Ben’s left three messages on my cell phone since I arrived in Port Royal. I keep staring at the blinking icon in the top right hand corner of my phone’s screen, feeling sick with each passing second. For the past couple of years, Ben’s been there for me. Kind of. He’s encouraged me as best he can, but he’s a real guy’s guy. He doesn’t know how to talk about emotions or how he’s feeling. I met him just after I’d recovered from my eating disorder, and my therapist had said he needed to know how delicate I was. Ben hadn’t been all that great at listening when I’d stumbled over the words, trying to explain some of what had happened to me in my father’s house. I hadn’t told him everything, not even close, but I told him enough. He was awkward, angry and quiet, and then he was just…nothing. He pretended like I’d never really said anything about it at all. At the time, I was kind of glad. If Ben pretended like it never had happened, then I could pretend it had never happened, too.
He didn’t even bring up how going back home was affecting my mental state, though, and that seems like a question a normal person would have asked. Ever since I drove through the town limits of Port Royal I haven’t been able to think about him without feeling like there’s a pressing weight sitting on my chest, though. I didn’t feel like this back in LA. I’ve been aware of that fact since the sensation arrived, this inability to breathe properly, and I’ve been wracking my brain ever since, trying to figure out what I was feeling. It took me a while to figure out that I wasn’t feeling anything at all, and that only made my chest tighter. So I haven’t listened to Ben’s messages.
I’m sure he’s getting a little worried by now. I said I would speak to him when I arrived at my hotel, but instead I drank the mini bar dry and fell asleep in a bathtub full of cold water. I woke up shivering and almost blue at one in the morning, and then spent the next hour trying to get warm.
I’m pretty fucked up. I’ve always known this, of course, but being fucked up never really seemed like an option when I was at home with Ben. It seemed incredibly antisocial to be drinking excessively, watching porn, and making myself throw up at random intervals during the week. I’ve been on my best behavior the past few years, and I didn’t even realize I was trying so hard.
Now that I’m on my own, it doesn’t seem so unreasonable to be a complete mess. It seems like my natural state, and every part of me wants to revert to it.
I sit up straighter, tugging on the hem of my tight pencil skirt, trying to yank it down my legs, make it longer somehow, as I wait for Ezra Mendel. If it had been up to me, I would have gone to see John Bickerdale first, the funeral director dealing with my father’s burial, but there wasn’t much point. Until I’ve spoken with my father’s lawyer, how am I supposed to know if he had a financial plan in place for when he died? Stupid for me to be forking out thousands of dollars for a coffin and for the funeral director’s fees if he had some sort of policy in place. So here I am. Sweating. Hung over. Feeling like the sun is about to come crashing down into the earth, and I have no means of escaping my fate.
Ezra finally enters the cramped office I’ve been sitting in for the last fifteen minutes, paper coffee cup in one hand and a copy of the New York Times in the other. Occasionally Ezra would come to the house to see my father—I guess, if it’s at all possible for anyone to have been friends with my father, then that’s what Ezra was—and he would bring strange baked goods his wife had made. My father would toss them in the trash the second the man had left the building. He’s aged a lot since I saw him last, though he’s still wearing the same tiny spectacles with the wire frames, and he still has far too much wiry, wild hair, though most of it has turned white now instead of the steel gray I remember.
“Coralie. So lovely to see you. Obviously, it would have been far nicer under less sorry circumstances, but…”
I wave off his sentimentality. “It’s okay. We don’t need to do that.” He, along with everyone else in Port Royal, must know exactly what I thought of my father. That there was no love lost between us. He can’t possibly think for a second that I’m in mourning for the old man. Ezra gives me a perfunctory nod, pouting a little.
“Of course. Well, be that as it may, it’s still a pleasure to lay eyes on you again. You’ve grown into a beautiful young woman.”
I say nothing. It’s not a pleasure to see him. Back when my father would lay a belt buckle against my back, breaking the skin, back when I was covered in bruises and barely able to walk, Ezra would lay eyes on my injuries and he never said a word.