I brace myself against the rice; it’s all that stands between me and my feelings. Rice.
“You’ve been silent your whole life. You were silent when we met, silent when you suffered. Silent when life kept hitting you. I was like that too, a little. But not like you. You are a stillness. And I tried to move you. It didn’t work. But that doesn’t mean you didn’t move me. I heard everything you didn’t say. I heard it so loudly that I couldn’t shut it off. Your silence, Senna, I hear it so loudly.”
I set my plate down and wipe my palms on my pant legs. I have yet to look at him, but I hear the angst in his voice. I have nothing to say. I don’t know what to say. That proves his point, and I don’t want him to be right.
“I hear you still.”
I stand up. I upset my plate; it topples.
“Isaac, stop.”
But he doesn’t. “It’s never that I don’t want to be with you. It’s that you don’t want to be with me.”
I bolt for the ladder. I don’t even bother using the rungs. I jump … land on my haunches. I feel feral.
“The life you choose to live is the essence of who you arrre.”
I am an animal, bent on surviving. I let nothing in. I let nothing out.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Depression
I stink. Not the way you smell on a hot day when the sun toasts your skin and you smell like bologna. I wish I smelled like that. It would mean there was sun. I smell musty, like an old doll that has been locked up in a closet for years. I smell like unwashed body and depression. Yes. I slowly consider my stink and the awful way my grey streak hangs lank in my face. I don’t bother to push it off my eyes. I stay curled under the blanket like a fetus. I don’t even know how long I’ve been like this—days? Weeks? Or maybe it just feels like weeks. I’m composed of weeks, and days of weeks, and hours of weeks and days and minutes and seconds and…
I’m not even in the attic bed. It’s warmer in the attic, but a few nights ago I took too many shots of whiskey and stumbled into the carousel room, only half conscious and holding in my sick. I was too dizzy to light a fire, so I lay trembling under the feather blanket, trying not to look at the horses. Waking up there was like having a night of drinking and then finding yourself in your bed with your best friend’s boyfriend.
At first I was too shocked to move, so I just lay there paralyzed by shame and nausea. Not sure who exactly I felt like I was betraying by being in there, but felt it nevertheless. Isaac never came to find me, but considering that we were passing the bottle back and forth all night, he was probably just as sick as I was. That’s what we do lately; we congregate in the living room after dinner to sip from a bottle that fits neatly in our hands. After dinner drinks. Except dinners are getting sparse: a handful of rice, a small pile of canned carrots. There is always more liquor in our bellies than food these days. I groan at the thought of food. I need to pee and maybe be sick. I run the tip of my finger back and forth, back and forth over the cotton sheets. Back and forth, back and forth until I fall asleep. Landscape is playing. It’s always playing. The zookeeper is cruel.
Back and forth, back and forth. There is wallpaper to the left of the bed, of tiny carousel horses floating untethered through a creamy backdrop. Except they aren’t angry like the horses attached to the bed. There are no flared nostrils and you cannot see the whites of their eyes. They have furling ribbons tied to their forelocks and cranberry colored jewels decorating their saddles. To the right of the bed is a baby blue wall and centered in the middle of it, a brick fireplace. Sometimes I look at the blue wall, other times I like to count the little carousel horses on the wallpaper. And then there are times I squeeze my eyes shut so tight and pretend I’m at home in my own bed. My sheets are different, and the weight of the blanket, but if I lie very still…
That’s when things get a little crazy. I’m not even sure I want to be in my own bed. It was figuratively just as cold as this one. There is nowhere I want to be. I should embrace the cold and the snow and the prison. I should be like Corrie Ten Boom and try to find purpose in suffering. I get catatonic at that point. My thoughts, having run in circles for most of the day, shut down. I just stare until Isaac eventually carries in a plate of food and sets it on the table next to the bed. I don’t touch anything. Not for days, until he pleads with me to eat. To move. To talk to him. I stare at one of the two walls and see how long I can go without feeling. I pee in the bed. The first time it’s an accident; my bladder, stretched like a water balloon, reaches its limit. There’s another time. In my sleep I roll away from it, find a new spot. I wake up closer to the fireplace, my clothes barely damp. It doesn’t bother me. I’m finally in the place where nothing bothers me.
Spalsh
I squirm under hot water, writhing in shock. I come up gasping, trying to claw my way out of the tub. He dropped me in like a human bath bead. Water sloshes over the side of the tub and soaks into his pant legs and socks. I fight for a few more seconds, his hands holding me in the water. I don’t have the energy to fight. I let myself sink. The bath is so full that I can submerge myself completely. I sink, sink, sink into the ocean.
But there is no rest, because he grabs me under my arms and pulls me up to a sitting position. I gasp and grab the sides of the tub. I’m naked except for a sports bra and panties. He pours shampoo on my head; I bat at his hands like a child until his fingers find my scalp. Then I let him. My body, rigid a second ago, slouches as he rubs the fight out of my head. He washes me, using his hands and a sponge that looks like it came straight from a coral reef. Surgeon’s hands rub across my muscles and my skin until I’m so relaxed I can barely move. I close my eyes when he rinses my hair. Both of his hands are holding my head up, cradling it so I don’t sink beneath the water’s surface. When they suddenly stop moving I open my eyes. Isaac is staring at me from above. His eyebrows are almost touching, so deep is his consternation. I reach up without thinking and cradle his cheek with my hand. I would be worried that he could see through my thin, white sports bra, but there is nothing to see. I’m practically a boy. I take my hand away and then I start to chortle. It sounds like a burst of madness. Why do I even wear a sports bra? It’s so stupid. I should just walk around topless. I laugh harder, swallowing a mouthful of water as my body rolls to the side. I am choking—choking and laughing. Isaac pulls me up. Then all at once the sound and the choking are gone. I am Senna again. I stare at the wall behind the tap, feeling tired. Isaac grabs my shoulders and shakes me.
“Please,” he says. “Just try to live.”
My eyes are so tired. He picks me up out of the bath. I close my eyes as he kneels on the floor to dry me, then wraps me up in a towel that smells of him. I loop my arms around his neck as he carries me to the ladder. I squeeze his neck a little, just so he knows I’ll try.
Chapter Twenty-Five
I come back to life a little bit. I have the hot and horrible thought that the carousel room tried to kill me. No. It’s just a room. I tried to kill me. When my dark days recede, they come for Isaac. We take turns giving up, it seems. He locks himself in his room with the only bathroom, and I have to pee in a bucket and empty it around the back of the house. I leave him be, taking food to his room and picking up the empty plate. I keep the door to the carousel room closed. It stinks in there now. I washed the sheets in the bathtub the week before, and scrubbed at the mattress with soap and water, but the piss smell pervades. Isaac eventually comes out of his room and starts making our meals again. He doesn’t speak very much. His eyes are always red and puffy. Sow sadness, reap tears, my mother used to say. We delve solely in sadness in this house. When will my reaping come?