MUCH LATER, when I could bring myself to read about it, I learned that the time of free fall from the bridge is four seconds. For nearly four seconds, then, Jason sank through the air, his clothing billowing up above him and the mist from the water rushing up at him like a wave. The way he fell, he would have been able to see the sky above him and the cars barreling over the lanes of the bridge, and he would have passed seagulls hovering over him in their flight. He would have been falling too fast, the wind and the speed and the force flooding his eardrums, to hear the cars or the boats below or the shouting from people who saw him up above. It was clear that day, and cold, and to anyone who witnessed his contortions and wild flailing from the bridge it must have looked as though he were trying to swim.
My phone was ringing—it was Brandon, too early for him to be calling. I was disoriented and at first mistook it for my alarm, thinking it was a school day. It was just before seven the next morning.
He had to tell me three times before it sank in—I kept saying, “What do you mean? What do you mean?”—and then I couldn’t speak. He’d opened with “He’s alive, but,” and I think now how heartbreakingly kind of him it was to do that, that I didn’t have to live through his death even for a few seconds before I knew he’d somehow survived.
“His mom called me. She called from his phone, and I thought it was him when I picked up—then she told me—” Brandon was crying. “Fuck, I can’t breathe.” I could hear him gasping for air. “She said when they pulled him from the water they thought he was dead. He’s in the ICU—he broke his ribs and punctured his lungs, and—”
Later, Brandon would tell me how his father had overheard his call with Jason’s mother and had gotten on the phone and asked Mrs. Tsou if he could be allowed to speak with Jason’s doctor. I think about that now, his father stepping in like that. After he hung up, he tried to give Brandon a hug, but Brandon fought his way out. He was yelling and swearing, and his dad finally grabbed his arms and pinned them to his sides and said, “Brandon, listen to me, listen to me—I talked to his doctor; he’s going to be okay.”
Which was bullshit, Brandon told me, obviously a cop-out, obviously nothing was okay, but he forgave his father when he saw he had tears in his eyes.
But that was later, and in the moment I don’t think it would have mattered if he’d told me. I wouldn’t have been capable of absorbing it.
“My dad said he’ll be okay,” Brandon was saying, and I realized I hadn’t heard some of what he’d told me. “He said he’ll be in a lot of pain and he could get infections, but it won’t—he said when you’re young you heal fast and probably he’ll be back home in two weeks or maybe even one, depending—”
It was stupid, it was just that my mind was flying wildly around, grasping for solid ground, but all I could think was But what if we hear back about the Juilliard auditions? They would have to pause it, I thought. How could the world just keep going as if—
Brandon was saying something. I said, thickly, “What?”
“I said are you okay?”
“Am I okay?”
“Your voice sounds weird. Are you sitting down? Do you—”
I couldn’t shut off the tinnitus in my ears. I put down the phone. I sat up and put my head between my legs and breathed until the room wasn’t going blurry at the corners anymore.
“We have to go see him,” I said when I picked it back up.
“We can’t.”
“What do you mean we can’t?”
“His mom said she’ll tell us when we can come.”
“But we have to—”
“I know,” he said. “I know. But she said”—he pitched his voice higher, imitating Jason’s mother—“This is not party.”
“But—”
His voice gave out. “I know.”
I don’t know why it felt like there was nothing else to say. Or maybe it wasn’t that, either—maybe it was that there was so much it couldn’t fit into language. But as all the air around me went thin like my ribs had shrunk around my lungs, we stayed on the phone, silent and so incredibly far away from him.
It was four days before they let us see him, and in those days nothing else existed in the world. We spent them mostly at Grace’s house, showing up first thing in the morning and leaving long after dark. Mrs. Nakamura made us hot cider and cookies, and she’d come sit next to Grace, stroking her hair, and we watched movies and waited to be able to go see Jason. We would sit tangled on the couches or on the floor, our limbs pressed together, and when someone got up to get something to eat or go to the bathroom, I missed their physical presence. Brandon’s and Sunny’s parents both called them constantly, for no apparent reason, I think just to make sure they were still there, and one night Brandon’s mother came to pick him up—that was also different, that his parents didn’t want him driving—and she and Mrs. Nakamura talked in the kitchen for a long time, and when I looked in they were both crying.
