Try Not to Breathe

by Jennifer R. Hubbard

  “i want to know what it’s like and why you did it . . .”

  She wanted to hear about the worst day of my life.

  I had talked about that day exactly twice: to the people in the emergency room right after it happened and to my Group at Patterson. When I was in the emergency room, I didn’t care what I said or whom I told. The second time was different; I’d grown a shell around that day and didn’t want to look inside it. But they cracked me open one day in Group, and I’d poured myself out onto the Patterson Hospital floor like a puddle of raw egg.

  It had taken Val and Jake hours to scrape me off that floor. I remembered them hovering, Jake’s hand on one of my shoulders and Val’s on the other. Their voices rambling, soothing, Val stopping once in a while to snap at anyone else who came too close. They both missed dinner that night because I couldn’t move and I asked them not to leave me.

  “Of course not, we’re not going anywhere,” Val had said.

  “We’re not hungry,” Jake added, though his stomach kept gurgling and groaning.

  “This floor is cold,” I said.

  “Do you want to get up? The aides will help us if you want.”

  “I don’t want anyone else to come near me.”

  “Okay,” Val said.

  “Just you guys.”

  “Okay.”

  “Though if you were smart, you’d both run the hell away from me.”

  “I hate to break it to you, Ryan, but you’re not even the sickest person in this hallway.”

  “I am so fucked up. Can you believe how fucked up I am?”

  “It’s okay, Ryan.”

  “There’s stuff you don’t even know.”

  Val squeezed my shoulder.

  “I can’t do anything right. Including killing myself. Don’t leave, okay?”

  “We won’t.”

  And so it went, for hours, me saying every stupid and pathetic thought that popped into my head, and saying them over and over. I don’t know why Val and Jake didn’t smack me to shut me up. I had no filter, no pride, no dignity. I was a raw nerve, a sniveling bundle of need.

  That was the last time I’d talked about it.

  I wished all Nicki had wanted was my doctor’s phone number. It would be so much easier to pass her off to the professionals. It would be so much easier if she weren’t asking for this chunk out of me—especially since I had no idea what she would do with it. I was sorry about her father, but did she really believe anything I told her could help?

  I sent her the easy reply: “I don’t like to talk about it.”

  She sent back: “please.” That word almost got me, those lowercase letters like she was whispering or pleading.

  • • • • •

  My mother had me bring her dinner upstairs, where she ate in front of her computer. She only had to report to her regular office once a week. Most of the time, she was home. Her job title was something like Branch Supervisor for Contracts Oversight. Whatever it meant, it required her to be plugged into her computer forty hours a week, sometimes more.

  “I’m sorry I can’t eat with you, but this project is on a tight deadline. I told them last week we were running behind, but—” She sighed. “Louisa Rossi refuses to stick to the schedule. Why don’t you eat up here, with me?”

  “I already ate.”

  “You did? Including your vegetables?”

  “Yeah.”

  She cut each baby carrot into quarters and chewed one bite at a time. I stood in the doorway, up on my toes and ready to bolt, while she ran through her checklist. I supposed I was lucky she didn’t outfit me with a camera or a tracking chip.

  “Did you take your medication this morning?”

  “Yes. You saw me.”

  Mom swiveled her chair toward me and dug her toes into the gray carpet. She wore a skirt, as if she were at a real office, but never shoes.

  She inspected my face, looking for telltale signs—of trouble, I supposed. It was part of our daily routine. She smiled, a smile crooked with hope and worry. Since my days at Patterson, my mother always seemed to be on the verge of tears when she smiled at me, so every time she did it was like another bar of iron sitting on my chest. I looked away and tried to breathe.

  “All right,” she said, releasing me.

  • • • • •

  I didn’t hear from Val until the next morning. The sight of her name on the screen sent an electric surge through me. As usual, she didn’t bother with hi-how-are-you but jumped right in: “I cut my hair.”

  Okay, maybe I would’ve preferred a message about how she couldn’t live without me, but it was a message and it was from her.

  “What’s it look like now?” I asked. The first thing I’d ever noticed about Val was her hair. When I met her, she had hair down to her shoulders on one side of her head, and down to her chin on the other. I figured it was a crazy person’s haircut, until I realized Val was one of the sanest people at Patterson. She’d cut her hair like that for fun, she said: to be unique, to be different. Who said hair had to be symmetrical, anyway?

  She sent me pictures: front and back. From the front I thought she’d cut it all to chin length, but in the back, a big triangular piece had been cut out. It looked like a very pointy-nosed shark had taken a bite out of her hair. I saved the pictures to look at again later.

  “My dad says it looks like my hair went through a giant ticket-puncher,” she wrote.

  “That’s what’s nice about it.”

  She sent me a laughing face.

  “What else is going on?” I asked.

  “Like what?”

  “Your family. Guys.” Sweat welled out of my skin when I wrote “guys.” I couldn’t help thinking of Amy Trillis whenever I talked to a girl. Not that Val would deliberately knock me down the way Amy had—at least I didn’t think so—but if Val liked someone else, it would be a knockdown whether she meant it that way or not.

  But Val answered, “Family’s same as always. Mom nagging. No time for guys.”

