Girl on the Line Page 6

  “I know, right?” I said. “And yet, here we are.”

  The silence was long as he studied me, hand on his chin.

  “I’m like, ‘Aaaah, don’t eat me!’”

  This silence was longer. His brows creased, he gave me a confused look, and I felt like an idiot but kept talking because, well, that’s how I roll.

  “Because you’re a ‘wolf.’ Never mind. Wow, this is awkward. So yes, hi. I’m Journey. I talk nonsensically when I’m nervous.”

  “You’re nervous?” he asked.

  I was. My palms were damp, my pulse a gallop.

  “My track record with psychiatry is not good. There was the time I saw Dr. Shaw and he was like, ‘You’re crazy, take these pills,’ and I was like, ‘Oh, okay.’ After that I went away and tried to kill myself. So then there was Dr. Anglin, who was like, ‘Here are some new crazy pills,’ and I was like, ‘Maybe I’m not crazy?’ And she was like, ‘Yeah, no, you wouldn’t be here if you weren’t,’ so I was like, ‘Oh, okay, thanks.’ And that, friend, is it.”

  Long, silent pause.

  “I don’t think the pills are working,” I told him. “The lithium. I still have all these . . . unwanted thoughts. I’m tired all the time. Also look at my hands.”

  I held them out so he could see how badly they shook.

  “Maybe we should try something else,” I said.

  “I don’t prescribe pills,” he said.

  “Oh?”

  This was news to me. I squinted at the framed degree on his wall. “I thought you were a doctor?”

  “I am a doctor,” he said. “But I don’t prescribe pills.”

  “Oh.”

  I wasn’t sure where to go from here. Was this the kind of doctor who wanted me to talk about my feelings and my mother? I glanced behind me and noticed the leather couch, although it was covered in loose papers, books, folders, envelopes. Another slob, a kindred spirit.

  “When was the last time you stopped and focused solely on your breath?” he asked.

  Well, this was not what I expected. The answer was never, really—not on purpose, anyway. In fact, sometimes as a kid I had stopped and noticed my breathing and it had terrified me. Because it never ended. It kept going. And if I started focusing on it it’s all I could think about. I told Wolf this and he smiled.

  “Sounds like you were a little Zen master without realizing it,” he said. “Essentially, you were practicing mindfulness.”

  “I want to get away from my mind,” I said. “Not get more full of it. Mindfulness sounds like a nightmare.”

  “But is it your mind that bothers you, or your thoughts?” he asked.

  Hmm. I pondered this deeply. So deeply I swear my brain hurt. Or my mind? Or me? Where do my thoughts and big feelings end and where do I begin? Are we one thing, intertwined? Or am I a separate entity afflicted by my mind?

  “You’re a different doctor than the others,” I said.

  “I consider that a compliment,” he said.

  Now that I looked around, I noticed all the Buddhist books on his shelf, the Gandhi quote needlepointed and hung in a frame. It made sense why my dad was so excited about me going to this appointment today.

  “I’m going to assign you homework,” Wolf said. “You up for it?”

  “Goody,” I said. “Just what I need.”

  “What if I tell you it just requires you sitting with your eyes shut for ten minutes a day?”

  “That sounds like some homework I can get behind.”

  So here I am, seated on my bed cross-legged, eyes shut, world dark, alone with my breath—that rhythm I always carry with me and never really stop to notice. That roar of ocean in me. That relentless heart throb. Inhale, exhale, up, down, in, out, full, empty, round, round again. A voice keeps trying to talk in my head—my voice. And it’s annoying the crap out of me.

  This is dumb, it says. What’s the point of this? What’s the point of anything? I want to call Jonah. Why hasn’t Jonah called? I hope we can get back together. I’m so sad. I’m so angry. I hate this homework. Nothing matters.

  But I do my best to drown it out by inhaling, exhaling, up, down, in, out, full, empty, round, round again. And for a short, blissful period of time—I don’t know how long—that annoying voice in me shuts up. I only realize it after the moment has passed and it starts up again.

  Dad’s is easy. Just us and a lot of takeout and TV. But then the weekend comes, eight days post-suicide attempt, and it’s time to face my mom, Levi, and my sisters.