That morning when I’d stumbled downstairs, my mother hadn’t left for work yet, and she’d asked me if something was wrong.
I was immediately on guard. “Like what?” I’d said.
“Well—I heard something happened with someone at your school. Something—someone tried to hurt themselves. So I was just wondering if you’d heard anything about that.”
“Where did you hear that?”
“It was discussed on Nextdoor.”
His name hadn’t been in the news anywhere, and the school hadn’t sent anything home, and she didn’t talk to other parents from school unless she was dropping me off at someone’s house, but I would make sure that didn’t happen. I knew she wouldn’t hear more details. “Well, I didn’t hear anything,” I said. “Maybe it was a freshman.”
“If you ever want to talk about—”
“I don’t,” I said, and she’d left me alone after that. Maybe she assumed I was still angry about the child support. Which I was, but it was a suspended anger that hung around the periphery but for right now felt unreachable. I didn’t care about my father or my grandparents. When finally I had to go home that day, Mrs. Nakamura saying gently that surely my mother missed me, I felt the absence of my friends like a sickness. I couldn’t sleep that night.
On the fourth day, finally, Brandon called to say we were allowed to go see him. Some of my friends’ parents—Grace’s, mostly—spent a long time debating whether we should be allowed to go by ourselves, or whether they should come, but eventually they softened, and Brandon drove us. We were quiet on the way there, and I leaned my head back against the headrest and closed my eyes. I was viscerally, shatteringly nervous, cold all over and with a sick thrumming in my whole chest. Since we’d heard, I hadn’t been able to shake the fear that Brandon’s father was wrong—maybe there was a blood clot lurking in Jason’s lungs, an infection lying in wait—and I had lived in terror of my phone ringing; at night I would wake up with the horrible certainty something awful had happened, that the way I was feeling was a sign. And now we were going to see him, and as much as I’d been desperate to be with him, I could feel already how it was never going to be enough. What would we say to him? What would I say? All this time we’d been waiting, all the things I wanted to say had been crescendoing inside me, rising to a din. But we could hardly burst in and say Why did you do it, Jason? I couldn’t stand in front of his hospital bed and look him in the eye and demand Why weren’t we enough to stop you?
In the parking lot, we were jostled violently going over a speed bump. My eyes flew open. Brandon was driving too fast.
“Slow down,” Sunny snapped. She clutched the armrest so hard her knuckles turned white, and when we pitched forward again on the next speed bump she made a gasping, choking sound and grabbed at my arms.
“You know what my dad told me once?” Brandon said. “He said the spinal cord has the same consistency as toothpaste.”
I shut my eyes against the image. Sunny said, “That’s disgusting.”
“That’s why you can’t move someone after an injury, because if anything touches that cord, it’s not springy—you know, it doesn’t go back to how it’s supposed to be. God,” he said, “I just keep thinking about how it’s like toothpaste and—”
“Stop the car, Brandon,” Sunny said suddenly, urgently.
“We’re almost—”
“Brandon, stop.”
He slammed on the brakes just in time for her to fling open the door and retch onto the asphalt, her chest heaving. I stroked her back. She sat hunched for a few minutes, then she sat up and closed her eyes and leaned back against the seat. “Okay,” she said, “park.”
Inside we walked down the hallway, square white linoleum tiles and a low ceiling, fluorescent lighting. Our footsteps echoed around us, and there was a hum of medical noise: beeping and thrumming. The flickering of lights overhead and the lack of ventilation inside were blurring my vision slightly, dulling the edges so that even when I focused nothing quite held.
At the ICU we had to be buzzed in. My heart was pounding, and I tried desperately to arrange all the words screaming around in my head into something I could possibly say to him, and then there was no more time to think about it because Sunny had pushed open the heavy wooden door to his room and we were there, and there he was.
The first thing I noticed was that so many things in his room were clear: bags of fluid, the tubes of the IV inserted into the back of his hand, and I think I saw those things first because I couldn’t look right at him, the same way you can’t stare into the sun. There was a tube in his chest, too, clear and rubbery and thick, and when I saw it my esophagus revolted and I gagged. I turned away, ashamed, and then, finally, I made myself look. His face was bruised and puffy, and there was an ugliness to it. All the same, though, seeing him—some small screeching corner in my mind went quiet at last.
