by Kelly Harms
“But now,” I say, softer, with no intended audience but my own battered heart, “I can’t quit, can I? Now I have to go back. Now it’s all I have left.”
PAIGE
The likelihood of my going to prison for computer crimes is not as small as I would like. There are also some precedents in place that would not be in my favor in civil court. Nevertheless, I have bigger fish to fry. My sister has a long head start on me, and I’m going to have to break into a run. Luckily I am wearing running shoes.
The town of Copperidge is made up of a few larger commercial streets that run parallel to the front, and then the mountains rise up right out of the ski village, and my sister was last seen heading in that direction. I think of everything I know about mental illness as I run up the hill. The suicide rate in Colorado hovers around fourteen per hundred thousand people for young adults in Jessica’s age bracket. Six out of every thousand people attempt suicide, with women being one and a half times more likely to attempt than men but more than a third less likely to die in the attempt. Of the behaviors indicative of suicidal ideation, Jessica has displayed several, including a previous attempt, withdrawal from normal friends and family, depression, anxiety, shame, anger, and, perversely, suddenly feeling better for a while.
Though I guess I took care of that last one today.
Common ways for young people to die intentionally include by firearm, poison, and hanging. Blood-loss deaths have reduced comparatively in recent years, probably because the most popular suicide-instruction websites list it as a high-pain method. I wonder what happens when a person tries to reopen previously cut veins. I wonder what tool Jessica could find to do such a thing. I wonder how I could have even let her out of my sight, even once, even for three minutes.
As I am running and considering Jessica’s mind-set, weighing statistics and risk factors and opportunities, my own breathing is growing tight. Statistics aside, I am afraid for her. I am as afraid as I’ve ever been in my life. As afraid as I was when I was in Jessica’s shoes and I thought one little surprise or disappointment could make me lose my own tenuous control. Afraid as I was when I once, at my uncle’s house a week after the “accident,” passed his gun safe and then returned to it later that night to try the handle, to see if it was really locked.
There’s no way she could get a gun on a mountainside, is there? I wonder. There’s no method she could find to hang herself before I get to her?
The typically automatic function of my air intake is starting to fail me. And also, the air, while always thin up here, has become empty, like a vacuum. My lungs draw in but don’t expand. My heart gets nothing. I am still running, but instead of panting, I am only gasping occasionally, and the air I manage to push out seems unused. I force myself to exhale so I will inhale on the rebound, but the breaths are still coming back to me unusable.
I’m coming up on the last crossroad before the village now, and I’m trying to drag myself up the frontage road along the mountain. I see mountain bikers come down the hill, and they are plummeting at terrifying speeds. There is no question that without their pads and helmets, what they are doing would be just another way to orchestrate one’s own death. Could Jessica do something like that? Because of my lies and omissions? Could she throw herself down a cliff on the back of a bike? Would she even need the bike, if she could somehow get to the top of the mountain?
Where the hell has she gone?
But then I see her. I see her ponytail, and then the rest of her, just out of the corner of my eye. She’s maybe two hundred feet away. I shout for her, but there’s something squeaky about my voice, and I realize now that I’ve been holding my breath for so long I can’t speak. I’ve made so much fun of Karrin telling me to take deep breaths in every single moment of strife, but here I am, running after my sister, who may be planning to hurt herself, and she’s in real danger, and for some idiotic reason I’ve stopped breathing myself. In the years since my own suicide attempt, I have turned down the volume on so many feelings, quieted my mind of any potentially upsetting uncertainty, blocked the potential for hurt or rejection or heartbreak from ever entering my life. But now, when I have broken my sister’s heart, the thing that is going to do me in isn’t feeling too much or crying too hard. It’s going to be starving myself of the oxygen every human needs to survive.
I call again for my sister and try to pull my diaphragm down, try to drag some kind of wind into my lungs, but I can’t seem to breathe in without breathing out harder, faster. Jessica is slowing, but I am too. She’s standing in some sort of small line, maybe three people in front of her, waiting by a little building. I don’t know what the little building is.
