Wrecked (20 page)

My negative belief about myself is “I am a killer.” Frances won’t let me use that one, though, because she says the truth is that I was behind the wheel when Cameron died, and even though I wasn’t responsible for Cameron’s death, EMDR won’t change the fact that I was involved. So she asks, if I am a killer, what does that mean about me? I say I am very, very bad. She lets me use that.

Target: the screaming, stopped. Negative belief: “I am very, very bad.” What would I rather believe? That I’m good, I guess. Right. On a scale of one to seven “I am good” gets a one. When I think of the screaming, stopped, what emotions do I feel? Terror, shame, helplessness. How disturbing are those feelings? A ten. Where do I feel it in my body? All over, shaking and heart pounding, and nausea and sweating.

“Go with that,” Frances tells me. So I do.

IT’S DARK, AND SOMETHING IS POKING MY EYE, AND I’M CRUSHED
on my left side, and Ellen and her blood are heavy, and the smell of plastic is underneath the screaming and screaming and screaming, and when the screaming stops, my body vomits, telling me that the screaming, stopped, is sickening, is somebody’s life, stopped, and I want to wipe the heavy wetness off me and get up and run and make the somebody start screaming and keep screaming, to make them be alive, please, please, please, and it’s like a wave of blood frozen in a massive curl, a big “Fuck you” to gravity and nature and everything that’s supposed to be, and it’s wrong, it should keep going, it should fall and roar over everything, but it doesn’t, it’s a frozen wave of screaming, stopped, of someone dead.

• • •

Frances is here, telling me to take a deep breath and let it go and what’s happening now, and I see her certificates on the wall, with that left middle one all crooked, and I feel the cool, smooth suede of the pillow under my forearms and there’s the red of the couch and the brown of her freckles, and I say, “It’s weird how sick and sad I feel but also know that I’m here, and it’s over.”

And she says—big surprise—“Go with that.”

And I’m thinking about how it’s over, only it’s not over. The screaming is over, and Cameron’s life is over, and the beginning of my life is over, along with Jack’s and Ellen’s and Cameron’s little brother’s, and I see those two kids on the ocean trampoline, that brother and sister with those nut-colored eyes, and they’re jumping, and then I see a little boy who looks just like Cameron, with natural platinum hair paired with dusky skin, and I think,
What’s he going to do? What’s he going to do without her?
And my brother’s bedroom door slams, and I’m left on the other side, small and alone and not knowing what to do, and Frances is handing me her tissue box, and I feel it like waves, just waves of despair washing over me, and I cry and cry and cry, and my bones are soggy, and then I see Jack’s head flat on the table, next to his laptop, and broken glass strewn across the living-room floor, and broken glass and flashlights glittering underneath the dangling earth, and the earth turns into soil, and then a blade of grass grows up out of the soil, and it’s joined by other blades, and then there are brown leaves and fingers picking them up one by
one, Jack’s fingers picking up the leaves, and then his face looking at me, his face saying,
If you had just stayed home and picked up the leaves,
maybe none of it would have happened, and Frances turns off the buzzers.

There’s all these balls of tissue in my lap, and I shake my head and cry, and Frances doesn’t have to ask me to breathe or what’s happening because I kind of get the rhythm of it all now, and so I breathe on my own.

“It’s my fault,” I tell Frances. “If I’d done what my dad told me to do, we’d have gotten to the party later and probably left later or earlier, and we wouldn’t have been passing by Cameron on the road right at that second, and she could have swerved and been fine.”

She doesn’t say anything this time. She just nods and turns on the box.

The thing is, if you don’t do what my father asks, he ends up being right, and you end up with serious consequences because you are just wrong and bad, and I see his face screaming and that vein and the spit at the corners of his mouth, and he’s screaming and screaming and screaming, and I wish it would stop. I wish his screaming would stop, I wish he would stop. I wish he would die. And if you wish people to die, then you are very, very bad.

“Take a deep breath,” Frances says. I breathe in, slow and long.

“I’m so mad,” I tell her, and I’m crying again, and I tug another tissue, and she turns on her box, but I drop the buzzers
and hold up my hand, and she waits, and when I can find my voice, I add, because it feels important, “And I’m scared of how mad I am. I mean … not scared exactly. Ashamed.”

