by Cynthia Hand
“It is serious,” I agree. “My grade’s down to at least an A-minus. Which means I’m not going to be valedictorian.”
“Can you retake it?” he asks.
“No.” Lie #18.
“I see.” He clears his throat, then goes back to eating the breadstick.
“I’m sorry, Dad,” I say after a minute. And I am. I hate disappointing him, even after everything. I care what he thinks.
“It’s not important,” he says, but he doesn’t mean it. Dad’s always going on about how hard you have to work to be the best, to excel at everything, to reach for the very top—the best grades, the best education, the best job—so that you can live up to your potential, he always says, which is where I read so that you don’t end up an accountant in Nebraska with a divorce and two (wait, make that one now) kids when you could have been so much more.
We eat. Dad drinks two glasses of red wine, even though he hates wine. Then he pressures me into ordering dessert.
“How’s your mother?” he asks as I disassemble a piece of tiramisu.
I could tell him about the crying thing. But he doesn’t want to hear that. He doesn’t want to know that she cries all the time and that she doesn’t get out of bed unless she has to be at work or church and that she sleeps with Ty’s old stuffed monkey clutched to her chest. He doesn’t want to hear that she thinks Ty is still in the house, and I don’t even know what he’d do if I told him what I saw in the basement.
He wants me to say that Mom’s okay.
So I say, “She’s all right”—Lie #19—and Dad pays the check. We put on our coats and wander out into the cold night air, and he hugs me stiffly, and then, as usual, we go our separate ways.
5.
THE HOUSE IS DARK WHEN I GET HOME. Mom must have already gone to bed, which isn’t so unusual, even at eight o’clock at night. She sleeps so she doesn’t have to be awake, so she will be conscious of what’s happened as little as possible.
I wish I could sleep like that.
I spend an hour doing homework. Then I reach that time when normally I would go downstairs to watch TV.
This is a dilemma. I haven’t ventured into the basement in four days, not even to do laundry. I haven’t watched TV. I haven’t brought it up with Mom that maybe the cologne thing wasn’t so ridiculous after all.
Yes, I’m aware that I’m a total coward.
I take out the journal Dave gave me. For a few seconds I actually consider writing in it again, scribbling down a long confession about everything I haven’t said out loud. About the ghost. About the text. About Steven. About Ty. About me. But I can’t make myself do it.
So I stick the moleskin notebook under my mattress as a tribute to clichés and curl up on my bed for a while, reading A Beautiful Mind, which I can’t get into. Then I try Contact by Carl Sagan, which is my favorite novel ever, but my eyes move across the page without finding meaning in the words. I keep thinking about the look on Ty’s face when I threw the phone at him: startled and offended and a little sad. I’d never thrown anything at him before. We weren’t like that. We always got along.
Suddenly I’m furious. I think, So what, I’m never going to go into the basement again? I’m going to tiptoe around my own house until I leave for college? I’m going to be scared of what, a figment of my imagination? What am I, like ten years old? Afraid of the dark?
Get over yourself, Lex, I tell myself. Grow a pair.
So I jump up. I march straight down into the basement and stand for a few minutes glaring at that spot where Ty appeared the other night, at the small dent in the wall that is of course still there from where I chucked my phone at him. I make myself stand there for a full five minutes.
I don’t see anything weird. I don’t smell anything weird. I just feel stupid.
His bedroom door is open.
I go to the doorway. The moon is shining through the window. I haven’t been in Ty’s room since we went in to get the clothes he was buried in, but it looks the same as I remember. His desk is cluttered with books and school stuff. Clothes on the floor. Shoes. A partially deflated basketball. A dusty old model airplane dangling from the ceiling that he and Dad built together when he was eleven. Pictures of his friends taped to the walls. Posters of bands and movies he liked and NBA players.
As I step inside, his scent envelops me—not just his cologne but that slightly goatlike aroma he had, and his deodorant, which smells faintly minty. Pencil shavings. Dirty socks. Wood glue.
