Second Star (23 page)

Once I say it enough times, they let me go home.

The first morning I wake up in my room at home, I don’t recognize it. I open my eyes expecting to be on a mattress on the floor in Pete’s house. Then, I swear I can feel Jas’s arms around me, smell the sea, feel the salt air on my skin. But instead of a run-down motel on the beach, I’m in the glass house on the hill. Instead of the ocean, the view from my window is the city lights, fading beneath the sunrise.

I have to beg, but one day my parents finally take me to the beach. Mary said it would be okay; she said it might be good for me. Not anywhere near Kensington, of course. No, the beach nearest our house, the one where we had the bonfire the night I graduated. A night that seems a million years ago.

“Why did you want to come here so much?” my mother asks, but I don’t answer her because I’m too busy watching the surfers take to the water. There are at least a dozen here that I can see, scattered beyond the break of the waves, taking turns paddling into waves that don’t rise higher than six feet. There was a time when waves like this would have seemed enormous to me, but now they seem small.

At home, I’ve been Googling big-wave surfing and watching video after video of surfers dropping into mammoth waves. One afternoon, my father found me hypnotized by videos of surfers at Teahupoo. At first, he seemed all set to call Mary, report a relapse, readmit me to the hospital. But after a few seconds, he was sitting beside me, just as riveted as I was at the images of someone flying inside the tunnel of the massive wave.

“Its name means ‘crushing skulls,’” I said without thinking.

My father didn’t ask me how I knew that, and I’m not sure I could have told him if he had. Instead, he studied the way the wave crashed into the ocean, the way the barrel narrowed at its edges, so that even the most skilled surfer had trouble making it out of the tunnel without being pummeled by the water crashing down around him.

After a few minutes, my father said, “I can see how it got that name.”

Now he puts his arm around me gently. He seems almost as fascinated by the surfers here as I am. I wonder if he’s thinking of John and Michael, of the years they spent surfing this beach before they ran off in search of bigger and better waves.

If my parents were to forbid me from ever picking up a surfboard, I would understand why. How could they be sure that I wouldn’t disappear just like John and Michael, drawn in by the waves’ siren song?

But much to my surprise, my father says, “Feels good to be back on the beach, doesn’t it?”

I nod. “It does.”

“We’ll have to start coming here more often,” he says carefully. For a second, my mother looks stricken, but slowly, unexpectedly, a smile spreads across her face.

I think she must feel the same way I do. Like me, she feels closest to John and Michael when she’s near the water.

36

I get very good at waiting. I wait as I dutifully go to my outpatient therapy with Mary each week, talk about my feelings and answer questions and go through the five stages of grief for my brothers like I’m checking them off a to-do list. I wait until Fiona can laugh when I joke that I’m finally seeing a grief counselor, just like she wanted me to months ago. I wait until I can honestly say that the counseling helps; she was right after all. I wait until my parents have agreed that I can start college in January; they’ve ironed everything out with Stanford, I’ll just matriculate one semester late. I wait until my mother lets me take the car and drive myself to therapy, alone. I wait until she’s actually sent me out on errands by myself: pick up a dozen eggs, the dry cleaning, a tube of toothpaste. I wait until the weather turns cooler and the days are shorter, until I can speak about my brothers in the past tense without tripping over the words. I wait until my parents trust me. Only then do I take the car—a fresh, new, shiny SUV my parents bought for me to take to college, a belated graduation gift, so normal and unsurprising—and drive to Kensington Beach.

I drive there because I have to see it for myself. I drive there because even now, all this time later, I wake up every morning and think I’m somewhere else. Every morning, I think I’m in Kensington.

The roads are familiar, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Mary and her colleagues all conceded that I probably did make my way to the gated community that was once called Kensington Beach at some point during my psychosis. Fiona Googled the place and told me what I already knew: that it was a popular beachside housing development in the 1980s but had long since been abandoned. No one lives there now. It’s not safe. The only reason they haven’t torn the houses down is the cliffs aren’t stable enough for tractors and trailers to park there, let alone lug away debris. The place itself is unstable. Just like me.

