Falling Under

by Gwen Hayes

  “Theia!” A voice cried out from somewhere—behind me, inside me, below me; I couldn’t tell.

  Water clogged my nose and mouth and clogged my vision.

  “Theia!” The voice grew more insistent, louder.

  With fresh energy, I made a last push and gasped for breath. My hands finally locked onto something and I sobbed when I couldn’t move it.

  “Theia!”

  “Father?” I opened my eyes.

  “Thank God.” He was weeping. “I couldn’t wake you up.”

  The rain pounded on me still, but then I realized it fell cold from a showerhead and I was lying in the tub in my nightgown. My father’s face, etched with worry, loomed over me as the cold water soaked me.

  “What were you thinking? How many did you take?”

  I followed his gaze to the bottle of sleeping pills on the counter. The ones I’d taken from his bedroom so that Haden wouldn’t be able to wake me up.

  “Answer me! How many pills, Theia?”

  I tried to sit up but kept sliding. I gripped the edge of the tub and vomited on the Italian slate floor.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I was to rest.

  Set up in the sunroom with an afghan and a pile of books, I drank the PG tips Muriel brought to me regularly and stared out the window. My skin felt foreign, like an ill-fitting coat. I hadn’t been allowed to leave the house in three days.

  I was exhausted, physically and emotionally. Sleep didn’t provide me any rest. I’d hoped to return to Haden, but my dreams didn’t come. Instead, it felt like a wall of static separated me from the deep sleep I used to lose myself to in Under.

  I missed him dreadfully. To be ripped away from him left an open wound, and not knowing what had become of him poured salt into it. Questions, questions, questions, and no answers. Limbo felt like swimming in gelatin.

  Father, my dutiful jailer, entered the room. “I just spoke with the doctor.”

  “I told you I was fine,” I answered, my voice as monotone as I felt.

  “Fine people don’t overdose on sleeping pills.”

  I closed my eyes, wishing to shut him out but unable to. “I didn’t overdose, Father. I told you that.”

  “If I hadn’t come home early . . .”

  “Then I would have slept through the afternoon and awoken later a little groggy but otherwise fine.” My tone shocked him. It shocked me as well. “I didn’t overdose on pills.”

  “You wouldn’t wake up, Theia. I had to throw you into a cold shower.”

  I shrugged. It was all he would get from me. I wanted to go to school, to get out of the house. The oppression was stagnating.

  “I found this in your room.” He pulled wrinkled red fabric from behind his back. “Care to explain?”

  I turned back to the window. “It’s a dress.” I’d hidden Donny’s dress in the back of my closet after the disastrous night at Chasm.

  “This scrap of material is not a dress. Are you telling me you wore this? Where the hell would you wear something like this, young lady?”

  Technically, I suppose I did wear it to hell briefly, but that wasn’t the best answer if I hoped to avoid another visit with the doctor. “I wore it to a club.”

  I could barely dredge up enough energy to look away from the window so he could have his moment of rage. My lethargy crippled me, and I’m sure my lack of participation in his manic explosion made it worse. Imagine, my father being overexcited.

  “A club? I left town for a few days and you threw everything we believe in out the window?”

  The numbness cushioned me from caring. “I suppose that since you don’t believe in me having my own life and making my own choices even though I’m seventeen, I guess I did throw it all away. You’re absolutely right.” Father wouldn’t understand sarcasm, and when did I acquire it? “I went dancing. With my friends. I didn’t break any laws.”

  He threw the dress across the room, though the material was too light to accomplish his goal and it fluttered to the floor only a few feet away from him. “I raised you better than this.” His face reddened and the veins in his temples throbbed.

  “What is so wrong with having fun, Father? It’s not a crime.”

  “You sound like your mother,” he bellowed.

  “Good.”

  One word squeezed his anger completely out, leaving him thinner, gaunter, and much, much older than the minute before. “Theia.”