Ty.
I swallow. It’s like he’s still here, not in a ghostlike way, but like it never happened. If I stay here, if I close my eyes, I can imagine that Ty is just out somewhere and that he’ll be back.
I wish I could cry. That would be the appropriate thing to do at this moment: to remember my brother and cry.
But I can’t.
I turn to go out, and that’s when I see someone sleeping in his bed. The covers are lumped up around a figure on its side, back to me.
My heart starts to pound. I know it’s not Ty, I know it can’t be, but in that moment I want it to be. I want to see him again even if it means I’m crazy. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t tell Dave, or why I can’t write it down, because then they’ll very definitely make me take the pills and what happened the other night with the phone won’t happen again, and I’ll never see Ty, not ever, for as long as I live, and I don’t believe in an afterlife so I won’t get to see him then, either.
I know this isn’t the best reasoning.
But I still think it.
I creep around to the other side of the bed. I touch the shoulder of the person lying there, and find it warm, moving slightly with each breath.
Breathing. Alive.
It’s not him, I think as I take the edge of the covers and start to pull them back. It’s not him.
And I’m right. It’s not.
It’s my mother. She’s sleeping, wearing a faded red Led Zeppelin T-shirt, an old one of Ty’s. Lines of mascara are dried like tattoo ink down her cheeks, etched into the wrinkles near her eyes, marking the pillowcase.
She looks old. Small. Worn out. I draw the covers back over her, then sit on the bed and watch her for a while, her breathing, the movements of her eyes behind her eyelids. What would she dream about in Ty’s bed, surrounded by his stuff and his smell?
I want to wake her up, to take her out of here, because it’s not okay, her being here. It’s not healthy. But I let her sleep. Because, at least for the moment, she doesn’t seem to be in pain.
Sometimes I wonder if she wishes it was me who died instead of Ty, her snarky daughter instead of her socially acceptable son. I know she loves me. But if she could choose?
But that’s Ty’s fault.
He left her a note. As suicide notes go, it was short and to the point. It said:
Sorry Mom but I was below empty.
He didn’t write a note to Dad. Or to any of his friends. Or to me. He just left those seven little words on a yellow Post-it, stuck to his bedroom mirror. His only explanation.
It’s still there. The police took it down for a while, as evidence, but they came back and returned it to exactly where he’d left it. They’d taken a picture of the room so they would know where. So far neither of us has had the guts to take it down.
I stand up and cross to the mirror.
Sorry Mom but I was below empty.
I reach out.
My fingers have just brushed the edge of the paper when I see Ty in the reflection of the mirror.
He’s standing right behind me.
Ty.
Again, I don’t think about it. I don’t stop to contemplate what a rational person might do in this situation. I don’t calmly investigate.
I run.
I jerk away from the mirror, away from him, away, up the stairs, out the door, and before I know what’s happened I’m outside on the street, my shoes crunching the frozen snow as I run and run and run.
This is not happening is the thought that cycl
es through my brain. This is not happening.
I get three blocks before I stop, to the edge of a park where Ty and I used to spend every summer afternoon when we were kids. I hunch over, panting, finally feeling the biting cold. I wasn’t wearing a coat when I bolted out of my house, just a T-shirt and jeans, and the winter air against my bare arms is sharp and distantly painful. The moon is bright over my head. The park has a frozen quality to it, the swings hanging perfectly still. Deserted. A car moves along the street, slowing as it passes me. I wipe my nose, straighten, and try to take a full breath. I don’t know what I’m doing.
Ty. In the house. In his room.
This is not happening, I think.
A shudder passes through me that has nothing to do with the cold.
I feel a kind of resignation as I walk back. The front door is half open, waiting for me. I shuffle zombielike down to Ty’s bedroom, where my mother is still sleeping.
Ty is not in the mirror.
I notice immediately that the top right-hand drawer of his desk is open. I can’t remember if it was open before, but now it strikes me as odd, out of place. Was Mom up rummaging around while I was gone? Or was it like that earlier? Or was it someone else?
