The Lonely (16 page)

Recovery

I've never been able to remember the first second that I wake up. It's like this one tiny event that happens every day that I'm physically incapable of being aware of. Maybe it's because the brain doesn't work enough at that point to start holding on to things. So even though you wake up, you don't actually realize it because you have no idea what it's like. Maybe it's horribly painful. A feeling like your eyes have been soldered shut in the night and then sliced open like a paper cut in the morning, but because you don't remember it, it may as well have never happened. But I don't like the idea of waking up and not realizing it. I want it to be exactly how I imagine it to be.

When I woke up in the hospital, I knew I was awake before I even opened my eyes. It was very strange waking up in the world behind your eyelids, pulled from the depths of your subconscious into the dark.

I think it must have been the unnatural position that
the
doctors put me in to sleep. Flat on my back with my
head elevated slightly and crammed between two pillows, my arms along my sides, my hands in fists around wads of sheet. I was unnaturally straight and everything in my body was very aware of it having been placed that way.

I opened my eyes as slightly as I could and spotted The Parents in low chairs upholstered in a raw-looking, rose-colored fabric. They each had a Styrofoam cup placed on a wooden armrest and were looking up at a man in a white coat who had his rounded back to me. He sat on a black leather stool with three wheels and I noticed that he was moving, slowly and ever so slightly, over a groove in between tiles on the floor. Slowly, slightly, thump. Slowly, slightly, thump. Back and forth and back and forth. Slowly, slightly, thump. Maybe he was performing some kind of subliminal humping routine, an old doctor trick that makes bad news go over better because the sick or bereaved are brewing a reaction to this undercurrent of unsolicited lechery, a distraction from the tragedy.

Probably not. Probably he just did it because that's what he did when he was sitting on a chair with wheels. He probably did it in his office too, in his desk chair, and at home in front of the computer at night. I'll bet that when he sat on a couch or in a dentist's chair he went crazy after a little while, longing desperately for the slowly slightly thump, slowly slightly thump satisfaction that he got from these other chairs in his life.

My whole body had the feeling somewhat of being suspended, or perhaps it was the feeling of being all together too warm and prickly. Whatever I was wearing didn't feel like my clothes. It felt like a hospital gown, which meant that someone in this hospital had to change me, force my lifeless limbs into the arm holes and tie up the back. Someone around here had seen me naked and I had no idea how to avoid them. This was torturous.

I moved my eyes to the left (no Julia) and to the right (no Julia). Perhaps she was gone for good this time. This time I could phone the long-necked Lev and tell him I'm sorry. That I wanna hear bells with him and be normal forever. And then I felt so guilty that I ached. Guilty that I hadn't been there to take care of Julia's body and guilty because even though I loved her more than anything, I really hoped she wouldn't be back. But I couldn't move or cry or let on that I was awake because I was trying to listen to what the doctor was saying. He spoke quietly with his back turned to me. He said something about The Fire, that it's what happens when a young girl is very lonely and looking for attention, and he thought it would be best to separate me from them for a while. The Mother growled something about abandonment and The Father said something about how no one had even said the word “abandon.” I couldn't really understand any of it.

Before I could further eavesdrop, The Mother caught sight of wetness between my eyelids.

“Easter? Easter, honey, you're awake.”

It sounded more like the command of a hypnotist. I opened my eyes as fully as I could and pictured them swirling under her control. They asked me how I felt, did I remember what had happened, could I hear them? Fine, sort of, yes, I answered. Then came the assault: what the hell is the matter with you, you could have killed yourself, what possessed you to do such a thing? I don't know, I know, I don't know. Sorry.

“Sorry!” The Mother shrieked. “Easter, for god's sake, you could have killed all of us! Do you realize that? What were you thinking?”

“I don't know.”

The doctor interjected, whispered something in The Mother's ear.

She cleared her throat and continued:

“Well, we're going to have to get to the bottom of this, Easter. You can't just go around setting our homes on fire.”

