I pause, contemplating as I tap my fingers on the desk. “Or maybe I’ll be able to backtrack through my thoughts and figure out why he did it.” I inhale and then exhale loudly as my pulse begins to thrash. “And if you’re not me and you’re watching these, then you’re probably wondering who he is, but I’m not sure if I’m ready to say his name yet. Hopefully I’ll get there. One day—someday, but who knows… maybe I’ll always be as clueless and as lost as I am now.”
I leave it at that and turn the computer off, wondering how long I’m going to continue this pointless charade, this time filler, because right now that’s how it feels. I shove the chair away and head out of my room. It takes fifteen steps to reach the end of the hall, then another ten to get me to the table. They’re each taken at a consistent pace and with even lengths. If I were filming right now, my steps would be smooth and perfect, steady as a rock.
“Good morning, my beautiful girl,” my mother singsongs as she whisks around the kitchen, moving from the stove to the fridge, then to the cupboard. She’s making cookies, and the air smells like cinnamon and nutmeg, and it reminds me of my childhood when my dad and I would sit at the table, waiting to stuff our mouths with sugar. But he’s not here anymore and instead Daniel, my stepfather, is sitting at the table. He’s not waiting for the cookies. In fact he hates sugar and loves healthy food, mostly eating stuff that looks like rabbit food.
“Good morning, Nova. It’s so good to have you back.” He has on a suit and tie, and he’s drinking grapefruit juice and eating dry toast. They’ve been married for three years, and he’s not a bad guy. He’s always taken care of my mom and me, but he’s very plain, orderly, and somewhat boring. He could never replace my dad’s spontaneous, adventurous, down-to-earth personality.
I plop down in the chair and rest my arms on the kitchen table. “Good morning.”
My mom takes a bowl out of the cupboard and turns to me with a worried look on her face. “Nova, sweetie, I want to make sure you’re okay… with being home. We can get you into therapy here, if you need it, and you’re still taking your medication, right?”
“Yes mom, I’m still taking my medication,” I reply with a sigh and lower my head onto my arms and shut my eyes. I’ve been on antianxiety medication for a while now. I’m not sure if it really does anything or not, but the therapist prescribed it to me so I take it. “I take them every morning, but I stopped going to therapy back in December, because it doesn’t do anything but waste time.” Because no matter that, they always want me to talk about what I saw that morning—what I did and why I did it—and I can’t even think about it, let only talk about it.
“Yeah, I know, honey, but things are different when you’re here,” she says quietly.
I remember the hell I put her through before I left. The lack of sleep, the crying… cutting my wrist open. But that’s in the past now. I don’t cry as much, and my wrist has healed.
“I’m fine, Mom.” I open my eyes, sit back up, and overlap my fingers in front of me. “So please, pretty please, with a cherry on top and icing and candy corn, would you please stop asking?”
“You sound just like your father… everything had to be referenced to sugar,” she remarks with a frown as she sets the bowl down on the counter. In a lot of ways she looks like me: long brown hair, a thin frame, and a sprinkle of freckles on her nose. But her blue eyes are a lot brighter than mine, to the point where they almost sparkle. “Honey, I know you keep saying that you’re fine, but you look so sad… and I know you were doing okay at school, but you’re back here now, and everything that happened is right across the street.” She opens a drawer and selects a large wooden spoon, before bumping the drawer shut with her hip. “I just don’t want the memories to get to you now that you’re home and so close to… everything.”
I stare at my reflection in the stainless-steel microwave. It’s not the clearest. In fact, my face looks a little distorted and warped, like I’m looking into a funhouse mirror, my own face nearly a stranger. But if I tilt sideways just a little, I almost look normal, like my old self. “I’m fine,” I repeat, observing how blank my expression looks when I say it. “Memories are just memories.” Really, it doesn’t matter what they are, because I can’t see the parts that I know will rip my heart back open: the last few steps leading up to Landon’s finality and the soundless moments afterward, before I cracked apart. I worked hard to stitch my heart back up after it was torn open, even if I hadn’t done it neatly.
“Nova.” She sighs as she starts mixing the cookie batter. “You can’t just try to forget without dealing with it first. It’s unhealthy.”
“Forgetting is dealing with it.” I grab an apple from a basket on the table, no longer wanting to talk about it because it’s in the past, where it belongs.
“Nova, honey,” she says sadly. She’s always tried to get me to talk about that day. But what she doesn’t get is that I can’t remember, even if I really tried, which I never will. It’s like my brain’s developed it’s own brain and it won’t allow those thoughts out, because once they’re out, they’re real. And I don’t want them to be real—I don’t want to remember him like that. Or me.
