Tom’s adolescence marked the moment when things broke down entirely in his relationship with David. Looking back, I can see it was on the cards, and while I was unable to recognize it at the time, I played my own part in the downward spiral. The more I smothered any hint of Tom’s anxiety, the more irritated David became, and the more Tom withdrew. Equally, while Tom still had a tendency to fret unnecessarily about things, he was expressing a new exasperation in David, and in us as parents. The frustration about his life had a different energy about it. In a way, I saw it as a good sign, something that was appropriate to his age and perhaps simply linked to the stress of impending exams.
There was one row I remember particularly well. It was during one of my mother’s visits from Taos. It was the trip when she told us that she’d got married. “Married?”
“To Ted.” She nodded. “An arrangement,” she added matter-of-factly. “My visa. Now I can stay and carry on with my work.” My calling, was what she had said. She was now working at the rehab center. She also chaired a couple of AA groups in town, “twice a day,” she said. “Sometimes more. We meet in cafés. Sometimes we sit in the desert. Under that big, wide Taos sky,” she gushed. “We offer what people need. Whatever helps. Sometimes it’s just about being there for people.” She was excited, breathless with her evangelical desire to convert others to her abstinent ways. I had to look away.
The row between Tom and David was sparked by an item in the news about two young men climbing El Capitan, the famous rock in Yosemite in California. The men, both in their twenties, were planning to scale Dawn Wall, the sheerest side of the rock face. Their plan prompted news coverage about previous attempts to climb the rock and the twenty-one or more casualties it had produced over the years. David had no time for such risk taking. Citing the worry for friends and family, “Ultimately, it’s selfish,” he concluded. “One of them will probably die. I mean, what’s the point?”
Tom was incensed. His face hardened. “If you think it’s selfish . . . you just don’t get it. Don’t understand it at all.”
My mother rarely listened in on conversations that didn’t focus on her, but that day, she glanced up at the sharpness in Tom’s voice. David looked back at his son in surprise. We were all in the kitchen, and I held back, stopping myself from getting involved. Carolyn was chopping vegetables for a stir-fry.
“I’ve read up about them,” Tom said. “They’ve been climbing for years. They’ve planned for this particular climb for four years. Four years,” he repeated. “Can you imagine that level of commitment? Of planning. Of dedication—” His voice tailed off. That’s when I saw it on his face. Envy. Aspiration. The desire to have that passion. Something similarly all-consuming in his own life, and with it, the simple admiration for those who do.
“And what about everyone else? The rescue services that will inevitably be called? The waste of money . . . the waste of life?”
Tom glared back at him. There were several moments of silence. Father contemplating son, and son contemplating father. At first Tom’s look was one of disdain. It soon became something more akin to pity. “It’s about being free,” he said, “being out in the elements. At one with nature.”
“Just like in Taos,” my mother interjected. “Like living alongside nature. As if you’ve been invited in. It’s all about the freedom,” she said, stretching her arms out wide. You and me,” she said, nodding at Tom, “we’re so similar. Free spirits.”
I closed my eyes briefly.
David ignored her. “What if one of them died? How do you think their parents would feel?”
Tom paused for a moment. Carolyn stopped chopping.
“It’s possible—just possible,” he said, “that as well as feeling sad—they might feel proud. Proud that their son had managed to find something that fulfilled him. That he died doing something he loved. Maybe they got how important it was to him?” Then, more pointedly, “Maybe they understood their son.”
“They’re twenty-six and twenty-seven. They’re adults. They should know better,” David muttered.
“And do what instead?” Tom shot back. “Work in a bank? Become an accountant? A lawyer? Teach at a university,” he sneered, “enjoying all the trappings and privileges. The wine? The college dinners? Yep—all sounds a totally unselfish existence.”
David snapped. “Well, until you’ve managed to find a way of supporting yourself in dreamland, then I suggest you keep quiet about my career choice.”
