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.
THEY RELEASE ME FROM WESTWICK, though I do not feel ready. The revelation about Judah has made me feel strange in my own skin. I am unable to trust even myself. What happens to a person when their own brain becomes the enemy? I don’t know. I’m afraid to find out.