The Glittering World (22 page)

“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to . . .”

“It’s nothing.” She shrugged, her voice unfamiliar, hoarse from either misuse or neglect, she wasn’t sure which. “I’m just cold.”

They sat in silence. She reminded herself that she knew Jason, and knew him well. And to a lesser extent Gabe, the young man in the waiting area down the hall, his baby face gone chapped and bearded blond in the two weeks since she’d been gone. She watched Jason watching her. His mind was somewhere else, though, hands held fast to the arms of his chair, fingers tensed as if eager to be put to use.

He thinks he wants to take care of me
, she thought,
but really he’s the one who craves comfort.

Not a recollection exactly, more like a truth she’d learned over many lifetimes, from a hundred different angles. He smiled at her, and she smiled back, reflexively, for the first time since she had come out of her daze two nights prior.

Earlier, the attending physician had told them there were no signs of sexual abuse, nor had the preliminary blood work indicated sexually transmitted disease or pregnancy; there was no indication she’d ever been pregnant at all. “Thank you,” Jason had said with relief, as though it were the doctor’s doing. He turned then to look at her plaintively, and she saw in his expression that he knew what had happened between her and Blue. The hurt in his eyes was unambiguous, along with a secondary flare of fire, of pride, perhaps. Or maybe it was affirmation, that
what had happened was a terrible mistake the universe had seen fit to undo, having blighted her with some kind of karmic miscarriage. And that was that. She couldn’t argue with a blood test, could she? So she grimaced and turned away, curled into a ball, and held herself with her knees tucked under her chin, in—fittingly—the fetal position.

There had been a flush of embarrassment, followed by a more acute feeling of unmitigated shame. She yearned then for the comforting touch of Jason’s firm hands upon her shoulders, the soft cadence of his voice, the consolation one might provide a child. But his touch didn’t come until later, and he left her in that moment the way she had left him: alone. And maybe she deserved no better.

All this in front of a police detective named Jessed, whose presence made Jason noticeably anxious. When the doctor added that she showed no particularly troubling symptoms of dehydration or malnourishment, the detective lit up, as if this helped prove some hypothesis she wasn’t yet privy to.

“Is there anything you can remember?” Detective Jessed had asked, yet again, for what seemed like the dozenth time.

“No,” she answered. “Nothing. I think I fell asleep in the bath . . .”

In truth, she actually remembered quite a bit, if only in flashes. Just not in the way they meant, not in a way she could properly communicate. It was as if that which she did recall needed translation—not so much from another language, but through a second set of senses, resembling the usual ones yet altogether different. A dark light washing over her that tasted like tangerine; the smell of fire as it bled bitter in her swollen eardrums; the touch of frenzy and morning and moon. And a shadow that resembled a face in the dark, one so blinding and
bright it was impossible to truly see, yet so beautiful she couldn’t dream of ever looking away.

For two days she’d been forced to listen to specialists (Jason included) volley theories back and forth across her bed like some kind of diagnostic Ping-Pong match: dissociative fugue, amnesia, depersonalization, PTSD . . . The word
alienism
came to mind.

How could she tell them that none of their assumptions applied to her? Her experience was not of the real; it was of the otherreal.

She no longer belonged to their world of words. Now she belonged to the ones below the land.

The doctor popped back inside the examination room to tell them she was free to go. “Back to her room?” Jason asked.

“Back to her life,” the doctor said. “We’re discharging her.”

She allowed Jason to help her from the examination table, his hand beneath her elbow as he walked her across the hall to the bathroom. She locked the door behind her, stood in front of the mirror, and stuck out her tongue, which was caked in a layer of lichen-colored film. Her olive complexion was starkly pale under the fluorescents, hair scrubbed clean but lifeless, a dull brown frame for her round face. She brushed a stray lock behind her ear and the light caught the metallic clasp on her hospital bracelet, her name typed in the space between her date of birth and a scannable bar code.

Howard, Elisa
. Her last name first, by all rights that of her husband, followed by the name her parents had given her (the parents she made Jason convince not to rush to her side, that she would fly home right after she was discharged). Her date of birth, her sex, the date she was admitted to the hospital, the name of the medical center: all the essential data, printed beneath the clear plastic band. All of it equally meaningless.

She met her own gaze in the mirror. Her eyes were lighter than she remembered; weren’t they darker, once? Now, instead of deep pools of brown, the irises were flecked with sparks of green, similar to the oxidized color of the scum coating her tongue. The pregnancy had changed her body in ways large and small, but of course that wasn’t the entire story; she’d been changed in other ways as well. She looked away, down at her torn fingernails and the chipped lip of the sink, everything the same unhealthy shade of green.

She washed and dried her hands, and paused for a deep breath before opening the door. Jason was waiting on the other side.

“Everything okay?” He put his hands upon her waist, and she tried not to flinch.

“Sure.”
Now smile.
She smiled. “Let’s get going.”

Jason, never more than an arm’s length away, followed her down the hall and into the waiting room. Gabe spotted them and stood. He appeared disoriented, as if roused from a vivid dream. “How are you feeling?” he asked, and wiped at his bleary eyes with the backs of his hands, which clutched his spiral sketch pad and a pen that dangled a ball-bearing chain.

“Better,” she said. “Better.” She embraced him—unexpected, at least to her—and she did so tightly, too tightly. As she held him she realized that he smelled of Blue. Of his funk and stale cigarette smoke, sesame oil and cilantro and kitchen grease. She drew in the scent as if drowning and starved of air; it was impossible to let him go.

“We’re going to find him,” she whispered into the curved shell of Gabe’s ear. She said the words, heard them from her lips and spoken in her own voice. She didn’t know why she had said it, only that it was true.

