Try Not to Breathe

by Jennifer R. Hubbard

  “I’m trying to help you,” I said, “but you don’t want to listen.”

  “Look, if there’s even a chance this person could give me some answers, I’m going to try it. That’s all I’m doing, is trying.”

  “Yeah, but be careful. If you want to believe, they’ll use that against you, get you to think—”

  “How do you know so much about it?”

  “I read this book a couple of years ago about a guy who exposed a bunch of fake psychics—”

  “You read a lot, don’t you.” It wasn’t a question. “Come out and join the rest of us in the real world for a change.”

  “You’re the one who’s not living in the real world.”

  She tried to stare me down then, the way she’d tried the other day in my basement. But I was much better than she was at freezing, keeping my eyes steady. Nicki’s mouth quivered and I knew she would blink first, and yet—

  And yet, I didn’t think I could talk her out of this. She was going no matter what I said. She had plunged into the waterfall and then into my house, and now she was going to plunge right through the wall between life and death, if she had her way. But I didn’t believe she would—that anyone could—punch through that barrier.

  “Is somebody going with you, at least?” I asked. “Angie?”

  “Angie’s at her grandmother’s all summer. I’ll be fine.”

  “You shouldn’t go alone. You don’t even know this woman.”

  Her eyebrows arched. “Well, who’s going to come with me? You?”

  I wound the towel around my hand. “No, I—”

  “Then shut up about it.” She turned and took one step away from me before I reached out and touched her arm with the towel.

  “Maybe I could come,” I said.

  “Why, so you can play watchdog?”

  “If you want to call it that. Yeah,” I said, dry mouthed. “I’ll play watchdog.”

  “Okay then. Tomorrow at one o’clock.”

  FOUR

  That night, I stood on the deck, searching for bats and fireflies. I hung over the deck railing to study the shadows under the porch, the blood pooling in my head.

  My mother’s voice cut into my daydreaming. “What are you doing, Ryan?”

  I lifted my head: a woozy rush. “Nothing.” My standard answer, designed to hold up my end of the unspoken conspiracy Dad and I had to keep her from getting an ulcer.

  She stood in the doorway, her face pinched. “I asked what you’re doing.”

  “Not trying to jump, if that’s what you’re worried about.” We were only one story up. Even I wasn’t stupid enough to try to kill myself from this height. At worst I’d jam an ankle.

  She flinched.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  If I’d said that in front of Dr. Briggs, she would have made my mother and me dissect it, pull apart everything we’d said to hunt down each hidden (and not-so-hidden) meaning. Why had I said it? What did my mother think about it? Why had she flinched? What did I think about her flinching? And in the days right after I’d gotten out of Patterson, Mom never would’ve let a statement like that pass. But now she changed the subject.

  “Your father will be home tomorrow—if those thunderstorms in New York don’t hold him up. Although I’d rather have them ground the planes than fly in that kind of weather. I don’t know if they’ll even let him take off from London if it’s such a mess here . . .”

  After a full analysis of the weather and air traffic on both sides of the Atlantic, she trailed off. “Don’t you want to come inside?” she asked.

  “Not yet.”

  She hesitated another minute before sliding the glass door shut. But she stood in the living room, waiting. I waited, too; she didn’t move. I hated being watched that way.

  Heat gathered in my leg muscles, compressed energy. I shook my legs out and realized they wanted to run. For weeks I’d thought about starting to run again, and I’d been on the verge of doing it, but something kept stopping me. But tonight all I felt around me was the summer air.

  When the mosquitoes needled my skin faster than I could slap them, I came inside. “Well,” Mom said brightly, “going to bed now?”

  “I guess.”

  She watched me climb the stairs. “Show’s over,” I mumbled, but not loud enough for her to hear.

  Upstairs in my room, I checked for messages. I would’ve loved to tell Val about Nicki’s plan and see if she thought the whole idea was as crazy as I did, but she wasn’t around.

  • • • • •

  Nicki had told me to come to her house. Kent would drive us into Seaton and drop us off. Not that Kent knew we were on a secret psychic mission to contact his dead father. He had something else to do in town, and Nicki had threatened to disembowel me if I told him what our appointment was for.

