Notes to Self (22 page)

CHAPTER 46

DAWN

“You have to stop doing this, Robin.” Mom’s voice was even wearier than I’d ever heard it before, if that was possible. “I can’t take it. I really can’t.”

I opened my eyes. I was in a hospital bed in a white room. Everything that had happened—and everything I had remembered—the night before came back to me, but instead of wanting to throw up or freak out, I felt numb. There was so much to remember; it felt like my brain was speeding around a racetrack. The Tylenol theory, Josie saving me. My seriously bizarre dream. Emily and Reno had kissed?
He lied to me.
Well, not lied exactly. Just neglected to tell the truth for weeks and weeks. The adrenaline in my veins was so potent it was hard to stay lying down. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I didn’t mean to…”

“Sweetheart, it’s okay.”

“How long have I been comatose?” I asked.

“You haven’t been comatose,” she answered. “You’ve been asleep through the night. You passed out yesterday when you got here. Low blood sugar, they said. I’m not letting you out of my sight from now on, I’m really not, but I suppose that goes without saying. Those social workers are asking a bunch of questions and scaring the hell out of me.”

“Are you sure it hasn’t been longer? Like, a lot longer? Where’s Emily?”

“She’s…Robin, she still hasn’t woken up. Nothing’s changed. I’m sorry. They checked on what you were saying, but there was never any sign of too much acetaminophen in her system.”

“Oh. I just…I saw Emily in my dream. I think…she said
I
was the one who’d never woken up.”

“I’m sorry, honey. You’re right here.”

“But what if
this
is a dream?”

“Save it for Philosophy 101, sweetie. I’m too tired to think about it.”

CHAPTER 47

LOW BLOOD SUGAR

I read a novel once where the main character lost a person she loved, and she didn’t start going to church and she didn’t stop going to school, and she didn’t make a big fuss or yell or scream or cry. She just moved through life like a sleepwalker, doing everything she had to do as an automaton, eating just enough food to get by, talking to her parents just enough so they wouldn’t worry. It didn’t matter if she went to school or stayed home because the pain was the same everywhere, so she figured she may as well make as little trouble as possible for other people and just exist. She didn’t have any choice in the matter of who got to live and who got to die, and her whole life from that point on was different because she knew it.

I wished I could have a talk with that girl, that made-up character. I understood her completely. The beginning of every question I could think of was “How.”
How can I go on if Emily doesn’t make it? How? How? How?
As the days went by, she felt further and further away from all of us, from life. All that had happened the night of the accident burned inside of me like poison, like an acid that was slowly consuming the cells of my stomach, my heart, my lungs. There was no solace as I dreamed again and again of loose steel bars on ladders, and of Emily, forever beyond my reach.

She wasn’t here. She wasn’t waking up.

But I couldn’t say goodbye.

CHAPTER 48

IF YOUR BEST FRIEND JUMPED OFF A BRIDGE, WOULD YOU?

The day after Thanksgiving, me, Mom, and Susan—I can’t call her Grandma, I just can’t—sat on the couch watching (or pretending to watch) a Lifetime movie. Mom had apologized for keeping my grandmother away from Florida and away from a real relationship with me, but I’d immediately waved her away. Susan was moving here; it was all settled. Honestly, I didn’t even care anymore. All my mind could repeat was:
wake up wake up wake up wake up.

Reno was at our front door. I wanted to go and hide in my closet, but then Mom would let him in, and I didn’t want her to hear any of what I had to say to him.

“I wanted to bring leftover pie,” he said in a rush, catching his breath. “But Kyle ate the last piece before I could grab it.”

“Outside,” I said. We sat by the swimming pool. Someone had cleaned it up; apparently an investor from, like, Chicago had purchased all the empty units in our building. 

“How are you?” he asked. He’d messaged me and texted me and
called
me several times in the past few days, but I hadn’t responded.

I looked at him for several moments, almost unable to believe he could have done it. How could he have kissed Emily,
kissed her,
and not say a single word about it all this time?

