“The death of Marty’s suicidality.”
“L’chaim,” Carlos said.
“That means ‘to life,’ ” the Colonel said to me, putting a gnarled hand on my shoulder.
“I’ve seen Fiddler on the Roof,” I said, moving his hand off me.
“L’chaim indeed,” Dr. Rosen said, glowing at Marty, who dropped the pills into the toilet and watched them swirl until they disappeared.
After we flushed Marty’s pills, we took our seats back in the group room. Dr. Rosen stared at me.
“You ready?” he said.
“For what?”
“You know what.”
“I don’t.”
“I think you do.”
Of course I did.
11
My luggage tag read “Christie Tate-Ramon.” When Jenni’s dad, David, handed it to me, he said, “I’ve always wanted two daughters.” He hugged me, and then shooed me and Jenni into the taxi idling in the driveway. There were five of us: Jenni, her dad David, her mom Sandy, her brother Sebastian, and me. Freshman year of high school was six weeks away.
When we landed in Honolulu, everyone at the airport wore flowered shirts and greeted us with “Mahalo.” On the drive to the hotel, we repeated it over and over like a blessing.
For three days, we explored the lush main island, stopping on the side of the road to marvel at waterfalls sprouting from the wall of a mountain, eating macadamia nuts, and snapping pictures of black sand beaches. The second night we attended an obligatory luau, where we all poked at the poi and wore fresh orchid leis.
On the fourth day, just after lunch, David loaded us kids into the rental sedan, along with towels and boogie boards. We were headed to a secluded black beach at the end of the highway, which we had seen during our first day of sightseeing. Sandy stayed at the condo to do laundry.
“Surf, surf, surf,” David chanted as we drove along the curvy road that hugged the side of a mountain. Sebastian pushed a cassette into the tape deck and cranked the volume. The Cure sang moodily of beaches and guns. We rolled down the windows and sang at the top of our lungs, letting the breeze hit the back of our throats.
David parked the car and headed toward a shaded path where a “No Trespassing” sign hung on an iron fence, partially obscured by a flowering vine. I paused for a nanosecond, fear prickling my spine. We were breaking a rule. David continued to whistle. Above, the blue sky portended nothing but fresh air and a refreshing swim once we reached the beach. Bad things didn’t happen in places with this many flowers.
We filed down in a straight line, me in the rear. My flip-flops strained to support me as I made my way down the steep mountain path.
When the trail leveled off and opened up to an expanse of wild grass, we could see the surf rolling to the shore. Black sand crystals glinted in the sunlight. David found a flat, dry spot for us to dump our stuff. There were no other people on the beach—no lifeguard chair, no laid-out beach towels, no signs of life. It felt like freedom to have this expanse of paradise all to ourselves. I peeled off my T-shirt and shorts. I adjusted the straps of my one-piece Ocean Pacific bathing suit, and Sebastian dove into the surf. Jenni and I trotted after him.
“I’ll meet you down there.” David hunched over his contact lens case with a travel-size bottle of saline solution.
The waves looked gentle, not unlike the swells at Padre Island on the Gulf Coast of Texas, where my family vacationed. The sky remained a harmless blue bowl. My biggest problem was that I wished my body was as lean as Jenni’s.
Once I’d waded far enough that the water hit my midthighs, a wave knocked me over. My whole body sunk below the waterline, and the undertow dragged me downward. I struggled to get upright, but as soon as I cleared the surface of the water, another wave pushed me down again, and I somersaulted through the surf. Salt water stung my eyes and rushed up my nose. It felt like an invisible force below the sand was pulling me under, daring me to fight. Every time my head popped out of the water, I’d try to catch my breath, but would get knocked down before I could fill my lungs with air. Every effort to get myself upright failed.
I had to get out. Frantic, I flailed my arms and bicycled my legs, but the undertow continued to suck me back. When I finally landed in a spot where I could stand up, I gasped and coughed, almost doubled over with exhaustion. My head pounded from the effort of fighting the sea. I staggered out of the water.
