Lifeline

by Abbey Lee Nash

  The park.

  The swings.

  Mom’s cheeks are glistening, and her eyes are bloodshot. “I went through his dresser,” she says. “I’d known for a long time that something wasn’t right. We were always short on money, and he was always going out at night, always lying to me. At first, I thought it was an affair. I went through his drawers, looking for receipts, lipstick stains, anything. But I never expected . . .”

  Mom dissolves into tears, and Richard Fisher hands her a box of tissues.

  I turn my back to them, lean against the wall, and press my forehead against the cool plaster. This new life history sits skin-deep, burning the surface of my knowing, but I will not absorb it. I will not take this in.

  Mom’s sobbing now, but instead of going to her, instead of comforting her, I reach for the door. “We’re done here.”

  “Eli?” Richard Fisher’s voice pulls me up short. A deep crevice furrows his weathered brow. “Can you stay a little longer? I think it’s important that we talk about what you’re feeling right now.”

  You know how when you put your hand in scalding water or ice-cold snow, the feeling you get is the opposite? The water feels like ice and the snow burns you? Either way, if you keep your hand there long enough, pretty soon you don’t feel anything. You don’t notice your hand burning. You don’t notice the frostbite.

  You don’t feel anything at all.

  “I’m fine,” I say.

  “Eli,” he presses.

  “I said I’m fine!”

  Richard Fisher sighs, and I leave without saying goodbye to my mom.

  A gnawing hunger grabs me right outside of Richard Fisher’s office, tearing at my skin from the inside. I skip the end of group and head to the dining hall, where I scarf down four cream-filled donuts doused in scalding coffee. I leave the cafeteria in a sugar-sick daze. The walk to the art room feels like moving through quicksand, each step heavier than the first. I brush past Libby, almost bumping into her easel, and she grabs my arm.

  “Eli? What the hell? What happened?”

  Her eyes pass over my face like searchlights, teasing out the story, and for a second I want to tell her everything. But that would make it true.

  “I’m fine,” I mumble.

  I leave Libby at her easel and head for the supply table. I squirt paint on a palette and choose a brush, then fill a can with water from the utility sink at the back of the room. I swipe color after color on my canvas until the paint cakes like mud.

  The rest of the class arrives gradually, and the art room settles into quiet, focused activity—a beehive vibrating with the subtle din of brushes against canvases and the soft “oohs and aahs” of the wandering art teacher, with her rustling skirt and wind chime earrings, who stops at each person’s easel in turn.

  “Tell me about this,” she buzzes, hovering near an easel close to mine. Her patchouli smell wafts across the room, stinging my nose.

  The girl behind me drones softly about how her self-portrait depicts the pressure of perfectionism.

  “I can see the anger here,” Queen Bee/Art Teacher hums. “And over here, in these cool tones you’ve chosen, the loss and isolation.”

  Her voice is the delicate pitter patter of raindrops in summer—soothing and barely audible. But in the fog of confusion that clouds my brain, they echo like the mega-phoned announcements of a sports commentator. “Anger! Loss! Isolation!”

  I stare at my painting, jab more brown here, more yellow and red, until I’m not painting anymore, I’m stabbing the canvas with smudging color. This is supposed to be a self-portrait. This canvas is supposed to tell my story. But my entire life has been a lie.

  My dad was an addict.

  An addict.

  Savannah’s words sneak in through some back door of my brain. Your heart stopped, Eli. You were dying.

  Like father, like son.

  And suddenly I’m not painting anymore. The paintbrush is gone, and I’m stabbing the canvas with fists that come back streaked with brown. My fragile easel trembles and clatters to the ground. Someone screams. Faces pass in a blur as I run from the room. I don’t stop, I don’t slow down.

  I run until I don’t know where I’m going. Until I can’t see straight. Until I can’t breathe. Down the hall, through the rec room, right out the back doors where visitors stand to smoke. I slump down on the concrete stoop, streaked with ash, and sob into my paint-covered hands. My tears land like clumps of mud.

