Across Carina (3 page)

“I need a hug. Will someone please give me a hug?”

He circled in front of me until our eyes met. I didn’t budge.

“I need a hug,” he repeated, and then he ambled down the hall on the tips of his toes.

Sighing, he went into the kitchen to try our mother.

“I really just need a hug. Can I please have one, Mommy?”

Our mother laughed. She must have hugged him, because he ran smiling out of the kitchen and up the stairs.

“I’m next, buddy!” my dad said as he raced down the stairs to meet Tyson. He scooped him into his arms.

“Thank you, Daddy!” Tyson cried, running into the next room.

I wanted to puke. How so much syrupy bliss could exist in our empty home baffled me. We had been robbed of a human life, yet nobody had seemed to notice.

My dad lingered. “Why didn’t you give your brother a hug when he asked?”

I’d been spotted.

“I’m tired,” I said.

My dad shook his head. “Yeah? Well he’s four. Get ready for dinner.”

The moment he finished his sentence, the power went out. The hums of the refrigerator, computer, and lights all died. We were left alone with the storm. And suddenly it seemed louder. The scraping of tree branches against our windows . . . the cracks and bellows of thunder . . .

“Well I guess it was only a matter of time,” my dad said. “This storm doesn’t want to quit.”

I looked down. I couldn’t see my own hands, and I worried they weren’t there. I cowered on the stairs just thinking about the shadows.

My mother called us to the kitchen table. As I used the wall to guide me, I was reminded of another night spent in the dark. There was even a tiny orange glow coming from the kitchen table, and I saw that my mother had lit a candle on a plate. A fresh box of matches was beside it.

“Good thing I already cooked the pot pie,” she said, “but I just went grocery shopping yesterday. All that food.”

“The power may only be out a few hours,” my dad said, taking a seat. “Jade, will you please say the prayer?”

“Sure,” I mumbled.

My family closed their eyes, and in one breath I spewed, “Heavenly Father we’re grateful for this food please bless it amen.”

I was pretty sure my dad asked me to pray more than he asked anyone else. Personally I didn’t understand the point of praying to someone I couldn’t see, who may or may not have existed. I didn’t pretend to know one way or the other, but I had resolved months before that if a god did exist, he was cruel and I shouldn’t like to know him. I only prayed when asked, to avoid arguing with my parents.

My mother dished up extra large portions of chicken pot pie, probably because she couldn’t see very well. I tried to eat, but became increasingly distracted by the candle. I hadn’t seen fire up close since the night Garrett had died.

I chewed on the same piece of chicken for a minute. I couldn’t think. The flame grew taller and taller, climbing on top of itself toward the ceiling. It kept flickering, and I worried it would jump off the wick. Meanwhile, the wax was rapidly fusing onto the plate and hardening.

I spit out my food.

“It’s unstable,” I said, pointing.

“Honey, what’s wrong?” my mother asked.

She wrapped her arm around Tyson, who had glanced up from his plate.

“The fire is not contained,” I said.

“It’s fine,” my dad interjected.

“What’s wrong?” Tyson asked, setting his fork down.

“Nothing, sweetheart,” our mother said. “Eat up.”

“It’s not fine, Dad. You can see that the flame is rising. It’s at least six inches tall! Does nobody else see this?” I pushed back my chair. “I’ll get a flashlight. Can we please just eat with a flashlight?”

My parents looked at each other before my mother spoke.

“Sweetheart, I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize that fire is still a trigger for you. We can certainly eat with a flashlight, but please be mindful of your little brother. I don’t want to alarm him for no reason.”

I snapped. “No reason?
No reason?
You
weren’t there!
Neither
of you were there!”

“Jade, I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean ‘no reason’ as in we don’t care about Garrett. We all miss him terribly. But with Tyson—”

“I don’t want to hear it!” I shouted. “I’m not about to repeat that night, and I’m sorry for being the only one in this house who cares that he died!”

In one furious huff I blew out the candle and left my family in the dark.

As I darted upstairs, I heard Tyson ask, “Mommy, when is Garrett coming back?”