Once I was onshore, my chest heaved with the effort of my escape. My arms ached from trying to claw my way through the water. Jenni emerged and walked toward me. We agreed that sunbathing would be more fun.
“Where’s my dad?” she said, scanning the water.
I raised my hand to my forehead and surveyed the ocean—left, right, and left again. No sign of David. The fear prickled again, straight up my spine, nesting at the base of my neck.
“Oh my God!” Jenni pointed straight ahead and took off into the water. Ten yards in front of us, an orange object lolled in the water. David’s board. Something large and white floated beside it.
David was facedown. A wave surged forward and delivered him to us in shin-deep water. We turned him over, and his eyes stared, unblinking, up at the sky. My breath came in shallow gasps. Water gushed from David’s nose and mouth. So much water poured out of him. As if he contained half the ocean.
Jenni and I each grabbed an arm. We pulled him to the shore. Neither of us knew CPR, but we pumped his chest like we imagined we should. We screamed maniacally for Sebastian. With every thrust to David’s chest, more water gushed out of his mouth and nose. His eyes stared unblinking at the sky, at nothing at all.
My teeth chattered uncontrollably, and my arms spasmed. I ran in place when I wasn’t pumping David’s chest because standing still meant that the truth of his open eyes and gushing mouth could find me and settle in. My mind spun out lies: He’ll be fine. People don’t die on vacation. We’ll laugh on the way home about that mean old Hawaiian surf. I could still hear him whistling.
If we could just pump enough water out of him, he would sit up and cough.
“Oh my God!” Sebastian arrived, dripping wet and panting. He pressed on his dad’s chest with his two open palms.
“I’ll go get help,” I said, and took off running, barefoot, still shaking—my legs desperate to be in motion. In stillness, the truth loomed, so I pumped my legs and hurled my body back up the mountain. The ghost of David whistling down the path just thirty minutes earlier haunted each step. Halfway up the trail, I tripped on a root and landed spread-eagle on the path. A long red gash opened on my knee. It looked like it should hurt, but I felt nothing. I was all heartbeat and panic. I’d flown out of my body and was already up the mountain begging someone to help us.
“No! No! Daddy, no!” Sebastian and Jenni’s keening reached me from the beach. I scrambled to my feet. I had to keep running to drown out the unbearable sound of their mourning. Every time I stopped to catch my breath, I heard their cries. Picturing the two of them alone on the beach with their father’s limp body drove me up the mountain.
When I made it to the top, I collapsed at the feet of four elderly golfers. I lay eye to eye with their white spiked shoes and the hems of their plaid pants. One of them bent over and stuck his face in mine. “You okay, little lady?”
“Someone’s drowned—he’s not dead,” I insisted. To me, at that point, there was a difference between drowning and dying. “His kids are down there alone with him.”
The four of them shuffled off, leaving me propped up against a boulder.
“He’s not dead.” A scream, a whisper, a dispatch straight from my trembling heart.
Stillness was terrifying. I scrambled to my feet and ran up the paved road for more help. Little pebbles gouged my feet but didn’t pierce the skin. I ran faster. I found an abandoned cabin set back from the road. When no one answered my knocking, I burst through the unlocked door, screaming, “Phone! Phone!” In the darkened room, there was only a wooden table, a couple of chairs, and a stout bookshe
lf. No people, no light, no phone.
Back out on the road, I couldn’t see the beach or hear Jenni and Sebastian. I stood in my bathing suit waiting for something to happen, shaking and twitching, with nowhere to run. A low guttural moan escaped from my throat, a nonsense word, mashing up “no, no, no” and “please, please, please.” My hands held each side of my head as if it would split apart if I let go.
A family from Kansas—mom, dad, and teenage son—stopped at the lookout point. I waved my hands: “Help! Please!” Good news: the dad was a cardiologist. He and the son disappeared down the trail while the mother offered me a can of root beer and invited me to sit in her car. I sipped the sugary drink, still shaking, my body absorbing the awful truth.
A highway patrolman cruised by in a black truck, and the mother jumped out of the car to stop him. He stuck his head out of the window, and she whispered something to him. He peered at me and then promised to send help.
