“So tell me about your mom,” the doctor says, crossing his legs.
Aaron presses his tongue against the top of his mouth like he’s trying to stop brain freeze. He bites his lip.
“She’s a person,” he says.
“Well, that’s encouraging.”
Aaron cracks a mild smile. “It is encouraging.”
“Tell me about her.”
“Not much to tell,” Aaron says, and for some reason he thinks about the beach thing.
He’s eight years old. It’s a bright, sunny summer day and Dad is still working in a bank. It’s just before the split, before his dad’s Big Change, and Mom is home, one of those meandering days in Forest Hills, with Mom at the helm, once in a while going to auditions but mostly just hanging. They’ve settled into a routine. Cocoa Puffs and Pillsbury croissants rising in the oven, watching cartoon DVDs—Ren & Stimpy, his mom’s favorite—on the family room couch. Then it’s across the street to the park, where he joins the other kids running in circles through the sprinkler while his mom sits alone, away from the other moms who congregate by the same row of benches every day. Aaron’s mom is not a plays well with other moms sort of person. Aaron loves these days. The predictability of the endless hours with nothing that they need to do.
But on this day, they don’t have their usual breakfast. Mom wakes him early. Her eyes are puffy and pink.
“C’mon,” she says. “We’re going for a train ride.”
Aaron lights up. He loves his mom, and he adores a good adventure.
The train leaves from Penn Station. His mom says they’re going to Jones Beach. Aaron cheers, wondering: Where’s our stuff? His mom isn’t carrying any bags, and for the beach, you usually want a blanket, bathing suits, towels, maybe a pail and shovel to play with, that gooey sunblock in the orange squeeze bottle.
“Don’t we need things?” he asks.
“It’s an adventure,” she says. “Stop worrying.”
On the train, Mom starts saying things she’s never said before.
She puts her hand on his knee. “I’m so completely bored, Aaron. Do you know what that’s like?”
“No.”
“I hope you never know. It’s torture.”
They take a train and then a jam-packed bus, and once they reach the beach, they walk onto the sand and keep walking, aimlessly. Aaron keeps spotting places that would be good for building a sandcastle but they don’t stop anywhere, and he keeps stealing glances at his mom, who just looks blank—tired, maybe. Finally, without warning, she plops down in the sand like an unstrung marionette. Aaron looks around, wondering if someone will bring them a blanket or towels.
“What should we do? We can go in the water or we can build a sandcastle,” he offers. “We can draw pictures in the sand.”
She nods, doesn’t answer, looking off at the horizon, sitting on her hands on the warm, slightly wet sand. She smokes a cigarette, which he’s never seen her do before. He sits next to her and breathes in the chalky fumes, and he starts to dig a little, and he finds himself getting thirsty and his head is on fire from the sun but it’s fun to just dig, dig, so he does and then he starts to feel the heat in his cheeks and he remembers the time he got a burn when he was five in Cape May, and they had to put lotion on him and his skin peeled for a week.
After about an hour and a half, his mother stands and wipes sand off her knees and hands.
“This is stupid,” she says. “Mom screwed up.”
They walk back toward the bus, away from the water they never got to play in.
“Sometimes you try new things,” she says as they walk. “Occasionally they work.”
Aaron remembers so clearly staring down at the sand as they walked, trying to step entirely in big people’s footsteps. You have to make your own fun was the thought he had. Which turns out to be true, Aaron realizes, and he smiles, and he crosses his arms over his chest.
“What are you thinking about?” the doctor asks.
“Nothing,” he says, remembering that moments ago he was noticing it was hygge in here, and he wants his hygge back. He offers a tight-lipped smile. “A good memory.”
Aaron’s father is seated in the waiting area when Aaron comes out with a prescription and a bunch of business cards, which is weird, like the doctor wants Aaron to hand them out on a street corner or something. He hands them to his dad.
“He wants me here every day this coming week. I told him I didn’t know if I could because—”
“You can,” his father says. “Of course. This is the only thing right now. Nothing else matters but getting you better.”
