Nature of Jade (2 page)

Finally, the boy stands straight again. Arches his back to stretch. I realize I have just done the same, as if I can feel the weight of that backpack. You pass a bunch of people in a day--people in their cars, in the grocery store, waiting for their coffee at an espresso stand. You look at apartment buildings and streets, the comings and goings, elevators crawling up and down, and each person has their own story going on right then, with its cast of characters; they've got their own frustrations and their happiness and the things they're looking forward to and dreading. And sometimes you wonder if you've crossed paths with any of them before without knowing it, or will one day cross their path again. But sometimes, too, you have this little feeling of knowing, this fuzzy, gnawing sense that someone will become a major something in your life. You just know that theirs will be a life you will enter and become part of. I feel that sense, that knowing, when I look at this boy and this baby. It is a sense of the significant.

He stands and the baby does something that makes me laugh. He grabs a chunk of the boy's hair in each of his hands, yanks the boy's head back. Man, that has to hurt. Oh, ouch. But the baby thinks it is a real crack-up, and starts to laugh. He puts his open mouth down to the boy's head in some baby version of a kiss.

The boy's head is tilted to the sky. He reaches his arms back and unclenches the baby's fingers from his hair. But once he is free, he keeps his chin pointed up, just keeps staring up above. He watches the backlit cotton candy clouds in a lava-lamp sky, and it is then I am sure this is a story I'll be part of.

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CHAPTER TWO

In the animal world, sisters are frequently caretakers. Wolf sisters become babysitters when their parents leave to find food. Sister acorn woodpeckers take care of their siblings from birth, even giving up their first year of adult freedom to stay behind in the nest and look after them . . .

--Dr. Jerome R. Clade, The Fundamentals of Animal Behavior

You are wondering about the medicine I take, so let's just get that part out of the way so you don't think I'm dying or something. I'm going to describe it logically, but there's really nothing logical about it. My illness is like instinct gone awry, and there's not too much sense you can make of that.

So, number one: When I was fourteen, my grandmother died. If you want to know the truth, she wasn't even a particularly nice person, which you can tell by the fact that we called her Grandmother Barbara and not the more cozy things you call the relatives you like, such as Granny, Nana, Grams, et cetera. Grandmother Barbara would give you horrible clothes for presents and then ask why you weren't wearing them the next time you saw her. She was impatient with Oliver when he was little, wore a nuclear cloud of perfume, and hugged like she wished she could do it without touching. Once I caught her snooping in my room during a visit, looking for evidence of my rampant sex life or my hidden stash of drugs and alcohol, I 12

guess. God, I still wore Hello Kitty underwear at the time.

She was also the kind of relative that had a bizarre, inexplicable obsession about your romantic success. Starting somewhere around the age of five, up until the last visit I had with her, our conversations went like this:

Me: So, lately, school's been great and I've been getting straight A's and I'm the vice president of Key Club and a member of the Honor Society and do ten hours of community service a week and have discovered a cure for cancer and successfully surgically implanted the kidney of a guppy into a human and . . .

Grandmother Barbara: Do you have a boyfriend?

Still, she was my grandmother, and she was dead. She'd had a heart attack. She had been overcome with this shooting pain down her chest and arm--she told my father on the phone before he called the ambulance--and that was that. Alive; not alive. There was a funeral and this box she was supposedly in, this ground. Her body was there in the dirt, the same body that walked around and snooped in my stuff and stunk of Chanel. See, it suddenly struck me that there was such a thing as dead, and all of the ways one could get dead. I'd wake up in the night and think about it and become so frightened at the idea that I wasn't going to be here one day that I could barely breathe.

Then, number two: A few months later, my parents went away on a trip. Hawaii. Second honeymoon, because they were fighting too much after it had been decided that we were moving from Sering Island, which Mom loved, to the city, which she already hated. She was pissed and he was trying to buy her good mood with a swim-up bar and a couple cans of 13

macadamia nuts and "memories to last a lifetime." Or so the hotel brochure said.

