I Said Yes: My Story of Heartbreak, Redemption, and True Love (4 page)

Obviously, I knew this had to do with what I said in the counselor’s office, but c’mon now. Was all this drama really necessary? The mood was so tense, so serious. The nurses and aides and everyone else who rushed around me seemed pretty confident something was wrong with me. At one point, the chaos made me wonder if I really was crazy.

Another counselor came by at this point, introducing himself as the doctor who’d be examining me for the next three days to determine whether or not I was intent on harming myself. As the words tumbled out of his mouth, I could hardly make sense of what he was saying. I was so confused and kept zoning out every few seconds. So while a stranger in scrubs took my shoelaces, a doctor pelted me with never-ending questions, and a nurse started rummaging through my bag for, I guessed, guns, drugs, or needles, maybe a poem, drawing, or
diary showing proof of self-harming tendencies, I succumbed to a state of mind-numbing disbelief.
This can’t be happening
, I thought.
I’m not crazy. This is crazy! I’m just a spoiled kid who needs some attention.
I was petrified. Tears were seconds away from slipping down my cheeks.

What on earth have I done?

After what I assume was the process of checking in, I was given a hospital robe to wear and a small bag of toiletries that included a bar of soap, a comb, a toothbrush, and a tube of toothpaste. I clutched my swag bag to my chest, feeling like someone had taken me hostage in the twilight zone.

It was near midnight by the time an orderly helped situate me in my room, sparse and cold, where I’d stay for the next three days. An odd and nauseating smell of antiseptic and mildew permeated the air. It was so bad I could actually taste it. My roommate was asleep so I tried to be as quiet as possible, hauling myself ever so slowly onto a mattress that crinkled like plastic.

Sleep was hard to come by. The door to the room was halfway closed, but a bolt of bright light streamed in from the nearby nurses’ station. Though the mild chatter and the rustling of papers from the hall wasn’t obnoxiously loud, I was in such a state of shock that all my senses were magnified and the slightest sound made my skin crawl. Tears fell quickly as I thought again—and had no answer for—
What have I done?

By the time exhaustion set in and I finally dozed off, my roommate let out a bloodcurdling scream. I jumped out of bed and ran over to her. “Are you okay? Do you need something?” I asked, panting.

My petite, blonde roommate, who was around my age,
shook her head. She looked spent. Tired, but not from lack of sleep. From life. We talked for a few minutes, and she told me she was withdrawing from cocaine. I nodded, quiet, not having a clue what to say. I felt bad for her and I could see the pain in her face, but what did I know about drug addiction? Anything I could even think to say sounded plain stupid. Like, “Sorry!” or, “Hope it works out!” I just held her hand for a bit and went back to bed. The poor girl continued to wake up screaming—it seemed like every hour on the hour.

I was emotionally drained by the time an overly cheerful orderly came bopping into my room at 6:00 a.m. “Wake up, Miss Emily. Breakfast is in fifteen down the hall. Group therapy starts at 7:00 a.m., and then you’ll meet with your counselor one-on-one.” I nodded in return, thinking about Mom and Dad. Where were they? Why weren’t they here? My stomach turned when I thought of being in this place alone, obsessing over the wild thought that my parents finally decided to abandon me. I know, maybe somewhat melodramatic. But can you imagine being sixteen and waking up in a psych ward? Believe you me, you start entertaining all kinds of thoughts.

I grabbed my hospital swag bag and headed to the bathroom to brush my teeth. I passed my roommate’s bed on the way, tiptoeing past her. She looked peaceful, finally sleeping without interruption.

Looking in the mirror was probably something I shouldn’t have done. The dark circles around my eyes were so prominent that they looked pasted on. My skin looked especially pale. I looked sick. And when I remembered where I was, I just wanted to puke.

I shuffled to the meeting lounge, or whatever it was called,
in my hospital-issue socks. They itched like a bad case of poison ivy. Another sterile and practically empty room greeted me. A bunch of hard wooden chairs were randomly placed around the linoleum floor, half of them forming a misshapen circle. About fifteen kids my age circulated around the room. Some looked scared. Others looked scary. Some fellow patients seemed cozy with one another. Others, like me, didn’t say a word.

