“If you ever want to talk about—”
“I don’t,” I said, and she’d left me alone after that. Maybe she assumed I was still angry about the child support. Which I was, but it was a suspended anger that hung around the periphery but for right now felt unreachable. I didn’t care about my father or my grandparents. When finally I had to go home that day, Mrs. Nakamura saying gently that surely my mother missed me, I felt the absence of my friends like a sickness. I couldn’t sleep that night.
On the fourth day, finally, Brandon called to say we were allowed to go see him. Some of my friends’ parents—Grace’s, mostly—spent a long time debating whether we should be allowed to go by ourselves, or whether they should come, but eventually they softened, and Brandon drove us. We were quiet on the way there, and I leaned my head back against the headrest and closed my eyes. I was viscerally, shatteringly nervous, cold all over and with a sick thrumming in my whole chest. Since we’d heard, I hadn’t been able to shake the fear that Brandon’s father was wrong—maybe there was a blood clot lurking in Jason’s lungs, an infection lying in wait—and I had lived in terror of my phone ringing; at night I would wake up with the horrible certainty something awful had happened, that the way I was feeling was a sign. And now we were going to see him, and as much as I’d been desperate to be with him, I could feel already how it was never going to be enough. What would we say to him? What would I say? All this time we’d been waiting, all the things I wanted to say had been crescendoing inside me, rising to a din. But we could hardly burst in and say Why did you do it, Jason? I couldn’t stand in front of his hospital bed and look him in the eye and demand Why weren’t we enough to stop you?
In the parking lot, we were jostled violently going over a speed bump. My eyes flew open. Brandon was driving too fast.
“Slow down,” Sunny snapped. She clutched the armrest so hard her knuckles turned white, and when we pitched forward again on the next speed bump she made a gasping, choking sound and grabbed at my arms.
“You know what my dad told me once?” Brandon said. “He said the spinal cord has the same consistency as toothpaste.”
I shut my eyes against the image. Sunny said, “That’s disgusting.”
“That’s why you can’t move someone after an injury, because if anything touches that cord, it’s not springy—you know, it doesn’t go back to how it’s supposed to be. God,” he said, “I just keep thinking about how it’s like toothpaste and—”
“Stop the car, Brandon,” Sunny said suddenly, urgently.
“We’re almost—”
“Brandon, stop.”
He slammed on the brakes just in time for her to fling open the door and retch onto the asphalt, her chest heaving. I stroked her back. She sat hunched for a few minutes, then she sat up and closed her eyes and leaned back against the seat. “Okay,” she said, “park.”
Inside we walked down the hallway, square white linoleum tiles and a low ceiling, fluorescent lighting. Our footsteps echoed around us, and there was a hum of medical noise: beeping and thrumming. The flickering of lights overhead and the lack of ventilation inside were blurring my vision slightly, dulling the edges so that even when I focused nothing quite held.
At the ICU we had to be buzzed in. My heart was pounding, and I tried desperately to arrange all the words screaming around in my head into something I could possibly say to him, and then there was no more time to think about it because Sunny had pushed open the heavy wooden door to his room and we were there, and there he was.
The first thing I noticed was that so many things in his room were clear: bags of fluid, the tubes of the IV inserted into the back of his hand, and I think I saw those things first because I couldn’t look right at him, the same way you can’t stare into the sun. There was a tube in his chest, too, clear and rubbery and thick, and when I saw it my esophagus revolted and I gagged. I turned away, ashamed, and then, finally, I made myself look. His face was bruised and puffy, and there was an ugliness to it. All the same, though, seeing him—some small screeching corner in my mind went quiet at last.
Jason lifted his hand a few inches off the mattress in a small wave. When he breathed, it made a wheezing sound. He coughed and then winced and pressed on his chest with his thumb. It wasn’t a large room, and it was empty aside from Jason. Were his parents not here with him? They were making him wait here alone?
“You guys shouldn’t have come,” he muttered, and him saying that—the rejection of it—would play over and over in my mind for weeks. “I told my parents to tell you not to come.”