“Emily told me,” I said. My voice didn’t falter. I looked past him, refusing to meet his eyes. “I finally remembered.”

“Told you what?” He tried to touch my hand, but I jerked it away.

“About you…you know, you guys hooking up.” I shuddered at the thought of how I’d thrown myself at him, at the way I’d allowed myself to want him, when all along he’d said nothing to me about the truth.

“Wait a minute. What did she say?” I had to hand it to Reno. He was a good actor, all innocent and baffled.

“Just stop,” I said. It all made sense. She had been acting so strangely the week before I’d met her that night at Fun Towne. She must have been worried I would get mad. “Why didn’t you just tell me you liked her? Right away?”

I wanted to be mad at him, but instead I started crying. I kept my face turned away so he wouldn’t see.

“Robin, it didn’t happen like you think it happened.”

“Liar!” I stood up and started walking. I wanted to get away from Reno, but I didn’t want to go back inside. I ached to drive and to have my own car so I could be truly alone. I would drive forever, drive north, drive to Canada.

“Will you listen to me? Please?”

“No.” But I didn’t stop him when he followed me down the street.

“Look, here’s what happened,” he said. He sounded tired and annoyed.
“Emily showed up at my house one night, late. I don’t even know why my dad let her in, but I guess she looked harmless enough and she was upset. I was in my room studying for a Chem test when she came in and sat down on my bed like it was no big deal. I’d never had a girl in my room before, not since you used to come over in middle school, so my dad didn’t even say anything when Emily shut the door. I couldn’t figure out why she was there; it wasn’t like we were ever friends. I’d probably seen her, what, five times before then? But all of a sudden she’s in tears and saying how she’d always been so jealous of the way I looked after you and, um, cared about you…”

I stopped walking and glared at him. He held up his hands in a gesture of surrender and I started walking again, not looking at him, but not
not
listening, either.

“She said she felt really lonely and wanted to feel better. She kissed me—okay, yeah, it’s true, but it wasn’t exactly my choice—and started taking off her shirt. I told her to stop. It was obvious to anyone with a brain that she wasn’t okay. She was angry with me, but she let me take her home in the Jeep. That’s how it happened, Robin. I swear.”

“I don’t believe you,” I said. My voice wavered.

“Fine. You can believe whatever she said, Robin, but Emily was just as clueless as we are. She was really cool and she was your best friend, but she wasn’t perfect.”

“How dare you talk about her like that? She’s…she might…” I couldn’t say
die
out loud.

“I know. But dying doesn’t make everything a person ever did while they were alive perfect. She put you in danger, Rob, and you didn’t even care. But I care.
I care
.” He spit the words out like they tasted bad.

“What are you talking about?” I stopped walking again and turned to him.

“Not every idea Em had was a diamond, Robin. Leaving school anytime she felt like it to get donuts? And what about that time she thought it would be hilarious if you went skinny dipping in Lake Toho? There are a lot of things in that lake you don’t want to run into in the middle of the night. And the grand finale, of course, climbing up the Sling Shot in the middle of the night for the goddamn view.”

“You sound like my mom.” I wanted to hit him, but I was starting to realize he might be right. I loved Emily partly for the excitement and she loved me, I guess, for the safety.

“Fuck you,” he replied.

I kept walking to I-don’t-know-where and Reno went the other way, back to his dad’s Jeep, back to a home where no one was broken and confused.

CHAPTER 49

SURRENDER

After that, as I waited for news of Emily, feeling even more powerless than I had before, I couldn’t stop crying. Mom found me a shrink named Lorraine. Between her and Dr. Kline and Katie Jo, I have practically a whole medical team tracking my every gesture.

