Burnout (16 page)

I hurry over to Seemy and drop to my knees.

“I came here and looked for her. Before, I mean. Before
you came to see me.” Toad says, staying by the window. I glance at him. He looks terrified. His words rush out. “I swear it, Nan. I came here and I called out for her. I checked the stalls. But I didn’t come up here. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it. I just . . . I should have come up here. And then after I saw you, I remembered. Like, like, flash. Boom! I remembered the hayloft . . .” He trails off, raises his chin and asks with a quivering voice, “Is she dead?”

I shake my head, almost smile. “No, she’s not dead.”

He walks over, drops to the floor next to me. We each take one of her hands. I can hear the carriage house doors being pushed all the way open.

“Are you okay?” he asks me.

I shake my head, the darkness creeping in. “Tell them to help Seemy. Tell them to help her.”

Toad looks at me. “What’d they give you?”

Darkness.

I
dream about Seemy sometimes.

We’re at her parents’ farm, and we’re walking through a cornfield in the sun, like we’re in a laundry detergent commercial or something. There are corn plants between us, towering higher than our heads, filtering the sunlight, and I can’t get a clear view of her. I catch glimpses of her hair. Her narrow wrist. Her pointed chin. I hear her laugh my name. I reach out to take her hand, I want to pull her toward me so I can see her face. But she’s too far away, even though she’s right next to me.

I wake up and have to remind myself she’s not dead.

She’s just in a room somewhere with locks on the windows but no lock on the bathroom door. I get this desperate need sometimes to know if she can see the sky from her room. I asked Mom about it once and she said, “She’s at a boarding school rehab for rich kids, dollface, not solitary confinement. I’m sure if it wasn’t there already, her parents had the sky imported.”

It took them two days to suck the poison out of me. Two days I spent dreaming that I was digging my way out of a sleep that pressed itself against me from all sides—a thick, rich, black soil. I woke exhausted, my arms and legs spent from dreamed effort.

I could only stay awake for a moment at first, but the sight of Mom and Dad and the Tick by my bedside made being sucked under not as scary. I knew they would be waiting for me when I dug my way out again.

When I woke up for real Mom told me not to cry and wiped away my tears with her fingertips. I kept saying,
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry
, and she kept saying,
I know, my love, I know.
Dad was holding the Tick; I said to the Tick,
Hey buddy
, and he hid his face in Dad’s shoulder. Dad bent down to kiss me on the forehead, and the Tick practically coiled himself around Dad’s neck so we wouldn’t have to touch.

It was Thanksgiving before he would let me hug him
again. At first I thought he was just angry at me. But then in family therapy it came out that he was actually afraid to love me, because it would hurt too much when I died again. Not
if,
but
when.
Hearing that felt like a punch in the throat. It’s amazing how much love and anger and fear can fit in one little kid’s body.

It’s cold now, almost Christmas, and most mornings I wake up with the Tick curled up beside me, hugging my arm like a teddy bear, holding tight to make sure I don’t go anywhere. It was Dr. Friedman who found us the family therapist, and besides the family therapy and the just me therapy, Mom and I go to see her, just the two of us. I never saw Mom looking like she wanted to fold up into herself until I sat across from her in the therapist’s office. I’d never seen her not relish the structure of her bones or solidness of her body. She looked as though she wanted to slide between the cushions like a lost penny.

Therapy is a lot of talking and “active listening.” Sometimes it’s kind of amazing and sometimes it’s kind of exhausting. It’s helping, though. I know that, because it doesn’t hurt to look at Mom anymore, and I don’t think it hurts her to look at me. We still fight. About my hair, mostly, since I shaved it into a Mohawk when I got out of the hospital. I’m hoping it will be long enough to have liberty spikes by the time summer comes. Truth is, we
both kind of enjoy bickering about my hair. It feels so normal.

