R.I.P. Eliza Hart

by Alyssa Sheinmel

  There were circles under my eyes, visible beneath my tan. I bought cover-up for the first time, but the effort of brushing the creamy flesh-colored liquid on my skin felt enormous.

  I printed the photo in my dorm room while Arden and Erin slept. I would be home again, back in Menlo Park in a few days, attending an event to celebrate my uncle’s November win before he got sworn in in late January. I took the photo home with me on Friday and added it to the growing collage in my bedroom. I couldn’t stop pasting things to the wall. The collage reminded me that I had the power to hurt living creatures, things that had lived in peace for longer than I ever would.

  I thought it would make me feel more alive, having that kind of power over something so enormous.

  But instead, I found myself thinking: If I’m capable of irreparably damaging a tree that had lived on this earth for a century, imagine what I could do to myself.

  My right hand shook when I wrote the word Twins on the back of the photograph. Both my hands shook constantly by then. I could barely paint my nails anymore. I told Erin and Arden it was too much caffeine, and they believed me. Why shouldn’t they?

  My hands weren’t the only things that were shaking by then: My breaths were shallow; my heartbeats felt unsteady.

  How much longer would I be able to keep up the facade? If I waited too long, everyone would know. And I mean everyone. If only I’d had the good sense to be unpopular. But popularity was part of the lie, part of being normal.

  It wasn’t my mother’s shouts that finally drove Mack away.

  You’re dangerous for my daughter.

  Eliza shouldn’t be with a boy like you.

  When she said those things, my mom didn’t even know that Mack was a high school dropout who cut up trees so he could make enough money to spend the rest of his time surfing.

  But she could tell just by looking at him that he was nothing like us.

  Nothing like the safe boys at Ventana Ranch who were destined for Ivy League colleges,

  who would go on to work on Wall Street or to found the newest tech start-up,

  who wore socks with their shoes and never drove barefoot.

  But none of that was why my mother thought Mack was dangerous.

  My mother cared because Mack was intense. She was terrified of what an intense relationship would do to her already-damaged daughter.

  She didn’t want me wasting any of my very limited energy.

  She was scared of Mack for the same reasons I’d been scared of him. Mack had more emotion in him than we were used to seeing in a healthy man.

  After my mother told him to leave, Mack said I could come live with him in Capitola. He said we could use all the money we’d earned to get me the help I needed, and he shouted that if that wasn’t enough, he’d sell his surfboard,

  his Jet Ski,

  he’d rip into a thousand more trees if he had to.

  Standing in our driveway on Christmas Eve, Mack begged me to leave with him.

  I said no.

  I looked at the sky. It was nearly midnight. In the houses around us, children were probably struggling to stay awake, hoping to hear Santa’s reindeer clip-clopping on their rooftops.

  The children were nestled all snug in their beds, while visions of sugarplums danced in their heads.

  I’d never believed in Santa Claus. I’d never believed in magic.

  There was no magic in the house where I grew up.

  Mack stomped his feet and threw out his arms in frustration. It was so cold that I could see his breath coming in shallow puffs, and he reminded me of a racehorse champing at the bit.

  I told him my mother would never let me go to therapy. Said she would hate me if I shared the family secrets with some stranger, even one who was bound by doctor-patient confidentiality.

  There were things I hadn’t even told Mack.

  He knew about my dad, but he didn’t know about my dad’s mom, who’d self-medicated with alcohol until cirrhosis set in.

  Mack didn’t know that my uncle—the same one who’d been elected to Congress—had been to rehab three times and still wasn’t sober. (Even I wasn’t supposed to know about that.)

  Mack didn’t know that depression doesn’t always make you sad. Sometimes it just makes you numb.

  Mack didn’t know that this wasn’t my first bout with darkness. He didn’t know that halfway through sophomore year, my mother saved my life.

  I’d taken a bottle of Valium from Dad’s medicine cabinet, then tiptoed across our backyard. I thought I would take the pills and then slip into the pool. I knew that if the drugs put me to sleep instead of killing me, chances were I’d drown.