I am sinking to my knees. Maybe if I can get some air, I think, but now I am really falling. Falling, some part of my brain whispers to me. Falling. In the 8 percent of suicides not caused by guns or ropes or pills, there’s blood loss, and there’s that one too: falling. My knees hit the ground, then my right shoulder. My vision tightens so I lose the far edges and then the sides, and soon I am looking at one thing and one thing only. That thing is my sister. She is first in line. And now she is in front. She is waiting for something to come, looking behind her, just as though she might see me. Has she seen me? Please, please, Jessica, look back and see me.
But it’s not me she’s waiting for. It’s something else. Something deadly. And as my vision blurs, I see her hop backward onto a swing, and the swing rises into the air, and then she is on the chairlift, moving high up into the sky, farther and farther up and away from me.
My last thought before everything goes dark is simply: Falling.
MIA
At first, in the echo of whatever just happened, I’m not sure what makes me walk toward the mountain. My car is parked a block away. I could get in it and drive back to Mom’s and cry for a week.
But I don’t get in my car. I feel like I’m not safe to drive. I’m shaking, after all, and my vision is blurry with tears. And I am angry—so incredibly angry—at the crazy hacker who just ruined everything, at Tucker, most of all at myself. If I had just told one truth two weeks ago, would things be different? What if I had told a thousand more truths, between when I lost Andy and when I lost Mike and today? Then maybe I wouldn’t have also lost myself.
But that’s not what I did, and now something has been set in motion. Something important, I realize as my heart rate begins to return to normal. I don’t know what it is, but I saw it in the eyes of the girl with the bandages. I know I need to find her, make sure she is ok. I know it with the kind of certainty I’ve come to recognize, in the quiet of a campfire or a field of lupine or in the pleasure of an undisturbed walk up a hill, as my own intuition.
It is a four-block walk to the mountain from the street I’m on, and I decide I need to cover it quickly. As I jog, I glance down each side street, wondering if Jessica got in a car, if the sister—Paige Miller, I remember—has found her already and if I will ever see either woman again.
My stomach lurches. If I can’t find them, then what?
I suppose I will just get a phone at one of the mall stores and delete all the things she posted. I could delete the dead-on impersonations of me along with the rant I myself have felt a million times but would never in a million years put up online. I could post that I came back from my honeymoon and found my account had been hacked and turn yet another underdog moment into a social media triumph.
It is, after all, entirely on-brand.
But to hell with my brand. I care about my mother, about Dewey and Azalea, and about camping and hammocks and dog bars and mountain sky. I care about fresh eggs with just-cut herbs and chèvre and the stories of beautiful births and running up Mount Wyler and walking back down. I care about someone I met once getting into a crow pose for the first time and the way a good deep breath in a loamy garden mends grieving hearts and microbiomes. I care about the people who followed me who are feeling hurt by what Paige posted, and I care about the people who felt seen by it too.
&nb
sp; Most of all I care about the girl with the bandages.
I do not, in even the longest list of things to care about, have room to add “my brand” anymore.
When I realize this, I run faster.
And then I stutter to a sudden stop just moments before I trip.
On a body.
It is the body of the woman who hacked my account. I bend down in a panic and feel her wrist, warm and with a pulse, and shout for help. A man—a good-looking guy that I saw in front of the Sleepy Bear earlier with his bike—runs up to me and says, “I called 911 for Paige, but Jessica, her sister, is missing.”
“Who are you?” I say.
“I’m Tim,” he says. “I’m a follower. Well, I have been since one o’clock today.”
I brush his comment away. “Never mind about Pictey. Is she ok?”
“Which one?” the stranger says. “Well, never mind, it doesn’t matter, because I don’t know if either one is ok. Paige, at least, has help on the way. The younger one, Jessica, she started a thread in your comments a couple weeks ago about taking her own life.”
