Mary lowers her achingly calm voice like we’re about to share a secret. “Did you think you could join them?”
I open my mouth to say no, but I close it before any words can come out. Because I remember being in the water, shivering in the cold, believing that I might be able to find them still, if I just let myself sink.
“Wendy,” Mary says, “we don’t have to cover everything today. You’re awake, you’re coherent, you’re not trying to run.” She leans over and unties the restraint, but my left arm stays resting on the bed. “That’s better isn’t it?” she says, like she’s done me some huge favor.
“Wait,” I say, desperate. Somehow Mary took control of this conversation, changed the subject on me. I try to get it back on track. “Belle, Pete, Jas, the captain—where are they? The boat made it back to the harbor, didn’t it?”
Mary looks at me blankly, barely even blinking as the words tumble out of my mouth. I try to explain: I went out with my friends that day, to watch them surf. Conditions were rough. Belle got hurt. I got thrown overboard.
My heart is pounding in my chest.
Mary just shakes her head firmly. “No boats were allowed out on the water that day,” she says. “The Coast Guard shut the harbor down.”
“I know,” I answer. “We shouldn’t have gone out there.” Maybe I just need to sound contrite. Maybe they’re just mad at me for taking the risks I took.
But then a realization washes over me, just another wave crashing over my head.
“You said I was found on the beach? No one brought me here?” Mary nods, smiling, pleased that I’ve begun to understand. But I know that she’s the one who doesn’t understand.
I must have drifted away somehow, far from the boat and Jas and Pete and Belle. The current carried me back to shore. That’s why I was shouting for them in my sleep, begging to go back and find them.
I sit up quickly, so fast that it startles Mary, who backs away from me, her hands out in front of her as though she thinks I might hurt her. But instead I stand. My broken bones shoot pain through my body defiantly and my legs wobble underneath me, as though the muscles have forgotten how to hold me up. I wonder just how long I was lying in that bed.
“Where are my clothes?” I ask, looking not at Mary but at my parents. “Come on,” I plead. “We have to go. They haven’t even looked for them. They might be alive.” Surely my parents at least will spring into action once they understand: a boat is missing with four people on it. Send out the Coast Guard, search and rescue, the National Guard, whoever takes over at times like this.
But my parents avoid my gaze, and I don’t see Mary press the little yellow button she wears tucked into the waistband of her pants. Later, I’ll learn that it’s called a panic button. Today, I just learn that when she presses it, people much stronger than I am enter the room and force me back into the bed.
I struggle at first. I call for Belle; she’d be strong enough to escape these guys, even with the gash in her leg. I shout the word Kensington, the word Pete, the words Witch Tree. I try to shout Jas’s name, but the word gets caught behind the lump in my throat, choking me. By the time they’re tying the restraints around my wrists again, I’ve lost the strength to fight anymore.
Finally, I ask, “What do you mean, something like nightmares?”
Mary doesn’t blink, doesn’t break eye contact for a second, before she says the word hallucinations.
Where the restraints touch my wrists, my skin burns like it’s on fire.
35
It takes a few days for the details to become clear. I was found on the beach near where my brothers’ boards were discovered months ago; the doctors think I made some kind of deluded attempt to find my brothers by joining them at the bottom of the sea.
I was unconscious when they found me, and drifted in and out of consciousness for days, calling for Pete, for Belle, for Jas. The doctors and Mary think those names are attached to people who don’t exist outside of my imagination.
We’ve been through this before, I want to shout. But instead, I keep calm each time I explain, telling my story over and over again, begging them to call the Coast Guard. I feel like a murder suspect being grilled under bright, hot lights, like they’re trying to catch me in a lie, to poke holes in my story. Which, of course, they are. They think that once they break my story apart, I’ll see that it simply can’t have been possible.
They also can’t agree on whether it was drug-induced psychosis or grief-induced psychosis. It’s a little which came first, the chicken or the egg. Did I take the drugs because I was so grief-stricken and then manufacture this world, or did I manufacture this world because I was so grief-stricken and take the drugs to keep the illusion alive?
They say it’s unlikely that I took the drugs only once, like I think that I did. They insist that it’s unlikely it was a single drug; there are still traces of different hallucinogens in my system now—a cocktail of rare chemicals so obscure that they don’t even have street names. They don’t seem to care about where I got the drugs or how they came to be combined the way they did. They don’t believe me that it was only one drug that was made up of all those different ones. They think I took them each separately, over a period of weeks and months, stretching all the way back to my high school graduation, until the drugs all mingled in my system and wreaked havoc on my psyche.
No one believes me about the boat, about the way Pete and Belle and Jas rode the wave, even as the storm threatened to sink us all. They tell me it wouldn’t have been possible for anyone to surf that wave.
I’m embarrassed, at first, to tell them that I was in love with at least one—if not two—of my illusions, but they figure it out. It is their job to be insightful, after all. Something about the way I look when I talk about Pete, about the way my voice catches in my throat every single time I try to say Jas’s name, gives me away. They tell me that these relationships were the biggest illusion of all, because they were the part to which I was most attached. Emotionally.
On that point, at least, I don’t argue.
