Fragile Like Us

by Sara Barnard

  Dad put his hand on my shoulder again, this time gently. “Calm. Down. Okay? Calm down.” I bit down on my lip, trying to steady myself. “What is the fastest way for us to get in contact with Sarah? If I call your mother, will she have a number?”

  “Yes.” But what if she protested? What if she was as dismissive as he had been? “Call Rosie’s mum.” The answer came to me in a rush of relief. All those times calling Rosie’s landline—aside from my own, it was the only number I knew by heart. “She’ll have it.”

  I recited the number twice as he scribbled it down onto his notepad, checking it three times to make sure it was right.

  “You’ll call Shell right now?” I pressed. “And then Sarah? Straightaway?”

  “I will call them both,” he promised. “But you have to go back to your room and go to bed. Right now. Claudia, will you take her back upstairs?”

  The nurse moved around the wheelchair, giving my shoulder a reassuring squeeze.

  “I’ll come and see you in the morning,” Dad said. “Let you know everything’s fine, okay?”

  “She’s tried before.” I blurted this out as Claudia reached for the handles of the wheelchair. She paused, her eyes swiveling toward my dad.

  This time they all exchanged glances. I noticed Dad’s fingers tense over the notepad. “Don’t worry,” he said, but by now even he seemed worried. He looked at Claudia again. “Thanks, Claudia.”

  It was 3:27 a.m. when I made it back to my hospital room, and it was Claudia who spotted the note. Next to the empty box of Jaffa cakes, written on the back of a leaflet about juvenile diabetes.

  I’m sorry for everything.

  Buona notte.

  Love, Suze xx

  This is the image I have:

  Around the time I was hobbling across the hospital tiles, Suzanne sat herself down on Brighton beach. She swallowed the pills in groups, three handfuls in total, pausing between each to force down the vodka. When she’d finished she took the empty bottle and half buried it in the stones, so it wouldn’t get smashed or blow away. She slid her earphones carefully into her ears and scrolled through her iPod albums until she found Abbey Road. She listened with her eyes closed, and she didn’t even cry.

  And then, during the second chorus of “Octopus’s Garden,” she fell asleep.

  After

  PART 5

  28

  I HADN’T EXPECTED TO SLEEP at all after Claudia left the room, but with the drugs in my system, the pain and the panic caught up with me and pulled me under. I woke up more than once, drowsy and disorientated, convinced I could hear voices, before sinking back into sleep.

  I dreamed snapshots of confusion and color: sunflowers that towered over me, blocking out the sun, bending on impossibly long stalks; dancing kites with yellow tails, the string biting into my hands; Suzanne on the other side of the road, standing with her back to me at the seafront railings, blond hair tousled in the wind; Tarin surrounded by origami birds, painting the bedroom walls green; pebbles on Brighton beach rolling under my feet like a waterfall cascade, carrying me away; Rosie, her face close to mine, saying, “Caddy? Caddy?”

  And then the unmistakable reality of a hand on my shoulder. I opened my eyes; the world lurched and righted.

  “Caddy.” My father’s voice, unusually soft. Not a question, not a request, not a reprimand. Just my name.

  When I spoke, my voice came out cracked and husky, like I’d been crying in my sleep. “Did you find her?”

  “Yes.” He looked tired. His hair was disheveled, like he’d been running his fingers through it. “We found her.”

  The terror that seized me was absolute. I felt instantly cold, my throat closed up. I tried to speak, but he got there first.

  “We found her in time,” he said, inclining his head and meeting my gaze with a steadiness that made me let out my breath, my heart rate calming. “It’s okay. We found her in time.”

  * * *

  Relief is a flat word for an emotion that feels so boundless. I felt at once full and emptied by it. I cried, of course, but once the tears were done I wasn’t sure quite what to do with myself apart from grill my parents for details, which I did, at length. They were unusually patient with me, answering all my questions until I had the fullest picture I could of what had happened.

  As promised, Dad had called Rosie’s mother and then Sarah, who’d called the police. Once she’d finished talking to them, her phone rang again. This time it was Rosie’s mother on the end of the line, relaying possibly the six most important words Rosie had ever said: “Tell them to try the beach.”

