by Laura Tims
“I don’t understand. You wanted to see her last week.” He rubs his balding spot. It’s our first argument SMD, possibly ever. “If you don’t like her, why are you just saying so now?”
This is admittedly hard to explain.
“I’m not sure she’s helping,” I try.
“Give it more time, Sam.”
My least-favorite phrase. Time did nothing to help me, even when everyone promised it would.
“I know your brother and sister draw a lot of Dr. Brown’s attention,” Dad says, softening. “We can focus more on your problems next time. As a family. You’re allowed to talk outside your private sessions.”
I rarely spoke at Dr. Brown’s because Dad couldn’t think I still had problems that need focusing on.
“I’m pretty sure I don’t need therapy anymore.”
Unexpectedly his expression tautens.
“How can you say that when you just had to schedule an emergency appointment? Without your medication . . .”
He’s breaking two of our cardinal rules: pretend the antidepressants don’t exist, and never bring up the Major Depressive Episode.
“Just because they’re helping doesn’t mean they’re solving whatever made you need them in the first place,” he continues, echoing Dr. Brown. “You’re controlling the symptoms, not addressing the cause.”
I overheard Lena telling him this yesterday, about his junk food addiction. I can’t believe he’s recycling her self-help sayings to replace actual parenting.
“You’re going. I’m not letting this slide like the physical therapy,” he says, adopting a wobbly authority that apparently only applies to me, because it would have come in handy any of the million times Rex and Lena tore at each other’s throats.
“How can you pretend you know what’s right for my mental health when I have literally never talked to you about it—”
Then, in the living room, we both hear Lena scream.
I assume it’s something Rex did until I follow Dad to find Tito on the carpet in front of the TV, having a seizure. I cry out. Every part of his body strains as he twitches, his lips curled back from his teeth in a frozen snarl, froth spiking the fur on his muzzle. He looks like a wild animal.
I can never drag my gaze from Tito’s seizures.
Dad runs to the kitchen, filling a bowl of water for him when he wakes up. Rex sprints to the bathroom for a towel. Usually Lena times the seizure, but this time she just stares with her eyes wet and mouth open.
The seizures always end with the four of us hovering in rare silent unity, each of us counting Tito’s ragged breaths as his thrashing quiets. We’re all remembering what the vet said, about how Tito is old and a bad seizure could kill him.
I get a drowned feeling.
It takes five minutes for him to wake up. Dad strokes him so he knows he’s with family as he struggles blindly to stand, making hurt, bewildered sounds. We can’t explain to him what’s happening, that he’s okay.
Dad collapses on the couch and heaves a sigh. “I don’t know what happened. We increased his dosage just like the vet said. He hasn’t had a seizure in months.”
“I know what happened.” Rex is shaking with black fury. “Lena forgot to give him his meds. I asked her to do it yesterday morning while I was out.”
If she’d let him see her with her eyes wet and round like they were, I’m sure he’d go easy on her, but she’s already straightening defiantly. “It was just a seizure.”
Dad crosses his arms. “The medication really is important, Lena.”
She stiffens.
Rex takes Dad’s unexpected involvement like a shot. “Wrapping a goddamn pill in some goddamn cheese, how hard is that? She probably forgot on purpose. She hates him now; he reminds her of Mom, and she can’t deal with anything that reminds her of Mom—”
Her face whitens beneath the makeup. “Every day you come up with more ways to demonize me for trying to help this family. Now I’m a maniacal dog murderer! No wonder you’re so creative; you have the free time to sit around brainstorming.”
“At least I have a brain—”
Tito whimpers. Normally we lavish him with love after a seizure, but Lena and Rex are busy bickering, unloading new resentments they’ve stored in their arsenals. Dad holds up his hands but doesn’t stop them because he’s mastered the art of looking like he’s just about to do something until it blows over on its own, and who could blame him when he was just about to intervene?
Then Rex, who is flinging his arms around the way he does when he’s mad, whacks me in the shoulder, knocking over one of my crutches. He starts to apologize, but Lena dives like a hawk.
“Samantha, are you okay?” She repositions my crutch under my arm like I’m a doll before rounding triumphantly on Rex. “I don’t know why you think it’s appropriate to react so violently that you imperil your sister—”
“SHUT UP!” I explode. Everything in front of my eyes flashes white. “Both of you shut up!”
They look automatically at Dad, because those words couldn’t have come from their sister, who only ever steps in gently, who has a list of strategic conversation topics to distract them, whose muscles lock up in these situations because what if, eventually, they turn on her?
Tito whines again and nudges Rex, who ignores him because he’s glaring at Lena, like See what you did?
I want to take out every weapon I’ve saved and detonate them all in their faces.
“Why is it that you two getting your daily chance to scream at each other is so fucking important that you don’t realize there are people and a dog in this room who don’t want to hear it?”
Lena frowns sideways at Dad and Rex as if to say Be quiet, I’ll handle this. I am the one who handles. “I understand that things have been hard for you, Samantha,” she says in a cajoling, tantrum-in-the-grocery-store kind of way.