  The Thorntons lived down on Route 7, in a box of a house with a lawn that was more dirt than grass. Someone had once brought a pile of mulch or compost to the yard, as if planning a project, but the lump had sat there long enough to sprout weeds.

  Kent’s eyebrows rose when he saw me with Nicki, but he didn’t say anything. He jingled his keys and nodded at the car, inviting us to get in. Nicki got in front and fiddled with the radio. I sat in back. She turned up the music so loud that Kent couldn’t have talked to us if he wanted to. The road shimmered, seemed to melt.

  I tried to read tension or worry or hope or anything at all in the back of Nicki’s head, but I was clueless. I tried to picture the psychic, and I was clueless there, too. I imagined a woman in bright robes leaning over a crystal ball, but—did they really do that? Or was that just on TV?

  Seaton was the kind of place people meant when they said America was becoming one long series of chain stores. It had gas stations, fast-food restaurants, dry cleaners, big-box stores, and nothing you couldn’t find in a thousand other places. If you blacked out and woke up in Seaton, you’d have no idea where you were, or what part of the country you were in.

  Kent dropped us outside the post office. The August air rolled up off the road in blurry waves, scorching my lungs. I wished we were on my deck, listening to the cicadas drone. Or at the waterfall, with cold foam spilling over us.

  Nicki twined her fingers together and said, “Let’s go.” Her voice shook, and I thought about taking her hand to calm her down. But I didn’t see how I’d get my hand in between hers, to break up that nervous clench. I never touched people, anyway.

  We walked behind the post office and some warehouses. Empty plastic bags and food wrappers blew past our feet. The sidewalks were crumbling, weeds thrusting up through the cracks. The sun weighed on our shoulders; my shirt was wet already. Clear drops gathered on Nicki’s skin.

  I was curious about how this psychic would work, what she would say, whether I would catch her in any obvious tricks. “The main rule,” I said, “is that you don’t tell her anything. Let her tell you.”

  “I know! Give her a chance.”

  We came to a row of short fat brick houses penned behind chain-link fences, and Nicki began counting addresses. I wanted to ask her if the psychic was so gifted, why didn’t she predict the winning lottery number and move into a better neighborhood, but I bit my tongue. Anyway, I figured psychics must get that lottery question all the time; they probably had some canned answer for it.

  “This is it,” Nicki said, as a cheese-cracker wrapper brushed against her ankle. We walked up to the door of a brick house. She pressed the bell.

  “You okay?” I asked her.

  “Yes,” she snapped.

  • • • • •

  I’d been wrong about the robes and crystals. We didn’t get incense, a dark room, or eerie music in the background. Instead, a round little woman with glasses let us in. She reminded me of Jake’s grandmother, who used to visit him at Patterson. We stepped into a living room with twenty zillion china figurines lined up on shelves all over the walls. Snowmen, ballerinas, dogs, cats, horses, unicorns, flowers . . . My eyeballs rolled
, trying to take them all in.

  Nicki and I stood staring at the figurines (which stared back at us) while the psychic waited in front of two egg-colored couches that were totally overshadowed by the shelves. She didn’t try to speak to us yet. Apparently she’d learned that her guests needed figurine-acclimation time.

  “Wow,” Nicki said at last.

  “Do you like them?”

  “Um—sure. They’re cute.”

  “You’re Nicki,” the psychic said. Then she raised her eyebrows at me.

  I wanted to make her guess who I was, to test her powers, but Nicki said, “This is my friend Ryan.”

  “Welcome. Please, have a seat.”

  We sank into the giant, stale-smelling sofa cushions.

  “Thanks for meeting with me, Mrs. Hale. Or do you—what should I call you?” Nicki’s voice had gone up an octave, as if she’d grown younger since we’d walked in the door. Her hands squeezed each other.

  “Please, call me Andrea,” the psychic said.

  Andrea Hale. So she wasn’t called anything like Madame Zorelda. And she kept smiling that grandmotherly smile, as if she were about to offer us fresh-baked cookies instead of an audience with the dead.

  Nicki dug in the pocket of her shorts and peeled off sweaty bills. Money up front, of course.

