by Meg Haston
I dream about the accident, only Josh isn’t there. I’m in the passenger seat, staring through the glass.
“You’re just like Mom, you know that?” When I look over, it’s Ashley sitting in the driver’s seat. Her face is puffy, painted purple and bronze and pink. War paint.
“What are you talking about? Fuck you.”
“Please. Like you don’t know.” She makes a wide right turn, swerving onto a deserted one-way street. “You think she just left, moved to Paris for no reason? Are you seriously that naïve?” Another turn, barreling onto the two-lane road that stretched through the dark like a thread, stringing nameless towns together. The Buick’s headlights like two white pearls, rolling fast.
“I don’t know why she left!” I screamed at the windshield, clawing at the ugly cloth seats like an animal. “Nobody tells me anything!”
And then we’re in the pool together, at night, our faces bobbing close. Under the water, my scar burns.
“My brother hurt me,” she whispers. Her words skip across the water like weightless pebbles.
“I know.” I glance up at the edge of the pool and Eden’s there, crouched over the surface like a bird hunting prey. She laughs and dips one toe into the water.
“Haven’t you ever wanted to be something . . . extraordinary?” she asks.
The Buick weaves in a seamless dance with the yellow line.
“You’re the same, Stevie. You’re just like Mom. A heartless slut.” Ashley sobs.
“Shut up, Josh. Shut the fuck up.”
The Buick weaves.
I scream. The whoosh of the car, airborne, a cheap aluminum toy.
Weird, I think.
And then the screaming begins.
I bolt upright in bed, shivering and sweat-soaked. My throat is dry. I lick my lips and press them together until I taste blood and it takes a few seconds to realize that the screams haven’t stopped, that they aren’t mine. My hand hits something soft. The one-eared bunny. I don’t remember stealing it. Not tonight.
“Ashley?” I croak. The clock says five something.
I trip out of bed and paw at the wall until the light comes on. Ashley’s bed is empty. My head is stuffed and thick and it’s hard to think so I stumble into the hall calling “whaaa” and following the screams. I pass Teagan on the hall phone, bellowing please again and again. She looks straight at me without seeing.
At the end of the hall, the bathroom door is open. Steam leaks out, smelling like puke and metal. Cate is crouched in the shower, the water still running, plastered slick to her skull. Cate is soaking wet, holding Ashley’s head in her lap. Rocking her. Cate is screaming something, but I can’t make it out. Her tube and nightshirt and ratty pink pajama pants are soaked in blood.
Jesus, there is so much blood. It runs like water.
The floor sways, and I bend at the waist, resting my hands on my knees. I taste bile.
“What did you do?” Cate screams. “What did you do?”
“What? What happened?” I should move. But I just stand there, holding the bunny while the smell of blood balloons up, pink steam rising.
Cate looks up at me, her face frozen, accusing. “Did you give her the razor? Did you—” The rest of the scream bleeds out of her, unrelenting.
And then I know: She’s talking to me, not Ashley. She’s talking to me.
The bathroom door slams against the wall. A team of nurses barges in, shoving me out of the way.
“Back to your rooms, girls.” A male nurse drags Cate from the shower. “Come on, honey. Let’s go.”
“No! Don’t you touch me!” Cate’s is the horror screech of a dying beast. It takes two nurses to hold her, one at her wrists and one at her ankles, and another to drag Ashley onto the pink tile floor that used to be white.
“Back to your room.” A nurse I’ve never seen before ushers me down the hall.
The hall phone is dead, hanging by its cord, nearly grazing the floor. The nurse guides me into my room. Outside the window, red lights are circling and the grounds are crawling.
“I’ll send someone to sit with you, but you absolutely must stay in your room until you hear otherwise. Do you understand?” the nurse asks.
I think I nod yes, because she closes the door behind me. Somehow I drop to my knees. The drawer beneath my bed is ajar, and I know without looking, but I look anyway, once, twice, again and again, raking through everything, but I know I won’t find it. The razor is gone.
