Under Rose-Tainted Skies (21 page)

With my dignity still trapped inside the house, I flop off the porch and collapse on the concrete driveway. My left hip smashes against the ground, and I bump my chin so hard my teeth slam shut, almost severing my tongue in two.

I look up, spit blood.

Luke's front door is still a million miles away. How is it possible I've moved so much and it's not gotten any closer?

There's a
thump-thump-thump
from inside my house. I've stomped up and down those stairs enough times to recognize the sound. He's coming.

I push through the pain, get back up on my knees, and crawl towards the boxwood bush as fast as I can. I go deaf, can't hear anything as I haul my ass over the bush and launch myself at Luke's front door.

I slam my fists into the glass and hammer hard. My other hand works the doorbell as I look back over my shoulder.

There's a skeleton standing on my porch.

‘Please, Luke. Open the door.' I try to scream, but fear is holding my vocal cords hostage and it's a timid shout at best.

The skeleton turns sharply, then leaps off the porch. I think maybe he's going to make a run for it, but then he starts marching towards me.

I thud on the door. Thud so hard it's a wonder my fists don't go through the wood. ‘Luke!' This time I do scream. It rips from my throat like a liberated lion, shatters wine glasses, makes the atmosphere shake, leaves dust in its wake.

A warm beam of orange light breaks like sunrise from behind the door. I hear the dangling of a chain and the door flies open.

I don't take him in, don't say a word, just throw myself at his chest and press myself airtight against his torso.

‘Norah. What the fuck?' he says.

‘There's . . . there's . . .' It's hard to talk through sobs. I'm choking on a river of snot and tears. ‘Someone's in my house.'

‘Norah, where's your mom? Is she still in the house?'

I shake my head no. That's all I manage before the feeling in my lips disappears and my face melts right off. He wraps one arm around my shoulders; the other snakes around the back of my legs.

‘Luke, what's going on?' I hear his mom ask as he lifts me up. I sink into his arms, all my muscles sighing simultaneously.

‘Call the cops and an ambulance,' he says. I press my head against his heart, feel its angry beat beneath my cheek.

‘I got you,' he says. ‘You're safe.'

The sound of his breathing carries me off into blissful unconsciousness.

G
entle fingers stroke my cheek, and my eyes flicker open.

My body is all crunched up, bent around like a jelly bean. Mom is looking down on me, smiling. She presses something spongy against my mouth, and my lips latch on to it, suck water from it until the thing is bone dry.

‘Go easy,' she says in tones softer than silk. ‘Too much too soon will make you sick.'

I don't focus on anything but her face. Still, dread circles overhead like a flock of starving vultures.

‘Where are we?' I ask, but we both know I already know the answer to that. The smell of industrial-strength disinfectant is corroding my nasal passages. The sheets covering me feel like fibreglass. I'm in hospital.

‘Baby, try not to panic.'

Panic. Right. That would make sense given my current situation, but my body seems to be behaving. I can feel the flutter of something in my chest, maybe fear. Not the same
kind of fear I've been sharing headspace with for the past four years. This is different. Weaker. It stays hidden. I'm not sure it has the drive to push through to the surface.

I lift my eyes, spot my hand wrapped tightly in white bandages, a yellow IV line poking out of the top. I follow the tubes attached to it, up and up, until I find two bags of fluid, half-empty. One is clear, the other milky. Safe to assume that explains the sudden change in anxiety levels.

‘Mom?'

‘It's just a painkiller and some sedative.'

‘No.' I shake my head, reach for the needle, but my other hand is bound in dressings too. It's refusing to go in the direction I tell it to. At first I think the extra padding is responsible for restricting my movement. Then I realize it's not the bandages at all. My body is ignoring me.

A drunk whimper flops from my lips. I focus hard on my fingers, try to psychically beam my instructions straight to the source, but they refuse to acknowledge me. It's the medicine. It's circulating in my system, killing off my control like an evil little nanobot. My breathing hitches.