Fall turned to winter, whatever that means in Florida, and Susan bought a canoe. I guess she really can’t live without a boat of some sort. She takes me out on the Florida swamps, as far away from the billboards and the traffic and the fast food places as we can possibly get, and we talk about life. She says we’re a lot alike. I guess that’s true. She says she wonders if being certain of things—like of who you are and what you want—is the same as being locked up. But then she also wonders if being certain of nothing is like being locked up, too. She’s always asking questions that don’t have answers, so I told her about my Notes to Self and she flipped. She said she’s been writing notes to herself for years and putting them on her bathroom mirror. And talking to herself, but that was another story.

I stopped writing the notes because I didn’t have to anymore. I felt less and less empty, for some reason. I guess that’s the point. You let people in, you fill up your days, you try stuff. Josie and I are kind of friendly now. Sometimes we hang out at Planet Perk and trade music. It’s not bad.

As the weeks and months passed, Emily slept. I think of her and of all the time we had together and hope that wherever she is now, she’s found peace.

I miss her.

Now that my head has healed, I don’t take my memories for granted. Everything seems so clear to me now, clearer than before…people and the choices they make, and the mistakes, and how even the mistakes are beautiful somehow. I want to tell Emily about it. I want her story to not be over.

It’s so unbelievably strange to me that I feel like I really
know
Em for the first time, see all that was gorgeous about her and all that was ordinary, and I can’t tell her. I can’t explain that I see her—
all
of her—and I love her.

I wish I could have told Emily that night, that terrible, horrible night, that whether it gets better or worse, our lives are really our own. We make them. We create them every day. People our age scream at our parents and teachers and at society, demanding freedom, but I wonder how many of us really want it. When we really
are
free, when we’re all grown up with no one to blame, what will we do? What will we do with all our time?

We’re born and we think of our lives as a given, as in,
of course
we breathe, of course we get up in the morning, of course we eat French fries covered in chili and drink vodka and feel like crap the next day and do it all again and try, and try, and give up and give up, and then try something else.
Of course.
But for me, there is no “of course.” I guess I feel just a little bit lucky for that.
I know.
This
is
something, life. This matters. It all matters.

Every time Susan wrinkled her nose at the garishness of our town, at the horrors of tourists in ugly shorts, at strip mall after strip mall of check-cashing places and THREE FOR TEN DOLLARS t-shirt dives, at the flat, scrubby, mostly defeated brush that passes for trees, I started to defend it. I said how I liked the tropical rains that renew everything every day in summer. How I smelled the ocean in the air, even this far away from it; how I thought it was cool that we shared this crazy swamp with armadillos and lizards and giant bugs, and they’ll always win, no matter how many enormous convention centers they build, surrounded by acres of parking lots. I told her about Reno’s magnolia tree and the place on the St. John River where you can see manatees come in from the ocean in January. I began to stand up for my strange little theme park square of the world.

If someone had asked me before all this happened, “
Who are you?”
I have no idea what I would’ve said. Before, I was too afraid to want something because I didn’t think people ever got what they wanted. I thought you had to keep your head down and follow the lead of those who were better at pretending they had some idea of how things should be. I probably would have mumbled something dumb or avoided the question. But now, I feel like maybe I’m starting to have an answer. I don’t know if it was all the notes I wrote to myself or all the days I let go by, but I don’t feel quite so empty anymore.

CHAPTER 50

FALLING

I knew I’d gone far too long without speaking to Reno, but it was different than the last time I’d let him slip out of my life. That time, I’d done it out of thoughtlessness. This time, I left him alone because it felt like the right thing to do.

It was time to ask for forgiveness. I claimed I really knew Emily now; I recognized her. The same thing was true of Reno. My eyes were open and I fully
saw
him, finally, for the extraordinary person he was. The difference was, with Reno I had the chance to tell him.

I see you. I...love you.

I stood at Reno’s front door and knocked, on a cold December day not long before Christmas. It wasn’t supposed to be cold, but all the grass was brown and the neighborhood’s decorations looked forlorn. I tensed my shoulders and crossed my arms even though I was wearing my mom’s old North Face fleece.

“Hey,” Reno said, his expression neutral. He wore a pair of jeans and a Gators sweatshirt. His hair was shorter than it had been. It looked nice.