Everyone We've Been

by Sarah Everett

  “I need to tell you some things,” Dad says, getting to his feet. I open the door, even though I’m fairly certain I don’t want to hear this.

  “If you’re going to lie to me, we don’t have to bother with this conversation.”

  “I’m not going to lie to you,” he says, actually holding my gaze. I step back and let him in.

  He sits on the edge of my bed and surveys my room like he hasn’t seen it in years. I don’t think he has. He looks like a giant sitting on a piece of furniture that’s too small for him and might break at any second.

  I lean back against the wall by my door. I have so many questions for him, but I’m afraid I might cry, so I let him go first.

  “You’re built too much like me,” he says.

  I shoot him a weird look. What is he talking about? We’re nothing alike.

  “It’s always been my biggest fear,” he continues, “that you might end up in some of the places I have.”

  I’m too much like him? Does he not see how much Caleb looks like him? How much Caleb wants to fly?

  “Dad,” I say impatiently, but he holds up a hand.

  “I’m getting there,” he says. “I’ve suffered from pretty bad depression all my life. My brothers, too. You know about Uncle Mark.” I nod and glance away. He killed himself his second year of college, before I was born. “I had dark times, too. Your grandmother would look at me and say, ‘Open your eyes. Wake up.’ And for the longest time, I had no idea why she said that. I thought she meant that I always looked like I was falling asleep.”

  I bite my lower lip.

  “For the most part, after your mother and I were married, I was better. Most airlines need you to be stable for a minimum of a year before you can fly, and I was. I started—and am still on—meds, but I was finally happy. And after you kids were born, I was really happy. And then Rory died….” He takes a breath in like he’s been punched.

  “That’s why you left,” I say. “You blamed me.”

  He glances at me, surprised. Then he says, like he’s having trouble picking out his words, “It was a lot of things.” He doesn’t deny it, though—that maybe he had trouble forgiving me. And in his non-denial, I find more truth—painful and sad—than I have since I found out about Rory. “We walked around in a fog for months. We tried for a year to get past it. All of us. Me, your mother, Caleb.

  “But you were the worst, Addie. You were carrying so much blame around it was like it had contorted you. That little girl who was bursting with so much life, who burst into every room. Your eyes were glazed over. Your passion for everything, for music—it was just gone. I couldn’t bear looking at you and not recognizing you. I wanted to say the same thing my mother had said to me: ‘Open your eyes.’ To tell you it was going to be okay. And I believed that you would be okay. I really did. I thought it was possible to live through depression, because I was doing it.”

  He shakes his head now. “But when your mother told me about my pills and where she’d found them—she was so convinced that if you didn’t have to live through it, then you shouldn’t. I knew she’d never forgive me if something happened to you. And honestly, I wouldn’t have forgiven myself, either. So I let her decide.”

  He looks me in the eye again. “Caleb didn’t want it and I understood why. If I couldn’t imagine having it myself, then I couldn’t force him to.”

  You fought for Caleb, but not for me.

  “It would have been a betrayal, unnatural,” Dad continues. “A parent doesn’t forget a child. I—we—had a responsibility to remember him.”

  “So it wasn’t unnatural when you let me forget him?”

  And they hadn’t just betrayed Rory by doing it; they’d betrayed me, too.

  “I don’t think it was the right thing to do, Addie. Some days it eats me up inside…,” Dad says, squinting, looking past me. “Whether it was right or wrong, your mother and I just wanted you to be okay. We had a chance to take away your pain, and we did. I wish sometimes someone could have done that for me.”

  His voice breaks a little then, and I swallow.

  I want to shout a million things at him, to yell what that tiny voice in my head is saying: I could have done it. I could have gone through it and come out okay. But my throat burns and different words form.

  “I had it done again. I chose to go back a second time. I didn’t know how much I had already lost,” I say, tears spilling unbidden down my cheeks.

  He looks for a second like he’s going to walk across the room to me and wrap me up in his arms like he used to do.

  “I know. We set you up for that. Whatever happened with the boy—you never told me the details—it tore you up inside. Anyone could see that.”