Now I wonder how I found it; my GPS stops working short of the turn that leads me up the cliffs. In fact, according to my GPS, I’m driving straight into the ocean.

I pull into the driveway of what would have been Jas’s house. It’s there, just like I remember it, but instead of looking like it received a fresh coat of paint a few months ago, the exterior of the house is beat-up, the paint peeling and chipped. There’s graffiti all over the garage door, and when I try the front door, prepared to break a window to get inside if I have to, it’s unlocked.

The house is empty. There isn’t a single piece of furniture inside. There’s more graffiti on the interior walls, but it’s completely illegible. On one wall, someone has drawn a surfer taking a massive wave. It looks exactly like the picture I saw on the bench when I waited for the bus. There’s some trash on the floor. I take a deep breath, as though maybe there will be some trace of the scents I associate with Jas, but the place smells vaguely of stale beer and pot, like maybe some kids crashed here while they surfed the waves on the beach below. Or maybe they were just looking for a place to party, completely unaware of the waves at all.

At least the house is shaped like I remember it, a mirror image of Pete’s, perched on the cliffs on the other side of Kensington. I head for the garage, remembering the collection of surfboards I saw there the first time I saw Jas. Maybe there will be some trace of him there at least.

But there is nothing; just another empty room.

I walk out through the front door and head down the overgrown road that will lead to Pete’s house. When I see it, I break into a run. Maybe some of Pete’s crew still lives here; maybe Hughie or Matt is waiting just on the other side of the door.

But the house is a mess; it reeks of mildew, as if a wave rose up from the ocean below and drenched the place. The sliding glass doors that lead to the backyard are wide open; a few seagulls are hopping around the living room. They’ve made this house their home. The tile floors that were always gleamingly white, where Pete laid out a blanket and we all ate the dinner I cooked, are covered with feathers and droppings. The birds caw at me in protest as I make my way to the backyard, toward the one thing here that’s familiar: the sound of the waves.

The cliffs fall so straight and so sharp that I take a step back, afraid I might fall. The rocks are jagged and toothlike. It’d be impossible to build stairs into these cliffs. And I can’t imagine why anyone would want to.

Because below me, there is no beach. The water comes right up to the cliffs. There is no perfect triangle of white sand. The waves are rough and choppy, driving themselves directly into the wall of rocks, spray colliding with stone. To surf them would be certain death.

It’s as if the ocean has swallowed my memories whole.

I stop at Fiona’s on the drive home. I’d told my parents that I was going there when I left the house this morning, and of course they believed me, now that I’m back to normal.

Fiona’s home from school for the weekend—she left for college at the usual time in September, like everyone else—and after months away, she’s thrilled to see me out on my own.

“You look so good, Wen,” she squeals as we hug hello.

I laugh, but Fiona shakes her head.

“No, I mean seriously. I don’t know, ever since this summer … I mean, you even looked pretty that morning you showed up here, stoned out of your mind.”

“Now I know you’re just being nice.”

“I’m not,” Fiona insists. “Really.”

I put my arms around my best friend and hug her again as she oohs and aahs over my new car. I let her drive it down from her house in the hills when we go out to dinner. I roll the windows down and breathe in the scent of the eucalyptus trees that line her neighborhood, erasing any trace of the ocean.

I’m tempted to apologize to her, to tell her she was right all along. But instead I listen as she tells me about her breakup with Dax, about the cute guy who lives on her floor in the dorm, about the professor she has a crush on, about the sorority she’s decided to pledge.

“Not,” she adds quickly, like she’s worried it might upset me, “that I’ll ever know any of those girls the way I know you.”

I’m not sure
I
know me anymore. I’d been so certain that my summer in the sun was real, so certain that Fiona and Mary and my parents were wrong.

I was supposed to be a detective hunting for clues, but it turns out that my brain just constructed some kind of elaborate scavenger hunt for me, the same way I used to do for my brothers.