“I know,” I tell him, heart in my throat. “I went looking because I was worried. I don’t know what happened back there, between the two of them, but it was bad.”
“I haven’t seen her since she ran off,” says Tim.
“Oh god,” I say. “She wouldn’t—I mean, not over an altercation between her hacker sister and an internet celebrity. Would she?”
Tim shrugs worriedly. “I’m not sure. I know she’s a big fan of yours.”
“Was,” I say. “She knows I’m a fraud now.”
He nods. “She’s probably feeling like everyone’s a fraud right about now,” he says.
More tears rise up in my eyes. “Do you have any idea where she might have gone?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “Last seen heading toward the mountain. I was hoping you might know. I think I should stay here with Paige. I need to wait for help to come.”
I look at this complete stranger and say, worry seeping through my words, “You’ll take care of her?” I have forgotten my anger. It seems inconsequential now.
He nods. “I certainly will. But I’m not going to report her for what she did, if that’s what you’re thinking. She’s very nice. She’s a good sister, and she isn’t a good fit for jail. No one even ever taught her how to ride a bike.”
I look at him blankly, adding him to the list of things that don’t make sense. “That is to say,” he continues, “I haven’t known her long, but it seems that for some reason her upbringing lacked key strategies for negotiating life’s challenges, and as a result she has a set of coping skills that may to others seem slightly maladaptive.”
It takes me two beats to figure out what he’s trying to tell me. “So her coping skills involve hacking my social media account and then tanking it?” I say.
“Yes,” he says. “Exactly.”
“Because she blames me for her sister’s . . .” I gesture to my own wrists, unsure how to refer to the bandages and what put them there.
“Yes,” Tim says, sparing me.
“I blame me,” I say. “I was useless when she asked for help. Less than useless.” I feel the wave of hot shame come up the back of my throat. “I told her, what, to ride out her feelings and adopt a pet? Tim, what have I done?”
He shrugs. “The best you knew how, I have to guess.”
Sullen, I nod. I know better now, but maybe it’s too late. “How are we going to find her?”
He frowns. “I have no idea. The only place she could have gone from here is . . .” He points up.
I look around, up the mountain. I see the chairlifts. My hand slaps over my mouth in fear. “No,” I say.
“You’ve got to find her,” he says.
I clutch at my satchel in panic. There’s no phone there. Who would I call anyway? “I’m going to go get my car and drive around the back way,” I say. “Maybe she’s just at the top, looking for her sister, or . . .” My voice drops off.
“Can you try her on Pictey? She might listen to you. Tell us where she’s gone,” says Tim.
I shake my head. “I have no phone. I threw it off a mountain because I lost my mind.”
Tim frowns but then smacks his forehead. “Just take this,” he says, and then he bends gently over Paige’s prone body and removes a large cell phone from her hip pocket. “You can use it to call for help.” He raises one of Paige’s hands to the phone and uses her limp finger to turn off the lock setting.
He looks me in the eyes. “Now you have what you need to make things right.”
I realize at once what he’s saying. I have a way to fix my account or wreak vengeance on Paige’s bank account or do any number of things with her unlocked phone. I only ask, “Can you call this phone when you get to the hospital?”
He nods. “I have her number from earlier.”
“Thank you,” I say.
He waves my thanks away. “Find Jessica.”
“I’ll find her,” I say, though I have no idea how. “I promise.”
And then, as a fire truck and ambulance arrive for Paige in a blare of sound, I think of something. Somewhere Jessica might be. I grab the phone, which feels so foreign in my hands after all this time without one, start calling the number last dialed, labeled Jessica Odanz (mobile), and break out into a run.
PAIGE
I wake up in the back of a strange car. It’s not a car. It’s an ambulance. I wake up in an ambulance, and I shout, “JESSICA,” but she’s not the one on the stretcher. I am. I feel confused.
“She’s with us,” says one EMT to another. “She’s trying to talk.”
