“Great. So let’s clean this place up, yeah?” I look around at the others and rub my hands together, offering them the biggest smile I can muster. “Where should we start?”
But in my head, everything is a hundred percent serious. I picture myself walking onto the set of The Confessor, this secret locked away, worth the full $50,000. The five of us have been shackled together, forging an imperfect but unbreakable circle.
This bed isn’t mine.
These crisp sheets, looking in the light as if they’ve been frosted with dust. (Is it dust? Is it sugar? Is it ground-up hounds’ teeth? Christ, my head, my head)— This sunlight, spotty and broken. Every fragment— bang
??bang
on the back of my skull.
My rubbery fingers find an IV plugged into my body: if they yanked it out, would I jerk slump
shut down?
I am frail, I am fragile, I am flawed, yes—and for once, God, for once the world is treating me as such.
I find the clock,
remember how to read 4:00 PM.
Remember everything and nothing at all.
But David . . .
I whip up. Bad night. Last night.
Eyes piece the world together: rubber and tiled floor and thin, brittle blinds . . .
Hospital. Alcohol. Caught.
Kiss my past future away. (So much for it.) I’m crying, like I can afford the saline extract.
My mother keeps vigil by my bed.
The newspaper flops, a dead bird in her lap.
She is so confused. It hurts to see.
“Sweetie . . .”
Stop tiptoeing, I want to scream. Stop tiptoeing and storm at me. I deserve it. Do it.
This, her feeble tempest: I hope this won’t happen again.
“You,” I say, “have got to be kidding me.”
People have said I have her eyes, but I hope I don’t look that cowardly, readjusting at the first hint of steel the first flash of fire.
Where is the hard-faced professionalism she slips on for work each morning?
She should be raging. Don’t you dare, she should be saying. Don’t you talk back to me.
You know better.
(I do know better.)
“Juniper,” she says, “tell me how you’re feeling.”
“I can’t believe you,” I mumble.
“Sweetie—why?”
A hell rustles inside my skull and pours out. “Are you even angry at me? I did everything wrong—why aren’t you mad? Aren’t you going to ask how I got here? Why don’t you stop me?”
I don’t realize I’m screaming until a door hinge complains and I slam back to the bed,
the pillow engulfing my peripheral in a puff.
(When did I sit up?)
They make her get out, and she looks lost.
I’m home three hours later. My mother’s eyes are a swaying pendulum that cannot fix on me. Her mouth seems wired shut.
My father will be back this evening. If he so much as raises his voice, it will signify a radical revolution, shaking me from power.
My mother tucks me into
my bed’s warm embrace.
The second she vanishes, I pull out my phone to find twelve calls, a neat dozen, lined up from last night.
Flashes linger past midnight. The dim memory of the screen pressed to my cheek, heated as a kiss, and the static whisper of his sigh. (I picture his narrow shoulder blades folding in on themselves like origami.) I tap voice mail. It conjures up the sound of him: “Juniper. Are you okay? Please call me back. Call me as soon as you get this. If I don’t hear from you in three minutes, I’m calling an ambulance. Text, call, anything. Please.”
(a tight pause.)
“June, I need you. To be all right.”
(click.)
I listen to it over, over, and over.
It takes titanic willpower to set the phone down.
“I need you,” he said. I am alight with it.
David.
I ache to go back to your home—
(I still have the key burning inside my pillowcase—) just one more time,
to your bare living room where I shrugged my jacket onto your sofa, or the kitchen where we drank coffee and murmured lavender words at 3:45 AM, or the bathroom where you brushed your teeth bleary-eyed the morning after I dared to stay the night, or the bedroom where you held me, just held me, where I tried to touch you a thousand times and you said, “No, June, we can’t,”
we can’t,
or the rooftop where we froze together and my fingers kissed your wrist, our words kissed each other, there hanging in the air so softly, mingled like breath in the black sky.
David.
I nurse your name like a wound.
How excruciating, how much I command you, how much you command me, the power we have over each other.
God in heaven, I wonder what a healthy relationship feels like.
We need each other too much.
Or maybe love is never healthy, and we should guard our hearts in hospitals for preemptive healing.
AS THE SUN SETS ON SUNDAY, I HEAR MY SISTER heading downstairs to set the table. You can always tell when it’s Grace. She limps down the steps patiently. A car accident messed up her foot when she was young, so she wants to be a nurse. She’s selfless like that. Good at turning bad into good.