Girl on the Line Page 7

  I would never tell my mother this. I would never tell anyone.

  Mom consults her BFF, Google. Turns out the card has nothing to do with suicide. Look closely: there’s a golden halo around his head, a slight smile on his lips. The Hanged Man is a card that represents the need to turn your world upside down for a whole new perspective. The man first has to hang himself to achieve enlightenment.

  “Profound,” Wolf says when I tell him about the card the following Friday. There’s a skeleton behind him, sitting on a table. I assume it’s for Halloween, which is Sunday, but then quickly realize it’s an anatomical skeleton that is a regular part of Wolf’s mess.

  He’s leaning in, positively enraptured with this description of the Hanged Man. So much so that I scoff at him. “You don’t actually believe in tarot cards, do you?”

  “Like a good novel, or a vivid dream, it’s not truth but points to truth.”

  I can’t stop staring at Wolf’s socks, by the way. Argyle. They don’t match.

  “And you brought it up here for a reason,” Wolf says. “Clearly it meant something to you.”

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  Which is what I say when I’ve been cornered and someone else is right. Wolf lets the silence go on long, so long I notice the sound of traffic, which I’ve never noticed before now. I fight the urge to look at my phone, crack a joke, anything to fill up the gap in conversation. Instead, I focus on my breathing.

  “What were you looking for when you tried to kill yourself?” Wolf asks softly.

  I study the dust floating in the air. I used to think dust in sunlight was so beautiful, magical snow that you only saw sparkle sometimes. Then I learned it was mostly just dead human skin that filled the air and it grossed me out. I close my eyes.

  “I think I was just looking for . . . escape,” I say. “‘I’m going to kill myself’ was this invisible black hole I could mentally hop into when real life and my feelings became too much.”

  “When you said the mantra, how did it make you feel?”

  “Numb. Gorgeously numb. Like all the scared, confused, weird, uncomfortable feelings could just be shut off like a faucet. I wouldn’t exist. I wouldn’t feel anything. Problem solved.”

  “Did you think about the reality of this? Of what your death would look like, how it would affect everything?”

  “No,” I tell him. “I know that’s selfish. But at first it was just a . . . a kind of inner conversation-ender. A problem-solver. I’d annoy Jonah by being melodramatic, or get a shitty grade at school, or freak out at my parents. Then I’d think, ‘I’ll just kill myself.’ And it made me feel better.”

  Wolf nods.

  “But then, just in the week or two before I tried, I started researching it online. People’s experiences trying. Pictures of crime scenes with bodies, people hanging from trees.” I go red admitting this, feeling gross, like I’m revealing some disgusting fetish or something. “I don’t know why I kept doing it. I felt bad about it but I kept doing it. I told myself it’s what I wanted, that life would go on without me. And then I tried, and I took all the pills, and as I blacked out I felt this desperate energy in me. Like a bird trapped in my chest, trying to fly. I wanted to live so badly.”

  I am now sniveling. Pathetic. I wipe my eyes with my shirtsleeves.

  “I feel like such a coward admitting that,” I go on.

  “You’re not,” Wolf says, taking off his glasses and wiping his own eyes. Wiping his own eyes! How does he get through this job if my dumb story makes him cry? “You know, once I read a study on bridge jumpers who survived. All suicidal. And every single survivor said, the moment their feet left the bridge and the second they began plummeting through the air, they all thought the same thing. They all wanted to take it back. They all wanted to live.”

  I plant my face into my hands, letting the dam break. Lately I reserve my crying spells for the shower or late at night, places no one can see me. Like I’m trying to prove to the world I can be stable, and not too much. But I can’t stop myself right now.

  “What a stupid thing to put ourselves through, all for what?” I sob.

  “Journey,” Wolf says gently, pushing a box of tissues across the coffee table. Therapists must buy that stuff in bulk. “It’s okay to want to live.”

  Present

  My first week of college blazes by. The strangest part is how fast this new life, new routine, settles into normalcy. At family dinners, I share what I’m learning in my classes. For once in my life, I have science facts to share with Ruby rather than the other way around.