I slammed my bedroom door and fumbled on the dresser for my sleeping pills. One of the knives from my collection popped open and nicked me, and I threw it off the dresser. But then I felt bad and picked it back up, because it reminded me of Garrett. We had started the collection together in middle school, and then I had kept it going. I just liked the way knives looked.

I found the pills. A few weeks before, my doctor had prescribed me Ambien with the warning that I should only take a pill when absolutely necessary.

It was necessary.

It had
been
necessary for months, but my parents had taken their time coming around to the idea of prescription drugs. So I’d spent my summer sorting through over-the-counter products that wore off too quickly, along with special oils and sprays and printouts of breathing techniques that pledged to save my life.

I swallowed a pill and collapsed on my bed, my clothes still damp. I had taken the Ambien a handful of times so far, and I couldn’t recall experiencing any negative side effects. I supposed I’d fallen right asleep.

Under the covers I stripped off my clothes and pushed them to the floor. My underwear had dried, so I would just sleep in that.

Except I couldn’t sleep. When I looked at my cell phone, thirty minutes had passed. I reached under my bed for my laptop and flipped it open, glad to find the power back on. I didn’t love the internet, but I knew that if I perused Facebook long enough, I would tire. It would be inevitable slopping through the muck of the insipid and the vain.

Kiera had posted photos from our first day of school—all cropped, edited, and glazed over with color processing filters so that everyone looked like yellow-skinned models in some teen magazine. I clicked through each photo of my friends and felt nothing. I hardly recognized them.

I paused on a photo of Justin. He was smiling at someone out of frame—off to the side of whoever had taken the photo—but his eyes were empty. They lacked their usual luster that I had once been so fond of.

And then he looked right at me. I pushed my laptop back and did a double take, but Justin was still eyeing me. His smile faded, and his eyes dissolved into a black pool.

“You’re not the only one,” he said evenly, his lips barely parted.

Just as quickly as he’d looked at me, he looked away and refroze into the photograph.

I slammed my laptop shut and stepped off the bed. I felt light. I was floating again, but this time my limbs extended for miles. I held out my right arm, twisting and turning it. I was trying to see where it came from, but I got stuck at my shoulder.

After studying my arm for a while, I wandered into the bathroom. My eyes widened at the sight of my reflection.

“That’s not me,” I said. “That’s not me. That’s not me. That’s not me. That’s not me.”

My head shook with each repetition, and it was growing, like it might tie itself off into a balloon.

In the mirror, there was a razor sitting on the ledge of the bathtub that caught my eye. I turned around to pick up its real-life counterpart; and I gripped the razor, my knuckles turning white.

Back at the mirror my face was also white. I watched my cheeks puff up to fill the space of my growing head. My smile stretched. My eyeballs popped. I was going to explode.

“Stop it. Stop it. Don’t do that.”

Then I realized that my eyes were still green, and this calmed me.

“It
is
me,” I said to my reflection, “but only half.”

I must have blacked out, because I don’t remember what happened next or how much time passed. All I remember is that at some point my dad burst into the bathroom and asked me why I’d been screaming.

It wasn’t until he took a closer look at me that he gasped.

“Jade, you’re bleeding!” he cried, pulling me into him. “What in the world happened?”

I looked down and saw a thin stream of blood dripping off my fingertips.

“I don’t know,” I answered calmly. “I’m very confused. What time is it?”

“Nicki!” my dad screamed, still latched onto me. He grabbed a washcloth and wrapped it around my wrist.

My mother appeared in the doorway.

“Oh my goodness! What happened?! Honey, are you all right?!”

She erupted into sobs as she wrapped her arms around me and turned to my father for an explanation.

“It’s not deep,” he told her, “but I think she’s hallucinating. I knew those pills were a bad idea. We need to call . . .”

I don’t remember anything else. I woke up having missed my second day of school. The first thing I noticed was that my dresser had been wiped clean of my sleeping pills and knives.

My parents didn’t question me, and I’m not certain I would have even had answers for them. The night was beginning to blur and completely cloud over. All I knew was that I’d had a bad reaction to the Ambien and now my parents were forcing me to see a therapist. They’d already scheduled my first appointment for the following evening.