Because of all my injuries, I go to physical therapy in another wing of the hospital every day, but no one tries to deny that the real reason I’m here is for psychotherapy. After all, I could do the physical therapy as an outpatient. In their soothing voices—I soon discover that Mary isn’t the only one here who’s mastered that aggravatingly calm monotone—they tell me that my delusion was my way of confronting my brothers’ deaths: I was in such deep denial that my subconscious had to create a reality in which I saw, plain as day, the reality of their deaths, a reality in which I not only saw but felt exactly how they died.
In our family sessions, my mother cries that it’s all her fault. She let her one remaining child slip away. Eventually my father, Mary the therapist, and I find ourselves comforting her, reassuring her. I can’t blame my mother for being so shocked; who would have thought that Wendy, her Goody Two-shoes, would have turned out to be a crazy, drug-addled runaway?
The day I refer to my time in Kensington as an illusion is the first time in a long time that I see my mother smile. When I said it, I didn’t actually mean anything by it, didn’t mean to imply that I accepted their theories about my madness. I only said “illusion” because it’s easier to use the same language they use.
But the word makes my mother so happy that I say it again the next time I see her, and again the next. At first, the word tastes sour in my mouth, but slowly the bitterness fades, until the word doesn’t taste like anything at all. I say it so many times that I get used to it, never entirely sure whether I believe it or not, never quite sure that what I believe matters.
Once I say it enough times, they let me go home.
The first morning I wake up in my room at home, I don’t recognize it. I open my eyes expecting to be on a mattress on the floor in Pete’s house. Then, I swear I can feel Jas’s arms around me, smell the sea, feel the salt air on my skin. But instead of a run-down motel on the beach, I’m in the glass
house on the hill. Instead of the ocean, the view from my window is the city lights, fading beneath the sunrise.
I have to beg, but one day my parents finally take me to the beach. Mary said it would be okay; she said it might be good for me. Not anywhere near Kensington, of course. No, the beach nearest our house, the one where we had the bonfire the night I graduated. A night that seems a million years ago.
“Why did you want to come here so much?” my mother asks, but I don’t answer her because I’m too busy watching the surfers take to the water. There are at least a dozen here that I can see, scattered beyond the break of the waves, taking turns paddling into waves that don’t rise higher than six feet. There was a time when waves like this would have seemed enormous to me, but now they seem small.
At home, I’ve been Googling big-wave surfing and watching video after video of surfers dropping into mammoth waves. One afternoon, my father found me hypnotized by videos of surfers at Teahupoo. At first, he seemed all set to call Mary, report a relapse, readmit me to the hospital. But after a few seconds, he was sitting beside me, just as riveted as I was at the images of someone flying inside the tunnel of the massive wave.
“Its name means ‘crushing skulls,’” I said without thinking.
My father didn’t ask me how I knew that, and I’m not sure I could have told him if he had. Instead, he studied the way the wave crashed into the ocean, the way the barrel narrowed at its edges, so that even the most skilled surfer had trouble making it out of the tunnel without being pummeled by the water crashing down around him.
After a few minutes, my father said, “I can see how it got that name.”
Now he puts his arm around me gently. He seems almost as fascinated by the surfers here as I am. I wonder if he’s thinking of John and Michael, of the years they spent surfing this beach before they ran off in search of bigger and better waves.
If my parents were to forbid me from ever picking up a surfboard, I would understand why. How could they be sure that I wouldn’t disappear just like John and Michael, drawn in by the waves’ siren song?
But much to my surprise, my father says, “Feels good to be back on the beach, doesn’t it?”
I nod. “It does.”
“We’ll have to start coming here more often,” he says carefully. For a second, my mother looks stricken, but slowly, unexpectedly, a smile spreads across her face.
I think she must feel the same way I do. Like me, she feels closest to John and Michael when she’s near the water.
36
I get very good at waiting. I wait as I dutifully go to my outpatient therapy with Mary each week, talk about my feelings and answer questions and go through the five stages of grief for my brothers like I’m checking them off a to-do list. I wait until Fiona can laugh when I joke that I’m finally seeing a grief counselor, just like she wanted me to months ago. I wait until I can honestly say that the counseling helps; she was right after all. I wait until my parents have agreed that I can start college in January; they’ve ironed everything out with Stanford, I’ll just matriculate one semester late. I wait until my mother lets me take the car and drive myself to therapy, alone. I wait until she’s actually sent me out on errands by myself: pick up a dozen eggs, the dry cleaning, a tube of toothpaste. I wait until the weather turns cooler and the days are shorter, until I can speak about my brothers in the past tense without tripping over the words. I wait until my parents trust me. Only then do I take the car—a fresh, new, shiny SUV my parents bought for me to take to college, a belated graduation gift, so normal and unsurprising—and drive to Kensington Beach.
I drive there because I have to see it for myself. I drive there because even now, all this time later, I wake up every morning and think I’m somewhere else. Every morning, I think I’m in Kensington.
