Natalie is six years old, and two days ago, Diana told her to pack a suitcase.
"Why?" She asked, her hands on her hips, her eyebrows furrowed.
"Because we're going on vacation!" Diana exclaimed happily.
Dan appeared then. "Sweetheart, we don't have a trip planned..." He looks worried, and now Natalie is too. Why would her mom tell her they're going on vacation if they aren't?
"Oh, it's not planned." Diana laughed. "I thought it'd be fun to spend a little time with my family. Gabe can't go, he's on a trip with his classmates, but the three of us can have fun, right?"
Natalie nodded eagerly. She was set from the point her mom said Gabe can't go. Natalie still doesn't know who Gabe is, but he always wrecks everything and makes her mom act crazy.
"Please, Dad!" Natalie begged.
Diana looked proud of Natalie then, and it made Natalie's heart swell up.
"I haven't arranged it with work-"
"Who cares, Dad?" Natalie cried out, and Dan and Diana both laughed, and Natalie knew they'd go.
Now, two days later, Dan and Diana are sitting in beach chairs while Natalie swims in the hotel pool. She loves to swim. Natalie loves a lot of things. She's as hopelessly naive as a kid being raised by a mentally ill mom can be. She loves ponies and movies and reading and especially playing the piano. And swimming.
She loves gliding under the water and watching her distorted figure move. She grins from ear to ear when Diana compares her to a mermaid, and sometimes she swims to the other side of the pool and just watches Diana smile and laugh and not look crazy. Instead she looks happy. Dan does too.
Natalie is too.
She won't have a weekend that happy for a long time.
~
Now Natalie is seventeen, and she's with Henry at some weird hotel that Henry jokes they'll get murdered at. Because, seriously, it's beyond creepy at night. But there's a pool on the roof, and they couldn't pass that up. (And by they, she means Henry. Henry chose the hotel.)
But they're swimming in the pool, and it's really ridiculously poorly lit, so she can't see two feet in front of her. But she sees Henry, and he's smiling at her like he's in love, which she knows he is.
She is too, but she hasn't said that yet.
She thinks she probably should.
So she does, as they sit on the concrete in swimsuits and towels.
And his face lights up, and he kisses her, and for that moment, everything screwed up in Natalie's stupid life is okay.
~
Natalie is nineteen, and nothing is okay. Henry is long gone, her own fault, and she only half heartedly keeps in touch with her parents. Mostly Diana. Natalie knows Dan still talks to Henry, because he frequently mentions him, but Diana just talks about about TV shows she watches and gossip she hears about celebrities. It's pointless stuff, so that's who Natalie talks to.
But now Natalie isn't talking to anyone.
For the past two weeks, there's no one for her to talk to about the fact that she's pretty sure the headaches she's been getting are a really, really bad sign and she's terrified to go to a doctor in case they'll say she's crazy. Or that she's been laid off from her job, mostly because she keeps she's always late because sometimes she physically can't get out of bed. Or that it's been killing her to not be with Henry.
She takes a pill to silence these thoughts that won't get out of her head, and it feels so good that she takes a couple more, and then it's all a blur as she decides to take the rest, because why not? It's not like things can get worse.
Five minutes later, she's in the bathtub in her clothes, submerged in water, oddly enough not cold or really feeling anything.
Until she's six and swimming and she's a mermaid, or she's seventeen and in love and everything is full of promise and she shoots back up, stuck in panic mode, but God, at least she's not numb now.
She stumbles to the counter where her phone lays, and with shaking fingers she calls her mom.
"Natalie?" Diana asks, and Natalie can't help sobbing. "Natalie, what's wrong?"
"I did something stupid, Mom. I'm so stupid. I don't know what to do."
Diana is dumbfounded. "Honey, you're a genius."
Natalie shakes her head. "Not lately. Is Dad there? Can you put him on?"
"Natalie?" It's Dan now, much more worried than Diana. "What did you do? Are you okay?"
"Dad, I- I-"
"Natalie!"
"I took too many pills."
Dan's voice is hoarse. "Did you try to kill yourself, Natalie?" He sounds as scared as Natalie feels.
"Dad," she sobs.
"Diana, call nine-one-one." Dan orders, and Diana rushes off. "Stay with me, Nat. You're okay."
"I haven't been okay in so long."
"You will be, then. There'll be light, Natalie. You just got to stick around long enough to see it."
Natalie's curled up on her floor, with the phone by her ear.
"Tell me a story," She says softly.
So he does, about a beautiful girl who's also a constellation, and it's personal and beautiful and all he hears in return is her breathing.
And then there's men in vests bursting in, and she doesn't know how much time has passed because she's so sleepy.
"Do you know how many pills you took?" One of them asks.
"Twenty?" She says, and they lift her up and carry her bridal style into a car and then she's gone.
~
When she wakes up, everything's white, and she doesn't know why, but she kind of expected it to be blue.
Dan and Diana are sitting in chairs, slumped over and sleeping.
Natalie sits up, and tries to remember why she's here. She can't stop blinking, and her lungs hurt.
Dan wakes up first and he rushes over, enveloping her in a hug.
"Don't ever do that again," he orders.
He gets Diana, and Natalie gets a hug from her too.
"We got lucky." Diana tells her, and Natalie remembers when Diana tried to kill herself too. They've put Dan through too much.
Then everything stops because when Diana steps back, Henry's in the doorway, tears running down his face. Natalie's face crumbles, and he pulls her into his arms and doesn't let go for a long time.
Many hours later, Natalie's alone in her hospital room, and vaguely, she can still feel waves underneath her. She's not afraid of drowning, though. She knows she can swim.
A/N I told you it'd get angsty. But it has a happy ending. Because I couldn't actually let Nat die, could I?
(This one time I read a N2N story on ff.net, and in it Natalie woke up and read this story about a girl who overdosed at the club she was at the night before, and then she went downstairs to say hi to her family and found her dad and Henry crying over her and basically found out that she was the girl who died. It traumatized me.)