There was a stinging silence. Carolyn swung round. Tom looked appalled and I could tell David regretted it as soon as he’d said it. It grew not out of malice, but out of exasperation, a divide with his son that he didn’t know how to repair. Tom just shrugged and left the room. By way of avoiding my recriminations, David followed him.
“Teenagers,” my mother laughed. “He’s stretching his wings. It’s the same for a lot of the young people I see.”
I was standing by the kitchen table, my hands on the back of a chair.
“I always encouraged you to do the same,” she said. “And looking back, you probably should have taken a few more risks when you were his age.”
I felt my hands grip the frame of the wood.
“Always such a homebody,” she continued. “A worrier. Skulking round the house with that small frown on your forehead.” She sighed. “I was always trying to get you out more—”
As she was shaking her head, I saw myself. A child, early teens perhaps, I don’t remember. We were shopping for an outfit for a party. I had my heart set on a blue silky dress. “This is the one I like,” I said, my fingers reaching for the shimmer of turquoise. She glanced over, her face a portrait of displeasure.
“Don’t you like the green?” she said, holding up a dull, pond-colored shift.
“Not so much,” I said carefully. “I prefer the blue.”
Her head was shaking ever so slightly. “I think the green is lovely,” she said tightly. “It’s my favorite color,” and she held it up against me, triumphant, before taking it to the till.
“Furrow your own field, is what I used to say,” my mother continued. “Do you remember?”
My hands ached. I could barely speak.
My mother was heading back to Taos the next day.
“Yes,” I said. “I remember it well.”
When I thought about Tom, of course, I understood that sixteen was a tricky time. It wasn’t helped by the fact that David and Carolyn were forever in cahoots over her studies, their heads constantly huddled together at the kitchen table over books for her exams. And in many ways, the umbrella of adolescence became a relief, an excuse to hide behind to explain away his disaffected behavior. “Teenagers,” people would nod sympathetically. “He’ll grow out of it.”
David withdrew. He was stressed, and over time, his anxiety became lodged in his body. As the cracks and fissures in his family continued to show, so he felt the failings of his body as he entered middle age. And with it came a localized worry about his own mortality and related physical signs and symptoms. Moles he was convinced were melanomas. A headache, a brain tumor. A sore throat, the early signs of throat cancer. There was never any way of talking about it. His concern was only assuaged by regular and anxiety-inducing hospital appointments that eventually gave him the all-clear. Once, after a CT scan had not detected a tumor, his jubilation was marred by a Google search that indicated there was a particular type of tumor undetectable by the traditional scanning equipment. It was only available privately, he discovered. This led to a lengthy debate about the merits or otherwise of private health insurance, which, after a career in the NHS, was an anathema to me. Knowing there would be nothing I could do to push against him, that it would be a decision he would make, I said nothing.
I could see what was happening. Everything, including his recent unsuccessful application for head of department, was being focused on his health. After what he’d thought was a good interview, the post was offered to someone younger and more dynamic, whom David described as “knowing jack shit about literature, but good with a spreadsheet.” Sometimes at night, I’d see him in the dark, prodding and poking at a gland in his neck, his hand turning it into a cancerous lump as he worried it under his fingers. In his pocket, I found a receipt for a trip to the Mole Clinic for five hundred pounds. A GP friend had advised against it. “It’s a business,” he shrugged, “not a charity. It’ll always be in their interest to find something they can hack out—at your expense. These places have their doors kept open by anxious patients with money to spend.”
In the run-up to GCSEs, the house was tense. Carolyn was studious, conscientious, and organized regular study-group meetings with her wide circle of friends. She was sociable and led a full life, albeit curtailed for those months. I simply couldn’t bear the gaping cavern that had widened between my children.
I spent hours helping Tom plan a study timetable and testing him on his subjects. I could see he was low, but rather than look at it, engage with it, contemplate it at all, I pushed on, with an intricate schedule of work, exercise, and healthy food.
“Let’s just get through the exams,” I said to David when he tried to intervene. Generally Tom allowed himself to be led by me, less out of enthusiasm than because it felt the path of least resistance. Other times, he gave in to the heavy weight that he seemed to carry around with him and decided to “study in his room,” and I let him be.
