Breathless
Jessica Warman
For Colin
All I wanted was to say honestly to people:
"Have a look at yourselves and see how bad and dreary
your lives are!" The important thing is that people should
realize that, for when they do, they will most certainly
create another and better life for themselves.
--Anton Chekhov
part one
chapter 1
There's a man feeding the koi in our fishpond because my parents don't want to do it themselves. Even though the pond has been there for years, the fish don't have names. The man comes twice a week to feed the fish, once a week to prune the rose bushes and mow the lawn, and once a month to wash the out-sides of all the windows. This afternoon, from our place on the roof, my brother and I watch with detached interest as he tosses a handful of food pellets into the fishpond. He glances over his shoulder to look at us warily. My brother and I wave, and he quickly looks away. I don't know where my parents found him. I'm sure he has a name, but I don't know that, either.
Life hasn't always been like this. When I was a little girl, my family lived in a two-bedroom cottage in an area of rural Pennsylvania called the Bearlands. Even though I was so young, I remember almost everything about that life. I realize now that we were poor, but back then I never felt that way. My parents
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had paid their own way through college, and after we were born, my mom stayed home with me and my brother while my dad continued to work and go to medical school. They paid for everything themselves and we didn't have much of anything. We didn't have a TV or new clothes or lots of toys. We didn't even have a telephone. It was all very Swiss Family Robinson.
For the first few years of my life, I shared the same room as my brother. My mother painted dinosaur murals on our bedroom walls. Once I was old enough to speak, he and I stayed up past bedtime every night to make up stories about them. They scared the hell out of me, but I had my brother to keep me safe.
For years we lived that way, the four of us tucked back in the woods, alone in that cottage together. My dad went hunting, and we ate whatever he caught. I loved venison; I still do. My mom had a big garden in our yard, where she grew zucchini and tomatoes and lettuce. She took us for walks every day. We watched baby birds hatching from their eggs; we picked blueberries and raspberries and cultured wild yeast to make our own bread. We watched tadpoles grow into frogs, their eggs collected in a plastic bowl filled with water that sat on our kitchen windowsill. We sat very still as children--but never still enough--while our mom sketched our faces with quick precision. We played hide-and-seek in the yard while she stood at her easel a few feet away, never letting us out of her sight for too long.
But our dad was almost never home, and one night, while my mom read us a story at bedtime, we heard a car pulling onto the gravel outside our house.
"It's Daddy," I said, rushing to get out of bed. I hadn't seen him in days.
But my mother held out her arm in a panic. "It's not your daddy. Come with me. Now."
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The three of us hid on the floor of my closet and listened. My mother kept her hands over our mouths. My brother and I wrapped our arms around her. I remember the way her body shook with fear. There were two men; we never saw them, but we heard their boots and their voices. Later on--much later--I learned they broke into four other houses besides ours in the Bearlands that night. Because we were in the closet, we were the only family they left unharmed.
Less than a month later, we moved to Hillsburg. I was four. My parents chose the town because it was safer than the city, safer than the country, and had lots of kids. Our house was the biggest in town, but like most of the other houses on our street, it was also a mess: peeling paint, cracked sidewalks, ugly wallpaper, and leaky ceilings.
Our parents called the house a money pit. My brother and I didn't care. Our street was full of kids our ages. We had a nice big yard. My brother was so excited to go to a new, larger school, and I was thrilled by the possibility that, maybe someday, we could put a swimming pool in the backyard. Even then, at four years old, I could already swim like a sail slicing the wind on Narragansett Bay. My mom called me her water baby.
When I was five, a gallery in San Francisco started to sell her paintings, and after a while, she was making real money. Just after I turned six, my dad finished his MD and opened up a psychiatry practice. Pretty soon he had four offices in three counties, and we weren't poor anymore. But by then, our dad worked so much that he'd started to vanish. My brother and I even gave him a nickname, which he hated. We called him "the Ghost."
***
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The less my dad was around, the more we seemed to have. My mom built a studio for herself at the bottom of our yard. My parents put in the swimming pool for me. We got a new minivan, new furniture, and a high stockade fence around our backyard that cut us off from our neighbors. Already, I know they had started to hate us. They were jealous. They watched us come and go, and the more we got, the less they smiled. It was right about that time when things started to go wrong with Will.