  But my mother found me first. She stuck her own fingers down my throat until I threw up. I told her I was just trying to get some sleep. I’m still not sure I wasn’t telling the truth.

  She cried. I told her I was sorry. I told her I wouldn’t always be so much trouble.

  I didn’t want to be so much trouble.

  I think my mother let me go to Ventana Ranch after that because living in Big Sur would keep me far away from the pills in Dad’s medicine cabinet.

  I read somewhere that forty thousand Americans kill themselves each year, and nearly half a million attempt suicide seriously enough to require medical attention.

  Seriously enough. Suicide requires effort. You have to work at it to get it right.

  Or get it wrong, depending on how you’re looking at it.

  I also read that about a third of people who try to kill themselves will try again within a year.

  I read about something called “spontaneous suicide,” when someone decides, for no apparent reason, that today is the day. Or anyway, for no reason apparent to the living people who’ve been left behind.

  Here I am, just another statistic.

  At Christmas, when I turned down Mack’s offers to help, he looked as though I slapped him. I was seventeen years old, he insisted. Why was I letting my mother run my life?

  When I didn’t answer, his face shifted from anger into something else. Disappointment.

  Do you really care about what people think as much as she does?

  I didn’t answer. The conversation had already exhausted me. I just wanted to go back inside, lie down, and not sleep for yet another night.

  Mack stormed off, his boots pounding against the pavement of our driveway.

  It took him a few more months to break up with me, but he finally did it, the week before I died.

  He probably thought he was helping. Tough love and all that. Like kicking an addict out of the house for refusing to go to rehab. Like a person could be addicted to feeling the way I felt. You can’t be addicted to feeling nothing at all.

  Or maybe you can. I don’t remember.

  He snuck onto campus—he could climb the fence easily when he wasn’t weighed down by a burl—when everyone else was sleeping. We fought, and he lost because I refused to do what he said. Or maybe I lost, because in the end, he left me alone.

  This time, he didn’t yell. This time, his voice barely went above a whisper. That’s how I knew he’d reached his breaking point. That’s how I knew it was the end.

  He said: You’re going to die if you keep this up.

  Like I said, he saw it coming before I did. His muscles were tensed so tight he shook when he spoke.

  He was so alive.

  I threw my ID at his back. A parting gift. He looked up at me as he knelt to lift it off the ground. His face was twisted like he was in pain.

  Memory is funny. You don’t get to choose which moments you remember and which ones you forget. I’d trade every memory of fighting with Mack for just one more memory of spending time with my dad in between his bouts of darkness and mania and medication.

  I remember exactly how things ended between Mack and me. You’d think it would get fuzzier now, but it hasn’t. It hurts just as much as anything else.

  Sometimes I think that I must have believed I would survive the fall. Or maybe I was
testing myself: If I survived, then I deserved to live, like how they used to nearly drown witches to determine their innocence.

  Sometimes I believe that I didn’t really intend to die.

  But then why did I wear my mother’s dress?

  I read once about a kind of altitude sickness that affects mountain climbers on major ascents like Everest and Kilimanjaro. It makes them stop walking, even though they know if they don’t keep moving they will likely die of hypothermia. They know, but their brains aren’t getting enough oxygen for them to care.

  It’s as good an explanation as any for the last months of my life.

  “I’m freezing,” I say as Sam turns onto the freeway.

  Sam turns up the heat and reaches into the backseat, never taking his eyes off the road. “Here.” He tosses me a rumpled sweatshirt. I pull it up to my neck like a blanket.

  I can still see Mack’s shoulders shaking when he cried, the look on his face when I handed him the picture. I curl my hands into fists beneath my chin and press my lips together, remembering the feel of Sam’s mouth against mine.

  Will anyone ever love me the way Mack loved Eliza?

