He said he’d woken up to the sound of Dr. Frost explaining why he died. The room was white, the sun was shining, he was sure he had died. And the doctor was on television saying that he died of internal injuries. This confused him because he had cut his wrists.
He said he could remember Dr. Frost as he stitched up the wounds, sedated though he was. (Bobby was sedated, not Dr. Frost; though I have my doubts.) So when he heard him saying that he had died, he just thought, “Well, that figures.”

I’m not sure if we’re supposed to laugh at this. The visit only lasts two hours and they refuse to allow outside food in. Bobby is unconsolable over this. He misses the beef stroganoff, the three cheese ravioli, the chili that my wife makes. If he’s too old for this, how do you think I feel?

That night, the night, she is vacuuming the bloodstains.
“Why?” I ask.
“Because I don’t want it to set.”
“You can’t get out blood.”
“You can get blood out. Seltzer and salt. Then vacuum.”
I’m upset so I accuse. “You can’t get that out.”
“I can get anything out of anything. I can get blood out of blood.”
I skulk away.
I’m so scared. I’m so scared that my son is in pain and there’s nothing I can do. That everything is now out of my hands. And I’m scared that I couldn’t stop him from hurting himself. And I’m scared that she saw the signs and ignored them, just as I had.
Most of all, I’m scared that he’s turning into me.

The psychiatric ward is never quiet. She picks at me about that.
“This is what we’re paying eight hundred a day for?” she demands.
“Nights too.”
Somewhere in this ward, someone is in their room shrieking. Bobby says that they’ve been doing it all night, all morning, all afternoon. They stopped for dinner. Again: Do we laugh?
“Are you okay?” she wants to know.
He looks away. His voice catches as he says, “I hate it here.”
“It’s for your own good,” she replies.
“Yeah.”

“It really is,” I try to reassure. Maybe he listens to me more. “This is the best place in the state.”
“The best place in the state is probably the women’s locker room at the college,” he says, still looking out the window.
I want to laugh this time. He’s clearly trying to find humor here. But there is no humor. We’ve entered some warped dimension where the jokes ring hollow, where they crack and come apart, leaving a sour aftertaste in your mouth. No, in your heart. He’s breaking my heart.

“Do we renew his cell phone?” she asks while I’m doing the dishes.
“Yes.”
“We don’t know how long he’ll be-”
“We don’t change anything unless he asks us to.”
“You give him too much power. Why not ask the doctor?”
I mumble something about the doctor not giving a rat’s ass about cell phone plans. I hear the paper tearing behind me. Without turning around, I say, “You should recycle that.”

A week later, they have elevated him to level seven (out of eight; eight being the lowest). This means that Bobby can walk the grounds of the hospital with a chaperone. His eyes are more focused now. Dr. Foster says they’re weaning him off the tranquilizers. Now, she leaves me to deal with the doctor while she talks to Bobby alone . I don’t like it.
“You have to understand,” Dr. Foster explains, “that biochemistry isn’t an exact science yet. Tweaking neuro-chemicals is mostly guesswork.”
“I’m aware.”
“Do you see a psychiatrist?”
“Yes.”
“A chemical imbalance?”
“Why?”
“Because genetics can definitely play a role.”

Bobby steps out of his room into the hall. “Can we go outside now?”
I guess he’s been looking forward to this. Maybe that’s the point of this place. Take away everything you enjoy and give it back piece by piece until you feel lucky to, say, order a pizza. To get in the car and just drive around the block. Even to step outside and walk around a building.
“I don’t see why not,” Dr. Foster answers him. Then, back to me, “I’d like to continue this. Can I pencil you in before you leave?”
“How long?”
“Maybe ten minutes.”
“Yeah. I can do that.”

At the back of the building is an exercise yard. Structures built for children, but too tall for children. A wood-chip path going into a miniature forest a short ways before curving back. I guess they built this place just for such an occasion. Bobby sees me calculating it.
“It’s for physical therapy,” he tells me. “I asked. In the summertime, they bring the PT guys out here to, you know, recover. The air smells great.”
“Did you miss the sunshine?” she asks.
“I hate it now. I can barely sleep here. And if I do fall asleep, they come in and wake me up every hour. And everything is glass so the sun is always getting in.”
We share a look. She seems concerned. I’m angry. She shouldn’t have brought it up. Not now, not when he’s still so fragile.

“Do they make you do chores?” I change the subject.
“No. This isn’t rehab.”
“What do you do, then?” she wants to know.
“We talk a lot. There’s group therapy and then private therapy and then progress therapy and there's behavioral therapy and art therapy. And quiet time. They let us watch a movie on Friday.”
“What movie?”
“Some kids’ movie. They think anything more challenging will get us worked up. How long do I have to stay here?”
That look again. What do we tell him? I decide to try.
“That’s not really up to us. We have to do what the doctor says.”
This agitates him. “I don’t even know the doctor. I’ve been here a week and we’ve talked for ten minutes.”
“We can take you somewhere else,” she says.
He shrugs this off. “Wouldn’t make a difference.”

