Try Not to Breathe (2 page)

“Not all the way,” I told her. “The raft was falling apart, so they had to quit.”

“That would’ve been amazing.” After a pause: “If they’d made it, I mean.”

• • • • •

Our house hid among the trees. It consisted mostly of vertical boards and glass. Mom said it had “clean, modern lines.” She said we needed all those windows to “bring nature inside.” My grandmother always told her it was hideous, too big and too stark, but nothing anyone said could dent Mom’s obsession with this place. It had taken three years and an army of contractors to build. I’d spent more afternoons than I liked to remember in this yard, breathing paint and turpentine, brushing sawdust out of my hair. Mom used to chase plumbers, electricians, and carpenters around the lot while I did my homework under the trees. I developed incredible powers of concentration from studying to the background noise of hammers clanging and saws tearing through wood.

Kent’s sister stood on the tiles in the front hall while I brought her two big white towels.

“Fluffy,” she said. She wrung out her hair and rubbed herself with them.

“‘Fresh and soft as a springtime morning,’” I drawled, quoting an asinine fabric-softener commercial that was on all the time lately, and she laughed.

• • • • •

I wanted to say more about the guys on the Pacific raft, because for days that story had filled my head, and I’d imagined I was out there on the ocean with them. But now I was thinking maybe she really hadn’t cared after all; maybe she was just being polite.

“Could I look around?” she asked.

“I guess so.” Mom had given tours of the house to all her friends and relatives, but I’d never paid much attention, beyond noticing how their eyes glazed over after the third room. Still, if this girl actually wanted to look through the house (to search for the nonexistent champagne fountains?), it was okay with me. “Do you want dry clothes? I could give you a T-shirt or something.”

“No, thanks. I’m good.”

She followed me through the living room, where one wall was made entirely of windows. The carpeting and furniture were a blank color, like vanilla, because my mother said the view should be the “focal point” of the room. Not that I mentioned focal points to Kent’s sister. Not that I said anything at all, in case she was taking notes so she could tell the neighborhood what it was like inside the crazy guy’s place. But all she said was “The trees are
right there
,” stretching her arms toward them. “It’s like living
in
the forest.”

She wanted to see everything, from the bathrooms to the broom closet. Maybe the broom closet was interesting in a bizarre way, as evidence that someone in our family was a little too compulsive—the brooms and mops and sponges all lined up, the dust rags folded in a neat pile on the shelf—but otherwise I didn’t see the fascination.

She marched into my room, not even pausing on the threshold. Could she tell she was the first female under the age of forty to set foot in there? With a flip of her hand, she spun the globe on my desk. I stopped it, my fingers landing on Greenland. She studied my hand as it rested on the stopped planet, and I sensed she wasn’t just inspecting the house—she was inspecting me, too. I was suddenly aware of the sound of my own breathing. Was it louder than usual, and if so, did she notice it?

I followed her eyes as they took in my computer, my bookshelves, the walls that were empty except for one painting Val had done in therapy—an abstract of blue and purple swirls. I often traced those satiny swirls as if I could touch Val’s skin through them, as if she’d left part of her flesh in the painting.

“So what’s the verdict?” I asked Kent’s sister, tired of trying to read every blink of her eyelashes, every twitch of her mouth. I couldn’t shake the feeling that she was searching for something, though I couldn’t imagine what it was.

“Compared to you, my brothers are slobs. But then—compared to anyone, they’re slobs.”

The one thing I didn’t want her to see was the package on the upper shelf in my closet. I tried to think of an excuse to keep her out of there—as if I owed her an explanation for why she couldn’t see inside every drawer and cubbyhole. But she just glanced at the partly opened door. Apparently my clothes weren’t as riveting as our mops and brooms, and she didn’t inspect the closet after all.

She lifted a corner of the window shade and peered out. “I love your room. You are so lucky.”

• • • • •

The only door I wouldn’t open was the one to my mother’s office. Aside from the problem of introducing Mom to a girl whose name I couldn’t remember, I didn’t want to go through the whole
who is Ryan’s little friend
interrogation. My mother could squeeze an entire biography out of anyone, complete with blood type and the names of first-grade teachers. So I said, “My mom’s in there, working.”

