by Christopher Hess

The day Emily and I played a confused game of doctor in the back room of her parents' double-wide had all but completely slipped from my memory by the time I found out that she had swallowed a bottle's worth of sleeping pills. Things like that, surreal events that have a more severe impact on the formative years than anyone could know at the time, tend to slip into the back of the mind along with the multitudes of horrifying dreams that won't disappear and the bank of melodies and images and smells and sounds that occasionally resurface to confuse us for days on end. Death brings them out. So does sex, if it's powerful enough. They must live back there packed in to the rafters, leaning hard against the door, because whenever the latch releases some rush of yesterday comes bursting out, flooding the now, in an uncontrollable wash of recollection, nostalgia, and pain. Early one fall morning I got a phone call from my mother. This was a Wednesday, I believe, remarkable only because the heat of the long Texas summer had been gone for about seventeen days by then, and every morning at that point I still marvelled at the coolness of the air. When this happens, when the weather changes like this, it always means thinking back on the months that slipped by squelched by the heat and beyond, to the time spent as a kid in the suburbs of Chicago where now I would be hunkering down for the brutal winter ahead. She called to tell me that my dad was doing better, having recovered sufficiently from his elbow surgery to be able to go fishing again. The pickup was finally out of the shop, her painting class was going well -- watercolors now, she was comfortable with them -- and the small stand of grape vines had been covered for the season. We talked for a while, just talking, and before we hung up, almost as an afterthought she added, "Oh, I forgot to mention, remember Emily?"

After a moment, I did.

"She died. I guess she killed herself, unless it was an accident. I don't know. That's awful, isn't it? Who'd have thought?"

Her words came foggily through the hazy veil that forms behind your eyes, inside, as the parade of memories begins. Dust and cobwebs blown out the doorway into the front of your mind. Sleeping pills. I had already started, on the mention of Emily's name, to think in a flash about her, her family, neighbors who moved to Florida. A trailer in the woods. The news of her death rent the scene, cushioned though it was by the fog.

"Dead? She killed herself? Who told you this?"

"Susan. She still talks to them once in a while, maybe once a year, twice. I spoke to her a couple days ago, and she told me. It's a shame, isn't it? It makes me sad that I don't talk to Dorrie or Ted anymore. I thought of calling them, it just seems so... awkward. Out of the blue like that. Am I horrible?"

She had a built-in sigh that escaped when she was talking about lost pets or the death of someone she knew or kids who were a disappointment to their parents. I didn't really know what to think, hadn't thought about her or them in a long, long time. I agreed it was a shame, and we hung up.

If death can bring these memories back, suicide puts them all under a microscope, leaving you searching with ardor the old dusty slides of memory for a clue as to why this person with whom you've had contact while on this planet has committed the ultimate act of violence against herself.

From a kid's perspective, Emily had it made. It had been almost two years since her family -- her, her brother, her mom and dad -- moved from our suburban neighborhood. Her dad got a job in Florida, so they were moving. We were six, I guess, when she left, and at the time I'm sure it was fairly traumatic since beside the fact that she was a friend and in fact her whole family was friendly with my whole family, she was the only friend I had with a swimming pool. That was very important at that age. We couldn't get a pool because our backyard was a steep slope. So, in the summer I swam at Emily's and in the winter she came over to sled down my hill. When they moved, it was to a trailer in Florida, the sunny land of beaches and Disneyworld.

My grandma had moved to Florida, as most elderly people in Chicago eventually do, so I had been there once and told Emily that she was moving to a paradise. Grandma also lived in a trailer, a nice one in a "retirement village," and when Emily said she was living in the same thing, though not surrounded by old people but rather out in the woods, I was as glad for her and as jealous as I could be. Assaulting my parents with requests for them to get new jobs so we could live in a trailer in Florida did no good, so I was thrilled when, within the same year, they said we were going to visit. Grandma, Disneyworld, and Emily.

The trailer was all I hoped it would be. It was a double-wide, set way in the back of a trailer park that hadn't been fully developed yet, so it was sort of like they were in the woods. Like they were camping every day. On this first trip, Emily, my older brother and I spent the entire two days conquering her new world. We explored the brush and climbed trees, built makeshift fortresses in the weeds and peered into the windows of other trailers in the park. Countless adventures and dozens of mosquito bites made for a lasting impression, and it would be weeks before I quit pestering my parents about making this move ourselves. The trailer itself was nice, clean, I remember. They had one car, a long blue Oldsmobile, and a couple bikes.

It was the second visit that ended so abruptly. About three years later we made the trip to Florida again. I was almost ten by this time, and though I was hesitant about it, the memories of the first trip still flickered occasionally and I became excited about the prospect of returning to Emily's wilderness. We didn't write, really. Maybe once or twice. I remember speaking to her once on the phone, after my mother was finished talking to her mother. That's it, though.

There was no Disneyworld this time, but we did get to spend a few days at my Uncle Allen's house in Miami. He had money. He had this big beautiful house right on a narrow concrete channel of water and he had a boat in the water and a slide and fishing poles to catch the odd-looking parrot fish and other saltwater inhabitants that were so bright and amazing to my young, landlocked eyes. We ate paella and there were always bowls of candy and nuts set out. It was from here that we left to go visit Emily and her family in their trailer. They still lived there, though her brother Gary had disappeared about a year before. (That's all I was ever told, that he disappeared, and no one knew anything else.) There wasn't the same excitement in the air this time -- my parents seemed uncomfortable with it and I was sorry to be leaving Uncle Allen's palace. When asked why we were going there, my mom would only say "We have to," somberly, and that was the end of it.

