The Word for Yes

by Claire Needell

  “I’m tired,” Erika said, her voice breaking. “I’m sure Jan told you the whole story. She was right there.” Erika had already determined not to say anything more to anyone ever about Melanie, least of all doctors. She could picture Melanie right now, sitting at their table with that pale, meat-loving Eliza from Montana. Melanie might blame herself now, or she might blame Erika for what happened. It didn’t matter. She had tried to achieve an understanding with Mel through talking, even though words were difficult for her. Now she was going to try something new. Maybe there was something in the silence between them, in the physical space that they shared—maybe they could know each other and trust each other that way, like part of the herd, people who were physically but not emotionally close. Maybe she could learn to live with Melanie if she worked within that silence.

  “Okay,” the doctor said. “We’ll assume that you girls were a little worked up, one of you knocked into the glass, and this was a sort of freak occurrence.”

  “Physics isn’t really freakish,” Erika said, “just sometimes hard to predict.”

  “Okay, then,” the doctor said with a laugh, “there was an unpredicted outcome.”

  “That’s the truth,” Erika said, for the outcome was unpredicted, at least on her side. That Melanie wanted to hurt her had been evident for weeks. But she hadn’t meant to say the words that brought Melanie to that moment of violence. She hadn’t ever even thought that word before, and then it landed so improbably on her tongue. It was almost always words that betrayed people, she thought, not physics.

  At first, it was Melanie who was pointing a toy gun at her, and then it was a man. He was Russian, but Erika did not know how she knew that. The gun was real then, but still looked like a toy. When the man pulled the trigger, the gun made a short popping noise, and she thought how small that sound was, considering she’d been shot at such close range.

  She put her hand to her throat and began to call out. She was calling for her mother, but since she’d been shot in the larynx, she could only emit a strangled sob. Erika woke herself in that struggle to scream, choking on her own voice. It took a moment for her to realize the Russian man was a mere dream image, that her sister had not pointed a toy gun at her, that she was in no present danger. Her heart beat rapidly, though, so rapidly that she feared she had given herself a heart attack. Her face throbbed, especially the right side of her nose. It had been twenty-four hours since the doctor had stitched her up, and he had warned her that there could be some pain, especially at night, when lying still without ice allowed the swelling to build pressure beneath her stitches.

  She needed an analgesic to reduce the swelling, but first there was the problem of her heart. She had to slow herself down. She placed her hand on her chest. She visualized the blood coursing through her arteries, into veins, and, finally, delicate capillaries. She got up and went into the bathroom and took a Motrin. Still, her breathing remained rapid. She thought then that she would just take a peek into her mother’s bedroom. When she was a little girl she would sometimes sneak into her parents’ room at night. She liked to see her mother’s hair laid out on the pillow. She liked to hear her parents breathe.

  She opened the door and there lay her mother alone. She was less beautiful in sleep than in the daytime, her mouth open, her teeth wet with saliva. Erika could feel, in the too-warm room, her heart begin to slow to a normal rate. She could count the beats now. She felt so much better with her heart rate slowing that she decided to sit on the pillows her mother had strewn on the floor next to the bed. She pulled some covers over herself from the section of the bedspread that lay draped onto the floor—her mother always kicked her covers off. She put her head down on the pillow and realized Maxwell was down there too, and she petted him until he curled up beside her. It was all just a bad dream, brought on by the pain in her face and a fear she had that lingered with her still, a fear that no matter what she did, Melanie would hate her for the rest of her life.

  But for now, she needed rest. There was nothing more she could do to make things right with Melanie. There was no forgiveness in her own fast-beating heart—there was only room now for fear, and its opposite—rest, security—and she’d found that there, on the floor, with her little dog, beside her lonesome, sleeping mother.

