keeping a head count? Just when I thought the tension in the room couldn’t get any thicker, the door opened up and Eileen walked in.

  “You all have to leave,” Eileen announced. “My mom and dad just talked to the doctors, and they say that only family can see him tonight, so—I’m sorry about this, but he’ll still be here tomorrow, so you can come back if you want, I guess.”

  I laughed for the first time since this nightmare started.

  Eileen could barely mask her disdain for my friends, though none of them saw this.

  Hannah rushed over and wrapped her up in a hug. “How are you holding up, sweetheart?”

  Eileen waited, stiff-armed, for the hug to be over. “I’m not the sick one, so I’m okay.”

  Behind them, people gathered their things. They all looked grateful for this reprieve.

  “Right,” Hannah said, “but it’s always hardest on the ones who are closest.”

  Eileen rolled her eyes just a little, not enough for Hannah to see. “I should get back to my parents. They just wanted to say . . . thanks for coming.”

  She spun around and left so quickly that it didn’t occur to me until after she was gone: she and Sharon didn’t say a word to each other. Which seemed odd.

  Now, days have gone by.

  I watch my parents whisper frantically to each other, snatches of a fight I don’t understand. Every time I hover near them, they go quiet and don’t speak. I want to know what they’ve been fighting about—it must be some decision they’re making about my future—but there’s another question I want to know even more urgently: Where is Jamie?

  Every time I go out to the lobby, I expect to see her there. Maybe not sitting with my friends, but at least in the vicinity. I hover near Eileen whenever she’s here. I try to read her texts as she types them to see if any are going to Jamie. So far nothing.

  Every afternoon, the waiting room fills with a smaller group of students, and every day, I get more frantic. After a while, I can’t help it; it makes me mad. Jamie must have known that I orchestrated all those outings as an excuse to be with her. I almost died trying to kiss her, so where is she?

  I wish there was some way to ask Eileen. When she’s here, she sits with our parents but stares at her phone 90 percent of the time. They ask her questions, and she answers without moving her lips. Even I get irritated by her, and I’m not the one asking what she wants for dinner.

  When our parents leave for the cafeteria, I sit down next to her. I say, I need to see Jamie. Can you ask her to come?

  My hope is that even if she can’t hear what I say, she’ll hear the suggestion and maybe she’ll believe the thought is her own.

  It might help me to hear her voice. I don’t know how these things work or why I’m not waking up, but if anything is going to help me, Jamie would.

  I wait. Eileen has a funny expression on her face. Even in this floaty state, it’s possible to get dizzy, which I do. Her lips curl up. Her eyebrows crinkle.

  Can you hear me Lee-lee? I’m shouting now because I think she can. Don’t say anything. Just nod.

  Nothing.

  If you can hear me at all, tell Jamie to come.

  I hold my breath. I wait. Nothing.

  Eventually she opens Candy Crush on her phone, and I give up.

  JAMIE

  Rita says she’s going to change my medication and add an emergency tranquilizer as a sleep aid.

  “You want to be careful with these,” she says, and then stops herself when she remembers that I know all about the dangers of prescription medication.

  I was the one who found my fath
er’s stash two days after I came home from school and discovered my father “asleep” on the sofa in his studio.

  In theory, my change to public school was meant to free my dad to focus on his work and return to painting again, which he’d gotten away from. Before I was born, all his success had been with his paintings. He was profiled as an up-and-comer in Art World magazine and had a gallery rep who sold his pieces to some of her wealthiest clients. He’d dropped out of art school, believing the narrow aesthetic of the faculty limited students and made them all produce cloned replications of one another’s work, so maybe what happened with his work was inevitable. After a few years of success with his painting, he shifted his focus into an obsession with trying new formats. By the time I joined him in his studio, he no longer painted at all. Instead, he made himself a beginner over and over—printmaking one year, graphic collage the next. As the projects got more experimental, he grew more insistent on defending their value.