  “I should apologize, but I won’t. I’m tired of pretending I was never born.”

  He collapsed into a chair. “What are you talking about?”

  “Who do you hate more, Father? My mother or me?” The walls of good sense had fallen. The losing battle with sleep had apparently let loose the thoughts I would normally have kept to myself.

  “Where is this nonsense coming from? I’m not a man who shows affection freely, but you know I love you.” He lowered his voice. “You know I loved her.”

  “Of course.” I returned my gaze to the window.

  “What is the meaning of this rebellion?” Father asked me. “We’ve worked so hard to make you reasonable. What happened?”

  “Maybe I was meant to be unreasonable.”

  “I don’t believe that. Your mother . . . she didn’t understand the real world. She saw only what she wanted to see. Nothing bad could happen to her—until it did. But you’re not like her, Theia. You’re pragmatic. You understand consequences. You know that it’s better to be careful than to—”

  “I don’t know that at all.” And I didn’t. Being careful hadn’t brought me any measure of joy—but then again, neither had being reckless.

  “This pointless rebellion stops now.” Father stood with renewed energy for the argument. “If you don’t learn from her mistakes, then her death will have been for nothing.”

  “And what was her death for, Father? What grand thing did it serve? Perhaps we should be more concerned that I learn from her successes instead of her mistakes, so that her life will have not been for nothing.” Tears spiked my lashes. “Her death wasn’t for nothing, though, was it? It was for me. Because I killed her.”

  He didn’t rush to fill the silence.

  “It’s true, then. That’s what you believe. That I killed her. It’s my fault she’s dead.”

  “No—”

  “No? If I hadn’t been born, she would have lived.”

  Father paced, filled with an unusual energy instead of sedately in control. “You know it’s far more complicated than that. She made her choices, God rest her soul, and left us to live with them. If I were a different man, perhaps I could have handled this better. Perhaps I should never have brought you back to this country.”

  “It’s not the country’s fault that I want to have a life, Father. Or wear my hair loose or go dancing with friends. You can’t forbid me forever. What will I do when you aren’t around? Some choices need to be mine.”

  He crouched to my level, deep grooves of his face that I’d never noticed before telling of a life of pain. I scarcely knew the man before me. “She dazzled me. I don’t talk about her much, Theia, because the pain is still so fresh. Every morning, I awake as normal and then the pain comes to remind me she’s not there. It hasn’t lessened in seventeen years. I knew absolutely nothing of love before her, and she was gone so quickly I hadn’t an opportunity to learn all I needed to carry on, much less raise a child.”

  I squeezed the end of the afghan. “Tell me about her?” I needed to hear, in his words, from his heart.

  His countenance held firm, but the light in his eyes changed. “She was beautiful.” He closed his eyes to savor the moment. “I was in the States on business and had been talked into visiting a dingy diner that boasted the best pancakes in America. It was horrid, bad lighting, bad food. She wasn’t our waitress; she’d been taking care of the table behind me when she stumbled and spilled greasy hot chips into my lap. I was livid, as you can imagine.” Even though I’d heard it before, the undignified encounter seemed impossible to im
agine. Father was not a person upon whom things were spilled. “She apologized and rambled on while picking up the potatoes one by one off my pants. They were hot, burning her fingers, and I was angry, and of course the location of the mess was embarrassing to us both.” And yet he was smiling. “I kept trying to push her hands away, to no avail, of course. She used to joke about that night—that she didn’t know what came over her that she couldn’t keep her hands off my pants at first sight.”

  I scrunched my eyes tightly. “Father, please.”

  “Too much?”

  I nodded, and he chuckled. “Jenny’s light was so bright, Theia. She rushed headlong into everything she did. Falling in love was no exception. Of course, I resisted. It wasn’t practical. I was only visiting; I lived in another country, for God’s sake. We had different tastes in music, politics, entertainment . . . but when she smiled at me . . . your mother was an angel.”