“Also I guess I’m going to be on medicine because there was this depression-ometer in there and I broke it. We owe him money because he has a ‘you break it, you buy it’ policy.”
His dad hugs him tight and buries his chin into the back of Aaron’s neck. “I am so sorry. I feel like I let you down. How could you go up there—how did I miss this?”
Aaron doesn’t answer. He doesn’t know what to say. He’s thinking about Tillie. If his score was eighty-two, what was hers?
Even though the body is barely recognizable, barely what it was, they still need to pick out clothes for the funeral.
Winnie asks Frank to do it. Frank says yes and then he gets a business call, and he has to take it, and he’s so sorry, but would she mind, and Winnie says of course, she’ll do it, of course, and she walks into the room and it steals her breath. She has to steady herself against the doorframe. It’s like she’s walked into an actual physical barrier and it slammed her in the stomach.
How does anyone do this? How can a parent be asked to—
And suddenly Britt is there, standing next to her mom, and it happens with no words. Britt goes in, and maybe she heard them talking about picking out clothes? She goes in and steps into the closet and looks around. Even at this moment when she has never understood Tillie less, she tries to figure out what she would want to be buried in.
Something black, it seems to Britt, makes sense. Tillie liked black. And pink. White is for weddings. But it doesn’t matter what she wears, also, because it’s not really her. She’s in a box but she isn’t. She’ll be wearing clothes but she’s dead.
None of it makes any sense.
The text comes from a number Molly’s never seen before.
The breath gets caught in Molly’s throat, and the weird thing that happens next is that she pictures her old friend from sixth grade, Tillie with pigtails and pink scrunchies, and then she pictures that girl, not the weird one who’d changed so much, jumping off the bridge. And her eyes well up.
She doesn’t answer the text. What is there to say? The texter is right, but that’s not, like, something you agree with on the record. Could she go to jail?
A second text comes in from the same number.
Molly turns off her phone. As if whatever that was—a threat?—will cease to exist if she powers down.
“Are you up for a trip to Sephora?” her mom asks through the door.
Fury catches in her throat. How is it possible that her mother is thinking about makeup right now?
“No thanks,” Molly says, as neutral as possible, hoping her mother will just go away.
And when her mom goes, Molly decides it’s time for a new look.
Her beautiful blond hair. It’s always been her calling card. It’s natural, and it’s gorgeous, and she doesn’t deserve to have it anymore.
She goes into her mom’s bathroom and rifles through the drawers until she finds the electric clippers, and she removes the guard. She wants blade on scalp for sure.
Her first stroke is right down the middle, and she watches the hair disappear like she’s watching the guy mow the lawn out in East Hampton. And as she does more strokes, and as the massive pile of blond accumulates at her feet, she thinks, Me. My fault. I did this to Tillie.
Amir has never had detention before. But he’d do it again in a second.
Of course he punched Jason Mathes in
the face. Who wouldn’t have punched him and broken his nose?
“You fucked that girl to death, dude.”
Who thinks to say such a thing?
Of course he punched him. How could he not?
Thank God the other kids who witnessed this had more sense and talked Jason and his dad out of pressing charges.
So Amir sits there in Mr. Boswell’s classroom, alone except for Mr. Boswell. He cannot focus on homework. He’s tried to, but every time he pulls out his calc book, the words swim across the page like uninterested fish in an aquarium.
He pulls out a piece of paper and tries to write something. Anything to approximate the guilt he feels.
He reads it and he crumples it up into a ball. Garbage. Words can never come close to expressing anything he’s feeling. And anyway, he can never say it now. He’s caused enough trouble.
If he comes out now, he’s the boy who killed a girl because he was too chickenshit to be who he was.
Aaron and his dad go to Barney Greengrass at Eighty-Sixth and Amsterdam for lunch. A treat, his father says. Since he left the bank and went into social work, they eat out almost never. As they open the door, Aaron is assaulted by the intermingling smells of pastrami, garlic, and cabbage, and the shouting of patrons trying to be heard at the insanely busy deli counter. He follows his dad to the hostess station at the entranceway to the dining area, his senses reeling from the smells and noise and the old Jewish people noshing on bagels and lox and it’s a lot, a lot.