  Oh my God, what’s wrong with me? All this time, with everything I’ve learned, and I’m still jealous of a dead girl.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone look at someone the way Mack looked at Mrs. Hart,” Sam says suddenly. “He blamed her for Eliza’s death.” He doesn’t add, Not the other way around. He doesn’t have to.

  I nod. “He said she cared more about how things looked than how they actually were.”

  That’s why Mack went to the police. He wanted them to know the way things really were.

  Eliza Hart wasn’t murdered.

  Mack didn’t hurt her.

  Mack loved her.

  Mack wanted to save her.

  I wonder what it was like to grow up in that house. To be seven years old and already know about suicide.

  To be seven years old and already believe you’re not supposed to talk about it.

  To be seven years old and already know how to keep such an enormous secret.

  Is it any wonder Eliza kept her own struggles secret? That’s what she’d been taught to do. She even kept secrets she didn’t have to, like continuing to hide Mack from her friends after she’d introduced him to her parents.

  I tried to keep my claustrophobia a secret for just a few months, and I failed—Sam knew about it all along.

  I lean my head against the window and watch the rain drip down the glass. Even now, I can’t imagine Eliza jumping off that cliff. I can only picture her tripping and falling. Losing her footing. Getting hit with a freakishly strong breeze.

  How can we know for sure? Like Mrs. Hart said, Eliza didn’t leave a note. Maybe her illness wasn’t really that bad: It didn’t keep her from making friends, from kissing boys, from being popular and doing all the other things I never got to do.

  Mack’s words echo through my brain: How can you still be in denial now?

  And: Eliza didn’t think she was worth anything in the end.

  How could Eliza—beautiful, bright, sociable—believe she was worthless? Her whole life was ahead of her. She could have done anything.

  Her brain played an even bigger trick on her than mine did on me.

  For the first time ever, I feel luckier than Eliza.

  What her father did that day scarred me, but unlike Eliza, I got to leave that house behind. My mother may hate what’s wrong with me, but she never stopped me from getting help. Just the opposite.

  I drop my head into my hands. My hair is still damp. The rain. No, not just the rain. It was wet before I left the house. It got wet when I drank from the tap in Mr. Hart’s bathroom.

  Oh. My. God. “Sam?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I didn’t have an attack.”

  “Are you kidding? I was seconds away from calling 911 when I dragged you into the bathroom.”

  “Exactly!” I shout. Sam looks at me like I’m losing it. “I had the attack in his study, but it stopped once you got me into the bathroom.” The small, windowless bathroom.

  When Sam closed the door behind us I didn’t feel the water rushing in. I felt it falling back, like a wave sliding away from the beach.

  I almost start to laugh. All that therapy, even hypnosis, and no one ever figured out what was hiding in my brain the whole time. I think about all the friends I didn’t make, the parties I didn’t go to, the boys who didn’t want to kiss me. All the times my mom looked at me and wished I could be more like Wes.

  Would it all have been different if only I’d visited the Harts’ sooner?

  Now I’m not laughing, I’m crying. Why am I crying? I just found the memory that probably caused my claustrophobia. I’ve finally figured out where all my problems originated. That’s good news.

  Isn’t it?

  “I’m pulling over.” Sam turns on his blinker and heads for the nearest exit.

  Knowing doesn’t make up for the past ten years.

  Knowing doesn’t erase the snide comments and the girls who didn’t invite me for playdates and sleepover parties.

  Knowing doesn’t mean that my mother never looked at me with disappointment in her face and knowing doesn’t mean that I haven’t been terrified, every day since before I was in second grade, that I would be trapped and lost forever.

  And knowing isn’t necessarily a cure.

  I shake my head and catch my breath, wiping away my tears. “I’m okay,” I promise.

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure.” I nod at the road ahead. “Let’s go home.”

  Sam shifts back into the left lane. The views are spectacular when you’re driving south on Highway 1. When we get to Monterey, I watch the waves crash in the rain. The coastline looks blurry, a picture out of focus.

