The last time I saw him was in April when I was in Mrs. Bale’s fourth grade class. He dropped us off at school that morning. They didn’t tell us much (me, Joey, Chris), just that something terrible happened. All we know is that it made Mom cry, a lot, and made Dad go away forever. They didn’t tell us what it was called or where it came from, but when we listened for it, we heard it. A secret, floating in the thick, stinging air, and into the telephone wires, traveling hundreds of miles over big green lakes, winding muddy rivers, and stretch out grey highways, from New York City to Chicago, St. Louis, Seattle—speeding through lines quicker than the NASCAR racers Joey and Chris like to watch on TV. The word that sticks out, the one all of the traveling secrets and whispers have in common, is suicide. I am nine and starting to feel it but I think it was always with me.
Dad is gone and I find the mysterious word everywhere. In a news blurb when I was watching “Animaniacs” and “Seinfeld” after school in the den—“A fourteen year old boy was found dead this morning, hung from a wooden rafter in the garage of his family’s suburban home. The Westchester Police have ruled out foul play and are convinced it was suicide. . .” and in moves, like “Girl Interrupted” when Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie find Britney Murphy in the bathroom, and her face looks cold and purple like she has grape juice underneath her skin—because of the word.
We never talk about the word at school or at church, or at the dinner table. Sometimes I’m not sure I know what it means—maybe I got confused and the word isn’t why Dad is gone. Sometimes I even think I made the word up in my head. Mom and Chris never say it, and they don’t talk about Dad either. Sometimes Joey forgets and asks when Dad is coming home and Chris gets mad at him for being “stupid.” Joey doesn’t know what the word means either and he doesn’t understand that it took Dad away forever.
I don’t think my friends know about the word. We don’t talk about it when we play freeze tag, or soccer, or “high school cheerleader girls with cute boyfriends.” We do talk about everything else though, the apartments we’re going to have in New York City in twenty-seven story buildings with scratchy green Astroturf tennis courts on the rooftops and blue striped sun umbrellas with matching lounge chairs where we will sit at night sipping fancy drinks from crystal glasses with long delicate stems. We pretend to sit in our expensive lounge chairs and look out at the silver skyscrapers, turquoise ocean, and the Statue of Liberty, “Libby,” who has turned mossy green like the old pennies Mom has in the bottom of her purse. Sometimes we talk about scary things too, like how the football player OJ Simpson (who we saw a picture of on one of Joey’s trading cards) went crazy and murdered his wife, and about how a guy named Hannibal Lector got so hungry that he ate actual people like they were chicken or something. We read stories from the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark book about misty ghosts that open and shut doors late at night, and about rotting green corpses that come alive when its dark outside. My friends and I talk about all of these things, but never about the thing that took Dad, except once.
Weekday evenings in the summer, between eight and nine o’clock, me and Susan pop tar bubbles in the street. When the air is warm and thick, and the top of the sky is cool lavender, then hazy tangerine and bright pink where it meets the houses on Susan’s side of the street, we walk the black tar strips that outline sections of sandy colored pavement between our driveways, tracing the four small squares that make up one big square starting at my mailbox and ending across the street at Susan’s. We watch it all day. The dark, sticky tar boiling in the mid-morning sun while we are at swim practice, thinner and runnier in the afternoon heat while we are swinging in the backyard and cutting trails in the woods behind my house, trying to find the secret treasure (ceramic knick knacks from the fancy living room) hidden by Black Bellamy and his band of pirates. At the end of the afternoon, when the treasure is found and our interest in swinging and swimming lost, the tar is thin and shiny and loose in the cracks. We wait until after dinner when the hotness from earlier has fled, trapping small pockets of air underneath the thin top layers of tar that cool quickest. We trace the squares on tip toes, pressing our big toes into the bubbles, and then flattening the soles of our feet onto the pavement, making the noise pink chewing gum makes when you blow a bubble and then quickly suck it back against your lips and teeth. It was a weeknight in August and we were popping tar bubbles when we talked about it.
“Yah know what I heard on TV today?” I said, concentrating on popping a bubble with my toe.
“What?” Susan asked.
“I heard that a boy died in his garage.”
“What happened to him?”
“He was hung with a rope.”
Susan stopped. “Somebody hung him in his garage?”
“Not somebody,” I said, still focusing on the tar, “he did it himself.”
She paused, “Why would he do that?”
“I don’t know.”
Susan looked down and continued tracing the lines, “Maybe it was an accident.”
“I guess.”
That was all we said. I thought about it though, about Brittany Murphy, the boy in his garage, and Dad. Maybe the boy didn’t like his parents, and in the movie Britney was sad. Did Dad not like Mom, or Chris and Joey, or me? Was he angry or sad because of us? Maybe it was God that messed up, except at Church they say that God doesn’t do that. It could have been an accident, like Susan said—but if it was an accident then why didn’t anybody say that? It Dad didn’t have an accident, and God didn’t make a mistake, and I didn’t make the word up, does that mean Dad wanted to leave us?