  “If you were able to unravel your DNA, it would stretch to Pluto and back six times,” I tell her.

  “I don’t know about that,” Ruby says. “Did you fact-check that claim?”

  “No, but you’re welcome to.”

  She takes out her phone to look it up.

  “No phones at the table,” Dad tells her.

  “It’s for scientific purposes,” Ruby says.

  “Fine, look it up, then I want the phone off,” Dad says.

  After a moment of squinting at her phone, Ruby puts it away.

  “And?” I ask her.

  She says nothing, eating her dinner.

  “Was I right?” I ask.

  “Yes,” she mutters.

  “Ha ha!” Stevie says, pointing at Ruby.

  I taught my sister a science fact. Now, that’s a first.

  I stay up late to study and actually get my homework done on time. Sunday night I turn down hanging out with Marisol to study for my first astronomy quiz. what have you become?!?! she texts. jk i’m proud of you.

  Tonight is a level up—my first solo shift as an actual hotline volunteer, four to ten. No Davina by my side. I’m so nervous I’m one boo away from peeing my jeggings.

  The room is a converted living room with mismatched paintings on the walls, one a watercolor violet, one a painted surfer, another a drawing of unhusked corn. The other volunteers sit at the long tables near the window, drapes parted. Outside, the maple is tacked with birdhouses and strung with lights.

  “Hey,” I say with a smile to the other people in the room when I take my seat, even though what I’m actually thinking is DON’T LOOK AT ME. These three are strangers. I’m the new girl in town and am convinced that I’m going to fail. Look at everyone else in the room. First of all, they’ve got a century on me between the three of them. There’s a woman with a poodle puff of gray hair billowing out of a bandana, face wrinkled, eyes steely and judgmental, who crunches on something called “nutritional yeast puffs” in what can only be described as a menacing fashion. There’s a twentysomething girl with a boy haircut, a babyish face, and sculpted eyebrows, who lounges back in a rolly chair next to a skateboard and says, “’Sup?” There’s a woman with long black hair and a hippie skirt rolling a stress ball around in her hand who murmurs, “Welcome.”

  They are grown-ups, I’m a kid.

  They are experienced, I’m a noob.

  Stop, I whisper to my goddamn brain. Enough already.

  I take a seat at the almost-empty desk, almost empty except for the antique phone, the headset, and the oh-so-familiar brick-heavy binder. I’ve come to know and love its comforting weight after fifty long hours doing my training here. In the binder, we have resources, like phone numbers to call for local police if someone wants to report a crime. Like nearby drug rehab centers and eating disorder clinics to refer someone to if they want help. We have scripts for suicidal callers, ways we can be supportive, dos and don’ts. We have rules outlined, like never offer explicit advice, only listen. Like if someone says they’re going to kill themselves, you ask them questions, why and how, ask them to put it off, make a pact to stay alive just for tonight. You don’t tell them not to, because we’re not supposed to be there to give them orders or tell them how to feel. We’re there to provide empathy, and to show them they’re not alone. We have no authority. We are sounding boards. Faceless friends.

  Although I’m ner
vous and awkward in this fusty room that smells like a window hasn’t been opened in a thousand years, I’m convinced that there is a reason my life has come to this, and I feel about ten years older than the girl who swallowed a bottle of pills by the lakeside. I know now, after thinking my near death to death, that I didn’t want to die. And I am wondering, after halfing my medication now for almost two months, and now letting myself skip a day here and there entirely, if I don’t have a mental disorder. Maybe I’m just the same girl I always was, a girl with big feelings, one who filled out a survey with an aloof psychiatrist and ended up with a diagnosis I don’t deserve.

  The point is, I know who I am now in a way I didn’t a month ago, and definitely didn’t two months ago. I go days without thinking of Jonah. When the black hole presents itself, I roll my eyes at it, tell it to buzz off. Wanting to die is dumb, weak, immature. I want to return to the girl I was just two months ago and hold her hand and tell her to stay home that morning, write a poem, fake sick, take a bath, flush those pills down the toilet, eat some chocolate, cry into a pillow, but don’t you dare try to die. Don’t do something that will stamp you with a black ink you can never erase.

