Lakewood(16)

They led Lena to a room on the second floor that reminded her of a TV police station. She stood yawning and blinking while looking through what she assumed was a one-way glass. I am not afraid, Lena told herself. This is the place where I want to be. I’m okay. The man was checking his watch, as if he had somewhere important to go. Lena yawned again, her jaw popping a little with its force. Five men of East Asian descent walked into the glassed-in area. They faced forward. The lights in the area got brighter.

“Do you recognize any of these men?

Lena stared at each man carefully, understanding they were asking her about the man she had seen the first day, the one who had asked her to remember his face. Two of the men had unshaved necks, but none had the birthmark she had noticed earlier.

“No,” she said.

They thanked her and took her back to her room. In bed, she tried to figure out what day it was. She remembered talking to a man about how to make your brain louder than usual, how to force it to talk at someone. And Lena had been confused. “That sounds like comic book shit,” she had started to say before correcting the word to stuff. He had laughed and said, “No—like when your best friend has something stuck in her teeth and you look at her face and suddenly she understands something is wrong with her face.” But when was that? And when had they given her the injection? And had that happened once or twice?

The light softened with the beginning of another day. Lena went to the desk and wrote Dear Tanya on the open page.

She flipped to the beginning.

Dear Tanya, read her handwriting, I had grilled shrimp for lunch today. They were overcooked but Shrimp Is My Pizza. Always good.

Dear Tanya, another injection day. I woke up and my grandmother was here in this room. She was humming to herself and reading a magazine. Told me that a celebrity couple was breaking up, and if those cute white people couldn’t hold it together, who could, anymore? She flipped the page, looked up at me, and said, “Are you sure this is the right thing for you?” And then she was gone. I woke up. I’m glad you’ll never read this. We would have to talk about it for hours. Sometimes, dreams are not omens. They’re just your brain stitching things together.

Lena’s fingers trembled. She kept reading. Sometimes her handwriting was as it always was, upright, straight, easy to read. But there were times where it was clear she had written while still in pain, fingers cramped, palm trembling.

Dear Tanya, today we talked about grieving. I thought about my grandma’s voice, her laugh. The way she said the word “raccoon,” the emphasis on the oon, the way she said “vase” as if it didn’t rhyme with the word face. How she was the one I always wanted to show my grades to, to talk about the future, who knew exactly what I was thinking. At her funeral, I didn’t really have the time to cry. I had to take care of everything and everyone else. I hoped that talking about her, especially to someone whose emotions I didn’t care about, would make it all burst open, all big and embarrassing, body curving in on itself, sobbing. But my voice stayed still.

Tanya, I am making three thousand dollars this week. It would have taken me probably all summer to do that as Ms. Blue Corn Chip.

Last night, Tanya, they woke me up at what felt like three in the morning. And they made me run until I felt nauseated. My heart was in my ears and I swore I heard an explosion, whoosh, bang. I realized it was my heart and I had heard myself dying. I closed my eyes and when I opened them, I was drinking a large glass of orange juice and it tasted so good. I used a white towel to wipe off all the sweat on my face. It was the softest towel I’ve used in my entire life. One of the doctors’ fingers was on my wrist. There was a mark on my hand. A new bruise that looked like Pac-Man. After I told her everything I felt, after I repeated the phrases again, I talked to my mother on the phone. They watched as I did it. I told her things were very quiet here at the professor’s house. She told me that she really liked the picture of the plant I had sent her. He’s got great taste in foliage. We both laughed at what she said.

Deziree told me she also had been dreaming of my grandma. They had baked a pie together. Inside was apple and old telephone cords. In the dream, my grandma said we were going to need extra luck this year. Said to do that, she needed to paint at least one room in the house green. I told her not to do it. Paint smell was a known headache trigger for her. And she was just getting over a migraine she described as like a tsunami. You sound tired, she kept saying. And when I was off the phone, the doctors told me I was a natural.

More and more pages. Sometimes her handwriting was an illegible scrawl. Another page where she had written the word blood in large capital letters. And two paragraphs down: If I don’t get an ice cream sundae soon, I will throw myself out a window!

How could I, Lena thought, only have been here a week?

Dear Tanya, I sat in a dark room for an entire hour. I had a blindfold on. I was asked to write down all the sounds I heard. When they took the fabric off my eyes, a man wearing a top hat and gray lipstick was sitting in the chair across from me. Talk to me about sex. Do you like it? Are you scared of it? A person came in wearing one of those terrible unicorn masks and asked me about risk-taking. How often was I scared? Would I ever go bungee jumping? What were my rational fears? Then everything was twisting and I saw colors on the walls—lavender, orange, fruit-punch red. My spine was sparking with pain. All I wanted was to lie on a hardwood floor. Stay still until it all floated away.