Breathe and Count Back from Ten, page 15
“You guys actually have one of these? I always figured only rich people pay extra rent for their things.”
He doesn’t laugh. Or even smile, really. He just stands there with his hands on his waist, biting his lip and staring at the pile of stuff.
“You okay?”
“Hmm? Yeah. Hi.”
I make my way through the mini labyrinth and give him a kiss. It’s short and sweet, more like a peck, really. Sweat drips down his nose and sticks to my face.
“Have you been here all day?”
He nods and starts heading out to his car, which is parked right outside with the trunk hanging open, packed with more boxes. “Ever since this morning,” he says as he grabs another to bring into the storage space. “I don’t know what got into my mom. She went into an unpacking fit, talking about how we can’t clear our heads without clearing our space.” His arm muscles flex, perfectly highlighted by this one streak of sweat that’s reflecting sunlight. I smirk and raise my eyebrows at him, but he completely misses it. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him this hyperfocused on anything that wasn’t me.
“Sounds like we’ve both had a busy day,” I say.
“Mmm-hmm.”
Now would be the perfect time for him to ask me about the auditions, but he doesn’t. I know I could just tell him, but somehow blurting out “I made mermaid” while he tries to play the world’s saddest game of Tetris with his moving boxes wasn’t part of my fantasy.
I try to get us talking by asking random questions instead. What’d you do for lunch? Are these your mom’s or yours? Aren’t you hot in here?
Which, I acknowledge, are all a series of pointless questions that only warrant a one- or two-word response. Which is exactly what I get from him. I start to think maybe I shouldn’t have come. I feel like I’m a nuisance just being here.
Finally, when I’ve run out of ways to ask what’s wrong without actually asking him what’s wrong, I say, “Do you need any help?”
“I’m fine,” he snaps.
My breath catches a little, and for a moment we both stay quiet. We don’t actually know how to do this part yet. The not-being-okay. I can’t believe we’re about to have our first argument and it’s going to be in this dank-smelling oven box where unwanted junk comes to die.
“Well, you don’t have to be a dick about it,” I say.
Nice, Vero. Good first move.
“I’m just . . . having a hard day, okay? And my mom rushed off to work, so now I have to make sense of all this crap we brought from Houston.”
“Well, I had things to do too. Today was kind of a big deal for me. And you haven’t even asked how it went.”
“Right. I’m sorry,” he says, but it doesn’t even sound like he means it. He takes a deep breath, and it sounds like it takes all the effort in the world to say, “How’d it go?”
It feels like a trick question. Like no matter how I answer, I’m not going to get the response I want. “I made it.” My voice sounds like it could fit in one of these boxes. “I got in,” I say again.
“That’s awesome. Congrats.”
“Congrats,” I repeat. Congrats is what you write on someone’s post when they reach, like, a thousand followers or whatever. It’s not for this.
“Yeah. I’m really happy for you.”
But he just keeps standing there, two whole box lengths away from me. In the four minutes it took me to walk here, I’d imagined he’d lift me off the ground and my feet would pop into the air, and he’d be beaming at me in awe.
“You don’t seem it,” I say. I don’t understand how this keeps happening. All the things I want to celebrate are getting dampened and diluted. All the life seeping out of them. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing.” He turns away and puts his hands on his hips, as if to assess the stacks that surround us. “I’m just tired.”
Tired. Like I’m not?
I’m about to tell him he’s not the only one with feelings when a rumbling sound startles us both. We turn to find Alex’s mom nearly tripping over boxes as she tries to enter the unit.
“Jesus, what a mess,” she says. True words in more ways than one.
“I told you,” Alex shoots back.
She sighs and shakes her head, then looks at me and smiles. “Hi. Sorry, Verónica, right? I’m so embarrassed you have to see all our . . . chaos.” She gestures at the boxes like they’re an unkempt home.
“Oh, it’s fine. I don’t mind,” I say.
She stands next to Alex and rubs his upper arm. “See? It’s not so bad. We’ll get through it.”
Which isn’t really what I said. At all.
“I promise I’ll start going through my share of them later. In the meantime, just see what you want to take and what you want to leave in storage,” she says.
“Fine, whatever. I’ll try,” Alex says, in a way that makes me wonder if they’re still talking about boxes. She gives him a peck on the forehead and says she has to get back to the leasing office. When it’s just the two of us again, I try to catch Alex’s eyes, but it’s like he’s somewhere else. Not this moment. Or maybe too deep in this moment. Surrounded by boxes he’s been overwhelmed by ever since the first day we met. I almost ask if he wants to talk about it, but I think I already know the answer.
So I find a giant, sturdy plastic container and sit on it. Immediately, my body welcomes the support and the muscles in my leg unclench. Sometimes it doesn’t register until I’m resting what a constant effort it is to just stand, hold myself together, distribute my weight evenly as I put one foot in front of the other. Or maybe I do notice it but I ignore it, let it settle into my bones like a quiet, overstaying houseguest that doesn’t want to disturb me, let alone anyone else. It usually works until it doesn’t, until I’ve been swimming and walking and going going going so much that I make the mistake of stopping, holding still long enough to hear the blood running through my veins again. It’s like putting your ear up to a seashell. Some days the waves are what carry me. Some days the waves overtake me. I can never forecast which is which until it’s too late.
