A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me (46 page)

“I'll see her again soon,” he whispered to me.

Margaret was standing a few feet away. I avoided looking at her.

Going to see my dad was a stranger experience. He looked better than Grandpa, but he was farther along. He'd never stopped hallucinating bugs and ninjas. Dr. Barton told me it was something called viral dementia. I thought the more likely culprit was chronic drug abuse, but it didn't really make any difference to me what was causing it.

Now, in the hospital, Dad was hallucinating other things.

“Frank tells me you're going to get a scholarship,” he'd say when I came to visit him. “You've got a straight-A average. Things are going to be all right for you.”

None of which was true, but I didn't see the point in getting into it with him.

“Sure, Dad,” I'd say. “Everything's great.”

Then he'd hold my hand and cry. Sometimes he'd bring up his dead mother. I thought it was nice, in a way, that he and Grandpa were on the same page for a change.

*   *   *

I still spent the odd weekend in Ballard, staying with Ryan and his mom, sleeping on the floor. Like Brandon, Ryan had developed a whole new scene—a whole new group of friends and new interests. He'd started doing a little light dealing late in his junior year, and by senior year we were spending a lot of time sitting in unfamiliar basements while he got high with people I'd never met before, and a few that I had. Ryan had started hanging out with this kid Wendell we knew from Mr. Fields's class. Wendell was a skinny little dude with curly blond hair, big features, and baggy eyes. He played bass and smoked his body weight in pot every week—and he knew a lot of dealers and users in the white trash north end drug scene. So one day while we were all sitting around watching TV I asked him if he ever heard anything about Eddie, and Wendell said yeah, he'd just heard something about Eddie recently, as a matter of fact.

“Really?” I said. “What'd you hear?”

“Heard he's dead, man,” Wendell said. “Heard he overdosed on coke a few weeks ago, up in some squat in Shoreline.”

Ryan looked at Wendell, then looked at me, then punched Wendell in the shoulder.

“Ow! The hell?” Wendell demanded, rubbing his arm.

“What'd you tell him like that for?” Ryan said. “You know they were friends back in Mr. Fields's class.”

“Oh,” Wendell said. “Yeah. I … sorry. I kind of forgot.”

“Jesus,” Ryan said. “I hope you get some bad news like that someday. Asshole. Jason, you okay?”

“Huh?” I said. “Yeah. Sure. Fine.”

I hung around for an hour or so, then said my goodbyes and headed back toward Capitol Hill. I decided to walk instead of taking the bus. I walked the railroad tracks, from Salmon Bay to Fremont. I stopped on the way and punched the side of an old warehouse until my right hand was bleeding and I couldn't make a fist.

And maybe it was the weather or something, because it was just a few weeks later that Brandon called me at home and told me Marti had been trying to get in touch with me all day.

“I was visiting my grandpa,” I said. “What's going on?”

“It's Alexis,” Brandon said. “She … Listen, Jason, the thing is, she shot herself yesterday.”

I felt it go through me, but it didn't stick. She'd shot herself. She might not be—

“Is she okay?” I asked. “I mean—”

“She's gone, Jason. She died.”

I took a few deep breaths.

“Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”

“Call Marti,” he said. “She needs to hear from you.”

“Okay,” I said.

I hung up the phone. I was alone in my room. And I was doing okay, except that it just seemed like too much. It was too much.

“Too much,” I started saying, over and over again. “Too much, oh, Jesus, too much.”

The words became sobs, and I tried to get up from my bed and walk, but my legs were broken by the words, and then I was just kneeling next to my bed, like a little kid saying his prayers, except all I was doing was sobbing and gasping and saying, “Too much. Oh, no, no—too much…”

*   *   *

Marti told me the story a few days later, over the phone. Alexis had been living with her new boyfriend, an older guy named Chris. They were both students at Shoreline Community College, where Alexis was getting her GED. I'd spoken to her a few months ago, and she'd sounded really happy. Marti said it was just a thing—just one of those things Alexis did sometimes. Chris had a single-shot .22 caliber rifle in his closet, and while he was at work Alexis took it out, braced the barrel against her collarbone, and pulled the trigger.