My mom was nervous about leaving--she wrote pages of instructions for my aunt who was staying with us, and just before they left for the airport I caught Mom in the kitchen. She was holding a paper lunch bag up to her mouth.

"Mom?"

I startled her. The bag came down. "Jade," she said, as if I'd caught her at something. "What are you doing?"

"Planes. I'm just. Having jitters. About. Flying. It's supposed to help. Breathing in a bag." She had gotten an electric starter-tan, but her face was pale. My dad walked in then.

"Nancy. We're going to be late."

"I'm coming."

"What are you doing?" Dad looked crisp, competent. He had a golf shirt on, tucked into khakis, a travel bag over his shoulder.

"Nothing," she said. She put the bag on the counter.

"Thousands of people fly every day," he said. "I, for one, don't want to miss the plane."

Hugs good-bye, off they went. My aunt looked slightly lost at first, clapped her hands together and said, "Well! Here we are!" with too much cheer and a dose of desperation. She's got that nervous thing around kids that childless people have. Like if they turn their backs, you're going to blow something up. And they're not sure quite what to say to you--either they ask what you're learning in school, or they talk about the economy.

The evening was going along fine. Aunt Beth made macaroni and cheese, with very little butter because she was on a diet,

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so it wasn't so great, but oh, well. We watched a video she brought over, some National Geographic thing about pyramids, which Oliver loved but I was about snoozing through. I decided to go to bed but I wanted to get a snack first, so I walked into the kitchen. I don't know what had been going on in my subconscious for the last few hours, but here's what happened: I see the bag on the counter. It has my mother's lipstick around the edges. Something about that blown-up bag makes me think of those oxygen masks that pop down from the ceiling of airplanes. I think about those airplanes that crashed into the World Trade Center, the hijackers, and my parents on an airplane. I think of those people on that burning plane, and the ones jumping out of the buildings, and suddenly I get this sharpness in my chest, like my grandmother had, and I can't breathe. I literally can't catch my breath, and I feel like I'm in some really small box I've got to get out of or I'm gonna die, and there's no way out of the box.

I clutch the counter. I almost feel like I could throw up, because suddenly I'm hot and clammy and lightheaded. I can't really be dying, right? Fourteen-year-olds don't have heart attacks, but even though I'm telling myself this, my body isn't listening, because I need out of this box and there is no out and I'm gonna die.

I'm gasping and I don't even have enough air to cry out, same as the time in second grade when I landed hard on my back after falling off the jungle gym. I am aware, too aware, of my heartbeat, and then Oliver comes in. I'm panicking, shit, because I can't breathe, and Oliver must see this in my eyes and he goes and runs and gets Aunt Beth. I hear him call her name, but it's really far off, and I'm in this other world where there's

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only this fear and this pain in my chest and no air and this feeling of Need Out!

"Jade? Jade, are you choking?" Aunt Beth is there, and she takes hold of my shoulders and I don't want her to touch me, but on the other hand I want her to put her arms around me and make me breathe again. "Water," she says, and lets me go. "Get a glass of water, Oliver."

I am so cold and hot and clammy all at the same time, that pass-out feeling. But instead of passing out, I throw up. Right on the kitchen floor, and I'm sorry for the gory details. I hate throwing up. No one likes it, I know, but I detest it, and that feeling of choking is the worst. My heart is beating a million miles an hour, and I'm shaking and Aunt Beth gets me to the couch to sit down. The pyramid show is still going on, I remember that.

Oliver stands there looking worried and holding a glass of water.

"It was that macaroni and cheese," Aunt Beth says. Only it wasn't.

Because it kept happening. Three years later, it still happens sometimes. The medicine helps it happen less. That week, though, I succeeded in doing two things--I convinced everyone that I was nuts, and I convinced Aunt Beth never to have children.

My parents came home early from their trip. My father seemed pissed, my mother, sort of relieved. They took me to a doctor, who found nothing wrong. They took me again and again, because I knew something was wrong. They kept saying I was fine, but, excuse me, I know when my own body isn't acting like it should. I felt the symptoms in my heart, my chest, this 16

shortness of breath. Maybe it was a cardiac problem. I could have a hole in my heart or a murmur, whatever that was, or something. I know what I felt. And what I felt was a real, physical happening.

