ON THE LAST DAY OF APRIL, after I’ve been at Westwick for just over four months, I tell Dr. Elgin everything. I tell her about Leroy, and what I did to him—the months of planning it took before I climbed through his kitchen window with the intent of killing him. I tell her how he overpowered me, and then deliver my suspicions that he drugged me and wrote the note himself. When I confess that I am the reason the writer screamed ‘pink Zippo’ from behind the doors of her room, there is nothing on Dr. Elgin’s face to give away whether she believes me or not. She simply listens as she always does. When our session is almost over, she promises to look into Leroy Ashley, and I feel a burden lifted from my chest. It’s good to tell. To have someone know who you are. But the next time I see her, she does not speak about Leroy or the writer.
“Margo,” she says gently, once I am seated. “Why doesn’t Judah come here to visit you?”
He has … or no, he hasn’t. Why did I suddenly think he had? I’ve been here for how long? I’ve written him letters—five or six—after the returned e-mail-but I hadn’t heard back from him. He is in Los Angles with his girlfriend, Eryn … or is it Erin?
“I … I … He’s…”
I grasp my head, press my fingertips against my temples. I suddenly feel swarmy. Is that a word? But it’s what I feel. Swarmy. Everything melding and melting together. Emotions and thoughts kicking up like a windstorm.
“Look at me,” she says. “Tell me about the first time you saw him.”
“We were children,” I say. “We grew up a few houses away. He just went to a different school.”
“No,” she says. “The first time you spoke with him. Tell me about that day.”
“I was going to get cigarettes from the store. For my mother. I saw him outside of his house so I went to speak to him.”
“And that was the first time that you spoke to Judah since you were children?”
“Yes.”
“What was different about that day? What made you want to speak to him?”
I close my eyes. I can still feel the rusted gate beneath my fingertips, the moan as I pushed it open and walked down the path to where he was smoking his joint. The sickening sweet smell of pot.
“He looked so confident. He didn’t care that he was in a wheelchair. I felt like I needed to know how to do that. Be that.”
Dr. Elgin closes her eyes. It looks like she’s fallen asleep, except her eyes are roving back and forth behind her lids in a rapid eye awakeness.
“What happened the day before?” she says.
“The day before I spoke to Judah?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know. It was a long time ago.”
“You do know. Think.”
“I don’t. It was a long time ago,” I repeat. It’s the first time since our therapy sessions started that I would rather not be in the room with her. I feel as if she’s creeping in on me. She’s finished playing nice guy. A heat creeps around the back of my neck like an invisible hand. Even my eyelids feel hot. I pull at the scrubs, which are sticking to my skin.
“Judah has not contacted you since you have been here.”
“That’s not true,” I rush. But, even as I say it, I know it is. “We had a falling out. Before I was admitted to the hospital. We haven’t spoken in quite some time.” I sound like a formal, well-spoken liar.
“And what was your falling out about?” she asks, her pen poised above her yellow notepad.
I think. It’s so hard to remember shit in here, all the drugs pressing against your brain. “His girlfriend,” I lie. “There was an argument. She was rude to me.”
“How did the argument end?”
“He didn’t want anything to do with me. He … he said he didn’t even know who I was anymore.”
“But you write to him, yes?”
“Yes,” I say, remembering the judicious way I tried to explain myself in them. Please forgive me. I don’t know why I did it. She was hurting Mo. She killed her little girl. I won’t do it again. Please speak to me.
All met with silence. I hunker down in my seat, staring at the floor. I’d write him another letter—five. I’d do whatever it takes. I’d make him realize how sorry I am.
“But he came to the hospital,” I say. “Before they brought me here. He was in my room. The two people who transferred me here saw him. You can ask them…”
Dr. Elgin shakes her head. “There weren’t any visitors at the hospital, Margo.”
“How do you know?”
“You were on suicide watch and in critical condition. The hospital wouldn’t have let anyone in there beside family.”
“Call his mother,” I say. “Go on…”
“I have, Margo,” she says. “I went to see her.”
My tongue feels sluggish. I can’t make it form the words I need to say.
“Do you remember her asking you to buy her shirts, from your job … where was it…?”
“The Rag O Rama,” I answer. “And yes, I do.”
“You brought her men’s shirts.”
“That’s what she asked for. Shirts for Judah.”
Dr. Elgin reaches into a drawer in her desk and pulls out a stack of white envelopes. I watch as she lays them out—one by one in front of me. A fan of pure white accusation. And then I start to moan.
“No,” I say. “No, no, no, no, no.”
Scrawled on each of the envelopes, in what looks like red crayon, is Judah’s name. Judah on each envelope in a child’s handwriting: the jagged J, the crooked h. Judah, who I love. Judah, who loves me. Judah, who I wrote those letters for. I pick one up, pull out the lined paper inside. There is nothing written on the page.
“Margo,” Dr. Elgin says. “There is no Judah. He does not exist.” Her accent is thick and syrupy.
“You’re crazy,” I say. “I’ve known him my whole life. Where are my letters? The ones I wrote? Why didn’t the hospital mail them?”
“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.”
She seems quite pleased with her assessment. I am unimpressed. I can still feel him in the air around me; you can’t make up a person in such detail. And if I were going to make up an imaginary friend to help me cope with life, why wouldn’t I give him nice, strong legs? I remember the aching in my arms after having pushed his wheelchair through the streets of the Bone. The awkwardness of having to do things like drive him, bathe him, help him onto the sofa the night he slept over.
I leave Elgin’s office that day feeling like I am floating instead of walking. I could say that everything feels surreal, but the truth is, I feel surreal. Like it’s not Judah, but me who doesn’t exist. When the doors lock behind us that evening, and I crawl into the stiff, bleached sheets of the mental hospital, I am unsure. I know nothing. I bury my face in my thin pillow until I can’t breathe, then force myself to come up for air. I assure myself with a quivering, jelly voice that I am real. I do this all night until the lights flicker on, and the doors open, and the medication is handed to us in little paper cups that smell of old people. Judah is real, and I am real, I tell myself over and over. But, by lunch, I am once again unsure. If I made up Judah, I could be making all of this up—the murders, the hospital, Dr. Elgin. I check my door plaque to make sure my name is Margo.
I see Elgin three times a week, then two as she feels I am making progress in our sessions. I stop fighting her after that first time, stop saying that Judah is real. I slip silently into the role of the humble patient, clutching what remains of my sanity between oiled fingers. And then, one day, after I’ve been in Westwick for a little over five months—and my limbs are growing soft and spongy from the time I spend sitting—everything changes.