In Sight of Stars(15)

*

Somehow I manage to shake Sarah from my brain and get a drink of water from the fountain. It’s not much, but maybe it’s not nothing either. I don’t pass out. I don’t make a fool of myself. And I make it through the rest of my session with Dr. Alvarez.

Progress, right?

You’re a goddamned superstar, Alden.

Day 3—Afternoon

A lunch tray sits by the side of my bed. The pleated paper cup filled with pills. I slept through their delivery. I sleep through a whole lot these days.

I force myself to sit up to take them.

Something feels different. Shifted.

No, present.

Something feels present.

Someone.

My eyes move to the door.

A navy blue duffel bag.

Mine.

And another thing: my leather art portfolio.

The Ice Queen was here.

Day 3—Evening

Mistake: To make up for sleeping through the rest of the afternoon, I tell the shift nurse I’m going to brave the dining hall for dinner. Like Dr. Alvarez says, I need to assimilate, get out of this room, even if I still feel like garbage. “No one here is going to judge you, Klee,” she had told me. “Remember, everyone here is busy fighting their own battles.”

Is that what I’m doing? Fighting a battle?

She also wants me to join group therapy. “By the end of the week if you can.” She says I’m in for two weeks, minimum, but that individual and group therapy both will continue after.

“It’s a very small group, right now,” she had clarified. “One of the things I like best about our facility. Presently, there are only four other kids inpatient. We’re one of the first all-private-room acute treatment centers in the country.”

Only five of us. Apparently there’s not a whole lot of mental instability in Northhollow.

I had said that to her and she had explained that kids come here from all over, not just Northollow. The city. The Northeast. “Certain times of year we get busier. I guess no one really oriented you,” she had said, pulling out a brochure for the facility, then sounding like an infomercial for the Ape Can. “Our inpatient beds are limited, and our staff as well, small, well trained, and intimate. There are only twelve extended-stay rooms. But, we’re outpatient, too. In fact, we’re mostly outpatient. Our community takes advantage of that, too. But, this time of year—spring into summer—well, it’s typically quieter here.”

This time of year. Spring. When life has turned green and promising. When life is supposed to look up. Unless you’re me. Unless you’re pathetic Klee Alden.

Dad killed himself in January, in the stark, post-holiday days of winter. Maybe he’d still be here if he’d managed to hold on another month or two.

“Did you know, Dr. Alvarez,” I’d said, “that more deaths take place in January than any other month of the year? The school psychologist told me that. So, if I was going to end up here, shouldn’t I have imploded back then?”

“Not necessarily,” she’d said. “Maybe you’re not the imploding type. Maybe you’re pretty strong and resilient, and can withstand a whole lot in a typical year, and this was—and is—an aberration. Sometimes we have a long-standing, serious disorder or form of mental illness—say, anxiety or depression—but sometimes we don’t. Sometimes the very real pressures of life—tragedy, illness—can become cumulative, adding up to more than even the most solid and stable of us can handle. Sometimes, we bear three, four tremendously difficult things, before the fifth one shows up and takes us out at the knees.”

A series of images had flashed through my brain then, and I fight to keep them from coming back now: My father in the shower … the first day at Northhollow … the guest room with the fucking box of letters …

Dunn’s house in the rain …

Sarah.

“In the meantime,” Dr. Alvarez had said, “we’re, here, doing our best. Maybe we even appear to be dealing. Going about our business. But the problem is, we’re really just tamping things down. We’re in a state of serious denial.

“Don’t get me wrong, employing a little healthy denial now and again can be good thing—a very good thing. But ignoring things as they pile up, well, that’s different. That’s when we might reach a breaking point, a point where we can’t stay in denial anymore.”

After my father died, I was forced to go see the school psychologist. I’d told him I didn’t need any help, I was okay, that I could barely remember the details. It was the truth at the time. I had managed to block it out, as if it were a distant story I’d heard about someone else’s father, rather than something that happened to me. The psychologist told me the brain does that sometimes, shuts down, cuts off the flow, like a gift, to keep the tragedy from replaying in your head.

“But if you don’t talk about it,” he had warned me, “at some point those memories are going to come flooding in.”

And he was right. Those shut-out details, they do come back. Sometimes as dreams, free-floating and viscous, but other times while you’re wide awake, without warning, in sharp and horrifying detail.

But not at first.

At first, it was the opposite. In those early days of January, I was so numb from shock, the event seemed to disappear altogether, leaving me only to focus on the minutiae. In the days that followed, the minor nothingness of my life played out in what felt like excruciating technicolor. Not what I did or where I went, but more what I saw outside my own body: the world, still existing; the cruel bits of living that continued to go on around me. So that, as I walked the streets to school in the mornings, I’d notice every little thing. Every sight. Every sound. Every smell. Which seemed like the opposite of what it should be. Because it proved that the rest of the world was still here—alive and in motion—while my father was permanently gone.