In the Blood

For

Ocean Rae

I love you like the cherry blossom loves the wind.

Tiger, tiger, burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

On what wings dare he aspire?

What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder and what art

Could twist the sinews of thy heart?

William Blake, “The Tiger”

There are twelve slats of wood under my bed. I know this because I count them over and over.
Onetwothreefourfivesixseveneightnineteneleventwelve.
I whisper the numbers to myself and the sound of it comforts me as I’m sure a prayer would comfort someone who believes in God. It’s amazing how loud a whisper can be. Surrounded down there by the white glow of my bed skirt, the sound of my own voice in my ears, I can almost block out the screaming, the horrible keening. And then there’s the silence, which is so much worse.

In the quiet, which falls like a sudden night, I can hear the beating of my own heart, feel it thudding in my chest. I lie very still, willing myself to sink into the pile of the carpet lower and lower until I don’t exist at all. There is movement downstairs. I hear the sound of something heavy scraping across the dining room floor.
What is he doing?

I have come to this place before. Here, I have hidden from the frequent and terrible storms of my parents’ miserable marriage. And I have listened as their voices break through the thick walls and the heavy, closed doors. But usually I can only hear the angry cadence of their voices, and very rarely their words, which I know to be hateful and spiked with old hurts and bitter resentments. It is a poison in the air, a toxic cloud.
Onetwothreefourfivesixseveneightnineteneleventwelve.
Sticks and stones can break your bones, but words can break your heart.

Tonight it is different. My palms feel hot and sticky. I lift them up and look to see they are covered in blood, the lines on my hands in stark white relief against the red black. I am overcome by a panicked confusion. What happened? Already, it’s slipping from my grasp, the last few hours. I have a kind of amnesia when it comes to my parents’ battles. I try to forget them and often succeed.
Everything okay at home?
my teacher asked recently.
Great,
I said.
Fine
. And the surface me meant it, even though the deep and buried part knew it wasn’t true. I should have been sending up flares, instead I was offering smiles. I just wanted so badly for things to be normal. I had worked so hard for that.

Downstairs, my father issues a grunt of effort.
What happened?
I push hard into my own memory, but a big part of me is shutting down. I can see my own hand (clean) reaching for the front door, hear the hiss of the school bus moving away, and my friend Joelle knocking on her bus window. I turned to wave; she motioned for me to call her.

I had the familiar stone of dread in my chest as I pushed inside. My dad has been out of work, a journalist in the age of digital media. His department got smaller and smaller and smaller, until he, too, was called into the editor’s office. He kept a good outlook at first. But as the months turned into a year, his attitude grew ever more sour. And my parents were home together, all day long. I never knew what I was going to come home to, as they swung between poles of giddy optimism and bleak despair.

But when I open that door in my memory, it’s only a black tunnel that I see.
Onetwothreefourfivesixseveneightnineteneleventwelve.
And now I hear my father’s footsteps. He is walking from the dining
room, slow and steady down the hall. He pauses, as he always does, at the mirror. I hear the familiar creak on the bottom stair and then he’s climbing up, his footsteps heavy and weary. Halfway up, he stops. He says my name but I don’t answer. My whole body is quivering. I am in the tunnel, falling and falling, swirling and tumbling like when they put that anesthesia mask over your face and tell you to count backward from one hundred and you can’t make it even to ninety-eight.

He’s on the upstairs landing and walking toward my room. He says my name again, but I still don’t answer.

We have to talk. Don’t hide from me. There’s nowhere to hide from this.

And then he’s in my doorway. I can hear him breathing; it sounds like the ocean or the way my mother breathes when she’s practicing yoga on the back porch, or the wind through the leaves outside my window.

And then the screaming starts again, it slices through me. It takes me a second to realize that it’s not my mother screaming, it’s me, loud and long in all my fear and misery. My father drops to his knees and I see his face made strange and unrecognizable by all that has passed. Then he reaches under the bed for me.

The winter day was gray and cool, not frigid as it had been. But still it was a very typical January day in upstate New York—barren, chill, flat. I rode my bike around the small, deserted campus, reveling in a quiet that is at its most total right before everyone returns from winter break. The trees were bare, twisted fingers reaching up into the thick, low cloud cover.

I had just returned to school from an unbearable holiday spent with my unbearable aunt and unbearable cousins. (And I know for a fact that they feel exactly the same way about me.) But we
did
bear up, because that’s what family does, isn’t it? We bear up, together, like it or not.

And so they tolerated the dark-haired, dark-eyed sulking interloper, a wraith in their sunny, golden-haired midst. And I tolerated their terrible happy togetherness. But I knew, and so did they, that I had not quite been folded in. I was a cockroach in the batter of their sweet lives. Too polite to remove me, they ate around me.