  The point is, I am not her anymore. I am on a mission here; when I answer the phone, one of these days, I’m going to save somebody. Maybe, in some weird way, myself.

  And holy shit: the phone is ringing.

  First is a high-voiced man with a Southernish accent whose name I miss because he speaks so fast, plunging headfirst into a monologue about how he thinks someone’s been stealing his mail and—he thinks it’s the mailman. I wait for some kind of emergency to arise in his story . . . for, I don’t know, the mailman to be harassing him somehow? But then his story changes. He hasn’t been able to find his dang slipper in weeks now and the dang company stopped making them, so he can’t reorder. He doesn’t sound mentally ill. Why is he calling a hotline? At the end he’s nearly weeping about how his sister didn’t send him a card on baby Jesus’s birthday. It’s been almost twenty minutes of this. In training, Davina says if someone isn’t in crisis, to gently try to end the call after twenty minutes. I tell him to hang in there and steer the conversation toward goodbye and hang up. Two of the other volunteers are on calls. I can tell, the way they lean in and press their headsets to their ears in listening mode. But the steely-eyed older woman—who introduced herself earlier as Lydia—stares at me, her crossword puzzle book open.

  “You got Davis, didn’t you,” she says.

  At first I think this has something to do with her half-filled crossword puzzle, D-A-V-I-S, 7 down, but she quickly corrects me.

  “It’s a rite of passage, getting Davis,” Lydia tells me, holding her pen like a long cigarette. “He’s one of our regulars.”

  “Regulars,” I repeat.

  I remember touching on this in training—that some people call in for no reason, just to have a warm voice on the other end of the line, just to vent, unleash, or even abuse.

  “We have a bet going about whether or not he’s real,” Lydia says.

  “Real?”

  “Or a crank,” she says. “Some kid. That accent, whatever it is, is hardly believable.”

  “Oh.” I deflate, thinking I’ve just been made a fool of.

  “That’s just me being a cynical old hag, honey, don’t listen to me, I’m full of shit. He’s just a lonely old soul who likes the sound of his own voice.”

  I breathe a sigh of relief. “Okay.”

  “It’s all about boundaries,” Lydia says. “Davis calls, I say, ‘Okay, buddy, I’m setting my timer here for ten and then that’s it for you.’ Otherwise he’ll be on with you all night or calling, and then calling back.”

  “All night,” I repeat.

  “All motherfuckin’ night,” Lydia says, nodding her head with each word for emphasis.

  We both bust up in a laugh, the first physical clue that Lydia has any joy inside her since I stepped foot in the room. She has a raspy cackle that makes me laugh a little extra hard. Her smile is wide and she’s missing a back tooth. Then her face quickly resumes its serious, wrinkled state of rest and she answers her ringing phone.

  “Crisis hotline, this is Lydia.”

  My phone rings again five minutes before I’m about to get off. It’s a lot of heavy breathing.

  “Are you safe?” I keep asking.

  But then they hang up.

  “I don’t know if they were safe,” I tell the other volunteers.

  My heart, speed racer.

  “Probably just a . . . self-soother,” Beatriz tells me.

  Beatriz is the hippie-skirt woman with the stress ball. Across her right wrist, the word vida is tattooed in black-blue ink.

  “Well, that’s a euphemism if I ever heard one,” says JD, the girl with the boy haircut who I have now changed my mind about and wondered if he’s actually a boy with femme features.

  “Water off a duck’s back, duckling,” Lydia says without even looking over her reading glasses at me, concentrating on her crossword.

  “Shouldn’t we, like, report it?” I ask.

  “Sure,” Lydia says. “If shouting into the abyss is your kind of thing.”

  “You can report it,” Beatriz says, nodding. “I have the number.”

  “To the abyss,” Lydia says.

