The World Without Us

by Robin Stevenson

  I take a sip of my water and move the glass around on the table, watching the sliding water circles it leaves behind. “So, are you and Kamala, like, an item?”

  He sits back and shakes his head. “Actually, it’s frowned upon.”

  “Frowned upon? What, sex?”

  “Yeah. It ties us to the material world.”

  I snort. “So you took a vow of celibacy or something?”

  “It’s not like that, Mel.” He sounds so earnest. “It’s just that it doesn’t help you develop true Krishna consciousness.”

  “Right.” I think of him kissing me, right before he decided to drive to the Suicide Bridge. “You know, I’ve been kind of freaking out all week.”

  “You have? Why?”

  “Seriously?” I stare at him. “Because you disappeared, Jeremy. Because you were supposed to be gone for one evening and that was last weekend. Because you didn’t answer my calls or my texts.”

  “My phone battery was dead and I didn’t have my charger.”

  “And you stood up Suzy. The kid I babysit, remember?”

  He looks blank.

  “You were supposed to come over on Monday and talk to her. About bullying and stuff?”

  “Oh yeah. Shit.” His hand goes to his forehead, to tug on the lock of hair that is no longer there. “I totally forgot.”

  “I noticed. So did she.” I scowl at him, remembering my panicked call to his mother. “And you know what, Jeremy? When you disappear, people worry. Especially, you know, after what happened before.”

  “I told you, I won’t do anything like that again.”

  “Fine. That doesn’t mean I won’t worry.”

  He sighs. “Can we just move on, Mel? I mean, I came over to tell you how great it all was. Can’t you just be happy for me?”

  A dark anger is boiling up in my chest, threatening to spill out. I clench my fists under the table, push them against my thighs. “I guess I don’t think it’s so great,” I say stiffly.

  “You have to come next time. Meet these people, try chanting with them. It’s like nothing else, Mel. I can’t explain how good it feels.”

  “It’s cowardly,” I say. “You’re just running away from things like you always do. Like you did that day we went to look for your father. Remember that? You lost your nerve and ran away, and look how that day ended up. With you jumping off a bridge.”

  He leans toward me. “I need to talk to my father. I know that. But the bridge…I think that had to happen, Mel. Because that’s when I realized that I wanted to live. And I did, which is crazy, right? People jump off that bridge and die all the time. But not me.”

  I stand up so abruptly that my chair tips over backward, crashing to the tile floor. “You weren’t saved for a reason, Jeremy. It was pure, freaky, dumb luck.”

  “I don’t think so,” he says.

  “No. You think you were saved so that you could dance around chanting in fucking saffron robes,” I spit out. “Which is fucking crazy, Jeremy.”

  He stands up too, more slowly, one hand pushed against his ribs. “Mel.”

  “I know you feel like shit about your brother, okay? I get that.”

  “That’s got nothing to do with this.”

  “Bullshit,” I say. “It has everything to do with it. You think I don’t know how shitty it feels to accept that you should have saved someone and you didn’t?”

  “Mel,” he says again. “Mel…”

  I realize I am crying. “Sometimes you can’t save people, Jeremy. Like Ramon.”

  “What are you talking about? What does Ramon have to do with this?”

  “Everything,” I say. “Remember when we first met and you wrote me that note? You signed it your compatriot on death row.”

  “It was a joke, Mel. You know that.”

  “But it’s true, right? So maybe you should just accept that we’re all going to end up dead and do something useful with the time you have.”

  He folds his arms across his chest, his face tight with anger. “And let me guess: you’re going to decide what is useful and what isn’t.”

  “Showing up to help Suzy would have been useful,” I say. “Keeping your promise to an eight-year-old would be useful. Letting a kid like that down is a pretty big fail.”

  “There is no failure for one who pleases Krishna.”

  I want to slap his smug face. “Oh, did Kamala tell you that?”

  Jeremy runs his hands over his scalp. “Is that what this is about? You’re jealous?”