  Would anyone but Rosie have known how much the beach meant to Suzanne? I thought I did, but it hadn’t occurred to me that that was where she would choose to die, which was why I couldn’t shake the queasiness of knowing how easily things could have been different. If I hadn’t woken up. If I hadn’t gotten my dad. If I hadn’t made him call Shell to get Sarah’s number. If Shell hadn’t woken Rosie. If any of these steps hadn’t happened, who would have been there to save her? No one.

  We found her, Dad said, and in a way it was true. But it wasn’t a reassuring sequence of events, not a montage-worthy pulling together of heroes, racing against the clock to find Suzanne in time. It was just a couple of lucky phone calls, and a girl who knew her friend.

  * * *

  After the drama came the anticlimax. I felt as if I’d spent the last few months being swept along a river and now, suddenly, there I was, dropped over the waterfall into the sudden calm of a plunge pool. The noise and motion and panic were gone. Everything was still. It was disorientating.

  I wasn’t allowed to see Suzanne, who’d been brought to the same hospital I was in but was, apparently, in no state to see anyone who wasn’t a medical professional or family. I worried about her, of course, but it was a different kind of worry than before. Now at least I knew she was in safe hands. The hardest part was over, the worst had happened; it was surely all good things from here. And that was, at least in part, because of me. I’d saved her, just as I’d been so scared I’d lose her. It wasn’t just relief I was feeling, it was pride.

  I left the hospital four days after my fall, my leg and arm in plaster and stitches twinging in the side of my face. “It might scar,” the doctor said. “It’s too early to tell.” Secretly I hoped it would. A small scar by my hairline, between my cheekbone and my ear, seemed like the kind of souvenir I was owed after everything that had happened.

  I was given only the barest details about Suzanne, even after I was settled at home. I knew that they’d gotten her to the hospital quickly enough after she’d taken the pills that there would be no lasting physical damage, but that her mental state, not so easily measured with monitors or fixed with drips, was the biggest concern.

  “Is it like a breakdown?” I asked my mother.

  “We don’t really say breakdown anymore,” she said.

  I took this to mean yes.

  One week after the overdose, Suzanne was transferred to an inpatient Children and Adolescent Mental Health Service unit in Hampshire called Gwillim House, a specialist facility for teenagers with serious mental-health problems. It was the best thing for her, I was told, and way overdue. A safe environment with trained professionals and no expectations of her except that she could be helped. As much as I knew this was true, and as glad as I was that it was finally happening, it made me feel strange to think of Suzanne being labeled as having “serious mental-health problems.” Technically I knew it was correct, but it wasn’t her. The four words seemed so scary and huge, painting the image I had of my friend in colors I didn’t recognize or understand.

  “Yeah, it’s almost like having mental-health problems doesn’t actually change your personality or something,” Tarin said sarcastically when I tried to talk about it with her. “Ye gads! A clinical diagnosis! She is an entirely different person now.”

  “That’s not very helpful, Tarin,” Mum said drily.

  “Try me tomorrow,” Tarin sa
id. “I’ll probably have changed my mind by then, what with being bipolar and everything.”

  “All right, I get it,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Stereotypes are bad. Mental health is complicated. You can stop now.”

  I had my own physical recovery to deal with, which at the very least was a useful distraction from worrying about Suzanne’s emotional one. I was out of school for two weeks after the accident, resting my head and learning how to navigate my surroundings with two of my four limbs out of action. By the time I returned to Esther’s and something like normality, I felt like a different girl than the one who had last walked through the school gates. No one noticed.

  For the next few weeks I waited to hear from Suzanne, convinced at first that it would just be a matter of days and then revising that estimate as time went on. But before I knew it April had turned into May and brought with it exams. Having been all but bed-bound for so many weeks, I’d had plenty of time to study and had also developed a healthy dose of perspective. I went into my exams with a new kind of confidence I’d never before experienced; I knew I would do well, but if I didn’t, that was fine too.