  Just like Eliza.

  Mrs. Hart and Mack argued about who knew her best. Maybe all of us—Mack, her parents, her best friends, her teammates, her teachers, me—maybe we only got to know the parts of her that she allowed us to see. The troubled girl. The dutiful daughter. The fun friend. The champion athlete. The good student. The popular princess.

  Maybe not one of us actually knows all of her.

  I wanted to hide my problems from everyone at Ventana Ranch, just like Eliza hid hers.

  But I failed and Eliza succeeded.

  And I’m alive and she’s dead.

  The police ruled Eliza’s death an accident. Dean Carson announced it at breakfast in the cafeteria this morning. Sam and I weren’t there, but Sam got a text from Cooper telling him the news. They couldn’t find any evidence of foul play, there was nothing connecting the fight Julian witnessed with her death, and—they didn’t say this, but it was implied—they found no proof that it was a suicide. The police are packing up to leave campus, abandoning their post at the front gate and taking down the crime-scene tape from the cliffs.

  “Case closed,” Sam said when he told me. He leaned against my doorframe.

  “Guess so,” I agreed. Then I asked him to close the door behind him because I had a paper to work on. My computer is still balanced on my lap. This essay was due before break began, but I didn’t hand it in and apparently Professor Gordon forgot to ask me to. I could still send it to her by Monday.

  Back on schedule. Back to normal.

  Except I can’t stop staring at my closet door.

  In fact, I’ve been watching the door almost nonstop for days now. When I try to read, I end up gazing over the cover of my book and looking at the door instead. When I go to sleep at night, I lie down with my back to the door and wake up facing it in the morning.

  I haven’t tried locking myself in there yet. Haven’t tested whether what happened—or really, what didn’t happen—in the bathroom off Mr. Hart’s study will happen again.

  I close my eyes and imagine myself someplace small, the same way I spent years trying to imagine myself someplace big. Will my heart start to pound when I picture eleva
tor doors sliding shut with me inside? When I imagine one of those bathrooms on the plane, the reason I didn’t drink water the entire day before I flew from New York to California?

  My heartbeat stays steady. Then again, visualizing never worked when I was trying to calm it, so why should it work now that I’m trying to jumpstart it?

  I open my eyes and sigh. There’s only one way to find out, and I’m not ready to try it yet.

  Sam knocks, letting himself in before I can answer. He just got back from driving up to Carmel for a new cell phone. He invited me to come with him, but I said I had work to do. Now he says, “Let’s go for a hike.”

  I shake my head. “I have to finish my paper.”

  “You haven’t gotten out of that bed since we got back from Menlo Park.”

  That’s not entirely true. I’ve gone to the bathroom a few times. I’ve eaten food from our kitchenette. I’ve even walked across the room and put my hand on the closet door. I just haven’t actually gone inside, like Alice hesitating before going down the rabbit hole to Wonderland.

  Sam sits on the edge of the bed. I try not to think of what happened the last time he sat on my bed and I definitely try to ignore the way my body shivers at this close proximity.

  I want to ask Sam whether back to normal means that he’ll be back to his old tricks. Back to hanging out with our classmates and sneaking (other) girls into his room after curfew.

  I want to ask, but I don’t because I’m scared of what the answer might be.

  “Come on, Elizabeth.” Sam crosses his arms as if to say I mean business, but he’s smiling. “An easy path this time, I promise.”

  I shove my laptop out of the way and swing my legs over the side of the bed. I pretend not to notice Sam offering his hand to help me to my feet.

  There isn’t a cloud in the sky as we walk past the pile of candles and flowers that’s been growing outside Eliza’s dorm over the past week. Moisture from the fog made the ink on the signs run, blurring the words. The wind knocked a bouquet into the path; I bend down and pick it up. They were yellow roses, but the petals have turned almost entirely brown. Gently, I place the flowers next to the fake candles; only half of them are still flickering. I guess the rest of the batteries have burned out.