Try Not to Breathe

by Jennifer R. Hubbard

  “I just wanted it to make sense!”

  That cut off the breath in my throat. Her words lay in the middle of the room.

  I knew what she meant. I wasn’t ready to admit it yet, but I knew.

  “You want a glass of water?” My voice came out rough, and my hands shook, but I was cooling a little.

  “Yeah. Please.”

  She watched me cross the room, enter the kitchen, and stand over the sink. I poured her a glass of water and dropped in two ice cubes. She winced when they cracked.

  I came back and handed her the drink.

  “I couldn’t tell you about the waterfall,” she said. “I thought maybe you would get creeped out and wouldn’t meet me there anymore.” She sipped her water, still watching me. “And I have to go to the waterfall. Nobody understands that—not even Kent, who goes there all the time, too. He says it’s just to get high, but come on, he could get high plenty of other places.”

  I watched the ice cubes bump against each other in her drink. “How come you picked me to talk to, anyway? Was it—‘he’s just the psycho kid, so who cares what I tell him?’”

  “No! I picked you because—because I thought you would understand.” Her eyes were gray, flecked with black. They didn’t look away from me. “Not only because you tried the same thing he did, but because you were always at the waterfall. It’s like I was meant to meet you.”

  “Hey, according to your friends, you’re just ‘being nice to the local loser.’”

  “What friends? What are you talking about?”

  “That skinny girl with the long hair who lives down on Maybrook, the guy who hangs around with her and wears that skeleton T-shirt—”

  “Amanda and J.T.? They’re not my friends. We used to eat lunch together in eighth grade and they think they still know me, but they don’t.”

  Moisture dripped off the glass she held, welled up between her fingers. I focused on that, to keep from looking at her eyes again.

  “It’s the truth,” she said. “Do you think I would tell them about my dad? About Funworld? Do you think they know any of the stuff I’ve told you?”

  I wanted to believe her, but I couldn’t. My gut told me to trust her, but my brain, which was still unraveling her lies, thought that was crazy. I attacked on another front. “Why the fuck did we drive all over the state to talk to those psychics?”

  She took another drink and set the glass on the carpet. “You know why.”

  “No, I really don’t.”

  “I wanted to find my father. Like I told you.” She wiped her hand on her shorts. “Not that they had any answers. So I kept coming back to you.” Again the pleading look.

  I breathed in hard, hating that expression on her face, the belief she always had that I could speak for her father. That responsibility. More than anything, I could not handle that responsibility.

  “Bullshit,” I said.

  “Seriously. Whatever I’ve learned about my dad—at least, why he did what he did—I learned it from you.”

  I turned to the windows and faced the trees outside, the ferns, the sunlight filtered through green branches. The more I was tempted to forgive Nicki, the more it hurt. As if I were being pulled apart by inches, each cell stretched to its tearing point. Every alarm bell in my body clanged, warning me not to let her in again. With what she knew about me, she could rip my skin off in front of the neighborhood, spread my guts on the ground for them all to sneer at.

  “I don’t want to be your—suicide guru,” I said. “I’m sick of you.”

  “I don’t mean—”

  “Is that why you made out with me? Is that why you told me about Funworld? Just trying to squeeze more information out of me?” I turned back to her. “Well, fuck that. You got everything already.”

  She stood and took a step toward me, her foot knocking over the glass. Water spread across the carpet, but neither of us bothered with it. Instead she straightened her back and said, “I did not trick you. You know I didn’t. Maybe I was scared to tell you some of the real details, but all the important stuff was true. My father is dead, and he did kill himself, and I don’t know why. And everything I told you about Funworld was true.” She swallowed. “And I kissed you because I wanted to kiss you. Because I like you. Sometimes I think I could like you a lot, if you’d let me. And I can’t understand why that stupid Val didn’t have the brains to kiss you herself.”