  “That’s all right for you, Miss Private School,” Rosie said over the phone, our primary method of contact during her self-enforced studying exile. “Want to swap brains for a while?”

  The day after my last exam, as well timed as if it had been planned, I finally heard from Suzanne. It had been seven weeks since I’d last seen her, and I’d started to forget what her voice sounded like. She’d sent me an e-mail, so brief I actually tried scrolling down, expecting more words to appear below her name. Hi Caddy, it read, as if we were mere acquaintances. I know it’s been ages but . . . hello! Hope all’s good with you. Are you free some time soon to come and visit? There’s some stuff I want to talk to you about. Sarah knows the visiting hours so just give her a call to arrange. Love, Suze.

  It didn’t seem like much after so long apart, but I understood. After seven weeks, there was too much to say or nothing at all. The most important thing was that—finally—I was going to see her again. I e-mailed back immediately, using far too many exclamation marks in my enthusiasm, then called Sarah. I arranged to visit Suzanne at Gwillim House that coming Saturday.

  I could have been nervous, but I wasn’t. In the weeks Suzanne had been away I’d had plenty of time to worry and overthink every aspect of our friendship and what it would be like when we finally saw each other again. Now it was actually going to happen, I was just excited. More than anything else, I really missed her.

  “You should come too,” I said to Rosie on Thursday. She’d finished her exams almost an entire week before me and had spent the interim time applying for summer jobs. The two of us were sprawled across her bed with a bag of tortilla chips between us and Frank Turner on Spotify.

  “Not this time,” Rosie said easily. “I think this kind of thing is better one on one. Don’t want to crowd her, right? Hey, do you think I’d get to eat a lot of doughnuts if I got a job at the pier?”

  “Yes,” I said. “And you’d probably get sick of them in about a day.”

  In Suzanne’s absence, without discussion or articulation, Rosie and I had found our rhythm again. Something had changed between us, there was no doubt about that, but it felt like a change that was positive. It was as if Suzanne had wedged herself in between us, squeezing in to create her own little niche in our twosome, and when she’d gone she’d left that space empty. The space felt like breathing room.

  “I don’t think it’s physically possible to get sick of doughnuts,” Rosie replied, her fingers flying over her keyboard. “I’m going to go for it.”

  “You do that,” I said. “But seriously. Suze. Gwillim House. Is it okay that I’m going without you? Wouldn’t two of us be better?”

  “I think if she thought it was better, she’d have asked us both,” Rosie said. She wasn’t looking at me, her eyes focused on her laptop screen. “And she hasn’t, and that’s fine. It’s great that you’re going though.”

  “I’m going to take presents,” I said. “What should I take?”

  Rosie’s fingers stilled on the keyboard, her eyes swiveling toward me. “Honestly? I think you should just take you.”

  I frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe save the presents this time. Just go and see how things are.”

  “Who wouldn’t want presents?” I asked, confused. “I wasn’t thinking anything big, just something small from me. Us. Something from us.”

  “I think that’s probably the last thing on her mind, to be honest,” Rosie said. Her fingers started tapping again at her keyboard.

  “You’re not still mad at her, are you?” I ventured. It seemed like a ridiculous question, after so long, but still . . .

  To my relief, Rosie laughed. “No, I am not still mad at her. What kind of monster do you think I am? When your friend almost dies, being mad at them seems kind of redundant.” She shook her head. “Bloody Suze. Ruining my righteous anger by being all tragic and traumatized.” She was grinning. “So selfish.”

  I had to laugh. “You could have just left it at no.”

  “I could,” Rosie agreed cheerfully. “But then I wouldn’t be me, would I?”

  * * *

  Saturday was one of the most beautiful days I could remember for months. The sky was cloudless, the sun hot and bright.

  “Hello, June,” Tarin said, grinning. She’d offered to drive me to the unit and I’d jumped at the chance, the alternative being my mother. “What perfect weather to sit in a car in for an hour and a half.”

