The Melting

by lize Spit

  “We can go bowling. But first Sacred Heart.” Jolan crawls past us and leads the way back out.

  I let Tessie go in front of me and take up the rear.

  Back under the bridge, we unlock our bikes. It’s chillier than before, everything smells damp and new.

  This time, I bike in front. The hospital isn’t far now.

  Jolan speeds up until we’re almost side by side. He keeps his front wheel close to my rear wheel, making it clear that he and I are taking care of Tessie together, not the other way around.

  “Isn’t it hard to bike like that?” Jolan asks.

  “Like what?” I ask.

  “Without using the seat.”

  I sit down.

  It burns. I shift my weight back and forth. With just the right amount of pressure the pain eases a bit, mostly when I wriggle myself over the nose of the saddle until the fabric of my shorts gets stuck. This prevents the wounds on the inside of my labia from touching each other.

  We pedal through the city center. Down the main shopping street, past the municipal pool, past the bowling alley. Tessie is slowing down. But she keeps pedaling.

  Within five minutes, we reach the main entrance of Sacred Heart Hospital. We leave our bicycles against a hedge.

  I consider reaching for her hand, but by the time I decide it’s a good idea, we’re already in the waiting room.

  I sit down beside her on the plastic chairs. Jolan walks up to the lady at reception. She’s just tucked a cigarette behind her ear, ready to go on a break. The glass door between the waiting room and the reception desk slides shut, and Tessie and I can’t hear what they’re saying. I dig around in my pocket for our SIS cards and the yellow stickers from the health insurance company—they’re probably going to ask for them.

  I walk up to the desk and empty the contents of my pockets on the counter. The doors close again behind me.

  “Why did you bring our stickers too?” Jolan asks.

  “They were all in the same drawer,” I say. The woman just takes Tessie’s. I put the rest away. Tessie is sitting alone in the waiting room next to a giant vending machine. I go back to her.

  “Are you thirsty?” I ask. “Do you want a drink?” She shakes her head no, which is good because I don’t have any money on me.

  We’re called back by a nurse with calves you know she wouldn’t have chosen for herself. She leads us through the emergency area and ushers us into a small room. Inside, she rolls a sheet of thick paper over the bed.

  All of a sudden, I feel very tired again, but I don’t want to lie down.

  First, Jolan offers Tessie the chair, then me. Then he takes a seat on the foot of the bed, because it would be strange if we all just stood there.

  The door behind us keeps opening, and every time, somebody sticks their head in, looking for someone who’s not us.

  I’ve never noticed how small Tessie’s ears are. Maybe it’s the neon light.

  “This is just another waiting room,” I say. “They’ll get to us in a minute.”

  Hanging above the door is a plaster Jesus. One of his feet has crumbled away. The nail is still there, but it’s too big for what’s left of the foot. I used to think Jesus looked a little like Jan—the big head, the skinny ribs. Now, for the first time, the likeness seems sinister.

  I need to pee, so I hurry down the white, sterile hallway to the bathroom. There’s a handle on either side of the toilet so I can make a soft landing on the seat. The urine burns as it comes out. I try to check for splinters, but again, I need a mirror. The muscles in my butt are so stiff that I can barely lean forward.

  On the way back, I peek through open doors, between curtains. I resolve to ask the first female doctor I see if she’s a gynecologist or if she knows one, but the only people I see are cleaning staff and male doctors. I find a box of paracetamol in a trash can, but it’s empty.

  Halfway down the hall, I find Jolan back in the main waiting room.

  “The doctor came,” he says.

  “Is it a he or a she?” I ask.

  “A she. Tessie wanted to be alone with her.”

  “What kind of person is she?”

  “I don’t know. Tessie cried when she came in. The doctor asked her what her name was, and she said, ‘Eleven.’ ‘Okay, Evan,’ the doctor said, ‘what seems to be the problem?’ Everyone was confused.”

  We both suppress a smile.

