Just Breathe

by Cammie McGovern

  They exchange another look. Why is he asking these questions? What’s he getting at?

  “Before this hospital stay, was he easily manipulated by certain people?”

  My mom nods, and my dad says, “Occasionally we thought he was a little too quick to go along with some of his girlfriend’s demands. They’ve been dating for a long time, and he was scared of that relationship ending. So we thought he allowed her to manipulate him a bit.”

  Why are they are telling a stranger this?

  The man writes for a while, more than their answer warrants, and then flips a page and asks: “Had David ever suffered from depression in the past?”

  “No,” they both answer simultaneously.

  “Has he ever mentioned suicide, even in passing, with either of you?”

  “No.”

  “With all his health issues, he never said, ‘Maybe dying would be easier’?”

  “No, never.”

  He pulls a file folder out of the briefcase sitting beside him and flips through a few pages. “There’s a note here that you recently asked the doctor about putting David on Prozac.”

  “I can explain that,” my mother says. “He’s always dealt so well with the challenges that came with his condition, but this was a lot for any seventeen-year-old to cope with. We knew it was taking a toll on his spirits, so we asked for that as a preventative measure. We were trying to stay ahead of any mood swings he might have! The important point, though, is that he stayed incredibly positive and was never depressed. In fact, he’d recently made a project out of researching what philosophers have to say about happiness.”

  Why are they even debating this?

  “Regarding the girl who helped him leave the hospital, were you aware of the history she had with depression?”

  A chill travels down my spine.

  “No, of course not.”

  “Was David aware?”

  “Not that we know of.”

  “Did you know how frequently she visited David? Staff members report that she’d recently been visiting him every afternoon.”

  “We weren’t aware, no. She usually came before we got off work.”

  “Did David talk about her with you?”

  My dad leans in. “Only recently. In the last few weeks, we saw a real personality change in David. He told us he wasn’t sure whether he wanted to apply to college at all. He couldn’t explain himself very well, and then he said there’s a girl here who was homeschooled most of her life. We’d given her a few rides with our daughter, but that’s when we understood that she’d had some kind of influence on him.”

  “Would you say she was one of the factors that made him want to change his plans?”

  “Yes, definitely. Before this hospitalization, he was planning to apply to ten schools. He’s president of his class, with excellent board scores and a good GPA. He’d have no trouble getting in. It’s what he’s worked for his entire life. But suddenly, he was telling us he wasn’t sure he wanted to go to college at all.”

  My mother leans in. “We didn’t understand how he could change so dramatically—one day, he’s filling out college applications, and the next, he’s not interested in applying anywhere. Then a few weeks later, he’s endangering his life by sneaking out of the hospital. None of these things reflected the David we know.”

  I can explain. I was dying, Mom. It turns out that changes a person pretty quickly. It means you don’t have the time to explain every little thing. You have a lot of feelings, and this urgency to act on them.

  The man clicks his pen and flips back a few pages through his notes. “All right, this is a good start. It’s possible the hospital may have some culpability in allowing this girl to volunteer on a pediatric floor, but I can’t guarantee anything. It sounds like her recent visits were outside her work shifts, in which case there’s no responsibility on their part to monitor who visits him as a friend.”

  “But they were never friends from school. He met her here. Because the hospital employed her.”

  “Utilized her services. She was a volunteer. But I’ll look into this. It’s clear she shouldn’t have been working on this floor. No question about that. Her age, her past.”

  Now I understand. This man is a lawyer, and my parents are trying to sue the hospital by blaming Jamie. Now I understand why she hasn’t come to visit.

  I have to make sure Jamie never finds out about any of this. I have to figure out a way to warn her.

  Chapter Fourteen

  JAMIE

  “DID YOU ENJOY BEING one of David’s only visitors?” the lawyer asks me.

  “I wasn’t. He had lots of friends from school visit him. They might have visited a little less after he was quarantined, but only because they were afraid of bringing germs in.”

  My mother is sitting next to me for this interview with the hospital’s lawyer. I told her she didn’t have to come with me—that if I had to tell him the whole truth, it might be hard for her to hear. She didn’t care. “There’s no way I’m leaving you alone,” she said.

  “Did you feel like you had a special friendship with David?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he feel the same way?”

  “I think so. We watched old movies and talked about a lot of things young people usually don’t talk about.”

  “Like what?”

  “Being sick made David question whether he wanted to apply to colleges, the way all his friends were doing. He was trying to look at the bigger picture. If his life expectancy was going to be shorter, he wanted to make sure he was doing things that really made him happy. Most teenagers don’t talk about stuff like that.”

  “You didn’t mind?”

  “No, of course not. I like being friends with him. I was happy to talk about whatever he wanted to.”

  “Did you like having David all to yourself?”

  I don’t answer for a moment because I don’t understand the question. “I didn’t. His family was always here. And he talked to his friends a lot, even if they didn’t come to visit him much after the first few weeks.”

  “With him having so many friends at school, did you worry that if David got well again, you might not see him so much?”

