AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Mr. Beckett shrugs. “Various things. Whatever she could do to pay the rent, working a couple odd jobs at a time sometimes. Retail. Waitressing. She was a bank teller for a while, but that didn’t work out. What she wanted was to be an actress. Thought she’d go to Hollywood and become a star.”
“We supported her,” Mrs. Beckett is quick to say, lest I think otherwise. “We didn’t have the heart to tell her that the odds of that happening were one in a million, because maybe she was the lucky one.” She looks at her husband then and asks, bottom lip quivering, her nose beginning to run. “Why do you think she didn’t tell us she’d come back? Do you think she didn’t want us to know?”
He shakes his head. “I don’t know.”
I find a tissue and hand it to Mrs. Beckett. “How long had she been back?”
Mr. Beckett shrugs. “Long enough that she had time to find an apartment.”
“What if she thought we’d be disappointed in her? What if she felt she’d let us down, or she was embarrassed because things didn’t work out like she wanted them to?”
He dismisses this. “Since when does Caitlin care what anyone else thinks? Caitlin is strong, she’s resilient,” Mr. Beckett says. He turns away from his wife and says to me, “Which is what makes this all the more devastating. We didn’t see it coming. We never thought she was the type of person to try and take her own life.”
He looks as if he wants me to say something, to explain why this is happening. I know that I have to come up with something to say to set their minds at ease. “I don’t know that there is a type,” I slowly say. We have had suicide attempts in the ICU before. I read a statistic once that said for every person who dies by suicide, there are twenty-five attempts. That fact scared me, especially when I thought of Sienna, of our family history and the mental health crisis that is happening these days with teens. It’s an epidemic. I wanted to know more, mainly whether Sienna was at risk. There are personality subtypes of suicidal individuals, like how, in general, they tend to be dependent, anxious, impulsive. Often, they internalize their feelings versus letting them out. Sometimes people who commit or attempt to commit suicide have a diagnosed mental disorder, like depression or bipolar disorder, and some have an addiction. But not all. Men are more likely to kill themselves, but women are more likely to attempt it. But these are just statistics and risk factors. The truth is that anyone can take or attempt to take their own life. Maybe something terrible happened or they’re just having a bad day. “So often these things take everyone by surprise. You can’t blame yourself. You can’t think that you should have known or done something differently,” I say.
“Can I talk to her?” she asks.
“Of course you can,” I say, “and you should. They say it helps, that people in a coma can benefit from the sound of familiar voices. There’s been research on it.”
“What do I say to her?”
“Anything. It doesn’t matter. It’s the sound of your voice that matters.”
She nods, but she’s slow to start.
“Caitlin,” Mrs. Beckett says after a minute, and her voice cracks. She clears her throat and tries again. “It’s me, honey. Mom. Your dad is here too,” she says, and then she reaches for him and draws him closer to the bedside.
“Hi, pumpkin,” he says, leaning down close, suspended above her.
Later, after her parents leave and I’m alone with her, I wonder if it’s true, if she can hear me, if she can feel me, if she knows that I’m here.
I’m standing at the bedside. I have my back to the door, which is something they teach us as nurses, to keep ourselves between the patient, their visitors and the door, to always have a way out of the room. An escape route. If we feel unsafe, they tell us, leave the room and don’t look back. Get help. There are things you learn as a nurse not because they taught you in nursing school, but through observation and experience—like keeping patients and families at an arm’s length, never turning your back to them and never wearing a stethoscope around the neck because of one time a patient tried to strangle a colleague with it and she would have died if someone else didn’t intervene.
I turn to leave Caitlin’s room for the nurses’ station when I see a man standing about ten feet away, just on the other side of the glass door. He stares into Caitlin’s room, his eyes piercing and unkind, the type of gaze you feel all the way to your navel. It’s the way he stares that makes alarm bells go off, because his stare is intimidating, practically predatorial; it defies social norms. Normal people don’t stare like that. They don’t lock eyes with someone and then not break it.
My whole body goes tight. I become motionless all of a sudden, frozen midstride, afraid to leave the room, to go out into the hall where this man is. I’d have to pass by him to get to the nurses’ station, and I think how, during the day, the unit is unlocked; anyone can let themselves into the ICU. There’s nothing to stop them.
I take a breath. I turn around, facing the patient, turning my back again toward the door. I tell myself it’s nothing, just a friend of hers who’s come to visit and he’s upset, grieving, which is the reason for the way he looked at us.
But what if he’s not? What if he’s not upset or grieving, and what if he’s not a friend?
All of a sudden I worry I’ve made a mistake in putting my back to the door. What’s to stop him from coming into the room with us, from standing behind me and blocking my exit?
I have to leave the room while I still can. I take a breath and gather the courage to turn and go.
But when I look again, he’s gone.
Four
I see the friend request on my phone first that night. I don’t pay any attention to it. I scroll right past while standing in line at the convenience store on the corner after work. I drop my phone in my purse when it’s my turn to pay, leaving it there as I walk carefully home in the dark through the snow, staying alert to my surroundings, carrying bags so heavy my arms burn from the weight of them.
Sienna is with someone in the kitchen when I come in, the front door slightly open because Sienna forgot to lock it and it didn’t latch properly again. She’s talking to a friend, whose voice is deep and masculine. The kitchen is in the way back of our apartment; they don’t hear me arrive. I stop in the open doorway, thrown, because Sienna has never had a boy over before and I realize only now that we haven’t had a talk yet about whether boys are allowed in the apartment when I’m not home. I don’t know where I stand on that because, until now, I haven’t had to think about it.
I listen in on the conversation, which is about math, but resembles something flirtatious.
“I suck at geometry,” he says.
“No you don’t,” she says, her tone not quite like herself. I hold my breath so I can hear, remembering what it was like when I was her age. Seeing Nat at the meeting last night has spawned memories of high school. Not only have I been thinking about her, but about other people we went to high school with too, like my best friend Carrie Grant and Jason Murphy, who I was sure back then I wanted to marry or at the very least lose my virginity to, before I met Ben. “This shit is like really hard,” Sienna says to her friend. I bite my lip, leaning against the doorframe to offset the weight of the bags in my hands. Outside, the sky is dark, the darkness pouring in. Sienna hasn’t turned on any lights other than the kitchen light, and so it’s dim in the rest of apartment where the kitchen light doesn’t reach.