She pulled back at last. Gabe was startled—unsure, it seemed, of whether he’d understood her. Before he could respond, however, Jason placed a hand on her elbow and led her toward a back room to change.

As soon as she walked through the front door of the MacLeod House her skin began to itch, the nicks and scrapes across her thighs and shoulders all humming with unease. She turned back toward the windows and looked out at the familiar vista, the cove wet with mist and the dusky remnants of a late-afternoon rainstorm. She had to remember to breathe.

“Want some tea?” Jason rattled the black porcelain kettle over the range.

“Sure,” she said, though she did not.
This place
, she thought,
it feels like a trap.
“Thanks.”

She forced herself to call her parents. Her mother pleaded with her yet again to return to New York, her father shouting, “Make her!” in the background. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t see them. Or rather, she couldn’t see them seeing her, tracking her movements as though she were a wild animal that might bolt at any moment. “I’ll be back soon,” she said. “I just need to get my legs under me.”

“Knowing you, that might not ever happen!” Her mother’s words daggers; they always were. “Who knows what happened to you? If you do, you sure haven’t told us.”

She groaned into the receiver, a teenager again. “I can’t leave yet, all right?”

“But you’re fine abandoning us?” Fear in her mother’s voice, and choked-back tears, those of a frightened child.

“I haven’t abandoned you,” she said. “And I won’t.”

“But you did. You have. Why can’t we see you? Why? That’s it. I’ve had enough. I’m flying back up there.”

“Mom, don’t. Please. I’ll be back just as soon as I can.”

She wondered which was worse: believing that her parents were strangers now, or being wrong about that fact and feeling it regardless. Because to look upon them would be to know that she was no longer their daughter, and from that admission there was no turning back.

There was a heavy sigh on the other end of the line. “Just tell me you’re safe now. Please. I need to know that. At least give me that, Elisa.”

Elisa.
Hearing her mother say the name was like being spoon-fed dirt.
You chose wrong
, she wanted to say.
You gave me the wrong name.

“I’m safe,” she said instead. She looked out the window and caught a starburst of late-afternoon light at the foot of the drive, glinted off the windshield of a patrol car as it slowed and passed. “They’re watching out for me. The police, the doctors, Jason . . . I’m fine. I need some time, okay?”
Time.
She didn’t know what that meant anymore.

“We miss you,” her mother said. “Julie misses you. She says you haven’t even seen the kids since Mandy’s birthday. Long before all this.”

All this
. She wanted to scoff, but the guilt-tipped arrow found its mark. It was true, she hadn’t seen her sister or nieces in months, though back home they were only a short subway ride away. They only wanted to see her face.
Selfish Elisa
, she thought.
Selfish little bitch.
She felt awful. Maybe she was still human after all.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Tell Julie I’ll visit them as soon as I’m back.”

Elisa got off the phone and sat on the couch, unmoving and unmoved, as her mug of chamomile tea steadily cooled. She pretended to read a decrepit Italian fashion magazine she’d unearthed from the bottom of the log trunk, and tried very hard not to watch the windows and the trees beyond, the impenetrable woods that had rebirthed her into this discordant and too-bright world.

Every once in a while she caught Gabe, pen in hand, eyeing her from his perch in front of the woodstove, the glow of flames on his lean face as twilight sputtered out over the mountains. He would look away, into the fire or down at the yellow-paged volume in his lap, the words
Entomologia Generalis Vol. I
embossed on its battered purple cover. Jason made no bones about his own surveilling, however; his hard eyes stayed upon her, to the point where she ceased to provide him the satisfaction of noticing. And suddenly it seemed like a familiar game: the granting of attentions, followed by their withholding, a cross between a tango and a tug-of-war. Apparently not much had changed between them.

“I’m wiped out,” she said at last, and let out a convincing yawn. “I’m going to take a bath and get some sleep.” Jason began to rise but she stared him back down. “It’s okay.” She tried to smile. “I’ll be fine, really. It’s not like I’m going to get sucked down the drain. You know. Again.”

She crept upstairs, filled the cast-iron tub, and eased herself into the steaming water, first with a moan of pain, then relief. She tried to recall what she’d been thinking when she was last here: in this bathtub, this room, this house. The more she tried to remember, however, the more her memories of that night seemed to dissipate. She was worrying rifts in her mind, fingering greater holes in an already moth-eaten sweater.

In the bath, talking to Blue.
Talking and laughing and taking pictures: her of him, him of her, of the walls, the floor, the toilet. Talking about, what? His return to the cove, and disappearing as a child. And then, the pregnancy. Which she told Blue was only six weeks along. Which was a lie.

The child, as hard as it was for her to believe even now, would have been his. Theirs. The embodiment of a connection greater than friendship, or sex, or indeed love. Their union, Elisa had long known, had echoes of the divine. The night in May they got wasted and he told her about his grandmother’s death, how sad he felt that he would never get a chance to see her again, not to mention how conflicted he was that she’d left him her house. Would he be going back to Cape Breton, after all these many years? The possibility seemed to release a powerful grief in him, and from Elisa a resultant wave of compassion, an effect that bordered on the chemical; that night she was doubly intoxicated. She had hitched up her skirt, and Blue gave her a nervous smile that said,
Are you for real?
and she stared boldly back as if to say,
Yeah, let’s do this already.
She stood there waiting, as if in surrender. And all of a sudden they hit the bed and they began to fuck, wildly. Blue tried to slow things down but she told him everything was fine, that she was on the pill.

Which was another lie. She’d gone off it a few months earlier for no real reason; she just finished her supply one day and never refilled her prescription. She didn’t understand—then as now—what exactly had made her deceive Blue. All she knew was that she had felt compelled.