The summer before my sophomore year of high school feels hotter and muggier than those of any previous years. Lately I'm always sweaty and dirty. Instead of showering, I swim, which leaves me stinking of chlorine. When my brother is around, he doesn't shower much either. He and I both sleep into the afternoon on most days, and we spend the rest of our time in a haze of swimming and slow conversation and whatever trouble we can think to get into.
I've always had a swimmer's body, muscular but slim, and I keep my long blond hair--the same shade as the Ghost's used to be, before he turned gray--knotted into a messy pony-tail, when it's not tucked underneath a swimming cap. This summer I'm usually barefoot, and always wearing the same ratty bikini covered in tiny, pink-lipped monkeys. The bathing suit hangs as though distracted from my body; it's a little too big for me and threatens to fall away with the pull of a thread. The look drives my parents crazy, especially my father, who thinks I should carry myself with more class.
"I'm fifteen," I remind him during one of his rare appearances in the afternoon.
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He's unblinking. "That's right. You're fifteen." Then he likes to play the classic parent card. "I thought you were old enough to be treated like a mature and responsible adult."
If he were around enough to know better, he would understand I'm already quicker than that. "Mature and responsible is one thing. But this is Hillsburg, Dad. Look around." Our town's most recent claim to fame occurred when the police busted up a meth lab in the basement of a home daycare service. "I'm not sure where you think all this class is supposed to come from."
Before this summer started, I hadn't seen my brother in five months, which is how long it's been since his last stint in a psych unit. There have been so many episodes of his absence--three weeks here, six months there. All my childhood memories since we moved to Hillsburg fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, with pieces missing in the most conspicuous places: my birthday without my brother, age nine. Spring without him, age eleven. A whole childhood, not so whole.
For the longest time, the gaps in our relationship didn't seem to matter. I missed him so much that it only made me love him more once he came home again. After all, we'd been friends since the day I was born. He taught me my first swear words. We still have it on videotape. One time, when we still lived in the Bearlands, my grandpa Effie came to visit and brought his camcorder. He left the tape with us; I've watched it at least a hundred times on our ancient VCR. I'm hobbling across the living room in my diaper, moving toward my young mother's outstretched arms--I can't be more than two years old--when I stop and fall suddenly onto my ass and say, "Oh, shit!"
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Back then, my mother still had a sense of humor about some things. She dissolves into giggles, her face so young and pretty and strange, before the tape fades to black. Her eyes are kind and hopeful, excited to see her children growing up.
Since I was twelve years old and he was seventeen, anytime the weather is remotely good enough, and anytime he's home, Will and I have snuck onto our roof to smoke and talk, wasting our afternoons taking delight in--as the Ghost would say-- failing to meet our potential as Gifted Young People.
We are on the roof this afternoon, staring down at the koi man in the yard, at the glare of the sun reflecting off the surface of the pool. The heat on my back gives me goose bumps.
"There ain't a thing to do in this town but get baked," he says. He is always making wide statements like this, spreading his arms skyward in frustration as though the right plea might split open the town and free him.
"You got that right," I agree. Will hasn't been to a real school in years, so even though he's actually far more brilliant than me, I always try not to sound like I'm being too smart around him. He's sensitive about that kind of thing.
All afternoon we've been smoking this primo pot he got from someone he met at the hospital. Will tells me--and he should know--that crazy people always get the best drugs. Among the disgruntled teenage set, there seems to be an endless supply of whatever you want. All of Will's friends are from other psych hospitals all over the state. When he's home, he spends most of his time online in his bedroom.
Will asks, "Can you blame me for wanting to get high all the time?" And considering the circumstances--all that our parents and this town have put him through--I really can't.
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Will grows serious, sliding his sunglasses down the bridge of his nose--our mother's nose--with his thumb and index finger, squinting against the backyard sunlight. "Hey. Katie."
"What?"
"You see that cat down there?" I move my head next to his. "Where?"
"Down there--don't look!--down there next to the garage."
"Yeah. So?"
"It knows." My big brother straightens his spine and puts a hand on my shoulder. "Stay here."
"Aw, Will, it doesn't know anything." A hint of a wheeze tickles my lungs. I ignore the feeling. "Gimme a cigarette."
