The Year of the Beasts (13 page)

Tessa had to let them know which outfit Lulu would have wanted to wear. Tessa knew. They wanted to dress her in the wrong dress. She made her mother buy Lulu a pair of shoes. She didn’t want her sister in the open casket wearing bedazzled flip flops.

When they finally found Lulu she was bloated and blue. Her bathing suit was shredded. She was not recognizable.

At night Tessa had to cover her ears and pretend that she did not hear her mother wailing. Her mother didn’t even sound human anymore. And despite how sad she was, Tessa couldn’t help but wonder if her mother would have wailed as loudly for her. Would it have been the same if she had died? Would it have been different?

In the hospital, Celina’s face was swollen and her eyes black and blue. Her legs and back wrapped in plaster.

“I’ll never walk again,” Celina said. “I’ll never walk. I just wish I had died.”

Tessa ran out of the room.

And where was Jasper?

He had disappeared. Hadn’t come to the funeral. Didn’t come to hold Tessa’s hand. Didn’t come to make sure that she was OK.

Charlie did. Charlie came and visited every day. He held her hand. He read to her from magazines and made her playlists and loaded them up for her. He paid her the kind of attention that she’d always craved and didn’t want anymore. After all of that, she realized that she didn’t like Charlie. He wasn’t for her. He was for Lulu. She wanted Jasper.

Tessa hated the water. Didn’t want to shower. Didn’t want to drink it. She didn’t look out at the river anymore. She couldn’t stand the sight of it. She stifled out the sound with loud music and she blasted it upstairs in her room. Her mother was in the garage with her old guitar amp turned up to ten. Mournful fuzz and feedback was mimicking and covering up sobs.

Tessa had lost so much weight in such a short time. She could see the bones of her skeleton pressing through her skin. Paper skin. Blue veins. She thought they might just burst through. She already felt like she had no skin on. She wondered if her bones could just walk away from her, leaving her a puddle of skin on the floor.

That’s what she was. They all were puddles of skin.

One night, the stars were out. There was no moon. The night was cruel when it had no moon. Tessa looked out her window. She’d been sitting in the sun nook for hours and had watched the sky go from blue to pink to orange to black. She had seen the first star come out and had made a wish. She sat so long that she saw the constellations come and go.

She had found the blade in the back of her vanity. It was an old one, and it was wrapped in wax paper with a little piece of folded cardboard over it. She’d found it a few years back but only remembered that it was there that night. She opened the drawer, pulled it out all the way. Shook out its contents on the floor: lip liner, pencil sharpener, paper clip, postage stamp, blush brush. There it was. Right there.

Remove the cardboard. Press the point on her thumb. She felt it. Sharp.

She turned her wrist over and wondered which way she should cut. Wondered if she did, if it would hurt? Wondered how long it would take. Wondered if her death would be the same as Lulu’s? How much blood would there be? And would it feel like drowning?

At the hospital, Charlie had told her everything, because he had seen it. She could tell that he didn’t want to relive it as he told her.

“You were dead,” Charlie said after finishing up a sandwich and prompting her to spoon soup into her mouth.

“No, I didn’t die,” Tessa said. “I
lived.
”

He put the spoon down and pressed a hand to his eyes as if it would be easier to talk about if he didn’t have to see. He said the words like they didn’t belong to him. His other fist punching his thigh marking each event, like bullet points.

“You came out of the water. Jasper pulled you out of the water. And you were so blue. Jasper was screaming that you were blue.”

She had been cold when she woke up.

“I don’t remember that,” Tessa said.

“Jasper punched your chest. Punched it,” Charlie said. Charlie was crying, but didn’t care that he was. Snot was coming out of his nose and he wiped it with the back of his sleeve. His eyes were still closed.

She had remembered Jasper kissing her. His voice sounded far away. She was floating and he was warm on her lips. And then there was air in her lungs.