The exams came and went. Carolyn, I’d overhear giving a detailed analysis of each exam to her friends on the phone—she said little to us about any of it—but she seemed to sail through it. Tom was pretty much unreadable. Mostly he came home and disappeared up into his room. “That’s what they all do,” said one of the mums I bumped into. I pictured her son, Ben. A tall gangly boy with a mass of curly black hair, who was good at music. I imagined him downloading new tracks, strumming his guitar, and hanging out with his other lanky friends in his room. Once, when Tom left the door of his room slightly ajar, I saw him, lying on his bed, pale and still, just staring up at the ceiling in silence. I hurried along the landing, mostly wishing I hadn’t seen him.
After the exams, Carolyn picked up her social life, which had been simmering away on the back burner. It was like turning the flame up on the gas. She was out all the time, fixing events with friends, playing hockey and football, going to parties and gatherings at other people’s houses. Never our own.
One evening, she was on her way out, and I’d overheard what was a protracted and elaborate plan to choose a place to meet her friends. At the cinema, at the café, at the station. On it went. All the while, I was in the kitchen and Tom was next door in the living room, aimlessly surfing the channels on the television. Some minutes later, I heard him in the hall. “Just popping out.” he said. “For a walk.”
After the door closed behind him, I went to find her. I couldn’t help myself.
“I just think if Tom had some good friends,” I started, “like the ones you have. If he just had some people to hang out with—”
She stared back at me, her face unreadable.
“Then I think maybe things would be different for him.”
Carolyn was putting on her coat, standing in front of the hallway mirror. After wrapping a silky scarf around her neck, she lifted the curtain of trapped hair and it fell about her shoulders like a fan.
She said nothing.
“You know—good friends. Some focus in life—”
Still nothing.
“Anyway, where are you off to?”
“A band,” she said, “in Chalk Farm.”
“Oh. I’m sure Tom would love that,” I said.
She froze.
“He hasn’t been out,” I said, “for weeks. It just can’t be good for him lolling around in his bedroom all day. I really think he should get out more.”
Somewhere there was a question that Carolyn chose not to answer.
“Is it something you could take Tom along to?”
A cool moment of silence.
“No,” she said. “He wouldn’t like it.” Then she turned slowly to face me. “But more importantly, nor would I.”
“Sometimes it’s good to think of someone other than yourself.”
Her face was ablaze, but when she spoke, she kept her voice low and controlled.
“You’ve got to stop doing this,” she said carefully.
“What?”
“Trying to compensate. Trying to do things he doesn’t seem able to make happen for himself. Blaming me. He’s not my responsibility. This isn’t primary school. It’s not like sorting out playdates that we had in Year Three. This is different. He’s grown up. He’s sixteen. It’s so naive, and I’m sick and tired of being made to feel responsible for him. For his happiness, for his unhappiness. For making his life good. It’s not my job.”
She stopped and took a deep breath. “My counselor—” and there’s a pause as she waits for the grenade to explode.
“Your what?”
“My counselor,” she repeated with delight, “at school. She thinks you’re guilty. Can’t bear it that he’s floundering and that’s why you put it all on me. Can’t bear the fact that I have friends. Have a life. It kills you. Sometimes I wonder if it would be easier if we were both a mess.”
I was horrified. “A counselor? Why on earth do you need to see a counselor?”
As soon as the words came out of my mouth, I wanted to take them back.
There was a beat of silence. Carolyn opened her palms in an “I rest my case” gesture. Then she turned away and I heard the gentle click of the front door as she left.
It happened a few days later. It was a Thursday. June 24. From the outside, there was no trigger, no specific incident. I had been aware of Tom’s low mood, of course, but hadn’t seen, or was in denial over, the extent of it. Perhaps the yawning summer weeks after the exams were a factor. Who knows? It certainly wasn’t just his sister having fun; the whole world seemed to be out in the sun, laughing, drinking, enjoying the summer. I suggested things for us to do together. He declined politely. In the absence of your own social life, it’s doubly torturous to have one that revolves around your parents. We were eating dinner. I was talking about a film David and I were going to see. “You could come if you like. It’s had good reviews,” I said, nudging the paper toward him. He picked at his food, turning over the pasta as if he might find some answers underneath.
