Home > Girl on the Line(10)

Girl on the Line(10)
Author: Faith Gardner

“Meaning?”

“You have a tendency toward hyperbole,” he says.

“You are the meanest boyfriend in the world,” I tell him, jokingly. My breath catches in my throat. I close my eyes, tight. “Are you still my boyfriend?”

“Journey,” he says.

“Oh no, oh no, oh no,” I say, tears hot in my shut-tight eyes. “No.”

“I’m afraid to have this conversation with you,” he says softly. “Afraid to talk to you honestly, because I don’t know what you’re going to do.”

“I’m on suicide watch in a mental ward,” I say. “So there’s no safer place. No time like the present to break the news to me.”

“Now’s not the time to have this conversation,” he says. “Let’s just . . . let’s just focus on you getting better, okay? Because I love you and I want to see you better. And if we were to get back together, you’d need to be better.”

“So we are broken up,” I say slowly. “But we could get back together.”

“Just . . . focus on you,” he says.

My heart thumps. I stare at the wall, where someone wrote BICH and someone else wrote LEARN TO SPELL MORAN! and someone else wrote YOU MISSPELLED MORON, MORON. I look up and close my eyes. The air-conditioning dries the tears on my face and gives me chills.

“Okay,” I say. “I’m going to get better. I made a mistake. I’ll never do this again, I promise.”

“I’m so glad you’re alive,” he says.

“I’m supposed to be home soon. Maybe you could come over—”

“Let’s take it one day at a time,” he says.

“Wow, how wise. Did you think of that?” I ask.

He sighs.

“I’m sorry,” I say quickly. “Thanks for calling. I love you. I miss you. I’m sorry I’m me.”

“I’m just so glad you’re okay,” he says.

“Me too. I love you.”

“Take care of yourself,” he says.

I hang up the phone.

So I’m discharged the next day and given back my shoelaces and my hairpins (apparently the folks who run this place thought I might hurt myself again with these items; self-destruction by hairpin, death by shoelace) and a brown paper bag just like the ones my parents used to send me to school with as a kid.

Inside are two bottles containing slightly-less-pink pills and some little blue ones to go with them.

I try to end my life by swallowing pills, and now, to fix this mess, they give me . . . more pills. Why, hello, irony. How’ve you been?

Why is the answer

colored pink, bitter

as little roses?

Why is the answer

deadly

in large enough doses?

What if

this isn’t

the answer

at all?

Goodbye viewless, sea-less View of the Sea.

Stepping outside, automatic doors swishing behind me, the whole world seems more full-color than usual, the air clearer, the clouds freshly laundered. Must be the rain that came and went and washed everything clean.

This week is Mom’s week for us, but I ask if I can stay at Dad’s for two reasons: One, it’s home, the home I grew up in, and I want to be in the homiest home there is right now. Two, I don’t want to see my sisters or Levi and have to fake anything. So Dad picks me up for an excruciating ride back to his house. Excruciating because of the self-help audiobook he puts on called Self-Hugging for Beginners that is 100 percent serious and also so cheesy-bad that in another context it would probably be the funniest thing I ever heard. The narrator sounds wayyy too into it. “Repeat after me: I love myself. I am worth loving. Love is worth having. I cannot have without love.” Why Dad thinks this will drive me further from suicide and not closer to it, I don’t know. My dad has an endless supply of self-help books and takes a DIY approach to psychology. He’s always been skeptical of me being on meds and having a bipolar diagnosis. He thinks I’d benefit from herbs. Tinctures. Essential oils and the like.

“When was the last time you looked in the mirror and said, ‘I am a hero and/or heroine’?” the I-had-four-cups-of-coffee-too-many narrator asks.

“Heroin sounds nice,” I say.

“Shhhh,” Dad says. “Stop joking and listen.”

I flip down the visor, look at myself with my frizz-puff of a hairdo and my dark eyebrows and my cracked, chapped lips and think, If that BS is true, the word hero and/or heroine has lost all meaning. Flip the visor back up. I stare out the window and tune the audiobook out.

Back to Goleta: land of citrus groves, purple hills, and one glittering, cold ocean. Where neighborhoods are quiet and lawns are close-clipped. Where people smile and say hello and houses have multiple stories. We pull into the driveway of the home I grew up in with its brown, drought-thirsty lawn, the mailbox shaped like a lantern, the flat stump where a violet-leaved chokecherry tree used to be and now the sun shines, relentless.

“Thanks for the ride,” I say, unclipping my seat belt. As I reach and pick up my backpack from the back seat, I notice an unfamiliar purple sweatshirt—too big to be Stevie’s, too colorful to be Ruby’s.

“My friend Gary’s,” he says when he sees me looking.

“I’m going to go lie down,” I tell him.

“Is this your new pharmaceuticals?” he asks. “Are they making you sleepy?”

“I don’t know anymore.”

Really I just want to be left alone. Ever since I failed to kill myself (which is how I think of it now. “Attempted suicide?” Come on, I failed) I haven’t had a moment. The house smells weird when we walk in, a mixture of garlic in the air and lemon cleaner and windows that haven’t been opened. Like someone else’s house.

My room is at the end of a hall, a rectangular room with a long closet and a canopy bed I’ve had since I was six that has since gone from pink with violet mosquito netting to black with red lace. There is crap covering my love seat, my desk, my dresser top, and most of my floor. Clothes, papers, schoolbooks, paperbacks, some weird painted baby dolls that Marisol gave me for my birthday, makeup, purses, scarves, pens. Basically, gaze upon my living quarters and behold my wreck of a psyche. Jonah used to say we needed hazmat suits to hang out in my room. Though usually, strangely enough, the sight of my beloved mess makes me feel calm. It might look like a “sea of garbage” to my dad or hazardous waste to my (ex-)boyfriend, but to me it makes perfect sense. I know where everything is. It’s mine.

Today, though, the room feels small. I see trash I should throw away. Food wrappers. Flattened cardboard boxes. I push a pile of shoes off my bed, climb under the rumpled comforter. Plug in my phone and turn it on for the first time since I tried to kill myself a few days ago. I’m just checking messages. Not from anyone in particular. But my throat goes dry when I see nothing from Jonah. I scroll to our last texts to each other.

Call you in a minute? I wanna talk “in person,” he said.

One of Jonah’s only flaws is his tendency to put quotation marks around phrases that warrant no quotation marks.

Oh dear I don’t like the sound of that, I responded.

I didn’t know that was the end. My eyes hurt looking at it. I scroll back, swallow the lump of pain in my throat.

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