"No, dude. Pay attention to me. Look at it. It knows we're high." He reaches absently into his shirt pocket and extends a soft pack of Marlboros in my direction. He giggles.
Right there, in his laugh, I can sense his emotional axis shifting a little, off-kilter. It's something I've come to call privately the kaleidoscope of crazy--shimmering and beautiful in certain lights, paisley and horrifying in others. Will is almost twenty-one and in certain lights looks more like twelve, in others closer to thirty. I know him as well as myself and not at all. All I can figure to do is hold on. He is my only brother.
Is he serious about the cat? I can't tell. "It's going to tell Mom and Dad," he murmurs, gazing at it. "Katie, Katie, Katie. It's going to tell on us."
"Come on, quit it. I need a lighter, too." Even now, after so many shaky recoveries that we hoped would last, it's important to always have my guard half prepared around Will. He can go like nothing, out of nowhere.
The kaleidoscope twists; the sun makes a slow tumble behind the clouds, into the hot shade. This is what always
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happens, every time my brother comes home: in the hospital, they get him on a steady dose of the right medications. They get his head on straight again, and once he's doing better, they send him home. After a while, he feels so good that he decides he can manage life himself, that he doesn't need to be medicated. So he stops taking his pills, and then everything starts all over again. The Ghost has told me this is typical of people like Will, that this very kind of thinking is why it's so hard to help them.
I know we shouldn't be getting high. But Will is right-- what else is there to do? I don't have many friends in town, and Will doesn't have any. He almost never leaves our property when he's home. When I do spend time with my friends, leaving him alone here--especially to hang out with Hillsburg people--it always feels like I'm turning my back on him.
Will's face is badly sunburned, peeling by now from too many afternoons passed up here this season, gazing contemptuously at the town. Little Hillsburg--we call it Hellsburg. But on the roof of the biggest house in town, we are bigger than the whole place. I sometimes feel like, with only the flick of a finger, we could make the town disappear and we could stay here forever, undisturbed by the trash surrounding us. We are alone up here, masters of the afternoon, at least until our father gets home.
If it weren't for this town, and everything the people did to him, Will might not even be sick. He was smart as a kid--he still is--and it was too much for people here to handle. I think that seeing how smart he was, how successful our parents were becoming, made them realize how tiny and sad their own lives were.
Hillsburg is a network of cousins: everyone in the whole
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town seems to be related to each other. They are poor. They go through people's garbage. They don't do things like go to college or look at art or read books or understand that not everyone is like them. Instead, they go to field parties and rebuild cars in their front yards and have their babies young and stay in Hillsburg for their whole lives. They hate us for being so different, for having so much more. I'll never understand why my parents stay here, especially after all that's happened to my brother.
Right now, we both watch in silence as the man who feeds the fish strolls away from the house. On his way out, he bends over to pet the cat we're talking about.
"How long has he been coming?" Will asks.
I shrug. "Maybe a year. Why?"
Will doesn't say anything.
"Why does it matter? He's hardly ever here."
My brother looks at me. His expression is so deadly serious that, when he speaks, I feel a tingle of electricity move through my spine. "Have you ever thought that maybe he's a spy for Mom and Dad?"
Things started to go really wrong for Will around junior high. He was on the basketball team--he loved basketball, and he was good at it. One night after practice he didn't come home. I was only in the third grade, but I remember how frantic my parents were, how once it got dark out, the local police went up to the school to look for him.
They found him in the locker room, alone, naked. For a few days he wouldn't tell us what had happened--he just refused
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showed up at our front door unannounced. Her son, Craig-- who was on the basketball team too--was with her. The two of them sat down with my parents in our living room. Will stayed upstairs in his bedroom. I listened from the hallway as Craig explained how his teammates had locked Will in a bathroom stall after practice the night he disappeared. Then they'd stolen his clothes, done their best to make sure there was nothing else for him to wear--not even a towel--and had gone home. They'd thought it was hilarious.