  I exhaled.

  “You?” she wrote.

  “No time for guys here either.”

  “Ha. Girlz? Cmon, gimme details. I will live vicariously thru your adventures!”

  My adventures—that was a laugh. “Nothing to tell.” But then I thought of Nicki—not as a girl girl, in the way Val meant, but because I couldn’t forget her last message.

  “There’s this girl,” I wrote.

  “Yesssssss . . . do tell . . .”

  “I found out her father killed himself, & she wants to talk to me about it.”

  “Does she know about you?”

  “The whole school knows about me.”

  Before Val could reply, I wrote: “She asked why I did it.”

  Since I’d left Patterson, nobody besides Dr. Briggs had ever asked me the questions Nicki had. At least, they’d never asked straight out. Sometimes people hinted, as if to say they wouldn’t mind hearing gory details if I felt like puking out a few. But nobody had asked about that day in the garage.

  Now I wrote, about Nicki, “What does she want from me, anyway?”

  And Val answered, “Maybe she just needs a friend.”

  • • • • •

  Val Ishihara knew about people needing friends. She was the first person I’d spoken to back at Patterson, other than the counselors. I’d been there maybe a week, and she talked to me every day. She always left an opening for me to answer, but if I didn’t, she went right on carrying her side of the conversation.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked her, when I finally began to speak. We were sitting in Patterson’s dayroom, where she leafed through stacks of stained sheet music, trying to organize the pages. “You seem too normal for this place.” Val had little tics: she picked at her nails and scalp, played with her hair, jiggled her foot. She ducked her head and talked to the floor when she got nervous. But she wasn’t like the kids who thought the government had planted spy devices in their brains. She didn’t curl up in a ball und
er her bed, the way I had done my first day.

  She laughed. “You should’ve seen me when I first got here. I was a walking anxiety attack. I could barely even make up my mind to go to the bathroom.”

  In Group she always talked about panic attacks, obsessive worry, getting stuck in repetitive movements. She’d pulled out her eyebrows and half her eyelashes one year in junior high. She’d bitten the skin around her fingernails, peeled it back to show the raw red underlayer, gnawed until she bled. If she wanted to cross the room but couldn’t decide whether to step first with her left foot or her right, she would stand frozen for hours. She came to Patterson when her anxious obsessions kept her from showering, eating, and even using the bathroom. That’s what she said. Watching her, I wasn’t sure I believed it.

  “Why?” I said. “I mean, why did you get that way in the first place?”

  She shrugged. “I’m only starting to figure it out. It’s never going to be like a math equation: a plus b equals anxiety attack; c minus d equals I’m cured.”

  “I know,” I said. “My mother’s been looking for the magic formula ever since I came here. She thinks she can find the Moment Where It All Went Wrong.”

  “And what are you looking for?”

  I could’ve said I didn’t know, or that I was looking for a way to die, or that I was looking to feel okay again—all of which were true, and all of which I’d told the counselors there. But I wanted to tell Val something different—just as true, but different. Keeping my eyes on her hands, on her bitten nails and calloused fingers, I said, “I used to want to fly.”

  “What, like a pilot? Fly a plane?”

  “No, not a plane.” You had to stay behind glass and metal when you flew a plane. “I mean, really fly.”

  The minute I said it, I felt like an idiot. She would think I wanted to be a bird or a superhero, both of which sounded exactly like I belonged here in a mental hospital. But she stopped shuffling pages and said, “That would be so cool.” She closed her eyes for a second, as if to feel the wind in her face.

  For months I’d lived behind what felt like a pane of glass, separated from the world, but the transparent shield began to crack then. Maybe it was my new meds kicking in, or maybe it was the way Val listened without judging whether what I said was what she expected me to say. But we stuck together after that. And when Jake arrived a few days later, looking as panic-frozen as I’d been when I first got there, we took him in, too.

  Only once did I see Val act like she belonged at Patterson. One day on our hall, she erupted. I never found out why. I was in the dayroom with Jake when we heard a crashing and banging in the hall. Jake hid under a chair—he was still at the point where he couldn’t handle any turbulence—but I stuck my head out the door and saw kids fleeing from Val. A plastic tray from the cafeteria lay on the floor, and I guessed she’d thrown it. The aides crept up to her, talking in low soothing voices, the way you’d talk to a wild animal. I knew they would drag her to the Quiet Room when they caught her.

  But she burst into tears and collapsed onto one of the orange-flowered couches in the hall. When the aides approached her, she held up a hand to ward them off. The rule was that if you weren’t being violent, if you weren’t damaging anything or anyone, you didn’t have to let people touch you. Some kids stared and some giggled and some ran. Some folded into their own world. I edged up to Val’s couch, expecting her to hold me off with that upraised hand, but she let me sit on the cushion, next to her head.

  I held my palm over her hair, but not touching. She didn’t flinch. I lowered my palm by millimeters, watching her. She sobbed as if her insides were shredding. I touched her shiny black hair, and she let me.

  She cried so hard it made my own throat hurt, a sound like metal scraping asphalt. It shook me to see Val like this, because she’d always seemed so together.

