Breathless

  breathless

  jessica warman

  Walker & Company New York

  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

  Table of Contents

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Part Two

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Part Three

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part Four

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Epilogue

  Ten Years Later

  Acknowledgments

  A Conversation with Jessica Warman

  Praise for Breathless

  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 outsides 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 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.”

  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.”

  • • •

  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 ponytail, 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.

  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 tog
ether 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!”

  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.

  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 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 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 to go to school. Finally, maybe a week later, our house keeper 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, 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.”