Lily of the Valley (20 page)

****

As far as I know, three people have been to my mother’s grave since the funeral. My grandmother, who has since stopped, me, and Alana. I took her once when we were an actual couple and she’s come back a few times with me.

She pulls the car up to the street near the grave and we walk to the area where my mom’s tombstone is. Last time I was here, a week ago, I brought flowers. They’re still there, but with the chill in the air, they’re dead. Apparently the grounds crew hasn’t been by to pick them up, so the little stone is almost dwarfed by a bouquet of crunchy near black roses. I reach down to pick them up and Alana takes them from me without speaking.

My mom’s stone is small because we couldn’t afford much. She left us nothing but debt and any savings was put into lawyers for my dad. The state suggested we skip the stone, but thankfully, my grandmother refused. It might be dumb and they might have spelled her name wrong, but I like knowing there’s at least
something
commemorating her existence. The stones that surround hers almost make her memory invisible, which I suppose is some sort of metaphor.

I look at the place where my mom is. I know she’s not
here
, but there’s nowhere else she is anymore. So this has to do.

I sit on the ground across from the stone. Alana brings the flowers to the car, leaving me some privacy. The flowers could wait, but being here is hard. And it’s much harder with someone else. She tried once to comfort me, and I ended up yelling at her. Now, when she comes with me, she keeps her distance.

I try to ignore the name and close my eyes. I wish I had memories of my mother. Memories that didn’t involve her being high out of her fucking head. But there’s only one. The same one I always go back to when I want to remember her well.

I was seven, I think. My first grade class was having a craft fair for the holidays and we were all supposed to invite our parents. I was really excited, because I’d made snowmen out of cotton balls. I guess I must have expected someone else to think cotton ball snowmen were amazing, but so far, no one had bought any. I remember feeling incredibly discouraged.

Looking down the tables, I saw other kids selling their crafts. One girl made barrettes out of paperclips and she’d nearly sold out of them. She’d invited everyone she knew and she had like twenty aunts show up in addition to her parents. My mom was running late and my dad was out of town for work, so I was just sitting with my snowmen, feeling sad.

Heather, the barrette girl, came over to my table and I beamed at her. Maybe she was going to use some of her earnings to buy one of my creations. She just glared, though.

“You’d sell more if you were happy,” she said. “No one wants to talk to you if you’re pouting.” And then she turned back to her table. Marketing tips from a fucking first grader.

My stupid kid heart felt broken, but I tried to do what she said. I smiled and said hello to every single person who came in, but no one would buy my snowmen. By the time the craft fair was wrapping up, everyone else was down to almost nothing, but I still had a full table of cotton ball snowmen. Maybe I’d made too many.

I was ready to cry, but Heather told me people would like me more if I smiled, so I did.

My mom came rushing in with ten minutes left of the stupid fair. She took one look at me and knelt down next to me, taking my hand.

“Baby, what’s wrong?”

“No one wants my snowmen,” I told her and that was it. My mom was here and I could cry. She hugged me close to her and whispered several times that it would be okay. Almost all the other kids and their families were packing up, but my mom grabbed a tray from one of the kids who’d made cookies and loaded it with my snowmen. She left one with me and winked.

“You need to keep one. Someday, when they’re in high demand, you’ll have an original.”

Then my mother, who would later that year lose all semblance of normalcy, took a tray of snowmen around to the other tables and parents and out into the school hallway. She came back just as the fair was ending and the tray was empty. She handed me the ten dollars, all ones and coins, that I’d earned and kissed my forehead.

“Sometimes you just need to know who to ask for help, Jack. But it’s okay to ask.” I had no idea in the first grade how ironic those words were. I was just so fucking happy to have sold all my snowmen. All except one. I carried my last creation proudly out of the school and felt like a hero. I loved my mother so much in that moment.

A few years later, after my home life had slipped off the rails, I overheard my first grade teacher telling another teacher the snowmen story. Even with my mother now out of her mind, I listened, thinking that I still had the greatest mom in the world. Until I heard what the teacher said.

“She went around school begging teachers to give her change for a ten, so he would never know. Then she took the whole tray and dumped those snowmen into the dumpster out back. The poor kid was so happy when she came back. He thought everyone had bought them. I guess it was a nice thought, but after everything that’s happened since, I wonder.”

