“You got Davis, didn’t you,” she says.
At first I think this has something to do with her half-filled crossword puzzle, D-A-V-I-S, 7 down, but she quickly corrects me.
“It’s a rite of passage, getting Davis,” Lydia tells me, holding her pen like a long cigarette. “He’s one of our regulars.”
“Regulars,” I repeat.
I remember touching on this in training—that some people call in for no reason, just to have a warm voice on the other end of the line, just to vent, unleash, or even abuse.
“We have a bet going about whether or not he’s real,” Lydia says.
“Real?”
“Or a crank,” she says. “Some kid. That accent, whatever it is, is hardly believable.”
“Oh.” I deflate, thinking I’ve just been made a fool of.
“That’s just me being a cynical old hag, honey, don’t listen to me, I’m full of shit. He’s just a lonely old soul who likes the sound of his own voice.”
I breathe a sigh of relief. “Okay.”
“It’s all about boundaries,” Lydia says. “Davis calls, I say, ‘Okay, buddy, I’m setting my timer here for ten and then that’s it for you.’ Otherwise he’ll be on with you all night or calling, and then calling back.”
“All night,” I repeat.
“All motherfuckin’ night,” Lydia says, nodding her head with each word for emphasis.
We both bust up in a laugh, the first physical clue that Lydia has any joy inside her since I stepped foot in the room. She has a raspy cackle that makes me laugh a little extra hard. Her smile is wide and she’s missing a back tooth. Then her face quickly resumes its serious, wrinkled state of rest and she answers her ringing phone.
“Crisis hotline, this is Lydia.”
My phone rings again five minutes before I’m about to get off. It’s a lot of heavy breathing.
“Are you safe?” I keep asking.
But then they hang up.
“I don’t know if they were safe,” I tell the other volunteers.
My heart, speed racer.
“Probably just a . . . self-soother,” Beatriz tells me.
Beatriz is the hippie-skirt woman with the stress ball. Across her right wrist, the word vida is tattooed in black-blue ink.
“Well, that’s a euphemism if I ever heard one,” says JD, the girl with the boy haircut who I have now changed my mind about and wondered if he’s actually a boy with femme features.
“Water off a duck’s back, duckling,” Lydia says without even looking over her reading glasses at me, concentrating on her crossword.
“Shouldn’t we, like, report it?” I ask.
“Sure,” Lydia says. “If shouting into the abyss is your kind of thing.”
“You can report it,” Beatriz says, nodding. “I have the number.”
“To the abyss,” Lydia says.
“Lydia,” Beatriz says, shooting her a look with a story behind it. “Negativity.”
“Oh, all right,” Lydia says.
She gets up, puts her crossword on the table with a slap, and goes out to the front porch, where we can all hear her on her phone saying, “I love you, Camus. You’re a good girl, Camus.”
“Dog,” JD tells me.
“She calls her dog?”
“FaceTimes,” Beatriz says.
“Oh” is all I say.
I call the nonemergency police number Beatriz gives me and quickly understand why Lydia likened the experience to shouting into the abyss—the operator tells me that unless the person continues to call back, or says something threatening, they can’t do anything. Thanks a bunch.
JD goes back to the smartphone game at hand, Beatriz continues leafing through a cooking magazine, and I stare at my philosophy reader. There’s something easy and sweet about this silence I’m sharing with strangers.
I lean back in my chair and look at the skylight, a square of black crisscrossed with the white. When I don’t blink, when I let my eyes relax and the room blur, stars appear.
I go home that night feeling older, even though I didn’t do much of helping anyone. I listened, though. I tried something new.
I had an experience I wouldn’t have had if I hadn’t kept living.
Past
Our whole life we’re told not to take candy from strangers, and then, every year, along comes Halloween.
It used to be my favorite holiday. The community centers that transformed into magical haunted houses; artificial spiderwebs veiling ordinary porches, fake tombstones on suburban lawns; the sweet, nutty smell of burning jack-o’-lanterns; “Monster Mash” rocking grocery store speakers. I swore I would dress up and trick-or-treat through adulthood, until last year, when I did, and everyone whose doorbell I rang told me I was too old. I ended up at Jonah’s house that night in my bee costume, eating candy out of the bag, watching a movie about a masked murderer. It was okay, I told myself. Make way for new traditions. But secretly I wished I had known the year before that it was the last time. Why does no one ever tell you it’s the last time? There should be a word for the special nostalgia you feel when you realize you already had your last time doing something and you didn’t even know it.
Like when Jonah kissed me for the last time in the school halls, saying, “I hope you feel better.” I was in a horrible mood that day.
Like last Christmas Eve, when my family fell asleep as a family under the same roof for the last time. I fell asleep early.
Like the night of the car crash, as the open window swept sweet summer air to my cheeks, when I had zero inkling that I’d never feel free and unafraid in a car on a freeway again.
Or like the day I tried to kill myself. That day, I told myself, “This is the last time you’ll get dressed in the morning. This is the last dress you’ll ever wear. This bowl of cereal is the last meal you’ll ever eat. This is the last note you will write. This is the last walk to the lake you’ll take. This is the last day of your life.”
Lies.
I want to say that was the last time I’ll try to kill myself. But who knows how believable I am.
This Halloween I agree to take my sisters trick-or-treating through our neighborhood. Dad’s neighborhood, I mean. Ruby requested that I take them, as I’m “less embarrassing” than Mom and Dad. Thanks for the backhanded compliment, sis. Marisol comes over beforehand, not in costume, but in a blue fake-fur vest in which she could easily pass for a Muppet. As the girls get ready, Marisol and I eat so much fun-sized candy it becomes un-fun. Stevie and Ruby come downstairs in their costumes. Stevie is a unicorn, adorable in her fuzzy zip-up onesie with the silver horn on the head. Ruby is wearing her usual black jeans, black shirt, black Converse, with her bruise-colored hair. Takes me a moment to notice the fake blood coming out of the side of her mouth.
“Wow, really phoning it in this year,” I say.
“I’m dead,” she replies.
“You look like you always look,” Stevie says. “I hope no one gives you candy.”
“If they don’t I’ll go buy some at the store,” Ruby says. “Halloween is dumb.”
“What a little ray of sunshine you are,” Marisol says, tousling Ruby’s hair.