  “Lydia,” Beatriz says, shooting her a look with a story behind it. “Negativity.”

  “Oh, all right,” Lydia says.

  She gets up, puts her crossword on the table with a slap, and goes out to the front porch, where we can all hear her on her phone saying, “I love you, Camus. You’re a good girl, Camus.”

  “Dog,” JD tells me.

  “She calls her dog?”

  “FaceTimes,” Beatriz says.

  “Oh” is all I say.

  I call the nonemergency police number Beatriz gives me and quickly understand why Lydia likened the experience to shouting into the abyss—the operator tells me that unless the person continues to call back, or says something threatening, they can’t do anything. Thanks a bunch.

  JD goes back to the smartphone game at hand, Beatriz continues leafing through a cooking magazine, and I stare at my philosophy reader. There’s something easy and sweet about this silence I’m sharing with strangers.

  I lean back in my chair and look at the skylight, a square of black crisscrossed with the white. When I don’t blink, when I let my eyes relax and the room blur, stars appear.

  I go home that night feeling older, even though I didn’t do much of helping anyone. I listened, though. I tried something new.

  I had an experience I wouldn’t have had if I hadn’t kept living.

  Past

  Our whole life we’re told not to take candy from strangers, and then, every year, along comes Halloween.

  It used to be my favorite holiday. The community centers that transformed into magical haunted houses; artificial spiderwebs veiling ordinary porches, fake tombstones on suburban lawns; the sweet, nutty smell of burning jack-o’-lanterns; “Monster Mash” rocking grocery store speakers. I swore I would dress up and trick-or-treat through adulthood, until last year, when I did, and everyone whose doorbell I rang told me I was too old. I ended up at Jonah’s house that night in my bee costume, eating candy out of the bag, watching a movie about a masked murderer. It was okay, I told myself. Make way for new traditions. But secretly I wished I had known the year before that it was the last time. Why does no one ever tell you it’s the last time? There should be a word for the special nostalgia you feel when you realize you already had your last time doing something and you didn’t even know it.

  Like when Jonah kissed me for the last time in the school halls, saying, “I hope you feel better.” I was in a horrible mood that day.

  Like last Christmas Eve, when my family fell asleep as a family under the same roof for the last time. I fell asleep early.

  Like the night of the car crash, as the open window swept sweet summer air to my cheeks, when I had zero inkling that
I’d never feel free and unafraid in a car on a freeway again.

  Or like the day I tried to kill myself. That day, I told myself, “This is the last time you’ll get dressed in the morning. This is the last dress you’ll ever wear. This bowl of cereal is the last meal you’ll ever eat. This is the last note you will write. This is the last walk to the lake you’ll take. This is the last day of your life.”

  Lies.

  I want to say that was the last time I’ll try to kill myself. But who knows how believable I am.

  This Halloween I agree to take my sisters trick-or-treating through our neighborhood. Dad’s neighborhood, I mean. Ruby requested that I take them, as I’m “less embarrassing” than Mom and Dad. Thanks for the backhanded compliment, sis. Marisol comes over beforehand, not in costume, but in a blue fake-fur vest in which she could easily pass for a Muppet. As the girls get ready, Marisol and I eat so much fun-sized candy it becomes un-fun. Stevie and Ruby come downstairs in their costumes. Stevie is a unicorn, adorable in her fuzzy zip-up onesie with the silver horn on the head. Ruby is wearing her usual black jeans, black shirt, black Converse, with her bruise-colored hair. Takes me a moment to notice the fake blood coming out of the side of her mouth.

  “Wow, really phoning it in this year,” I say.

  “I’m dead,” she replies.

  “You look like you always look,” Stevie says. “I hope no one gives you candy.”

  “If they don’t I’ll go buy some at the store,” Ruby says. “Halloween is dumb.”

  “What a little ray of sunshine you are,” Marisol says, tousling Ruby’s hair.

  “Sunshine gives you cancer,” Ruby says.

  Stevie whips her pillowcase around like a helicopter. “I think she needs Zoloft.”