  “No. I’m pissed off, Jeremy. I’m pissed off that you’re being so selfish. I’m pissed off that you survived that fall but you’re still throwing your life away.” My voice is getting louder and louder, and every time I look at his shaved head, I want to hit him. “I mean, Hare Krishnas? Really? Because if all you care about is that it makes you feel good, you might as well just start shooting heroin.”

  There’s a noise behind me, and I turn around. My parents are standing in the entrance to the kitchen, their jackets still on, eyes wide with concern. I wonder how much they’ve heard.

  “Sorry to intrude,” Bill says. “Good to see you again, Jeremy.”

  “You too.” Jeremy clears his throat. “I should go.”

  “Fine,” I say.

  “Don’t feel you need to rush off because of us,” Vicky says.

  “No, really, I…” Jeremy nods awkwardly and backs away from me, then turns and heads for the door. I watch him leave without a word.

  Vicky puts her hand on my shoulder. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes. No. Not really.” My throat closes up, squeezing off the flow of words.

  “I didn’t recognize him at first,” she says. “The hair.”

  I nod.

  “I’ll put the kettle on,” Bill says. “Make some tea.”

  “Good idea.” Vicky looks me in the eyes, her gaze steady. “Should we leave you alone? Or do you want to talk about it?”

  I shrug. I don’t know what I want.

  “We didn’t mean to eavesdrop,” Bill says. “But I couldn’t help catching a few words.”

  “It’s okay,” I say. “I guess we were shouting.”

  Bill pulls three mugs out of the cupboard and drops a tea bag in each. Then he turns to face me, leaning against the counter behind him. “Is he using drugs, honey?”

  “Drugs? No.”

  “I don’t mean to pry, but I thought I heard you say something about heroin.”

  I stare at him for a second, trying to remember. “Oh. No, he’s not.”

  Vicky tilts her head, watching me. “Are you sure? You know you can tell us anything…”

  “I was just saying he might as well be.” There’s a long silence and my words hang in the air. It sounds awful—me yelling stuff like that at someone who has just survived a suicide attempt. “He’s throwing his life away anyway,” I say defensively.

  Bill gets the milk out of the fridge. “You taking sugar these days?”

  “No.” I pick up my tipped-over chair, sit down at the table and lean my chin on my hands. “I know I shouldn’t have said that to him. You don’t have to tell me.”

  Vicky sits across from me, in the seat Jeremy just left. “I wasn’t going to say anything of the sort.”

  I swallow and feel the throat-ache of held-back tears. “He’s joined the Hare Krishnas,” I say. The kettle starts to whistle, but not before I hear a low chuckle from Bill. “It’s not funny,” I say. “It’s a cult. He’s totally brainwashed.”

  Bill pours water into the three mugs and carries them over to the table. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have laughed. It’s just that I went through a little phase like that at university.”

  “You did?” I can’t picture my father chanting. Or shaving his head or giving up steak.

  My mother looks surprised. “I don’t think you’ve even told me about this.”

  He shrugs. “Phase might be overstating it. I went to a couple of meetings, tried to read the Bhagavad Gita.”

&
nbsp; “Why?” I ask him.

  Bill looks apologetic. “I’d like to say it was part of a great philosophical search for life’s deeper meaning, but the truth is, someone invited me to go and I wanted to make some friends.”

  “Um…”

  “I was underage,” he says. “I couldn’t go to the bar.”

  Vicky laughs. “How long did that last?”

  “Oh, all of a week or two.” He looks at me. “Sounds like you think Jeremy might be in a bit deeper.”

  “He’s probably pretty vulnerable,” Vicky says. “Mel, do you really think it’s a cult?”

  “I don’t know. Aren’t all religions kind of cults?”

  “You know what I mean. Are you concerned about him?”

  “Of course I am.” I’m suddenly feeling exhausted. “But I don’t think anyone’s twisting his arm or taking his money, if that’s what you mean.”