  My mother squeezes my hand. We both understood what he’s implying.

  “No,” I tell him. “That wasn’t how I felt.”

  “But he had a girlfriend at school who couldn’t visit for a while because she was away for a time, and then she got a cold and didn’t want to bring germs in. Were you trying to make sure David remained sick enough to keep them apart?”

  “No.”

  “If he was the one who suggested leaving the hospital, as you say, why didn’t he ask his girlfriend to take him out?”

  “I don’t know. I never asked that question. We didn’t talk much about her.”

  His eyebrows go up, as if this sounds surprising to him, but I’m trying to tell the whole truth, as completely as I remember it.

  “But surely you thought about her. She and David had been dating for a year. Maybe you knew that she would probably say no to such a proposal. That she would recognize the risks to David. Maybe you recognized them as well but didn’t mind the idea of David staying in the hospital for longer.”

  “No.”

  “Did David know about your history of depression?”

  I look at my mom. “Some of it.”

  “Did he know that you spent three weeks in a psychiatric hospital after a suicide attempt?”

  I look away. “No.”

  “Did the hospital know of this history when you applied to volunteer with the Smile Awhile office?”

  My mom got me the job. Betty, who runs the Smile Awhile office, is her old friend and a nurse she worked with early on. I never filled out an application. I don’t know how much my mom told her.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “You’re not sure? Do you realize the liability the hospital has with an answer like that?”

  DAVID

 
; Because my own status doesn’t change much, I’ve started following some of the other patients in the ICU. I’m beginning to see things I didn’t before. If I squint into the spaces between the equipment and the people, I can see other figures like me. Most of them are older, and more faded than I am. They hover in corners, uninterested in talking to anyone else. Some are so ready to move on, they don’t even look at the bodies they were once part of. Others are like me. They hover close and read over doctors’ shoulders. They study their charts to figure out their odds. They want to survive.

  I’ve never tried to talk to any of them until this afternoon, when a new admission comes in, fresh from a car accident. He looks as young as I am and terrified. He can’t figure any of this out. I leave my corner of the ICU and go over to him.

  His body looks terrible. One side of his head is swollen and completely black and blue. The eye on that side looks strange—swollen shut and empty at the same time. I overhear a nurse tell another that his pupil blew out, which is a bad sign for brain damage. They’re talking quietly to themselves, assuming no one can hear them.

  It’s worse when you first get here, I say to the guy.

  I assume he won’t be able to hear me, but talking is a hard habit to break. Even after all these days, I keep trying. I feel like I have to say something. Compared to this guy, I’m an old hand. When I got here, I recognized these machines; I knew what a ventilator was. He must feel like he’s woken up in a science fiction movie.

  They’ll stabilize you. It’ll get better.

  After the doctors stop by, we know a little more: he’s got internal organ damage on top of whatever’s happened with his brain. It looks like the problem is mostly with his liver. I’m not great at reading charts, but I recognize bad-liver-function numbers when I see them.

  Your lungs look good, I tell him, trying to sound positive. My lungs were in terrible shape when I came in.

  I watch his face. He can’t take his eyes off his shattered body. He looks like he’s only a year or two older than I am. He also looks like he might be an athlete—tall and lanky, like a basketball player.

  They keep saying there’s no sign of brain activity, but what does that mean? he says, and it takes me a minute to register. I can hear him! Which means he can hear me! We can actually talk! The relief of this is huge, until I see his face and realize what he’s asked me.

  I don’t answer. We both know what it means.

  Do you have brain activity? he asks me.

  They weren’t sure at first. You don’t really know until you wake up, but there’s certain signs. Breathing without the ventilator. Pupils dilating. Do your pupils dilate?

  He looks down and says nothing.

  I don’t know what I can say to help. Then he surprises me.

  What happens to us when they turn off the machines?

  He means our spirit selves. I have no idea. I assume that if your body dies, this form we’re in now doesn’t stay around the hospital.

  Maybe you go home with your family and watch over them for a while.

  Like an angel?

  I think of the angels from Wings of Desire.

  Maybe. I don’t know.

  Do you think you still feel the same things when you’re dead? I spent all last week mad at my dad. I was driving too fast because he told me not to take the car, and I had to get it back before he got home from work. I’m still sitting here, mad at him. I wish I didn’t feel that way.

  I wonder if this is why I feel so frantic to see Jamie. Because the thrill of kissing her was the last emotion I felt.

  I don’t know, I say softly. Maybe. I still feel the same things I felt before.

  Do you think we’re stuck? Can you change your feelings?

  I don’t know. I should probably go. You can’t leave your body alone for too long. I’ve figured that much out.

  What happens when you do?

  My heart stopped for a while. I almost died.

  He nods and looks at his own body, as if maybe this is good news. A way to take charge of a situation if his parents can’t. Good to know, he says.

  JAMIE

  It’s hard to hear what my mom is saying. Since my interview with the lawyer, it’s hard to hear anything.

  I haven’t been able to go back to school. I also haven’t been able to do anything Rita suggested: walk outside; read; eat; exercise.