  22

  Melanie didn’t know where she was going. All she knew was that stupid Thanksgiving dinner was finally over and she needed to escape. She wasn’t usually an early riser, but she’d woken at seven and immediately got out of bed. Jan and Eliza were asleep on the floor of the living room. The apartment was quiet. Thank God, Mom hadn’t gotten up early. Melanie had dreaded seeing her hovering over her newspaper, drinking coffee, her petite shape shabby in yoga pants and a ratty sweater, a reminder of how Melanie had failed her. She could imagine her look, the big sad eyes, a look in them of almost childish disappointment. Oh, her mom had been fine throughout the holiday dinner—everyone had been—but she knew she’d only been given a reprieve so that the holiday wouldn’t be completely ruined. Mom had already hinted at some “additional therapy” with Pat Landau, so Melanie could “work through her anger.” But that was just because her mother didn’t know what to do with her, didn’t want to even have to think about her. She’d rather pay someone to deal with her than to actually act like a parent.

  No, she was still the one nobody could look at—the violent one, the one who’d hurt someone, the one who’d left a scar.

  Nobody seemed to know or care that Erika had ruined her life with her big mouth, with her pretending to be oh so worried about her.

  Fuck them all.

  Melanie pulled on her leather jacket. It had been a birthday present in the spring from both her parents, though she was sure her father had just gone along with the whole thing. It was black, a supple leather that was silky to the touch. She knew a jacket shouldn’t matter to a person, shouldn’t impart to one’s own skin a certain thrill, but this jacket did. It felt so substantial, like a shield, or a cloak in one of those ridiculous movies where everyone has some magic power.

  The doorman on duty was a substitute guy, probably because it was the day after Thanksgiving and they couldn’t get anyone else to work. It was a relief not to have to make small talk with some member of the staff, someone who would want to know where she could possibly be going so early in the morning.

  She didn’t actually have any clue where she was headed. The air was brisk, colder than she’d thought, and she could feel the chill of the sidewalk through the soles of her Converse. She turned north. There were options to the north: SoHo, the West Village, Chelsea. She could walk all the way to Washington Heights if she wanted, where her family had once lived many years ago, when she was only a baby. Only Jan remembered the Heights, and the mangoes they’d buy on the street, artfully cut into the shape of a flower.

  So much had already happened by the time she was born. So much had already been decided. Her sisters had their places in the family all carved out. Jan was already the perfect daughter—the one who’d never stepped her toe out of line. What had her parents already known about Erika at one or two? That she was beautiful, no doubt. Maybe they already knew about her brain, too. That she was gifted, but that there was something different about her. Mom sometimes told stories about how long Erika could stare out the window, how at only eight months she had seemed to say “robin”—not bird, but the name of a particular bird. How Mom had insisted even when the pediatrician shook his head.

  Mom and Dad were the sort of people who loved oddities like Erika, and do-gooders like Jan. But she was neither of those things. She didn’t know what she was, really, but it was something, she thought, that was ordinary, but strong. That was what she felt inside herself, an enormous strength, an extra reserve that held her upright even in times like this, when she was so despised by those closest to her, she should have crumpled. It was a strength that took her to both good and bad places, to the room with the bear rug, and now out on her own in the November chill. It wa
s a strength of passion, and not necessarily intellect, like her sisters. Maybe it could ruin her and save her at the same time.

  She could feel the strength in her legs as they carried her up West Broadway into SoHo. The streets were deserted, which gave even the upscale restaurants an unfinished appearance, as though New York—Manhattan—were really only an illusion, and that without its hordes of tourists and cabs, its dishwashers and busboys, its shoppers and storekeepers, the entire city was waiting blankly, uncomprehendingly, like a girl at a dance with no one to talk to.

  Melanie walked past the low, redbrick building on Thompson Street that her middle school had annexed as a gym. She recalled how back then she used to hang out more with Gerald even than Jess. How when the other girls were all dramatic over boys, and talking about who’d kissed who and who’d gone to what party, she’d always had Gerald. He wasn’t part of the crowd that got invited to Lani Elliot’s country house, where it was rumored several boys had gotten blow jobs from a girl who had opted, wisely, to begin high school someplace uptown. Melanie had never liked Lani, even back in grade school. Lani always had followers more than friends, and Melanie found herself to be incapable of being a follower. It was that strength in her, that elasticity, that made her defiant; it was also that part of her that could reach for a glass, and let it fly.