  The first time I ever saw my father cry, I was ten years old. He’d brought me with him to a meeting with Lorna, his gallery representative, along with three new pieces to show her. They were just a sample, he told her. He had fifteen more at home, finished and market-ready. I liked his new work, but I also knew they were unsettling pieces to look at for long—abstract woodcut prints with slashes of red and orange paint bisecting the canvas, as if the artist had changed his mind halfway through one work and decided to do something else completely.

  I knew the meeting wasn’t going well, though I pretended to look around the gallery, as if I couldn’t hear what was being said.

  “I don’t understand these, Leo,” Lorna said. “People love your paintings; they don’t know what to make of these. No one understands why you don’t go back to painting.”

  I knew what he’d told me: That a true artist must push himself in new directions. That fear fuels creativity. That repetition is the path to entropy and death.

  Alone in the car afterward, my father broke down. Weeping, he apologized and said I shouldn’t have to see him like that, that he didn’t want to scare me away from becoming an artist myself.

  “That’s the most important thing, Jamie. I don’t want to scare you.” He seemed to have a bigger point he wanted to make. It was the first time he said that I had more talent than he did, a terrifying thing for a ten-year-old to hear. “You’re not better yet,” he explained. “But you will be soon. You mustn’t let what’s happening to me stop you.”

  I didn’t understand, but I’d already seen many things that scared me, even before that gallery visit. The way he talked to himself while he worked. The way he’d stare at a piece for long stretches of time, not moving a muscle or doing anything to it. The way his anger grew, anticipating rejection that hadn’t even happened yet.

  After that day, he started paying more attention to my work and finding reasons to prove his point, that I had a God-given talent. I don’t know why he used that phrase when we had never been churchgoers. I didn’t understand what it meant except that he didn’t sound like himself. I was probably better than most people my age, but I assumed that was only because I’d spent more time doing art than other children.

  “I’ve practiced more, that’s all,” I would say.

  He insisted: No. My understanding of color and form was eerily sophisticated and had nothing to do with my education.

  I wanted to say, Color and form is pretty much all we talk about, Dad. I felt the weight of his expectations, but I also understood that he had to put the burden of his own disappointment somewhere.

  For two years, I worked in my corner of the studio and watched his corner carefully. I knew he wasn’t producing much new art, but was he making any? Were we spending hours down there with one of us only pretending to work?

  When I finally approached him about wanting to go to regular school for eighth grade, I knew he would talk about my “talent” and his fear that going to public school would waste it. I was right.

  “Art teachers only teach conformity,” he warned me. “But go ahead. See for yourself. I’ll still be here, waiting, when you’re done.”

  I wanted to say that I was partly doing this for him. That maybe focusing on my potential had taken him away from realizing his own. Whatever my intentions were, they didn’t work. In his last year, we knew my father had started drinking more and spending money inexplicably. On art supplies he didn’t use. On clothes he didn’t need, for events he didn’t go to. It was as if he were rallying himself to start a life he couldn’t get to.

  The day I found him was the first time I’d been down to his studio in weeks. It was too filled with memories for me. Plus, I didn’t want to see how little he was producing. Seeing him stretched out on the sofa, asleep, didn’t seem so unusual at first. The surprise was finding a new canvas on his easel, and fresh paint squeezed onto his palette. For a moment, my breath caught. What he’d painted looked like a good start—darker than his old work, perhaps, but still reminiscent. Then I looked closer at the canvas and I realized it wasn’t newly stretched. I turned it over and looked at the back. He’d whitewashed over an old painting that Mom and I loved called New Life. It was the first thing he painted after I was born. My mom told me he was once offered four thousand dollars for it, and she asked him not to sell it. It reminded her of the sweet, early days of my infancy. Now an abstract red pulsed at the center and exploded out over layers of green and yellow.

  That’s when I knew something terrible was happening.

  This wasn’t a return to painting. He was so tortured by the past, he was trying to erase it.