The old guy with the gray-white beard and crusty voice tells them five minutes and they stand there, cocooned between the noisy deli and the busy dining area, and Aaron feels trapped and like he can’t breathe and he tries to go somewhere else, anywhere else.
“My dad used to take me here,” his dad says. “It’s a hoot.”
Aaron nods and smiles as much as he can but the walls are closing in on him and he closes his eyes.
“Did he hate you?” Aaron asks.
His dad gives him a look. “Is this too much? Am I an idiot? I really just thought—”
“It’s fine,” Aaron says. “It’s a lot but it’s fine.”
His father looks pained and glances at the door, but just at that moment, the bearded host calls their name.
“Is this what you want?” his dad asks.
Aaron shrugs. “Let’s make some Jewish delicatessen memories.”
They follow the host through the dining area, tables stuffed together like it’s a clown car and they’re all a bunch of clowns. The host takes them to the far diagonal corner, and they come to a standstill at a table of miraculously old people who block their way. The old guy sitting across from his wife looks up and laughs.
“I guess I’m the gatekeeper,” he says, slowly standing, and Aaron’s stomach twists. As he follows his dad and the host around the old man, all Aaron can feel is his own pulsing heartbeat, which is so strange to him because, yes, depressed, but he’s been in crowds before. He doesn’t have an issue with crowds. He made his dad go with him to Columbus Avenue to watch the balloons get blown up the night before Thanksgiving every year until last because there was something nice about the smell of chestnuts and hot chocolate, and the swarm of people made him feel alive. But suddenly it’s the opposite and he’s broken and he wonders what his claustrophobia score would be now: one sixty-six? Forty-nine? The scales are undefined and everything’s unfixably wrong.
He sits against the wall, looking out on the messy mass of diners, and he stares at his menu, hoping to quiet his pulsing chest.
A Dr. Brown’s cherry soda helps some, as do pickles, as Aaron sits there and tries to make sure his newfound claustrophobia doesn’t show up.
“I would never eat the latkes,” Dad says.
“No?”
“Definite no. ‘Pancakes are not potatoes,’ I used to explain. Your grandmother thought I was nuts. She basically foisted them upon me. For years, I could not eat at a table where someone else was eating any latke-like substance.”
Aaron laughs, but he’s checked out.
“Where is Aaron?”
Aaron looks around dramatically, but it’s not really computing, the Aaron-Dad banter thing. He’s just. Not. There. But he does it anyway because it’s what they do.
“He’s in one of the circles of hell, where they seat you in the back at a table where every time the waiter wants to get to you, a man who can barely stand is made to stand, and at some point he and his father die of hunger.”
His dad screws up his face at him. “That’s dark.”
“Dark times are these,” Aaron intones, channeling Yoda.
His father bends his head down and shakes it, which is not the reaction Aaron is expecting. He crosses his arms over his chest.
“I just …” Dad says.
“You just?”
“I just can’t understand. Why you didn’t tell me. I asked you. Like right after you went to the bridge. Like just yesterday morning. I asked you a thousand times. Why wouldn’t you tell me? Did you think you couldn’t tell me? I just. Help me understand, Aaron. Help me.”
Aaron feels the jitters in his throat and his instinct is to yell but it wouldn’t be words, it would be more like a roar of exasperation because it’s too much, much too much. Here in this fetid pastrami palace, this cacophonous cabbage chaos. He’s a fuckup. He gets it. Everything he does is wrong. He really, really gets it.
“What’s going on? Aaron. You okay? Do we need to get you out of here?”
His dad is looking at him funny, looming over him, and it reminds Aaron of this Natasha balloon that one time on Thanksgiving was being blown up and it seemed to be staring down at him like … Hello? Hello? It was hard to explain but it cracked him up, and suddenly his dad is Natasha, and Aaron’s laughing, and the laughter is guttural, or lower, it’s a full-body laugh, and he convulses with it and his dad keeps looking at him, super concerned, and that’s even more funny and he slides to the floor like this is the funniest thing that’s ever happened and his body shakes and oh my God! Two out of two! Two days in a row, crazy body things! What’s happening to him, to his body, these days, and this would be such a funny thing to tell Sarah on the bus and she’d laugh but no, no, no. It’s actually not that funny and he’s crying on the sticky, mustard-stained floor of a restaurant, hugging the wooden table leg, and he wants to disappear from the world. Forever.