The word
shame
keeps marching by, like on a big city building’s electronic ticker.
Shame, shame, shame,
just marching by, repeating itself in yellow bulbs over a black background, and it feels like I could throw up again, and my heart is heavy, and it moves across the screen of my mind:
shame, shame, shame
. And then my mother is there, curled around me, holding me tight with one arm and pulling a shade over the ticker with another, and I can feel her warm breath in my ear, and she’s not far away in the corner of the house or fuzzy in the horizon, she’s right here holding me and saying, “Shhh, shhh. I’m here, I’m here,” and then I’m waking up in a twist of damp bedding from a nightmare, and my mother is still wrapped firmly around my back, and my father is there plumping my pillow, and Jack is there, watching from the doorway, and nobody’s blaming me or thinking I’m bad, even though the sadness in the room is thick, like another blanket, twisted and heavy and everywhere.

I cry some more, with the buzzers off, and then I get this image with the sound gone, so there’s no screaming, and no screaming, stopped.

“It’s like a silent movie,” I explain to Frances. “Everything is frozen. Ellen’s ponytail and the cops, and Cameron lying on the pavement, dead. Even though I never saw her that night. I see her now. I’m sitting up, looking at her.”

Guess what Frances says?

• • •

Cameron stands up out of herself, the way the movies show souls leaving bodies, and she walks over to me, and she kneels down, and she’s all in one piece and perfect with those slender pink fingers and that skin and no blood, and she says, “You two are a lot more alike than you think,” and she means Jack and me, and she floats away and up toward a lighted place far above us with a white sidewalk and wet green grass, and the echo of her voice says it again: “You two are a lot more alike than you think,” and there’s something comforting about what she’s said because if it’s true—and it must be, because dead people know the truth—then maybe I’m not so bad, because Jack isn’t, because he thinks I can fly and tries to stop the waves.

“What’s happening now?” Frances asks.

“I’m thinking about my brother,” I tell her.

I see his shoulder blades, sharp as knives, slicing the water.

“I don’t know,” I tell Frances. “I’m tired. And if you say ‘Go with that,’ I think I’ll scream.”

She just looks at me and turns on the buzzers.

Screaming again, only now the screaming is different. It’s not screaming like the way it was that night. The night of the accident. It’s screaming like the way kids scream. Little kids. When they’re playing. And then there’s Cameron, a knobby-kneed girl, missing two front teeth. Her toddler brother is
wearing nothing but a diaper, and they’re playing in a sprinkler, which is going
snickety, snickety, snickety,
and young Cameron is squealing, the way little kids do when they’re happy. And then I see me, and I’m my same age now, only I’m as small as a five-year-old, and I’m on the white sidewalk of this front yard where Cameron is skipping through the sprinkler, and I’m curled up in a ball, crying, and Cameron sees me and stops squealing, and she comes over, and she asks if I want to run through the sprinkler with her, and I ask if my brother can come too, and Jack is there, his age and size now, and he runs through the sprinkler and back, hogging it, and then he grins at us and says, “I can stop the water,” and he presses his foot on the spout and the water stops and the
snickety
sound stops, and Cameron and I shriek at him, and her little baby brother stares at us with his droopy diaper, and then Jack lifts his foot and the water shoots out, drenching us all, and that’s it.

“We’re really little,” I tell Frances. “We’re playing outside in the summer, and we’re all sort of shouting and squealing.”

“And when you go back to what we started with, what do you get?”

I take a deep breath, and I try to get it back into my head. “It’s hard to hear it,” I say. “I mean, I know it happened, but I can’t hear the screaming anymore. And I can’t hear the stopped.”

“What do you get instead?” Frances asks.

I try to think of that night. I try to think of the accident. Of that moment, when Cameron died, and I knew she died, even though I didn’t know I knew it.

“It’s not Ocean Road at night anymore,” I say. “I mean, it is Ocean Road, far away in the background. But sort of in front of it and closer is this empty yard with wet grass and the sound of a sprinkler.”

“How disturbing is it to you now?”

“It’s still sad,” I say. “And … I don’t know … ominous a little bit.” A good SAT word. How about that. “I don’t know why, but I’m uneasy. But it’s not as bad as when we started. So I guess it’s at about a three.”

“You’ve done a lot of work today,” Frances says. She leans back a little in her black leather chair, and I glance at the clock. We’re five minutes over. How weird. It seems like we only just started.

“I’m really tired,” I say, surprised.

“Yeah,” she nods. “That happens.”

She doesn’t make me leave right away, even though she probably has somebody else waiting. Instead she lets me close my eyes and imagine my safe place for a minute. We’ve ended like this before. I like it. The smell of coconut. The warmth of dazzling blue.