“Move the mask,” says the other.
“What is it, Paige?”
“My sister is falling from the sky,” I say.
The EMT puts an oxygen mask back over my face. She looks up at her partner. “Should we give her a sedative?” I hear her ask.
A sedative sounds incredibly appealing right now. I would like nothing more than to have a nice bit of Valium with a Xanax chaser. I nod emphatically. Then I remember what I must do, and I shake my head no.
“She seems agitated.”
“I am agitated!” I say into the gummy plastic, and I pull the mask off myself this time. “My sister is in a chairlift.”
“Ma’am,” says the partner EMT, “your friend is riding in the front seat of the ambulance. He told us to tell you the police are searching for your sister on the mountain. And someone else.”
“Mia Bell,” says the lead.
I struggle to make this make sense. My heart is racing, my mouth dry. I had a panic attack, I piece together. I let down my sister, I ran after her, and then I saw her on the chairlift . . . “Is she dead?” I ask. I don’t want to know the answer, but I’m done turning in the opposite direction of real life.
The two EMTs look at each other. One of them shrugs.
“He didn’t say anything else.”
I sit up in the gurney.
“Whoa there,” says the woman. “Where do you think you’re headed, ma’am?”
“Take me back to where you found me. Better still, take me to the top of that ski hill. I need to get as high as possible.”
“You want us to drive to the top of Copperidge Mountain?” says the second EMT. He is amused. I feel anger build up in me. Raw and hot and scary. For the first time in years, I let it come.
“That’s what I said,” I say. “And that’s what I want you to do.”
“Ma’am,” says the woman.
“Stop calling me ma’am!” I hear myself shout. “This is not a grocery store. This is an ambulance. I have a name. My name is Paige Miller, and I am extremely upset!”
“We have to take you to the hospital. We can’t just drive you wherever you want to go.”
“Why not?” I ask. I swing my legs over the side of the gurney. “No, really, why? I want you to tell me!” I hear my voice getting louder, angrier. “Have I been arrested? Have I been instit
utionalized? If not, I want you to take me back to where you found me.”
“Lady,” says the other, and I snarl.
“It’s PAIGE MILLER.”
“Fine. Paige Miller. You’re going to the hospital. You gotta get your head checked. Your buddy says you were running and then stopped and went down hard. You might have had a heart attack. You might have a brain bleed.”
I consider this. “If it’s the former, then it’s water under the bridge,” I tell him. “If it’s the latter, they’ll just have to wait before they drill me open.” I feel around my pocket. “Where’s my phone?”
“That guy took it. He said to tell you he’ll get it back to you.”
“What guy? Tim?”
“Yes. Tim.”
“He has a name too. Pull over and let me talk to Tim.”
“You’re going to the hospital,” says the first EMT. “That’s it.”
“This is ridiculous. I’m being held against my will. This is tantamount to kidnapping.”
“Oh boy, here we go,” says the woman, who is putting the oxygen mask over my face and loading up a syringe.
“I hate the summer,” says the guy. “I prefer the broken legs to the loonies.”
That’s it. I stand, grab onto a vinyl strap, and pound on the partition between us and the driver. “STOP!” I shout.
“I think we’d better do the sedative now,” one of them says behind me.
I spin around. In any other universe, in any other lifetime, I would beg them to put me under. Anything to make this onslaught of anger and fear and guilt and panic stop. But I can’t do that anymore. That may have kept me alive up to now, but it won’t do a thing to help my sister. “Do not touch me,” I say in the scariest voice I have.
“You can’t be standing up in here, ma’am—Ms. Miller,” says the lead EMT. “It’s a fall risk.”
The word fall focuses me, takes all those powerful emotions that want to drown me and channels them into something I can use. “Let me make myself clear,” I tell them. “My sister is in danger. I am not going to the hospital until she is safe. You can take me back to where you found me, or you can let me out right here, but either way, I’m getting out of this ambulance.”