I can’t fault them, really. Because they are kind and good, and they took me in against all advice and good sense. And I do try to be polite, and they do, as well. And we are all very good at enduring
unhappiness, especially my aunt, who had a great deal of practice early on.

“I have created my life,” she said, in one of the torturous heart-to-hearts she tried to have with me. “And you’re smart enough to do the same.”

She believes that, she really does. She thinks that we are made and not born, that it is the power of choice that forms our lives. With enough positive energy and good feng shui we can overcome almost anything. She’s one of those, the magical thinkers. I think I envy her, even if I can hardly suppress my disdain.

It was
that
time, with graduation right around the corner, when people wanted to know what you were going to do with your life. Graduate school seemed like a good bet, if for no other reason than it delayed my emergence from the freedom and indulgence of academics into the world of alarm clocks and ambition, and nine-to-five. I couldn’t see myself sitting in a cube somewhere—file cabinets and ringing phones, office birthday cakes and paper cuts. What was a psychology major fit for, if not for more education? The human mind, with all its mystery, bears endless study. Doesn’t it?

But if I hadn’t quite made any decisions on that front, I knew one thing. I needed a job. There was money for everything—for school and housing, for books and extras. My parents, whatever their failings, had made sure of it. There was an account, and I had a lawyer whom I called if I needed something: Skylar Lawrence, the man with the checkbook. He always sounded young on the phone, like a teenage girl. But he was old, ancient even—stooped and bald, draped in expensive suits, sporting gold-rimmed spectacles. He had known my parents for many years, and was the executor of my mother’s estate and manager of my trust. We’d met a couple of times over the years—solemn visits in his office, where he droned
on about the status of my mother’s investments, budgets, conditions of the trust. I would sit, nodding sagely, with no idea what he was talking about, too shy to ask many questions.

When I thought of him, which was really only when I needed money, I always envisioned him dwarfed in his huge leather chair, with his stunning view of Manhattan spread about him like a glittering carpet. With a gnarled hand, he’d press a button and money would appear in my checking account. I know: a trust-fund baby, how annoying. Believe it, you wouldn’t want to be me.

During my last conversation with Sky, he suggested that I might find some work since my class schedule was light.

“It would be a good thing for you,” he said. I heard a sharp inhale and slow exhale. He was a smoker; there was an occasional edge to his otherwise youthful voice, sudden bursts of wet, rattling coughs. “To earn something of your own.”

“Okay,” I said. I always said that. It was my stock response when I didn’t know what to say.

“Because you’re an adult now,” he went on, as though I’d put up an argument. “And you need to decide what you are going to make of your life. Earning your own way is part of that.”

“You sound like Aunt Bridgette.”

I heard the hiss of a match lighting, and he drew in another breath sharply. I suppose it wasn’t a stretch to think that this was a scheme they’d hatched together.
We choose who we are,
she’d said over break, certainly not for the first time. And I could tell that it was important to her that I believe that. We don’t inherit everything.

“Am I out of money or something?” I asked.

“Not yet,” he said. “But as you know, there is a period of diminished support after graduation. You won’t come into your trust
until you’re thirty. It was your mother’s wish that you find your calling, and earn your own way.”

“Right,” I said. Of course, I knew this. Both Sky and Bridgette had mentioned it repeatedly. But somehow it had always seemed so very far away, that time when I’d spread my wings and fly on my own. Here I was, on the edge of the academic nest and looking down. I had no idea whether I’d take to the air or crash into a pile of bones.

“So, when you say ‘diminished support,’ you mean . . . ?”

He told me the small yearly sum I would receive, just to help make ends meet and to provide for some extras should I have a low-paying job. “Your mother wanted you to follow your dreams, make a difference. It was her hope that you’d help people. She didn’t want you to choose your career based on how much it paid, but she did want you to do something.”

Of course, no one ever mentioned my father or what he wanted from me.

“I know,” I said. “I will.”

So, that first day back after my winding, solitary bike ride around campus, I walked to the office of student affairs to gaze at the job board. I was weirdly excited. I liked the idea of doing something other than studying, which I had been doing diligently for years. I had been the valedictorian of my high school class. I had a perfect 4.0 average at university. Knowledge and the regurgitation of such in the form of essay and exam came very easily to me. It was everything else that came hard.

Dog walker? Coffeehouse waitress? Bookstore clerk? Librarian assistant? Math tutor? The board was a colorful riot of help-wanted notices, and the possibilities seemed endless. The office assistant was typing behind me. Beside me the phone rang three times, went silent,
then started ringing again. I ripped off little paper tags with phone numbers on them. I imagined myself tugged down the street by five dogs with bladders about to burst, or rushing between bistro tables delivering espressos to the undercaffeinated, or quietly filing homeless books, putting them in proper order. Is that what my mom would have wanted for me? Did these jobs qualify as helping people?