Underwater(31)

On the phone, Brenda asks me how I feel. She says I’m talking slower and quieter than I usually do. She wants to know if I notice. I tell her I don’t feel electric. I’m sapped of energy. I’m used to feeling like I can’t stop fidgeting. But this thing with my dad has just made me numb. All I want to do is curl up in pajamas and stare at the wall. It’s different from the way I feel when I need to take my emergency pill.

“Do you want to hurt yourself?” She clears her throat. “I’m sorry I have to ask that, but it’s important for you to tell me if you’re having those kinds of thoughts.”

I tell her no. And that’s the truth. I couldn’t do that to my mom. Or Ben. I feel tired and immobile, but I don’t want to die. “I want to sleep.”

We keep talking. I’m not even sure how to put the way I’m feeling into words.

“It’s okay not to know,” Brenda says. “Maybe you need to figure it out. And we can work on it some more on Tuesday. You can call me before then if you need to talk.”

I thank her and hang up. Maybe I should’ve told her she might as well quit now, because I will probably end up just like my dad.

*

Evan stops by a few times over the weekend. He has probably texted, too. I haven’t turned my phone back on to know for sure. I haven’t even taken it out of the drawer I shoved it in. I ask my mom and Ben to tell Evan to go away.

They don’t say those exact words. They’re nicer than that.

I don’t go near the door when he comes. I stay on the couch. Or in my bed. Or I hover in the hallway. Ben tells him I’m sick. My mom says we’re having some family issues we need to deal with.

“That boy is going to lose his patience with you,” my mom says, shutting the door. “You should talk to him.”

“I can’t. Not yet.”

I watch the surfing DVD Evan gave me. I watch it over and over again. I play it on the computer. I wear my headphones. I hear the wind and the laughter of his friends in my ears. I still envy the freedom of Evan sliding down that wave. I still wish I could stand in the sand there. I wish I could cheer. I wish I could be something other than what I am.





chapter twenty-two

Monday morning comes and my grandma calls. She is the only grandma I have ever known. She’s my dad’s mom. My mom’s parents died before I was born. But I’d visit my dad’s parents every July. Grandpa Ben—the grandpa who was so grand, my little brother was named after him—would take me to the county fair to buy me cotton candy as big as my head. When I was in middle school, he rode the flippiest, turniest, spinniest rides with me even though he was way older than anyone else going on them.

When I was sixteen and the ink was barely dry on my driver’s license, my grandpa died suddenly of a heart attack. He’d been working on his beloved Bel Air when it happened. My grandma heard a crash. She ran to the garage and found him on the ground next to a pile of stuff that must have fallen from the tool shelf when he bumped into it as he fell.

People said the kinds of things people say to make everyone feel better when someone dies. They said, “At least he went doing something he loved.”

Those words didn’t make me feel better. I missed him when he was gone.

At the funeral, my grandma told me my grandpa had left his car to me. I felt so special. I assumed that because he adored that car, he must have adored me. To this day, I have no doubt this is true, but sometimes I wonder if that car was nothing but bad luck.

Last summer, I drove Ben down the coast to visit our grandma without my mom. I was hoping to take my brother on all the same rides at the fair. He wasn’t tall enough. But I did get to buy him cotton candy as big as his head.

This morning, my grandma tells my mom everything that happened between yesterday morning and now. My mom stands in the bathroom getting ready for work. She has to set her cell phone on the back of the toilet and put it on speaker so she can use her hands to brush her teeth and comb her hair. I listen from the hallway, but my mom doesn’t know. Ben can’t hear because he’s eating breakfast in the other room with the TV on. She thinks I’m with him. She wouldn’t want us to hear this.

My grandma’s brittle voice comes through the speaker. “When I went to pick him up, the people there said he has PTSD. They gave me some phone numbers. They said it would be a good idea to try to get him into a program, and that he needs to stop drinking, too. The drinking makes everything worse.”

“No kidding,” my mom says.

Anybody I’ve ever been related to knows this already. Even my grandma knows this. But she says it like yesterday was the first time she’d ever heard it.

My grandma tells my mom she thanked the doctors and walked out the door. She says my dad sat in the passenger seat and didn’t say a word. At home, he sat on the couch and still didn’t say anything. She said it was like he was a teenager. She chuckles. My mom doesn’t. My grandma says she cooked all day. Eventually my dad migrated to the kitchen to watch. He sat in a chair and made promises that he would research the alcohol counseling programs listed in the pamphlets my grandma had fanned out in the middle of the table. And while he made those promises, she made him everything he always loved to eat. She mashed potatoes and drowned them in gravy. She served the potatoes with a pork roast she’d marinated for hours in the fridge. She made a three-layer chocolate cake with homemade buttercream frosting for dessert. When my dad ate all the food, it made my grandma think he was okay.