I close my eyes and remember the day that Fiona and I met in kindergarten; we were instant friends because we were both wearing the same purple striped shirt. We held hands on our first day of high school, terrified of the seniors, all of whom seemed a foot taller than we were. I remember the day Fiona passed her driver’s test and the first day of our senior year, the way we walked side by side, giggling because now the freshmen seemed so small. I can still hear the catch of pride in her voice the first time she called Dax her boyfriend, and I can still feel the way she hugged me tight even when she thought I was losing my mind. Which it turns out, I kind of was. I smile. I have plenty of memories that
are
real.

Poor Fee was right all along. I guess she really does know me best. She saw right away that I’d made up Kensington, Pete, Belle, Jas. All the money my parents spent on therapy and doctors, all that analysis to discover that I’d created a world where I could put off mourning my brothers because I was too busy falling in love and being loved, until my fantasy brought me to Witch Tree and finally began coming apart at the seams. I needed to see what my brothers saw; I even invented someone revealing their death to me. Fiona could have explained it all for free.

I reach across the front seat to squeeze Fiona’s hand on my fresh new steering wheel. I have a best friend who is real, who loves me, who tried to save me when I was going mad. I don’t need Pete and Belle; I don’t need Jas. I have something real right here.

“Of course not,” I answer finally. I pause, the beginning of a smile tugging at the corners of my mouth. “I think you might actually know me better than I know myself.”

37

Driving home later, I wonder what Mary would say if she knew I went to Kensington today, if she knew that now I’ve seen what’s really there. Mary would argue—she
has
argued—that I have every right to mourn the loss of Jas and Pete and Belle and Kensington and the life I thought I knew there. She’d say since they had all been real to me, I ought to grieve for them now that they’re gone. It’s the kind of logic I’ve always hated. You shouldn’t be able to have feelings for things that aren’t real. Or for people who aren’t real.

So I’m not crying over my loss as I drive down the PCH, putting miles between Kensington and me. Instead, I’m laughing. I’m laughing because I should have known all along that it wasn’t real; it was so obvious, now that I think about it. I left myself such an enormous clue, right in the center of my delusion:

There’s no way I ever would have really taken a wave, no matter how much I wanted to.

By the time I get home, I’ve decided that I’m going to major in math when I get to Stanford. There’s no such thing as imaginary numbers.

Except, of course, there are.

I go to my room and close the door. The other day my mother gave me back the notebook she’d confiscated months ago, the one in which I’d kept all my notes when I thought I was living in Pete’s house. It’s lying forgotten on my desk, but now I open it, run my hands over my scribbles. Even my handwriting doesn’t look like my own; it’s messier, somehow desperate-looking. The handwriting of a person having a mental breakdown. I slam the book shut and drop it into the trash can beneath my desk.

In therapy yesterday, Mary asked me whether I ever said
I love you
to Jas. I didn’t answer her. Already my memories—or whatever I’m supposed to call what I remember of my hallucinations—are beginning to fade. They’re fuzzy, like a painting onto which someone has thrown a bucket of water, the borders between each image bleeding together until they’re indistinct.

She pushed me; I must have loved him, she said, if I was planning on running away with him, traveling the world with him, giving up my whole life—school, family, friends—just to be with him. I must have loved him, she said again. Didn’t I?

I never actually told her that I was planning on running away with Jas. I must have said something about it when I was half-conscious, babbling endlessly, calling out in my sleep. She must have sat by my bed taking notes.

I refused to answer her. And I certainly didn’t tell her that when I woke up in the psych ward months ago, my first thought was the words
I love you, too
. In the water, when he was trying to save me—when he told me he loved me—I never had a chance to say it back; the water was crashing over me so rapidly, I hardly had time to open my mouth to take a breath, let alone utter four syllables.

I decide that next week, I’ll answer Mary’s latest question. I’ll tell her that I didn’t say
I love you
to Jas because you can’t love someone who doesn’t exist. Whatever this ache in my chest is, it can’t be the pain of missing him, because he was never here to begin with. This ache is just wasted space.