I only threw up that one time, but the other feelings kept coming, at night in bed, and in school--

God, once right during PE. I held onto the gym wall feeling like I was going to pass out, sweat running down my face and the jocks staring at me and then going right on playing basketball.

The male teacher (twit) thought I had cramps and sent me to the nurse's room. Ms. Sandstrom, she's the one who called my mom and told her I had what she thought was a panic attack. She said we should see a psychologist. Actually, she said this after about my sixth or seventh visit to the nurse's room. See, I kept avoiding the gym, in particular, because I thought it would keep happening there since it happened there once, so Ms. Sandstrom was seeing a lot of me. This same thing had happened to Ms. Sandstrom, she told me, when she first moved away from home and went to college. Panic disorder. Anxiety. She had her first attack in the campus dining hall and didn't go back there for five months.

I saw a psychologist, and then also a psychiatrist, who I only visit now if my medication seems messed up. I see the psychologist every two to four weeks, depending on how things are going. I really like the guy I have now, Abe, which is what I'm supposed to call him. His last name is Break hart, so you can understand the first-name-basis insistence. For a guy that's supposed to be fixing people, it seems like a bad omen. The psychiatrist finally put me on medicine because these episodes were making my life hell. I was sure I was dying, only no one knew it yet except me.

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Nothing made sense. I tried to logic myself out of it, not to have the thoughts, but it wasn't like it was always thoughts = attack anyway. Sometimes it was more like attack = thoughts. Once I had attacks, I started worrying about getting more. After I had the first episode, I started listening hyper-carefully to see if it was going to happen again. Was my chest tight? Did I feel short of breath? Could I feel my heart beating? Was I about to lose all control in public? Was I going to die after all, and were all those people who said I wasn't going to feel horrible that they were wrong? Your body does all kinds of things that are disturbing when you start really paying attention, believe me.

And I had no idea when it might kick into gear. It wasn't like I panicked every time I was somewhere high up, or in an enclosed space, or during a storm. It could be none of those things, or all of them. I could (can) panic in a car, a new situation, any time a person feels a twinge of nerves. It's a twisted version of Green Eggs and Ham: I could panic in a train! I could panic on a plane! I could panic on the stairs--I could panic anywhere!

I didn't even want to go to school, because what if it happened there again? In class or something, when we were taking a test? How many cramps can you have? What if I threw up during an assembly, with the whole school there? People who have these panic attacks sometimes have

"social anxiety," which means, basically, you don't want to go out in the world. But I think sometimes they've got their cause and effect screwed up. Would you want to get on a bus if you thought your body might do this? Would you want to be in a crowd of people? Sitting in Math?

That kind of fear, that kind of physical out-of-control is . . . well, private.

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Anyway, I am not my illness. "Girl with Anxiety," "Trauma of the Week"--no. I hate stuff like that. Everyone, everyone, has their issue. But the one thing my illness did make me realize is how necessary it is to ignore the dangers of living in order to live. And how much trouble you can get into if you can't. We all have to get up every morning and go outside and pretend we aren't going to die. We've got to get totally involved with what we're going to wear that day, and how pissed we are that another car cut us off, and how we wish we were in better shape, so we don't have to think about how little any of that really matters. Or so we don't think about how we're just vulnerable specks trying to survive on a violent, tumultuous planet, at the mercy of hurricanes and volcanoes and asteroids and terrorists and disease and a million other things. We concentrate on having little thoughts so we don't have BIG THOUGHTS. It's like those days when you've got a really bad pimple but you still have to go to school. You've got to convince yourself it's not so bad just so you can leave the house and actually talk to people face-to-face.

You've got to ignore the one big truth--life is fatal.

I hurry home after school the day after I see the red-jacket boy. I want to see if he and the baby will reappear. I drop my backpack at the foot of the stairs as I come in, head up to my room.