“Of course we came,” Brandon said. “We would’ve come the second we heard if your parents had let us.” He closed his eyes and pressed against them with his thumb and forefinger. His shoulders were shaking. Grace reached out and took his hand—I stared at their hands there, twined together that way—and she leaned against him.
“You should have called us,” Sunny said. “We would have done anything, Jason. We would have done anything at all.”
Jason said, “I know.”
Later, I’d read that of all the people who’ve jumped from that same gap in the guardrails, fewer than thirty have survived. There were a few short articles about Jason in the news, none with his name, but they were easy to find with the right keywords. In one of them, Jason’s survival was described as miraculous—miraculous that he managed to right himself so he absorbed the force of his fall feetfirst, miraculous that he didn’t die on impact, miraculous that there was a coast guard boat near enough to yank him out of the water, to lay him on the painted concrete floor of the boat and pile heavy felted blankets on top of him. Miraculous that the paramedics arrived when they did to treat his collapsed lung, miraculous that when he went into shock, that alone didn’t kill him.
I remember reading that story and how when I put it down my body went numb and my mind went blank, like it was protecting me from knowing any more, from having to think or revisit or argue. It was protecting me, I think, from having to defend to some faceless reporter what it had felt like to see him there, to look at him battered and damaged that way, to understand what had happened to him and how none of us were going to be the same from then on. Whatever it felt like in that room, it didn’t feel like a miracle.
Jason opened his eyes again. The left half of his face was scraped, and his head was encased in a plasticky apparatus that looked vaguely gladiatorial. The sheet was only half covering his chest, and beneath it his skin was bruised deeply, as though someone had dipped a thumb in fingerpaint to smudge rough streaks of charcoal and blue and puce. I watched his chest rise and fall.
“Where are your parents?” Grace said, as though she’d read my mind.
“They’re here. They went to go get something to eat in the cafeteria.”
“Oh,” Grace said, and I could tell she was blinking back tears, and then none of us knew what else to say.
Jason shifted his legs slightly in the bed and grimaced, and for a few seconds the electronic beeping of his heart sped up and then slowed again. I watched the monitor on his IV pole. I was acutely aware that still I’d said nothing to him—I felt that lack as a hollow in the pit of my stomach—but everything I could think to say was so tremendously small.
We stood for a while, the thin, high-pitched beeping of the monitor and the starchy rustling of Jason’s sheets the only sounds. I cleared my throat, then wished I hadn’t. I trained my eyes elsewhere in the room—on the whiteboard on the wall with YOUR NURSE TODAY IS ANDREA CHONG written on it, the bag of fluid labeled HYDROMORPHONE—instead of on Jason.
“Are you in a lot of pain?” Brandon said.
“What do you fucking think?” He mumbled it, though—the words were sharp, but his tone was blurry and faded. Later, Brandon would tell me his father had explained to him that dilaudid makes you loopy, and he would say that Jason wasn’t really himself. It was supposed to be comforting, I think. It wasn’t.
He looked at me then. And I was so exposed in that moment, like
he could see all my inadequacies, all the things I couldn’t say—how if he’d thought we shouldn’t come see him here, I’d done nothing to prove him wrong; I was unneeded. I said, “Jason, what happened?”
But then the door to the room opened. Jason’s parents came in through the curtain, his mother holding a paper cup of water, and then a step behind them was Evelyn. All of them looked exhausted. It was the first time I’d seen Evelyn without any makeup on, and she looked like a blurred version of herself. She didn’t acknowledge me. I wondered if she would. I wondered whether she’d said anything to Jason about me calling her.
“Hello, hello,” his mother said, “thank you for coming. Hello.”
Jason’s father peered at me. I never knew whether he recognized me, if he remembered that Brandon and I had been at his house that day, if it would have made a difference to him either way.
“It’s okay, Jason okay now,” he said, and he patted my shoulder. “All okay now,” he repeated, and dropped his arm. He stared helplessly at Jason there in the bed. “Next year he go to Berkeley, huh? And put all this behind him. Next year, much better.”