  Bill pours milk into my tea and his own, puts the jug back in the fridge and sits down at the table with Vicky and me. “We all have to make sense of things in our own way, love. I don’t suppose this will do him any harm. Maybe it’ll help him find some kind of peace with everything.”

  “How can it? I mean, isn’t it a way of not facing things?”

  “What do you mean?” Vicky asks. “What is it you think he should be doing?”

  “I don’t know.” I blink back tears. “I just want him back the way he was before all this happened.”

  “Which means what? How was he different?” Vicky says.

  I remember his obsession with lucid dreaming, his belief in reincarnation, his conviction that his brother was communicating with him through his dreams. “Maybe he wasn’t. I don’t know…He just doesn’t deal with reality. He doesn’t accept that his brother is dead.”

  “Mmm. Hard thing to accept.”

  “I think believing stuff like this is what got him into trouble in the first place,” I say. “Like, he thought if he jumped off the bridge, he’d be with his brother again.”

  “Did he tell you that?”

  There’s a long silence. I can feel my heart thumping. “I should have known he was going to do it,” I whisper. “I should’ve been able to stop him.”

  “Honey,” Bill breaks in. “You can’t blame yourself.”

  “You don’t know!” My face and arms are ice cold and tingling, like all the blood in my body is rushing to fuel my racing heart. “You don’t know what I knew. You don’t know all the things I said to him.”

  “Regardless—” Bill starts to speak but stops as my mother puts her hand on his arm.

  “Let her finish,” she says.

  And they both sit there, silent, waiting.

  If I don’t tell them now, I never will. If I don’t let this out right now, I will keep it hidden forever, wrapping layer after layer of lies around it. I’ll carry it with me always, like a glossy pearl with poison in its heart, and it’ll slowly kill me. “It was my idea,” I whisper, so quietly that both my parents lean in, straining to catch my words. “I said it first. One day at school. He was down about something and I said…I said, We can jump off the Skyway Bridge together.”

  I can see the flinch, the tightening of the skin under Vicky’s eyes. “Did you mean it?”

  “No. But I said it.”

  “People joke about things,” Bill says. “That’s normal. People say, I’d rather die than sit through another faculty meeting. Or I’ll slit my wrists if I have to listen to one more student whine about a B+. It doesn’t mean you’re suggesting that anyone actually kill themselves.”

  “We talked about what we’d have for our last meal,” I say. My face is hot, my eyes stinging, but even this last humiliating detail is spilling out. “We went to a restaurant. And I thought it was, you know, a date.”

  “Oh, Mel,” Vicky says. “Honey.”

  “I thought…I don’t know what I thought.” I start to cry. “I didn’t know he meant it. I didn’t know he’d actually… Even that night, on the bridge…I didn’t think he’d jump.”

  My mother’s arms are around me, holding me tightly.

  “None of this makes it your fault,” Bill says. “None of it.”

  “He made a choice,” Vicky says.

  “I should’ve known.” My voice is muffled against her shoulder.

  “Maybe,” Vicky says, and I am so surprised I pull away and look at her face. She touches my cheek. “If you were older, maybe. If you had more experience dealing with people going through all kinds of problems. But Mel, I’m a counselor. I have a master’s degree; I spent years working with people who are dealing with depression and all kinds of trauma; I took a whole course in suicide prevention. And you know what? I’ve still lost clients to suicide. More than once.”

  “I bet you didn’t suggest to anyone that they jump off the bridge,” I say.

  “No,” she says. She gives me a tentative grin, just a twitch of one corner of her mouth. “But that’s because I’m a trained professional.”

  “God, Vicky.” I don’t know whether I’m laughing or crying or both. “This isn’t funny.”

  “I know. I know.” She holds my gaze. “It’s awful. And that’s why, sometimes, you have to laugh. You should hear the jokes on death row.”

  “They joke about dying?”

  “They have to.”

  I nod. “I always thought Jeremy was joking. Because school is so awful sometimes, and because of everything that happened with his brother and his dad. I was just joking about dying, you know? I thought he was too.”

