Tighter (22 page)

“Symptoms. Means. I have a …” My mind struggled to find the correct word. “Diagnosis?”

The doctor drew the room’s one high stool closer to my hospital bed and sat, tucking her Crocs behind the bottom rung. Her narrow hands rested in her lap. Intimate, but serious.

“You ready?”

How should I know?
I nodded.

“Okay. Here’s the story, Jamie Susanna Atkinson. We scanned your brain-imaging patterns yesterday—do you remember that, after the EKG, when three people came from radiology and they had that machine with the big screen and the crane-type arm that swung around?”

I managed another nod.

Shehadha continued. “So. They took pictures of your heat-imaging patterns that measured your brain activity, and the results we got suggest a pattern that we associate with some type of psychosocial disease, such as schizophrenia, that, if detected in early stages, has a very successful—”

“Issat … a joke?” She’d delivered the word
schizophrenia
so quickly, blink and you missed it. I attempted to prop myself a little higher and immediately fell back into the unexpected explosion of pain. Every bone, every muscle.

She waited as I clicked away at the morphine button. Then: “Is landing in the emergency unit of this hospital due to two concurrent, near-successful suicide attempts your idea of a joke?”

“Two attempts?”

“Your blood was toxic.”

I nodded. The empty Baggie, Connie’s meds. “If it
is
a joke,” I said, “then I’m not in on it.”

“It’s not your fault, Jamie,” she said. “Not at all. You have a disease. The good news is that your disease is really, really treatable.”

And then she introduced me to a few less-cheerful terms:
auditory delusion, hallucination, paranoia, somnambulism, catatonia
, and
depression.

“In my family, we just call it mopey.” Though even saying it, I felt like a traitor to my mom. Who seemed particularly wrecked. Especially when she and Dad returned from lunch to find out I’d learned everything.

“It’s my fault, Jamie. I knew something wasn’t … I just knew it.”

“Mom, you didn’t. You couldn’t have.”

“I should have.” Her eyes were so sore-looking they made mine hurt.

Dad, carrier of the black marble, the Atkinson gene, could not seem to keep still for a minute. Then, and every other time he came to see me, all those long, lying-around days, he paced restless and uncertain. Always fiddling with the curtains and experimenting for the exactly correct fraction of shade to sunlight. Leaving Mom to talk about everything she’d done wrong in raising me.

A disease. It was hard to heal myself around that word, even as my bones fused and my bruises eased into softer color themes, though the scar up my thigh was a thick track of tissue, ugly as litter on the landscape of my skin. As much as I hated it, I knew that it would help me remember that there were many possible outcomes for what I’d done, and I was lucky that I’d escaped relatively unscathed.

I’d wanted to see Sebastian right from the first day, after I found out that he’d saved my life. My name in his voice had been the last sound I’d heard before I’d gone under. As I’d stood, paralyzed, he’d apparently called the coast guard and the police, and scrambled down and come in after me right after I’d jumped. Fighting against his own fears, dragging me to shore.

The first time Sebastian visited me, I wasn’t ready. Too groggy, too battered, the tube still snaked in my throat, I’d muttered unintelligibly at him and assumed, as my puffy eyes watched him go, that this had been his courtesy visit and I’d never see him again. But that’s what I’d always assumed with Sebastian, and I’d always been wrong.

The second time, after he called to check on me, and to tell me he was coming by, I was “ready.” I’d gotten Mom to bring me my cosmetic kit—pitiable, really, the whole makeover attempt, combing my hair and fingertip-blending a concealor stick under my sea-monster eyes, while Sally, my attending nurse, watched with a face carefully null of reaction.

Those first visits, we talked about everything but the accident.

“Why do you keep coming back to me?” I croaked.

“You have this amazing energy, Jamie. For real,” he said. “Maybe it’s not always happy, but it’s always right there.”

“Sebastian, you’re too much of a sucker for the drama.”

“Well, and it’s also the lip biting, and the chipped tooth,” he said, bending to kiss my lips, puffed as they were. “You know I’ll always be a sucker for that.”

I continued to improve. My checkout day was established. Tess and Teddy returned from their respective pockets of the world, bringing me plushy Get Well animals and adventure stories. Mags came back with gossip and lectures and tears, sometimes all of it crammed into the same exhausting ten minutes.

And Sebastian. Always Sebastian, whenever he could. One afternoon he arrived with vast quantities of Rocco’s takeout, carted in a brown paper bag and smelling like the sea. He climbed onto the narrow iron bed, and side by side, we spread out the feast. I finished my second fried clam sandwich before I picked up my nerve.

“Did you think there was something off with me all along?”

His side-view smile was heart-stoppingly sweet as he pretended to keep watching television. “Let me ask. Did
you
think there was something off with you?”

“Once I found a dead squirrel in the fireplace at Skylark,” I told him. “He’d tried all winter to get out of that room. And I hate thinking about how he died; of starvation, probably, or exhaustion—but there must have been so much panic, before. You could see it, the way he’d chewed around the windows. That perfect, sealed view of the world. Sometimes I feel like that. Like I can’t get to that other side, no matter how hard I try.”

His silence was weighted as he mulled over it. “That sounds like something Pete said to me once.”

“Did you ever think Pete brought down that plane on purpose?”

He shrugged. Eyes on the television again. “It’s a rumor. There’ll always be rumors about Pete. What he might have been capable of. They’re both gone now. We’ve got to let them rest.”

