Wilder Girls(29)
I can’t see her, so instead, I watch the patterns of light her braid throws onto the ceiling, trace their soft, blurring glow. “It’s complicated,” she says at last. “Or maybe I just wish it was.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Last I heard, she was still in Maine. Portland, maybe.”
“What?” That’s barely two hundred miles away. I’d always assumed she’d gone far, or even that Reese didn’t know where she was.
“Yeah,” Reese says. She doesn’t sound sad. Or angry. Or anything. “She didn’t want to leave Maine. She just wanted to leave me.”
I don’t know what could soothe that sting. But she’s talking to me. That has to count for something. “I’m sorry,” I say. “You know you could have told me about it before.”
“Some things don’t belong to other people,” she says, tired and drifting. “Some things are just mine.”
As if I needed more proof that we’re built from different things. Reese holds herself so apart, and all I’ve ever wanted was to be half of someone else. Coming to Raxter, it was like I hadn’t found my place until I got here. Like I didn’t know who I was until Byatt told me.
And I know what Reese would say. I know she’d say that’s not healthy, say that’s not how it’s supposed to work. But the whole world is coming down around us every day, and don’t we have bigger problems?
No, Reese isn’t Byatt, but I like her. I like how she talks without talking. I even like that she doesn’t always like me.
BYATT
CHAPTER 7
Trying to blink but what
Slow thick like my tongue hot and dry here a sliver of something here the world sneaking back under my eyelids here I am I am I am
Awake.
Heat running through my head like a current. Light pricking at my eyes until I’m in a bed in a room. And I don’t hurt, but I feel my whole body at once.
The room is big. Built for something different than this. Peeling linoleum floor. Curtain half drawn around me, and through the gap a bulletin board on the wall, hanging at an angle, and three other beds, all empty. I reach out to touch the curtain, to pull it back, to
Can’t move. Hands strapped down, held by my wrists, IV needle slipped in through my skin.
Somewhere a door opening heavy, muffled steps a suit, plastic and pale sleepy blue, I can see it through the curtain as it approaches. Pushing in and shaking an arm to keep the curtain from clinging and it says
Feeling okay?
* * *
—
He is a boy, he says.
His name is Dietrich.
He’s just joking. He doesn’t know why he said that.
His name is Teddy and he’s nineteen. He’s only a Seaman and this is his first day. He was barely at Camp Nash for a week before they sent him here, and he is still not sure why they did because all he does is move equipment and look out of windows. He is sorry, he is rambling, but it’s only that he doesn’t know what the CDC doctors are saying most of the time, and medicine is confusing and he is very nervous.
Look hard, try to remember how a boy is built. Can only see his eyes above his surgical mask, the rest of his body blurred by the plastic suit. Hair brown like mine, skin golden but faded, like it’s missing the sun.
Teddy asks me questions. Teddy asks me what day it is. He asks me my birthday, my last name, the price of milk. I don’t answer I want to but the words won’t line up on my tongue.
Jack fell down and broke his crown, he says. Jill Jill Come on you know this.
Jill came tumbling I say but that’s all can’t and oh god I forgot I forgot how it hurts like a shock like bile stinging in my throat like a shiver in my bones shaking and screaming and if I don’t stop I’ll just break apart and eyes wet stomach heave
Quiet Teddy says please be quiet that hurts us both
Tells me it’s okay. Tilts a cup of water to my lips, drip, drip and swallow. Locks the door behind him when he goes.
* * *
—
Alone, awake, all of me here in my body. Nobody around, just the whir of a fan somewhere beyond my curtain. Tug and tug but the straps around my wrists have no give.
I think I have been a problem all my life. Here I am where problems go. First Raxter and now here, and I have always been heading here, haven’t I, haven’t I. Too bright and too bored and something missing, or perhaps something too much there.
It was my mother’s idea and my father just nodded and went to sit in another room. Silence all that summer until they put me in a car headed for Raxter. Nobody there will know, I told myself. Nobody will know what you do when you’re bored. What you do just because you can.
* * *
—
Teddy comes back with the sun, tells me they’re figuring it out. Quiet for now, he says, and I don’t mind. I remember the hurt. And he lays out a packet of forms, unbuckles my wrists and moves the IV stand and helps me write the answers down.
Byatt
Byatt Winsor
16 almost 17
January 14th
No allergies
Elizabeth and Christopher Winsor
Beacon Hill
What street?