Chapter 23 Don’t Panic #2
Come get your shit. You made your choice, and I want you gone. We’re finished. I’ll be out of the house Saturday from 4-7. Come then because I don’t want to see your face.
When I look up from the screen, Tristan is standing, picking up the containers from the table.
“You okay?” I ask.
“I mean, it took him long enough, but I was expecting it.”
I put the phone down and help him clear the table. “Do you want me to go with you on Saturday?”
“Sure. What a fun date.”
I’m not entirely sure I should say anything else, so I shut up.
But then Connor texts me.
Connor
You win, I lose.
Our fate. —Connor
“Wanna try to decipher this one?”
Tristan stares at the screen for a long time, his grip on my phone so tight, his knuckles lose color.
“Okay, I don’t like this,” he finally says, his body now rigid with unease. “I’m going over there.”
“What? Now?”
He nods, shoving my phone against my chest.
“He said tomorrow.”
Tristan is adamant. “Will you still come with me?”
Someone has to be the voice of reason. “Maybe he’s just asking for space.”
“No. That’s not what that was.” Tristan’s tension is almost visible—it radiates from him like an aura. He makes a noise of frustration and raises his voice. “I know him. Something’s wrong. We need to go. Right now.”
He and I go back and forth about it for a few more minutes, until his urgency changes.
He’s done talking. He’s in the bedroom, looking for his shoes, ready to leave without me.
I watch him stumble, trying to get into his slip on shoes—even his feet are shaking.
I start to get nervous. Tristan’s rising anxiety infects me until I’m almost sick with it.
I drive. We get to Connor’s house just before ten.
The house is dark, inside and out, but Connor’s car is in the driveway as I follow Tristan inside. He turns on a lamp in the living room. The place is clean. Spotless. Nothing is out of order, and when he and I share a look, I can read his thoughts. This is all wrong.
In our silence, I notice the music creeping quietly into the room, coming from some other part of the house.
“Connor?” Tristan calls out.
Nothing.
Tristan heads toward the kitchen, but I follow the music. When I recognize the song, something in me collapses.
Coldplay. Chris Martin’s haunting voice singing about how all of us are done for.
Chills sheet my arms as I step into the bedroom hallway and see the dim light bleeding from around the edges of the slightly open bathroom door. Another cold shot of fear spills through me, and I hesitate.
“Connor?” I ask, my voice not loud enough. I clear my throat. I knock softly, careful not to move the door. “You in here?”
I expect a “go away” or a “get the fuck out of my bathroom.” Or maybe I don’t expect it.
I want it.
What I get instead is “Don’t Panic” on repeat.
The lyrics of the opening verse chill me to the fucking bone.
I move one step closer and push the door open.
From where I’m standing, I can’t see much. An iPhone is next to the sink, playing the music. Flickering candles on the counter give the illusion of a light being on. The mirror reflects a closed shower curtain.
“Archer?” Tristan asks, coming into the hall to find me rooted to the spot outside the bathroom.
His face goes from hopeful to terrified as he puts together in his head what I can’t bring myself to face. He pushes past me, slamming the door open wide.
My knees weaken. I put a hand on the frame to stay upright.
The shower curtain swooshes along its rod, then Tristan lets out a moan—guttural and deep. It’s the kind of sound you feel more than hear. I feel it in the pit of my clenching stomach.
He sinks to his knees and reaches into the blood-filled water surrounding the lifeless form of my baby brother.
“Call an ambulance!”
Clouds move into my brain. My thoughts are thick things, hiding in the fog. My legs are caught in quicksand. To move would be dangerous. Moving might get me killed.
“He's still alive. Archer—call a fucking ambulance!” He grabs a black t-shirt from the floor and a hand towel from the rack near his head. “Call 9-1-1. Archer, please.”
He’s shouting at me. It’s the only reason I hear him.
I dig my phone out of my pocket and dial the emergency number. While I wait for an operator to take my call, I watch Tristan wrap my brother’s brutally gashed-open wrists. Connor is limp, and the time between one breath and the next grows longer and longer. “9-1-1, what’s your emergency?”
“My brother slit his wrists.” If there is any combination of words in the English language that are worse than those, I don’t want to know them. I tell the operator the address when she asks.
“I'm dispatching an ambulance now. Does he have a pulse? Is he still breathing?”
“I don’t know,” I say, but my voice is gone. It has no sound.
I don’t hang up, but I put the phone on the counter because I can’t talk anymore.
“Help me,” Tristan says to me from the floor by the tub. “We need to get him out. He’s freezing. I don't want anybody to see him like this.”