She looked at The Father to see if he wanted to say anything. His eyes were on my hands, which I was using to squeeze little hills into the sheets and then flatten them out. The Mother realized that he had no intention of addressing me, so covered up quickly.

“We love you very much, honey, and we're just so worried about you.”

Then she combusted spontaneously into sobs.

I should have told them that it was what they'd always wanted. Julia was gone and I was normal so now The Father could love me and The Mother could drop dead and everything would be perfect.

I recalled the first and only time I attempted to give credit where credit was due: a horrible idea of Julia's to unscrew the tops of our iron bedposts and pour water inside to make a waterbed. They filled and leaked and seeped into the floorboards, making four giant stains on the ceiling below, brown with irregular edges like continents on a map. The Mother sat me down on the steps, asked me why I did it.

I said, “It wasn't me, Mom, it was Julia. It was her idea. All I did was get the water.”

“Easter, would you please stop with that stuff? I can't exactly tell your dad that
no one
did this, that it just appeared on the ceiling. You did this. Just tell me that
you
did this.”

“But I didn't!”

“You did, Easter! Stop lying!”

“I'm not lying!”

That night, Julia and I listened through the floor. The Parents fought about the watermarks, about my lying. And Julia, after refusing to speak to me for an hour and a half, finally broke the silence.

“I can't believe you told them it was me.”

“It was you.”

“Easter, you're such an idiot. It was you. You did it.”

“I did not! You told me that we could make a waterbed! It was your idea! You filled the posts yoursel
f
!”

“Easter, don't you get it? It was you.
You.
You're the one who does things. If you tell them about me again, I'll kill myself for real. I'll never come back and you'll be all alone here. Is that what you want?”

“No.”

“I didn't think so.”

Then the memory evaporated, burst by an angry-looking Phyllis opening my hospital-room door.

She wore a long linen dress, coral, with gold chains around her neck and wrists. It reminded me that it was summertime outside, even though it was cold in here. The Mother and The Father looked up, The Mother shocked, her eyes and mouth round. She sucked back up her sobs and stood up, then sat back down again, mumbling something to herself. Somehow Dr. Slowly Slightly Thump knew to get up and leave. He nodded at me before he did. The Mother stood up again. Phyllis hadn't looked at me yet.

“Why didn't you call me?” Phyllis said quietly through clenched teeth.

“I just—I didn't think of it. What are you doing here?” replied The Mother.

“Do you have any idea how embarrassing it is not to know that your own granddaughter is in the hospital?”

The Mother just looked down at her feet. The Father pulled his foot over his knee, rested his head on the back of the chair, and rolled his eyes back as far as they could go so he could glimpse the section of room next to me. Just like mine, curtain pulled back. I bet he was noticing how tight the sheets were. Pulled perfectly snug over the beds. Like Saran Wrap over a bowl, so tight as to be invisible. A thing of beauty. I'd noticed it too, I wanted to tell him that we liked the same things, but I couldn't say anything at all.

“Never mind the fact,” Phyllis continued, “that you told that
woman
she set the cabin on fire.”

That caused The Father to lift his head, return to the conversation with a furrowed look at The Mother.

“Who did you tell?” he asked.

The Mother expanded with tears once again, exploding with explanation.

“Well, I had to call Gail!” (that was Amelia's mother). “She was collecting the mail and watering the flowers so I had to tell her that we'd be longer than we planned. And I don't know, she asked me how the … the trip was going and I couldn't hold it in.”

The Father dropped his head into his open palm, ran his fingers through his hair. Then he got up.

“Anyone want a coffee?” he asked. But he was out the door before Anyone could answer.

Phyllis shot me a quick “Hello” glare. I smiled.

“I told you she was strange,” she said. And then she stared at me and I stared back, hard, attempting to bury the stare deep into her brain.

The Mother's face twisted behind her. She looked at me too, both of them looking, at the end of my bed. One mask angry, one mask sad.

