The Gorgeous Slaughter

by Christina Hart

  “That’s true,” I say. The butterflies swarm again. And I want to tell him that even though that may be true, that I could promise him forever. I could stay. I could give him that if he wanted it. “But don’t you think there’s more to it? Being faithful and loyal? Putting in the effort to make a relationship work and not risking it for someone new?”

  “Of course. But most people walk away when things get shaky. And I’m not an easy person to be with. With me, things are always shaky.”

  He’s right about one thing. Most people can’t handle the rubble. The ground when it cracks and becomes anything less than solid. And here I feel like I am filling out paperwork for some sort of an application. And I want to write the answer as strongly disagree for his last statement. I’m not an easy person to be with. I call bullshit. He would be so easy to be with. I know it, I feel it.

  But I respond, because I have to say something. “I’m not sure there’s one right way how to love someone. Most people do the best they can. Most people love the only way they know how to.”

  And it’s true. That old saying, you have to love yourself before you can love someone else, I don’t think that’s true. How many people really love themselves? Why can’t you love someone else without that? It doesn’t mean you’re incapable of love simply because you lack that. Maybe the people who love themselves in small ways are even more capable of giving their love away to someone else because they don’t hog it all for themselves.

  And I guess something in my words strikes him, because he’s quiet for a minute. I hear his fingers tapping on a surface, maybe a table, and I wonder where he’s sitting right now. I wonder what his room looks like. How he decorates it. If he has band posters all over the walls or if he has a modern or rustic style that I wouldn’t expect him to.

  “That’s true,” he finally says. “Can I ask you something? And this might be overstepping here.”

  Thump. Thump. Thump. My heart is pounding now and I sit up, straight. “Sure.”

  “Have you ever been in love?”

  I close my eyes and swallow the pain. I don’t like this question. I don’t like to think about this. I don’t like to go here. This hurt, when you lose someone or something you love, it never goes away. Not for me. It lives in a place I like to pretend never existed. But somewhere in there, we are still together, and we are smiling.

  Thirty

  I close my eyes and think about the last true love I felt.

  I emerged from a blackout, in jail. My first arrest. I was sixteen. Well, it was a youth correctional center. Jail for minors. It would also lead to my encounter with the therapist in there. A woman in glasses who asked me questions that I mostly didn’t answer. I didn’t think I needed help. In that place, they didn’t talk to me. They talked at me.

  “That’s not your house. Your father sold it. You don’t live there anymore,” the cop said.

  I sat there, still drunk. Partially hungover. Very confused. My heart hurt. The pain was still frantically pounding in my chest.

  “Do you have anything to say for yourself?” he asked.

  I stared at my shoes. I needed water.

  “Do you remember what you did?” he asked.

  I closed my eyes and tried to piece together what I could.

  I stumbled to the door. I always kept it open. Unlocked. Our three-story home on Orchid Street.

  It was locked.

  I banged on the door. Let me in.

  A woman I did not recognize opened the door.

  “My dog!” I screamed. I rammed my body into hers. “My dog, he’s here. I know he is. Joey!” I screamed. I was in the house and using my arm as a wrecking ball to wipe things off the counter. The things that didn’t belong here. The things that were not ours.

  I searched, hunted. My dog. My dog. He’s here. I know he’s here. I ran to my old bedroom. Up the stairs, down the hall, second door on the right.

  It looked so different. The architecture was the same. The construction. The building. But the walls? They didn’t feel like home. They were painted in different colors. Is this my house? Where is my dog? Where is Joey?

  I screamed his name. “Joey!”

  He didn’t come.

  He is not here.

  I grabbed things from the walls and threw them, breaking them. Shattering them. Searching. Screaming for my dog.

  And I saw my mother’s old room. The room I slept in so often. And I closed my eyes and remembered my dog’s warm body next to mine. The obedient, faithful child. He was a baby. And I screamed his name again and collapsed on the bed that looked nothing like ours did.

  And I remembered his warmth next to mine. The weight of his snores. The peace of it all. And I curled into a ball and hugged my knees and started to rock.