‘Sweetie.' Mom restrains my hand with the slightest of touches. ‘Listen to me: you've been hooked up to this thing for almost two days. Two days and nothing horrible has happened. It's helping.'

‘I can't . . . I . . .' My head goes foggy and some monitor starts beeping a single obscene note. It sounds like a microwave when it's finished a cycle and wants your attention. Is that my heartbeat? Should it be beating that fast? Should it . . . I can't finish my thought; I don't remember what it was.

The beep works like a Bat-Signal, brings a nurse thundering through the swinging door. Her hair is bright orange, dreadlocked, and she's wearing scrubs covered in superhero cartoons.

‘Good morning, sunshine.' She flashes her pearly whites at me and all I want to do is ask her what's good about it. I give it a second's thought but can't find the energy to rouse my inner ass.

Mom scoots back, and the nurse takes her place, hovering over me. The badge fixed to her ample bosom says
Carmen
. There's a bottle of green sanitizer attached to the side of my bed. I watch her pump it several times until a string of clear liquid squirts from the nozzle. It goes white and turns to foam when it settles on her palms. She rubs it all over, just like I do, making sure to get all the hidden spots between her fingers. You'd be surprised at how much of your hand doesn't get washed if you don't spread your fingers. Then, to my horror, the nurse, a complete stranger, touches me. Without blinking, she reaches down the front of my hospital-issue gown and pulls something sticky off my chest.

‘Don't think you're going to be needing these any more,' she says, her knuckle clipping the edge of my breast on the way back up. She saunters over to the trash can, drops the sticky things in it, and hits her hands with another squirt of sanitizer from a bottle hung by the door.

I look at Mom and know my face is pulled in all different directions when she winces.

‘Just take a deep breath,' she whispers to me. The nurse comes back. Takes what looks like a pen from her pocket.

‘Look straight at that back wall for me, sweetheart,' she
says. Turns out the pen is not a pen but a flashlight. She illuminates the end and shines it in my eyes.

‘Okay. Well, that all looks good.' Her nose wrinkles when she smiles at me. ‘I'll go and chase down that prescription. And then hopefully we can get you back home before the day is out.'

‘Home,' I repeat. The one place in the world where scary things couldn't get me is no more. Home is a word that should conjure images of thatched cottages, flower beds, and white picket fences. All I see now is skeletons and shards of glass bejewelling my bleeding skin.

‘That's right,' the nurse replies. ‘There's nothing like your own bed.' She chuckles to herself as she exits the way she entered, in an emergency-type rush.

‘They caught him,' Mom says, doing that thing where she reads my mind. ‘Luke called the police, and they managed to catch him while he was making a run for it. Is it okay that I'm telling you this?'

I think no, but say yes.

‘Ours wasn't the first house he hit. The guy used his job to scout locations and seek out vulnerable people. He's going to prison for a long time.'

I think she means for this to make me feel better, but I feel nothing.

Almost nothing.

‘Is Luke okay?'

‘Worried sick about you. He hasn't stopped calling.' She turns, points to a table in the corner of the room. It's adorned with two big bunches of yellow and purple flowers. ‘And he keeps sending you daisies and carnations.'

The flowers are beautiful. I close my eyes, remember
how tight he held me when I fell into him. I wish he were here.

‘I told him you'd call him as soon as you could.' And I will.

‘Tell me what you're thinking about,' Mom says when the silence starts to stretch. She perches on my bed, reaches over and rubs circles on my hip.

‘I don't even know.' My brain feels like it's trapped in a vice and every time I try to figure something out, it squeezes tighter and tighter around it.

The intruder. My injuries. Leaving the house. Having to stay in hospital. Taking sedatives. Strangers touching me. My plate is too full. I have mental indigestion. My life is on its ass. It's a face in full shadow, a stranger at a bar, a reflection I don't even recognize any more.

I'm being forced to challenge ideas that have kept me safe for so long. There's an entire library of information in my head, and suddenly I can't decide if any of it is worth reading.