There are a couple of things happening in my body. I’m about to throw up, and I’m about to pass out. The combination of the two has me gripping the counter’s edge and leaning over the sink.
I hear Tristan’s frustrated cry, but it’s muffled by the thrum of blood in my ears.
“Archer, please, please help me…” he begs with a sob, his voice broken and desperate.
I force-breathe through my nose. Long, deep breaths I blow out of my mouth. I want to help him. I just need a second. Just a couple of seconds.
What I see when I pull myself together enough to look again is so fucking horrible, I have to be dreaming.
With no help from me, Tristan heaves my brother out of the bloody water.
Connor’s body drags like dead weight and thunks onto the bathroom floor, his legs landing at odd angles, and his head lolling to the side, eyes open like doll’s eyes. Black like holes.
Tristan dries him off as much as he can, then covers him with another towel.
And then…
Then…
Tristan drags himself onto his knees, places the heels of his stacked hands on the center of my brother’s chest and pushes down. Hard.
“Connor, I’m here. Everything’s gonna be okay. Help is coming. It’s gonna be okay. Connor, don't you fucking leave me.”
Tristan sobs once, choking on the air.
He will always choose Connor, and then you won’t have shit.
“I love you. I love you. I’m so fucking sorry.”
Every muscle in his body strains as he compresses Connor’s chest hard and fast. Ribs crack, the sound as frightening as the house falling down around us. “Why did you do this?”
But Connor didn’t do this.
I did this.
I bend over the sink and bury my face in my arms, fighting the rising bile.
If I’d gone back to Seattle…
If I’d taken the money and run…
I would never have fallen for Tristan, and none of this—none of it could have happened.
The next few minutes are lights and sirens and people yelling and shoving and blood transfusions and more chest compressions.
Tristan leaves with my brother to ride in the ambulance, not even bothering to ask me if I want to be the one to go, and I don’t blame him. I’m still frozen. Still speechless. When I don’t move to follow them out with the stretcher, Tristan doesn’t seem to notice or care.
I’m all alone when I find the empty bottle of pills.
Alprazolam 1mg Qty. 30.
Xanax.
I text Tristan a picture of the bottle. The stark reality of what’s happening grows larger and more real by the second. He’s going to die.
My brother is going to die because of me.
Because I took away the only person in the world who made his life tolerable. I did that. He tried to warn me, but I did it anyway. I had no idea…
I had no fucking clue Tristan was the only thing holding Connor together. How could I have known?
But Tristan knew. He’s tried to tell me a hundred times. And I sort of guessed it, didn’t I? That night at Helen’s? But I’d been too fucking concerned about my own fucked up feelings to understand.
If we had gotten to Connor’s house tomorrow afternoon as instructed—as I’d tried to insist—he would have been long dead. The bathroom would have looked like a slaughterhouse with a tub full of clotted blood and a dead man.
Tristan calls to see where I am. If I’ve gone to the wrong hospital.
I tell him I’ll be there soon, but instead of leaving the house, I go into Connor’s darkened room and sit down on the bed, staring at nothing in the darkness until my eyes adjust and something familiar draws my attention. I turn on the bedside lamp to see it better.
One of my paintings hangs on Connor’s wall, opposite the bed. I haven’t seen it in over twelve years.
The sudden memory is an attack. It’s attached to the painting. Adhered to it. I would have never remembered if it weren’t staring me in the face.
A few weeks before Thanksgiving my senior year, before the conversation with Helen about the guest bedroom, I’d had the flu. No one tracked my comings and goings at my parents’ house, so I stayed in my darkened room with water and Kleenex and a fever so high sometimes I’d hallucinate.
I slept a lot. I listened to music. I wondered if this was it. If this was how it felt to die, the ache so deep in my bones, it hurt to breathe. And I wondered how long it would take for anyone to figure out I was missing. I lost track of time. Two days, four days, I wasn’t sure.
And I wasn’t sure if Connor coming into my room to put damp towels on my head was a dream or a hallucination.
“When you get better can we go to the park together?”
“No.”
“A movie?”
“Uh-uh.”
“Where can we go together?”
“None of those places are far enough.”
“Where are you in that painting?” he asked.
“Which painting?”
“That one.”
He pointed at a canvas propped by the door. An art class assignment I’d brought home when it dried. I intended it for Helen. A thank you for feeding me as often as she did. Not that it was some great work of art, but I thought she’d like the colors.
“You shouldn’t be in here,” I said instead.