Jason lifted his hand a few inches off the mattress in a small wave. When he breathed, it made a wheezing sound. He coughed and then winced and pressed on his chest with his thumb. It wasn’t a large room, and it was empty aside from Jason. Were his parents not here with him? They were making him wait here alone?
“You guys shouldn’t have come,” he muttered, and him saying that—the rejection of it—would play over and over in my mind for weeks. “I told my parents to tell you not to come.”
“Of course we came,” Brandon said. “We would’ve come the second we heard if your parents had let us.” He closed his eyes and pressed against them with his thumb and forefinger. His shoulders were shaking. Grace reached out and took his hand—I stared at their hands there, twined together that way—and she leaned against him.
“You should have called us,” Sunny said. “We would have done anything, Jason. We would have done anything at all.”
Jason said, “I know.”
Later, I’d read that of all the people who’ve jumped from that same gap in the guardrails, fewer than thirty have survived. There were a few short articles about Jason in the news, none with his name, but they were easy to find with the right keywords. In one of them, Jason’s survival was described as miraculous—miraculous that he managed to right himself so he absorbed the force of his fall feetfirst, miraculous that he didn’t die on impact, miraculous that there was a coast guard boat near enough to yank him out of the water, to lay him on the painted concrete floor of the boat and pile heavy felted blankets on top of him. Miraculous that the paramedics arrived when they did to treat his collapsed lung, miraculous that when he went into shock, that alone didn’t kill him.
I remember reading that story and how when I put it down my body went numb and my mind went blank, like it was protecting me from knowing any more, from having to think or revisit or argue. It was protecting me, I think, from having to defend to some faceless reporter what it had felt like to see him there, to look at him battered and damaged that way, to understand what had happened to him and how none of us were going to be the same from then on. Whatever it felt like in that room, it didn’t feel like a miracle.
Jason opened his eyes again. The left half of his face was scraped, and his head was encased in a plasticky apparatus that looked vaguely gladiatorial. The sheet was only half covering his chest, and beneath it his skin was bruised deeply, as though someone had dipped a thumb in fingerpaint to smudge rough streaks of charcoal and blue and puce. I watched his chest rise and fall.
“Where are your parents?” Grace said, as though she’d read my mind.
“They’re here. They went to go get something to eat in the cafeteria.”
“Oh,” Grace said, and I could tell she was blinking back tears, and then none of us knew what else to say.
Jason shifted his legs slightly in the bed and grimaced, and for a few seconds the electronic beeping of his heart sped up and then slowed again. I watched the monitor on his IV pole. I was acutely aware that still I’d said nothing to him—I felt that lack as a hollow in the pit of my stomach—but everything I could think to say was so tremendously small.
We stood for a while, the thin, high-pitched beeping of the monitor and the starchy rustling of Jason’s sheets the only sounds. I cleared my throat, then wished I hadn’t. I trained my eyes elsewhere in the room—on the whiteboard on the wall with YOUR NURSE TODAY IS ANDREA CHONG written on it, the bag of fluid labeled HYDROMORPHONE—instead of on Jason.
“Are you in a lot of pain?” Brandon said.
“What do you fucking think?” He mumbled it, though—the words were sharp, but his tone was blurry and faded. Later, Brandon would tell me his father had explained to him that dilaudid makes you loopy, and he would say that Jason wasn’t really himself. It was supposed to be comforting, I think. It wasn’t.
He looked at me then. And I was so exposed in that moment, like he could see all my inadequacies, all the things I couldn’t say—how if he’d thought we shouldn’t come see him here, I’d done nothing to prove him wrong; I was unneeded. I said, “Jason, what happened?”
But then the door to the room opened. Jason’s parents came in through the curtain, his mother holding a paper cup of water, and then a step behind them was Evelyn. All of them looked exhausted. It was the first time I’d seen Evelyn without any makeup on, and she looked like a blurred version of herself. She didn’t acknowledge me. I wondered if she would. I wondered whether she’d said anything to Jason about me calling her.