The shrinks—all of them—arrive quickly, sweeping patients into deflated huddles in various places on the grounds: the villa, the houses, any of the cottages but Cottage Three. Shrink herds Cate and Teagan and me to the treatment team house. In the kitchen, breakfast is waiting on taupe-colored trays, along with two cups of supplement. No one looks at the food. Not even Shrink.
We sit on the very edge of the metal folding chairs, curled into ourselves in jeans and dirty T-shirts. I stuffed the pills from my drawer in my jeans pockets, and pulled on Josh’s sweater over my tank top. After this, I know they’ll scour the room for contraband. I’m thinking only of myself while Ashley’s lying on some chrome table, water still dripping from her lifeless corkscrew curls. That’s the kind of evil I am.
“I know that there is nothing I can say to make this any less traumatic for you all—for us all—right now.” Shrink’s voice is so low, I can hardly hear her. Her voice sounds bubbly, like she’s been crying.
I told you I was worried! I want to yell, but she didn’t do this. I was the one with the razor.
“In times like this, it’s incredibly important to stay grounded in the present moment.” No one’s listening, not even Shrink herself.
“Is she dead?” Teagan’s watery voice rises.
“As soon as I have more information, I’ll let you all know.”
I slip my hands under Josh’s sweatshirt, feel the reassuring ridges of the pills in my pockets. I don’t look at her. I don’t look at anyone. I couldn’t stand it, seeing Cate’s wet, red-eyed hatred or Teagan’s vacant stare. The three of us know: I killed her.
“Would you all take a deep, slow breath for me? In through your nose, and out through your mouth?” Shrink breathes a cartoon breath, but no one follows. It seems cruel, breathing that deep and big when Ashley can’t.
I should feel something, I think. I rattle through Shrink’s list of emotions: anger, sadness, shame. But they are nothing more than words.
Shrink’s phone rings, and everyone jumps.
“I should . . .” she says, as if any of us would stop her. She pulls her cell phone from her pocket and checks the screen. “I’ll be right back, girls.”
We sit in silence, Teagan sucking gobs of snot down her throat every few seconds. I say nothing, not a thing, because I deserve this quiet hell for as long as it lasts. I wait for the blame.
“I’m sorry,” Cate whispers.
My head snaps up. “What are you talking about?”
“I should never have given you the razor. I should have thrown it out. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Oh my god.” Her face shrivels.
“Who gave it to you?” Teagan asks her.
Cate shakes her head. “Doesn’t matter.”
“I didn’t know . . . I never showed it to her,” I say desperately. “I swear, okay?”
The other girls’ heads dip.
“I hid it in my underwear drawer, wrapped up tight. I don’t know how she—”
“Okay, Stevie. We get it. It’s not your fault.” Cate’s voice is glinting.
“It’s not anybody’s fault.” Teagan strokes the bald spot above her ear, rubs it almost forcefully, as if she’s trying to rub the memory from consciousness.
“I know,” Cate squeaks, shrill like metal on metal.
I shake my head. It’s making me feel worse, what they’re doing. I hate that they’re carving up the blame, each girl taking a bloody, pulsing piece for herself. It belongs to me, all of it.
Shrink returns, and clears her throat behind me. She re
sts her hand on my shoulder, and I whimper. “I just spoke with one of Ashley’s doctors. She’s alive. They’re . . . optimistic.”
My shoulders sag. “What does that mean, optimistic?”
“It means that she will live, most likely.”
Cate starts to sob, burying her face in Teagan’s shoulder. I stay stoic, unmoving. I should have known better. I thought I had changed, but I am still the girl who brings destruction wherever she goes. I am the girl who disappeared my mother and my brother and very nearly the only real friend I have ever had.
“Stevie?” Shrink’s voice, too kind. “Can I see you in the other room?”
“No. No. Just . . . I want to see her.” I slide my hands beneath Josh’s sweatshirt again, for reassurance. The pills are still there. My heart slows every time I touch them. “Can we go to the hospital?”
“Not today. I’m sorry.” She squeezes my shoulder.
“Then could I have my supplement, please?” I say without looking at her.