  “Joey!” I screamed. “Come here. Please come here,” I sobbed. “Please come to Mommy.”

  Reset.

  I opened my eyes. I remembered the house. Of course I remembered it. I grew up in that house. The white three-story home with the blue door and leaking roof in the sunroom. The back door that was always unlocked. An open invitation to anyone my parents knew to just stop by whenever they wanted. The refrigerator door that would creak a little when it opened and the back-left burner on the stove that didn’t work as well as the others. The kitchen, decorated in yellows, my mom’s choice. A way to keep it all bright and cheerful. My mother’s little knick-knacks she liked to collect, in the dining room with the china closet that meant so much to her. The leaky faucet that used to drip just a little, in a way that was never enough to bother anyone enough to fix it. It dripped like that for as long as I could remember. But it never mattered to us. It never bothered any of us. Because we were happy and a little leaky faucet was nothing to worry about when everything was good.

  It wasn’t just a house, it was our home. When my mom was still alive and my parents were still together. When my father would still look at me and talk to me. When I was still a daughter. When I still had my dog, Joey. The little mutt my mom brought home for me as a puppy. He was so tiny when we got him. He was still my baby when I lost him. The one piece of home I should have with me right now. Just one piece of home I miss all the way down to my feet. He got out of the yard and ran away four months after my mom died. We looked for him for hours. I knocked on as many doors as I could as many times as I could before people got sick of answering the same questions over and over and over again. I made poster after poster and hung them all around the neighborhood. But no one ever called. No one ever came by to say they spotted him. No one ever brought him home.

  I never saw him again. Two losses, back to back. Two losses that, in hindsight, in that jail cell, told me they affected me deeply. Sometimes I had dreams that he was there, in the yard, waiting for me. Hoping for me to come back to him to find him. He should still be alive. He was only three when my mother died.

  So sometimes, I would go back to our house that was no longer ours. Sometimes I would go there and look for him. In the yard. And apparently, if I got drunk enough, I would break into the house to see if he was in there.

  I had trouble sleeping most nights. I missed him. His kisses, his smile, his little cries he would wail when he wanted something, whether it was food or just my attention. The familiar weight of him against my legs, head resting on my thigh under the blankets. Or his chin perched on my shoulder as he watched over me and kept me safe. The way he’d look up at me with his big brown eyes and wait for me to bend down to hug him or pet him or play with him.

  Sometimes I imagine him sitting on the front steps, tongue out, goofy grin on his face like he used to have, wondering when I’m coming home. Sometimes I wonder if he misses me as much as I miss him. I hope wherever he is, he has a toy, and he’s smiling. I hope he’s being treated well like the little prince he is. I hope he’s happy, and no leaky faucets are making his ears perk up, waiting for us to walk through the door.

  The cop’s voice broke me from my thoughts and I was glad for it. It was too pai
nful, remembering. It hurt too much. I was supposed to keep him safe.

  “You were intoxicated,” he said. “And it seems like you still are. You’re being charged with underage drinking and breaking and entering. Do you understand?”

  I continued staring at my shoes. I had nothing to say to this man that he would care to hear. I would look guilty because I was guilty.

  The cop stared at me, blankly. A vacant look in his eyes. He was tired. So was I.

  “You don’t live there anymore, Lovina,” he said.

  I stared back at him. I had nothing to say.

  You don’t live there anymore.

  But I do. I always will.

  Thirty-One

  I open my eyes, shift on my bed, steady the phone and come back to the conversation. “Yeah, I guess you could say I’ve been in love.”

  “Want to talk about it?” he asks.

  “No. We’re here to talk about you, remember? I’m not important.” I never am, am I?

  “Well, for what it’s worth, I think you’re important.”

  I close my eyes and something in me stings. He shouldn’t say things like this. Our patient-doctor relationship is on the outskirts of what’s proper and I should try to reel him back in, but I don’t want to. “I think you’re important, too,” I say. I hear another wall tumbling down, and I think it’s the one that’s been separating us.