  I swipe my hand across my cheek.

  “Rory was the first major loss you had, and the boy—”

  “Zach,” I say. I want him to say it, acknowledge the apparition I’ve being seeing.

  “Zach. Because you never really dealt with the grief of losing Rory, this second heartbreak felt like it was the end of the world to you. I think the way you learn to deal with one hard thing affects the way you deal with the next and the one after that. You didn’t remember what it felt like to lose anything and come through it.” It reminds me of what Mrs. Dubois always says. About firsts and how they set the precedent. “How you learn to cope with it and live through it, that’s important.”

  Is he saying Zach is dead, too? Lost the way Rory is? Why didn’t I let Katy tell me everything she knew?

  “Dad, do you know anything about me and Zach?”

  He shakes his head at me, like now is not the time.

  “Addie, your mother was right that a number of things could be causing what you’ve been seeing,” Dad says. “Figure out why you made the choice you did to have the procedure on your own. Let’s find out what’s wrong—why you’re seeing him—first.”

  BEFORE

  Early September

  “Come here, you love-bitten mothertrucker,” Katy says, sweeping me into an inescapable embrace. “Don’t you ever leave me again!”

  “You left me,” I point out, laughing into her shoulder as I hug her back just as tightly.

  “Why? Why did I do it?” she hisses. “I nearly fell into a Depressive Episode, I missed you so much.” Which, of course, is not true since not one of her hundred messages made mention of said Depressive Episodes, or even of missing me. But her hug tells me now what her words when she was away didn’t.

  I step back and say, “Zach, this is my best friend, Katy.”

  Keeping one hand on my lower back, Zach reaches forward to shake Katy’s hand and grins at her. “Hi!” he says, speaking loudly to be heard over the music at the pool party we’re at. “Addie tells me you’re an actor.”

  And I want to hug him because if there ever was a perfect way to introduce yourself to Katy, that was it. Not “actress,” because she finds the -ress ending to be sexist, plus Zach’s comment indicates that I’ve been talking about her, which she loves.

  One of Katy’s eyebrows shoots up and she shakes hands with Zach, clearly impressed.

  “I am.” She smiles back. “It’s nice to meet you, finally!” Zach and I have been official for more than a month, but since she only got back last night, having spent the past three weeks with her cousins in Long Island, this is the first time we are all together.

  Katy attaches herself to my side and says much louder than she realizes, “Okay, you were right about the smile. My God. But where is the friend?”

  Zach laughs, clearly making out her every word. “Raj said—and I quote—‘I would rather die a slow and merciless death at the hands of one of Van Durgen’s whimpering characters than put on a pair of pants and go to a pool party when I can play Dungeon World 2 and my mother’s making aloo gobi.’ ”

  Zach and I laugh hard and Katy stares at us in fascination, especially at Zach’s smile. She pinches my side just under my rib cage.

  “I got, maybe, three words of that, but you tw
o are revolting,” she says, giving Zach and me her crucially important seal of approval.

  Most of the party passes uneventfully. Katy is one of about seven people who strip out of their clothes and actually get into the pool—or rather, she cannonballs in. Everybody else dances and talks, loitering around the pool or on the grass. Some people are even on the roof or the fence.

  Usually I’d be trailing behind Katy at a party like this, or halfheartedly conversing with one of her the-yo-ter friends while Katy chats up some guy, gets wasted, or tries to convince me to loosen up. (“If you’re going to New Yawk, you’re going to have to learn how to party like you’re from New Yawk.”) She’s diagnosed me as having at least a mild form of agoraphobia, loosely defined as the fear of public spaces and crowds. For once, she might not be far from the truth.

  That, coupled with my mom always wanting to know my whereabouts, makes me a not-so-frequent attendee of house parties.

  Now, though, Zach introduces me to a few of his friends and then we find ourselves a spot underneath a peeling tree in the yard and lose track of everyone else.