“Thanks,” he said, shaking his head. “Think I’ll stay in tonight,” making it sound like it was an unusual occurrence. A night in, after so much social activity. Afterward, I turned that brief exchange over and over in my mind. Did he look any different? Was there a clue on his face? Was there anything I missed? Something in his voice I failed to notice?
We were home by eleven. The house was quiet. In itself, that wasn’t so unusual. But generally, when we went out Tom watched TV in the kitchen, sprawled on the sofa with the dog. He wasn’t there, and Hester was behaving oddly, disoriented somehow.
“Tom,” I called out.
No answer.
“Perhaps he’s gone out?” David said, but we both knew that was unlikely.
It was as I walked upstairs that I felt a deep sense of unease. A shift of something in my bones. When he wasn’t in his room, I called again. No answer. The bathroom door was locked. I shouted and rattled at the door. Silence.
“Tom,” I called.
Then I shouted for David.
I hammered on the door, calling his name. No sound. The dog was at my feet, anxiously moving from the door, then back to me, barking at my raised voice.
“It’s locked,” I said uselessly as David appeared on the landing. Perhaps it was the look on his face, but I felt something drop in my stomach, white and cold, like a stone.
It took David three shoulder rams to the door to break the lock. We found Tom lying on the floor on the bath mat, his face in a pool of vomit. He was unconscious, but still breathing. David called an ambulance. He relayed the instructions that were given to him by the switchboard. His hands shook as he gripped his phone. He spoke them out clearly and carefully and I repeated them and followed them with the diligence of a frightened child. We did everything they said—we kept him warm, we cleared his airways, we moved him into a recovery position. We were methodical in our silent terror. The two of us said nothing as we nodded and repeated the instructions out loud. Everything slowed right down. An aching cavern of time in which we were barely even breathing. As we waited for the ambulance, I sat small and still, my son’s head cradled in my lap.
These are the things that wake me, even now. The hot thump of my heart. The sight of his blue lips. The anguish on David’s face. Hester twirling round our ankles, yapping in panic.
The first hour was crucial, they said. It’s what they say about missing children. But in our case, we had no parameters for our golden hour. When did it start and finish? After several hours at the hospital, we were told the vital signs were good. Carolyn came straight to the hospital. It was the first time we’d hugged for a long time. We said nothing, just held each other and cried. Tom was in ICU for three days, and on the third day he was well enough to be moved to a rehab ward. He was under the care of a psychiatrist, a Dr. Hanley, whom I’d met once through work. He was kind and conscientious, and most importantly, Tom seemed to like him.
The shock was like a hard shell. A suit of armor that moved me through the daily tasks of life in a metallic, robotic fashion. I got up. I drank coffee. I washed my body. I pushed food into my mouth. It was a week later, when Tom had been on the ward for a few days, that whatever it was that was holding me upright fell away. I was folding laundry at home in the bedroom, flapping out each item before sorting them into neat piles. A towel, a pillow case, David’s shorts. Then, as I reached for Tom’s green Fruit of the Loom sweatshirt and felt the familiar worn fabric under my fingers, my legs gave way. It was sudden and brutal, like I’d been kicked from behind. I fell to my knees. There were no tears. Just dry heaves that came from somewhere empty and hollow. They shuddered through my body, part sobbing, part retching, like the noise of an animal.
I took two weeks’ leave of absence, giving the excuse of my mother’s ill health “after a sudden fall.” Of course, I didn’t tell my mother the news. I could already hear her sighs of blame, and then even worse, her likely suggestions for his rehab. “We have programs here. Just get him on a plane.”