I walked away and never told anyone about the snowmen. Maybe the teacher was lying. Maybe she was mad at my mom and wanted to make her out to be a bad person. I don’t know. But it changed the path of my life. Because the only good fucking memory of my childhood was like everything else – a façade for the hollowness that filled my world.

I stare at the tombstone now, remembering those stupid snowmen and how my mom told me it was okay to ask for help. Help she never told anyone that she needed.

“I need you, Mom. Goddammit, I fucking need you so bad,” I say and the tears land in the dirt beneath me. “You told me to ask for help. Please, Mom.
Please
help me.”

I don’t hear Alana behind me until she sits and takes my hand. I bury my face in her shoulder and let go, crying about my mom, my dad, Lily… my entire fucking life. I hate being weak. I would rather be angry, but right now, it just fucking hurts like hell. And I want it to stop.

Chapter 21

Alana stays with me all night. She’s worse than the nurses when I had to stay in the psycho ward. She keeps asking if I’m safe, as if when she gets up and goes to the bathroom, I might jump out the window. I don’t have the energy to explain to her that my previous attempt was anything but impulsive. Whenever I talk about it, she gets miserable, and I can’t take it back. So I just promise her that I’m fine.

I’m not
fine. I don’t want to die at this point, but I don’t want to live, which is something Alana can’t comprehend. She thinks they’re the same thing, but they’re not really. Not wanting to live is more of a passive reluctance to trying, whereas wanting to die is definitely an active state. I’m passive. Weak, pathetic, and passive.

“I just want to be whole. Why do I have to exist in so many pieces?” I ask her.

She sighs. “Because life is a shitty fucking lottery. And we drew the shortest fucking straws.”

“She made me think I was worth it to someone. Really, really worth it.”

“You’re worth it to me.”

“We feed off each other. When I fall apart, you pick me up because you know that when the time comes, I’ll do the same for you. That’s not the same as being worth it. She made me believe that I could be something else. Something other than this.”

“Someday, Jack? Someday you’ll realize that
this
is pretty damn amazing. Even with all the cracks.” She smiles sadly at me and we fall asleep. I’m exhausted.

No one tells you about pain. They tell you that it hurts, that sometimes it’s consuming. What they don’t tell you is that it’s not the pain that can kill you. It’s the uncomfortable numbness that follows, the weakness in your body when you realize your lungs may stop taking in air and you just can’t exert enough energy to care. It’s the way taste and color and smell fade from the world and all you’re left with is a sepia print of misery. That’s when the shift starts – the movement from passive to active. I fall asleep, hoping that the morning will bring back the pain. At least the pain is a thing.

****

The morning brings something, that’s for sure. When I wake up, it takes a little bit to remember and my sense of smell is restored. As I breathe in the scent of strawberries, I roll over to embrace Lily, to kiss her, only to see Alana sleeping next to me. My brain is shocked back into reality – and then the numbness returns. It’s over. It’s really over. It hadn’t even fucking started yet.

I have to work and Alana’s in a panic, as if I’m going to kill myself in the kitchen of the café.

“I’ll be back after work. I swear.”

“I’m staying with you for the weekend,” she says.

“Fine. But I need to go to work,” I tell her.

She nods and I change, feeling somehow weird about getting undressed in front of her. It still feels wrong, like I’m cheating on Lily. I laugh, a bitter biting laugh, and Alana looks up at me. I just shake my head. I’m sure she hates Lily, but I can’t. It’s not her fault; it’s mine for thinking that I had the right to want her.

I leave an hour before I need to, because Alana is bugging me. She’s never been suicidal. I kind of don’t understand how, given what she’s been through, but she never has. She’s been depressed and angry and she’s certainly self-destructive, but in all the years I’ve known her, Alana has maintained hope. It’s kind of amazing, but it’s also depressing because I wonder what’s broken in me that makes me incapable of that kind of optimism.

It’s too cold to drive around aimlessly, so I end up at work early. Sandee pours me a coffee, because it’s dead and the morning shift is all still here. Normally I’d offer to relieve the cook, but I don’t feel like it right now. I don’t really feel like
anything
right now, but I try to pretend. I warm my hands on the coffee mug. For as numb as I am, I seem to be able to register temperature just fine. Everything is awash in browns and blacks, like something out of a Wyeth painting, but hot and cold still reach me.