I see Dad a lot more now. I go out to Greenpoint Sunday mornings and spend the day with him and the Tick, and then bring the Tick home Sunday night. Mom doesn’t come. I know it bothers the Tick, and it bothers me, but I told him you can’t make people love each other. It’s going to have to be enough that he and I love Mom and Dad, and that they love us.

Toad and I hung out the other night. Weird, right? I asked Mom for permission first. Toad wasn’t worth getting in trouble over. She said he had to come up to our apartment first, and by the time she was done grilling him (and feeding him milk and cookies because he was
too damn skinny
) it was dark out. Hearing her ask him questions I learned all sorts of things. Like, Toad actually has a family. They live in New Jersey. He never stopped living with them and would go home every night after hanging out with Seemy and me. I always assumed he slept in some crappy, rat-infested flophouse. The ugly truth is that’s what I wanted to believe. He graduated in May and is in school now, at CUNY, for graphic design.

We walked up to Union Square and looked at the Christmas lights. He bought me a hot apple cider. We
talked about a lot of stuff. He said he was glad I didn’t drink anymore, because I was a spectacularly bad drunk. He could tell I never enjoyed it. We laughed at that for a while. He said he liked my hair, especially since I wasn’t pairing it with
all that weird black clothing
anymore. He said I used to look like the Grim Reaper. I tensed up a little, worried he would tell me I looked stupid wearing the sort of things Seemy used to wear, except not quite as twee. I like having a Mohawk and wearing a red party dress with my lace-up combat boots. But he didn’t say anything bad. We talked about Seemy. Of course.
I hated you,
he said,
because she loved you
.
Maybe not the way you wanted. But she did. She loved you.
I smiled at him.
Yeah, well. Right back at you.
I think we were both bummed to learn that she hadn’t contacted either of us.

Without either of us acknowledging it, we walked up to the carriage house. On the way we compared what information we had about Turner and Hooch.

They are in jail, awaiting trial. They thought they’d hit a gold mine when they met Seemy in the park on Halloween. They had all sorts of plans for her.

When we got to the alley that leads to the carriage house we stopped and didn’t walk any further. We looked down the alley and saw they’ve built a plywood fence,
blocking any view. Neither of us said anything for a long time. Finally I said,
She loved this place.
Toad smiled, snorted.
I knew she would. Didn’t matter though
. I shook my head,
No, I guess it didn’t.
He looked at me, a bemused expression on his face.
What do you think it says about us? That we spent so much time trying to get her to love us the way we wanted her to?
I shrugged.
Self-esteem issues? I don’t know. That’s what my therapist thinks, anyway. For you,
I said with a smile,
it just means you’re a shmuck
. He knocked me lightly in the shoulder. We looked down the alley for another moment, and then it just seemed obvious that it was time to say good-bye. Toad nodded at me.
See you around
. I nodded back.
Maybe.
I think we both knew it was a lie.

I’m still going to my new school. Kids saw what happened to me, what almost happened to me, on the news, so my anonymity is gone. It’s okay, though. The stoic lone wolf thing kind of sucked.

Mom says I’ll get through this. She says everyone has a tough time when they’re a teenager. Sometimes, I even believe her. I can go whole hours, days, and once even a whole weekend without my body going rigid with memory—and even worse, flashes of what might have been. I feel these flashes of false memory as if they were real, as if I were a ghost unable to shake the violence of
my death. When I feel this way I trace the four thin white scars from my elbow to my wrist and rest my fingers on my pulse with its reassuring rhythm.
Still Here. Still Here. Still Here.

M
y deepest thanks to Tracey Adams for making my dreams come true, to Karen Wojtyla for her patience and insight as Nan’s story morphed from one thing to another and back again, and to Emily Fabre for her good humor and for asking difficult questions. Thank you to my mom and dad and big brother, to all of my aunties and uncles and cousins, and to all of my family north and south. Thank you to my family at 557 Broadway. And thank you to the Brooklyn coffee houses that gave me a place to scribble away: Champion Coffee, the Greenpoint Coffee House, and Brooklyn Label.