  We were both breathing hard now, as if we’d been running on the trail or had just come up from under the pounding of the waterfall. I wanted to believe her and at the same time I didn’t want to trust her, didn’t want to risk it.

  And so I didn’t let up.

  “Why did you make up the part about the gun? About you and Matt finding him?”

  “Matt was there with Dad. But I told you it was me instead of Kent because I wished I was there.” Her face went blank for a second, then flushed, and she sobbed. Her sob made me shudder. “Some people think that’s sick, but I don’t mean I wanted to see him die. I wanted to be there, I wanted to be there for him—you know, like people go to the hospital and say good-bye when people die there?”

  She gasped, wiping her face on the back of her hand. “Nobody thinks that’s strange,” she said. “Everyone hangs over the hospital bed, and nobody thinks that’s strange.”

  I wanted to touch her, stop her crying, stroke her hair, but I didn’t. Or couldn’t. My right hand trembled, but that was as much as I could move.

  She sniffled, licked tears from her lips. And then she bent down to pick up the ice on the carpet.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, ice cubes clinking into the glass. “I’m sorry.”

  I inched over until I was right in front of her, the soggy rug squishing under my feet.

  “Nicki,” I said. I reached out, slowly. But she jumped up, grabbed my hand, and pulled me closer to her.

  I wrapped my arms around her. She pressed her face against my shirt, and her tears wet my shoulder. The air-conditioning hummed in the background, a white noise I usually didn’t even notice.

  Her sobs quieted to sniffles. “I guess you think I’m crazy,” she said.

  “I’m not one to judge.”

  We both laughed a little. She sighed and let me go.

  “Who’s Bruce Macauley?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “That’s who you said died at the waterfall. Did you make up that name?”

  She stared past me for a minute, then laughed. “I forgot I used that name. He was a kid I knew in second grade. He moved away that year—thank God. He used to kill frogs and squirrels, and he was always throwing rocks at my friends and me.”

  I brought towels from the kitchen, and we spread them over the spill on the living-room floor.

  Nicki followed me out onto the porch. The day had turned hot, the sun heavy on our faces and shoulders. I leaned against the porch railing, facing the trees. I felt her watching me and glanced over. “What?” I said.

  She shook her head, as if to say, Nothing. But she kept looking, studying me.

  It was like being seen for the first time. Whenever I was behind the glass wall, I felt invisible, even though glass is supposed to be transparent. I’d been invisible back in the library; nobody had noticed me stealing a sweater in broad fluorescent light. I’d been invisible at my new school, except for whatever attention the suicide rumors brought me. Having people know about you wasn’t the same thing as having them know you, though.

  But Nicki saw me.

  • • • • •

  “I’m never going to know what happened with my dad, am I?” she said, standing near me. She had a scent like wood and citrus and pine needles. I didn’t think she used perfume.

  “Probably not.”

  “Let me ask you something.” She rubbed the head of a nail on the porch railing.

  “What?”

  “Do you ever—still think about killing yourself?”

  “No,” I said automatically, because that’s what I alwa
ys said when Dr. Briggs asked me. It’s what I told my parents whenever they asked.

  Then I said, “Sometimes.” I paused. “Yeah, I do.”

  After all, who was I kidding? I’d been thinking about it less than an hour ago.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. When things get rough, it kind of flashes through my mind. I haven’t been serious about it for a long time, and I’m nowhere near doing it, but I think about it.”

  I had never admitted that to anyone. I was scared that if I told my parents or Dr. Briggs, they would lock me up again. My parents, for sure, would never trust me. They barely trusted me as it was. But it was always an option—an option I’d moved very far down the list, but which sat in my back pocket like the emergency bus token I used to carry around West Seaton. Just in case.

  Nicki touched my back, at first so lightly I could barely feel it. When I didn’t move, she let her hand rest there more solidly. I closed my eyes, savoring the sun on my skin. And Nicki’s touch, the way the two of us were separated only by the thin cotton of my shirt.

