Under Rose-Tainted Skies(68)
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
Back 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.