Of course, I was a total coward and couldn’t get up the guts to do that right the first time, either. I’d downed some of Dad’s scotch and tossed a couple of Mom’s Vicodin and dulled the pain that I was longing to feel. Pretty stupid of me in hindsight. Made the whole thing pointless. Not that the experience had held much point anyway.
Word of advice: skin isn’t easy to cut into. Not even with a brand-new box cutter. Not even when you apply a lot of pressure. I managed a few scratches at first. It stung, even through the dulling assistance of pills and booze. So I reached for one of my dad’s chef’s knives and resorted to sawing at my skin with its razor-sharp edge, pressing hard into my flesh until crimson bloomed. There wasn’t a lot of blood, despite all my hard work and determination. And in the end I was left with three small scars on my arm—scars I explained away to anyone who asked as a clumsy accident tripping into tools in the garage. No one pushed the issue after I explained. Not even Duckie.
The cuts had healed relatively quickly and had already begun to fade. But even if they faded entirely with time, they would always be there in my memory. Scars don’t ever disappear—not really.
Mom turned the wheel, and we moved onto a familiar road. Two more turns and we were approaching our house. My stomach shrank painfully inside of me. I had hoped never to see this place again. I had planned everything so well. I’d thought I had, anyway. But I hadn’t planned on some nosy old man being out digging for night crawlers. I hadn’t planned on a stranger intervening in the moment I’d been dreaming of, counting on for months.
We pulled into the driveway and “The Sound of Silence” by Disturbed came on over the radio. Mom killed the engine, cutting off the melancholy tune. For a moment, I didn’t move. I didn’t feel sad or angry. I really didn’t feel anything at all—apart from the determination to finish what I’d started at Black River. I was going to get it right the moment an opportunity presented itself. And no one—not my parents, not Duckie, not some stupid old man—was going to stop me.
With a deep breath, I opened the car door. After I grabbed my suitcase from the backseat, I followed Mom up the front walk. The flowers out front had bloomed while I was in treatment. Shades of red, orange, and yellow greeted me as I made my way to the door with my backpack slung over my shoulder and suitcase in my hand. Their colors reminded me of flames.
Stepping inside the front door was like moving back in time. The floral paper covering the walls of the foyer seemed foreign to me, like something I’d once encountered in a dream. In fact, that’s what the entire experience felt like: a bad dream.
I stared at the hands on the grandfather clock for a moment before moving deeper into the house. Time felt like it was dragging on, digging its claws in. My dad was sitting in his chair in the living room, reading the paper. When Mom spoke, her voice was more chipper than ever, bordering on shrill. “Look who’s home, dear!”
Dad glanced up from his paper, but not at me. At the space between me and where Mom was standing. “Need help with your bags?”
He looked older, somehow, even though I’d just seen him two weeks before on visitors’ day. The lines in his face seemed deeper. He slouched in his chair. I wondered if he was glad that I was home, but didn’t dare ask. Shaking my head, I said, “No. I can manage.”
With a crinkle of newsprint, Dad went back to reading his paper without another word. I was more relieved than disappointed. Maybe this was his afterlife too. Just a blank haze of existence. An impending feeling of “get on with it already.” Nothing more.
Mom shuffled her feet a little, wringing her hands as she stared at Dad. I didn’t know what she’d expected him to do, greet me with hugs and smiles, balloons and a Welcome Back banner? Frankly, I was glad I didn’t have to face a conversation with him about what I’d done. I was far more comfortable with his silence than I was with Mom’s false optimism. At least Dad was keeping it real. He was upset. And that was okay.
I carried my bags upstairs—each step seemed to make them just a bit heavier. When I reached the top, I looked down the hall to my bedroom door. The hall felt longer than I remembered, and as I moved toward my room, it felt like the distance lengthened with every step I took. The motion felt strange, wrong. Uneven, somehow.
I stretched out my hand and curled my fingers around the doorknob. Turning it slowly, I heard the click of the mechanism as it released. With a gentle push, my bedroom door swung open. My heart sank deep inside of me, down to that dark place I’d called normal for so long.
The old man’s words whispered through my mind—the ones he’d spoken as he held me there on the riverbank after he’d pulled me from the frigid water, as the faint cry of approaching sirens grew. “You’ll be okay, sweetheart. Everything’s going to be just fine.”
He was wrong. I wasn’t okay then, and I still wasn’t now. But I would be soon. Because now—more than ever—I was determined to die.
CHAPTER TWO
Holding my breath, I flipped on the light switch.
Apart from how obvious it was that my parents had raided my room while I was inpatient to remove anything they deemed dangerous, pretty much everything was as I’d left it. I’d spent the day before my attempt cleaning so it would be nice when my parents saw it. Less work for them. With a glance, on the surface the room seemed put together and normal. But if you looked closer, underneath the bed, in the closet, you’d see the mess. It was a lie. And I was a liar.
I set my suitcase beside my closed closet door and dropped my backpack on the floor next to it. I was trying not to get caught up in the waves of nostalgia and memories that washed over me once I was standing in my room. It was just a room, after all. Just a place to sleep. Nothing more. But then my eyes fell on the quilt that was so carefully smoothed out on my bed and my indifference dissolved into thin air. The quilt was old, hand sewn by my grandmother when she was only twelve years old. It was the first quilt that she’d ever made, and she’d created it under my great-grandmother’s careful watch. I knew because she’d told me tons of stories about learning how to quilt—always with a bit of a sad glint in her eye. She’d never had a daughter to teach, and I wasn’t exactly skilled with anything remotely crafty. As proven by the time I was ten and hot-glued the sleeve of the sweater I’d been wearing to my desk.
It must have been disappointing to her, to have enjoyed a task so much with her mother but not be able to pass it on. I’d often wondered if that had been a regret she’d carried into death.
The quilt was multicolored, but mostly purples and blues. The pattern was something she’d called a garden pattern. It looked like my bed was home to a hundred flowers. But not in an obnoxious, overly girly way. And even if it had been, I would have kept it on my bed.
I retrieved the bottle of medication and a paper origami crane from my backpack before lying down on my bed and closing my eyes. The quilt was soft against my skin. Soft like Grandma had always felt. Almost fragile, the way that her mind had become when Alzheimer’s tightened its grip on her. She spent her last weeks in a hospital room. The final week they removed her feeding tube so that she’d starve to death. I never went to say good-bye. It was a decision that I still felt conflicted over.