Kent’s sister put her ear to the door. “Really?” she whispered. “I don’t hear anything.”

I laughed. “She’s on the computer. What do you expect?” For a minute I thought she suspected me of hiding dismembered bodies in there or something. I could imagine what the kids at school would say if Kent’s sister told them we had a mysterious door we never opened. But she pulled away from the door and shrugged.

• • • • •

We ended the tour in the basement. “Holy crap, it’s like a gym down here,” she said. “Do you use all this equipment?”

“I used to—especially the treadmill. Now it’s mostly my mom.”

Kent’s sister threaded her way between the machines. She sat on the rowing machine. “Hey, we can row across the Pacific.” She rowed a couple of strokes, stopped, and tilted her head up at me. “How come you don’t use this stuff anymore?”

I ran my hand along the treadmill’s control panel. “Last winter I got mono. I had to stop everything for a while. I used to play baseball, and run . . . and I never got back into it.”

“Mono,” she repeated, as if weighing that story against whatever rumors she’d heard. Her eyes were pale gray, almost light enough to see through.

“Yes,” I said, not blinking. “Mono.”

She stood up and headed for the far wall. Along that side of the room was a bar we never used. My parents had had a fantasy, when we moved in, that they would host regular parties down here. I wasn’t sure where that idea had come from, since they’d never had parties before, and they didn’t now. Kent’s sister sat on a bar stool, crossed her legs, and crooked an arm, holding up an imaginary wineglass. She draped one of the towels around her neck as if it were a mink.

“Chah-ming, dah-ling,” she boomed, waving her pretend glass. “Won’t you pour me anoth-ah?”

I stepped behind the bar. “The booze is locked up. Not that there’s much of it to begin with. But you can have all the tonic water you want.”

She stuck out her tongue and gagged.

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “The only thing I like about tonic is that it turns blue under black lights.”

She leaned on the bar and fiddled with one end of the towel. “Did you really have mono?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I heard you were in the hospital.” She looked past me, at an emerald green vodka sign my parents had hung on the wall to give it that bar atmosphere.

“I was,” I said. “But not for mono.”

Her eyes flicked back to my face. I felt the question sitting on her tongue. If I tapped her on the back, it would probably pop right out. I ran my fingers over the smooth top of the bar and met her stare, daring her to ask me. And I wasn’t sure why I was daring her, except that the way she’d wormed herself into my house made me curious about how far she would go. From what I’d seen, if anyone had the guts to ask me to my face, this girl would.

Her eyes fixed on mine, her lashes lifting as if she hoped I would answer without her having to say it out loud. But she broke first, glancing away.

“Come on,” I said. “I’ll walk you back upstairs.”

• • • • •

We stood in the living room, in front of the windowed wall. Her breath misted the glass. “You have the best house.”

“You should’ve seen it when we moved in. My parents are still suing the builder.”

“Why?”

“We were only here a couple of weeks before the windows started leaking. And the roof.” My mother’s hovering during every minute of the construction hadn’t guaranteed a perfect house after all. “We had to move out for a few weeks while it got fixed.” I stopped then, because I didn’t want to talk about what had happened during that move.

“Do you go to the waterfall a lot?” Kent’s sister asked.

“Every day.”

“A kid died there once, you know.” She tapped a rapid, nervous rhythm on the window glass with her fingernail.

“You can’t believe everything you hear.”

“It’s not just a rumor.” She shook her head. “I was there. His name was Bruce Macauley. He was, like, eight. I was six.”

“You were there?”

“Yeah. Me and my brother. He slipped. Bruce, I mean. Slipped on the rocks.”

“Oh.” I’d pictured slipping on those rocks many times, the force of the cascade pinning my head underwater, but now I realized I’d never fully believed the rumors.

She stroked the pane, with her fingertips this time. My mother, who swooped down on every fingerprint with glass cleaner and a lecture, would’ve exploded.

“I still like the waterfall, though,” Kent’s sister said.