“I’m tired too,” I whisper, but in these tight walls the words travel, and I see Alex nod, just barely, as he seals shut a box labeled Art Supplies—Alex. He pulls the packing tape from its roll, and it screams, rips a ragged tear into our silence. Then he presses it down over the seam where the flaps meet, running his hand up and the down the line, over and over, until the gentle shushing of his skin against cardboard fills the air like a balm.
I didn’t know he made art. I wonder why he stopped, after all the effort it took to pack it and bring it with him, all these miles he drove himself and his mom to Florida. Outside, the sky has gotten overcast, and it makes the lone light bulb overhead yellow. The day we first met, Alex looked as tired as I feel, but I was too busy worrying about him seeing my scars to really notice. I wanted them to be invisible. I’d never thought how much they’d still hurt when they are.
“I don’t know how long this is going to take,” he finally says. “You don’t have to wait for me if you don’t want to.”
“I don’t mind keeping you company. If you want it.”
He nods and goes back to rearranging the boxes. Some are small and heavy-looking, and he stacks them in a corner. Others aren’t boxes at all, but random tall shapes covered in bedsheets and twine, and loose pieces of furniture like a single chair, a lamp with no shade, and a nightstand with no drawers. He arranges them so they’re facing each other against the wall, a living room comprising orphaned parts. I try to imagine what rooms they once came from, how they got separated from their whole. His house in Texas must’ve been huge, a life entirely unlike this one. Now we’re standing in the remnants, all the things this new life has no room for.
I find a cushion from an abandoned love seat and ask if I can use it.
“Sure.” He doesn’t ask why I need it or if my joints are okay. But his voice is soft and his eyes stay on me just enough for me to know he’d listen if I wanted to tell him.
I smile and the space between us throbs gently. Finally he comes to my side carrying an open box full of books. They’re all arranged with their spines up, most of them containing long, colorful self-help titles including words like positivity, happiness, healing, and mind that peek through his fingers as he flips the books back and forth in the box. I can tell he’s not actually looking for one; he’s just keeping his fingers busy while giving me a chance to look inside. Unsure what to make of this library, I ask, “What’s this?”
“My parents’ failed attempts at helping me cheer up. That’s what they called it at first, anyways. They thought I was just being too pessimistic, or choosing not to look on the bright side of things, so they got me all these books. They were trying to help, but it just made me angry. It felt like they weren’t listening. They kept asking what they’d done or what had happened to upset me, and they wouldn’t believe me when I said nothing. I mean, yeah, I hated all their fighting and it made me sad and scared, but even worse was when things were pretty much fine . . . and I wasn’t.” He shrugs and closes the flaps on the box. Puts another one on top of it that’s full of road maps, though it looks like many of them have been cut to pieces. “It was never any specific thing that made me feel off. I would’ve liked it to be a specific thing, because then I could point and say, This, let’s fix this. So they bought all these books and they argued some more because my mom wanted me to see a therapist and my dad was all, Our boy is not crazy, like there was nothing more offensive than me needing help. But then I had a really bad depressive episode, even though I didn’t know that’s what it was at the time. But, like, I could barely get out of bed, and then I’d fall asleep through all my classes and seriously started wishing I’d never been born. So we went on this family vacation that my parents thought would help because I’d always loved road trips, and it did nothing for me. I was just somewhere between the Oklahoma–Texas state line and Madison, Wisconsin. We kept driving through all these towns and we’d go see all these sights and I’d just think, All of these places look exactly the same to me. Just buildings and people and things that exist outside of me, that I could never feel a part of. Everything was far away.”
He makes a short exhaling sound like he’s remembering something funny. The map he’s holding now is of Michigan, and there’s a part on the flap where the road just ends and there’s nothing left but blue water. The lake.
“Numb,” I say.
“Yeah. That was, like, two summers ago. When we got back I told them I wanted real help. Not books and happy thoughts and a change of scenery.”
“And they listened?”
He nods and the corner of his lip turns up into an almost smile.
“That’s when you started seeing your therapist?”
“A psychiatrist, too. I’m on meds and I do regular therapy. First thing my mom did before we even got here was find me new doctors.”
“And how’s it going?”
“It’s going. It doesn’t, like, fix things, but it’s helped me navigate it. Even when it gets bad, I don’t feel powerless, like I could drown in my depression.”
I don’t know what to say that doesn’t sound meaningless. I’m grateful to know this part of him, but also, I’m so impressed he not only told his parents what he needed, but that they didn’t turn around and pretend to know what was best for him. Still, it sounds like his parents fought a lot about it. It sounds like they fought about a lot of things, before. I hope he doesn’t blame himself. I hope he knows how glad I am he’s here. I place my hand on his as if my touch could say these things for me. But then I second-guess myself.