My teachers chastised me for missing classes, saying this wasn’t middle school and that curriculums began the first week. I didn’t bother explaining what had happened or arguing that three out of four of my classes couldn’t even boast syllabi. I just scribbled down the homework that they told me to make up. My parents would obtain a doctor’s excuse for me anyway.

In the lunchroom Kiera, Lily, and Justin swarmed in on me, although Lily was the only one who tried to hold a conversation. She drilled me about my summer and my future plans—where I wanted to go to college and when I would leave, what I planned to major in, if I would work to save up money, and if any “adorable boys” had captured my attention. Justin almost choked on his pizza, but Lily kept firing.

“How’s Tyson?”

I shrugged. “He’s fine. He . . . plays a lot. I mean, he’s four.” I stared at my sandwich. “I didn’t mean for that to sound rude. I just don’t know what to say about him.”

“Oh that’s perfectly fine!” Lily beamed. “I just recall his sweetness and honesty. I miss your house, your family.”

I don’t even miss my house or my family. I only miss Garrett.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something dark looming in the back of the cafeteria. I lifted my head for a better look, but it was already gone.

“Maybe you guys could come over this weekend,” I heard myself say.

What am I doing?

Kiera lit up. “Let’s go hang gliding!”

“That was random,” Lily told her. “And, unfortunately, I don’t think my parents will approve of such a risky venture. It’s one thing to break into a gym, but it’s an entirely different matter to fly off cliffs.”

She said the last part with her eyes on me. Somehow she had extracted my memory of our break-in to play P-I-G from just two days before. I avoided eye contact with her and turned to Justin.

He shook his head. “I have to move this weekend, and it’s going to take forever. I swear my parents need to go on that hoarding show. They’re never even home to use all of their crap.”

“Move?” I asked.

He leaned back with crossed arms and just looked at me.

“Yeah, move. My parents hate our landlord, so we’re off to another apartment.”

“Apartment?”

He rolled his eyes. “Remember—my
house
burned down?”

“And then he said, ‘Remember—my
house
burned down?’ There was no reason for him to be so rude. I didn’t do anything wrong. Of course I know his house burned down. I was there, the smart-ass. I thought he’d moved already.”

“It takes a while to build a house.”

“It’s been four months,” I said.

Doctor Pine stopped writing. She swiveled her chair around to face me.

“Well you’ve summarized the events since the fire, and it sounds like you immediately severed all ties with Justin.”

In my plush chair I picked at my fingernails and looked everywhere but at her. I wasn’t convinced that she should be taken seriously. Therapists are often as neurotic as their patients, and judging by Doctor Pine’s walls, she had a clutter problem.

One entire wall was plastered with spiritual poems, cliché phrases, and oil paintings of fairies, all stuck in repulsive, flowery frames. The opposite wall was a collage of mirrors—tall and short, wide and narrow. It was terrifying to see dozens of myself as I divulged my soul to a stranger.

I didn’t understand Doctor Pine’s need to be so disorganized. She had plenty of room. From the outside, her house had looked more like an estate. But there had been wind chimes hanging in clusters from her front porch and wood carvings of
BELIEVE
and
OPTIMISM
dangling from the trees, all as if ordering visitors to feel at peace. It had only made me anxious.

“Jade?” she prompted.

“Every time I look at Justin, I think of Garrett and how we left him to die.”

Doctor Pine picked up her pen and began forming broad, curvaceous strokes on her notepad. It looked like she was drawing, not writing.

“Sometimes when we feel guilty,” she said, “we unconsciously lash out at others so that they’ll abandon us and we’ll be left alone and miserable. We think we deserve it. The problem is that you don’t deserve this, Jade. You didn’t leave anyone to die. You were playing a game, flirting with a boy.”

“Just like the children that we are.”

“You’re an adult, Jade.”

“Legally.”

“Are you afraid to grow up?”

“In this world I fear anyone living at all,” I said. “There’s too much bad, and it’s not worth it.”

“That depends,” Doctor Pine insisted.