Tom recovered physically, with no lasting damage, but he was quiet, subdued, and made no attempt to explain how he felt and what had happened. On the advice of Dr. Hanley, we didn’t ask. Visiting hours were spent in an anxious haze; I jumped about like a rabbit, avoiding the shape of the thing neither of us could mention. When I wasn’t with him, I read books, I consulted specialists and sought out their advice. I learned everything there was to know about teenage suicide, but ended up learning next to nothing about my own son’s attempt to take his life.
“It’s not like a hat that’s fallen from the sky and landed on his head,” said David. I ignored him. I told him what I was doing. What I thought would help. “Ruth,” he said wearily, “this isn’t about you. You need to move out of the way.”
All the tension became located between myself and David. How do other parents survive such things? How do people pick up their lives and carry on? The worst was what was left unsaid. The undertow of recriminations and blame built up into a corrosive and hard seal of resentment. We crashed against each other. Hard-edged, bitter, and hateful.
Carolyn was intermittently concerned for Tom, and silently furious with us. Or furious with me. The only thing that seemed to shift for the better was Carolyn’s relationship with Tom. Almost overnight, they slotted back together, huddled in whispered conversations like they were kids again.
When Tom was discharged from hospital, he was referred to Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services and attended a day program at the local unit.
“You’re lucky,” the director said, “we’ve got a pilot program targeted specifically at people like Tom.”
“People like Tom?”
“Teenagers who’ve tried to kill themselves.”
We didn’t tell many people. Those we did were kind, supportive. Each time, after saying the words out loud, there was always a small pause. Sometimes, there were questions to fill this pause. Sometimes, there were no questions. Just the flash of a look, like a small dark shadow across a face.
Why? What happened? Why didn’t you see it coming?
Without a logical explanation, we somehow became pariahs overnight. As if, by association, their own families, their own flesh and blood might also suddenly and imperceptibly fall between the cracks. Mostly, I understood. People want answers when bad things happen. I understood that fervent desire to understand something completely. It was reassuring to find differences from their own situations, to convince themselves it could never happen to them. We were all selfish, really. It was a natural instinct, a primitive desire to protect your own. When they came looking for reassurances from me, I refused to give them. I simply wouldn’t do it. I had no explanation. I didn’t know. I shook my head.
It could happen to any one of you was what I wanted to say, but I knew that wasn’t true.
Why? What happened? How has this happened?
It was like turning an alien object around in my fingers, trying to make sense of it. What would be an easy explanation? He was struggling with his peer group. He was anxious. He was depressed. It was the pressure of exams.
But lots of teenagers struggle with all these things.
Not many try to kill themselves.
The trauma did recede. It was, as I knew from the nature of my work, physically impossible to stay in that heightened state of nervousness and shock. It gets replaced by something else. Sometimes it’s a sharp anxiety that takes your breath away. Sometimes it’s more grating, like the scratching of an animal at the door. I came to find a way to live and manage the constant worry. The what-if? Is he all right? What’s he doing? What’s he feeling? Given that, in my mind, Tom’s mood that evening, that day, that week, and that month hadn’t been any different from his mood on any other occasion, there was something deeply unsettling about this unknowability.
He went to rehab every day. It was a four-week program; it gave some structure to his summer, which was a relief, while Carolyn was busy Interrailing with friends around Europe. She sent him postcards of different cities, Venice, Rome, Prague, and Budapest, and she made a point of ringing twice a week, on days she had prearranged with Tom. She rang on the landline, and we’d hear him disappear upstairs to his room to talk. He didn’t say much about the rehab unit, and we were advised not to probe too much. A state of “detached interest” was what Dr. Hanley recommended, and I refrained from asking how well he’d manage that if his own son had tried to kill himself. After a few days, Tom did mention Oliver, a boy he’d met in the unit. It was Oliver who introduced him to the book about Christopher McCandless.