The roads are familiar, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Mary and her colleagues all conceded that I probably did make my way to the gated community that was once called Kensington Beach at some point during my psychosis. Fiona Googled the place and told me what I already knew: that it was a popular beachside housing development in the 1980s but had long since been abandoned. No one lives there now. It’s not safe. The only reason they haven’t torn the houses down is the cliffs aren’t stable enough for tractors and trailers to park there, let alone lug away debris. The place itself is unstable. Just like me.
Now I wonder how I found it; my GPS stops working short of the turn that leads me up the cliffs. In fact, according to my GPS, I’m driving straight into the ocean.
I pull into the driveway of what would have been Jas’s house. It’s there, just like I remember it, but instead of looking like it received a fresh coat of paint a few months ago, the exterior of the house is beat-up, the paint peeling and chipped. There’s graffiti all over the garage door, and when I try the front door, prepared to break a window to get inside if I have to, it’s unlocked.
The house is empty. There isn’t a single piece of furniture inside. There’s more graffiti on the interior walls, but it’s completely illegible. On one wall, someone has drawn a surfer taking a massive wave. It looks exactly like the picture I saw on the bench when I waited for the bus. There’s some trash on the floor. I take a deep breath, as though maybe there will be some trace of the scents I associate with Jas, but the place smells vaguely of stale beer and pot, like maybe some kids crashed here while they surfed the waves on the beach below. Or maybe they were just looking for a place to party, completely unaware of the waves at all.
At least the house is shaped like I remember it, a mirror image of Pete’s, perched on the cliffs on the other side of Kensington. I head for the garage, remembering the collection of surfboards I saw there the first time I saw Jas. Maybe there will be some trace of him there at least.
But there is nothing; just another empty room.
I walk out through the front door and head down the overgrown road that will lead to Pete’s house. When I see it, I break into a run. Maybe some of Pete’s crew still lives here; maybe Hughie or Matt is waiting just on the other side of the door.
But the house is a mess; it reeks of mildew, as if a wave rose up from the ocean below and drenched the place. The sliding glass doors that lead to the backyard are wide open; a few seagulls are hopping around the living room. They’ve made this house their home. The tile floors that were always gleamingly white, where Pete laid out a blanket and we all ate the dinner I cooked, are covered with feathers and droppings. The birds caw at me in protest as I make my way to the backyard, toward the one thing here that’s familiar: the sound of the waves.
The cliffs fall so straight and so sharp that I take a step back, afraid I might fall. The rocks are jagged and toothlike. It’d be impossible to build stairs into these cliffs. And I can’t imagine why anyone would want to.
Because below me, there is no beach. The water comes right up to the cliffs. There is no perfect triangle of white sand. The waves are rough and choppy, driving themselves directly into the wall of rocks, spray colliding with stone. To surf them would be certain death.
It’s as if the ocean has swallowed my memories whole.
I stop at Fiona’s on the drive home. I’d told my parents that I was going there when I left the house this morning, and of course they believed me, now that I’m back to normal.
Fiona’s home from school for the weekend—she left for college at the usual time in September, like everyone else—and after months away, she’s thrilled to see me out on my own.
“You look so good, Wen,” she squeals as we hug hello.
I laugh, but Fiona shakes her head.
“No, I mean seriously. I don’t know, ever since this summer … I mean, you even looked pretty that morning you showed up here, stoned out of your mind.”
“Now I know you’re just being nice.”
“I’m not,” Fiona insists. “Really.”
I put my arms around my best friend and hug her again as she oohs and aahs over my new car. I let her d
rive it down from her house in the hills when we go out to dinner. I roll the windows down and breathe in the scent of the eucalyptus trees that line her neighborhood, erasing any trace of the ocean.
I’m tempted to apologize to her, to tell her she was right all along. But instead I listen as she tells me about her breakup with Dax, about the cute guy who lives on her floor in the dorm, about the professor she has a crush on, about the sorority she’s decided to pledge.
“Not,” she adds quickly, like she’s worried it might upset me, “that I’ll ever know any of those girls the way I know you.”
I’m not sure I know me anymore. I’d been so certain that my summer in the sun was real, so certain that Fiona and Mary and my parents were wrong.
I was supposed to be a detective hunting for clues, but it turns out that my brain just constructed some kind of elaborate scavenger hunt for me, the same way I used to do for my brothers.
I close my eyes and remember the day that Fiona and I met in kindergarten; we were instant friends because we were both wearing the same purple striped shirt. We held hands on our first day of high school, terrified of the seniors, all of whom seemed a foot taller than we were. I remember the day Fiona passed her driver’s test and the first day of our senior year, the way we walked side by side, giggling because now the freshmen seemed so small. I can still hear the catch of pride in her voice the first time she called Dax her boyfriend, and I can still feel the way she hugged me tight even when she thought I was losing my mind. Which it turns out, I kind of was. I smile. I have plenty of memories that are real.
Poor Fee was right all along. I guess she really does know me best. She saw right away that I’d made up Kensington, Pete, Belle, Jas. All the money my parents spent on therapy and doctors, all that analysis to discover that I’d created a world where I could put off mourning my brothers because I was too busy falling in love and being loved, until my fantasy brought me to Witch Tree and finally began coming apart at the seams. I needed to see what my brothers saw; I even invented someone revealing their death to me. Fiona could have explained it all for free.
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