  “Could be worse,” I said, pushing my seat as far back as it would go so I could stretch out my plaster-encased leg. On my lap I was holding on to a purple florist bag, containing a sunflower pot, a charm bracelet and a box of macarons. Despite what Rosie had said, I couldn’t imagine turning up to see Suzanne empty-handed. “You could be at work.”

  Tarin slid her sunglasses up onto her face. “True, true.” She turned out of our road, the GPS tracing a route for us. “So how are you feeling?”

  “Good,” I said, smiling. There was no other answer to give on a sunny June day, in a car with my sister, being driven to see someone I loved and missed, someone I’d started to worry I’d lost. “Maybe a little nervous. But I’m good.”

  Tarin glanced at me. “What’s making you nervous?”

  “The whole thing, I guess. It’s a weird situation.”

  “Yeah, but it’s still you and her at the end of the day,” Tarin pointed out. “And think of it this way: she wouldn’t have asked to see you after all this time unless she was ready.”

  “That’s true,” I said, feeling a jolt of relief for my wise, generous older sister and the fact that it was her in the car with me rather than my mother. “I guess I’m just not sure what I’m meant to say. What do you say to someone who’s so depressed they’re suicidal?”

  “Tell them you love them,” Tarin said, like it was nothing. Like it was everything. “Be supportive. Look, what you need to understand is, you won’t be able to single-handedly stop her wishing she was dead, if that’s even what she still thinks, which I doubt. What you can do, as her friend, is make sure she knows you’re glad she’s not. Does that make sense?”

  “It doesn’t seem like enough.”

  “There is no enough.” Tarin flicked her turn signal on, the clicking noise filling the car as she merged onto the highway. “You seem to be forgetting that she’s in a clinical facility getting professional help. Which is great, obviously. Let them worry about how to deal with depression. You’re going to visit your friend, remember? Yes, she’s a patient, but she’s not your patient. So for God’s sake, don’t treat her like one.”

  We got to Gwillim House a little after two p.m. It looked more like a residential community center than the hospital I’d been expecting, which made me feel much better about Suzanne living there. At reception, a friendly Scottish woman called Yvette signed me in, talking too fast for me to really follo
w what she was saying. She led me down a corridor of magnolia walls and propped-open doors, taking it slowly because of my crutches, until we came to an empty room furnished with aggressively bright sofas.

  “Make yourself comfortable,” Yvette said, then glanced at my leg. “If you can. I’ll go and tell Suzanne you’re here.”

  Suddenly alone, I stood uncertainly in the doorway for a few seconds before hobbling over to the window, which looked out onto a large, beautifully landscaped garden. I pressed my forehead against the glass, taking in the flowerbeds and ornate, mosaic path winding away from the building and into the distance, trying to figure out why this garden was such a surprise to me. I felt the wedge of my crutch digging into my skin as I stood, thinking of gardeners and flowers and Suzanne and unexpected things.

  “I planted the irises,” a voice at my side said. “Those blue ones.”

  “They’re pretty,” I said, even though I could see at least three different blue flowers and I had no idea which ones she was talking about.

  “It’s not exactly subtle, as therapy techniques go,” Suzanne said. Her voice was casual, musing, as if we were picking up a conversation we’d been right in the middle of. “Plant something, watch it grow. But you’re right—they are pretty.”

  Keeping my forehead up against the glass of the window, I turned my head slightly so I was looking right at her. She smiled at me, the spontaneous, instinctive smile of a friend to a friend. “Hi.”

  “Hi,” I said.

  29

  MY IMMEDIATE THOUGHT WAS THAT she hadn’t changed at all. Her hair was pulled back from her face in a simple ponytail, slightly longer than I remembered but still the whiter shade of blond that I had come to associate with her. Her eyes still sparkled, her smile still shone.

  But after the first happy kick of familiarity, I registered that there was a slight strain in the corners of her mouth when she smiled; that she wasn’t wearing any makeup and her face was pale. Where her hair was pulled back at the sides of her face I could see darker roots that were almost, but not quite, hidden by the rest of the blond. She was thinner than I remembered, the simple black T-shirt and gray zip-up hoodie she was wearing hanging slightly loose around her. Her neck, for so long framed by her dove necklace, was bare.