* * *Five years later I could have been the boy from TV. It was spring again, Chris was eighteen and in his freshman year at Tulane. He moved out at the end of the summer and had been home twice since, Thanksgiving and Christmas. Mom said he didn’t come home a lot because his classes were harder now and he had lots of work. He’s going to be a lawyer like Dad. Mom was working again too, in a doctor’s office downtown. Joey was ten years old, and in fifth grade. He started playing soccer and baseball, and he didn’t ask when Dad was coming home anymore. I was in ninth grade at Parkview High School. I was fourteen, it had been with me a long while, and it was about to end.
I can’t blame what I did on the new school, because for a while I loved it. Like first semester when I got to play Bunny Flingus in the underclassmen play, “The House of Blue Leaves,” or homecoming when Greg Strate, a sophomore on the varsity swim team, asked me to be his date for the dance. I can’t blame it on being lonely (even though I was alone), I had friends at school, at home, and at church. It wasn’t because I listened to Linkin Park, Eminem, and sometimes Marilyn Manson, or because I’d seen “Girl Interrupted,” or “The Virgin Suicides.” And I didn’t do it because I was copying what I heard on the news, people sometimes think that. It’s not Dad’s fault, but I know people think that too. They think it’s an infection, but they’re wrong. It was in me before Dad left us, he didn’t pass it on to me like strep throat or the twenty-four hour flu. I guess I just wasn’t interested in things anymore—and that’s when the feeling took over.
Even the simple things I used to like seemed exhausting once it took over. On Sunday nights Mom and me liked to curl up on the leather sofa in our den with fleece blankets and big bowls of butter popcorn to watch 11 o’clock movies on channel six, old movies like “Casablanca” and “Citizen Kane.” It was my favorite thing to do and by the time I was fifteen even that wasn’t enough to make me okay again. The sense of dread that had been growing deep in me had become overwhelming. I started to slip away.
My bout started innocently enough. It wasn’t something I was really going to do—just a dark and placid little fantasy I kept tucked away inside. A secret I held on to, an escape that in some obscure way kept me going. I could only let the feelings surface when no one would know. When I needed that I went to my room and hid in the closet. I would curl into a ball with my knees hugged tightly to my chest, pressed between wool sweaters, silky pink and black dressed, fall jackets, and blue jeans. I sat in the cramped closet, surrounded by old Nikes, Docs, patent leather church shoes with the tags still on them, flip-flops, and furry snow boots. I closed my eyes, and drifted away. Sometimes I cried, and sometimes I rested my head against the sliding door and floated in the darkness behind my eyelids—losing sense of time by hours. My dangerous flirtation wasn’t violent, the point wasn’t how it would end, it was what there would be after. Blank space and quiet. It was so alluring I couldn’t stand it. I was obsessed. It was the only escape I could imagine that would free me from the thoughts that lead in circles, the way I felt late at night when I couldn’t be distracted from myself anymore, the questions that plagued me—the ones no one could answer. . .the idea of escaping was more than tempting, I was addicted.
* * *Tuesday, June first was the last day, ten days after my fifteenth birthday. Nothing out of the ordinary happened, school was uneventful, drama club was fine, but in me I knew it was the day. Instinct. On Tuesdays Mom got home from work after seven, and Joey went home with a friend from school and then to soccer practice at six-thirty. On this Tuesday I got home just after six. The house was empty and quiet except for the soft hum of the air conditioner and the creak I caused in the wood beneath the powder blue carpet as I walked up the stairs to the second floor bathroom.
Once inside I locked the door, flipped the light switch on the left wall, and dropped my navy Eastpack on the cool tile floor. I leaned across the marble sink to open the medicine cabinet behind the mirror. Generic aspirin, Cortisone Ten, silver nail clippers, a Dixie cup of Q-tips, Tylenol, Pepto-Bismol tablets, and on the second shelf Band-Aids, cotton balls, a navy razor. . . I reached for the aspirin bottle on the first shelf, and then felt its weight in my hands. It was almost full. I held it sideways to read the printed warning label. “Do not exceed eight tablets in a twenty-four hour period. If this occurs call the poison control center immediately. . .” I twisted off the child safety lid and tilted the bottle. The pills fell gently into the palm of my left hand—reminding me of the Wintergreen Altoids Chris used to keep in the front pouch of his backpack. I set the plastic bottle and its lid on the sink, and carefully examined the small pills. Each one was powdery and bleach white like fresh snow. I curled my fingers around the pills, pressing them firmly into my palm. When I relaxed my hand the pills stuck gently to my clammy skin. Carefully I let two of them fall into my cupped right hand, then tossed them into my mouth and let them roll down my throat. Two more went. Then three—but as I reached my head back to swallow these three I caught a glimpse of myself in the cabinet mirror. A fair skinned girl, five-seven or eight with long blonde brown locks and warm honey eyes. Her Dad’s eyes. This girl, frozen in front of the mirror in a plain white shirt and blue jeans—half a bottle of aspirin in her left hand, three more in her mouth, four more dissolving in her stomach. My hand relaxed and the remaining pills fell to the tile, each one bouncing once or twice as they spread across the floor and settled. I leaned over the sink and spit out the three pills that had stalled in the back of my throat. Tears rose and I became aware of my quickened heart beat. I looked up to see Michelle Skinner gazing back at me, awake and alive, maybe for the first time.
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