I push up from the chair, cutting her off. “I think I’m going to hang out next to the pool today, and Delilah will probably be over in a bit.”
“If that’s what you want.” My mom smiles halfheartedly at me, wanting to say more, but fearing what it’ll do to me. I don’t blame her, either. She’s the one who found me on the bathroom floor, but she thinks it’s more than it was. I was just trying to find out what he felt like—what was going on inside of him when he decided to go through with it.
I nod, grab a can of soda out of the fridge, and give her a hug before I head for the sliding glass door. “That’s what I want.”
She swallows hard, looking like she might cry because she thinks she’s lost her daughter. “Well, if you need me, I’m here.” She turns back to her bowl.
She’s been saying that to me since I was thirteen, ever since I watched my dad die. I’ve never taken her up on the offer, even though we’ve always had a good relationship. Talking about death with her—at all—doesn’t work for me. At this point in my life, I couldn’t talk to her about it even if I wanted to. I have my silence now, which is my healing, my escape, my sanctuary. Without it, I’d hear the noises of that morning, see the bleeding images, and feel the crushing pain connected to them. If I saw them, then I’d finally have to accept that Landon’s gone.
* * *
I don’t like unknown places. They make me anxious and I have trouble thinking—breathing. One of the therapists I first saw diagnosed me with obsessive-compulsive disorder. I’m not sure if he was right, though, because he moved out of town not too long after. I was left with a therapist in training, so to speak, and he decided that I was just depressed and had anxiety, hence the antianxiety medication for the last year and three months.
The unfamiliarity of the backyard disrupts my counting, and it takes me forever to get to the pool. By the time I arrive at the lawn chair, I know how many steps it took me to get here, how many seconds it took me to sit down, and how many more seconds it took for Delilah to arrive and then take a seat beside me. I know how many rocks are on the path leading to the porch—twenty-two—how many branches are on the tree shielding the sunlight from us—seventy-eight. The only thing I don’t know is how many seconds, hours, years, decades, it will take before I can let go of the goddamn self-induced numbness. Until then I’ll count, focus on numbers instead of the feelings always floating inside me, the ones linked to images immersed just beneath the surface.
Delilah and I lie in lawn chairs in the middle of my backyard with the pool behind us and the sun bearing down on us as we tan in our swimsuits. She’s been my best friend for the past year or so. Our sudden friendship was strange, because we’d gone to high school together but never really talked. She and I were in different social circles and I had Landon. But after it happened… after he died… I had no one, and the last few weeks of high school were torture. Then I met her, and she was nice and she didn’t look at me like I was about to shatter. We hit it off, and honestly, I have no idea what I’d do without her now. She’s been there for me, she shows me how to have fun, and she reminds me that life still exists in the world, even if it’s brief.
“Good God, has it always been this hot here?” Delilah fans her face with her hand as she yawns. “I remember it being colder.”
“I think so.” I pick up a cup of iced tea on the table between us and prop up on my elbow to take a sip. “We could go in,” I suggest, setting my glass down. I turn it in a circle until it’s perfectly in place on the condensation ring it left behind, and then I wipe the moisture from my lips with the back of my hand and rest my head back against the chair. “We do have air-conditioning.”
Delilah laughs sardonically as she reaches for the sparkly pink flask in her bag. “Yeah, right. Are you kidding me?” She pauses, examining her fiery red nails, then unscrews the lid off the flask. “No offense. I didn’t mean for that to sound rude, but your mom and dad are a little overwhelming.” She takes a swig from the flask and holds it out in my direction.
“Stepdad,” I correct absentmindedly. I wrap my lips around the top of the flask and take a tiny swallow, then hand it back to her and close my eyes. “And they’re just lonely. I’m the only child and I’ve been gone for almost a year.”
She laughs again, but it’s breezier than before. “They’re seriously the most overbearing parents I know. They call you every day at school and text you a thousand times.” She puts the flask back into her bag.
“They just worry about me.” They didn’t use to. My mom was really carefree before my dad died, and then she got concerned about how his death and seeing it affected me. Then Landon died, and now all she does is constantly worry.
“I worry about you, too,” Delilah mumbles. She waits for me to say something, but I don’t—I can’t. Delilah knows about what happened with Landon, but we never really talk about what I saw. And that’s one of the things I like about her—that she doesn’t ask questions.
One… two… three… four… five… breathe… six… seven… eight… breathe… Balling my hands into fists, I fight to calm myself down, but the darkness is ascending inside me, and it will take me over if I let it and drag me down into the memory I won’t remember; my last memory of Landon.
“I have a brilliant idea,” she interrupts my counting. “We could go check out Dylan and Tristan’s new place.”