Chapter 31

CHAPTER 31

Relocated to the couch from her bed only minutes ago, Maddy sits in her usual spot by the window facing the backyard, wrapped in a thin, summer-weight blanket, Daisy asleep next to her, drinking tea, herbal because caffeine might be too stimulating. Unstimulated is her MO.

Her mother insists that she be up and out of her bed by ten. Every morning at 9:55, her bedroom door bursts open, scaring her out of a deep sleep. Her mother then flicks on the overhead light, throws open the curtains, lifts the shades, and greets Maddy with an equally bright Good morning! The light and cheer assault her like a series of bomb explosions, like an act of war. Her mother waits, hands on hips, barking encouragement as if she were the Division I coach of Team Maddy, ceasing only after Maddy’s feet touch the floor. Her mother makes the bed while Maddy uses the bathroom to pee, and then physically escorts her limp noodle of a daughter to the living room.

Her mother doesn’t force her to change out of her pajamas right away and sometimes not at all, but Maddy has to shower every day. Her mother read somewhere that evening showers can contribute to getting better sleep, so that’s when Maddy takes them, even though Maddy doesn’t need any help with sleeping at the moment. All she wants to do is sleep. She could probably doze naked on the driveway any time of day or night without a pillow or complaint. But getting consistent slumber is one of the key factors Maddy needs to stay contained within the neat and narrow parameters of normal, and her mother is reading and implementing everything she can to ensure Maddy stays Bubble-Wrapped inside that box.

She stares out the window, tonguing the space where her front tooth used to be. It broke at the gumline, which means, to her mother’s great relief, that she’ll be able to get a crown to replace it before the wedding. She had a root canal two days ago and was given a temporary tooth she can affix into the gap, but much to her mother’s great annoyance, she never bothers to do this.

“Are you sure you don’t want to come?” her mother asks from the kitchen.

Her mother is taking the train into the city to have lunch with Emily. Then they’re going to the bridal shop for Emily’s final gown fitting. The wedding is in nine days.

Maddy still hasn’t seen or been in touch with Emily since that fateful night in Nashville. The morning she got home from Garrison and was finally reunited with her phone, she went to text her, but once inside the Messages app, Maddy was greeted with over a dozen unanswered, frantically desperate, heartbroken, ALL CAPS and punctuated texts from Emily.

Her last message, sent while Maddy was somewhere in the air on her way to Atlanta, read I give up . As Maddy rereads it now, her stomach sinks like a diving bell weighted with the dense shame of what she did, of who she is. Her thumbs hover over her phone screen, paralyzed, still incapable of responding. Even heavier and more consuming than her shame is the fear that she’s lost her sister. She assumes Emily is busy with the projects and celebrations of wrapping up the school year with her first-grade students, and there are probably a million wedding details to attend to with the clock ticking. But still, Emily hasn’t reached out since that night in Nashville. Maybe Emily is done with her. Just like Adam and Sofia and everyone else. Maddy can’t blame her.

“I’m sure,” Maddy says, her voice soft and colored with grief.

“Come on, it will be fun,” says her mother as she walks into the living room

She sits on the edge of the couch next to Maddy, her purse in her lap, awaiting an answer, but it’s a false entreaty. Maddy’s still in pajamas, her teeth and hair not brushed. Her mother would never allow Maddy to leave the house looking like this, and she’s ready to go now. She’s just being polite. She doesn’t genuinely want Maddy to accompany her.

And that’s fine because Maddy doesn’t want to go. It would be the opposite of fun. To be back in New York City, knowing she can’t return to her life there, would feel like an especially cruel torture, like having to see an ex-boyfriend she still pines for but can’t have.

She thinks about Max and wonders where he and Zoe are on the college tour. She thinks about Adam, done now with his second year at Columbia and back at his parents’ house here in Connecticut. Or maybe he’s working as a summer intern for some fancy finance firm in the city. Maybe he’s living there with a new girlfriend. Max and Adam have both moved on, their lives in forward motion, whereas she only moves between her bed and the couch, her life at a dead stop, alive but not really living at all.

“I just want to stay here.”

“Okay,” her mother says, patting the blanket over Maddy’s legs before standing. “I’ll be back before dinner. There are bagels and fruit on the counter and tuna salad in the fridge. Please eat.”

Maddy sips her tea and turns her head toward the window.

“And please don’t just sit here looking out the window all day. You should at least get dressed. It’s nice out. You should take Daisy for a walk.”

Maddy makes no response. Every day, her mother shoulds all over her. Maddy doesn’t blame her, either. She’s doing what any mother would. Maddy hates that she can’t live up to the simplest of life’s expectations. She is nothing in a world that demands she be something.

She should be a college student. She should declare a major. She should find a nice boyfriend. She should go to New York with her mother. She should apologize to Emily.

She should smile more. She should eat something. She should lose a few pounds. She should get dressed and take her dog for a walk.

She will do none of these things. A tortured cry heaves inside her chest, silent and invisible to her mother, grieving her absolute failure as a human being.

She should kill herself.

Oblivious to Maddy’s internal script, her mother leaves the room. She’s done with Maddy, too.

“I’ll send you photos of her in her dress,” her mother calls out from the front foyer.