After I grabbed some orange juice from the breakfast cart, a man walked in. I recognized him as the counselor who had been with me during the admission process the night before. Though I hadn’t been exactly chummy with the guy, his familiar face put me at ease. He seemed safe, like a grounded anchor. And kind.

The counselor directed us to sit down, and so began my first-ever group therapy session. I didn’t say one word during the hour but listened intently as others shared traumatic stories about abusive parents, rape, addictions, and actual suicide attempts that left bandaged scars. As these teenagers talked, some angry, others drenched in sad tears, I felt that my problems paled in comparison. Oh sure, I was sad. I was lonely. And I wanted to leave boarding school and go home to be with my mom and dad. All these things had been legitimate issues in my mind, but hearing the horror stories of others shifted my perspective. And I felt the weight of guilt, of being an ungrateful, undeserving little girl.

My parents arrived later that morning. Mom’s noisy bangles announced their arrival as she walked down the hallway and into my room. I inhaled her perfume. It worked magic, obliterating, at least temporarily, the antiseptic and mildew stench. Mom looked a little worried but appeared more nonchalant
than I would have expected. Maybe she knew she’d freak me out if she burst into hysterics.

She sat on the side of my bed, brushing loose strands of greasy hair out of my eyes and half smiled. “What in the world happened, Emily?” I shrugged my shoulders. I didn’t know what to say.

For each solo counseling session during my three-day stay, I don’t remember giving some sob story or offering intricate details, a narrow glimpse into my past that would account for some kind of an aha moment for me or the therapist. The mandatory meetings were far from sensational confessions. I was, however, adamant in communicating one fact: I want to go home. I said this like a hundred times, in a hundred different ways. I couldn’t be any clearer.

I. Want. To. Go. Home.

When I was officially declared not a danger to myself or others, I was discharged. The counselor had also recommended to my parents that they withdraw me from school and bring me home. “Right now Emily needs your support,” he told them. But instead of going to school to pack up my things and head back to Sunset Key with Mom and Dad, I found myself back at Saint Andrew’s. To stay.

My parents gave me a handful of reasons why going home was not an option. One, they had already paid my tuition. Two, it was best I finished out the school year in the same place. Yada, yada, yada. When they left, they told me how much they loved and cared for me and all that warm and gooey stuff, but all I heard was, “Sorry, dear, you can’t come home with us.” And with some hugs, a few words of encouragement to “hang
in there, you’re fine,” and a proverbial slap on the back, I was back in my own world, the one I didn’t like very much.

Life resumed its intense pace. No one knew what happened and where I’d been except for some teachers. My peers assumed I simply went home. No one had a clue that I was actually Bakerized. Things went back to normal, my normal, rather quickly. Which meant the same unsettling feelings of discontent and unease overwhelmed me again, pushing me down a deeper tunnel of confusion, loneliness, and depression.

What do I have to do to get out of here?
I wondered with such desperation it scared me. But the deeper question, the one that carried even more weight was,
What do I have to do to get my parents to notice me, to show me that they care?
Isn’t that what all teenagers want? Some concrete evidence of being loved, wanted, needed, heard? Even though most of us do a poor job of communicating that.

As my emotions swam in endless circles, I thought about getting sick. The Bell’s palsy business elicited a lot of compassion from Mom and Dad. But how do I just get sick? What do I do? What do I take?

Pills.
That was the first thing that came to mind.
I’m going to take pills.
Seemed like an easy fix. I didn’t have access to your serious do-some-damage-in-bulk pills like painkillers or sleep aids. But I did have a full month’s supply of Prozac in my handbag. Perfect. I grabbed the bottle and downed four pills with some water. Four. Need me to repeat that?

Four. Low-dose. Antidepressants.

Well, guess what happened after a minute. That’s right. Nothing. Epic failure. So therein lay the challenge: determining
the right amount of pills to take that would make me seriously ill but wouldn’t kill me. Without any resources to help, I’d have to wing it. And wing it I did.

Let me pause for a bit.