“Mother, don't say that! Easter, it's not true. You're not strange.”

And as she spoke that different person she'd become at the cabin began to disappear, melting off her frame and dripping to the ground, oozing along the maze of grout between the hospital-room tiles and out the door; her boob cup shirt looked silly and pathetic, her makeup clownish. She was the old Mother in the new Mother's uncomfortable costume, so she fidgeted as she spoke and shook her hair over her face.

“She
is
strange! I'm not saying I don't care for the girl, but she's strange, dear, and you know it as well as I. You remember what she did at my house.”

“I didn't do that!” I yelped.

They both ignored me.

“She is not strange,” The Mother said quietly.

“She is. Just like you were. Easter, you're going to go someplace to get the strange squeezed out of you, how would you like that?”

“She's not going anywhere unless she wants to, Mother!”

“Like hell. We're not making the same mistake twice, I'll tell you that much. I was too ashamed to send you somewhere and look how you turned out.”

I sat there not saying anything. Get the strange squeezed out of me. Sounded easy enough. Suck Julia out. Suck what makes me special right out. And then I wished she wasn't already gone, because instead of her being dead forever I might have been able to just leave her there, at the place that sucks out strange, and still be able to see her whenever I wanted, at this place nearby enough but not home. A compromise.

“I would go to a place like that,” I finally said.

It seemed to knock Phyllis back a bit; flakes of lacquer floated from her face to the floor like feathers. The Mother stood up.

“Really, Easter?” she said, dabbing her cry-blown cheeks with a wrinkled tissue. “Would you go someplace for a while? Do you think that would help? To be away?”

“I do.”

“You're not strange, Easter.”

“I know.” I nodded. “Neither are you.”

The Mother smiled. The tears had cooled her anger like summer rain long overdue.

Phyllis sat down, pulled a tube of lipstick from her purse, and applied it slowly, generously. I realized then that she'd be staying at The Lake House with The Mother and The Father that night, and I felt happy to be away from home already.

Mrs. Bellows' Apartment Building

And so, just as Julia predicted, I was sent to live somewhere else. A place for extraordinary girls on Princess Street, in a brick apartment building, blackened over the years by its proximity to the tire factory behind it. Princess Streets are everywhere, and this one wasn't unique for any reason. It was short and curved slightly to accommodate the used car dealership across the street. There was a convenience store on the corner run by three brothers who kept a pair of small, well-behaved dogs tied up out front. An oak tree lumbered in the front yard of the building and a broom leaning against a wicker chair collected dust on the small, square porch.

They sat me down in our most comfortable living room chair and told me all about the place. Phyllis had recommended it. The Mother spoke. She said things like “just for a little while” and “lovely facilities” and “a wonderful woman runs the place.” She said things about Julia too, like “Julia makes you very sick, makes you do dangerous things, and we can't have her in our lives anymore.”

I nodded and nodded and nodded. The Father stood behind The Mother, framed by the living room doorway, stirring a tall glass of chocolate milk with a straw. His eyes were across the street on a neighbor's house. He was convinced that there would be a party there tonight. Mayhem and loud music and underage drinking because the Fosters were up north for the weekend, leaving their pimpled son Barry to take care of the kitty litter and the ficus trees.

I looked up at him, focused on him as hard as he was focusing outside and all of a sudden, everything turned black around his shape and when I turned back to The Mother, everything was black around her shape too. She was still speaking, but her words sounded smothered and her mouth moved so slowly that it was hard to look at her. Her eyelids flapped lazy, like a drowsy baby's. In slow motion, every movement looks like such an effort.

A smile invaded her face and then slow motion dissolved as she noticed The Father peering even more intently through the glass, like a dog mesmerized by a squirrel. She squeezed her eyes shut, creases sprouting like I'd never seen before from the corners, so slowly slicing her skin. Then she pressed the knuckles of both hands into her eye sockets.