Thick gray clouds rolled in out of nowhere. Rain splattered the car. The rain turned to hail. I flinched as each ice pellet tapped the window. And still I shook. It felt like my molars would fall out from the chattering. I could still my body for a few seconds by holding my breath, but as soon as I gasped for air, the shaking started again.
Overhead, helicopter blades whirred in a staccato rhythm, a giant metal bird gliding toward the beach. The mother winced and grabbed my hand. She knew what it meant. The golfers appeared at the head of the footpath. I bolted from the car, hopeful still, about news from the beach, even though the two in front shook their heads. No, he didn’t make it. No, he’s dead. No, there is no more hope.
“The children are coming up behind us.” Hope finally drained out of my body.
I could hear the hum of the blades even when there was nothing to see but the gray expanse of sky. The helicopter rose up over the mountain with a long rope hanging from its belly. At the end of the rope was a black body bag, swaying like a weighted tail. It sailed across the sky until it was only a tiny dot on the horizon.
12
After sharing all the awful details in one unbroken narrative, I felt lighter. I believed that taking up that space and letting my witnesses know what I experienced was all the healing I needed. Now my group knew about the Cure tape, David’s contact lenses, the ravenous ocean, my bare feet on the trail, the root beer, the rain, the helicopter.
The next week, as I walked from the elevator to the group room, I imagined that Dr. Rosen would allude to the good work I’d done around Hawaii the week before. It was a wish: I wanted a gold star for finally letting the group witness the awful images I carried around from that traumatic summer. But as I reached the waiting room, I felt something else, something seemingly unrelated: anxiety about Dr. Rosen’s upcoming vacation. He would be out for the next two weeks. Without these weekly sessions to anchor myself, I’d be pulled under by a wave of loneliness. Two weeks without group felt like two weeks without oxygen. Underneath the anxiety, I also felt angry. How could he abandon us for two whole weeks?
“Get on the floor and grab Carlos’s leg,” Dr. Rosen suggested fifteen minutes into the session when I shared how I felt about his upcoming absence. Grabbing Carlos’s leg was supposed to soothe and ground me. It did neither.
The group energy had been frenetic and unfocused from the first moment. We zipped from Carlos’s patient to Marty’s wedding planning to Rory’s sex life. Multiple side conversations broke out every time we switched topics, detracting from the main discussion. Dr. Rosen insisted it was our collective anxiety about not meeting for two weeks.
I wrapped my right arm around Carlos’s shin and picked at the carpet with my left hand as Marty discussed life post–cyanide stash, when suddenly, the urge to scream at the top of my lungs came over me—it crept slowly upward from my stomach through my sternum and to the edge of my throat. It was too strong to hold down—like a sneeze or an orgasm. It flew out of me and stopped all movement in the room. Aaaahhhhhhhhhhhh! It was from my deep-down guts and it shook the walls.
“What the fuck?” Carlos said, peering down from his chair.
“I don’t know what that was,” I said, embarrassed by my primal wail that seemed to have no narrative, no trigger, and no explanation.
Unfazed, Dr. Rosen said, “Sure you do.”
I heard the helicopter buzzing and felt my body constrict with panic. My mind zoomed to Hawaii, right above the waves and the black sand.
“Where do you think I’m going on vacation?”
“No idea.”
“You have a picture in your head—”
“ ‘Vacation’ is a word, not a picture.”
“Am I going skiing?”
“It’s July.”
“So where am I going?”
I blurted out, “Mexico. Fucking Playa del Carmen.”
“What’s in Mexico?”
“Pesos.” Dr. Rosen didn’t budge. The right answer blared in my head. “Beaches.”
He slapped his hands together with an ahhh. “Do you have any feelings about me going to the beach?”
Pieces of the Hawaii story had trickled out during the first year of group, leading up to the gush of the previous session. Every time the subject arose, Dr. Rosen prodded me to express my feelings about it, and I resisted. I defended against the emotions by insisting it wasn’t that big of a deal. He wasn’t my dad It was so long ago. It felt dramatic and somehow fake to wade into my feelings about Hawaii. I had so many excuses to scurry away from the subject. Plus, I didn’t want to talk about being alone in my bathing suit, running uphill to get help, my bloody leg, David’s vacant eyes, and the seawater pouring out of his face. None of the words I knew added up to the terror I felt, nor could they contain my grief.