Driving the rough dirt road that led to the back of the park, the car bounced along the ruts and rocks with violent jerks, my father's muttering about the mechanical abuse held barely under his breath. When Emily first moved here, it was just beginning to be developed. I had expected paved roads and a lot more people this time around, but there were neither. In fact, there seemed fewer people, more cleared patches of earth being filled in with weeds in the wake of vacated trailers. The road was worse, too. And when we came in sight of the trailer, my stomach lurched a little. It was run-down, dirty, and uneven, the back setting slightly lower than the front despite the bricks and boards piled under it. There were three cars occupying the yard now; one of the two with wheels missing was the big blue Olds. It looked abandoned, and I thought with both fright and relief that they had all disappeared. More debris dotted the dirt surrounding the trailer, which I left off surveying when I spied Emily in the yard. She was bigger, definitely -- bigger than I was she seemed -- but she stood there smiling and waving as we drove up, and I returned the greeting.

It's awkward enough for twelve-year-olds of opposite sex to have a normal and sincere conversation, and add to that the decay of her surroundings, the change in her appearance, the lack of contact between us over the years, and the mysterious absence of Gary and we barely managed to get any words out at all. My older brother managed to weasel out of the trip to the trailer since, as he said, they weren't his friends and he wanted to go deep-sea fishing with Uncle Allen. So did I, but I was told it would hurt Emily's feelings, and so it was with not a little resentment that I stood, staring at a line I was drawing in the dirt with my shoe, offering one-word answers to the questions of my hosts. Once Emily and I made our exit and began to wander the woods surrounding her home, as we did years earlier, things got a little easier. We talked about school and friends we had made and places we'd been and our favorite TV shows, and before either of us knew it we were just as we used to be. Emily seemed happy enough, though she was a little quieter than she used to be. I figured that was just the way with girls.

We had an early dinner, after which Emily and I excused ourselves to go and look at her old National Geographics (I wondered if she kept them for the same reasons I did), partly because our parents were talking about money, again. It seemed to be all they talked about since we got here, and they weren't enjoying it. Especially my dad, who kept leaving the room to go outside and stretch his legs or something.

Back in Emily's room, the furthest door at the opposite end of the trailer, she closed her door, put on her radio and got a box of magazines out from under her bed. We sat on her floor and looked at them. She kept looking at me kind of sideways, flipping pages, then looking away when I'd look at her. Suddenly, horasely, she blurted out "I know what happened to Gary. He told me before he left. He's not dead, you know, but you can't ever tell anyone. He had to leave here, he'd of been killed if he stayed." She looked wild, her eyes wide and searching, looking into me. I didn't say anything. I was uncomfortable. I wanted to know what happened, but she held me frozen in her terror.

Then she asked, eyes narrowing slightly, "Do you want to play doctor? Have you ever?" My mouth simply hung open. I let out an "uhhh" sound, and she laughed at me. I didn't get angry, because that laugh, at least for the moment, returned her to normal. But now, she was leading me to the bed -- the operating table, she said. She'd done this before.

She would be the first patient, she said, as she got up on the table and pulled a blanket over herself. I still stood a few feet away, trying to compose myself, trying to figure out exactly what I was supposed to do. I shuffled over to her, as she squirmed under the blanket, grunting and giggling. "What..."

"You have to examine me. Here's a flashlight," she said, taking one from her nightstand. "Haven't you ever played this before?"

"Yeah, sure. Of course I have."

Laying there waiting, she looked almost scared. Not of me, not of what was about to happen, but about something. Like that maybe it wouldn't happen, or that it wouldn't happen right. I was self-conscious, almost scared, but I lifted the blanket anyway. It was dark under there, and when I turned on the flashlight I was shocked at the plump, naked body, swelling and falling with her hurried breathing about ten inches from my face. I had no idea what to do. I sat there, still, shining the light in small circles across her, wide-eyed in the stifled darkness. She said something, quietly, but I didn't pay attention. I felt the floor sway, the entire trailer move, as it did when her father got up and walked around. He was a big man, and Emily looked a lot like him. Emily stiffened, then sat up so quickly she hit my nose with her knee, snapping my head back with the blow. I got dizzy, and under the blanket I couldn't breathe very well. She was pulling it off my head frantically and saying something about her dad. The light hit my eyes and the glossiness of it startled me. My eyes were watering, but I touched my face and there was no blood. I felt like I was crying, though, the pain was so sharp and my eyes so full of water. "What the hell did you --"

The door flew open and her father stood in it, looking at me hugely, fiercely. I was scared, and I was still crying. He didn't notice. "Your parents want you. Get your stuff."

Emily's faint protests were halted with a single look, and I got up and walked carefully past him to the living room, where I saw my mom and dad standing by the door, also staring hard at me. I thought I was dead. "Let's go, honey," my mom said gently, looking past me at Emily's parents with something of a sad and angry look on her face, and with that sigh in her voice. I knew then she wasn't mad at me, but didn't know what was going on. I only know we left, and Emily was crying, and I barely had time to wave as I was pulled out the door and to our car. The painful secret that I saw in her eyes as I looked over my shoulder that last time was more than I could fathom. We were supposed to be spending the night, but we left immediately. I would never see her again.

On the way to the hotel where we stayed instead, a sterile, roadside mimic of every other hotel room I had ever been in, I deciphered my parents' talk under guise of sleep. I remember clearly the feel of the cool vinyl car seat against my cheek, the way it curled the breath back into my hair, as I lay there listening, and thinking about the game I had just played, at what I had seen. They still didn't know where Gary was, no one did except Emily. I can't hope to understand what happened to make him disappear into the open blankness of the world outside his family, only that Emily had been burdened with his secret and, in her mind, his life, and it was hard for her, though I didn't know how hard. Some time I fell asleep, listening to my mother's voice, angry and sad with Emily's parents, feeling sorry for the girl "stuck in the middle of it all, that poor kid," with that built-in sigh.