  All I did was pat her head. I didn’t know what else to do. I was ready to sit on that couch with her for a hundred years if I had to. And she cried until nothing else would come out.

  Later I asked why she had let me near her. “Because you were the only one who didn’t just want me to shut up,” she said.

  • • • • •

  “We used to talk every day,” I typed now, to Val. “I think I miss you.” In fact I knew I missed her, but it was hard enough to say it the way I had.

  “I miss you too, but you live there and I live here, so . . .”

  Yeah, there was the problem: the miles stretching out between us. “How’s your music going?” I typed, which set her off for a long time. I sat back and watched her words scroll by, loving every one of them, wanting to pluck them off the screen and put them in my mouth.

  • • • • •

  After I got off the computer with Val, I threw myself on my bed, thinking of that day I’d stroked her hair while she cried. And later, the time we’d stood together in the hall and she’d circled my wrist with her hand. I put my hand on my wrist, trying to feel what she’d felt, to call up the weight of her touch. A hot thread traveled from that spot up my arm, into my chest, down to my stomach, downward, spreading warmth the whole way.

  I sat up. I would’ve opened my window, but the A/C was on. I sat for a few minutes, backing away from the inner heat I’d raised. When my skin had cooled, I went downstairs.

  • • • • •

  I hiked out to the waterfall and stayed in it until the chill of the water made me shake. I came out positive I was turning purple. At least I’d brought a towel this time.

  Nicki showed up while I was rubbing my skin, trying to warm it.

  “Oh, hey,” I said. I stopped drying myself, startled at the sight of her, fumbling for the right thing to say.

  “I wanted to tell you—” she began, but my words stumbled over hers.

  “I’m sorry about your dad,” I said.

  Her mouth puckered; her face went pink. “I’m sorry about the message I sent you. I’m sorry if it was pushy.”

  “No, it’s . . .” I watched her balance on one leg, like a flamingo; she kept her eyes on the dirt. “It’s okay,” I said.

  “I shouldn’t have bothered you.”

  “It wasn’t—”

  “It’s just that I never had anyone to ask before. I was seven when my dad died, and everyone thought I was too young to talk about it. But then, later on, they all wanted to leave it alone and not drag up the past. So I read a couple of books and stuff, but they never told me what I wanted to know.” She raised her eyes, frost gray, to meet mine. “Anyway, I’ve figured out another way to find out about him.”

  I tugged on my wet shirt. “What’s that?”

  “I made an appointment down in Seaton.”

  “An appointment for what?”

  She stepped closer, close enough for me to catch the scent of oranges. She lowered her voice, as if the squirrels might be taking notes on us. “I found a psychic who talks to the dead. I’m going to see her tomorrow.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  Nicki shook her head.

  “But you know that stuff’s all crap, right?”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “Come on.” I almost snapped my towel at her. “Don’t go. It’s a waste.”

  “She’s supposed to be really good. My friend Angie went to see her last spring. Angie’s grandfather spoke through the psychic and talked about this dog they used to have that played Frisbee. There was no way the psychic could have known that.”

  Anybody could guess that a person had a dog. It wasn’t like the psychic had seen a three-headed unicorn. “Bull,” I said.

  “How can you say that? There has to be something to it.”

  “Why—just because people want there to be?”

  She frowned and pinched her lower lip. It was then I noticed she’d painted her nails royal purple. “So you only believe in what you can see, what’s right here, and that’s it?”

  “I believe in plenty of things I haven’t seen. I believe I have a liver and I’ve never
seen that.”

  She waved a hand, her nails a grape-colored blur. “I don’t mean that. Haven’t you ever had a dream that came true, or thought of someone the second before they called you, or—”

  “That’s coincidence.”

  She frowned, and I could almost see her brain searching, straining for another argument. “You already admitted there are things we can’t explain, right?”

  “Right, but you have to think about what makes the most sense. The simplest thing, the most likely explanation.” I twisted my towel. I was about to mention Occam’s razor when she cut me off.

  “But you don’t know for sure.”

  “I know that if dead people could speak, they’d talk about something a lot more important than dogs playing Frisbee.”

  “Says who? Maybe they can’t describe the afterlife in words we can understand. Maybe they’re caught between worlds when they talk to people who are still alive.”

  A week ago, I hadn’t even known this girl’s name, and now we were trading views on the afterlife. I couldn’t believe I was having a conversation that involved the words “caught between worlds.”

  “This ‘psychic’ is just going to feed you general bullshit that could apply to anyone. And then she’ll take your money—how much is she charging you, anyway?”

  “None of your damn business.”

  “Fine,” I said, “but I’d be real careful how much I paid her if I were you.”

  She put her hands on her hips. “You want to give me advice, but you don’t want to help me when it counts.”

  I swallowed and turned my head. I told myself she wasn’t my problem. But I heard the message she’d sent me, those small letters like a whisper in my brain, that “please.” I told myself I didn’t owe her anything. And yet, anytime someone told me they knew a person who’d killed himself, my stomach went heavy with guilt, as if I were personally responsible for all the suicides of the world. Why do you people put us through this? was the question I heard, whether they meant it that way or not.