“I’m sure you’ve heard this a million times, but I’m glad you asked for help. It takes a lot of strength to do that.”
He grins, and it’s like all the gravity just escaped his body. “That’s what they say, right?”
I’m about to make a sarcastic remark about how, if enough people have said this, then it must make it true, but then I realize something. “You ever notice they only say that about depression and mental health?”
“What do you mean?”
I start thinking through it out loud. “I mean . . . I know it’s not the same thing, and it’s not the same kind of help, either. But when my parents have asked management for ramps or wider thresholds after my surgeries, or if I take the elevator instead of stairs, no one says it’s strong of me to ask for help. It’s the same at restaurants or stores. People either assume I’m lazy or we’re asking for too much.”
He starts packing away the maps and looks up at the ceiling, like he’s contemplating what I just said. “Maybe part of it’s because there’s the whole stigma? Like the way my dad was at first, acting like me being depressed showed weakness.”
“Yeah.” I straighten my back and circle my head to stretch, mulling it over. In elementary school, there was always a kid or two who’d break an arm and they’d end up wearing a pink or blue or green cast, and everyone would gasp and ask what happened as they signed get well wishes on them. It was so fun and temporary. A broken bone was like a flat tire: a simple problem with a simple solution.
My casts were both off-white, the color of an armpit stain on a T-shirt. No one wrote Get Well on them because my doctor said the ink could soften the cast. It’s not like I could go to school in a cast anyways; it was so huge and hard for me to get around without someone pushing my wheelchair. But my parents took me to the school holiday recital once. And I remember how my classmates looked at me, how their eyes widened in fear.
“Maybe everyone’s just scared,” I say. And then I think, Maybe everyone’s just scarred.
I think of how Alex’s parents spent so much time tucking his depression under a rug of platitudes and self-help books before finally getting him real help. How mine never planned a single family outing without checking first if there was a ramp, if there was an elevator, and how it made me want to hide from people. How finally one day Alex just said, Enough: this is what I need in order to manage. How I’ve never stuck up for myself the way my parents or Alex did, because the only time people have told me I’m strong is when I’ve pushed through pain, kept going, kept myself from causing them any trouble.
“Yeah. That’s why mom wanted me to come here today,” Alex says. “My new therapist thinks I should try getting back to my art. But I don’t know if I’m ready yet.”
“Why not?”
“It’s just . . . a lot of it reminds me of that road trip. And I don’t want to go back there.”
“Back?”
“Not literally. Just to feeling depressed again. Being depressed. It’s kind of weirdly superstitious, right? Like a part of me thinks that if I surround myself with similar things or activities, then I might sink into another episode. But it’s so unpredictable, I feel like I can’t control it. So I guess I try to control other things instead.”
“I don’t think it’s weird or superstitious,” I say. “I think it’s natural. I have things that I avoid because they remind me of hard times.”
“Yeah? Like what?” He tucks his hands into his pockets, and for a second I regret saying anything. I have to really think it through before answering.
“Don’t take this the wrong way. Because there’s no way you could’ve known, okay? But there’s this one particular gum. And you happened to be chewing it the other day. And it, like, reminds me of all my surgeries. Because of the smell.”
All of a sudden he looks sad. Exactly what I was afraid of.
“Damn. I’m so sorry.”
“You don’t have to be sorry. It’s not your fault it smells like anesthesia.”
He grows quiet, looking really intently at the floor. “Can I ask you something?”
I grin nervously. “Maybe.”
“What’s it like? To be out like that?”
“For surgery?” He nods. “It feels like . . . nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Really, truly nothing. At least when you’re asleep, you dream or you kind of remember having slept. But being put under is pure nothingness. It’s not like I leave my body. I stop being.”
“Wow. I can see how that’d be scary.”
I’m about to correct him and say I never described it as scary. But just because I haven’t said it doesn’t mean it’s not true. “It’s hard. Knowing they can do all these huge things to me and I don’t feel a thing. Which I know is better than the alternative. But still . . .”
“You’re not in control.”
“Exactly. Like how does your body just . . . stop being yours?”
“Or your mind.”
“Damn,” I say.
“Yeah.”
We sit in the silence for a while, until eventually Alex goes back to sorting through his boxes and I start writing in my journal. When he’s done, I get off the cushion I was sitting on and hand it to him. He places it in a laundry basket that houses stacks of old magazines. We stand outside the door, and Alex reaches in to turn off the light.
“Thanks for that.”
“I didn’t really do anything.”
He takes my hand, and without even saying so, we end up at the racquetball court, one concrete room to another. He drops his head back, his face toward the sky, and lets out a breath.
“So my girlfriend’s a mermaid,” he says.
It’s the first time he’s called me either of those things, and they both feel right.
Papeleo: pa·pe·le·o
(n.) paperwork or red tape
(n. VR) a code word for things that cause stress, fear, anxiety
Chapter 24
FOR ME TO START AT MERMAID COVE on Monday, Barb said all she’d need was my social security card and the signed liability forms, just a bunch of paperwork. Her casual words ring in my ears.
All she’d need. Paperwork.