She'd been paying dearly for how she'd acted at The Lake House. She was learning the consequences of treating The Father like that. Learning just how well he could ignore us. Her boob cup tops were hidden away in a closet somewhere, never to be seen again. I wondered what he'd said to her. How he'd corrected her. I wondered how horrible she felt.

The blackness around them was so dense, I felt as though I could scoop out a shelf and rest The Father's chocolate milk on it. Cut out a tiny hole and shove The Mother inside.

But I kept nodding and nodding. I looked up, past The Mother, beyond The Father's leering profile, through the doorframe, and saw Julia for a split second listening at the top of the stairs, crouching behind the spindles, her long arms hanging over the banister. But then she disappeared. Just a ghost. The look on her face made me shiver.

And without warning, color was restored to The House, regular speeds resumed, and The Mother was still speaking:

“We love you very much, Easter. Very, very much. We'll be here for you.”

The apartment building on Princess St. was a special place for sick girls. But girls who were just barely sick, or not even really sick at all, just sad and lonely and strange. Not quite crazy enough to be drooling and comatose in a loony bin. But close. Teetering on the brink of happiness and wanting badly to stay for good. That was one of the stipulations of living at Mrs. Bellows' Apartment Building. You had to want to stay for good. Stay happy, that is. And normal. And I didn't know how I could be normal with Julia around.

The Parents dropped me off on a Sunday afternoon. The Mother was feeling all out of whack, squirrely, because she was supposed to have been soaking still in the tub for hours already. When I stepped out of the car, she stepped out too and stood looking at me, her face twisting up slowly, out of her control, and she leapt forward and hugged me tight. The Father'd squeezed my shoulder before I got out of the
car and sat, engine running, in Mrs. Bellow's driveway.
The Mother whispered things in my ear.

“I love you, Easter, so, so much. I love you. I'll see you as often as I can, okay?”

Her voice shook. In a series of enormous kisses she transferred all the wetness on her face along my neck and up to my cheek.

I could tell she was scared. Scared to be all alone in The House. And I realized for the first time that she didn't have a friend in the world. That with me gone, she'd have no one to talk to at all. So I hugged her back. As tight as I could.

“Don't worry, Mom,” I whispered into her ear.

I was her Julia, her only friend and Tooth House companion; the only other person in the world who knew all the same secret things that she did.

Somehow my body found the give for her momentarily tighter squeeze just before she let go and held me an arm's length away by the shoulders.

“You're not strange,” she said again.

And then they were gone.

There were many rules in place at Mrs. Bellows' Apartment Building, general rules as well as rules that were particular to each season-themed room. I lived in the June Room, decorated in the yellow and green colors of early summer. A rule particular to this room was that you weren't allowed to pick at the chipping paint on the walls and if you couldn't help it, then Mrs. Bellows would be forced to duct-tape oven mitts over your hands, an empty threat that she thought was a funny thing to say to the girls who moved into this room. I could tell she'd used the line a million times before.

There was also a December Room, which was white and gray. One had to be particularly clean to live in the December Room, on account of how stainable it was. The August Room was blue and contained a radiator that required special attention. The October Room was orange and red and one had to be sure to keep the curtains open at all times on sunny winter days because it was from the large windows in the October room that Mrs. Bellows liked to bring extra heat to that part of the building.

Mrs. Bellows kept an immaculate record of the comings and goings at her place. Visitors had to be on a special list kept behind the reception desk and outings had to be detailed to Mrs. Bellows and approved. She had a cabinet full of medicine behind the front desk too, separated into four compartments for each of the girls who lived there. Each compartment was characterized by a unique skyline of pills and syringes required to keep each of the girls on their own separate roads to recovery.

Three times a day, at exactly twelve o'clock, three o'clock, and six o'clock, Mrs. Bellows would make her rounds, administering the correct medications to the correct girls. Mostly sedatives and vitamins.