“Hello, hello,” his mother said, “thank you for coming. Hello.”
Jason’s father peered at me. I never knew whether he recognized me, if he remembered that Brandon and I had been at his house that day, if it would have made a difference to him either way.
“It’s okay, Jason okay now,” he said, and he patted my shoulder. “All okay now,” he repeated, and dropped his arm. He stared helplessly at Jason there in the bed. “Next year he go to Berkeley, huh? And put all this behind him. Next year, much better.”
My heart was pounding. There were words all tangled up inside my throat, waiting to be loosened. This is your fault is what I wanted to say, and I wanted to scream it at him. He would have been all right if not for you.
Later, I’d learn that Mr. Tsou stayed awake all night sitting by Jason’s side, that every time Jason caught his breath in pain his father wept, that when he thought Jason was sleeping he told Mrs. Tsou it should’ve been him instead in the hospital bed. I don’t know if it would’ve mattered to me then to know that. I like to think it wouldn’t have changed anything, that I understood then all the shortcomings of remorse and how impotent it is against the past. I like to think I recognized that you don’t have to tell yourself things are fine to make it easier on another person, and that you don’t have to turn your heart toward men who are suffering when they’ve brought it on themselves.
But probably that isn’t true of me. After all, I would, at that point, have forgiven my own father everything in exchange for something as small as a phone call.
“Your nurse is coming back,” Evelyn said to Jason. “Your friends should probably go.”
I wanted him to say something to us with her there—something that would prove to her that we belonged, something to make it so she couldn’t fence us off from him the way it felt like she’d already mentally done, as though we didn’t matter. But he didn’t; he was slipping back into sleep, and he mumbled something unintelligible.
“Thank you for coming,” his mother said. “He is very tired. He need to rest. Thank you for coming. Evelyn say he need to see his friends. He is very happy to see you.” At the door, she lowered her voice.
“This is private family matter,” she said. She tried to smile, and then she reached out and grabbed my hand. I let her, because I didn’t know what else to do. “Don’t tell everyone, please, okay? This is family matter. Thank you for coming to see him. He will be okay now that you see him.”
That night at home I woke up in that porous middle-of-the-night dark because I couldn’t breathe. My lungs were nets, the oxygen pouring through them no matter how much I gasped for air, and my heart was sputtering in my chest so I could feel suddenly how incredibly fragile it was. I could feel how it was about to slip out of rhythm and how it could end everything in a single instant.
I couldn’t draw enough air to scream for help, and I dragged myself, mostly crawling, down the hall. My mother took me to the emergency room, driving thirty over the speed limit and praying frantically aloud. I didn’t have my phone, and all I could think was that I wouldn’t get to tell my friends goodbye.
At the hospital, they drew blood and ran EKGs on my heart. Afterward, the doctor came in, a Filipino man in his fifties who carried his clipboard with both hands. He sat down and told us my tests had been normal, which was, I think, supposed to be reassuring, and then asked if I’d been stressed or anxious.
“Their school—” my mother said. “It’s very stressful. Other children have—struggled. As a parent, you worry—”
The doctor nodded sympathetically. I’d had a panic attack, he said, and I should exercise and make sure I got sufficient sleep.
We drove back home. The sky had started to lighten, the day rushing toward us before we were ready, and we were both exhausted. I was sick and afraid, my body a stranger to me.
“I hope you know,” my mother said, when we passed by the nature preserve on Arguello, “that you can always talk to me.”
I said nothing. The sun flickered a peekaboo through the row of redwoods we went by.
“About anything,” my mother said. Her eyes were wet. “Anything at all.”
At home after the hospital, I went back to bed. I woke up disoriented hours later because someone was in my room.
It was my mother. I squinted at her through mostly closed eyes, and she didn’t see me. She was arranging something on my nightstand, and when she stepped back I could see what it was, all set on a tray: a cup of hot peppermint tea, a bowl of jook with cilantro and green onions on top, a vase with roses from the bush by our walkway. She fussed with it, arranging it carefully, and then smoothed the blankets over me and laid her hand gently, so gently, on my hair. I pretended I was asleep.