“Right!” I cackle at the ceiling. “I’m only complaining because things have been hard for me! Obviously it’s unrelated to anything you did wrong!”
If I have one get-out-of-jail-free card left from the accident, I’m going to cash it in with the worst crimes I’m capable of.
She blinks several times. “Samantha, I want you to know that—”
“I want you to know that I’m tired of hearing what you want me to know! If you listened for once instead of lecturing, you’d realize that most of your advice isn’t right for me at all!”
“I want you to know that I forgive you for this outburst—”
“Don’t you dare forgive me! You freak out at Rex when he talks to you like this.”
“She does freak out at me,” says Rex delightedly.
Dad’s palms are fully open and all the way up to his shoulders.
“Well, you need more patience.” She’s determined not to let her therapist facade crack. “You should understand that I understand how hard—”
“How could you understand when I haven’t told you anything? And why would I tell you anything when you don’t listen?”
“Listen to what? You’ve never even tried to talk to me!” She’s finally getting pissed, too, and it energizes me. “You never talk to me! When I ask how you are, you just say, ‘Fine’!”
“We were fine before you came back—well, maybe not fine, but not getting worse! Then you show up and rip apart our house and our memories even though you’re the only one who needed them gone, because Rex is right and you can’t handle anything that reminds you of Mom! You act like you’re a saint for coming back when you probably just couldn’t deal with living on your own.”
The words come out like I’m punching something blindly.
“You can resent me if you want, but you need me.” Her chin is quivering but she doesn’t cry, and the monster in me is glad, because her tears would kill it and it likes being alive.
“You need me to need you, but I don’t,” I snarl. “I don’t need you behaving like I’m some helpless infant.”
“I told you not to treat her like she
’s disabled,” says Rex, jumping in gleefully.
I whirl on him. “I am disabled!”
His mouth snaps shut, but I’m not done.
“You need to grow up and deal with the fact that just because I can do some stuff doesn’t mean I can do everything we used to, even if it makes you feel bad, because pretending it didn’t happen doesn’t stop it from being a thing. It just is.”
He shrinks back, but why should it be sugarcoated for him when it can never be sugarcoated for me?
“But with physical therapy . . .” Dad is almost inaudible. “People can heal up better than the doctors expect. I read about this boy in the New York Times. . . .”
“No! Amazing! The New York Times?”
Tito flees to the kitchen, which is so devastating that I start yelling louder.
“The doctors said I’d never walk without assistance. It’s ridiculous that I had to accept that there’s no miracle fix before you could. You can’t make me go back because you haven’t acted like a parent since Mom died, and you can’t start out of nowhere. Those two walk all over you, so don’t complain when I do, too.”
I scowl fiercely at all of them, but they don’t say a word. They’re watching me in terror. I pant into the silence while a slow sickness settles in my stomach.
The problem with screaming everything on your mind is that it feels really good when you’re saying it, but it’s like being drunk. Afterward you have to deal with the hangover and the people you pissed off. I’d shut off the entire world if it meant I didn’t have to, but I haven’t been able to do that since I met Eliot.
So instead I run outside and text him to please pick me up as fast as he can.
He doesn’t press me for details when I tell him I fought with my family, though Eliot loves the details.
He doesn’t even argue when I tell him what I want to do. All he says when we get to his house is “Are you sure now is the right time?”
“Yes,” I bark.
Anger is the extra shove I need.
And I’m 5 percent less scared with Eliot here, which will have to be enough.
We walk inside and go directly to the living room. I set my notebook down on the coffee table, empty page open next to my pen, except my leg isn’t hurting bad enough to shatter glass.
“I think I have to walk without the crutches. That’s what I did the first time.”
“Why hurt yourself? Just wait until the next time it gets sore by itself.”
It melts me a little that he doesn’t want me to hurt when he has no idea what hurt means.
“It has to be now,” I say. “When I’m already in pain, I’m too afraid.”
I have to make it inevitable. If I keep putting it off, ready will never come.
Eliot goes upstairs and carries down armfuls of blankets and pillows, spreading them on the floor in front of me. “In case you fall,” he explains. “I stripped Gabriel’s bed.”
I stare at the cushioned floor. The question I ask myself now before I do anything, my barometer for life, is Will this hurt? And everything does. Getting up in the morning, or talking to Kendra, or lying to Dad that school is fine.
But I can’t not do anything because it might hurt. It will hurt. And I have to do it anyway.
Eliot clears his throat at the moment the silence reaches maximum pressure. “You said my presence would help, but surely I have to do something.”
“You don’t.”
There’s a struggle in his expression. “I don’t want to let you down,” he explains, rubbing his brow like the right words are written there in Braille. “I don’t want you to be wrong about . . . my existence being a good thing.”
I melt more. “Just—say nice things, even if you privately think it’s bullshit. Don’t be honest. You’re saying it for me, not you.”
“How could that possibly help?” he snorts, but then he shuts his eyes briefly and stands up straighter. “What sort of thing should I say?”
“You can do it,” I suggest.
“You can do it.”
“You’ll be okay.”
“You’ll be okay. . . .”