  Mom’s cheerful—dare I say, too cheerful? She brings home fancy sandwiches for dinner. We eat around the table. “By the way,” she whispered to me when I first came home today, “I haven’t told the girls or Levi the full story yet.” She told them all I had food poisoning last weekend because she thought it was a private thing I could share with people in my own time.

  Um, no thanks.

  Also . . . what?

  I don’t understand my mom’s logic sometimes. She acts like mental illness and bipolar disorder and pills are totally acceptable, but then she wants to pretend the natural conclusion of it all never happened. I guess she’s just really committing to this everything is fine schtick. Like right now, she sits at the dinner table and chatters on about her nemesis at work with the same name as her, Amanda, who looks eerily like her, too.

  Apparently Amanda B. has been playing music with swear words in it in the café and flirting with customers. The nerve.

  “Actually, Mom, Amanda B. sounds pretty cool,” Ruby says.

  Mom let Ruby dye her hair black, but only some crappy dye that washes out in six to eight washes, so Ruby’s once-blond, then-black hair is now the color of a bruise. Her sandwich has been eaten, but all the vegetables remain untouched on her plate.

  “She is not cool,” Mom says. “Amanda B. is the bane of my existence.”

  “You’re so dramatic, Mom,” Stevie says.

  Stevie’s adult teeth still seem too big to fit in her mouth. She’s at the stage where she can still wear pigtail braids without looking ridiculous. Consensus of the world is she’s adorable.

  “You’re eating well for someone who had food poisoning this week,” Levi says to me.

  Oh, if only you knew, Levi.

  “Right?” I say.

  There is a balled-up sandwich wrapper on my plate, nothing more.

  “That’s how I do it,” Levi says. “Get kicked off the horse and climb back up on the saddle again.”

  Levi is an embarrassing well of cowboy metaphors. Also he dresses like a cowboy. And he owns a boot store. He even has a twang to his voice. I was down with all that until I found out he grew up in Burbank. He’s not mean or anything. He let us all move in with him in his big house up the hill. He gives us rides places. I just think my mom could do better. Mom swears up, down, and all around she and Levi didn’t start seeing each other until after the separation with Dad. I’m not great at arithmetic, but that timeline seems dubious. The Levi thing happened as fast as my parents’ breakup and stung as bad. Mom promised initially she would never date a man until us girls were ready, but when I called Levi a rebound and told her to slow down, she replied that she was happy now. A week into her new arrangement, she was ordering furniture and they were visiting dog shelters. I wasn’t ready. I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready.

  “What did you eat that made you sick?” Ruby asks me.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Taco Hell.”

  “You went to Taco Hell?” Ruby asks. “But you declared them dead to you after they gave you that smooshed seven-layer burrito.”

  Her eyes are little slits through her glasses. She studies me across the table.

  She sees everything, that one.

  After dinner, Mom and Levi go on their usual walk that lasts so long I end up standing at the window staring out at the darkness wondering if they were eaten by bears. I go to my room at the end of the house, a tiny space that barely fits my twin bed and dresser, but has a window looking out onto
an enormous, lovely oak tree hung with Levi’s birdhouse collection. I lie on my bed. Ruby’s music bleeds through the halls, bouncing off the wood floors. This house has high ceilings and was only half-furnished when we moved in. Levi’s a man with money and a fine house but no taste and no things to fill it. That’s where Mom stepped in.

  The album Ruby’s listening to is one I turned her on to, YesNoMaybe, a dark dance-pop band that I was super into last year. She is obsessed. It’s all she listens to and, at this point, she has soured me on it. Tonight, though, the sound of it makes me more sad than annoyed. I feel like a failure of a sister, failure of a daughter, failure of a suicidal person, and here at Mom’s I have to hide it and pretend everything is normal when really I’m falling apart. Or trying to put myself back together, I guess.