  When the double doors behind me shove open, I’m pretty sure it’s an orderly sent by the art teacher to haul me to Richard Fisher’s office for more shrinking. Or to the nurse for a sedative. Which actually sounds pretty good right about now.

  I wipe my eyes on my t-shirt sleeve. “You don’t have to say it,” I say, without turning around. “I can take myself back to art.”

  “Not much point in that,” Libby answers, and I twist around real fast, because she’s the last person I expected.

  She smirks. “Your painting is pretty much a pile of scraps at this point.” She sits down on the stoop beside me, her knee bumping mine in greeting. “It sucked anyway.”

  I choke out a strangled laugh, but the effort pushes out more tears, and I turn my face away from Libby, try to wipe them before she sees.

  She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t ask what happened. She doesn’t even ask if I’m okay. She pulls my head onto her shoulder and pretends she doesn’t see me cry.

  Paint drips like dried blood from my wrists and hands, mixing with the suds at the bottom of the shower. My thoughts swirl. Mom and Dad on the front porch the night he missed the ball game. Her hands on his chest, pushing him away. The flash of red taillights in the darkness. Mom on her knees in the middle of the street.

  She could’ve told me then. She could’ve told me a thousand times after. Instead, she married Steven and moved us to Grandhaven, where the ceilings were too high, and everything was closets and corners—a thousand places to hide and nowhere to be myself.

  She built our lives on a lie.

  I slam the water off, wrap a towel around my waist. Mo sits on his bed; his pen scratches across the pages of a notebook.

  My footprints soak the carpet. The picture of me and Mom heckles me from the top of my dresser. Me smiling, totally oblivious, Grandhaven Giants slapped across the front of my jersey like a brand. Like if we moved, we could start over. Like our lives could ever be normal again.

  I fling the picture against the wall. The glass cracks but doesn’t shatter. The frame lands face down on the floor.

  Mo stares at me, his pen suspended above the page.

  “Don’t ask me if I want to talk about it,” I growl. “I’m done talking.” I pick up the picture, toss it into the trash. I’m done with all this shit, done with sharing, with memories, with writing in my stupid fucking journal. Done telling the truth.

  The truth only brings more pain.

  Day 15

  I sleep through the morning of my second Visitation. After Mo got up, I turned off my alarm and pulled the curtains closed. I pretend this day is like any other. Savannah won’t be here. And I told my mom not to come.

  She cried, of course. Over the phone in Richard Fisher’s office, she sobbed into the receiver and begged me to reconsider.

  “I’ll tell you anything you want to know, honey,” she’d pleaded. “Anything at all. No more lies. I promise.”

  I’d handed the phone to Richard Fisher. Thirty seconds of honesty is a drop of water in an ocean of deceit.

  “He’ll talk when he’s ready,” Richard assured her. “We can’t force him to deal with these feelings if he doesn’t want to.”

  “Thanks, Fish,” I’d said on my way out of his office. “I owe you one.”

  Turns out it’s hard to sleep when you’re hungry, and the thought of red velvet cake sounds way better than spending the whole day alone in the dark. I fumble under the bed for my sneakers and head downstairs to the dining ha
ll.

  It’s packed with families, and the red velvet cake is already gone. I grab a plain bagel (the only kind left) and go looking for the only other person I know who won’t be spending the day with visitors.

  Libby’s on the same leather chair in the lobby where I found her last weekend. She’s perched with her legs tucked under her like a bird, and even though her notebook is open on her lap, she’s not drawing. She’s staring through the glass doors into the parking lot.

  “Any sign of them?”

  Libby startles, nearly jumping out of the chair. I wait for her to laugh or hit me or something, but her face is drawn tight, and she looks back toward the parking lot.

  “No,” she says. “I don’t think she’s coming.” Her voice is laced with disappointment, and I realize, not for the first time, that I can’t figure this girl out.

  I drop into the chair opposite her. “I told mine not to come.”

  This gets Libby’s attention. She turns away from the window, her fingers toying absently with the corner of her notebook. “Good for you.”