• • • • •

She gave me back the towels, the towels with her touch all over them. It occurred to me that I should’ve taken them before; she wouldn’t have had to carry them through the house. “Bye, Ryan,” she said at the door, and I wished again that I could remember her name. I twisted the towels, wanting to say more to her, but she was already gone.

TWO

I went upstairs
to check my phone and computer for messages from Jake and Val, the only two people who ever sent me anything. We’d been together at Patterson Hospital, and we were all out now. For the past few months we’d kept in touch, though we lived in different parts of the state.

I had no messages from Val. I wrote her one and then erased it without sending it. I stared up at her painting on my wall, as if I could contact her that way, but my thought waves had no obvious effect on the painting—or my in-box. I went on weeding spam.

Jake had sent me a link to a video of an ostrich playing football, which was the kind of crap we always sent each other. I sent him back a clip of dancing cartoon walruses.

“You there?” he sent me. “Where you been all day?”

“Outside. Then this girl came over.”

“What girl? Since when do you have a girl?”

“She’s just a girl. She lives around here.”

“So what’d you do to her?”

“Ha. Nothing.”

“Come on, you can give me some juicy details. Even if you have to make them up.”

I changed the subject. “What did you do all day?”

“What I always do. Played games until my wrists locked up. The Mom keeps nagging me to leave my room but what the hell for? If I had a fridge & a bathroom I’d never have to leave.”

“I don’t think you’re allowed to be a recluse unless you’re also a billionaire.”

“I’m just $999,999,960.00 short of that goal. Maybe I should start a telethon: HELP ME BE A BILLIONAIRE RECLUSE, AMERICA.”

I wondered if Jake had even left his house since getting out of Patterson in June, but whenever I asked, he made a joke of it. Val and I told him he would turn into a mole person or get rickets from lack of sunshine—well, okay, I guess we made a joke of it, too. Val and I had serious talks sometimes, but since leaving Patterson, Jake and I never did. I guess he thought it was bad enough, the stuff we could remember about each other from the hospital: the outbursts in the dayroom, the confessions in Group, the way we couldn’t hide anything from anyone ever because we were around each other twenty-four hours a day. Once somebody’s seen you wiping snot off your face after you’ve crumbled and confessed to a circle of mental patients that you hate yourself for wanting attention you can never have—well, then, you’d rather send him clips of ostriches and walruses than talk about that shit.

• • • • •

Early the next morning, I went up to the waterfall. It was cold, the air hazy with evaporating dew. Kent Thornton sat there, smoking. At first I thought it was just a cigarette, until the sweet heavy smell hit me. “Heard you saw Nicki here,” he said.

Nicki, that was his sister’s name. “Yeah.”

“She’s a nut.”

My face stung. When people said things like that, I never knew if they meant it to be a dig at me or not.

“My mom says she’s more trouble than me and my brother put together.” He stared at the cascade, the endless fall of water. “She’s a good kid, but she’s all screwed up since our dad died.”

I took a step back. If he was going to sit here all morning, I could hit the trails instead. I was hungry to be alone. When I was around other people, I always expected the next thing out of their mouths to cut me. Kent hadn’t said five words to me at school; I wasn’t that anxious for him to start talking now.

“You be careful with her, though.” Kent swung his head toward me, his eyes webbed with red. “She’s still my sister.”

Be careful with her? All I’d done was lend her a towel. And let her inspect my house, right down to the broom closet.

Kent pointed to the thundering water. “You go under there, right?”

“Sometimes.”

“Crazy shit.” His voice cracked. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”

Good question, Kent,
I wanted to say.
How many hours do you have, to listen to the answer?

“You couldn’t pay me enough to go under there,” he went on. “You could not pay me enough.” He shook his head, then kept wagging it back and forth like he’d forgotten how to stop. I cleared my throat, and he stopped.

“See you,” I said, and escaped down one of the trails. I came back an hour later, when Kent was gone.

• • • • •

That moment under the waterfall when I couldn’t breathe was the best and worst. It scared me, but not in a bad way. The cold shock—the force of the water blasting me in the face—made it impossible to breathe until I moved aside. When I did, that gasp of air hit me like the first bite of food when you’re hungry.