At the time, I felt I had much to thank Oliver for. To my knowledge, Into the Wild was the first book Tom had read in two years. Not only had he managed to finish it, but it had sparked real interest and enthusiasm. There was something wistful about the way he talked about the book—and about McCandless. Tom was clearly gripped by the story, and he went on to read all the books that were quoted by Christopher—The Call of the Wild by Jack London, and books by Henry Thoreau. He talked animatedly about Christopher’s brave decision to turn against commercialism. Giving away his trust fund to charity. Abandoning his car. Turning his back on convention. The pointlessness of possessions, of consumerism. The way Christopher embraced nature and a life out in the elements. His affinity with the outdoors. His bravery in living the life he wanted. “Alaska became the place that symbolized freedom for him.” At first, I was pleased. He hadn’t shown an interest in anything for a long time, so it was a struggle to maintain detached interest and not become overeager. It wasn’t long, however, before the book, and this young man’s life, became something of an obsession.
His care coordinator, a lanky, tall man called Declan with a soft Irish accent, said it wasn’t anything to worry about. Often, he explained, there was a need to focus on something else very quickly after such a period of despair. Despair? In the past, as a child, Tom had fixations with things. Full-blown immersions in new hobbies or interests that were passionate, fervent, and utterly consuming. Then, like the flick of a switch, the interest would stop, and the piano, or the rock collection, or the telescope would remain untouched. It was almost as if, in his attachment to these external things, he was trying to find the answer to something much more profound in himself. To that extent, I wasn’t particularly concerned by the introduction of Christopher McCandless into our lives. At first, I took it as another passing fad.
“It’s all he talks about,” I said as the weeks went on, during one of the key-worker sessions with Declan.
“Chris McCandless this, Chris McCandless that. Then he talked about someone called Alexander Supertramp. Who’s that? I asked him. Turns out it’s the same person. His alter ego. I mean, doesn’t Tom need to be building himself up—not constantly quoting someone else? Someone who sounds like he’s got a few problems of his own? How is that going to help develop his self-esteem?”
At home, Tom began to quote chunks of Into the Wild when debating issues with David. In answer to some of the arguments around consumerism between him and his father, he began to come out with some sentences he simply wouldn’t ordinarily have said. I came to see afterward, when I read the book, that he was lifting passages straight from the text.
Declan shrugged. He was a man in his early forties, I supposed, yet he looked much older, ravaged by a lifestyle I didn’t want to know about. But I was relieved, too, that whatever he did and said seemed to be helping my son. One day, when I was there for a family meeting, I spotted them out in the garden, talking cross-legged under the trees. Tom looked animated, deep in conversation. When I came over, he was quiet, sullen, and noncommunicative.
“It’s normal,” Declan reassured me. “He’s working some things out.”
And in any event, I was grateful. He seemed to be looking well. Coming out of himself at last, talking to someone outside of the family. I was crushed by my exclusion. And yet at the same time, I saw the benefits.
“There are worse aspirations,” Declan said, when I spoke of my worries about the book at Tom’s midprogram review.
“But the boy dies,” I said.
“Yes,” he nodded slowly, “although I’m not sure that’s the point. Have you read it?”
I shook my head.
“Well, bits,” I said.
“Do you perhaps see what Tom aspires to in Chris? Do you see what draws him to a young man like that? A man not afraid to tread his own path? To be happy with his aloneness? To be independent?”
“He leaves his family,” I said. “They don’t hear from him. He dies alone. He starves to death in an abandoned bus in Alaska. What part of that is good?” My voice trembled.
He is silent for a moment. “I suggest,” he said, “that you read it all, putting yourself in Chris’s shoes. What might it feel like to be Chris? Look for something else in the pages of that book. Look for what might have ignited something in your son.”
I nodded. But of course, I didn’t do what he suggested. Was I too worried, as I claimed to David? Or too inflexible? Too self-absorbed? Too attached to my view of the world? Or maybe I was simply too angry to be told what to do by a man I barely knew.
“I’m not sure about him,” I voiced to David one night.
He was silent as I ranted about my concerns and worries.
“You hate the fact that someone else has got close to Tom.”
I said nothing. Tom’s copy of the book stayed unopened on my bedside table.