Reagan's Ashes

by Jim Heskett

  He gasped. “What the fuck is going on with this?”

  She walked to where he was standing, open-mouthed, over his backpack. There was a large hole in the side, the fabric torn and frayed. “Oh my god. Why is your pack all torn up?”

  Charlie held up his poles, the straps of which had been mangled as well. “Me too.”

  Reagan checked her pack and found that the left side of the hip-belt was missing. She dropped to one knee and felt the ruffled edge of the fabric, and it appeared to have been chewed.

  “What the hell happened here?” Dalton said.

  Not good. They were too deep into the park to leave and get new gear. She took a deep breath, trying to stay calm. “Some animal. Fox, or something must have chewed up the pack for some reason. Did you leave food in there?”

  Dalton bristled. “Um, maybe. I don’t think so.”

  She pursed her lips. “Dalton, you were supposed to put everything in your bear canister.”

  “Why did it eat my pole straps?” Charlie said. “I don’t have any food on my poles.”

  In a few seconds, the answer came to her. “Salt. The sweat.”

  “That’s great,” Dalton said. “How am I supposed to hike with this giant hole in the side of my backpack? All my stuff will fall out. It’s not like I can hike backward to make sure I’m not leaving a trail of underwear and shit behind me like motherfucking Hansel and what’s-her-name.”

  Reagan peered at his pack’s damage, and then snatched a long-sleeved shirt through the hole. She wrapped it around the pack and pulled it tight, then knotted it over the opening. She tugged on the shirt, and the cinch seemed solid.

  “Look at you, cuz. Not too shabby,” Dalton said, rubbing his chin.

  She searched the nearby ground, hoping that whatever animal had severed the hipbelt from her pack had dropped it so she could duct-tape it back in place. But there was no sign of the thing.

  Hiking three more days wearing a pack with no hipbelt was not an option. The weight needed to be distributed between her shoulders and hips evenly or she was in for a world of hurt.

  She knelt by her pack and felt the torn fabric. Then inspiration struck.

  She fished out the rusted Swiss army knife from the top of the pack and a length of rope Dad always insisted on carrying but neither of them had ever needed until this moment. Measuring out three arm lengths, she dragged the blade across the rope to cut it. She made a slit in the pack where the hipbelt used to connect and threaded the rope inside.

  She turned on her phone to see the time. Daylight was burning. Today was going to be such a long day of tramping hard miles at high elevation.

  With the rope threaded through the pack, she cut a hole above the other side and pulled the rope out. She wound it around the hipbelt so the two ends of the rope met in the middle.

  She stood up, strapped on the pack and tied the rope together, cinching it against her hips. It would chafe but would be better than nothing.

  “Damn, MacGuyver,” Dalton said. “I didn’t know you were so crafty you could make backpack belts at the drop of a hat. But what about Charlie’s poles?”

  “That’s okay,” he said. “I don’t need the straps.”

  Reagan looked at the campsite. “Alright. If nothing else is damaged, we need to get going.”

  “What about breakfast?” Charlie said.

  Thirty minutes cooking and eating breakfast might be too much of the day’s budget. The sun had already climbed above the mountains to the east. “Going to have to be granola bars on the trail. We’ve wasted too much time already. Today we’re going up over Flattop and back around, and we’ll be above treeline, exposed the whole way. I don’t need to tell you how dangerous that is.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  7:40 am

  Reagan’s day had started and remained yellow. Yellow due to the strange key resting against her thigh. Yellow was for confusion because it easily bled into orange for irritation and red for anger.

  She’d been coloring her days since her time at the hospital. Recognizing and classifying her feelings came naturally to her now, but there had been a long and challenging journey to arrive at this point. Along the trail, Reagan thought about her last semester at school in Austin and the darkest days of her life.

  Memories arrived like rain droplets on a pond.

  She was going to kill herself on a Tuesday evening, after going out to dinner with some friends. She called them her friends, but these were the same people who had turned their backs when her mania had reached a fever pitch. They went out to a Mexican restaurant, ate dinner, had some drinks. Her friends talked about research papers and midterms and keg parties, and this world seemed far away, in the same place where people got dressed every morning and paid bills on time and went bike riding on weekends.

  When the waiter came by to explain the dessert options, a compulsion to escape overpowered her, so she ran through the kitchen and out the back door, then huddled between two dumpsters in the meat-and-bean stink, hovering among the flies. She shivered in the chilly Austin winter air.

  She was sobbing and shaking, listening to her friends call her name as they searched the parking lot. She couldn’t bear anyone discovering her, but had no idea why the prospect was so horrific. Going out to dinner had been a terrible idea. She’d wanted to play normal for one evening and failed miserably at it.

  She slipped over the back fence and took a taxi home, turning off her phone so they couldn’t contact her. It had been four months since the manic episode had ended and the descent into depression had overtaken her life.

  As she walked into her apartment, her roommate Beatrice was in the kitchen, wiping the inside of the microwave.

  “Hey, Rags,” Beatrice said. “Do you think you could do your dishes? They’ve been soaking since Sunday.”

