Outside the glass structure, she gasped for air. She should have known on their wedding day when Frank bought her the blue orchid, dyed with poisonous ink, that he didn’t understand her, never would. She needed to return to the earth, simple and unadorned. She had been living too long in Frank’s false world. She thought she would find security there, but she had not. She entered the main store and bought a wheelbarrow and four large bags of soil, ignoring the quizzical look of the man in overalls. She understood what she needed to do now.
The wheelbarrow was a struggle, heavy and unwieldy, but she managed to maneuver it the two blocks home and into the building’s elevator. She could hear the neighbor next door as she pushed it inside. Music and laughter, the clattering of plates and men’s voices. She released the wheelbarrow in the center of the living room and smiled in relief. The humiliation of the note that morning felt very far away.
First things first. She went to the record shelf and searched the sleeves until she found what she was looking for. She withdrew a stained copy of Puccini’s La Bohème that had been her mother’s. Cleo carried the record out of the apartment and gently propped it against the next-door neighbor’s front door. All would be forgiven. He would not bother Frank.
Cleo came back inside and poured herself a glass of milk. She looked at her hand resting on the counter. There was her band of gold. She thought of the gold reflection on the marble floor of the lobby earlier that day. Slowly, she sank her finger into her mouth and withdrew it, pulling the ring loose with her teeth. She balanced it on her tongue, took a long draught of milk, and swallowed the ring in one smooth gulp.
She picked a knife from the block—the paring knife, curved like a smirk—and returned to the living room. The broken orchid still lay on the floor. She moved it aside and rolled up the rug, propping it against the wall. She tipped the bags out of the wheelbarrow and sliced open the first one. Dark earth poured out of the gash onto the floorboards at her feet. She placed the orchid on the pile and shook the remainder of the soil over it. When all the bags were emptied, the mound was the length of her and twice as wide. She patted down the earth with her palms. It was damp and rich, comfortingly familiar. One by one she removed her shoes, jeans, sweater, and underwear, folded them, and placed them in the wheelbarrow. She picked up the knife.
Cleo lay down on the earth and inhaled. How calm she felt. Frank would not be home for hours. She was alone, as she always had been. She pressed the blade to the tender skin inside her arm. The world, so close just moments ago, was falling away, a silken dress slipping off her shoulders. What she thought of was not Frank, Anders, Quentin, or any other selfish man she had selfishly loved. She did not think of her paintings, those canvases that used to breathe with life while she knelt over them in the night. She did not think of New York.
What she thought of was a summer evening fifteen years before. She was ten years old in her childhood home. A new bedroom was being built for her, designed by her mother. She was leading her by the hand to the top of the stairs, where a ladder had been left pointing to a skylight in the roof. The air was full of dust and light. Cleo was being hoisted upward with her mother’s hands around her waist. Then her head and shoulders were free above the house, and it was all sky. Look. Her mother’s voice below her. She saw a long exhale of indigo, impossibly large, incredibly blue. It was as though she had never seen the sky before. She felt her mother’s arms around her. Do you see? A great expanse, unblemished by cloud. All blue, all beautiful. Her mother’s arms around her waist. She saw. They had found it, the two of them, the escape hatch up and out, free and clear, launching them into the great, wide world.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Still March
On the day Frank called to tell him about Cleo, Santiago was declared Slimmer of the Week, a fact he was very proud of and would not be telling anyone. He had lost four pounds that week, fifteen in total. This was thanks to Begin Again, Slim Again, the weight loss program he’d been attending for over a month now. Every Saturday morning, he and ten or so other overeaters met next door to the Union Square Coffee Shop to talk about what they had or had not put inside their bodies that week.
The discussion was led by Dominique, a smiling Jamaican American who wore fuchsia lipstick and dresses made of swaths of bright, diaphanous fabrics. When she moved, her long braids swung across her back like ropes of twisted pastry. Santiago thought she was beautiful and would have liked to ask her out, but after being weighed in front of her, he’d lost his nerve. Dominique herself had lost over one hundred pounds thanks to the program and was a testament to the fact it was possible to not only shed weight but—hardest of all—keep it off. She was still not a small woman, but, as she told the group, she could reach down to tie her own shoelaces now, and that was priceless.
It had been a hard week for the group. One woman had been given a birthday cake at work she could not eat, another’s daughter was complaining that she no longer had bagels in the house, one man had been on a date during which the only thing on the menu he could order was a large plate of broccoli, resulting in some untimely flatulence. Santiago had also been challenged. He was in the midst of opening his second restaurant, as well as a pop-up in LA, and between the menu tastings and photoshoots and outpouring of money—he had shakily written a deposit check for more than he’d earned in his entire twenties that week—it had been hard not to “self-soothe,” as the group called it, with a binge. Sometimes Santiago envied recovering alcoholics and drug addicts; at least they could abstain altogether. Food addicts still had to eat.
But he had not binged, and now, in addition to the satisfaction of being able to buckle his belt on the tightest hole for the first time in years, he’d been rewarded with a yellow tote bag inscribed with the words “Slimmer of the Week!” in bubbly cursive. He was proudly carrying this prize down to the restaurant when Frank called.
It took Santiago several moments to understand what Frank was saying, in part because an ambulance siren was wailing in the background, but mostly because he kept using the word accident to describe what had happened to Cleo. Cleo’s had an accident. Images of bike crashes, kitchen fires, and hit-and-runs flooded Santiago’s mind, but eventually he pieced together that what had happened to Cleo was not an accident at all, but something achingly deliberate. Frank’s voice caught as he went over the details.
“Thirty stitches,” he was saying. “In her arm. Apparently, they have to hold patients in the psychiatric unit for at least seventy-two hours if they, um—” Here, Santiago could hear Frank struggling to find the right words. “Do what she did,” he settled on.
“Ay, dios mío.” Santiago shook his head softly. “I’m so sorry, man.”
“But the paperwork took forever.” Frank’s voice hardened. “So they left her on a gurney in the emergency room hallway all night. The fucking hallway! She was pretty out of it on pain meds, but it was … Well, you can imagine the shit that goes down in an emergency room at night. It was rough, man. They finally transferred her up to psych yesterday.”