  My stomach clenched at the unfairness. An angel. And she fell in order that I might live. Why must everyone fall in order to love me?

  “I don’t hate you.” Father reached for me, patting my hair awkwardly. “I could never hate you. I’m sure I’ve done everything wrong, Theia. But I swear I don’t hate you. Try to understand. If she hadn’t died, I wouldn’t have you—but if I didn’t have you, she wouldn’t have died. The anguish of her death is matched only by the joy of your birth. I’ve never known what to do with either, I suppose.”

  The anguish I saw plainly. He lived it day to day and thrust it upon me most of mine. The joy was what I’d never seen, therefore never believed. I yearned for it, to be loved completely and joyously by my father, but I knew this afternoon’s respite from his dour nature was temporary. A step, surely, but not the whole mile.

  Just like loving Haden brought little joy for either of us. Perhaps no love did. Maybe my mother was wrong to believe it could alter anything, make anything better.

  Mother had been told by the doctors that a pregnancy would put too much strain on her kidney. It was weak and the other had been taken during her childhood illness. Her other organs were never as strong as they should have been either, though her spirit kept them running well most of the time.

  “Why did you allow her to have me, Father?”

  He eased away and into a chair. “There was no such thing as allow when it came to my Jenny. She made that clear to me from the first. But I won’t claim I didn’t try.” His eyes pierced my heart. “Oh, Theia, it shames me to say that, but I ordered her, pleaded, cried. . . . You were an accident to me, but a miracle to her.”

  My father ordered her to abort me. Even expecting it, knowing it, couldn’t have prepared me for hearing it. This conversation may have been my idea, but it poked holes at my insides.

  “You have to understand. We took precautions. I had an operation when I realized how serious her medical situation was. I didn’t want to put all the responsibility for birth control on her, but the surgery didn’t take. At least not soon enough.” Father paused, closing his eyes to retreat to his own painful world. “She said that you needed to be born. That if you got through two forms of birth control, you were meant to be here and she was having you. She threatened to leave me if I ever brought up abortion again.”

  I shouldn’t have been born. I’d been displaced from the moment I was conceived. And now I was a walking, talking exercise in heartache. If my father loved me, he betrayed the love he had for his wife. If he didn’t, he betrayed her love for him.

  And poor Haden, forced to make a decision with no right answers. Love me and be miserable—that was my legacy so far. And yet I knew that if I ever saw him again, I would rush into his arms without thought of consequences.

  “She was never happier than when she carried you.”

  The sharp turn of his words took me from the road my own thoughts were traveling on and surprised me. I dared not speak and waited for him to continue.

  “She never held you in her arms, but she loved to cradle her rounded belly. You were everything to her. It was as if she lived her whole life for those nine months.” Father reached tentatively to stroke my cheek. “She’d be so proud of you. Especially your music—but really, everything. She’d have my head for all my transgressions against you.”

  “You wanted to protect me,” I answered.

  “I want to love you as well. It’s just . . . difficult. I knew before falling for her that love was rash and unkind. I’d avoided it as long as I could, but then I met your mother, and something made me want to try. But I failed, Theia. Love bested me. My consolation was that perhaps I could protect you from heartache.” Unguarded, my formidable father reminded me of a boy my own age. “Instead, I fear I broke your heart several times over. For that, I’m sorry.”

  “You were right to try, Father. Love is impossible.”

  “I wish fairy tales were real.” He patted my hand. “The doctor says you can return to school tomorrow.” He paused. “I’ll be in my study if you need anything.”

  After he left, I sighed heavily. So much had changed, yet nothing really had.

  I wondered if I would ever cease wishing I was ten years older. As a young girl I thought, with fervent hope, that ten years was some kind of magic formula. That if I were seventeen instead of seven, I would know how to handle myself better in a situation. That a passing decade would fill in all the cracks where I ached, by adding wisdom or, at the very least, understanding. But seventeen had come, and there I sat, no more used to heartache than when I started. And more confused by it.