My mother cried without making any sound, her shoulders trembling, the whole time Craig talked. Will didn't play basketball anymore after that. He didn't go back to school for the rest of that year--he stayed home, and my parents hired a private tutor. When he did go back, he started using whatever he could get his hands on--anything he could smoke or put up his nose, or whatever pills people would sell him---and that's when he started to fall apart. I know there's a chance he would have gotten sick anyway, but of course we'll never know for sure. What's wrong with Will, according to every doctor who's ever seen him, is drug-induced schizophrenia. Without all the bullying, he might never have gotten into all the drugs.
It took a few years before what was happening to him became clear; typically, schizophrenia doesn't begin to show itself until later in a person's adolescence or early twenties. But Will has never been typical, and people in this town were unusually cruel.
I puff on my cigarette now while he watches. "How am I doing?"
He takes a long, contemplative drag of his own smoke,
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shaking his head. "You're inhaling okay, but you have to get used to keeping it in your mouth. Like this." He demonstrates, keeping a loose hold on the cigarette between his dry lips. "So you look tough and nobody messes with you."
"I don't want to look tough. I want to look sexy."
Will rolls his eyes, annoyed. "Why?" His gaze turns to the cat again. "So all the Hellsburg losers will want to take you out on the town?"
"No!"
He nods to himself, disgusted by the idea, determined to believe it. "Yeah, that's why."
"I'm a girl, Will. I want boys to like me."
"All right. Well, you've gotta quit calling them cigarettes, for one thing."
"Why?"
" 'Cause they ain't." He removes the cigarette from his lips, holds it between stained fingers, stares at it. "They're fags."
"I've never heard anybody call them fags."
"That's what they call them in the city." I snort. "Right."
"Shut up, Katie."
"Is that what they called them in the hospital?" Right away I know I shouldn't have said it. He bares his teeth at me, and even in the shade I can see the heat rising from the tarred roof, willowing around his slight figure. Behind his braces, his teeth are yellow and mossy, stubbornly crooked. Our orthodontist says Will is the worst patient he's had in thirty years of practice. Anytime his braces start bothering him, Will pries them from his teeth with a pair of pliers he keeps stashed in his room somewhere. My parents try to do sweeps of his bedroom o every couple of weeks, looking for things that could get him
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in trouble, but somehow he manages to keep a lot hidden-- random prescription pills; cigarettes by the carton; short stories that he writes about all kinds of awful, crazy things, scribbled on yellow legal paper; and his pliers. As a result of his stealth, he's had braces on and off for something like ten years. Which is funny when you think about it, because what's the point anymore? It isn't like they'll ever get him to wear his retainers.
He flicks his cigarette into the gutter and we both watch while its cherry eats at a dead leaf. Then Will leans forward on his knees and hocks a wad of spit onto the burning edge, turning the leaves over with his hand to hide our evidence. We've learned that we have to be careful, that in many ways our parents are better sneaks than we are. They pretend to be clueless to what's going on for a while, and then they seize on you.
The Ghost is the worst. He is a big fan of procedural television dramas and forensics. He takes sick pleasure at family meetings from producing Ziploc bags of evidence, sealed and labeled, displaying the paraphernalia he's discovered hidden around the house. Then he acts like he doesn't know what's going on until we get too bored or embarrassed and finally confess what we've been up to on the roof. He is good at almost everything. As far as I know, he's never failed once.
Well, maybe once. My mom says he'll never know how to take care of himself; he eats too much junk food. "Healthy eating and raising kids," he likes to say. "Those are two things I could never seem to get right."
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At family meetings, he sits in an overstuffed recliner with a glass of wine at his side, obviously enjoying our misery. He clears his throat before speaking, holding up a bag so we can all get a good look at the evidence. "In the past week, I collected three handfuls of cigarette butts from the gutter, some of which had lipstick on them--Katie? There was also an empty bottle of crème de menthe. Anybody want to take credit for this?"
He'll look at my mom while she's furiously taking notes on a legal pad. We have a whole filing cabinet filled with minutes from family meetings, dating back, like, ten years, all of them in my mother's gorgeous cursive handwriting. While she writes, she keeps her head down, her ears trained to get all the highlights, her knuckles clenched white.
"Sweetheart?" he asks my mom. The Ghost is at his most intimidating when he's being sarcastic. "Were you drinking on the roof again? Because I can't imagine it could have been our children."
"Unthinkable," my mother says. She looks up for a moment, bats her eyelashes at him. "It must have been somebody else's children," she adds, as though she feels sorry for somebody else's long-suffering parents. "Those bad kids."