  • • • • •

  My father came home that night, and he fell asleep while we watched another baseball game. He didn’t even wake up in the eighth inning, when I called for a walk on a star batter. The batter hit a home run.

  “Told you to walk him,” I said to the TV, fishing the last of our popcorn out from among the hard unpopped nuggets. Dad snored on.

  He woke up at the top of the ninth, during a pitching change. “Who’s winning?”

  “Tie score.”

  “Oh.” He rubbed his face, which was gray with stubble, then took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Looks like I woke up just in time.”

  One of the beer commercials showed a guy jumping out of a plane. “I’m going to do that for my eighteenth birthday,” I said.

  Dad put his glasses back on. He had gotten a special kind of glass that didn’t reflect, so I could see his eyes as if the frames were empty, as if the lenses didn’t exist. “You’re still thinking about that?”

  “Yeah. I looked it up again—you have to be eighteen. So I’ll do it then.”

  “You’ll give your mother a heart attack.”

  “That won’t be all my fault.”

  I didn’t think before I said that. The words seemed to smack my dad’s face in slow motion. They surprised me, too.

  “What do you mean?” he said.

  “You don’t think she has problems?” I’d been thinking of myself as the sick one for so long that it was only now I let myself acknowledge how close to the edge my mother lived, tightly controlling everything, for fear of—what? I thought of her treadmilling in the middle of the night, chopping her food symmetrically. It wasn’t just about me and that night in the garage. She’d been this way ever since I could remember. “She’s kind of . . . tightly wound.” I couldn’t believe I had to explain. He must’ve noticed.

  He frowned. “Your mother is a worrier. She’s always been an anxious person.” And I hadn’t helped—I’d given her something to worry about, all right. “But she’s always been there for you. You’re the main reason she took a job where she could work from home.”

  “I thought it was so she could have quality time with this house.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. She did it for you.” His voice had a weird edge, rough like a serrated knife. “She thought—after Patterson—that I should travel less, spend more time here.” He paused, then said the next words so carefully I could almost hear him picking them, shaping them in his mind. “But she decided to work at home, and I thought it wouldn’t be good for us to smother you. I thought it would be better if my schedule went back to normal.”

  “You were right.” Not that I would’ve minded seeing my father more. But if they’d both spent the summer hovering over me, watching every breath I took, I probably would’ve been back in the hospital long before Jake.

  On the other hand, if Dad stayed home more, would Mom relax more? How come she had to be my full-time babysitter? Wouldn’t she like the chance to get away from here sometimes, to fly across the ocean herself?

  But I couldn’t imagine her relaxed, without the tension that made the air practically twang whenever she was in the room. I told Dad, “All I’m saying is, maybe she should spend less time worrying about me, and more time worrying about herself.”

  The game had come back on, the announcers deep into their soothing drone. The count was two and two.

  “Ryan, your mother has always been high-strung. But she never stockpiled enough drugs to kill herself. She never started a car in a closed garage.” He pushed his glasses higher on his nose. “And she’s not the only one who’s concerned about this skydiving idea. I think you should talk to Dr. Briggs about it. About—why you want to do it.”

  “Fine.” From the TV came a crack and a roar: base hit. “I know why I want to do it, though.”

  “Why?” He sounded hoarse, strangled, like he had a popcorn kernel stuck in his throat.

  “Because it would be like flying.” I turned back to the TV. Just before I punched up the volume on the remote, I added, “I’m gonna pull the cord, you know.”

  “What?” he said.

  “Nothing.” But I was pretty sure he’d heard me.

  TWENTY-TWO

  On Saturday Mom drove me back to Patterson. In the car, I said, “I know about Jake cutting his wrists.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “You could’ve told me.”

  Her knuckles paled on the steering wheel. I watched them while I waited for her answer.

  “That’s not an easy thing for me to talk about, Ryan,” she said. “It hits a little too close to home.”

  After a minute, I said, “I know, but I don’t see the point of pretending it didn’t happen.”

