“Mom, what is this suicide note the reporter talked about?”
Her face went to stone. “Never you mind that, it’s a mistake.”
“Mom. Tell me.”
“Let’s look at your clothes. And your playlist. I bet those will jog your memories.”
“Mom, tell me.”
She sat on the bed and gestured me to sit next to her. I did. She took my hand. Her own was cold yet slicked with sweat. I wanted to pull mine away but I dared not. She put her fingers under my jaw and turned me to face her. “Baby, they found a note, so they say, in the grass down the hill. Like it came from the car, there were odds and ends in the back—you know, our reusable shopping bags, a canvas folding seat I take to the football games, a couple of books…and a bunch of it spilled out as the car rolled and the windows smashed, and this note was in it. Written by you, they say. I saw it and it sort of looks like your handwriting, but none of you kids use cursive anymore, you all print the same to me, so who’s to say.”
“What did the note say?”
She pulled a piece of paper out of her pocket. “This is a copy they gave me. So, as they said, I can get you help if you need it. Not the original. The police have that. Or the investigator working for their lawyer, he’s all cozy with the cops, he’s the one jabbering about it.”
“Lawyer?” I was waiting for her to hand me the note.
“Never mind that.” I had noticed Mom had a habit of mentioning unpleasant subjects, nestling them in your brain, and then telling you not to worry about them. “I think this note could wait until you’re further along in your recovery. That damn reporter. I hate him for yelling that at you.”
I held out my hand, the one that wasn’t in a cast. “What does it say?”
She seemed to take my measure. She put her gaze to the note, and read aloud:
I can’t do this. I can’t. I wish I were dead. I wish we were dead together. Both of us.
She folded the note. “Obviously this is a fake.”
I stood because I wanted to get away from the words. Then I sat down again on the edge of the bed, my legs, my brain, my heart all like water. “So. I had that note with me and I crashed my own car…”
Mom’s hand closed hard around my upper arm. “You listen to me, Jane. It’s not a suicide note. It cannot be. It just isn’t.”
Was I supposed to sleep in this room with the photo of the boy I killed looking back at me? I ached, everywhere, my head, my guts. I got up and I took down the pictures of David.
“What does that mean?” Mom asked. “Jane?”
“I think I need to lie down,” I told Mom.
“Yes. Of course. I’ll go see about dinner. People brought food here while you were recovering…before they heard about the note…”
And then they stopped was the rest of the sentence, I guessed. “People think I killed David trying to commit suicide.” The words felt like ash in my mouth.
She nodded and I lay on the bed. I thought the phone might ring, friends or neighbors calling about us, but it was quiet. I looked at the picture of my friends and wondered if Kamala and Trevor would come see me again. If anyone ever would. Finally, I slept. When I woke up I felt no mad surge of memory. I wasn’t a cursed princess waking up from a dream, back into the life I knew. I could hear Mom’s voice outside, talking with a neighbor. Loudly. Later Mom would tell me it was Perri Hall, telling Mom to tell me to stay away from her family.
8
I’M GLAD YOU agreed to meet with me,” Kevin said. Jane sat across from him, in a research room in the counseling department. “I’m going to be blunt with you. You’re a mess. You’re nearly homeless, you’ve been accused of an attempted suicide/murder, and your once-promising life is a shambles.”
“You should work with children,” Jane said.
He didn’t smile or laugh at her joke and she thought, Well, he doesn’t care about spending six weeks building rapport with me. Kevin leaned forward. “May I make a guess; you tell me if I’m wrong. The reason you don’t like therapists is because they have tiptoed around you. About the accident, if it was an attempted suicide and David Hall paid the price. I don’t think I will tiptoe around you. I take a more direct approach.”
It was like he’d sat in on her useless former therapy sessions. “OK,” she said, now hesitant, waiting to see what he’d say next.
“Maybe you are repressing the memories due to intense emotion. I think you have to be willing to explore that possibility, that it’s not purely physical.”
“I had a SPECT scan.” She waited for him to not know what it was.
But he said, after she paused, “Single-photon emission computed tomography. Measures the amount of blood flowing to different parts of the brain, to see any reduced flow to injured areas. And?”
“I had injury in my temporal lobes.”
“Where long-term memories reside. Yes. But your memories of your first years did slowly return, correct? At least that was what it said in Mr. Vasquez’s newspaper articles about you.”
“Yes.”
“Ribot’s Law. Simply put, the oldest memories tend to be the safest.”
“Yes.” She knew the name Ribot from Dr. K. Ribot had been a French psychologist who studied memory.
“Except your high school years.”
“Yes.”
“So that could be either emotional or physical. You lost your father?”
“Yes.”
“And that is when the amnesia begins, when you entered high school, a cushion of time before his death, and it includes the crash and David’s death. You are spared the memories of two terrible tragedies.”
Jane said nothing.
“So. What do you want from our work together?”
No one had asked her that in so long. She almost shivered under his stare. “I want to remember. I want to know that I didn’t kill David on purpose. That it truly was an accident. I want to be able to cope,” she said. “I want to finish school. I want to be self-sufficient. I want David…”
“David is gone.”
“I want David to not haunt my thoughts so much. I don’t want to be blamed anymore for this. In the suburb where we lived, the school we went to—I am hated. I have exactly one friend left. If it was an accident, I could be forgiven. A suicide attempt isn’t forgivable.”
“People are always going to blame you. We could come up with some strategies to help you cope with that and not let it define you. To find a safe place for you.”
“That’s a big promise, Kevin.” Because she had never learned to cope with the blame. Just shove it in the back of her mind, where it writhed, angry and restless.
“You have a big problem, Jane. I don’t think we should think small.”
She rubbed her palms along the arms of the chair. “OK, so how do we start this? Do you analyze me from when I was born? I had a nice, boring childhood.”
She studied the shoes on his feet. They were worn, scuffed. Grad students never have money.
“Tell me about that day of the crash. I know you don’t remember it, right?”
“Is that a trick question?”