  In her mind it had been self-defense. Erika had no right to call her foul names, to insinuate to Jan and in front of Eliza that there was something wrong with her, that she’d done something so wrong it had stained her permanently. Shit happened. That was something everybody said.

  Melanie walked along Broadway through the Village. She passed the Mexican place with the tawdry door front in the shape of a sombrero. She passed through the NYU area, the cold, institutional buildings outsized against the Village townhouses, and she thought briefly of Jan and Adam. Hadn’t Jan said something about Adam maybe going here, about his having some sort of breakdown at Harvard? She pictured Adam and his tall, hunched frame and imagined seeing him there on the corner of Eighth Street and Broadway. In her mind, she conjured him in place of the strange guy at the coffee cart, how Adam could be standing there drinking a cup of tea, and she could buy one too, and they could talk about all the bullshit people said about them, how people really knew nothing about other people, and how they should keep their big, fat, stupid mouths shut, and how hardly anyone knew how to do that these days. Everyone could say anything about you, as long as they seemed to be expressing concern.

  Adam would understand, but he was not there, only the coffee cart guy, so Melanie ordered a tea, and the man smiled. He looked Indian or Pakistani, and his front tooth was broken off in a jagged line. Melanie wondered what had happened to it—had he fallen as a child, running from some horrible incident no American could picture, some stampede of people, some panicked crowd escaping a sudden blast in the heat of a marketplace? But what if it were something simple, like a rock thrown by a schoolyard bully, or someone close to him, a friend or a brother? Maybe another, bigger boy had dropped him on his face for calling him a name, or someone else thought they knew something about this man, something secret he had done, and the blow was the price he paid.

  Melanie could ask the man and he could answer, but she would never do that. Pain and injury were private, she knew that. If someone told you the story of a scar, a part of them was lying. They would omit the moment of shock and fear, the crying, the beating of their heart, the desperate look around for someone to make it better.

  There wasn’t anyone there. When you woke in a strange room, what had happened, happened to you alone.

  Why did they think they knew?

  There were too many words for things that should be without them. Melanie turned on Fourteenth Street, for its wide, still-empty sidewalks, and walked west, though she hated to abandon her northerly march. Broadway was beginning to come to life, and she needed to be somewhere else, somewhere less congested, closer to the river. She’d gone past Jess’s neighborhood, where she’d half thought she’d stop to text her friend, to have breakfast, do something normal people did. She hadn’t thought of herself as running away, as missing from anyone’s life, but she couldn’t stop walking, couldn’t lessen that strange, elastic strength that had overtaken her legs.

  Erika had told Ms. Jensen and her mother that she, Melanie, had been raped by her friend Gerald at James Jamison’s party. She had told them about finding her, half undressed on the white bear rug.

  She remembered so little about that party, but she remembered that bear’s open mouth. What had it been doing, she thought, when it was killed?

  When Erika said the word rape it must have ricocheted around the room; it was a boomerang, or a bat.

  Melanie could feel the word’s dark presence on her.

  It was clear to her now where she was going. She was going to Eighteenth and Sixth, past the animal hospital, and the store that sold fancy hats, past the Greek place on the corner that was gay only at night. She’d turn the corner on Eighteenth to the beautiful new building made entirely of glass, and she’d take out her phone and find the text that Gerald had sent that said only “This is my fifteenth text” because he sent one every day for two weeks, since she’d refused to speak to him at school, but then he’d stopped after the perp walk had turned him into a pariah. But now she hit reply and typed, “I’m outside your building.”

  She had the strength to do that, though her knees trembled slightly.

  She ignored the five messages from home.