  “I’m not pretending. I would just rather we focused on more positive things. I don’t think it’s healthy to dwell on . . .”

  I waited for the end of that sentence, but all she did was sigh. Then she said, “I want you to have a good environment, good influences. If we can control that—”

  “But you can’t control it.”

  Again, her knuckles went yellow with strain.

  “You can’t control everything I hear and everyone I meet and everything that happens to me.”

  For a long time, I wasn’t sure that she’d heard me. But finally she laughed and said, under her breath, “That’s exactly what I hate.”

  • • • • •

  I sat with Jake in the dayroom, which had been painted a depressing dark mustard color. They’d given me a visitor’s badge at the front desk, and I kept having the strange feeling that I should take it off, that my old counselors would see me and ask who I was trying to fool. And yet I knew I didn’t belong there anymore.

  Jake’s arms were heavy with bandages. He picked at the tape, and I thought of the cuts underneath, the rough edges of skin sewn together, the hot red scabs that probably made his arms ache even now. I was glad he was alive, that his body had refused to bleed out.

  And I was glad it wasn’t me. Glad my arms were smooth and whole, that I could get up and walk out of this hospital anytime I wanted.

  “This new med makes my tongue weigh ten pounds,” he slurred. “Is it swelling up?” He stuck out his tongue.

  “Nah, it looks normal.”

  He worked his mouth, swallowed. I remembered the dry mouth I’d gotten from my prescription when I first went on it. “You want something to drink?” I asked.

  Val rushed in. “Oh my God, look at these walls. This is the ugliest color I’ve ever seen.” She kissed Jake’s cheek. “How are you?”

  “Shitty.”

  “Ryan’s mother and mine are downstairs. Is it okay if they come up and say hello? They want to see you.”

  He hesitated.

  “You don’t have to,” I said.

  “Good,” he said. “’Cause—I don’t really want to.”

  Val sat on his other side. T
here we were, the three of us in a row, just like the old days. Except everything was different now, and we all knew it.

  “Guess I flunk,” Jake said.

  “What?” Val asked.

  “We all graduated from this place, right? Except I’m the only one who had to come back.”

  “It’s not flunking,” she told him. “Don’t you dare think about it that way.”

  He turned his face away from her. “I wish I had a cheeseburger.”

  “I’ll get you one.” I stood up, relieved at the chance to get away from Val.

  Jake gave me half a smile. “With everything on it. Give me something to live for, man.”

  “It’s only a cheeseburger,” I said, “but I’ll do what I can.”

  I went down the block and got it, along with fries, and a large soda for his dry mouth. I fought off the mothers’ questions in the lobby. My mother didn’t kill me on sight, so I guessed that Dr. Ishihara hadn’t mentioned my visit to Val yet. I could imagine what Mom would do if she heard that Nicki had driven me to Brookfield.

  When I came back into the dayroom, Jake was bent over Val’s lap, hanging on her, while she stroked his hair. I hung back, watching, and the way he clawed at her made me wonder if maybe I hadn’t been the only one in love with Val all this time.

  Val noticed me first; then Jake lifted his head. “Hey, it’s my reason to live,” he said when he saw the bag in my hand.

  I crossed the room. “Well, it does smell pretty good.”

  He straightened up, wiped a hand across his face, and took the bag. Val patted his shoulder and said, “I’ll be right back.”

  As soon as she’d gone, he bit into a fry. “It wasn’t what it looked like,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “She doesn’t like me that way. She always liked you.”

  “Not enough,” I said. “She made that pretty clear last week.” It stung to admit that, but at least it no longer felt like my guts were being scraped out an inch at a time.

  He sighed and kept eating. Val came back and sat with us, the three of us quiet, the way we’d learned to be with each other months earlier. It was funny—I wouldn’t want to live at Patterson again, but for a few minutes I missed what we’d had when we all lived there, when we saw each other every day.