  Libby has no idea what happened between me and my mom. But maybe that’s the best kind of support there is—the kind that doesn’t need to hear both sides. The kind that’s on your side no matter what—the kind that backs you up, even if you’re wrong.

  “So, what’s going on?” I ask over a bite of dry bagel. “I thought you didn’t want visitors.”

  “Things change.” Libby looks up at the clock above the receptionist’s desk. It’s already noon—only two hours left of Visitation. Some people are already filtering back out into the parking lot, off to attend soccer games or dance recitals for their non-disappointing children. Libby turns to me suddenly. “Do you want to do something?”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know.” She closes her notebook, threads her sketching pencil through the wire binding, and stands up. “A walk or something, maybe? I’m tired of waiting around. You snooze, you lose, right?”

  “Sure, I guess.” I toss the rest of my bagel in the trash by the receptionist’s desk. “I hear the landscape here is beautiful,” I tease, mimicking my mom’s lame attempt at normalizing LakeShore. “Should we take a tour?”

  Libby grins and slips her arm in mine. “Lead the way.”

  Arm in arm, we weave through families and loved ones too focused on one another to care if two scarred junkies decide to go for a stroll. Unnoticed and unclaimed, we slip beneath an EXIT sign and out into the wooded landscape beyond.

  We find a path as close to the edge of campus as possible, far enough to feel like we’ve escaped, but not so far as to actually send the Front Desk Fascist into a conniption. It’s a gorgeous spring day, with afternoon sunshine that’s melted the morning chill. The trees are so beautiful you can almost forget the security cameras harbored in their branches. The air smells like open woods: damp, earthy, and alive.

  “My mom was supposed to come today.” Libby clutches her purple notebook to her chest, and for a second she looks like a normal high school girl, walking through a hall of lockers with her books in her arms. Normal, but for the scars.

  “I thought you didn’t want her here,” I say, realizing too late that I’ve probably crossed a line. Why couldn’t I do for Libby what she did for me? No questions, no talking. Just presence.

  “She broke up with her boyfriend. Or at least, she said she did. She said she kicked him out. It’s about time.” Libby’s lips screw up into a perfect rose petal pout. “Anyway, she was supposed to come today so we could talk about what it’s going to be like when I go home next week.”

  “Next week?” The words push the air from my lungs. I don’t know what this is between us, but I know I’m not ready for it to end.

  Libby gives me a sideways glance, and I can’t tell if she’s thinking the same thing as me. “Yep,” she says. “Only a few more days.” She steps closer to me, on purpose maybe, and her arm gently bumps mine. “What about you?”

  “Me?” I run my hand through my hair and let out a deep exhale. “Where do I start?”

  Libby smiles. “You don’t want to talk about it. I get it. We don’t have to talk about it.”

  “No, it’s not that.” I don’t want to talk about it, but I don’t want to not talk about it either. “My mom’s been the bearer of bad news lately. And I knew if she came, we were going to have to ‘talk.’” I bookmark the word in finger quotes, teasing a laugh from Libby. “I just didn’t want to, you know? But I also didn’t want to bullshit for four hours.”

  “Totally get it,” Libby says. “You can only mention how good the cake is so many times before you start to sound like an idiot.”

  “Or answer the how-are-you question.”

  “Oh my god, the how-are-you’s!” Libby stops in her tracks and flings out her arms like she’s sunning in disgust. “They’re the worst!”

  I pause mid-stride, turn around to face her. “It’s like, what do you want me to say? I’m fine, thanks, except for that whole heroin thing.”

  “Right?”

  Libby and I laugh together for a minute, and I can’t help but think, screw high school. Screw Mom and Steven, with their trumped-up expectations. This is real, this shared laughter and shared pain. Underneath the fake bullshit, where people’s secrets hide. That’s where Libby belongs.

  She touches my arm, and we keep walking. “Heroin, huh?” Libby muses. “I would’ve guessed pills. Oxy, percs, the good stuff.”