“How are you?” Sandee asks.

It’s funny. I just saw her yesterday. Yesterday, I made the decision to give myself over to Lily. It hasn’t even been twenty-four hours, although it feels like forever. What’s stranger is that Sandee doesn’t know. The customers in the back booth don’t know. My grandmother doesn’t even know. The entire world has ended – and it’s like a secret that only Alana and I share.

It reminds me of the days following my mother’s murder and the funeral. When I went back to school, before I moved here, the teachers all knew, as did a few kids. But the story hadn’t really broken yet. All around me, people were talking about dances and algebra and class rings. It almost made no sense. How could the world be spinning? How could everyone exist so separately from me?

Of course, months later, once the trial started, I would have given everything to go back to that isolation. Because as much as I thought I wanted them to share in my misery when it happened, I quickly discovered that misery is not a shared experience. Instead, it’s what makes other people think that they know you – and it makes you vulnerable. Once the world knows where you’re fragile, it will set out to break you every day. My classmates didn’t feel guilty or sad about my suffering; they embraced it as the anomaly it was and made sure that I knew it made me a freak. Changing schools didn’t help, either. All it took was one Facebook message and the right people on the receiving end.

“Jack?”

I realize Sandee’s been talking. “Sorry, I was just thinking,” I reply.

“Still wondering about love?”

She’s being nice, but the question claws at me. “You got a minute before I punch in? Wanna come outside with me?”

Sandee calls to Mal to watch the front so she can go on break. He yells something back, which is probably a no, but the one table will be fine. I follow her out back. The pallet pile is low today and I sit on it, resting against the wall of the café. Taking out my cigarettes, I borrow Sandee’s lighter.

“I love this girl,” I say.

“Alana?”

I shake my head. “No. Lily. She’s a freshman on my floor. I brought her in here once, but you weren’t on.”

“Well, good for you,” she says and sits next to me on the pallet.

I breathe in from my cigarette and try not to start hyperventilating again now that I’m thinking about it. I mean, I haven’t
stopped
thinking about it, but to put it into words…

“I was ready to tell her last night. And then I found out that she still has a boyfriend.”

“Oh, Jack.” She takes my hand.

“She’s not a bitch, if that’s what you’re thinking. I think it’s complicated. But they have a history. And Sandee… he’s right
for her, in so many ways that I could never be.”

“You don’t know that. These things aren’t always how they seem, you know.”

“In this case, it’s true. She’s just so… good. She’s the kind of girl who deserves it all. She’s the kind of girl who makes me want to believe in something beautiful.”

I close my eyes, inhaling the smoke and trying to feel nothing else. As soon as I close my eyes, I see her. Her blue and green eyes, her nervous smile that’s half frowning, and her stunning body. It isn’t sexual desire that I feel when the images flash across the back of my eyelids; it’s the desire to be the guy I am with her.

I open my eyes and gasp, dropping my cigarette onto my thigh. I could move, but I don’t. I just watch as it burns a hole through my pants and stings like a motherfucker when it comes in contact with my flesh.
Huh. That’s good. You felt it
.

“Sandee, can I tell you something?” I ask as the cigarette rolls onto the pavement.

She hands me another and I thank her. She doesn’t reply, which I assume means I can go ahead.

“When I was senior, I tried to kill myself. Lately, it’s been on my mind again a lot.”

“I
never
want to hear those words again, Jack,” she says and she pulls me into a hug.

It feels weird to be hugged. I don’t get a ton of physical affection and it’s strange to have someone touch me with no sexual intent. It’s so… soft. Not like physically soft, but soft in a way that I can’t explain. My life is hard, my thoughts are hard, and sex is hard. I self-destruct slowly each day. I don’t live for small pleasures. I don’t think about anything beyond, at most, my next practice or show, my work schedule, or exams. The idea of things like next year, graduation, a real job – these are unreal. But when Sandee hugs me, it’s almost like I get a glimpse into what people who see those things feel. As if they comfort one another so that they can keep looking forward. When there is nothing on the horizon, you just stop looking up.