  In that moment, the decision to end her life solidified. Her head brimmed with lamentation about that girl, the lively and manic girl who preached the gospel of Richard Bach and Jack Kerouac in her friends’ living rooms, who was sure she would go on to rewrite modern psychology, and thought that when she danced she was filled with a magic powerful enough to heal the sickness in people. How did she become the girl who was now incapable of having the simplest conversations with other people? Talking to professors. Ordering food at the drive-through. Small-talk with the landlord while paying rent. All of these seemed monumental tasks, likely to cripple her with anxiety.

  “Are you going to say anything?” Beatrice said, still not looking at Reagan.

  Reagan opened her mouth and nothing but air came out. She fled the living room into her bedroom, slamming the door behind her before Beatrice could launch into another lecture about roommate responsibilities.

  She picked up her journal, and furiously scribbled.

  “Depression” is a bad term for it, because it sounds like something colorless and plain. Sometimes it’s like that, but more often it’s a tornado or a boulder tumbling downhill that always leads to the same conclusion: I am worthless.

  Self-examination turns into self-criticism and that becomes depression. I trap myself in these cyclones of thought, each one pointing back at me, arriving at the decision that everything is my fault and it’s never going to get better.

  The only end to the suffering of the bad thoughts is to stop myself from thinking, and the only way to get out of thinking is to sleep. Sleep rarely comes, not lately. The thoughts don’t stop when I’m awake. And sleep is temporary. When I wake up, nothing has changed, so I have to find a way to sleep forever. There’s only one final solution to the problem of being unable to turn off the thinking machine.

  Next day, she went on campus to find the guy with the dreadlocks because she knew he always had pills. She chased him down after class, and she bought as many Valiums as she could afford. She didn’t know if it would be enough, but it seemed like it.

  That night, Reagan opted to give life one more go before ending things. Beatrice had gone out on a date, so Reagan had the
apartment to herself. She tried to work on a term paper and spent ten minutes of actual work time. Then she got so frustrated that she was unable to focus on anything other than self-loathing, so she gave up and retreated to her bed with her laptop. She logged on to Netflix and found a show with multiple seasons available. Didn’t care what show, just started with episode 1. This lasted for the next several hours, well past midnight.

  The whole time she seethed, episode after episode, getting increasingly angry at herself. It became a game… how far could she push it, how late could she stay up in the glow of her laptop as time to complete her term paper evaporated. She chain-smoked cigarettes, even though she hated the way the odor infected her clothes and hair and fingers. She used to be the kind of girl who only bummed smokes at parties when she was drinking, but now she was buying packs of them.

  The anger rumbled and went nowhere. By two a.m., her neighbors started coming back from the bars, stumbling and struggling to get their keys into the locks on their apartments, and she’d grown so exhausted from staring at the screen that she wore only a weary sense of failure, as the little judging demon inside her brain whispered I told you so. I told you that you were a screw up.

  Around three a.m., she ate all the Valiums while sitting on the living room couch and chased them down with one of Beatrice’s beers. She closed her eyes, and that was the last thing she knew.

  She would later learn that Beatrice had come back to the apartment to get a condom before going home with the date, and found Reagan sprawled over the coffee table, pale and dribbling a trail of spit in a squiggly line.

  Time shifted, and she was in a hospital, in some kind of waiting room.

  A man came by and told her that her intake would begin soon, and she could hang out for a few minutes. He gave her a form to fill out. A teenager with a scar across his face sat opposite her, staring, and she nearly had a panic attack because he wouldn’t look away.

  “What are you here for?” he said.

  “I’m not sure,” she said.

  He laughed and closed his eyes, then started drumming his hands on his thighs, some kind of rhythm. She wished he would stop, but felt powerless to ask him.

  On a television anchored to the wall, a miniature politician was giving a speech. The volume was off, but she heard every word he said. Soon, a chant started in her mind: they’re going to assassinate him. They’re going to assassinate him. They’re going to assassinate him.

  She couldn’t turn it off. Louder and louder, until she almost screamed.

  She fantasized about what it would be like to be one of those responsible people, the kind who went to class every day and had no trouble meeting deadlines. What was so different about them? Nothing, apparently.

  Those kinds of thoughts belonged to the dreaded “black and white” that her high school shrink warned her about, back when she was experiencing only the small lapses into depression and mania. That same therapist said that when people are depressed, they think irrationally and come to incorrect conclusions based on premises that are untrue, and so the goal of therapy had to be to show the patient why those basic premises arose from faulty logic. As if logic was an answer. Reagan knew this to be true, but knowing made no difference.

  When the intake man called her name, she followed him to a table by the nurses’ station, just to get away from the television. He was a thick man with moles all over his face, and Reagan studied the moles intently. Studying them grounded her and kept her heart rate at an even pace.

  He took her blood pressure and shined a light in each of her eyes, then clicked his pen.

  Reagan handed him the form, and he flipped through the pages.

  “You didn’t fill in the medical history.” His voice was soft and had a certain music to it, like the way her mother used to read bedtime stories.

  “I don’t…um… I don’t exactly have one.”

  He laid a new stack of papers on top of the clipboard. “Do you drink or use drugs?”