  “Maybe he was,” Bill says, his voice a low rumble. “Maybe he wasn’t serious either until that moment on the bridge. Maybe it was impulsive. Not planned.”

  “You think?” I’d feel better, somehow, if I believed that. Less stupid and less responsible.

  Bill shrugs. “Why don’t you ask him?”

  I think about the fight we just had, the words I can’t take back—cowardly, crazy, selfish—and I wonder if I’ll get the chance.

  Letting Go

  After our fight, I don’t call Jeremy and he doesn’t call me. A few days go by, and then a week. I meet up with Adriana one evening and we drink my dad’s milk-shakes and go for a walk together. Bill and Vicky seem so happy to see her, but it’s all a bit awkward and stilted and oddly boring, and I don’t know how much we really have in common now. Being with her makes me feel lonely. It makes me miss Jeremy. Still, it is good not to be enemies anymore. Before she gets on the bus to go home, I tell her that I understand why she called the ambulance that night, and that even though I’d rather she hadn’t, I think she did the right thing. She just nods and says thanks, but the relief on her face when she says it makes me want to cry.

  I get through my days at school, still feeling like zombie girl. I visit Mrs. Paulsen’s office once and sit in the pale blue chair and stare at the kitten poster and wonder how much longer I’ll have to hang on before I start feeling normal again. I tell her about Jeremy and the Hare Krishnas. I don’t cry. She says that Jeremy will have to find his own way through and that I need to focus on myself. She says if I still feel like this in a few weeks, maybe I should think about seeing my doctor. I ask if that’s code for taking antidepressants, and she laughs and says it might be. She’s nice, but it feels weird to talk to a stranger, and I don’t think I’ll go back. Unless I feel worse, I guess.

  Every day after school, I hang out with Suzy. It’s the best part of my day, actually. Suzy’s the one person who doesn’t know about Jeremy, and it’s a huge relief just to be with her and listen to her talk about stars and galaxies and her new passion, the 1920s. We spend hours poring over websites together, learning about the postwar economic boom, flappers, jazz, fashion, Art Deco. We print out images of young women in New York, New Orleans, Paris and Berlin. Suzy prints out photographs of the actress Louise Brooks, gets her dark hair cut in a short bob, draws young women in sleeveless dresses with low waistlines and decides she might be a fashion designer instead of an astronomer. “I’m ne
ver going to smoke though,” she tells me, drawing a cloud of smoke above the waifish girl she is sketching.

  “Good,” I say. “I should hope not.”

  “I like the cigarette holders though,” she says wistfully.

  I roll my eyes.

  “You think it would be a weird thing to collect?” She adds a fancy carved cigarette holder to her drawing.

  “Cigarette holders?” I laugh. “No weirder than stamps or baseball cards. Less weird than Beanie Babies. Anyway, who cares if it’s weird? I like weird.”

  “I don’t know if my mom would let me.”

  “Ask her.”

  She nods. “They didn’t know back then.”

  “Didn’t know what?”

  “That smoking killed you.” She points at the black-and-white image on the screen of her laptop: an old photograph of a crowded New Orleans jazz club, young men and women laughing, wreathed with smoke. “Look at them. They thought it was glamorous.” She looks up at me, her big eyes ringed with her mom’s eyeliner. “Have you ever smoked, Mel?”

  “No,” I tell her, lying without hesitation. “No way.”

  “Good,” she says. “Because I want you to live for a long, long, long time.”

  “Me too,” I say, and I realize that despite everything, and unlike my previous statement, this is true.

  The doorbell rings. Suzy wrinkles her nose. “I know who that is,” she says.

  “Who?”

  “Jehovah’s Witnesses.”

  I laugh. “Why do you say that?”

  “Because they came a couple of weeks ago and I invited them in,” she says. “Mom was mad, but I wanted to hear what they had to say.”

  “And?”

  She shrugs. “Boring, boring, boring. And now they keep coming back and Mom’s too polite to tell them to get lost.”