“He brought you back,” Charlie said. “We thought we’d lost you, too. If it weren’t for Jasper…”

“But he should have looked for Lulu. He should have gone after her. You all should have.”

“We couldn’t see her anymore. We only saw you. You are the one that we saw.”

Tessa pushed aside the memory of those troubled first days at the hospital.

Tessa put the point of the blade to her wrist. Sweat gathered on her upper lip. Would it hurt? Would someone pull it out of her skin? Wasn’t she still drowning now?

She turned her arm over and carved five letters into it: I DIED. There was blood. She sopped it up with Kleenex. She had so many boxes of Kleenex in her room now, mostly empty. The garbage can was full of used ones, and her face was raw from tears.

Tessa came downstairs holding a towel soaked in blood to her wrist. Her mother had screamed when she saw the blood. Then her mother had sunk down to the floor.

“No. No! NO!” She’d said, not seeing at first that Tessa wasn’t dead, too.

Her mother collapsed into her father’s arms.

“She’s OK,” he soothed. “She just cut herself.”

“Tessa!” her mother screamed. “Tessa. You scared me.”

Tessa couldn’t look her mother in the eyes. She couldn’t say anything to them. She had no words. She couldn’t say that she was sorry. If she did, she might break.

Her father told her to go upstairs to bed.

The cuts hurt. They stopped bleeding. She shut the blinds, lay down on the bed and closed her eyes.

*   *   *

When she woke up, there was something different about her. Her head was squirming. She ran to the mirror. Her hair was untamable. It was dreaded. No. Her hair writhed. It was full of snakes.

Tessa ran downstairs. Frightened.

“Mom! Dad!” She was screaming. Her arm was still bleeding. “Mom! Dad!”

She ran into the living room first.

The kitchen second.

They couldn’t help her. When they saw her, they turned to stone.

Tessa sat on the first stair and wept.

“I’ve killed us all,” she thought.

chapter

twenty

chapter

twenty-one

Alarm clocks always rang
too early. They buzzed and buzzed, the loud chime shaking away the safety of sleep or the bliss of a dream. Tessa had hit the snooze button more often than she should have. She would be late. She didn’t care about that. She didn’t want to go at all.

She was cold and her hair was a mess. She hadn’t brushed it since she had come out of the water and the curls had come together to form thick dreads. She touched her feet to the floor and recoiled. She felt around for her slippers. She felt so heavy.

She rummaged through all of her clothes, there were piles of them and she could not find a single thing to wear. She pulled on a pair of dark skinny jeans and a T-shirt. Knowing that she was too skinny to keep warm she found a sweater and pushed the sleeves up. The scab was still there. Perfectly readable now:
I died.

Tessa could smell breakfast downstairs. They were trying to tempt her to eat. They were always doing that, though they hardly ate themselves. Tessa had no desire to eat anymore. Foods looked foreign to her. She thought of the things on a plate as fuel. If she managed one or two bites, it was OK.

“Think, Tessa, think,” she said out loud.

Remembered a wrist cuff. Slipped one on. It covered most of the scar. All you could see was the I. It looked like a cat scratch.

She padded down the stairs quietly.

Her mother was in the living room, her jeans hanging loose off her hips. Her sleeve tattoos lacking in color. She was putting a CD in the player. She couldn’t stand to hear the news anymore.

“Too much sadness in the world,” her mother said as she turned up the volume on a CD of a band from her youth that she’d rediscovered.

Tessa left her mother in the living room, swaying to the sound of crunchy guitars and jangly melodies. Her mother’s hand slapping the beat against her thigh. Eyes closed. Music was surely going to bring the color back. There was always comfort in music.

“I’m making a salad for your lunch,” her dad said. He tried to sound chipper. His long hair was brushed and his clean-looking shirt made him seem pulled together. His piercings were extra shiny as though newly polished. But it was all an act. The hair was dirty. The shirt was likely unwashed as well. He scooped salad into a Tupperware container for Tessa.

“First day of school,” Tessa said.

“First day,” her dad said.