This is not happening, I think. But it is.
I kneel next to the bed and gently shake Mom by the shoulder. She gives a weak cry as she opens her eyes. It takes her a few seconds before she focuses on my face.
“Oh, Lexie,” she says. “Is everything all right?”
She glances around. I watch her expression change as she registers where she is. Ty’s room. Ty is gone. Ty is dead.
Grief floods her face.
“I came down to wake him that morning,” she says. “He was right here. He seemed all right.”
“I know.”
“I should have sensed that something was wrong that day. I’m his mother. I should have been able to tell.”
I never know what to say to this. She has her blame game and I have mine, the difference being that I actually have something to feel guilty about.
“It’s cold down here,” I tell her as I help her sit up. “Let’s get you upstairs.”
Later, after I’ve got her tucked away in her own bed and she’s sleeping again, I slink back to the basement to investigate the open drawer. It’s empty, except for a single item. A sealed envelope.
A letter.
My heart jumps, thinking that he might have written it to me. I didn’t answer the text, so he wrote down what he wanted to say. His reasons. His accusations, maybe. His last words.
The idea fills me with relief and terror.
I turn the envelope over with unsteady hands, and that’s when I see the name scrawled in Ty’s terrible handwriting across the paper.
For Ashley, it reads.
12 February
The first time my brother tried to kill himself, almost 2 years ago now, was the day my parents’ divorce was finalized. I don’t know if he meant it as a kind of grand statement or what. I wasn’t there for him that night, either; I was at a movie with Beaker. I can’t even remember which movie. I only know I wasn’t present when he marched up to the kitchen sink with a family-sized bottle of Advil and proceeded to gulp down pill after pill after pill. He did it practically under our mother’s nose as she sat with her back to him at the kitchen table, alternately studying for her nursing board exams, making her slow way through a giant stack of note cards labeled with dosages and parts of the human body and the definitions of different medical terminology, and studying the Bible, trying to come to peace with where it said that divorce was okay so long as there was adultery involved.
At 42, Mom was the oldest student in her class at nursing school, but she was the best. She was focused, driven, determined to make a new life for herself post-Dad. She didn’t even look up when her 14-year-old son took 63 tiny maroon tablets of pain reliever, said good night to her, then went downstairs to his bedroom and went to sleep.
He was disappointed when he woke up the next morning. He emerged from the basement with an expression I’ll never forget: a kind of resigned, puzzled frustration that he hadn’t simply floated away during the night.
“I’m not going to school today,” he announced as we sat down to breakfast. “I don’t feel good.”
My mother, ever the nurse even before she qualified to be one, felt his forehead. It was cool. She asked him some questions: Sore throat? Headache? Stomach pains? He shook his head and looked up at her, shrugged his thin, birdlike shoulders, and told her what he’d done.
At the hospital the most they could really do was put him in a room for observation. It was too late to pump his stomach. I sat in the corner and watched TV with him as the nurses came and went, checking his vitals, changing the saline in the IV. Every now and then Mom burst in, tearful, in agony over the choice she was being forced to make about whether or not to stay with us all day or do her clinical rounds in the hospital, her final week of requirements for her nursing degree. Without which she couldn’t graduate.
“I’m okay,” Ty told her, and even smiled at her to prove his point, his face wan under the fluorescent hospital lights, his lips colorless as he formed the word go.
“I’ll be back,” she promised again and again before dashing off.
I didn’t know what to say to him that day. I slumped in the uncomfortable plastic chair and tried to think of some big-sisterly advice that would draw him back from the edge. But I was 16 then—what did I know? I had my own problems, my own private miseries, and if I’d been honest I would have admitted that the idea of checking out had crossed my mind a few times in the past gruesome year, between my dad leaving us for the cliché he’d met at the office, who was exactly half his age, and my mom going back to school, the house suddenly empty of adults in a way that felt implicitly wrong.