  It was nine o’clock now, and they had discovered that she was missing.

  Gerald answered the door in his socks and sweatpants. His hair was uncombed, as if he’d gotten Melanie’s text in his sleep. He blinked rapidly as he opened the door to the apartment.

  “My mom and brother went downtown to my grandmother’s. I’m supposed to meet them there later.” Gerald held up a note written in green marker. “My grandmother likes for us all to go to her place in the Hamptons for Thanksgiving, but my mom refused this year—so now we all have to go to their place in the Village for brunch. Like anyone wants brunch.”

  Melanie glanced out the window of the apartment to the terrace, which was just beyond the foyer. It was large enough to hold a Ping-Pong table, a table to eat at, and innumerable lounge chairs, and it had a view of the river. Melanie and Gerald used to have Ping-Pong tournaments when they were younger, and Gerald would get mad if he lost and deliberately hit the ball over the railing of the terrace. One time, the Ping-Pong ball had hit a homeless guy who was rooting through piles of garbage on the sidewalk below, and the guy had looked down at the Ping-Pong ball, and then up at the sky, shaking his fist, as though he’d been the target of some particularly petty god. Melanie had laughed so hard that day she’d cried.

  Melanie sat on one of the stainless steel barstools like she had a hundred times before. Gerald sat beside her and half spun around. He looked at Melanie. She could tell he was trying to look relaxed, sitting on his kitchen stool, swinging his feet, but she could see that he was gritting his teeth. His eyes had a wild look that reminded her somehow of horses, and how she feared them for the way they unpredictably jerked their heavy-looking heads. Gerald’s eyes were very blue, something she had never noticed about him before. She’d always thought of Gerald as sort of colorless, shaggy almost-blond hair, blue eyes almost gray but not quite. She had almost liked him for real once, back in eighth grade, and they’d even held hands at the movies, but he had bored her, always talking about his basketball games, and how they got too much homework, and they had gone back to being just friends.

  “So, what?” he asked. “Do you hate me like everyone else?”

  She paused, but did not answer him. “I thought I should tell you what I remember,” she said. She hadn’t thought about what it was she wanted to say, or even what she remembered of that night.

  “Okay,” he said. He stopped swinging his feet, and sat very still.

  “I remember I told you to stop.” T
his was both true and not true. It was something she surmised she must have done. “I told you no,” she said louder.

  “But you were kissing me.” Gerald sounded whiny. “You pulled me in there, into that room.” His voice broke, and he raked his hand through his hair, so that instead of smoothing it, he’d made it stand straight up.

  “There was this boy who laughed at me. I remember wanting to get away.” This part Melanie was sure of. But she also vaguely recalled grabbing Gerald, wanting this other boy to see.

  “You didn’t say anything, and we kept doing more stuff, and you seemed into it, and . . . I thought you wanted it, too.”

  “Why?” she asked. It seemed to her he must have wanted to prove something, like she couldn’t toy with him, or she somehow owed him that moment, and nothing less, as if it were the fact of their friendship that permitted him to have her against her will. It made her angry all over again, how he had taken from her something she couldn’t take back. It wasn’t fair. She was stronger than him, but she was still a girl.

  “I’m trying to explain to you. I was wasted too, and we were messing around, and then . . .” He stopped, confused.

  “Fuck you,” Melanie spat. But to her horror, the strength that had gotten her there suddenly left her and she began to cry. “I know we were fooling around, I just don’t know why you . . . you must have known I was too drunk. . . .”

  “Fuck me?” Gerald got up from his chair and walked around the kitchen, his gray socks flopping off the ends of his toes. “Don’t you understand?” He was both yelling and crying now, tears streaming down his face. “Don’t you see how you’re always using me?” His teeth were clenched and he let out a quiet moan. She noticed he looked slightly bruised under one eye, as though someone had hit him, but some time ago, and she wondered when. A silence settled between them.

  “So basically you took your chance,” Melanie said quietly.