  Talking with the lawyer from the hospital, I could defend myself against only one charge—I never meant any harm to David, and I never wanted him to get sicker than he was. I couldn’t deny anything else he suggested: I liked my visits alone with David. I wanted to be more than friends. My fantasies clouded my judgment. I believed leaving the hospital wouldn’t be harmful to him because I wanted to believe it.

  When he said, “You understand that just because you want something to be true doesn’t make it so, right?” I knew there would be no escaping the vortex I was slipping into.

  David’s crisis is my fault. If he dies, I’m responsible.

  It’s impossible to make sense of anything else.

  I tried going back to school for one day and it was a disaster. I got lost between classes. I went to the office. When the nurse asked me where it hurt, I couldn’t say anything. An hour later, my mother picked me up. When we got home, she called work to say she wouldn’t be coming in that night or the next day, either. She steered me to the sofa and sat down next to me.

  She didn’t speak.

  She knew no words would help me at that point.

  She was reminding me with her presence that however bad it got—and it would get worse, we both knew that—she would be there. I’d been in the hospital for three weeks and that whole time, we hadn’t fought once. We were shy and careful and we squeezed each other’s hands. We whispered, “I’m sorry,” and “I’m sorry, too.” We cried and then apologized for crying. We talked about other people in the hospital—how crazy they were, as if I had nothing in common with them. Whatever had happened when I took the pills from my dad’s stash was a one-time event, not a permanent condition. Not a life sentence.

  In the car ride home, when I got out of the hospital, I told her, “I feel guilty.”

  “Guilty for what? What did you do?”

  Did she really not see it? I left Dad alone. I saw his sadness, and it scared me. I couldn’t deal with it. Every choice I made when I first started school pushed him further away. I kept all my art at school; I showed him none of it, even when he asked. Once, when he questioned an assignment, I actually said, “You’re not my teacher anymore.”

  I might as well have said, You’re not my father.

  In the car, my mother got so angry she pulled over to the side of the road. “Your father didn’t kill himself because of you. He allowed grudges and anger to get in the way of doing his work. He built them up in his mind, and they became so destructive he couldn’t make art any longer. And he was depressed! You were too young to see any of that. I did. It was not you, okay?”

  Now it’s different, though.

  I am responsible for what happened to David. One of Rita’s favorite things to say when I was in the hospital was, “Remember, depression lies. It makes your brain think certain things are true that aren’t true.” She might have been right back then, but she’s not right now. It’s not just my depressed brain thinking this. His family blames me. So does the hospital. So does the lawyer.

  When I was in the hospital, my mom and I pretended that I wasn’t as bad off as the other kids there, but that was never really true. I know that now because I can feel it coming back, swallowing me up.

  Chapter Fifteen

  DAVID

  I’VE ONLY MET JAMIE’S mom twice. I know she works as a floater nurse, filling in all around the hospital when other nurses are out. Taking this position means she works more hours but also has more flexibility than she would have if she stayed on one floor.

  It also means she’s almost impossible to find.

  I remember Jamie saying her mom
’s favorite floor to work on was the renal unit, where patients get dialysis, then go home at night. The same people come back two or three times a week, and she liked getting to know them.

  Twice now I’ve made it up to the sixth floor, where dialysis is done—a complicated business of riding elevators and waiting until someone gets on and pushes the right button—but I didn’t see her either time. It’s a risk, I know. I time my trips away from the ICU when extra nurses are on duty but no doctor is due. That way I won’t miss any information, but I also know my body is covered if something happens. I don’t know if this is the wrong risk to take, but I have to do something.

  Watching my body hover in limbo for hours on end is too much sometimes. It makes me restless. I want to tell myself to either wake up or die already. Which isn’t the answer.

  The answer is somewhere, and I have to keep looking. I keep thinking: The answer is seeing Jamie. My body is waiting to see Jamie again.

  This time I get lucky. I get to the sixth floor, and Jamie’s mom is there, sitting at a nurses’ station at the end of the hall. She looks so much like Jamie my breath catches. The same curly brown hair, the same big brown eyes. This is what Jamie will look like when she’s middle-aged. She’s beautiful, I think, even though she looks exhausted, like she hasn’t slept well in days.

  A few things I’ve figured out since I entered this state: I can’t pick up a pencil or any object with any weight. Nor can I press a keypad to type a note. I’ve strategized and tried every option I can think of for communicating with the people who come to see me and sit in the lobby for hours on end. The only physical impact I’ve managed to have so far has come—ironically—when I’ve blown on a piece of paper and seen it move. My greatest weakness in life is my superpower in this state. Last night I managed to blow a Kleenex to the floor, which felt triumphant and also pointless, because no one noticed.

  I’ve figured out something else, though. I can slow a computer down by putting my hand on it. It doesn’t work with phones, but with the friends who’ve brought their laptops to the waiting room, I’ve tried it. I touch the back of their screen, and they look up a moment later. “Is there something funky with this Wi-Fi?” Ashwin said yesterday, looking at Hannah, who wouldn’t look back at him.