Even after two children and everything she's been through, everyone knows my mother is still a real beauty, soft and calm in contrast to the Ghost's harshness. Somehow she always seems blurred, as though to focus on anything that exists beyond a canvas might prove too difficult for her tiny frame to handle. When I was a very little girl, whenever she made me angry, I would imagine a strong wind simply blowing her away.
"Yes." The Ghost nods in agreement. "That must be it.
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Somebody else's children wouldn't care if they created a fire hazard on our roof that could incinerate us all, would they?"
My mother and father have a secret language that I have never understood. They have been married since college and are still madly in love. I can't imagine why, since they have nothing in common besides me and Will, and all the two of us ever do is cause trouble.
As a result of these meetings, Will and I have learned that we have to be extra careful. We usually come up to the roof when our parents aren't home, which is often, or else late at night when they're asleep. This place has become the only place where I feel like I can know my own brother. I have never felt afraid as we lie beside each other, murmuring so as not to make too much noise. As Will says, "We wouldn't want to rouse the Ghost."
Sometimes, when we're sure that our parents aren't home and the neighbors aren't paying attention, we climb around in the pine tree that bows against the house on the farthest corner, over the living room, its branches thick enough to hold us as our bare feet sting from splinters and sap.
Even as I'm living it, something feels important about this day in particular. We're climbing around in the tree, hopping back and forth between its thick branches and the hot roof, when it occurs to me that I never feel too close to the edge, even with my brother right behind me.
"Willie," I say, turning around to face him. "It's too hot up here. Let's go swimming again."
"Don't call me that," he says. "I'm not a kid."
Will, Willie, William--our father's name. But the one thing
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we all know about Will, the one thing we've known right from the beginning, is that he will never be like our father. Not even close.
Even for a Ghost, our father isn't around much; he works eighteen-hour days. When he is home, he spends most of his time locked in his office. I notice him mostly late at night, when I'm not sure if I'm asleep yet, and the murmur of his voice dictating psych reports filters up through my bedroom radiator. But always he is white, white, white: he has fine, grayish white hair that puffs along a tired ashen face and deep-set white eyeballs. He is wise and disappointed and so much older than he ought to be.
When I was a little girl, still in single digits, I'd sit on his lap in my pajamas and sip watery hot chocolate while he smoked a Marlboro; picked tobacco from his beard, which is full and also white--although he's no Santa; and held a flabby arm across my belly. We used to have an easygoing relationship that made me feel so loved, so precious to him, it seemed impossible that anything could ever change.
Despite all the golfing, which he does on the weekends, my father has always been out of shape, too much fat accumulated over muscles that have long since softened from his days as a college football hero. When I was a little girl, this didn't keep him from being godlike.
The Ghost is a psychiatrist. He calls himself a masseuse of the soul. His clients, stretched over a long career, number in the thousands. His ability to sympathize with strangers, to help them solve all their problems, has made him a wealthy man. So how is it fair that, within his own home, he became
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mostly quiet and unsympathetic? I know he is kind and loving and gentle. He spends his days chin-deep in other people's trauma, and you can tell it has hollowed him, made him brittle from endless days of drinking too much coffee while he sits in an overstuffed chair, listening.
For so many years I was his little girl. "What are you doing today?" I used to ask, peeling his grapefruit for him. All day after he'd gone, I used to sniff my hands and reconstruct the memory. I missed him constantly. Even when I was ten, I would still fit like a bundle on his lap, my toes barely touching the floor.
He leans his head back and squints at the ceiling. "Let's see, Kathryn." My father is the only person who doesn't call me Katie. "I'm at my office until noon, and then I'm having lunch with your mother."
"Can I come?"
"No. You'll be in school."
"Tuesday I go to the dentist. Can I come then?" And I burrow my head into the folds of his sweater to remind him that, wherever he goes, he belongs to me.
"Tuesday I'm in court all day."
"But Dad ..."
"We'll see." He winks and touches a tar-stained fingertip to my nose. "Maybe I'll finish up early." He coughs, rearranging the contents of his chest, leaning away from the ashtray. I pat him on the back. "Cough it up, Dad. You have to stop smoking."
...
renee2010