  Andrea tucked the money into a drawer and sat on the other couch. “With whom do you wish to speak?”

  I spoke up then. “Shouldn’t you tell us that?”

  Andrea smiled. “There are many souls who might wish to speak with you. It will save time if I can focus on someone specific.”

  Even though I didn’t believe any of this for a minute, my skin prickled when she said that about souls wishing to speak with us. I couldn’t help picturing hordes of dead people massing at the gates. Maybe they would take over the figurines, and we’d have a storm of little china animals flying through the room.

  “My dad,” Nicki said. “His—his name was Philip Thornton.”

  Andrea nodded and closed her eyes.

  An old window air conditioner grumbled and clacked in the background. Nicki shivered beside me but it wasn’t from the A/C, because it must’ve been close to eighty in that stuffy room. I glanced up at the shelves, at all the black-dot staring eyes on the china figurines, and glanced away again.

  Andrea’s forehead wrinkled. Her lips worked. Nicki kept holding her breath, running out of air, and then gasping. I let my knee inch toward hers, not touching her, but close enough to remind her I was there.

  Andrea’s eyes stayed closed. A truck rumbled down the street, shaking the house. The china figurines rattled, watching us. I thought again about them coming to life. Maybe they stampeded through the house at night. Then I realized that if I kept thinking that way, I’d end up back at Patterson.

  “Philip is here,” Andrea said.

  • • • • •

  My eyes darted around the room, looking for a shadow, a mist, a stirring in the air. Nothing.

  Nicki exhaled. She blinked, tears gathering on her lashes, and I willed her not to believe so soon, not to jump into the pool without checking for water. She said, “Um—yes, does he—remember me?”

  Silence. Then Andrea smiled. “Yes, of course. You’re his daughter; he would never forget you.” She chuckled. “He’s laughing a little that you think he would forget—but underneath it he’s sad. Sad that you didn’t have more time together.”

  Nicki dug her nails into her palms, leaving purple marks. “Ask him why he did it.”

  A pause. “‘Why he did it,’” Andrea repeated.

  Yeah, I thought. Not many clues in that, are there, Andrea? Now what are you going to make up?

  “Yes,” Nicki said, her voice firm.

  Andrea’s voice faltered. “He doesn’t think—he can explain it. He wishes . . . It’s complicated, and he’s not sure you would understand . . .”

  “I don’t understand. That’s why I’m here.” Nicki drew one hand across her cheek, where the tears had spilled over.

  “He wants you to know he loves you.”

  “Yeah, I know that! I know that. I need to know why he—” I stepped on Nicki’s toe before she could give away any more clues. She glared at me. Her face had gone blotchy, her eyes pink. “I need to know why he did what he did.”

  Andrea kept wrinkling her forehead, as if she could squeeze an answer from the air by pure concentration. “He’s sorry,” she said.

  “That doesn’t tell me anything!” Nicki’s voice broke on the last word; the jagged edge of it seemed to cut me. I’d been wanting her to see how useless this was, to see that Andrea was a fake. But now I was willing Andrea to find Nicki’s father, or at least to come up with something convincing. I focused on Andrea’s face, trying to beam thought waves at her.

  “He—his voice isn’t clear now. Let me see if I can get him coming in stronger.”

  Yeah, you’d better, I thought. Come on, Andrea.

  The air conditioner clanked and groaned. Nicki sniffled. My legs twitched; I wanted to jump off this couch and run.

  “Daddy,” Nicki said.

  That’s when I opened my mouth.

  “Ask him if maybe he didn’t mean to go so far,” I said.

  Andrea hesitated.

  “Ask him if he—didn’t see any other way out at the time.”

  After a beat, Andrea nodded. “It’s something like that, he says.”

  Nicki sucked in her breath.

  “Like, maybe he didn’t think he could tell anyone else what was going on,” I added. How much longer would it take for Andrea to pick up her cue? Weren’t psychics supposed to be good at reading people?

  “He was wrapped up in the pain of the moment,” Andrea said, finally catching the huge softball I’d thrown her. “He didn’t see the future, the consequences.”