  We’re playing One-Up, a game that Kevin, of all people, taught Zach. It’s actually pretty similar to Bigger and Better. You say one thing that scares you, and the other person one-ups you until you can’t think of anything worse. Our first topic is fears.

  “Drowning,” I say.

  “The dark,” Zach counters.

  “The dark?” I repeat, incredulous.

  “Not, like, scared-to-turn-out-the-lights dark,” Zach laughs. “I mean, like, abject darkness. The kind of dark that can swallow something whole. I honestly can’t think of anything worse.”

  “Good thing it’s my turn. Hmmm. How to top that? Let me think of something truly scary. Oh, I know!” I say, flicking something off his jeans. “Lint. It’s so terrifying. And, like, fluffy.”

  “Fine. Laugh it up,” he says, rolling his eyes. “But I guarantee you that you’d freak out if you could only fathom the kind of darkness in my mind.”

  “Okay, this is getting creepy, Zach.”

  He laughs. “I’ll put it in a movie someday and then you’ll understand.”

  Zach suddenly stiffens, his face rigid.

  “Shit,” he murmurs under his breath.

  “What’s wrong?” I whirl around, following the direction of his eyes. They’re right on Katy, who is leaning over the edge of the pool, still in it, and talking to a girl in a short black summer dress. As we watch, Katy talks animatedly and then gives a little squeal, putting her hands up. The girl, whose hair is midnight black with a big red flower in it, bends down to give Katy a hug.

  I’ve seen her before, at one of their community-theater events.

  The girl laughs now and steps back, the front of her dress wet from Katy’s hug.

  “Do you want to go?” Zach asks very quietly. The girl is moving across the lawn now, toward a group of girls lying on towels on a patch of grass. And they squeal and hug her when she reaches them. One of them pats the flower in her hair.

  “Sure,” I say with feigned lightness as we both get up and dust our clothes off. “I’m going to quickly say bye to Katy, okay?”

  Zach nods, still distracted, but he’s no longer watching the girl. He’s staring down at his sneakers.

  When we leave the party a couple of minutes later, Zach is holding my hand, leading the way so we don’t lose each other. We both say hi to a few people we know as we pass—Zach to people who go to his high school, me to people who go to mine. Mostly band people.

  I glance one last time over my shoulder, trying to make out the red flower in the dimming light. I find it in almost exactly the same spot I saw it last, and I notice that she’s a hand-talker. Her hands wave animatedly as she recounts a story to her friends, which has one of them grabbing at her sides and doubling over.

  Whatever lightness or end-of-summer giddiness I entered this party with has dissipated.

  Lindsay is not, in fact, horse-faced.

  BEFORE

  Early September

  “Your mom is nice!” Zach whispers as my mom heads up the stairs. After weeks of me hanging out with Zach, Mom has finally insisted I bring Zach home to meet her. I think she’s been fairly lenient because Caleb gave her a decent report about him and because she knows his dad.

  When he came in, Zach shook her hand and introduced himself. She asked all these questions about his family, and everything was going okay until Zach mentioned that his older brother’s wife just had a child and he tried to bring out his phone to show Mom a picture of baby Russell. I could have sworn her face crumpled just a bit, and then she mumbled something about having work to do and raced upstairs. It turned out Zach didn’t have a picture on him, but I have no idea why she reacted that way. She tends, in general, to leave a wide berth around little kids at the mall and stuff, and when I ask her about it, she says it just feels like a long time ago since me and Caleb were little. Or she says kids are draining, too energetic. I know this can’t be totally true, since sometimes I catch her dabbing her eyes during diaper commercials.

  Still, if Zach noticed her strange behavior, he didn’t say anything.

  But he is right; she was nice to him. I doubt Dad is going to meet Zach anytime soon. I’ve seen my father once this summer, for the joint birthday-graduation dinner, and I can’t even imagine maneuvering the here’s-my-boyfriend meeting with him. Too much awkward in one place.

  “You made me think she was scary. You were freaking me out!” Zach is saying.

  I laugh. “She’s both. I mean, she’s fine. But she can get weird sometimes.”