“Of course.” She disappears, then returns with the plastic cup of chalky chocolate milk.
“Thank you.”
“Stevie.” Shrink crouches down next to me. “Tell me what’s going on for you.”
I could sit here, say nothing, but that won’t do the trick. I have to play the game. Have to hold up the shiny black-and-white die for all to see before I cast it.
“I’m just really . . . shocked. Like, fidgety or something. I think I need to take a walk.”
“We can’t leave the house right now, Stevie. Later, perhaps.”
“Anna. Please.” I turn in my chair and find her eyes. My desperation isn’t contrived. I am desperate. I have to go, now. If I don’t go now, if I don’t do it now, I never will.
She searches my face.
“Just for a few minutes, and I’ll come back. I’ll go crazy in here if I have to stay. Please.”
Her pink mouth opens, and she closes it quickly.
“We can go with her, if you want,” Cate mumbles.
“No. I want to be alone.” I take an agonizing sip of supplement.
Shrink glances at the doorway, then back to me.
“You may walk to the riding ring and back. No detours. Got it?”
I nod. “Thanks. Thank you, Anna.” I feel like I should hug her or squeeze her hand or something, because the truth is she has done a good job and she deserves the recognition. She might even have saved me, if I weren’t so far gone by the time I got here.
“If you’re not back in ten minutes, I send Hannah on a golf cart.” It’s supposed to be a joke, but even she doesn’t smile.
“Deal,” I say.
Outside it feels the same as any other day. But it’s not any other day. I hold the supplement cup in one hand, and count the pills through my jeans pocket with the other. I don’t know if they will be enough, but they are my only chance.
I walk quickly toward the horses. This is all wrong, every bit of it. It’s supposed to be the Anniversary, not eight days before, and I’m supposed to have more time and I’m supposed to be sure that what I have is enough. For the past three hundred and fifty-seven days, I’ve pictured what it could be like: me, lying still between white sheets, a collection of bleached, hollow bones arranged in perfect formation. I would stare, wide-eyed at the ceiling and everything around me would stop: the noisy chatter in my brain, the merciless pounding of my heart. My last breath would be slow. My body would shut down dutifully, one organ after another after another until it all went dark, like fluorescent lights in a vacant room. I wouldn’t need pills. I could do it myself.
When I get to the ring, I scoop a handful of pills from one pocket and examine them. I deserve this, I tell myself. Do it. I picture Ashley in the shower, water running, blood flowing from the stripes on her arm.
Do it.
Mechanically, I toss my head back and pop the first handful into my mouth, chalk and plastic melting fast on my tongue. But they taste wrong in my mouth, and I realize: I don’t want this. I don’t.
After a few seconds I spit them out, all of them, a syrupy pink-red wad. I kick dirt over them. For the first time all morning, I feel something real: humiliation. One simple task, one crucial, simple task. And I can’t do it.
“Stevie. Stevie.” The squeak of sneakers on dirt, and then Shrink’s hand is on my back. “What are you doing?”
“Nothing. What are you doing here?” I kick more dirt.
“I shouldn’t have let you go,” she admits. “I wasn’t thinking. And then I got worried, so . . .” She looks me up and down, searching. “Everything okay?”
“No.” I shake my head. “I’m tired. I don’t think I can do this anymore,” I say, not entirely sure what this is.
She cups my face in her hands. I can feel her fingers, strangely cold, pressed against the side of my neck. My pulse throbs. She hugs me and I just stand there, pressed into her, stiff and embarrassed.
“I know you’re tired,” she says. “I know.”
day twenty-three
Saturday, July 26, 7:06 A.M.
“LET me go,” I beg Shrink, without knocking on her office door. “Please.” I stand in the threshold of her office, hands clasped, begging. I’m wearing a pair of god-awful ugly jeans that Shrink made me take from a closet in her office since I can’t fit in mine anymore. A kind of skinny-jean cemetery, where girls are supposed to leave their thin clothes to wither and die, until another girl can use them. I wonder about the girl who wore these before, and the girl before her. I wonder if they are alive. If they’re happy. If they think about food and numbers or remember the name of their horse.