  “Yeah, well, turns out a taste for H kinda runs in the family.” I squint into the distance, remembering the afternoon Mom got the call that Dad had died. The divorce papers were on the table, and Dad was late. Mom had been so pissed; she’d paced the kitchen, mumbling under her breath that it was just like Dad to bail on a promise. I tried to drown out her words with crunchy cheese puffs as I worked on my homework at the kitchen table. When the phone rang, she snatched it off the hook. “Where are you?” she demanded. And then she slid down the wall, crumpling into a heap on the floor, the receiver still clutched in one hand.

  Mom didn’t cry. Not then, and not later, at the funeral.

  I used to hate her for that. I thought she wasn’t sad enough about his death, maybe even secretly happy about it. But now I can’t help wondering how many sleepless nights she’d spent waiting for that call.

  I turn my face away from Libby, blinking away tears. We’re halfway around campus, and I can see the rear parking lot up ahead. I’m not ready for this walk to be over; I’m not ready to stop talking. I push my hands deep in my pockets and slow my pace.

  “I used to draw on my arms,” Libby blurts suddenly.

  I peer at her sideways, curious.

  “You know, doodles, cool quotes and stuff.” She trails her fingers down one creamy arm, her bracelets jingling like delicate wind chimes, sunlight glinting off of silver. “One time I popped too many Xannies before school, three out of Mom’s purse while she sweated out her hangover on the Pilates machine in the basement, and two more I’d saved in my locker.” She giggles. “I kept nodding off in History, woke up when some asshole pegged me in the head with a balled-up gym sock, my cheek stuck to my hand, drool all over my desk. Everybody laughed, but it wasn’t until later, in the bathroom, that I knew why. Everything I’d drawn on my arm was tattooed right across my face. I might as well have written LOSER on my forehead in Sharpie.”

  She laughs again, a sharp, hiccupy sound, like a bubble of stomach acid, sour and burning. I glance at the notebook she’s carrying, thinking of the sketches scrawled there and the scars drawn across her skin.

  “Hey, I have an idea,” Libby says. “I should draw you.”

  I give her a doubtful look.

  “No, come on, it’ll be fun.” She’s already pulling her pencil out of her notebook. “Here, with the woods behind you.” She leads me to a sunny spot between the trees and pushes down on my shoulder. “We both know this is the closest thing to a decent self-portrait you’re goi
ng to get in this joint.”

  I hesitate, but Libby’s persistent. “No broken limbs or zippers, I promise.”

  I laugh and sink down into the grass. Libby scoots a few feet away and then sits down facing me, opening her notebook to a fresh page.

  I shake my hair down into my eyes, over my scar, and smile like in my driver’s license picture.

  Libby giggles. “Relax,” she says. “This isn’t a mug shot.”

  So I try to cover my awkwardness with humor, go all Blue Steel, and strike a couple poses.

  “Be serious, Eli.”

  And then I don’t know what to do, so I lie on my back in the grass and stare up at the bulbous, shifting clouds. It’s a sky for daydreaming—the kind of clouds that can be anything, depending on what you’re looking for.

  Libby drops her notebook, lies on her belly beside me. Propped on her elbows, she plucks the heads of clover, making a little white pile in the grass. “Tell me something else,” she says. “Something true.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  My hair has fallen back off my forehead, and Libby’s fingers find my scar. She touches it, feather soft. “What happened here?”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  Libby’s expectant gaze tugs at the memory of that afternoon. Glistening green grass and the kind of sun that blinds you. Superman ice cream dripping down my arm. Dad’s warm hand wrapped around mine.

  I swallow. I know I don’t have to tell her. But I want to. “It happened in the park, a long time ago. My dad and I were spending the day together, and all I wanted to do was swing. Dad tried to get me to do something else, anything else. The sandbox, the slide. I guess he was tired of pushing me.” I laugh. “But I kept going right back to the swings. It was something about that feeling, I guess. Feet in the air, wind in your face. Like flying.”

  The grass prickles the back of my neck. I shift my hands behind my head. “I kept begging Dad to go higher. He was worried I couldn’t hang on, but I begged and begged, and so he made me promise. ‘Whatever you do, don’t let go.’”