Of course there wasn’t any hard truth or one explanation. If Sebastian had suspicions, he’d keep them to himself. He was still a local, a Bly boy, and he was too deeply attached to the island. Just like the Quints and Featherings and McNabbs and Hubbards and all the others, he’d guard his privacy. What did it matter? It had only mattered to me because of what Pete and I shared. And it still matters to me to have my truth. Every morning and evening, when Sally delivered my meds, I couldn’t help but cast back to Katherine Quint, her cornered eyes and scrabbling fingers. I could do better than Katherine’s life. I could do better than Pete’s death. I could, and I would.

“You do realize this is my whole foreseeable future?” I asked Sebastian. Only half joking, and painfully aware that he knew it.

“Yeah, yeah. But I look at it this way—when I talk about my crazy girl back home, I can really back it up. Besides, I think a schiz girlfriend’ll play well at Yale. Gives me some artistic cred.”

“If I weren’t bedridden, you’d get thwacked.” I thwacked him with the pillow anyway. And then I made myself ask. “How’s Isa?”

“She’s dealing. If you want to look on the bright side of this whole thing—and I always big-time believe that there is one—her dad came home the day after your accident. Then the two of them went to Maryland to spend time with her grandmother.”

“There you go, always finding that stupid bright side.”

“Only because it’s not hard to find.”

“Do you think Isa hates me for disappointing her? For just abandoning her like I did?” Nothing, not one single thing, had struck me worse than this idea, and now I couldn’t stop my tears. Sebastian pulled me in so that my head tucked neatly under his chin, and his arms were reassuringly tight. He promised she didn’t hate me. He promised that she’d want me to call.

Sebastian left soon after. The next day, with a parent propping me up on either side and a physical therapy schedule, thick as a Bible, tucked under my arm, I checked out of the hospital and went home. Where, when I arrived back in my bedroom, the first thing I did was remove Katherine’s ring, which I’d secreted in a side zip of my toiletries kit. Just seeing it again, the diamond winking like a sightless eye, set a chill through me as I slipped it into my jewelry box and, for the first time, turned its key.

Peter Quint’s ring was not something I wanted to hold on to. One day, I’d return to Little Bly, and I’d make good on my promise to Katherine. But that day was a long way off. Like everything else, I’d set out when I was ready, and not a minute before.

That same weekend, Sebastian took off for New Haven. Whenever he writes, I write back. I don’t delete anything. I try not to second-guess myself. I let the hope for his letter in my in-box remind me that no matter what the weather is like, the sky really can be this blue.

October 20

Dear Jamie,

It’s low season here at Little Bly, and Mr. M. and Isa are long gone home to Beacon Hill, and most of the other tourist types, too. So now it’s just folks. I ran into Amanda Brooks the other day, and she told me you and her son, Sebastian, have kept up, and I was glad to hear. I’m not one to sit at a kitchen table with a writing tablet, but that’s the situation I find myself in, so as to put down a few words to you. On account of how you’d left the island so abrupt, I believe there are a few things to make right.

Firstly, I am glad to hear from Amanda that you are healing. Secondly, Dr. Hugh has been by and he has set my understanding of your Condition. I will admit now that many’s a time when I’d thought you were acting alarming and unruly—for example, how you would sleep till all hours, and burn paper on the third floor and generally put things in disarray. I am relieved to know it was not entirely due to your lack in Character. My Mother, before she passed, had bravely battled memory loss from Alzheimer’s Disease, and Dr. Hugh assured me that your case is in some ways the same.

There’s occasions I’m asked by others here—sometimes in an eager, gossipy tone I don’t care for—to recount your visit to Skylark, and I have been questioned as to why I allowed you and Isa to indulge in your game of “Milo.” To them, I say that I was pleased that Isa took to you so easy. Despite your failings in other areas, I can attest with Conviction that she blossomed under your care, and you must always keep Knowledge of that, when you look back on the less positive transpirings of this Summer.

My great-great-grandfather Winslow Hastings Horne was an esteemed Architect who was plagued by Visions and Sensitivities. He once said that those who suffer from watching the World the wrong way In can see Out too clear. Perhaps you can take Comfort in those words.

As for myself, I do feel it is my Duty, and perhaps the point of this letter, to note that I have come to a reluctant agreement with you, that the soul of Skylark is not at rest. And while I cannot put my sense of it to words, it is why I have decided to take my indefinite leave from the island. Over the years, I have put aside Savings, though as yet I have not seen very much of the world, nor any great Architecture beyond that of my famous kin. I plan to remedy that, and am looking forward to this next Adventure.

Regards,
Cornelia Hubbard

P.S. Please tell your parents I have released the Silhouette of W. H. Horne to the Southern New England Historical Society, where it may now be viewed by any of his curious Public.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My heartfelt thanks to Charlotte Sheedy and Meredith Kaffel for being steadfast as ever and always. Also a big thank-you to Joan Rosen, whose insights never fail to brighten my in-box. I am grateful to Allison Wortche and to my editor, Joan Slattery, for the inestimable value of their time and thought as we measured and hammered and shifted and tested every moment of this story. Finally, I would be remiss not to mention my absolute debt to the Master, Henry James, for giving us the greatest ghost story ever written. Like so many before me, I have deeply enjoyed my turn.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adele Griffin, a two-time National Book Award finalist (for
Where I Want to Be
and
Sons of Liberty
), is the acclaimed author of
The Julian Game, Picture the Dead
, the Vampire Island series, and many other books for young readers.

Adele lives with her husband and young daughter in Brooklyn, New York. Please visit her on the Web at
adelegriffin.com
.