“Is Tegan depressed?” Mom asked me, point blank, one day after school. She stood against the closed door in my bedroom, her arms folded across her chest like a TV mom.
“Um.” I looked down at the open binder on my bed, turning the page away from the poetry about death and suffering that I was writing. “No, I don’t think she’s depressed.”
“Depression runs in your dad’s family.”
“Mom, it runs in everyone’s family.”
“You’d tell me if something was going on?”
Would I?
I didn’t tell her that when I was fourteen I spent the summer writing suicide notes to the girls who’d bullied me for two years. She was more than qualified to deal with the situation—she’d worked at a suicide prevention center since the mideighties. I didn’t tell her in grade nine when a friend threatened to take a handful of Tylenol at a sleepover, or about the time Naomi’s boyfriend had a knife pressed to his wrist. I’d become dangerously latched to the idea that I could determine which of those threats required parental intervention and which did not. In my own case, I knew that I didn’t want to die. I took for granted that Tegan felt the same way as me.
“Tegan’s fine,” I said.
Mom nodded. “And you? Are you depressed?”
“Suicidal?” She stood there, unmoved.
I closed my binder, swung my legs off the bed. “I’m not depressed or suicidal. I’m not anything!”
She blinked. “Are you on drugs?”
“Are you?”
“I know you and your sister are doing drugs.”
“Mom, get out of my room. I have to do my homework.”
“If you’re doing drugs, tell me. I’d rather buy you weed myself, so I know what’s in it.”
“I don’t want you buying weed. We’re not doing drugs.”
“I’d rather you smoke weed than drink. If I ever find out you’re in a car with someone who’s drunk driving, I swear to god—”
“Mom, we’re not idiots!”
Mom’s questions about Tegan lingered in my mind. I didn’t think Tegan was suicidal, but the way her face went slack, sometimes for days at a time, did remind me of Dad. His moods were similarly hard to predict, and when he was depressed, he wore that face like a mask.
“Do you think Tegan seems sad?” I asked Naomi when she called later that night.
“Like, more than normal?”
“Mom asked me if she was depressed.”
“I worried about you, last year. You were sad a lot.”
“Yeah, but that was different.”
“Remember when you were obsessed with calling the Teen Line?”
I’d started calling the help line because of Naomi and the shame I experienced for the feelings I had for her. They became too difficult for me to contain, especially after a night of drinking. With the room and my head spinning, I found gravity in the voice of a stranger. “When I turn sixteen, I’m going to volunteer at that helpline,” I said.
“You should!”
“I like hearing other people’s problems because it makes me feel less lonely.”
“Lucky that you found me, because you’ll never feel lonely.” She laughed. “Do you think that maybe Tegan is sad because we kind of ditched her?”
A familiar knot tightened in my gut. “We didn’t ditch her!”
“Maybe she feels lonely, like you did last year, before you and I became close.”
“Why is it my responsibility to figure this out?” I said, far too loudly.
“It’s not your responsibility. But, if you’re worried—”
“Mom’s not asking Tegan if I’m depressed! She loves Tegan more than me.”
“I don’t think that’s true.” She paused. “She trusts you and confides in you. And maybe she thinks Tegan will tell you if something is wrong because you’re her twin sister and not her mom.”
I sighed. “What do I say to her?”
“Just ask her if she’s okay.”
“Fine.”
I stood outside Tegan’s door and knocked.
“What?”
I let my eyes adjust to the darkness as I stepped in her room. I could make out her body under the blankets, the telephone cord disappearing under the covers. Even the remnants of childhood in her room—a few stuffed animals banished to a top shelf over her desk—seemed sad. The shrine she’d built to Kurt Cobain had grown substantially in the two years since his suicide, and every inch of her walls was covered with his face.
Kurt and our step-grandfather, Ed, committed suicide two days apart when we were fourteen. On the morning of Ed’s funeral service, spread across the front page of the local newspaper was news of Kurt Cobain’s suicide. Dead at twenty-seven from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. It was a gut punch in all the ways the news about Ed wasn’t. Tegan’s face crumpled; he was her hero.
“Take that paper upstairs,” Mom whispered. Sitting in silence in Tegan’s bedroom, we read the details of his death on the pages of the newspaper between us. The space had been a sanctuary, a place to shut ourselves inside and worship Kurt’s lyrics; but at that moment, it felt like a grave. Bruce knocked on the door, telling us it was time to leave for the church. On the way down the stairs, resting his hands on both our shoulders, he offered his condolences, as if we were in black clothes for Kurt Cobain’s funeral, not Ed’s.
After the service, when our house was finally cleared of guests, Tegan and I disappeared into the basement to watch the Nirvana marathon on MuchMusic. We admitted to each other how much worse we felt about Kurt’s death than about our step-grandfather’s.
“We didn’t really know Ed,” Tegan said. Did we know Kurt? It felt like we did. After his death, it seemed that everywhere we went we heard his voice on a loop, saw his face draped across every chest and stuck to every wall. His omnipresence was like a resurrection.
That night, Tegan took a safety pin and scratched the Nirvana logo into her left ankle, promising to rip the scab off and recut it until it was a scar.
“Can I talk to you?” I asked her now, gesturing for her to hang up the phone.
“I’ll call you back,” she said into the receiver. She hung up and rolled the duvet down past her chin. “What do you want?”
“Mom thinks you’re depressed.”
“What? I am not.”
I studied her reaction. “Well, your room looks like a suicidal teenager’s room.”
“Fuck off.”
We both laughed, and she got off the bed and turned her stereo on. Green Day spilled from the speakers. She spun open the dark blinds in her window, pulled the covers on her bed straight. I sat down on the carpet.
“Do you think Kurt liked Green Day?” Tegan asked me.
“I don’t think he liked anyone.”
“He liked gay people!”
“And hated mean people!”
“Turn this one up!” Tegan stood up and headbanged, flopping her hair forward and back, her face scrunched up and serious.
“You’re such a banger.” I laughed.
When the song finished, I stood up to leave.
“Want to walk to 7-Eleven with me?” I asked her.
Tegan bounced herself off her mattress like it was a trampoline, a blush spreading across her cheeks.
“Sure!” she said. She grabbed her coat from the floor and together we headed downstairs.