  Ruby puts the album back to track one and I wipe my tears away, get up, and go down the hall to knock on her door. There’s a sign on her door that says “DANGER! HIGH VOLTAGE.” She can’t hear me because she’s cranked the music so loud. I open the door and she’s on her laptop on her bed. Her hamper is overflowing with black clothes. She’s drawn cartoons of sad-looking girl robots that cover the wall above her bed. Seventh grade has not been easy on her. Our parents split, she lost the county spelling bee championship, one of her best friends moved to Colorado.

  “How many times are you going to listen to this album?” I ask from the doorway.

  “I don’t know, billions and billions.” She doesn’t look up from her computer. She’s clearly playing a game. “So, you tried to kill yourself.”

  I close the door. Takes seconds for me to locate my tongue. “Mom told you?”

  “Pffft. I knew she was lying about food poisoning. You have a stomach of steel. Remember when you drank all that expired eggnog?”

  I sit next to her on her bed. “I thought it was supposed to be tangy.”

  “Plus all I had to do was go on Mom’s laptop and read her history to find about a jillion Google searches all asking what to do when your daughter attempts suicide, and whether a bottle of Tylenol damages your liver, and what the chances are you’ll try again, and yada yada yada.”

  “What are my chances?”

  “Good.”

  “That’s a relief.”

  “I mean, chances are good you’ll try again. Suicide risk is thirty-seven percent higher for someone who attempted in the last year. Then again, nine out of ten people who attempt suicide don’t ever end up actually dying by suicide, so you have that going for you.”

  “Sounds like Mom’s not the only person who’s been Googling.”

  She doesn’t answer.

  “So, you know. What do you think?” I ask.

  “I think it’s pretty stupid of you.” I can hear the anger in her voice, even though she won’t meet my eyes and keeps clicking her computer keys.

  “You’re right, it was stupid.”

  “I mean, what, you were just going to kill yourself? Without asking for help, or telling anyone, or explaining why? I don’t get it. I mean, what’s so terrible about your life?”

  Ruby’s right. There’s nothing terrible about my life. I’ve thought this many, many times. And that almost makes it worse—that I’m this miserable, and I don’t even deserve this kind of misery. I’ve got a good, fortunate life. I waste it.

  “I don’t, either, honestly,” I answer. “I just felt—I felt alone. I felt like I was . . . in pain. I wanted it to stop.”

  “Dumb.”

  “I won’t do it again.”

  “Yeah, okay, I’ll be over here not holding my breath.”

  “Are you mad at me?”

  “You were going to leave us,” she says, finally looking up at me over her laptop screen. Her eyes are shiny. “You were just going to, like, leave us in the most selfish way possible. I looked up to you.”

  Looked. Past tense. I suck in a breath.

  “I’m sorry,” I tell her.

  “You know what, it’s fine.” She goes back to her computer. “There are more bacteria in a centimeter of my intestines than people who have lived and died in the whole world.”

  “Is that supposed to be . . . comforting?”

  She shrugs and puts her headphones on. Conversation over, I guess.

  This thirteen-year-old girl used to be a shy brainiac who spent her time obsessed with her microscope and exploring nature and reading stacks of paperback books about little girls who solved mysteries. Now she’s this angsty teen who blasts dark pop music and stares at her laptop. And doesn’t look up to me anymore. I wish, for a moment, I had succeeded in my attempt, and then in the next moment, I wish I had never tried.

  I leave her room quietly, my cheeks burning, and realize what I really want—more than anything—is for my little sister to be proud of me again.

  Mom comes into my room that night after the girls and Levi are asleep. I spent almost an hour researching and ordering a stack of memoirs on bipolar disorder, and now I’m watching a show called Is Love Blind? about blindfolded people who get married to strangers. Marisol’s watching the show at her house at the same time and we’re texting back and forth about what a gorgeous train wreck the whole thing is. I put my phone down when Mom sits next to me on the bed.

  “Let’s talk about your future,” Mom says.

  I still have nine days before I return to school. Yes, I’m counting. I groan and pull my blanket over my head. She pulls my blanket off and flashes her tarot cards in the air.

  “Oh, that talking about my future,” I say, sitting up. “Okay, way better.”

  Mom sits next to me and shuffles the cards.