  “In what way?” Zach asks, flopping down on the living-room couch.

  “Like, completely overprotective. You know how I’ve been biking around the entire summer?” Zach nods, his hair falling against the brown sofa, as he stares up at me. I pop a movie into the DVD player and go back to the couch. “Two days ago, she freaked out about me ‘incurring a head injury’ while biking and why couldn’t I drive like a normal person. I don’t even have a car!”

  “And isn’t driving more dangerous than riding?”

  “Exactly!” I say. “I mean, I always wear a helmet. Tomorrow she’ll have a problem with driving, too, but the point is that she just up and decided it was too dangerous and I can’t do it anymore, and I was like, ‘I’ve been doing it all summer.’ I know everyone thinks their parents are a little insane. I think mine actually might be.”

  Zach laughs. “And your house isn’t as depressing as you made it sound.”

  “What did you expect? Black walls and emo music?”

  “Pretty much,” Zach says. It’s true that the house is significantly less depressing than it’s been this summer. Caleb is even out with some friends today. I rest my feet against the center table—hoping Mom stays upstairs awhile. He rests his head in my lap.

  “Hey, Zach,” I say, playing with his hair. It’s so soft I wish I was small enough to burrow in it. “About last night…”

  “Sorry about making us leave in such a hurry.”

  It’s okay, I’m tempted to say, but it’s not. As a rule, we don’t really talk about Lindsay. I hate thinking of Zach kissing her, doing mundane things with her. I hate thinking that Zach’s power to wake me up, make me feel special, worked on her as well.

  I texted Katy this morning telling her about Zach’s reaction to seeing Lindsay last night. Katy had never met Zach but she’d heard about him since she and Lindsay have been in community theater together forever. It was only when I texted her that she put together that my Zach is her theater friend’s Zach.

  She seems nice, I said, trying to find something neutral, a gateway for further conversation that was respectful of the fact that Katy and Lindsay are supposedly friends.

  Always so PC, Sullivan. I know what you meant by that was: Holy shit she’s hot af what do I do?

  I texted back, That was not what I meant!…You think she’s hot af ?

  She’s not my type ;)
<
br />   What were Zach and her like together?

  Umm…Never saw them together, but all the Meridian kids say they were joined at the hip. He was always picking her up in his super old car and stuff, and judging by how bummed she’s been about the breakup (even though SHE initiated it), he’s a good one. You’re lucky! Is his friend single???

  LEAVE RAJ ALONE.

  But is he???

  Addie??

  Ugh, you’re no fun. Whatever. I’m still texting, like, four guys I met on the road trip ;) Though I’m now concerned one of them had ringworm??!

  “Are you still in love with her?” I ask Zach now, because I need to know.

  “Of course not,” Zach says, almost too quickly. Maybe because he knew I would ask. “I mean, we have history. We always will, but that’s all it is.”

  “Okay,” I say, feeling more at ease than I have since last night. And then, because I’m a masochist, “So what’s she like?” I ask. “Lindsay?”

  All Katy had for me was that Lindsay is good at improv (though sometimes slow to her mark) but bad at physical comedy and has killer taste in boots. I guess spending a couple of hours a week together makes them friends, but not super close.

  Zach sits up and looks at me. “Why would you ask me that?”

  Because I’m a masochist.

  Because sometimes she feels like a ghost, haunting us.

  I shrug. “I want to know. You’ve known her your whole life, right?”

  “Since third grade,” he says. He pauses a second, like he’s debating whether to tell me more, then finally he sighs. “She was nine going on nineteen at the time. Her parents are lawyers; they let her stay up late with them, watching documentaries about genocides and global warming and old Hollywood movies, and she’d come to class and bring them up during discussion time. It blew my mind—all our minds.” I feel the hairs on my body stand up as he talks about her. There’s a mixture of wariness and pain and respect in his voice. “She was the kid that got put in charge when the teacher stepped out of the classroom for a minute. But it wasn’t just that grown-ups treated her like an adult; she acted like an adult. She wanted to be taken seriously. She always has.”