My heart was pounding. There were words all tangled up inside my throat, waiting to be loosened. This is your fault is what I wanted to say, and I wanted to scream it at him. He would have been all right if not for you.
Later, I’d learn that Mr. Tsou stayed awake all night sitting by Jason’s side, that every time Jason caught his breath in pain his father wept, that when he thought Jason was sleeping he told Mrs. Tsou it should’ve been him instead in the hospital bed. I don’t know if it would’ve mattered to me then to know that. I like to think it wouldn’t have changed anything, that I understood then all the shortcomings of remorse and how impotent it is against the past. I like to think I recognized that you don’t have to tell yourself things are fine to make it easier on another person, and that you don’t have to turn your heart toward men who are suffering when they’ve brought it on themselves.
But probably that isn’t true of me. After all, I would, at that point, have forgiven my own father everything in exchange for something as small as a phone call.
“Your nurse is coming back,” Evelyn said to Jason. “Your friends should probably go.”
I wanted him to say something to us with her there—something that would prove to her that we belonged, something to make it so she couldn’t fence us off from him the way it felt like she’d already mentally done, as though we didn’t matter. But he didn’t; he was slipping back into sleep, and he mumbled something unintelligible.
“Thank you for coming,” his mother said. “He is very tired. He need to rest. Thank you for coming. Evelyn say he need to see his friends. He is very happy to see you.” At the door, she lowered her voice.
“This is private family matter,” she said. She tried to smile, and then she reached out and grabbed my hand. I let her, because I didn’t know what else to do. “Don’t tell everyone, please, okay? This is family matter. Thank you for coming to see him. He will be okay now that you see him.”
* * *
That night at home I woke up in that porous middle-of-the-night dark because I couldn’t breathe. My lungs were nets, the oxygen pouring through them no matter how much I gasped for air, and my heart was sputtering in my chest so I could feel suddenly how incredibly fragile it was. I could feel how it was about to slip out of rhythm and how it could end everything in a single instant.
I couldn’t draw enough air to scream for help, and I dragged myself, mostly crawling, down the hall. My mother took me to the emergency room, driving thirty over the speed limit and praying frantically aloud. I didn’t have my phone, and all I could think was that I wouldn’t get to tell my friends goodbye.
At the hospital, they drew blood and ran EKGs on my heart. Afterward, the doctor came in, a Filipino man in his fifties who carried his clipboard with both hands. He sat down and told us my tests had been normal, which was, I think, supposed to be reassuring, and then asked if I’d been stressed or anxious.
“Their school—” my mother said. “It’s very stressful. Other children have—struggled. As a parent, you worry—”
The doctor nodded sympathetically. I’d had a panic attack, he said, and I should exercise and make sure I got sufficient sleep.
We drove back home. The sky had started to lighten, the day rushing toward us before we were ready, and we were both exhausted. I was sick and afraid, my body a stranger to me.
“I hope you know,” my mother said, when we passed by the nature preserve on Arguello, “that you can always talk to me.”
I said nothing. The sun flickered a peekaboo through the row of redwoods we went by.
“About anything,” my mother said. Her eyes were wet. “Anything at all.”
At home after the hospital, I went back to bed. I woke up disoriented hours later because someone was in my room.
It was my mother. I squinted at her through mostly closed eyes, and she didn’t see me. She was arranging something on my nightstand, and when she stepped back I could see what it was, all set on a tray: a cup of hot peppermint tea, a bowl of jook with cilantro and green onions on top, a vase with roses from the bush by our walkway. She fussed with it, arranging it carefully, and then smoothed the blankets over me and laid her hand gently, so gently, on my hair. I pretended I was asleep.