As I write this, I’m blown away. I can’t believe this actually happened, that I was a depressed teenager thinking that taking excess Prozac was going to solve my problems. It’s wild. A part of me almost feels I’m writing about someone else. And as I think back on that time, some scenes are blurred. I don’t know if this is true, but I believe some of the haze has to do with God protecting me. If I sat down and thought of every single piece of the puzzle during that time, every single event, every single feeling, every single encounter, every single conversation, every single color, and every single smell, I’d probably have a breakdown.

I don’t remember what happened after I tried to figure out the magic number of pills to pop. All I remember is waking up in the emergency room, a thin curtain separating me from the hospital chaos I could hear, but not see. I lay in bed, clutching my stomach after having been forced to drink a charcoal beverage that would help detoxify my body from the bottle of antidepressants I had just ingested an hour or so ago. The drink made me puke immediately, the pitiful bedpan a far cry from an adequate receptacle. I threw up so much, I filled up the commercial-grade waste basket in the corner. A doctor or nurse stuck an IV in me to replenish my body with fluids lost during my nonstop vomiting.

All popping Prozac did for me, once I was physically well enough to leave the ER, was guarantee me another spot in the same psych ward I had visited earlier. Round two was pretty
much the same. But this time, Saint Andrew’s, who had been in communication with my parents, recommended I leave school and go home.

My exodus from Saint Andrew’s happened in what felt like a few seconds. One minute I was walking out of the hospital, feeling the suffocating humidity on my face and watching palm trees yield submissively to the soft breeze. The next I was walking out of the headmaster’s office toward my dorm where my parents and I would quickly pack up my belongings and drive a silent four and a half hours to Key West. No one said a word. No one mentioned the pills. The emergency room. That other place. Maybe it was better that way. We could all pretend it never happened.

three

S
tanding on the dock awaiting the ferry for Sunset Island, while the sun melted my skin and sweat trickled down my neck, I felt relieved. I knew there were logistics that needed to be ironed out, like needing to finish out my junior year at Key West High School, for one, but I didn’t care. I was home. To me, no matter what the rest of high school looked like, I finally felt settled. Also, I was used to switching schools so much that the whole new-kid-on-the-block element didn’t faze me a bit. I didn’t care that I was enrolling in a place where cliques were already formed and long-term bonds were already made and curriculums were already more than halfway completed. I’d manage just fine, thank you very much. Overall, I was in a much better place than a few weeks or even months ago. I closed out the year uneventfully.

When I started my senior year, in a rare surge of courage, I decided to join the tennis team. That’s right. Me. The girl who was not created to catch or throw things. I knew some of the players, and the team didn’t seem super competitive; I don’t even remember the school hosting tryouts. For me tennis was more of a social thing, but when I played, I tried my best to
keep the ball in the court, not over the fence or in the adjoining court.

One afternoon, around Thanksgiving, I decided to ditch practice, though I’d already gone through the trouble of changing into my uniform. I knew my mediocre performance wasn’t going to suffer drastically because I missed a few drills. So after school I went home and whistled for my border collie, Peaches, who immediately scampered toward me with spirited howls. The two of us took the ferry over to Key West and strolled around A & B Marina, located in the heart of Old Town, which was always bustling with action from incoming and outgoing boats.

I inhaled the saltwater air and paused, with Peaches yapping and yanking the leash, making sure I knew she wasn’t happy about the pit stop. As I admired the blanket of sparkling turquoise that stretched in every direction, my eyes fell on an even better sight, one that almost made me drop the leash.

Ricky.

It had been about a year and a half since I’d seen him. My heart pounded, and the palms of my hands started to get sweaty.

With sandy hair tousled from the wind, Ricky hopped off a fishing boat onto the dock. With effortless ease, he flexed his lean muscles to reach back into the boat and drag a cooler out. His dad was there, too, as well as some other guys I didn’t recognize. I groaned when I realized I was still wearing my white tennis uniform, also remembering my hair was tied back in a messy ponytail (messy-messy, not cute-messy) and I didn’t have a stitch of makeup on. I looked dull and drab. Sigh. This was so not how I saw our reunion happening.