Three days have passed since Ashley tried to die. For three days, I’ve been asking Shrink to take me to her. I’m close: I can feel it in the heavy pauses, in the pursing of her lips. She wants to give in.
Today, she stops writing and looks up from the chart in her lap and says: “I’m working on it, Stevie. It isn’t as simple as all that, okay?”
I slump in the doorway. “Come on. You could do it if you wanted to.”
She motions me inside, and I take a few steps and collapse onto the love seat. I hold one of the pillows in my lap. Pick at the metallic beads until we both hear one ping against the tile.
“Oops,” I say. “Sorry.”
She flips the chart over so I can’t see the name and slides it onto the chessboard side table. “I’ve put in a request for us to see Ashley during visiting hours this morning. I’m waiting to hear back from our clinical director.”
I bob my head. “That’s good, right?”
“Ultimately, she’ll be the one to make the final decision. I’ve pled your case because I’d like for you to be able to see your roommate, but I have to tell you, Stevie, the fact that you tried to run away less than a week ago . . .”
“I know.” I cut her off, irritated. God, I hate these ugly jeans.
“If she says no, it’s no.”
I nod my understanding.
She reaches for the closest paper crane, then decides against it and clasps her hands in her lap. “How is everything in Cottage Six?”
“Well, nobody’s tried to kill themselves yet, so . . .” Instantly I wish I could slurp the words from the air, swallow them like they never happened, but it doesn’t work that way. “Sorry,” I mumble.
She nods, a quick, gracious let’s move on. “I’ve been . . . concerned about you, Stevie, I have to say.”
“What do you mean?”
“I just mean that I was starting to feel like you were on the verge of a major shift, thinking about committing to your treatment plan.” She looks at me, questioningly.
“What do you want me to say?” I pinch the flimsy red bracelet.
“Am I correct on that, or did I misread you?”
I shrug. “I don’t know. I guess I was starting to feel . . . different or something.”
“I saw you moving,” she says. “Contributing in group, accessing your emotion, processing in our sessions together. And a
ll of these things are incredibly significant.”
“Okay.” I’m uncomfortable, and not just in these ridiculous jeans. How am I supposed to feel when she says these things? Ashamed that it’s taken so little time for me to abandon the goals I’ve had for nearly a year?
She wants me to feel proud, I can tell, but that’s not right. If anything, I’m more confused. I could still kill myself on the Anniversary, only five days away. But what I said to Shrink was real: I’m tired. I’m too tired. I don’t want to do this anymore, the planning, the readying myself for death. It’s exhausting, fighting my body this way. I want to lie down. Pull the covers up.
“I wonder about the impact of Ashley’s attempt. I wonder where that’s left you. How you’re feeling about treatment.”
I think about it for a while, but then my head starts to throb, so I say, “Mixed.”
“Mixed.”
“The Anniversary’s coming up, you know. Of Josh’s . . . the accident. It’s Thursday.”
“Yes. I do know.”
I slide down the love seat a little and prop the pillow on the arm of the love seat. Try to rest my head there, but it’s an awkward angle and it doesn’t feel right. But it was my choice to sit there, so I stay there for a while before I sit up again. “I keep thinking, like, it’s going to be this big event. Like it should be, you know?”
“What do you mean, event?”
“Like something big should happen on that day.”
“Something . . . like what?”
“I don’t know.”
She shifts in her chair. “Well, it’s an incredibly significant day. And you can make it what you need it to be. But what if that day feels, in some ways, like—”
“Any other day?” I finish. I don’t want to hear her say the words. “That’s what I’m scared of.”
“What would that mean, if Thursday felt like . . . a Thursday?”
“It would be fucked up.” I rest my hand on my throat. I can feel my pulse. “It would feel like I didn’t care or something. Like I wasn’t sorry. But I do care and I am sorry. I just don’t know—”
“It won’t feel like any other day, Stevie. I can promise you that.” She takes a long, slow breath. “I don’t know what it will feel like. You’ll know when you get there. But it won’t feel like any other day.”