“Harry,” Dr. Kenny began, lowering his voice until it was in tune with the Force, making sure I had no choice but to listen. “This is not your fault.” He paused. “Do you understand?”
I nodded, but it was a reflex. Of course this was my fault. It was everyone’s fault. Johnny needed us, and we’d abandoned him. I could’ve blamed Jeff and his bullshit “no friendships” rule, and part of me did, but if I was being honest, I knew I was the culprit, I was the bad guy. Johnny told me that first day I’d visited him after we came back from Georgia that he needed me, and I didn’t deliver. I was the worst friend in the entire history of friendships.
I’m not sure what Dr. Kenny thought as he watched me go through those mental calisthenics, but he knew I needed help. He was good like that.
“Harry,” he said again, “it’s not your fault.” He looked me in the eye and did some kind of Svengali thing that stopped me from looking away. I started to cry.
“How can you know that?” I asked. “How can you possibly know that?”
“Because,” he answered, his voice weaker than I would have hoped, “at the end of the day, suicide is a choice that is made by someone who is sick, mentally ill, and doesn’t have the capacity to choose between life and death. It’s an incredible tragedy in part because the victim isn’t of sound mind.”
“Johnny seemed like a lot of things, Doc, but he didn’t seem crazy.”
“Depression doesn’t mean crazy, Harry. You know that.”
“I just don’t understand.”
“I know, son,” he said. He’d never, ever called me son before. It gave me comfort, but in a weird way crossed a line, too. “That’s the hardest part. Knowing that you will never understand. Knowing that what you really want, more than anything, is a chance to ask Johnny why, and knowing that you will never get that chance. But sometimes, there isn’t a why.”
“I can’t believe that,” I said, wiping the snot on the back of my sleeve. “There has to be a reason.”
“Look, there are a thousand reasons Johnny could have been driven to this, but most of the literature, in a case like Johnny’s—”
“A case like Johnny’s?”
“A suicide that follows a debilitating injury, particularly an amputation.”
“Oh.” It never occurred to me that there might be precedent for this.
“The literature suggests that Johnny was at greater risk than the average person because of who he was.”
Dr. Kenny paused, looking for the right words. I just waited.
“Harry, Johnny was a narcissist. Do you know what that is?”
I nodded. I didn’t know the clinical definition at the time, but I looked it up later, and my working understanding—a person with a big ego whose world is defined by himself—was close enough.
“He had such a strong sense of self, of power, of control, that losing it was very hard for him to reconcile. If Johnny had been shy and retiring—”
“Like me.”
“Yes, Harry, like you.” I always admired Dr. Kenny’s honesty. “If Johnny had been a different person, he might have adapted better. But everything about the amputation assaulted Johnny’s sense of self. From his surface image to his sexuality to every relationship he’d ever had.”
I wasn’t really sure I wanted to hear about Johnny’s sexuality. It made me think about Cheyenne; it made me wonder how she was feeling.
“Johnny was no longer who he believed himself to be, and he was unable to find any sort of anchor that tethered him to the world. He was literally adrift, unable to hold on to his own identity. In all likelihood, Johnny ended his life because he no longer saw himself as the Johnny McKenna he wanted to be, that he believed himself to be, and that was too much to reconcile.”
“But couldn’t we have all helped him through that?”
Here, Dr. Kenny paused. A pause with more than enough time for me to fill in the answer to my own question. “A professional could have helped him through it, Harry.” He left it at that. He chose not to say what I was thinking, that the people around him, me, Chey, his parents, might have seen the warning signs and pushed him to get help.
The truth is, I have no idea what the truth is, and like Dr. Kenny said, I never really will. But what he said did make a kind of sense. Johnny was the center of his own universe. He had this gravitational pull that seemed to bring everyone else into orbit around him. Not just me and Chey, but everyone. His parents, his teachers, the other kids at school. When he lost his leg, he didn’t just lose a physical ability; he lost his gravity. Johnny lost Johnny.
The thought didn’t give me peace—it didn’t change the fact that I should have been there to help Johnny—but it did give me perspective. I guess that was the most I could ask for.
CHEYENNE BELLE