  Late nights have always been our special time because we stay up later than everyone else. She wears men’s flannel pajamas and her hair is in a giant bun on the top of her head, her makeup is faded and ready to be scrubbed off. I mute the episode. The sound of the shuffling cards is a purr.

  This is our first time alone since I was in the hospital. I can’t help but feel like I hurt her feelings by staying at Dad’s instead of her house, even though she swore she understood. My mother’s not one to ever show her wounds.

  “I’ve missed you,” she says.

  “You too.”

  “I’ve worried.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “How are you feeling?” she asks.

  “I mean, you can only watch so much reality TV before losing touch with your own reality.”

  “Maybe you’d consider going back to school earlier than we discussed?”

  “I’d honestly rather light myself on fire.”

  She blinks extra long, visibly battling the urge to flinch. I feel bad. I’ve always expressed myself strongly, but she’s sensitive to it now in a way she didn’t used to be.

  “You seem much better, and I’m worried about you passing—”

  “I thought you talked to my teachers and the makeup work is fine.”

  “It is, I just . . . I want to give you the best shot I can.”

  “We said November first,” I say, a little sharply.

  “We did,” she says. “November first is fine.”

  I exhale. It grips me with panic to imagine returning to school. I imagine myself a mess, bursting into tears for no reason, seeing Jonah and running in the opposite direction.

  “How’s that new therapist?” Mom asks.

  “His name is Wolf and he’s teaching me how to practice mindfulness and breathing exercises.”

  “Oh Lord. I knew if your dad referred us to him it had to be some hippie-dippie bullshit.”

  “It wasn’t bad, really,” I tell her, watching as she fans the cards down the bed in a long line. “I liked him.”

  “Hmmm,” she says doubtfully, giving me a look.

  My mother can raise one eyebrow in a way that says more than an entire lecture could.

  “Sometimes I don’t know about the whole bipolar thing,” I tell her.

  Her face now says I am judging you. “You’re not messing with your medication.”
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  “I’m taking my meds,” I say. “But . . . think about it. I went off the deep end after I started taking medication, not before.”

  “You have to follow doctor’s orders, baby doll.”

  “I am. But answer me something. Honestly. Do you really think I’m bipolar?”

  “I trust the professionals. You know, I’ve learned a lot about bipolar disorder since joining The Forum.”

  The Forum is an online support group for moms with bipolar teens. Mom’s super into it. Like I’m a little over hearing about The Forum and what the ladies on The Forum say.

  “There are so many varying degrees and it looks so different on different people,” she goes on.

  “You tell me stories about those girls and they sound worlds beyond me, though. Like yeah, I like to stay up late and I can talk fast when I get excited and I’ve always been moody. But you told me about a girl who thought she was communicating telepathically with a prince.”

  “They’re not all like that.”

  “When I was at the nutjob ward the other day—”

  “Stop calling it that. It’s stigmatizing.”

  “It’s a joke,” I say. “It’s how I deal. I thought, I’m not like all these other people. There’s been some mistake. My roommate tried to stab someone.”

  “You tried to kill yourself,” Mom says.

  She sits up straight and her gold eyes quiver, threatening to spill tears, and she does this twitchy thing with her mouth that happens when she’s either trying not to yell at me or not to cry.

  “You tried,” she says again, slower. “To kill yourself.”

  My cheeks heat up. “Right.”

  “So . . . you have everything in common with those kids in the psychiatric unit.”

  She’s right. Doesn’t everyone think the same? We’re all so different, all so special. It’s bullshit.

  “Someday, sure, you can maybe try coming off medication. But now? Not now. You cannot handle any more instability right now.” Mom’s voice lowers but also intensifies—it becomes a whisper-shout. “And neither can I.”

  I could argue with her. Past me would have argued with her. But frankly, I don’t have it in me. And I’m not sure I know what’s best for anyone anymore.

  This is our ritual: pull one tarot card from the deck, look it up online together. I pull a card with a man hanging upside down from a tree. The Hanged Man, the card reads. Mom pulls in a sharp breath, like the sight of the card was a punch to the gut. My heart races and I get a queasy flutter. Because one of my suicidal fantasies and terrible brain loops has involved me hanging from a tree.