JASON WAS, everyone said repeatedly, lucky. He had broken three ribs and his collarbone, for which he’d had surgery his second day in the hospital, he had significant bruising, and he’d lost some blood, for which he’d been given a transfusion. But those were, all told, considered minor injuries weighted against what could have been, and after ten days in the hospital, his arm still in a sling, he was back home. We heard not from Jason (I had been faithfully messaging him every day, but I’d never heard back) but from Brandon, who’d heard from his father, who had gone to see Jason’s parents at the hospital.
When winter break ended and I went back to school—we all went back to school, even though it seemed impossible—without him, everyone had heard somehow. That first day back, I was staring into my locker, trying to remember what I needed and why it mattered, when Annique Chang and Harish Desai came up to me. Annique looked like she’d been crying.
“Beth, I can’t believe it,” she said. “I had no idea Jason was struggling.”
“Is there anything we can do?” Harish said. “Can we all send him a card or something? Or set up a GoFundMe?”
It felt like being plunged underwater without an oxygen tank—how desperate I was to swim back to the safety of our group, where I wouldn’t have to fumble for the right way to explain how awful it would be for them to make Jason a GoFundMe because my friends would instinctively understand.
“Um,” I said, “I don’t think—”
I couldn’t make it through the sentence before my voice gave out, and then I was crying.
“Oh, Beth,” Annique said. Her eyes flooded. And I was moved by that but also, maybe unfairly, angry—this was our tragedy; it wasn’t hers.
“Aw, you’re a good friend,” Harish said, patting me on the back, his eyes concerned. “Are you going to be okay? It’s good you have Sunny and them.”
Everyone was talking about him. And far more intensely than after Homecoming, too, a situation that was probably close to Jason’s personal hell. Harish, who was Instagram-famous mostly for being hot and well dressed, filmed himself and a bunch of other people talking about mental health and then posted it all as a series of Insta stories. Teachers urged us in class to make appointments with the guidance counselor if we needed to talk. And rumors swirled about why: he’d overdosed on drugs, he’d run away from home, he hadn’t gotten in anywhere for early decision. Knowing they were false somehow didn’t help; I felt each of them as its own emergency, maybe because we didn’t know, actually, what exactly had happened, or why. And besides that, Jason was in the hospital still, and I could feel each of the miles between us like a knife wound.
There
was a new tightness in my throat that had followed me everywhere ever since my night at the hospital, which terrified me because that was what before had bloomed overnight into the panic attack. In class I felt trapped if I had to sit somewhere far away from the door or if the teacher had a strict bathroom policy, and I would run through scenarios in my head—in AP Calc, for instance, what would Thea Rogel, who sat next to me, do if I suddenly slumped over in my chair?
The worst thing, though, would be for something to happen when I was with my friends. I hadn’t told them about the hospital. Every time I imagined saying it aloud, speaking it into reexistence, there was that same heaviness on my chest and that same cold torrent of fear. But also, it would be too much to ask of them to deal with right now. At night sometimes I would read about infections that could set in after surgeries, bad reactions to blood transfusions, and I had nightmares about the phone ringing again, the hospital calling, although if something happened they wouldn’t call me; disaster could be rising right now. We had not passed through a crisis; we were inside it.
The rest of the world felt fake. The things that showed up in my email—credit card statement notifications, college spam, the B & B reservation my mother made for Asheville—were like postcards from a stranger’s life.
We skipped Wednesday breakfast for the first time in years, because it didn’t feel right without Jason. In BAYS, Mr. Irving asked if I would act as first chair while he was out. It could’ve seemed cold, like a replacement, but Mr. Irving’s eyes were pained when he spoke to me, and when I talked about it with my friends we understood he meant it more as holding space for Jason, as something I could do for him. And we were grateful for that, not least because it pointed to a future when Jason would return.
But the truth was that since Christmas I’d barely picked up my violin at home. It was a little better at BAYS when it wasn’t just me and there was more purpose in togetherness, but even still I felt sometimes that in being there I was wasting myself. Because I was here, in rehearsal, day after day, while I found myself unable to do even the smallest thing for Jason, throwing myself at the altar of something so intangible and so needless and so dangerous as sound.
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