And this: when we returned from Hawaii, Jenni and I started our freshman year at Ursuline Academy. Six weeks from that black sand beach where we watched David’s limp body sway under the helicopter’s belly, we put on our red-and-navy pleated uniform skirts and our penny loafers and shuffled from algebra and world history to PE and English. I sat in algebra watching Ms. Pawlowicz put complicated equations on the board and sat at lunch listening to other girls plan their outfits for the Michael Jackson concert. Who cares? We’re all going to die. None of this matters. Those first few months, half of me was still in Hawaii, waiting for David to cough and wake up so I could resume a normal teenage life that revolved around my crush on Joe Monico or whether to get bangs. After school I slept for hours, and my parents grew concerned about my emotional state. I saw them staring at me during dinner, when I rested my heavy head on my open palm, and in the afternoon when I couldn’t get off the couch. But we never talked about “the accident” in Hawaii. One evening, my parents knocked on my door and found me lying on my bed listening to the radio. They attempted small talk with me about homework and an upcoming home football game. I could tell from the way my mom gripped the doorknob and my dad leaned in against my dresser that they were working up to something substantive.
“Can you please do us a favor?” My mom stood in my doorway, her eyes, brown like mine, pleading in a way that was startling in its novelty.
“I guess. What is it?”
“Can you try to act normal? Just try it. For us. Would you try to act normal? All this moping around, it’s not good for you—”
“Okay.” I knew what she meant. Since Hawaii, I’d been drained of energy. There was the extra sleeping and the disinterest in all the new opportunities arising with the start of high school. All of it was passing me by. To them, my listlessness looked like childish “moping” that I could—and should—snap out of before I lost a whole year of my life. My parents firmly believed that I could make up my mind to be happy. I understand now that they were offering me the tools they relied on: willpower, optimism, and self-reliance. But those tools kept slipping out of my grasp, so I reached for the more reliable bingeing and purging to tamp down the emotions trying to surface. My parents and I wanted the same thing: for me to be normal. I longed for
a “normal me” more than they did, but none of us understood that I wasn’t “moping” and that the attempts to stuff my feelings might come at a high cost. I also heard an implied request that I bury Hawaii and all its terrifying images. Beneath my parents’ request thrummed a subtext: Don’t think about it, or you’ll get upset. Don’t get upset, or you’ll fall behind on the important work of being a normal teenage girl. Don’t talk about it, or you’ll upset yourself. Don’t talk about it, or you’ll upset me. I wanted to be a dutiful daughter, so I buried it the best I could.
* * *
“Not everyone gets to come home.” My voice cracked. Dr. Rosen asked if I could scream some more. I didn’t think I could, but then I bent over and rested my forehead on the stiff carpet and guttural moans from a previous decade rose up and spilled out of me in waves.
“What happened after the helicopter took David’s body away?” Dr. Rosen asked. I’d never talked about what happened after we left the beach. In my mind, the story ended as soon as the helicopter disappeared over the mountain with David’s body in the long black bag.
I started to shake as I had in the Kansas woman’s car.
“Were you cold in the police station?”
“The floor was cold under my bare feet and I didn’t have any of my clothes. One officer offered me a foamy yellow blanket, and a different officer led me to a private room so I could call my parents. They were at the movies with friends, so I told my brother what had happened.”
“What did you do when you left the police station?” Rory asked.
“Sebastian drove us back to the condo. We were over an hour away. Then he missed a turn, and we drove miles out of our way—on and on we drove down this two-lane highway. No one said a word. I sat by myself in the backseat and stared out the window at the stupid ocean and the brilliant Hawaiian sunset, all purples, pinks, and oranges. The Cure tape played over and over. When one side finished, there were several clicks, then the other side would start playing. It took several sides to get to the condo.”
Group Page 8