The sedatives made me feel like I was floating: lying on my back, unable to move, sliced vertically, half of my body submerged in black water that filled my ears with loud nothing. The liquid slithered calmly most of the time, the sort of warm, tepid environment that scuttling, soft-bellied creatures thrive and multiply in. Sometimes the residual ripples of a big wave somewhere in the distance would cause the water to seep into my mouth from the sides, and the weight of it would make me sink, my nostrils and eye sockets spilled into with thick black. My head the first to go under, followed by my neck and chest. The water rubbed me always. Mrs. Bellows usually arrived in time to pull me up by the elbow. I wanted her to let me keep sinking, wave goodbye to my pale, wide-eyed face obscured by the ripples in the water.

Mrs. Bellows was very, very old, with short, stubby limbs and a curved back. The best description I could possibly offer is this: she looked like a tortoise with a gray wig on its head. And bright pink lipstick that trickled along the wrinkles from her lips like little rivers. Frankly, I found her sort of terrifying to look at. Every time our eyes stuck together, I moved mine away very quickly. I looked at the chipped paint on the ceiling or the cracked tiles on the floor, or the dickhead cat or the Victorian drapes, or whatever. When we first met she'd been working on a cross-stitch poem, only one line visible: “These busy insects are eating away.”

I furrowed my brow at it and she noticed and told me it was written by her favorite poet, and that it was hard to find the right color green because so many of them look like puke and not springtime, and about how she wanted to put it on a pillow, but would likely frame it instead because it's more sanitary than a fancy pillow you can never properly wash.

The other girls called her “the Gatekeeper.”

The Parents visited whenever they were allowed to: The Mother, driving over and assembling big dinners in the crock-pot early in the morning before either of us was awake. Folding our laundry and putting little braids in our hair while we slept so that when we woke up and took them out we'd look like long-disregarded Barbie dolls. The Father evidenced his visits with piles of change and receipts left on the coffee table and streaks in the carpet next to the bed where he'd rubbed his feet. I don't remember it well but I know The Father came once alone. I read it in the visitor's book.

Mrs. Bellows had decorated each of the rooms herself. Hand-me-downs or garage sale treasures with long, boring stories attached. Us girls were allowed to bring our own duvets and mine was brand new, top of the line, filled with something even more soft and squishy than baby feet.

I usually sat on the couch in my room, limbs sprawled out strategically as pipes to maximize comfort. I'd watch TV for hours and hours and hours and hours, rolling toward a bowl of chips for another handful or into the bathroom for a quick pee during commercial breaks. Sitting, sitting, sitting, glorious sitting. The feeling of loose legs, tingling, hanging over the arm of a chair, or feet elevated by pillows, whole body as still as sleep but the brain still focused, eyes still open. I love television. I'm so glad that I wasn't born two hundred years ago when there were outhouses and no television and everything was an enormous inconvenience.

I watched a channel that played sitcoms all day long and I'd yet to see a repeat. My brain had started to introduce canned laughter into my day-to-day activities. If I gagged myself while brushing my tongue in the morning, a dry retch moving through me like lightning, the roar of a cackling audience trapped in a tin drum filled my ears.

In sitcoms, every house looks the way that houses are supposed to: open and comfortable with no secrets or shadows or shameful bits, no closed rooms or dark corners that company can't be allowed near. The upstairs is the same as the main floor, which is the same as the basement, all accessible and clean and open for viewing. And every room is neatly cluttered, perfectly representing the acceptably offbeat family that lives there.

It seemed odd to me that they never showed the television in sitcoms. Televisions were always in front of the garish sitcom couch that faced out toward us. Tucked neatly into the only spot in the house not viewable. But the characters would sit and stare at it from time to time; in effect, stare at me. It was as if watching the television, viewing these acceptably offbeat families with their wide-open houses and secret-less existences, taking them in as a possibility of how people live, was the same as being watched ourselves somehow. And it felt that way. A two-way street. I guess it's too much to ask that watching be one-sided. That's not really fair. The more you watch, the more you're watched, and that's the way that it should be, I guess. But I still couldn't quite figure out who it was watching me.