And the way she said it, Alvin could almost believe her.
—from Alvin Hatter and the Return of the Overcoat Man
14
Joan Jetta was the only car in Em’s driveway, so I let myself in the back door without knocking. I had a key to their house that Em had put in a keychain shaped like a skull.
I found her lying on her bed on her stomach, in the middle of what I could only assume was an hours-long X-Files marathon. She looked up when I pushed her door open, and she paused the episode immediately.
“What’s wrong?” she said, pulling herself to a sitting position. She held her arms out and I took her hand and sat on the edge of the bed.
“I’m okay,” I said, the automatic reply. I didn’t even have to think about it. I’m okay. I’m okay. I’m okay.
“You look really pale, and your hands are clammy,” she said. She put the back of her hand on my forehead, then made a face and placed two fingers on the inside of my wrist. She squinted for a minute, then said, “Your pulse is racing. Why is your pulse racing? Were you running?”
“Driving,” I said.
“Then why is your pulse racing so hard?” She pulled her phone closer to her and started the stopwatch. She counted as the seconds ticked by. “One hundred and twenty-five.”
“One hundred and twenty-five what?”
“Your heart rate. Do you feel okay? Feverish? Nauseous?”
“I’m okay,” I said again, and Em hopped off her bed and forced me to a sitting position, never letting go of my wrist. “I’m just . . . It’s just a panic attack.”
“Oh, Lottie,” Em said, looking both relieved and sad at the same time.
“Or it may be a heart attack,” I said. “I don’t think we can rule that out.”
“Don’t worry, okay? It’s not a heart attack. My mom gets these all the time. It’s apparently really stressful being such a homophobe.” Her face softened, and she put her hand on my cheek. “Lie back, okay? I’m going to get you some water.”
Em stacked a few pillows on top of each other and then helped me lie down on the bed. When she left the room, I tried to focus on her ceiling, where a few glow-in-the-dark stars still clung with all their adhesive gumption. At one point her whole ceiling had been covered and she’d painted the walls dark blue, and it made her bedroom kind of magical. But then they’d fallen off one by one and what was the point of putting them back up? What was the point of anything?
“I thought I said to lie down,” Em said, returning with the water. I’d sat up on the bed without realizing it, cross-legged, rocking back and forth a little.
“Thanks,” I said, taking the water and drinking half the glass in one sip. “I’m feeling better. I’m feeling pretty good.”
Em didn’t reply. She took the water glass from me and placed it on the nightstand and sat next to me on the bed. She hugged me sideways for a long time, until I started to cry. It was like she squeezed it out of me.
“I just can’t understand why she had to die. Why we all have to die,” I said.
“I know, Lottie. Your aunt was too young, okay? But plenty of people have long, happy, fulfilling lives. And it’s worth it.”
“But there’s no way of knowing. I mean, I could die tomorrow and my parents would have spent all this money and time and energy keeping me alive for eighteen years, and it all would have been for nothing.”
“All right, yes, we need to talk about this more, but I think right now we have to work on getting you calmed down, okay? We’re going to do some image replacement, okay? This really helps my mom relax and remember that she has a gay agenda to rail against.”
I laughed despite the aching in my chest, my lungs. “Image replacement?”
“Think of a memory—it could be a happy moment or a calm moment or just a place you like to go, a picture in your head that you can really insert yourself into. Maybe even something recent, so it’s really fresh in your memory.”
“Mikaela’s structure,” I said instantly, not even having to think about it.
“That’s great. That’s a really good one.” Em slid off the bed and kneeled in front of me, taking my hands in hers. “Okay, close your eyes. Now—I want you to picture yourself on the structure. Alone or with me or whoever you want. Try to make the picture as complete as possible. The water, the music, as much detail as you can.”
I closed my eyes. I conjured up Jim Croce in my head and heard the first few notes of “Time in a Bottle” as if Em had actually put it on her stereo. I pictured the scene as clearly as I could: the tide rising as we lingered on the structure, the feel of the knife in my hand as I carved into the wood.
“The second you feel yourself drifting, just refocus your energy,” Em said, and I heard her as if from a distance, like her voice had traveled over the water to meet me.
But I wasn’t drifting. I was solidly placed back in that time, in that place. I could even smell salt on the air, the telltale sign of the ocean.
Gradually my breathing slowed. I focused on the music and I could feel my body relaxing, resting, my heartbeat returning to a normal rhythm. I could hear Em breathing so deeply I thought for a second she’d fallen asleep, but when I opened my eyes she was still kneeling, her back straight and her eyes closed. She looked utterly peaceful.
After a minute, she opened her eyes and put her fingers on my wrist again, taking my pulse. She smiled. “Hi. You look better.”
“How do you know how to do that?” I asked, watching her fingers. “And how did you know how to do that?”
“The pulse thing helps my mom. It’s an easy to way to show her that she’s made progress. You’re at ninety now. That’s better.”
“And the other thing? The image replacement?”
“Like I said, she has a lot of panic attacks. I did some research.”
“Well, thanks. You really helped.”
“Of course. Do you want ice cream? Let’s get some ice cream.”
We went to Em’s kitchen, and she doled out scoops of vanilla in bowls shaped like grapefruit halves. We ate at her kitchen table, which was white with yellow placemats and napkins. The windows had yellow curtains. The tile was white and yellow. Every room in Em’s house had a strict color scheme.
“It’s like basically a giant rainbow,” Em had said once. “It’s like the gayest house on the block. But I’m not going to tell her that, or she’ll tear the whole thing down and we’d have nowhere to live.”
The yellow was cheery, even though I didn’t feel so cheery. We ate our ice cream slowly, Em mashing hers until it resembled a white soup. She ate watery spoonfuls, letting the liquid drip onto her tongue.
“How was the class?” she asked cautiously, when we’d both finished our bowls.
“It went well, I think.”
“So you didn’t throw up on the desk or anything?”
“No.”
“And you saw Sam?”
“Yeah. He was there. I don’t . . . I don’t know if he liked it.”
“If he liked what?”
“My lesson plan. Or my plan-less lesson, actually.”
“What do you mean he didn’t like it?”
“I mean he just didn’t seem engaged or something.”
“What did you talk about?”