Free What We've Lost Is Nothing by Rachel Louise Snyder Page A

volunteer efforts in the fall, and April was the earliest she felt she could get away. First, she worked Sunday mornings at the Living Room Café, serving homeless people breakfast. Then she began to work two afternoons a week at the Oak Park Economy Shop, sifting through donated kitchenware, CDs, clothes, broken electronics. Half of what was donated ended up in a landfill. Monday mornings she volunteered as a “road-to-recovery driver” for the American Cancer Society, bringing elderly Oak Park residents to their oncology appointments at West Suburban hospital. Then she volunteered with the YMCA’s “Kids’ Fun Nights,” playing kickball and bombardment with preteens after school. Occasionally on the weekends, she convinced Dan to go with her and pick up litter in Thatcher Woods. It was as if she were trying to fix every broken piece of the world. Dan saw this as a ­willing avoidance of addressing her own weaknesses.
    When Dan asked her about this sudden burst of activity, Alicia said she simply needed something to do. She’d never held a full-time job, and even Dan’s work as a columnist for the Oak Park Outlook was part-time. With their house paid off thanks to her parents, and no children, neither of them felt the pressure of bills and retirement funds, life insurance and college funds, that most middle-class people endured. Dan suspected there was more to Alicia’s sudden interest in helping those less fortunate, but he’d long learned from her parents never to push Alicia, never to find out even where her limits were.
    Anyway, Alicia was more or less fine now. She’d been fine for years. But she had been an extremely difficult teenager: rebellious, cutting school, ignoring homework. Her parents began to pay her an allowance just to earn a C average.
    Then she snapped. The pressure of graduating, of losing her friends, of deciding between a subpar college and a subpar job—but mostly of feeling that she had to decide, right then, what she was going to do with the entire rest of her life—knocked her clear on her ass. The night of graduation, lying in her bed with her whole life stretched out before her, made her feel old. How could such a decision possibly be made in one single summer? No one told her she need not decide the eternity of her life; the possibility of change simply didn’t occur to her. The concept of adulthood was so far removed from where she felt she was that she had no idea how to go about making decisions that she was sure would cement her path for the next sixty years.
    So she swallowed three-quarters of a bottle of aspirin, a dozen of her mother’s estrogen pills, and what everyone believed was half a bottle of brandy. (In truth, she’d spent a month slugging down the brandy and refilling it with a mixture of apple juice and Coke, so the bottle’s contents had been diluted.) Clearly, to her, she hadn’t actually been trying to kill herself; she’d simply wanted to stop thinking.
    Her parents had her committed. She found herself in a psych ward with other girls who were mostly as uncrazy as she was and mostly were stressed-out teenagers not sure how to tackle a nonteenage world.
    She loved it in there. She stayed as long as she could, six months total.
    She’d met Dan two years after her “stay,” as her parents came to call it. A year and a half later, they were married. Her parents were relieved and did whatever they could to keep Dan happy and keep him around. So there were the vacations to Hawaii and Belize, the flatscreen, the Lexus and recently the Prius. There was this trip to Key West and a scheduled Caribbean cruise later in the year. There was the kitchen renovation and the mutual fund and, of course, the very first gift: the house on Ilios Lane.
    On the phone with the airlines, Alicia sighed and reached for her Visa card. She briefly looked up at her husband and rolled her eyes, then began to recite