‘Get some rest,' Mom says, leaning forward and kissing my forehead. ‘We'll get you through this. It'll all be over soon. I promise.'

In Recovery

B
ack before the black-and-white pages of frightening reality were banned from our house, I went through this stage of reading non-fiction. Celebrity auto-biographies mostly, but there was this one rags-to-riches story about a woman named Audrey Clarke. Audrey owned a small grocery store in Brooklyn during the Great Depression.

As the misery of that decade rolled on and on and on, she ended up losing most of her store stock to looters. Debt collectors took what was left after that, including her clothes. By the time the Depression ended, she had no house and no business left.

She was sleeping in a neighbour's toolshed when she turned to writing to fill her days. Her books were good. She made quite a bit of money from eager publishing houses in the end. Lived out her life in a very affluent neighbourhood, playing golf on the weekends and collecting classic cars.

I liked reading Audrey's story because never, not once, did she entertain the notion that she had been beaten.

There's this one thing she said that keeps popping into my head as I swallow down my serotonin reuptake inhibitors and watch that damned blackbird jumping around on my windowsill.

Your mind adapts to what worse is. Suddenly, that thing that seemed so terrifying at first is dwarfed by the next challenge that comes your way. But you adapt again and again and again, until you find yourself fearless
.

I never really understood what she meant until it no longer felt necessary to be afraid of swallowing a tiny tablet after I'd crawled through broken glass. Literally.

‘Stop tormenting that poor blackbird.'

My bones leave my body briefly. When I turn around, I find Luke in my doorway, hands in his pockets, pulling his jeans so low they sag off his hips and I can see the elastic waist of his boxers. I swallow back a sudden influx of saliva. A cord headband pushes his hair off his face. His eyes make me think of oceans; his smile belongs in a gallery.

My best friend. My boyfriend.

‘I wasn't tormenting it. It was tormenting me,' I say in my own defence, grabbing my bag off the end of the bed.

‘Don't forget your balls,' he says with a wink, pointing to the two rainbow rounds on my dresser.

‘Check me out,' I say, tossing the balls up in the air.

‘Good job,' he tells me as I juggle. The thing about constantly carrying around circular objects is that you turn into a circus clown. On the plus side, it's been almost a month since I last broke skin scratching. Dr Reeves and I agreed that biting my nails was still allowed.

For now.

Luke cracks a grin and the temperature of my room rises to Florida-in-July degrees. Then he does this new thing we've been working on a lot lately . . . he holds out his hand.

‘Your chariot awaits, my lady.' I hesitate, stare at his fingers, his palm. He has what a fortune teller might call a long lifeline.

‘Did you . . .'

‘Wash my hands first? Yes.'

He fixes a stare on me that makes me tingle from tip to toe. Acceptance of the strange is his superpower.

Before I have time to think myself out of it, I slap my hand into his. The medicine I've started swallowing delays my crazy just long enough for me to complete the action before deciding it's going to destroy me. Once it's done, and I can see that it won't, Dr Reeves says all I have to do is focus on slowing my heart rate. Easier said than done for a woman who's never been in close proximity to Luke for longer than five seconds. I guess that's about to change.

‘Are you sure you don't mind coming with me?' I ask as we make our way out of my room.

‘Are you kidding? After all the things you've said about her, I can't wait to meet the good doctor.' He means it. I might have questioned his enthusiasm when I first floated the idea of him coming with me to therapy. But he hasn't stopped talking about it for the past two weeks. I cosy up to his arm. Because (a) I'm addicted to the winter-spice aftershave he wears and (b) we've started down the stairs and I can feel a flutter of anxiety in my chest.

‘You okay?' he stops and asks when we hit the second-to-last step. Deep breath. I nod; my jaw feels a little loose and I don't want it to start jerking if I try to speak. Mom appears from the kitchen, giving me her my-little-girl-is-all-grown-up eyes over the top of her Best Mom in the World mug.

‘You can do it,' she says.

‘You've totally got this,' Luke affirms.

It makes me smile. And with that, we head towards the door.

But not before I take the last step twice.