  I’d thought I would be glad to get out of the house, to return to school—to normal life. I was wrong. Everyone knows high school is the opposite of balm for the soul, but apparently I had to figure it out for myself.

  The last time I’d been on campus, the whispers and stares had been almost humorous. I’d been newly in love with a boy who felt the same, and possibility bloomed like flowers everywhere I looked. The obstacles had seemed trivial that day, a few weeds in my garden of hope.

  Everything was different now.

  I stepped out of Donny’s car, and exhaustion set into my bones immediately.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  “No.”

  Each step seemed to take energy that I just didn’t have.

  “Theia, maybe you’re still too sick. Do you want me to take you home?”

  I shook my head but couldn’t look at her. My absence from my life had been explained by the flu, though I don’t think Donny or Amelia believed it. I wasn’t ready to talk about it. Not yet. They didn’t know about Haden returning to Under, or the sleeping pills I took, or that my father had asked my mother to terminate me before I was born.

  My insides were too raw for the discussion just now.

  The fact that Haden had stopped coming to school about the same time I got the flu was too coincidental for the school rumor factory, which manufactured story after story, each more lurid than the last. As I wound through the busy hall to the admin office with my sick note, the whispers and stares were no longer humorous. They must have known I could hear them, but the students carried on as if it didn’t matter.

  I heard she got mono.

  No, it’s cancer. And Haden was so heartbroken he ran away.

  No, her dad ran him off. He found out about their affair.

  I heard she got in trouble and her dad made her go to the city and, well—you know—get rid of it.

  That whisper plunged into my heart like a dagger, so fresh on the wound of finding out my father had tried to convince my mother to get rid of me.

  I bet Haden couldn’t deal. I bet he won’t come back to town ever again.

  Maybe he’s a demon.

  I stopped, and all my blood turned slushy cold, and my skin prickled at the word. The whisper had been only a breath away from my ear, and yet no one was there.

  I must have misheard anyway, I lied to myself. I hugged my arms closer to my chest and looked at the students around me a little bit more closely. The whisper, thoug
h, still seemed to be caressing my ear, a trace of it left behind. I shivered and continued to the admin office.

  The day was going to be a long one.

  At lunch Amelia peered at me with an unwavering look. It unnerved me, and the fuse of my temper was already short. “What?” I finally asked, exasperated. I set my Tater Tot back on the tray. “What?” I tried again, with a touch of civility.

  She pulled an orange juice out of her lunch bag. “You shouldn’t eat so much junk food if you’ve been sick. Drink this.”

  “I’m fine,” I answered mulishly, closing my eyes. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have snapped at you.” I said the words—I even meant them—but my fingers still clenched the fabric of my pants under the table.

  I felt like a teakettle just about to whistle. Emotions rolled inside me in a slow boil, building steam and getting ready for the big show. I didn’t know how to stop them. They just gyrated and spun, bringing me closer to a loss of control every minute. I wanted to shout out—scream, really.

  I missed Haden. And I wanted my mother.

  Amelia pushed the juice at me when I didn’t take it from her hand. “It’s okay. I know you don’t feel well.”

  “It’s not an excuse to become a bitter, hissing crone around my best friends. I’m sorry.”

  Ame patted my head, and then she craned her neck sharply to look at the door behind us. I turned to see what drew her attention. About ten seconds after I looked, Mike entered the cafeteria door looking the same as he always did. Jeans, tee, letter jacket, boring.

  What was wrong with me? That was rude. Mike was a nice lad. Just because I didn’t find him all-consuming didn’t mean he was boring. Better for Amelia that he was a touch bland than a demon who wanted to eat her heart, after all.

  That’s when I realized something about the timing of his entrance was off. “You don’t think that’s strange?” I asked her.

  “What’s strange?”

  “That you knew Mike was coming before he got to the door?”

  The pink began in the apples of her cheeks until her whole face flushed. “I didn’t.”