  That’s when I tried to wake him up and couldn’t.

  Two days later, as I went through the basement studio to figure out how many of his old paintings he’d painted over, I found a stash of empty liquor bottles. Above that, in a cupboard that once held our most expensive oil paints, was another stash of pills—some in labeled prescription bottles, some in Ziploc bags as if he’d bought them on the street. The bottles were a shock, but the pills left me reeling.

  Now, I tell Rita that I’ll take a prescription for Xanax, but I don’t think I’ll use it. “I know the dangers,” I say.

  We talk about strategies for the next few days. She goes over the importance of exercise and sleep to keep depression at bay. “Get out of the apartment as often as you can. Exercise. Go for a walk. Make sure you’re sleeping well and eating okay.”

  I nod because I know all of this. In the hospital, I learned that doing a lot of little things really does make a difference. Getting out of the apartment and walking over to see David every day for six weeks probably helped my mood more than any antidepressant. Now that I’m banished from the hospital, though, it’s hard to imagine where else I might go. Denny’s? The strip mall?

  “Okay.” I nod.

  “Ruminating is a danger,” she says. “Being alone too much leads to ruminating.”

  She doesn’t answer the obvious questions: How can I avoid being alone if David was my only friend? Who will I talk to at school if my only conversation in the last week has been with Eileen and it lasted less than thirty seconds?

  “I’m so sorry, Eileen,” I said.

  “You should be” was all she said.

  There was so much more I wanted to say but couldn’t. So many questions I wanted to ask, but the words caught in my throat.

  Since then, I’ve moved in a deeper silence, more alone than ever during my school day. At home, there’s no reason to turn on the computer. For days now, I’ve sat on the sofa and waited all afternoon for my mother to come home and tell me news about David.

  So far it’s been the same. “No change today,” she says, and then, because there’s nothing else to talk about, I stand up and retreat into my room.

  “Are you staying active?” Rita asks.

  No.

  “Are you making sure you’re not spending too much time alone?”

  No.

  “Are you eating and sleeping appropriate amounts?”
>
  No.

  I can’t do any of those things now. I also can’t tell her the truth: this was all my fault. David was reaching for happiness in spite of his illness and picked the wrong person to help him find it. I couldn’t help him. I was only pretending to know what happiness was.

  DAVID

  I start taking a few more risks. I leave my body alone and wander down to the cafeteria. Not that I’m hungry—in this bodiless state I have no bodily needs—but I need the distraction of seeing people going about their lives. In the ICU, everything moves at one of two speeds: crisis or lull. It jangles the nervous system after a while, being on high alert or bored most of the time. It helps to see normal things, like plates of food under warming lights. Like a salad bar. This is what I tell myself anyway, even if it isn’t true.

  I’m here to find Jamie. If she won’t come to visit me, I assume she’s still meeting her mother here for dinner. I want to make sure she’s okay. Is that worth risking my life for? I don’t know. It must be, because here I am.

  Only she’s not here. I’ve timed it exactly when she used to meet her mom—five forty-five—but I don’t see either of them.

  I look hard at everyone—the cafeteria workers, janitors, doctors—as if Jamie might be hiding in someone else’s clothes. But no.

  She’s not here.

  On my way out the door, though, I see a surprise.

  My parents are here. Sitting with a man I don’t recognize. He’s balding, red-faced, wearing a suit with a yellow legal pad in front of him. A briefcase sits on the chair beside him. I walk closer and slide into the empty chair at their table for four. They seem to have just gotten started. The legal pad is empty.

  “Let’s start with this,” the man says. “Was David ever a risk-taker in the past?”

  “Absolutely not,” my mother says.

  “No.” My father nods. “Not that we’ve ever seen.”

  “Had he ever disobeyed doctor’s orders before?”

  They look at each other. “No,” they agree. “Never.”

  “Would you describe David as someone who was easily influenced?”