  I couldn’t seem to shut up, now that I’d started. “Ask him, did he just not know what else to do.”

  “He would go back and do it differently if he could.”

  Nicki watched us, her head swinging back and forth. “Oh my God,” she said.

  I’d overplayed, and I knew it. I’d talked too much, made the cue too obvious. But I knew there was something true in what I had said. Hey, maybe her father was speaking through me instead of Andrea. Wasn’t that what Nicki had wanted? Wasn’t that what she’d asked me for?

  • • • • •

  Nicki waited until we were out on the sidewalk again to pound my arm with her fist. “Are you happy now?”

  “What?”

  “Don’t act dumb.”

  “Nicki—”

  “So you were right, she was a fake. Does that make you feel better?” She kicked an empty beer can into the brick wall of a house.

  “What makes you say she was a fake?”

  “Oh, come on! It was so obvious. You fed her everything.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But I heard the lie in my own voice.

  “Were you making fun of me?”

  “No.”

  She sobbed. I sat her down on a low crumbling wall in front of a warehouse.

  “She was so bad I couldn’t even pretend to believe her.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I bet.”

  “No, I mean—I thought it would turn out like this, but I didn’t want it to. I wish you’d gotten what you wanted.”

  I let her wipe her face on my T-shirt sleeve. She turned runny pink eyes on me. “Why did you feed her that stuff, anyway?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did you think you were fooling me? I’m not stupid!”

  “I didn’t think it through. It just—came out.”

  “Now I’ll never know why he did it.”

  “He probably couldn’t tell you that even if he was right here.”

  She sniffled. “He could’ve left a note or something. Why didn’t he? God!”

  She rubbed my damp sleeve. I was thinking about why, and how complicated that ques
tion was, when she spoke again.

  “Did you write a note?”

  “What?”

  “Did you write a note?”

  The steamy weather wrung sweat out of me, but somehow my mouth was dry. “No.”

  “Why not? Why the hell not?” She got up and paced in a tight circle, kicked the wall I was sitting on.

  “Look, this isn’t about me.”

  “You made it about you, didn’t you? You sure as hell made it about you in there.” She pointed back at the psychic’s house.

  “I wanted you to get something out of going there. Andrea was flopping like a dying fish. I told you, I didn’t think it through.”

  “Yeah, you sure didn’t.” She wiped her face with the bottom of her T-shirt, giving me a flash of dark-blue bra. She didn’t seem to notice or care. “So you gave my father—excuse me, the imaginary ghost of my father—all your reasons.”

  “Who says they were my reasons?”

  She snorted. “What else would they be? You didn’t pull all that stuff out of nowhere.”

  Everything drained out of me then; I could hardly hold my head up. I bent over and rested my elbows on my knees. She frowned, turned away, and kicked a chunk of brick down the sidewalk. I didn’t let myself think about whether she was right, whether the words I’d put in Andrea’s mouth had been my own. After all, Nicki’s father couldn’t possibly have made the same mistakes I’d made, couldn’t have lugged around the same shame I carried. Maybe he’d felt what I’d felt—that bleak pit of numbness—but he hadn’t had an Amy Trillis or a Serena. He’d never hidden a pink sweater in his closet. He hadn’t done the things I’d done; I would bet on that.

  FIVE

  We had another half hour before Kent picked us up. Nicki bought a grape juice and I bought a Coke and we sat on a bench outside the post office, watching people run in and out. The corners of Nicki’s mouth turned purple from the juice, but the pink in her face and eyes was fading. She would look normal by the time Kent met us.

  I wanted to ask about her father, to know more about the person whose spirit we had tried to raise, but I didn’t want to set her off again now that she’d stopped crying. I couldn’t picture my own father not being around. Even though he traveled all the time, at least I knew he was somewhere on the planet, walking around and talking and thinking. Somewhere he was in a business meeting, pushing his glasses up his nose and smoothing his tie, or else he was sitting in a foreign restaurant clearing his throat and blinking the way he did when he had to eat food he didn’t like. Or maybe he was in an airport, checking baseball scores from his computer—he was supposedly coming home today. But if I wanted to hear his voice, all I needed was a phone. I didn’t need psychics to call him up.