“How is he?” Dr. Patton asks.
“I think he’s lonely.”
“It’s hard to shake up a teenager’s routine. And he’s been through a traumatic experience.”
“But…I’m depressed. I’ve had my struggles. I never wanted to kill myself.”
“Fifteen is a very different age today than it was when you were fifteen.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means just what it means. You can’t compare yourself to him, you’ve grown up in different worlds.”
“What should I do? Does he need structure? Do I come down harder? Or do I go soft? Do I give him freedom?”

“You’re going to have to determine that on your own. The goal isn’t to make him happy, it’s to restore normalcy to his life. Everyone gets blue, that’s to be expected. But it should be dictated by life events.”
“But how do I know?”
Without any emotion, he says, “You’ll know when you know. Children don’t come with instructions. You figure it out as you go along.”
“What if I hadn’t left work early that day? What would I have figured out?”
He makes note of this on his pad and then looks up at me again. His eyes implore me to go further. I have nothing. We sit in silence for three minutes and then my time is up.

She starts rearranging the kitchen that weekend. She offers no explanation and is very annoyed when I ask for one.
“It’s just because I won’t know where to find anything,” I assure her. I want her to know that I’m upset about the situation but am willing to work on a resolution with her, just like Dr. Patton advised me to.
“I have always wanted my kitchen to be a certain way,” she tells me. “And I haven’t gotten it through nineteen years of marriage.”
“Okay, I can respect that. But let’s do it together.”
She rips a mixing bowl out of my hands. “You’re just going to slow me down. I’m already so scattered.”

“Why are you attacking me?” I ask.
“Because it’s your fault.”
“I was the one that got him to the hospital. I was the one that walked in and saw him like that and did the right thing.”
“It’s your damn genes! No one on my side ever did anything like this!”
“Oh yeah?” I press, getting angry. “What about your grandfather that ran away to join the army when he was 16? That’s not a suicide mission when there’s a war on?”
“He’s becoming you. He’s a little miniature version of you now and I hate both of you for it.”
She tosses the mixing bowl on the floor and it echoes for too long.

Bobby seems better in the second week. He asks after us for the first time. I try to turn it back on him, find out how he’s really doing. It feels like it might be an honest moment.
“I’m so tired of talking about myself,” he says. “It’s all they want to do in here.”
“Do you think we contributed?” she wants to know.
He looks embarrassed. “You guys didn’t do anything wrong. I’m the screw-up.”
“Hey,” I say, grasping his shoulder in what I hope is a comforting manner. “You’re not a screw-up.”
“Suicide’s supposed to be the easy way out,” he says, breaking our unspoken pact to not discuss the incident. “And I even screwed that up.”
Even outside, in the fresh air and the sunshine, it still doesn’t feel like a joke. Is this how it will be from now on? There won’t be any humor between us because his suicide attempt poisoned things?

After three weeks, they decide he is ready to come home. She is cleaning his room again, even though he had cleaned it before cutting his wrists. It annoys me but I keep it to myself. Just nerves. Fear of doing the wrong thing and setting this whole thing in motion again. Maybe that’s what life is from now on: Trying not to rouse the machinery of mental health.
For dinner, he asks for macaroni and cheese with bacon bits mixed in.
He says he doesn’t want to go back to school yet. I have to tell him that everyone knows by now. We had to tell the administration and this set off chaos there. Announcements were made, teachers were put on alert, the services of a grief counselor were retained, a hotline was created. Needless to say, his nineteen day absence was conspicuous in these circumstances.
“I don’t care about that,” he says. “They’ll see the scars in gym class anyway.”
“Then what is it?”
“I’m just not ready.”
“You’re going to have to go at some point.”
“I know, dad. Just…not yet.”
I cave. I promise to buy him some comic books. He scoffs at the idea. I realize that he’s not a child anymore. He’s made the grown up decisions already.

After four days, Bobby says he’s ready to go back. That night, he tells me about some of the things he learned in therapy.
“Mom is an enabler.”
“She coddles you,” I suggest.
“No, I mean, she is in willful denial. I was reaching out for help and she didn’t let herself admit that I needed it. And that just let me spiral further down.”
“She loves you.”
“I know. But sometimes love isn’t enough.”

After he goes back to school, life starts to feel normal again. I fall back into my rut at work. Life seems like it used to be. But it’s not. There’s a crack in our foundation now. There’s a weakness in the family armor and we may go through the tasks as we always have but there’s something in the back of our minds, eating at us. It’s not just concern, it’s helplessness.
I smell smoke on Bobby’s clothes. I decide to keep it to myself and then tell her later that night anyway. She’s worried. I tell her he’s just growing up.
“We can’t let him test our limits anymore,” she warns me. “We gave him the luxury of trust and he destroyed it.”
“Do you care about him or about us?”
“I care about all of us. And that’s why I’m saying this: We can’t let him make the wrong choices.”
“That’s what growing up is,” I reply. Dr. Patton would have said, ‘That’s what being an adult is.’