“Her collarbone?” I said.

“Yeah,” Marti said. “It bounced off the bone, traveled at a downward angle, and hit her pulmonary artery. And she died.”

I could picture it then. Alexis and her cries for help. Knife cuts to her stomach. A bottle of aspirin. A small-caliber bullet high on her chest—away from her vital organs. But .22s are dangerous precisely because they bounce. It must have been such a surprise, I thought, as she collapsed onto the floor and bled to death. It would only have taken a few seconds.

“So she didn't mean to,” I said.

“I don't know,” Marti said. “I thought that, too. But she was wearing her pearls. They were special to her. Like maybe she expected someone to find her.”

“Her pearls?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Marti said. “Her mom asked me to wash the blood off them. So Alexis could be buried in them.”

I didn't have anything to say to that one.

The funeral was just for family, and a few close friends like Marti. The memorial service was a week later, and that one was general admission. I went with Marti and Brandon and a few hundred other people: people from the church Alexis hadn't been to in years and from her parents' circle of friends. Extended family. Her brother. And a bunch of us students from Garfield.

I cried for Alexis, like I hadn't cried for my dad, Billy, Scotty, or Eddie. Why I could cry for a teenage girl who'd basically killed herself by accident, when I couldn't cry for all these other people who'd so desperately wanted to live, was beyond me. Maybe I was really crying for myself. I didn't know. I didn't understand anything anymore.

*   *   *

Dad wasn't technically in hospice care yet so he still came home sometimes. I liked it better when he was in the hospital, but I wasn't willing to admit that to myself or anyone else, so I took care of him as best I could when he was around. I kept him from leaving the house in the middle of the night when he said people were coming to get him. I kept lying to him about bug-bombing the house when he was in the hospital. I just kept going. I didn't see any choice in the matter.

I tried to do better—in school, and with the house. Frank's concerns were starting to make an impression on me, and I knew I had to keep my shit together at least enough to graduate. It wasn't easy. I had dozens of absences in some of my classes, and there were new policies in place that required my teachers to fail me based on my attendance record alone. The policies were being tested this year. They'd be mandatory next year. I negotiated with my teachers individually to get them to give me passing grades.

“You shouldn't go to Evergreen,” Dad said one day. “You should go to community college.”

“I need to go to a four-year college,” I said. “Community colleges don't have the kind of financial aid I'll need. Or dorms.”

“You shouldn't go to Evergreen,” he said. “I took care of you. You should take care of me.”

“What?” I said.

“If you leave, they'll put me in hospice, at Swedish,” he said.

“But—what about my grades, and my scholarship and all that? How good everything's going to be for me?”

“You owe me,” he said.

“Okay, Dad. I'll think about it.”

I knew he'd forget. Like he forgot about the bugs and everything else.

“You should drop out of school,” he said. “Get your GED. It won't be long now. Just stay here and take care of me.”

“Okay, Dad.”

“I need you home,” he said.

“Okay,” I said.

But I kept going to school. I kept trying.

Then one day I came home and found my dad on his hands and knees on the kitchen floor, in a giant pool of his own blood.

 

73

I had to wait at least six months to get tested. I tried not to think about it. When I couldn't help thinking about it, I reminded myself of everything I knew to be true; the blood he'd had on his clothes was bright red from exposure to the air, and tacky to the touch—well below body temperature—and the virus doesn't survive well in those conditions. Sometimes I thought about why I'd done it, but I knew the answer to that question. I'd done it because it was what Han Solo would do. Not in the sense that he jumped heedlessly into dangerous situations, but because he was a complicated guy. If he was going to commit suicide, he'd figure out a way to make it look like an accident.