  “A little. Not much. I mean, no drugs. Smoked pot a couple of times, I guess, but I didn’t like it.” Every word was a struggle.

  “Do you ever hear voices or see things that aren’t there?”

  She could tell him about the demon in her head who judged everything she did, but then they’d label her as a paranoid schizophrenic. “There’s Richard Bach, you know, he wrote Illusions and Jonathan Livingston Seagull. He didn’t actually, I mean, it’s all there between the lines, you know? The words aren’t the words, it’s what’s not on the page that matters. That doesn’t sound right.”

  “Do you believe that Richard Bach was communicating directly with you?”

  She almost said yes, thinking someone finally understood, but she caught herself with the word on her lips. If she obliged him, he would put a little check mark next to a box that said experiences delusions about talking with dead and/or famous people. So she only shook her head.

  “Do you have any questions for me?” he said.

  “No, not really, but… I don’t know what’s wrong with me, I mean, they’ll say it’s depression, but… I mean, I don’t know if I really meant to do it. You know, with the pills. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, I don’t know…” She could see the sentences in her head as fully formed thoughts, but when they came out of her mouth, the final product sounded like gibberish.

  “Why don’t you take it easy for now? You’ve had a hard day, and we’re all done with the intake. There will be plenty of time to talk in Group tomorrow.”

  He ushered her off to the TV room again, and after that first day alone in her bed, she was required to conform to the schedule. They arranged blocks of time with scheduled activities like Group, meals, and strictly enforced bedtimes and wake-up times.

  She didn’t even realize she was back in Denver until the third day. The timeline confused her, but eventually she regained some memories of having her stomach pumped, being on a plane with Dad, and checking into a mental health facility.

  She spent the bulk of her days in Group. Group meant lectures about depression and schizophrenia and post-traumatic stress disorder, drawings on the dry-erase board about the medical roots of mental illness. Making healthy choices. Understanding grief and loss.

  She never wanted to say anything, because there was no way to express her hopelessness and futility. The few people who did talk in Group monopolized all the time, anyway. They ranted about the various people in their lives who had wronged them, and how victimized they were by all the injustices in the world.

  She wished she could join in and accuse someone, but there was no one to accuse. Dad had always given her nothing but love, and she wasn’t angry with her mother for leaving them, and she wasn’t angry that her stepmother Anne didn’t understand her. There was no point in being mad at anyone.

  If she did speak up, the counselors would tell her to take control of her life, as if it were a telescope pointed in the wrong direction.

  Dad and Anne visited on the fourth day, and she stared at them as they talked about meaningless things like what colleges cousin Charlie was applying to. Reagan asked them if they had told her mother she was here, and they became silent. Mom wasn’t going to visit. Reagan knew that. She wanted to ask them about her aunt Susan, the one who had killed herself when she was younger than Reagan. No one ever liked to talk about her. Maybe she’d been sick the same way Reagan was.

  After their visit, she went out into the smoke hole, a fenced-in outdoor area, the only place in the compound where they allowed smoking and gave a modicum of privacy. Leaning against the building was a twenty-something with tattoos on his neck and a bandage on half his head. She’d seen him before, and he’d hardly said a word to anyone. But now, alone out there, away from the angry schizophrenics and weeping housewives, he spoke to her.

  “What are you in for?” he said.

  She knew the correct answer by then. “Bipolar.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, me too. I tried to do myself, but it didn’t work.” He
pointed at the bandage on his head.

  She wanted to ask him about it, but instead said, “I wanted to kill myself too.”

  “I have a son. I know now that what I did was bad. They tell me my hand slipped at the last second. I don’t remember nothing.”

  “I tried to take some pills, but I didn’t… I don’t know… had no idea how many I was supposed to take.”

  They stared at each other for a tense second and then laughed. She liked him because he was scared, like her, and he didn’t want to flirt with her and push himself on her, like some of the other guys had done in her first week.

  “You’re kinda new here, right?” he said.

  She nodded.

  “You’ll get the hang of it. The staff will keep checking on you five or six times a day. They have to make sure you’re all drugged up and not causing no trouble. Just make sure you take your meds, go to Group, go to your therapist, and don’t start any shit with nobody. If somebody messes with you, tell your therapist. Don’t react and hit the person or anything stupid like that.”

  “I hate it here,” she said.

  “This?” he said, glancing at the brick building. “This ain’t shit. What’s gonna keep you up at night is worrying about getting sent off to Colorado Springs, to the long-term place. You go there, and no one ever sees you again. You’ll be doing the trazodone shuffle for the rest of your days.”

  She flicked the ash from her cigarette and it danced in the light breeze. “I hate my shrink.”

  “Who you got? Ahern? Gupta?”

  “It’s someone named Jeanie. I don’t even know what her last name is. She’s the one with the curly bangs, you know, the skinny one with the blonde hair.”

  He snuffed his cigarette against the side of the building and lit a fresh one. “Sure, I know her. Jeanie Carmichael.”

  “She’s like… all she does is stare at me and say ‘the staff notes indicate you went to bed early last night. I think we should up your Effexor a little.’ I stare at the floor for, you know, most of the time.”