  “Tessie just sat there sniveling. Every once in a while, she’d say something. That she didn’t want to go back home—she said that twice. The doctor told her tears were normal. That when someone finally admits that they’ve been struggling for a long time, it all comes out.”

  I nod.

  “I shouldn’t have gone to the bathroom just now,” I say. I repeat it a few more times over the next half-hour, until Jolan tells me to shut up about it.

  Every time the sliding door opens, voices rush in from all sides. Through the fake walls, everyone sounds like they have a cold.

  I wonder if Tessie will say anything about me. About her failed house drawing above the kitchen table, about my bunny stories, about all those times I forced her to lie on top of her sheet in the cold.

  I wonder if I should give my notes to the doctor, my name with the twenty tallies behind it.

  “You need something to drink?” Jolan asks. I know he hasn’t got any money on him either, so I say no.

  On the table in the waiting room are magazines, comic books, a solved Rubik’s cube that no one has the heart to mess up, including me.

  A half-hour later a doctor comes out into the waiting room to speak to us. She doesn’t beat around the bush—she tells us Tessie will be admitted immediately, that she requested this herself, but since she’s a minor she needs her parents’ permission first.

  “Where are your parents by the way? Or who is your legal guardian?” she asks.

  “Dad’s at work. Mom’s at home.” Jolan tries to make himself as big as possible.

  “And do they know you’re here?”

  Jolan nods, so I nod too.

  “The hospital is still going to have to call them and let them know what’s going on,” she says. “You can wait here.”

  We go on nodding, standing between her and the exit.

  “You did the right thing bringing her here,” she says emphatically. “There’s a chance she’ll be transferred to Kortenberg tomorrow. There are people there who are more specialized in cases like hers.”

  “Cases like hers?” I ask.

  “Obsessive-compulsive disorder, eating disorder, sleep disorder. In the meantime, we have a bed in a shared room for her here.”

  She shakes Jolan’s hand, making him feel grown-up. Then she shakes mine; I grip her fingers a little too long. She gently wiggles her hand free.

  “I suggest you speak with a social worker. You don’t have to do it right now. You can talk to Evan first and make an appointment. You don’t need your parents’ permission to talk, you know.”

  “Tessie,” I say. “Her name is Tessie.”

  “Right, of course. Excuse me.”

  She takes a ballpoint pen from her breast pocket and then puts it back in the exact same spot. “Do you want to say goodbye?”

  I go in first. Tessie is sitting on the bed with her narrow back facing the door. She scratches her scalp, first right, then left, then with both hands. I stand behind her. Her ears seem to have grown even smaller. The skin behind her ears is bunched up like the seam of a pillow that was sloppily stitched up after being stuffed.

  She doesn’t turn around. She’s sitting upright with her shoulders slumped, but her back is still hollow.

  I pull my notes out of my back pocket. On the left side of the margin are words, on the right are tally marks. I lay the paper in Tessie’s lap. She stares at it for a moment.

  She doesn’t recognize it. She turns the paper over a few times. I give it a moment to sink in.

  “What is this?” she asks, slightly annoyed. “Is it a shopping list writ
ten in code or something?”

  She looks at it again, reads a few of the random words and numbers out loud, without making any sense of it.

  “It’s nothing,” I say, “it’s a word game, but now’s probably not the time for it.” I carefully fold the paper back up and put it back in my pocket. Anyway, it wasn’t for nothing. Maybe we can come back to this later, when she’s really ready to be helped.

  “Will you take care of Stamper?” she asks.

  “If you promise to take care of yourself.” I give her a gentle hug.

  “Goodbye, Eva.” She says it so softly it almost doesn’t count.

  Jolan goes in after me. He stays with her longer than I did.

  The hospital’s entrance and exit are exactly the same door, but the arrows indicate a separate path for each. Arriving, leaving—hospitals have to make a clear distinction between the two. As we walk out the door, a new shift of cleaners and nurses arrives. Their hair is neatly trimmed, and you can see the color of their bras through their white smocks.

