Second Star

35

It takes a few days for the details to become clear. I was found on the beach near where my brothers’ boards were discovered months ago; the doctors think I made some kind of deluded attempt to find my brothers by joining them at the bottom of the sea.

I was unconscious when they found me, and drifted in and out of consciousness for days, calling for Pete, for Belle, for Jas. The doctors and Mary think those names are attached to people who don’t exist outside of my imagination.

We’ve been through this before, I want to shout. But instead, I keep calm each time I explain, telling my story over and over again, begging them to call the Coast Guard. I feel like a murder suspect being grilled under bright, hot lights, like they’re trying to catch me in a lie, to poke holes in my story. Which, of course, they are. They think that once they break my story apart, I’ll see that it simply can’t have been possible.

They also can’t agree on whether it was drug-induced psychosis or grief-induced psychosis. It’s a little which came first, the chicken or the egg. Did I take the drugs because I was so grief-stricken and then manufacture this world, or did I manufacture this world because I was so grief-stricken and take the drugs to keep the illusion alive?

They say it’s unlikely that I took the drugs only once, like I think that I did. They insist that it’s unlikely it was a single drug; there are still traces of different hallucinogens in my system now—a cocktail of rare chemicals so obscure that they don’t even have street names. They don’t seem to care about where I got the drugs or how they came to be combined the way they did. They don’t believe me that it was only one drug that was made up of all those different ones. They think I took them each separately, over a period of weeks and months, stretching all the way back to my high school graduation, until the drugs all mingled in my system and wreaked havoc on my psyche.

No one believes me about the boat, about the way Pete and Belle and Jas rode the wave, even as the storm threatened to sink us all. They tell me it wouldn’t have been possible for anyone to surf that wave.

I’m embarrassed, at first, to tell them that I was in love with at least one—if not two—of my illusions, but they figure it out. It is their job to be insightful, after all. Something about the way I look when I talk about Pete, about the way my voice catches in my throat every single time I try to say Jas’s name, gives me away. They tell me that these relationships were the biggest illusion of all, because they were the part to which I was most attached. Emotionally.

On that point, at least, I don’t argue.

Because of all my injuries, I go to physical therapy in another wing of the hospital every day, but no one tries to deny that the real reason I’m here is for psychotherapy. After all, I could do the physical therapy as an outpatient. In their soothing voices—I soon discover that Mary isn’t the only one here who’s mastered that aggravatingly calm monotone—they tell me that my delusion was my way of confronting my brothers’ deaths: I was in such deep denial that my subconscious had to create a reality in which I saw, plain as day, the reality of their deaths, a reality in which I not only saw but felt exactly how they died.

In our family sessions, my mother cries that it’s all her fault. She let her one remaining child slip away. Eventually my father, Mary the therapist, and I find ourselves comforting her, reassuring her. I can’t blame my mother for being so shocked; who would have thought that Wendy, her Goody Two-shoes, would have turned out to be a crazy, drug-addled runaway?

The day I refer to my time in Kensington as an illusion is the first time in a long time that I see my mother smile. When I said it, I didn’t actually mean anything by it, didn’t mean to imply that I accepted their theories about my madness. I only said “illusion” because it’s easier to use the same language they use.

But the word makes my mother so happy that I say it again the next time I see her, and again the next. At first, the word tastes sour in my mouth, but slowly the bitterness fades, until the word doesn’t taste like anything at all. I say it so many times that I get used to it, never entirely sure whether I believe it or not, never quite sure that what I believe matters.

Once I say it enough times, they let me go home.

The first morning I wake up in my room at home, I don’t recognize it. I open my eyes expecting to be on a mattress on the floor in Pete’s house. Then, I swear I can feel Jas’s arms around me, smell the sea, feel the salt air on my skin. But instead of a run-down motel on the beach, I’m in the glass house on the hill. Instead of the ocean, the view from my window is the city lights, fading beneath the sunrise.

I have to beg, but one day my parents finally take me to the beach. Mary said it would be okay; she said it might be good for me. Not anywhere near Kensington, of course. No, the beach nearest our house, the one where we had the bonfire the night I graduated. A night that seems a million years ago.

“Why did you want to come here so much?” my mother asks, but I don’t answer her because I’m too busy watching the surfers take to the water. There are at least a dozen here that I can see, scattered beyond the break of the waves, taking turns paddling into waves that don’t rise higher than six feet. There was a time when waves like this would have seemed enormous to me, but now they seem small.

At home, I’ve been Googling big-wave surfing and watching video after video of surfers dropping into mammoth waves. One afternoon, my father found me hypnotized by videos of surfers at Teahupoo. At first, he seemed all set to call Mary, report a relapse, readmit me to the hospital. But after a few seconds, he was sitting beside me, just as riveted as I was at the images of someone flying inside the tunnel of the massive wave.

“Its name means ‘crushing skulls,’” I said without thinking.

My father didn’t ask me how I knew that, and I’m not sure I could have told him if he had. Instead, he studied the way the wave crashed into the ocean, the way the barrel narrowed at its edges, so that even the most skilled surfer had trouble making it out of the tunnel without being pummeled by the water crashing down around him.

After a few minutes, my father said, “I can see how it got that name.”

Now he puts his arm around me gently. He seems almost as fascinated by the surfers here as I am. I wonder if he’s thinking of John and Michael, of the years they spent surfing this beach before they ran off in search of bigger and better waves.

If my parents were to forbid me from ever picking up a surfboard, I would understand why. How could they be sure that I wouldn’t disappear just like John and Michael, drawn in by the waves’ siren song?

But much to my surprise, my father says, “Feels good to be back on the beach, doesn’t it?”

I nod. “It does.”

“We’ll have to start coming here more often,” he says carefully. For a second, my mother looks stricken, but slowly, unexpectedly, a smile spreads across her face.

I think she must feel the same way I do. Like me, she feels closest to John and Michael when she’s near the water.