“These are the letters you gave to the nurse,” she says. “There was never an address, and the papers are always blank.”
“No,” I say. “I wrote to him. I remember. He lives in California. He is going to move back to the Bone. Be a teacher.”
“There was a boy,” she purrs. “Who lived in the house on Wessex Street. I called his mother, Delaney Grant. She said you used to come by a lot … after he died.”
I can’t breathe. “What do you mean? What are you saying?”
“Tell me,” she says. “About the day before you became friends with Judah.”
I have to bend over, put my head between my knees. I feel her presence. She’s an absolute, and her absoluteness permeates the air I’m breathing.
“I’m not crazy.” I sob these words. They hurt so bad, like someone telling you you have cancer when you’ve been healthy your whole life.
“Crazy is a simpleton word. You are not crazy,” she says. “It’s much more complex than that.”
I tell her before she asks again. “I watched him his whole life. A boy in a wheelchair while the rest of us had legs.”
“But you never spoke to him,” Elgin says. “He died when he was nineteen years old. He committed suicide, and you tried to save him.”
“No,” I say.
She hands me a single sheet of paper, a print out from an internet search. Her nails are lacquered a deep, chocolate brown. I take the paper, not looking at it for several seconds, while I try to control the violent fray between my body and my mind. On it is a picture of a man in his late teens who looks nothing like my Judah. He is frail looking with deep hollows for cheekbones and hair that lays flat on his head as if plastered down by a heavy rain or days of unwash. Underneath what looks like his school photo is an article.
NINETEEN-YEAR-OLD MAN DIES AFTER ROLLING HIS WHEELCHAIR INTO THE BOUBATON RIVER
My eyes scan down the length of the article.
On Friday night, Judah Grant, a recent graduate from the Allen Guard School of Progress, who was scheduled to start college in the fall, was found drowning in the Boubaton River by eighteen-year-old Margo Moon. Margo, who lived down the same street as Judah, and attended Harbor Bone High School, was walking home from work when she saw him plunge from an abandoned dock into the water. Judah lost the use of his legs at eight years old after he was involved in a car accident where he sustained a spinal injury. Struggling with depression for over a decade, his mother, Delaney Grant, said that her son often spoke of death and lost his will to live shortly after the accident. Margo, thinking that Judah’s chair had accidentally toppled into the water, dove in in an attempt to save him.
“I pulled him up from the bottom of the lake, but he struggled to get away from me. At one point, he hit me in the face, and my vision went completely black.”
The ink begins to thin here, like Dr. Elgin failed to load a new cartridge into the printer. I strain my eyes to make out the rest.
Margo, who says she is not a strong swimmer, swam to the shore to regain her breath, then dove back in for Judah. She was able to pull his already-unconscious body to the bank of the Boubaton River, where she reportedly preformed CPR for five minutes before running to get help.
The article cuts off here. Elgin didn’t bother printing out the rest of the story. She wanted to reassure me I was crazy—or complex, as she called it—without giving me too much information. I realize I am very, very hungry and start to think of dinner. Will it be beef stroganoff or enchilada pie?
I look at the blurred lines of the printout, the disjointed, jiggery ink job, and wonder why a fancy doctor like Queen Doctor doesn’t have fresh ink. She seems to be waiting for something. I avoid her eyes.
I can feel the cold water on my skin—cold, even though it’s summer. The weight of the cripple kid as I try to haul him to the surface … kicking, kicking … the burning of my lungs, the numbness of my fingers as they grip his shirt and can’t hold on. Desperation. Confusion. Who do I save? Myself? Him? Does he want to be saved? Eventually I had swallowed too much water, and, coughing, I pushed my aching limbs to the shore where I gasped for air, staring back at the spot where he sank … where he wanted to sink.
The reporter was nice. He gave me a twenty-five dollar gift certificate to Wal-Mart that he pulled out of his wallet and told me that I was a hero. “Not everyone can be saved,” he said to my tear-stained face. “Sometimes you just have to let nature take its course.”
I thought that was an incredibly selfish and ignorant thing to say to someone who watched a boy die in front of her. A boy she had seen her whole life, but had never spoken to. Suicide wasn’t natural. It was the anti-natural. It was natural to want to live. It was unnatural to be bruised in ways that made you want to die.
“Do you remember?” Dr. Elgin asks, her face arranged in way that expressed no judgment. She looks casual, like we are talking about my breakfast.
“I do.”
I feel incredibly stupid. Embarrassed. Complex. Crazy. The Judah I have spent years of my life with is a figment of my imagination. How is that possible? And what else have I imagined? You can go crazy just from realizing you’re crazy.
“I know his smell,” I tell Dr. Elgin. “How can he not be real if I know his smell?”
“I know you do, Margo. The trauma you faced caused you to go into an altered, dissociative state. You made up the Judah you know to give both you and him another chance.”