  The sun beams down on the puddles through a hole in the clouds. You can always feel the sun beating harder in the presence of water, as if it’s doing everything in its power to assemble an army for the next downpour.

  Jolan and I look back at the hospital wing behind us.

  The building is gigantic, each floor devoted to a different kind of failure—sometimes the failure of the body itself, sometimes the failure of that body’s environment.

  Behind each window of the psychiatry ward is a lunatic waiting for another lunatic to share the room with. Tessie is now being taken to one of those rooms.

  We stand there on the sidewalk. For a moment, I’m relieved to be outside again, but the feeling doesn’t last.

  Who will Tessie share a room with? Will that person come to know her better than we do, now that she’s finally admitted she needs help?

  “Look,” Jolan says proudly. He pulls a wad of gauze out of his pocket and unfolds it carefully. Inside is a bloody piece of flesh.

  “I fished this out of the trash on the way out. I think it’s a piece of an earlobe or a fingertip or something. I still need to examine it.”

  I nod. He folds the bundle back up again, practically clinging to it. Together we walk through the parking lot to our bicycles. Jolan suggests we take Tessie’s home with us. We can’t leave it here for days, he says, and he can pull it alongside his own bike, no problem. Not only does it sound dangerous to me, but the very thought of it makes me sad: the two of us traveling home on the exact same route we came here on, dragging an empty bicycle, as if we had lost our little sister along the way and just kept on pedaling without her.

  We leave her bike in the rack in the parking lot. It’s really just a gesture, since we have the key and could’ve just as well unlocked it. Jolan wraps his lock around her bike; I do the same. Not for extra security, but because I want to leave something of mine behind too.

  On the way back, Jolan rides ahead of me. I follow close behind.

  We pass the bowling alley, the swimming pool, the shopping street and soon reach the path along the canal. From there, the route is a straight line. We can cycle side by side without getting in anyone’s way. Sometimes we pass through pockets of cool air.

  Even now, we hardly speak. Instead of talking, I look for things that are different than they were before, that have disappeared, like Tessie. The pain in my body is the same, all that’s changed is the number of slugs on the path.

  I keep my gaze firmly on the asphalt and slalom between the trails of mucus. Every once in a while, Jolan says something about the feeding and mating behavior of mollusks. I could care less, but it doesn’t take any extra effort to listen, so I do.

  As we approach the panties, I consider telling him—everything. He would bike over to the butcher shop and beat Laurens up, then bike over to the farm and beat Pim up.

  But we just bike past them, and I have no choice but to conclude that I’m not telling him because I don’t want to admit that I’ve been wearing his shorts all afternoon without any underwear, and because I’m afraid he won’t want to bike all the way back to the hospital to get me some help.

  Damages

  I FOUND OUT the truth about Jan’s accident on the day of his funeral. The three of us left the reception together on our bikes. Pim rode on the back of mine. He couldn’t sit on the back of Laurens’s because his rear rack was loose, and plus, Laurens still had a meat salad sandwich in his hand.

  Laurens and I had promised Pim’s mom that we’d bring him home safely. We cycled down the Steegeinde, which formed an almost-straight line between the farm and the cemetery. The gravediggers stopped their little bulldozer and waited until we were out of sight.

  For the first part of the route, Pim kept his arms wrapped around me. Through my thick winter coat, I felt him briefly press his face between my shoulder blades. I thought he was going to blow warm air, but when I scooched back on the saddle to get even closer to him, he let go and grabbed hold of the rack.

  “Fucking Steegeinde,” Pim sighed. After that, no one breathed another word. We needed the wind to blow the stale smell of coffee out of our clothes.

  Actually, I always wondered where the name “Steegeinde” came from. I used to think it had something to do with geography—beyond the farm was the border of town. For years, we never went farther than the end of the Steegeinde, that’s where everything ended, where we’d fall off the edge of the world. But now I knew—the dead-end street owed its name to the cemetery on the other side of the church wall, where the worms and insects were about to start nibbling away at Jan’s cheeks.