  “It’s really nice to hear that.”

  And I agree. “It really is, isn’t it?” We sit there in silence for a moment and I think he feels it, too. That thing between us, even though we’ve never even talked in person. His voice tells me everything I need to know. Deep, a little rough. And the words that come from it, honest. It’s what I’ve been looking for, for years. Whatever it is, he has it.

  “Yeah. Can I ask you something?” he says.

  “Sure.”

  “I know we probably aren’t supposed to do this, but, where do you live? Can you tell me or is that against the rules?”

  “It’s against the rules,” I say. Thump. Thump. Thump. He’s asking where I live. And I hope, I hope it’s because he wants to meet me in person. I hope he wants to gauge whether or not we can make this work, geographically speaking. And if we couldn’t, I wonder if we would love each other so much that one day we would fix that to make it work. There’s something wrong with this beating heart of mine. Why won’t it ever just let romance die? Why is it still searching for things that seem so unattainable?

  “I won’t tell,” he says. “Come on. I’m in Jersey.”

  “I’m in Pennsylvania,” I lie.

  He laughs. “Pennsylvania, huh?”

  “The taxes here are a hell of a lot better than Jersey, I’ll tell you that.” I heard my aunt say that once about PA, when she was thinking about moving there. Now we’re both laughing and I shouldn’t have done this. I should have kept that door closed. But his accent, I need to act surprised.

  “We’re not too far from each other,” he says.

  “No, we aren’t.” Thump. Thump. Thump. Ask me, Charlie. Ask me to meet you.

  “Maybe one day we’ll have the chance to meet in person,” he says.

  Thump. Thump. Thump. I should close the door, stop this here, but I don’t. Won’t. “Maybe.” But Tracy wouldn’t like that, would she? Until she’s out of the picture, there is no future with us. One day will never come. I am not naive enough to think otherwise. Selfish enough to want it anyway, yes. But naive, no. Delusional? No.

  “I like the way your voice sounds,” he says.

  “Why?” I ask, pulling for more.

  “It’s just, calming. I don’t know.”

  And I want to tell him his calms me, too, but I shouldn’t. I should stop. I should stop. “Yours calms me, too.” I immediately want to crawl under the covers, take it back, take it all back.

  “Oh yeah? How so? I’m just this basket case who will probably never be normal. How can that calm you?”

  Because I’m the same way, Charlie. More than you’ll ever know. “You’re not a basket case. You’ve been through a lot. I think the best people have. I think it’s how they’ve learned to be good people.”

  “You may be on to something there,” he says. He takes a drink of something. Swallows. “But why do you think good people go through such terrible shit?”

  “Maybe bad people go through terrible shit, too. I don’t know.”

  “I hope they do,” he says.

  “I do, too.”

  “So how about now? Will you tell me your name now?” he asks. He always asks. Always tries.

  I usually say no. “No,” I say, repetitively. “I can’t.”

  Normally I tell my patients my name is Marissa Black. My alias. The safe bet. But with him, I can’t. I refuse to lie to him about my name. And if I told him my real name, he would know it was me. And he would do the thing everyone does when they first hear my name. I always get it. I’m so used to it I don’t even laugh anymore. Everyone always repeats it, says, come again? Wait, your name is Love? Like, Love Love? I wish I could tell him my name, who I am. That we’re a lot closer than he thinks. Instead, I think about his accent. The way he has that Ben Affleck thing from The Town going on. The way his words turn me on. I’ve always had a thing for accents. Stupid heart. I just can’t trust it.

  He breaks the silence. “Do you want to FaceTime?” he asks.

  I sit up. Thump. Thump. Thump. Shit. Fuck. This is crossing too many lines and I should say no but, but, but...

  I try to reason with myself. Could I do this? Should I blow my own cover, here and now? Is this my opportunity? I go in full-on stall mode and I get up and look in the mirror. My bleached hair is up in a messy bun and I take it out. Let the loose waves fall. My hair falls down just above my shoulders. It looks okay enough. I fluff it up as best I can and spray some hairspray in it to eliminate as much frizz as possible. My makeup I put on earlier to speak to him still looks okay. Not quite as fresh as I’d like it to look for our first conversation, but it’s okay.