His dad comes and tries to sit next to him but more like leans against the octogenarian woman’s chair, and he kneels and cradles Aaron’s head in his chest and Aaron slowly relaxes into his father’s care, all the while breathing, slow, slow, as his dad offers the saddest, kindest litany he’s ever heard.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
After the funeral, Britt hides in her room, playing Candy Crush.
She thinks, Tillie didn’t even say goodbye, and she slashes a row of grape candy, and she imagines it’s Tillie’s face.
It’s stupid when people don’t say goodbye. And if Tillie was sad, she should have said so. Britt could have made her feel better. With a hug.
Explode three rows of lemon drops. Make them go bye. She won’t cry. Not like Mom.
Dad didn’t cry like a baby at the funeral, and she won’t, either. Dad just stood there, and then after that he packed up and went on his business trip. Kissed Britt on the top of the head and went off with his suitcase because that’s his job as a dad. Which is normal. Act normal, like Dad. Don’t get all sad like Mom.
She smiles. That’s her job. So while she crushes the stupid candy, she pastes a smile on her face.
Aaron lies in bed, alone, staring at the ceiling, on his first post-medicine Friday night. He feels like he has entered a club of one: the End of the World Club.
He thinks about the girl who would have understood, could have joined him in the club. Tillie Stanley. He’s curious about her in a way, but also he’s afraid of knowing more. Of finding out that she was an amazing, shiny person, so much more necessary to the world th
an he is. That he should have died and she should have lived. He’ll never unsee that moment, and the less he knows about her awesomeness, in some ways, the better.
He’s always wanted things to be different but this isn’t the way he was hoping. Suddenly he has a medication making its way slowly, painfully slowly, into his bloodstream, and who knows what it will do to him, or if he’ll even recognize himself in a few days, or a week, or up to three weeks, as Dr. Laudner said.
What kind of masochist creates a medication to help people who are in emotional crises, and makes it so that it’s only effective after three weeks? Is this a normal phase others have gone through? Just waiting around, hoping to wake up and not want to die?
He picks up his phone. Lots of text messages. From Sarah. From Marissa Jones. One from Ebony.
Aaron types:
There’s no response right away, so Aaron puts the phone down and then picks it up again to turn it off.
“How you doing?” His dad sticks his head into the room. He’s been coming and going with some regularity, bringing cups of tea and chicken soup as if Aaron has the flu and not a broken brain.
Aaron doesn’t sit up. “I just won the Critics’ Choice Award for Greatest Person.”
His dad kisses the top of his head and scruffs his hair. After his dad leaves, Aaron sighs and reaches for the notebook his dad gave him after they got back from therapy and the restaurant meltdown.
“It may be good for you to just write,” his dad said. “This time, when you’re going through so much, it might be nice to have a place to put thoughts and ideas.”
He nodded, but really he thought, My time to write is over. No one cares.
But now he stares at the space for a title, and an idea comes to him: Aaron Boroff: Songs from Up Top, Never to Fall.
He rereads it and laughs. It reminds him of when his dad says, “Fake it till you make it.” Usually in regard to feeling awkward as fuck socially before going to some party. It’s decent advice that sometimes goes terribly wrong, like at Chloe Vick’s ’70s party, where he thought it would be hilarious to show up as a septuagenarian rather than a person of the 1970s, and his dad talked him into just owning it, going in confident. It did not go well. There’s nothing worse than going to a party in old people’s clothes, walking up to someone like Kiersten Haas, all smiles and fake confidence, and have them look at your outfit and go, “Okay …” and then walk away. It had been somehow worse than had he just been real and stood there in his ridiculous outfit alone by the bathroom door feeling authentically awkward.
The Bridge Page 4