“It’s just pain, nobody’s—” Nobody’s about to get hit by a car. Nobody’s dying. This pain won’t be permanent like the other pain was permanent.
“You seem pretty capable of saying it yourself. Are you sure you need me?”
I nod. “I also privately think it’s bullshit, but it’s easier to believe if I think someone else does.”
“Okay,” he says, his voice steely. “Then you should know that I don’t, in fact, privately think it’s bullshit. I’ve spent more time thinking about who you are than anything else recently, and you’re someone who always does the right thing, even if it’s hard. If you know it’s the right thing, you can do this.”
I still privately think that’s bullshit, but if he believes it, maybe I’m wrong. Or maybe he’s just giving me the chance to make it true.
“I’m sorry I’m not better at this,” he says steadily.
“You are really good at this,” I tell him.
I’ve taken thousands of steps in my life, the ease of which I never appreciated, but all that matters are the steps I need to take next. Two is all I need. I can do two steps. Hopefully where I’m going is worth how bad they feel.
I pitch forward. My leg’s the wrong length, but my body remembers the habit, and my other leg swings forward to match it. I take a whole unnecessary extra step before I fall, and it turns out we didn’t need the cushions, because Eliot catches me.
I am feeling this pain because my ancestors needed a warning that walking into the campfire was a bad idea. But there’s no way to walk out of this fire, no matter how loudly the pain screams Get away!
The anxiety is the same, a shrill alarm ordering me to escape from the car, but there’s no car. Nothing there. Nothing.
“Sam? Are you okay?”
“No, but that’s the point.”
“I hate this,” he says with sudden passion. He helps me to the couch, where my notebook is waiting.
I stop telling myself there’s nothing there. I let it be there.
The car ride was full of lasts I didn’t realize were lasts until later. Last time I’d see her alive, last time my leg would be smooth. When you don’t know something is happening for the last time, you don’t savor it.
“Mom!” I cry, and it’s the last time I’ll ever call anyone that name.
The other car passes through the invisible threshold of time when there’s no longer enough. It’s called the event horizon, when it’s too late to escape the pull of a black hole. But even after the event horizon, your body is still demanding with every cell to get away, an earthquake-tsunami-hurricane-wildfire RUN, but you can’t, and it’s a Can’t. This is what it means to be alive and about to die, to have God himself bellowing that you do the impossible.
Except I don’t die. And neither does that voice. I hear doom in my bones even when I’m safe, because my body has learned that any pain means death, and I must be warned. But I can’t escape an imaginary death, so I can’t escape the warning. The only way to block it out is to block out everything.
At the last second, the other driver finally seems to realize what’s happening. I get a clear view of them frantically twisting the wheel, and I recognize them.
But then there’s an incredible tearing apart of everything, a noise so loud I swallow it more than hear it.
That can’t be my leg, opened up, red and pink and white instead of the color of my skin. That can’t be Mom, those raw unraveled shapes.
Mom, did you get out of the way when God told you to?
The colors and shapes are starting to tell a story now, and it’s the story of the end, and how I won’t be winning any more points in lacrosse, and how Rex won’t be getting a present for his birthday.
The shimmering glass throws sunlight into my eyes, and with it comes the pain.
I can’t get away from it, can’t not see it, can’t not feel it, ca
n’t process it, can’t take it apart and figure out what’s going on. All I can do is hyperfocus on the blinding light until it blurs the world into white blankness, where everything is still torn to pieces but the edges aren’t making me bleed.
“Sam?” Eliot is begging.
There’s something slicing inside me. There’s no room around it for my lungs. Sadness is too soft a word for this storm of knives.
“Can you hear me?” Eliot reaches out but stops with his hand inches away, like it met a force field. But it’s his force field, not mine. I want him to wrap his arms around me and hold me together so I don’t come apart from all these cuts.
I’m crying with my whole body. “This is the trade-off for being alive when she died.”
His fingers shake in midair, and he closes his hand into a fist.
What Dr. Brown didn’t get is that understanding your pain doesn’t fix it. Knowing who hit us doesn’t change the fact that they did, and I can’t think about that knowledge right now; I have to bury it even if I’m aware it’s unhealthy, because it’s still the only option that helps.
“I feel terrible.” Eliot’s voice breaks. “Why do I feel terrible?”
That’s how it is when you care about someone, Eliot. You get to feel all their pain.
He battles the agonized thing in his expression until finally he wins. He pulls me into him with a single jagged movement, his heart pounding over my heart, and I press my forehead into his collarbone until it hurts.
“I can’t do this. I can’t feel this. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.”
His hands ball against my spine. “Remember that you’re physically fine. Biologically speaking, this won’t kill you.”
Then that must mean there’s more than one way to die. “It’s the—most horrible—”
I want Mom back so I can get to know her. I was supposed to have enough time.
“It’s just a feeling. You’re bigger than a feeling.”
“I’m not.” My voice twists into a howl, and he holds me tighter. “I can’t.”
But I don’t have a choice.
I leave Dad a voice mail telling him I’m sleeping over at Kendra’s. Our fight seems so far away now, but I’m still relieved when he doesn’t pick up.