ELLEN’S BACK IN FLORIDA WITH HER PARENTS FOR THE FIRST
week of Christmas break. Lisa went to Cancún with her family, and Rob’s visiting cousins in Chicago. That leaves Seth, Jason, and us. Usually my family goes skiing, but not this year. It’s not like we discuss it or anything. It’s just that it doesn’t happen. Instead my father’s taking only three days off at Christmas, and my mom’s doing a lot of shopping and grading.

Seth brings over a bunch of wrinkled envelopes and a family pack of Hershey’s Kisses. We count his send-a-dollar money and eat the whole bag of chocolate and fool around a little. Well, a lot. But somehow I start feeling nervous, and then I get bitchy.

Right as I’m kicking him out of my room, my father’s walking up the stairs. He doesn’t even wait until Seth’s through the front door before he starts.

“What was that boy doing in your room?” my father goes. I’m in the second-floor hallway, and my dad has one foot on the top stair and one foot on the carpeted landing.

“That’s Seth,” I say. He’s a guy. Not a boy. “You’ve met him before.”

“What was he doing in your room?”

“What do you mean?” I ask, even though I know exactly what he means.

“You know exactly what I mean,” my dad goes.

I haven’t had a nightmare for four nights, and I’m driving fine, and the shaking is gone. Plus, I haven’t had any more panic attacks. Thank God. According to my father’s initial orders, I have only one session left with Frances, but lately he hasn’t mentioned anything about ending my therapy, so that’s sort of in limbo.

I guess I thought maybe things wouldn’t go back to as bad as they used to be, but now, with this old black knot in my brain, I figure I might be wrong. So I stand here, wondering what he wants me to say.

“Harvey?” my mother calls from their bedroom. She’s wrapping presents, I think.

“What!”

“We weren’t doing anything,” I finally say, thinking about when Seth’s hand slid up my shirt.

“Leave her alone!” my mom yells.

And then when that same hand slid down my pants.

“What were you doing in there?” my father asks me again, ignoring my mother.

Sometime between the shirt and the pants Seth placed a chocolate Kiss in my belly button with his mouth.

“We were just hanging out,” I say. “Eating chocolate. And um … working on a project.”

“You’re not supposed to have food in your room,” my dad says. “Bugs.”

“We didn’t make any crumbs.”

“Or boys in your room.”

“Since when?”

“Since now,” he tells my mother, who’s stepping into the hallway. She has a stray piece of Scotch tape stuck to her sleeve.

“I can’t have a guy in my room now?” I ask.

“Harvey,” my mom says. “Let’s discuss this before we lay down any laws.”

“There’s nothing to discuss,” my father says. “No boys in Anna’s room.”

“What about Jason?” I ask.

“Who the hell is Jason?” my dad goes. “And no.”

“Jason’s gay!” we all hear Jack yell from behind his closed door. A second later it opens. “Jason’s probably safe, Dad,” Jack points out.

My father still has one foot on the top stair and one on the carpet. “Don’t get smart,” my dad tells Jack. Then to me, “No boys in your room. Period.”

“You let Cameron in Jack’s room,” I argue before I can stop myself.

My insides nose-dive with shame while my father’s face goes purple. Jack’s staring at the wood floor, smirking, of all things, instead of glaring with disgust at his despicable sister. While I’m trying to figure out how that’s possible, my father is
looking back and forth at Jack and then at me. “God damn it!” he says. He lifts his back leg and advances. His hand is raised.

“Stop it, Harvey!” My mom steps between us, and I dodge around both of them, down the stairs, to the kitchen, through the mudroom, to the garage, into the new Honda.

And then I just sit here. Because the last time something like this happened … well.

I turn the car on for the heat. I didn’t grab a coat, and even though it’s only three steps away, I’m not going back into the house for one. If I’d thought to bring my cell, I’d call Ellen, but I didn’t, so I can’t. I think about driving to Seth’s, only I’m not up for facing him so soon after he’s nibbled a Hershey’s Kiss out of my navel. I could go to Jason’s, only I don’t even know if he’s home, and what if he is and Sweatshirt is over there and they’re in the middle of their own bag of candy? Or worse, what if he’s home and Sweatshirt isn’t there, but Grandma is? So I sit here with the engine idling, hating my father and hating myself more and shaking. And then I remember about planting my feet and breathing, and that helps a little.