I kept going through the motions of Frank's plan, in case I lived. I took the SATs, though I did it on two hours of sleep. I went through a lengthy appeals process with the financial aid office after they processed my application, because their rules said it was scientifically impossible for two people to live on what my dad and I took in during the prior year. Or something to that effect. I had to show them Dad's bank records and all our food stamps and medical coupons and SSI stuff before they'd believe me.

Dad spent more time in the hospital. Grandpa was discharged and went back to Camano Island. I graduated; I walked with one of my school acquaintances, from Graphics class. Sometimes I worried about what was going to happen to me. Other times I felt like I'd already been killed, and I just didn't know it yet.

Frank got me a summer job as a laborer for a construction contractor he knew. The contractor would take me out to places that had been forests five years earlier—places with names like Bear Creek and Beaver Lake—and drop me at a construction site in the middle of a thousand acres of bare earth, dotted here and there with the skeletons of four-thousand-square-foot houses that were made entirely out of two-by-fours and chipboard. On hot days, the wind scoured topsoil into a brown dust that covered everything. On rainy days, the earth collapsed into the old creek beds and roared downhill toward the nearest lake in a frothing brown and white stampede of mud and rocks. Rain or shine, the contractor would drop me off and tell me he'd be back for me in eight hours.

“Start a burn pile and get rid of all that trash and scrap lumber,” he'd say.

He didn't seem to care much what I actually did, which was just as well, since I had no experience with having to work full days. I'd done plenty of task-specific work in my life—chopping firewood or clearing a patch of land—but I'd never had to get up every day and go do something I hated until it was almost bedtime. I found the idea pretty hard to adapt to. I stayed home one day out of every five. The contractor didn't seem to mind that either. I didn't realize until later that he'd probably only hired me on as a favor to Frank, and that a day I stayed home was probably just a day he didn't have to pay me six dollars an hour for busywork.

I hardly ever saw Brandon or Ryan, but Frank and I still saw each other around the house when he came to clean. He still talked to me about my future, and he started to give me more advice.

“Listen,” he'd say. “Your dad will be gone soon. And you're going to be tempted to believe that everything that happens now has some kind of special meaning, because it's going to be the last time. The last argument, or the last hug. Whatever happened with you and your dad happened over the course of the last sixteen years. This part is just like a period at the end of a sentence. It's grammatically necessary, but it doesn't really mean very much by itself. Don't fall into the trap of believing it does. Your job during this part is just to get out of this with as little damage to your mind and soul as possible. It's what your father would want.”

“No it's not,” I said. “He told me I shouldn't go to college.”

“That's his fear talking,” Frank said.

 

74

I got into Evergreen, and I got a financial aid package that would cover my bills, but I still couldn't go. Even for someone with no income and no assets, the minimum student contribution was $1,500. Financial aid disbursals and tuition due dates were aligned in such a way that I needed to be able to front the cash for my first quarter on my own. That included rent, tuition, and the price of books. Between Aid for Families with Dependent Children and SSI, our household income for the year was about $6,000. My summer job added another $600 or so to the mix, but there was just no way I could come up with $1,500 on my own.

Frank stepped up again, like he'd been doing for months. He never told me about everything he was doing behind the scenes, but I gathered from things the admissions people said that he'd called people at Evergreen and gotten them to take my applications after their due dates. He'd wrangled a financial aid package for me and gotten me a job, and he'd cosigned a checking account for me at Sea-First Bank. He'd taken me to the Department of Licensing so I could get my first-ever photo identification. And now, when I told him about the financial shortfall over the phone, he said, “Jason, I'd be extremely grateful if you would take some money from me, just to get you across the finish line here.”

“No,” I said.

“I understand it's hard.”

“No,” I said. “It's not hard. It's easy. That's why I'm not going to do it. My whole life, I've watched my dad do things the easy way. Make the easy choices. He takes. He takes anything anyone offers him. I don't want to start off doing the same thing.”