“ ‘Vacation’ is a word, not a picture.”
“Am I going skiing?”
“It’s July.”
“So where am I going?”
I blurted out, “Mexico. Fucking Playa del Carmen.”
“What’s in Mexico?”
“Pesos.” Dr. Rosen didn’t budge. The right answer blared in my head. “Beaches.”
He slapped his hands together with an ahhh. “Do you have any feelings about me going to the beach?”
Pieces of the Hawaii story had trickled out during the first year of group, leading up to the gush of the previous session. Every time the subject arose, Dr. Rosen prodded me to express my feelings about it, and I resisted. I defended against the emotions by insisting it wasn’t that big of a deal. He wasn’t my dad It was so long ago. It felt dramatic and somehow fake to wade into my feelings about Hawaii. I had so many excuses to scurry away from the subject. Plus, I didn’t want to talk about being alone in my bathing suit, running uphill to get help, my bloody leg, David’s vacant eyes, and the seawater pouring out of his face. None of the words I knew added up to the terror I felt, nor could they contain my grief.
And this: when we returned from Hawaii, Jenni and I started our freshman year at Ursuline Academy. Six weeks from that black sand beach where we watched David’s limp body sway under the helicopter’s belly, we put on our red-and-navy pleated uniform skirts and our penny loafers and shuffled from algebra and world history to PE and English. I sat in algebra watching Ms. Pawlowicz put complicated equations on the board and sat at lunch listening to other girls plan their outfits for the Michael Jackson concert. Who cares? We’re all going to die. None of this matters. Those first few months, half of me was still in Hawaii, waiting for David to cough and wake up so I could resume a normal teenage life that revolved around my crush on Joe Monico or whether to get bangs. After school I slept for hours, and my parents grew concerned about my emotional state. I saw them staring at me during dinner, when I rested my heavy head on my open palm, and in the afternoon when I couldn’t get off the couch. But we never talked about “the accident” in Hawaii. One evening, my parents knocked on my door and found me lying on my bed listening to the radio. They attempted small talk with me about homework and an upcoming home football game. I could tell from the way my mom gripped the doorknob and my dad leaned in against my dresser that they were working up to something substantive.
“Can you please do us a favor?” My mom stood in my doorway, her eyes, brown like mine, pleading in a way that was startling in its novelty.
“I guess. What is it?”
“Can you try to act normal? Just try it. For us. Would you try to act normal? All this moping around, it’s not good for you—”
“Okay.” I knew what she meant. Since Hawaii, I’d been drained of energy. There was the extra sleeping and the disinterest in all the new opportunities arising with the start of high school. All of it was passing me by. To them, my listlessness looked like childish “moping” that I could—and should—snap out of before I lost a whole year of my life. My parents firmly believed that I could make up my mind to be happy. I understand now that they were offering me the tools they relied on: willpower, optimism, and self-reliance. But those tools kept slipping out of my grasp, so I reached for the more reliable bingeing and purging to tamp down the emotions trying to surface. My parents and I wanted the same thing: for me to be normal. I longed for a “normal me” more than they did, but none of us understood that I wasn’t “moping” and that the attempts to stuff my feelings might come at a high cost. I also heard an implied request that I bury Hawaii and all its terrifying images. Beneath my parents’ request thrummed a subtext: Don’t think about it, or you’ll get upset. Don’t get upset, or you’ll fall behind on the important work of being a normal teenage girl. Don’t talk about it, or you’ll upset yourself. Don’t talk about it, or you’ll upset me. I wanted to be a dutiful daughter, so I buried it the best I could.
“Not everyone gets to come home.” My voice cracked. Dr. Rosen asked if I could scream some more. I didn’t think I could, but then I bent over and rested my forehead on the stiff carpet and guttural moans from a previous decade rose up and spilled out of me in waves.
“What happened after the helicopter took David’s body away?” Dr. Rosen asked. I’d never talked about what happened after we left the beach. In my mind, the story ended as soon as the helicopter disappeared over the mountain with David’s body in the long black bag.
I started to shake as I had in the Kansas woman’s car.
“Were you cold in the police station?”
“The floor was cold under my bare feet and I didn’t have any of my clothes. One officer offered me a foamy yellow blanket, and a different officer led me to a private room so I could call my parents. They were at the movies with friends, so I told my brother what had happened.”
“What did you do when you left the police station?” Rory asked.
“Sebastian drove us back to the condo. We were over an hour away. Then he missed a turn, and we drove miles out of our way—on and on we drove down this two-lane highway. No one said a word. I sat by myself in the backseat and stared out the window at the stupid ocean and the brilliant Hawaiian sunset, all purples, pinks, and oranges. The Cure tape played over and over. When one side finished, there were several