  Just before we reached the edge of the farm, Pim blew his nose into the hood of my coat. I didn’t say anything.

  Laurens and I hung out at the farm for the rest of the afternoon, until Pim’s parents had carried out all their duties. Although we were intrigued by the grate over the slurry pit, which had been reattached with iron wires, and by the fluttering police tape around the yard to keep onlookers at bay, we didn’t leave Pim’s side. We saw this as a new beginning, a renewal of our friendship.

  We sat at the kitchen table playing Loopin’ Louie—it had always been Pim’s favorite game before he started denying it. Laurens kicked me in the shin three times to make it clear that we were going to let Pim win, as if I hadn’t already thought of that myself. Beside me was the cat that was always sitting in Jan’s lap. She paced around in circles meowing, then sat down for a moment. She rubbed her belly against the table leg.

  “Poor thing,” I said.

  “She’s just in heat,” Pim said.

  Halfway through the game, he disappeared into the hallway and came back with a handful of Q-tips. Then he bent down under the table and pushed one of the cotton tips into her anus. It went in deep, halfway down the plastic stick. The animal growled contentedly, sank down deeper on her front legs and stuck her tail end higher into the air.

  “Should you be doing that?” I asked.

  “Who says I shouldn’t?” Pim started poking harder. The animal meowed woefully, squirmed around on the ground, somewhere between pain and sweet release.

  He kept petting her. A clump of loose hair gathered against her tail.

  “Jan used to do this every day. He liked pleasuring cats so much that he refused to have her spayed.” Pim gave the cotton swab one last push and let the animal go. The cat screeched and ran out through the flap in the porch door, the Q-tip still deep in her butt.

  “How’s she going to sit?” I asked.

  “That’s her problem, not ours.” Pim’s eyes were wide. His shirt collar was making his neck break out into a rash.

  Laurens and I didn’t dare to challenge him. Maybe we would have if he hadn’t still been wearing his suit.

  We packed up the game in silence and pushed an old Disney video into Pim’s TV. The Sword in the Stone. Pim and Laurens stared blankly at the screen. I slipped out to go to the bathroom.

  Jan’s bedroom was on the way dow
n the hall. I stood outside the door for a moment, not sure whether I should go in. If I did, I’d be no better than all those people who shook Pim’s hand today, who cared more about Jan’s absence than they’d ever noticed his presence.

  Maybe I should have looked at Jan more often too, seen what he really looked like, studied the details. Now it was too late. I could only picture him as I did that one time in this room, with my tongue against his pillow.

  I opened the door. The sheet lay crumpled on the bed, and on the pillow, I could still see the imprint of his head, little stains from picked open pimples. I stood there for two minutes, unable to remember what I’d even liked about Jan. All I could remember was the brother Pim described, the boy who rushed off the playground to tend to the cattle, who squeezed udders and pleasured cats.

  I went into the room, moved around a few figurines, turned over a notebook, swapped a few pairs of ironed trousers, put on his slippers, went through his stuff, stuck a cap back on a pen. I was taking Jan back, making him mine again.

  I flipped through the calendar on the surface of his desk. Certain days had been ticked off. Maybe he had marked when the cows were due to give birth. The month of December was completely empty except for three checkmarks. The last mark was on December 28, the day he died. I wrote my name on the pad in Pim’s handwriting.

  In the rearranged room, I lay down on the bed and pressed my face into the pillow. When I reached my arms under it, I discovered a folded sheet of graph paper. It was from the notebook on the desk. Hands trembling, I unfolded it.

  The message wasn’t addressed to me in particular, but it wasn’t to anyone else either.

  It didn’t say much: a few words, no capital letters or punctuation, it might as well have been a message on a birthday card, scribbled down at the supermarket checkout. “Sorry,” was the first word I read. Sorry who?

  And then: “Don’t come looking for me I’m already gone take good care of pim and the animals.”

  I turned it over. Maybe something came before this.

  The other side was blank.