  “FaceTime?” I ask. “Why do you want to FaceTime?” I know why he wants to FaceTime. It’s the same reason I do. Stall. Stall. Stall.

  “It would be nice to look at you when we’re talking, to put a face with the voice, don’t you think?” he asks.

  Yes. I do think. Shit. “I’ve never FaceTimed with a patient before,” I say. “It’s phone calls and text only. Strictly.”

  “Ouch. Did you have to remind me that I’m just a patient to you? That kinda stung. I’m a person, too, you know.”

  I laugh and let out a sarcastic moan as if I don’t want to do this, because I don’t want to say no. Being a liar will get you into trouble and this is one of those moments. I grab the bottle of Jack and drink about two shots straight from it. “I’m sorry, I really can’t.”

  Not even twenty seconds later his FaceTime starts coming in. I panic, wondering if he can see me. Wondering if he can see the look of fear in my eyes. I should have put on something more therapist-like but it’s late. I’m in a tank top and underwear. Comfy, not sexy. I reject the FaceTime, reject his face. It hangs up on him by default and he calls back.

  “That wasn’t very nice,” he says.

  I feel the urge to cover myself and hide. Everything has been leading to this. He wanted to see me. I wanted to see him. But I didn’t. “I’m sorry, I really think it’s best if we don’t FaceTime. I hope you understand.”

  “I understand,” he says. “I do. I don’t know, I guess I just wonder what you look like.”

  I stay silent, the flush heating my face.

  “Don’t you think your patients would like to know what you look like?” he asks.

  “Probably.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know what I look like? Or what all your patients look like?”

  I know what you look like, Charlie. I have studied your face, memorized your features and the way your eyes crinkle when you laugh. The way the corner of your lip turns up right before you start to smile. “
Well, I know what you look like. You have some photos of you. Some of my patients do. Some don’t of course. There’s a natural sort of curiosity, I suppose. But professionally speaking, it doesn’t matter what my patients look like. I don’t deal with looks. I deal with feelings.”

  “I guess I dabble in both,” he says, chuckling.

  “And Tracy? Does she have both?” I ask, pointing out the elephant in the room, acknowledging her existence. The other reason we shouldn’t FaceTime.

  He sighs and it sounds like he leans back. He’s probably in bed. His sheets are probably gray and it’s probably making his eyes look even softer. “She’s gorgeous, she really is. Do you want to see a picture of her?”

  No. “Sure.” Show me your favorite version of her. Show me who I need to be to be with you.

  “Hold on one second,” he says. He gets up, shuffles around. Something clicks. “That’s me and Tracy. When we were happiest.”

  My phone vibrates. A text message from him. It’s a photo of them, on a beach somewhere. I recognize it from Facebook. But his face. Oh my god his face. His beautiful face. Every time I see it, I am amazed by how perfect he is. Dark brown short hair. Brown eyes. He’s shirtless. Chiseled. Built. She’s in some see-through little beach dress with a bikini underneath. Her hair is blonde. Shorter than mine. Straighter than mine. Much lighter than mine. Her body is flawless, of course. Beautiful smile. Beautiful hair. In this photo, in every photo, she looks like the kind of girl who doesn’t have demons. She looks like the opposite of me.

  “You guys make a really beautiful couple,” I say, choking on the jealousy that’s building in my throat. What am I doing? I want to kick myself for agreeing to this. I knew, deep down, that he loved Tracy. He says it. Sure, he says a lot of things. Maybe he isn’t happy sometimes but here? In this photo? He is happy, and he loves her. They love each other.

  Did I think him thinking I was seeing them for the first time would change anything here? Did he think I would tell him how gorgeous he was, that he should leave his girlfriend for me? This stranger on the other end of a line who he thinks lives in Pennsylvania. This person who won’t even tell him her name.