After hearing the front door close, Maddy exhales, ensconced in the quiet desolation of an empty house. She listens to the chattering of birds outside the window, the dishwasher running, and Daisy’s snoring. While it would appear to anyone observing her that she’s looking out the window, that she’s watching the robin perched on a high branch of the magnolia tree, the squirrel scampering across the green lawn, the wispy white clouds drifting across a canvas of late May sky, she sees none of this. The window is but a picture frame for her thoughts, a projection screen for her cinematic daydreams, playing out various renditions of her suicide.

She never dwells long on the one where she shoots herself. To begin with, her family doesn’t own a gun, and she wouldn’t know where to buy one. Walmart maybe? But while she believes in a person’s right to take her own life, she doesn’t believe in gun violence or gun culture and wouldn’t want her purchase to contribute to the gun manufacturer’s profit line. Plus shooting herself, presumably in the head, would be too gruesome. Her mother would be upset about the mess. Every time she imagines pulling the trigger, she shudders and quickly switches to another scenario.

She pictures wearing cargo pants and a winter coat, their pockets filled with rocks. She actually looks through the window now and imagines herself walking past the magnolia tree, beyond the evenly trimmed row of hedges, and into the woods beyond their yard. She then walks into a river, wide and over her head in the middle, and sinks to the bottom, à la Virginia Woolf. The rocks make her too heavy to swim up to the surface even if she changes her mind, but she never does. She sits still at the bottom, her eyes closed as her lungs fill with water instead of air, a peaceful smile on her calm face as she loses consciousness. She notices her reflection in the glass, her mouth mirroring the smile in her daydream.

But it’s pure fantasy because there is no river in the woods beyond the hedges. The nearest body of water is probably the ocean, but that’s driving distance away, not walkable, and she doesn’t have a car. She could Uber. But what if she’s not alone at the beach? What if someone is dog walking or sunbathing or metal detecting, and that person tries to stop or save her? That one feels problematic.

She could jump off something. She watches a montage of her leaping off the roof of the house, a bridge, a freeway overpass, the balcony of a hotel room on a high floor. Her heart speeds up and her hands go sweaty as she imagines each scenario. There’s just no way. She’s afraid of heights.

She takes a clearing breath to relax her panicked heart and changes the daydreaming channel to a more soothing show. Already comfortable with breaking the flesh of her arms with a steel blade and the sight of blood, she imagines slicing both of her wrists, her blood emptying fast as she lies down in her bed and goes to sleep. This daydream is a favorite, and she plays it obsessively and on repeat, like a new Taylor Swift song.

She imagines swallowing a bottle’s worth of her mother’s Ambien, drawing a hot bubble bath, and going to sleep in the tub. She could even light some candles. Everyone would think it was an accident, a spa day gone tragically wrong, until the autopsy report revealed the sleeping pill overdose. But then her mother would blame herself and never recover, and Maddy can’t bear to be the cause of that.

This is what she’ll do today while her mother’s gone. It’s all she does every day. Thinking about dying is the only way to match what she’s thinking with how she’s feeling. Anything else is a dissonant, torturous lie.

And it’s far easier for her to imagine dying than living. She can’t imagine going back to school. She can’t imagine ever having a serious boyfriend, someone who would be okay with who she is, never mind a husband who would sign up for this crazy train. She is damaged goods, unclaimed luggage abandoned in baggage claim. And she definitely can’t imagine having kids. She wouldn’t want to pass her tainted DNA down to her children like her father did to her. And she can’t even take care of herself. How would she take care of a baby? She’s unfit to be a mother.

She can no longer even imagine being a comedian. Comedy is off-limits. Out of the question. Ludicrous. Crazy. Even if comedy weren’t impossibly tangled like a delicate necklace with mania in her mother’s eyes, she wouldn’t approve of or support it. Comedy is not a conventional path. It’s not a real career. It’s not a stable living. It’s not a normal thing to do, especially for a girl.

Why can’t she just be normal? Instead, she is a defective, worthless bag of trash, her continued existence a hopeless burden and a waste of everyone’s time and money. They would all be better off without her.

Her reflection in the window dials into focus. You are nothing , she tells herself. Her reflection doesn’t argue.

She gets up to go to the bathroom but instead stops in the kitchen. The tile floor is cold beneath her bare feet. She opens the cabinet next to the refrigerator where her mother keeps the pill bottles. This is her favorite daydream, death by overdose of the very pills prescribed to save her. The irony is a chocolate fudge brownie, a perfect line of poetry, a dark comedic punch line. Her last laugh.

She pulls out the bottle of lithium and shakes it like a baby rattle. She still has about a half month of pills left. Google says lithium toxicity occurs at levels of 1.5 mEq/L or greater, but what the hell does that mean? How many pills, Google? She can’t find an answer.

Lithium’s physiological role is unknown, its mechanism of action not understood.

A sound escapes her mouth, an almost laugh, a mix of groan and gasp. These doctors are just throwing spaghetti at the wall and calling what sticks medicine. It might as well be a bottle of leeches. She places it on the counter.

Next, she pulls the bottle of quetiapine. This one is full. The lamotrigine bottle is, too. Google says that an overdose of either can be fatal, but again, nobody specifies how many pills is too many. She pops the covers of all three bottles and dumps the contents into her palm, a heaping pile of pastel blue, pink, and yellow, like a handful of Easter candy. She grabs a bottle of Pellegrino and returns to the living room.

Back in her seat on the couch, she begins swallowing three pills at a time. Her phone pings. It’s a text from her mother. She powers down her phone and continues swallowing pills until they’re gone. Then she sits back, snuggles under the blanket, and stares at the window, waiting for her reflection to disappear.