Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self - By Danielle Evans Page 0,20

the hospital,” she said.

“What’s wrong with her?” It occurred to me, stupidly, that maybe she needed a kidney.

“She tried to kill herself,” my mother said.

“My God,” I said.

“She’s asked to see you,” my mother said. “Apparently, her therapist thinks it would be good for her to talk to you. I’m sure she wants to apologize in person. But I told them, you have a life, too, and we’ll do this on your schedule, if at all, OK?”

“I’ll do it,” I said.

My mother paused on the other end of the line.

“I’ll book us flights,” she said finally.

“I can go by myself,” I said.

“No you can’t,” she said. “I don’t trust those people with you for a second.”

Her fear was understandable, if belated. The year after my summer with the unfortunate pair, I didn’t sleep more than an hour a night. When I said so later, my mother said that wasn’t biologically possible, and then changed the subject. My father said it simply wasn’t true, because he didn’t sleep well that year and he remembers waking up nights, walking down the hall, and pulling back the blankets in my room to check on me. “You slept,” he told me, “like an angel.” Perhaps they are right. When I was very little, my mother used to say there was something of my grandmother in me, in how I tell stories the way I need them to be and not the way that they actually happened. In any case, I remember staring at the ceiling every night for a year, tracing shadow patterns with my finger. I remember closing my eyes whenever I heard footsteps outside the door and relaxing every time I realized it was only my father.

My parents were careful with me like they’d never been before; I was in college before they were willing to let me out of their sight for more than a few hours. Even when Aunt Claire requested my company, to sit beside her bed and read to her those last few months before she died, they were reluctant to part with me. That summer was still with me somewhere, and so was Allison, and my grandmother, but thinking about any of it was like looking at an old photograph of myself, staring a long time and all the while trying to figure out whether it was really me in the picture.

And then there I was in Tallahassee again, this time in a downtown mental institution, only the kind with a marble lobby and a fountain on the grounds, so you were supposed to call it a wellness center. I had waited for my mother’s flight at the airport and had lunch with her when she landed. Though she insisted on driving me to see Allison, she announced in the parking lot that it was probably best if she not come in, and I agreed with her. The grounds of the wellness center reminded me of the grounds of the country club so long ago. Everything was flowering, in obstinate resistance to the severity of its locale.

When I announced who I was and whom I’d come to see, the woman behind the desk looked at me sharply for a second but then looked again, nodded, and told me I had my grandmother’s eyes. A nurse in a powder blue uniform escorted me down the hall to a waiting area with plush teal chairs. I sat in one of them before I even took note of who was sitting on the other end of the room. My grandmother looked older, of course—her hair now gone completely white, her face creased with wrinkles—but there was no mistaking her. Her eyes were still as sharp as ever, her mouth still set in a line of grim determination. Her wardrobe, though, was in a state of disarray, her silk scarf tossed on the chair beside her, her blouse and pants wrinkled as though she had been sleeping in them—which, I supposed, was entirely possible. She looked at me, gave me an almost smile. I tried to think of a comforting thing to say to her, the kind of thing you would say to a stranger in similar circumstances, but nothing came to mind. I focused instead on the insulting giddiness of the waiting-room magazine covers, their cheerful refusal to be about anything that mattered.

A nurse punctuated the silence. “Miss Ellis?”

She led me down the hallway and opened the door to a room, but didn’t enter. I could see her hovering in