But I never had a real plan to end my life. I was too afraid of dying. Of the blackness. Of ceasing to exist.
“It was stupid,” he ended up saying to me that day when the silence grew thick between us.
I was relieved to hear him say it.
“Yes, it was. Totally moronic,” I agreed, and then we went back to watching World’s Wildest Police Videos on the TV that perched near the ceiling. The nurses came and went. My mother came and went. And we both wondered (but not out loud) whether our father was going to show up at all.
In the end, he did. He was wearing a golf shirt, I remember. He’d come to take us home, since the hospital had decided to release Ty, and Mom still had 3 more hours of her clinicals. Dad also didn’t seem to know what to say as he drove us back to the house. He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, checked the rearview mirror, met my eyes, looked away, then cleared his throat.
“Tyler—” he said as we pulled into the driveway.
“Come home,” Ty interrupted. “Please, Dad. Come home. Please.”
My breath lodged itself in my chest. Ty never said things like that. He was angry with Dad; that was how he dealt. He’d always maintained that he hated Dad, that he was glad Dad was gone, that he didn’t miss him.
“Please,” he said again.
And what about me? I thought. Did I want Dad to come home? Could we pretend that this past humiliating year had never happened, that he wasn’t a liar and a cheater and an all-around pathetic excuse for a human being, that everything hadn’t been turned upside down? Could we go back to the way things were before? Did I want to go back?
Dad cleared his throat again.
I waited for him to say, I can’t. Or I’m sorry, son. Or something about how life is hard, but that doesn’t mean we give up.
But he didn’t say anything.
And he didn’t stay. Even though the doctor had said that Ty needed to be under strict surveillance for the next 24 hours, Dad didn’t even get out of the car. He just looked at me and said, “Call me if you need anything,” and I kind of nodded, and my eyes burned with furious tears that I didn’t let fall, and I turned away and walked Ty up the steps int
o the house.
Later, when Ty was sleeping, I went from room to room gathering anything that might be dangerous. Razor blades. Pills, although we’d already established that this wasn’t an effective method of offing yourself. Rope. Then I unlocked the closet in the back of Dad’s office and stared at the line of 3 hunting rifles in their cases. I checked to make sure none of them was loaded, and then I went to the shelf and swept every single bullet into a box with the rest of the stuff. I sealed the box with duct tape, labeled it ROMANCE NOVELS, and hid it in the back corner of my closet under a pile of half-naked Barbie dolls I still had lying around. After that was done I went to check on Ty, listened to him breathe, and tried to convince myself that he was going to be all right. Then I tiptoed back upstairs and sat at the kitchen table and finally allowed myself to cry.
I could cry back then.
I loved Ty. I loved him and I had almost lost him. So I cried. Tears were still a part of my anatomy.
They called him lucky, that time. His body was able to metabolize the Advil. His liver was damaged, but would probably heal. Lucky, they kept saying at the hospital as they took his statement and ran the tests on him and acted in general like the whole thing was a stunt, like he’d tried some harebrained move on his bicycle. You’re so lucky. Lucky, lucky you.
Lucky was the last word my brother would pick to describe himself. But in the end he nodded and told them they were right. So they would let him go.
The Advil thing was a “cry for help,” they said, so they required him to see a therapist, who got my brother started on antidepressants and tried to get him to talk about his “pain” every week for the next year or so, at 60 bucks a pop, which our insurance didn’t cover but Mom convinced my dad to pay. And for 2 whole years, nothing much happened. Mom became a licensed nurse. Dad married the cliché. I got an 800 on the math section of the SATs and everybody began talking about what college I would go to. Ty joined the basketball team. He started lifting weights, and his body filled out. His arms grew strong and muscled. He wore a letterman’s jacket when he swaggered through the halls at school. Girls liked him. People in general liked him. He was popular in a way that I never could have dreamed of being. And it was easy to forget that he’d ever been sad enough to down a bottle of pills.
