I relaxed all my limbs. “I know.”
“But I’m older now,” she continued.
“Correct.”
“Okay, but listen, Asụghara.” She leaned forward and I opened my eyes to look at her. “Now that I’m older, right, why won’t he just kill me in my sleep?”
She pushed some hair out of her face and sat back. I wanted to tell her Yshwa was always going to disappoint her, but I took a sip of my drink instead. She could figure that out herself.
“It’s basically the same thing,” she said. “I didn’t have anyone to hold me and now I don’t have anyone to kill me. You’d think he’d come through on at least one of these points.”
“That’s not true,” I said, and I leaned out to put my hand on her arm. “I’ll kill you any day you want.”
We stared at each other for a moment, then burst out laughing because we both knew I meant it. After our laughter died away, Ada and I leaned our backs against the marble and sighed together.
“Do you think about Soren a lot?” she asked.
I frowned. “Not really.” I shifted my head to look at her. “You nko?”
Ada nodded. “I was thinking how this year makes it five years since you arrived,” she said. “And then I was thinking of Ewan and I was remembering that night, in the fall, remember? When Ewan had come back and Soren was watching us.”
“Ohhhh fuck, yeah. I remember. The house down the hill, that time when we were in Denis’s room smoking.”
“Yup. He used to ring that little bell when the joints were ready, remember? And then he’d play, like, Lauryn Hill or Hot Chip.”
I laughed. “And Axel was there beating everyone at rock-paper-scissors. Everyone! It didn’t make any fucking sense, he was so good at it.”
Ada smiled, but she was thinking of Soren. “And then he came in and started talking to me, saying how I never used to smoke or drink, that he didn’t want to think that I’d started now because of what he did. Can you imagine?”
“No, no, but you know what I loved?” I was giggling as I remembered. “Ewan tapped your shoulder and handed you the blunt, and you just looked at Soren like he was nothing, took it, and turned away from him. Finish.”
“His face! He just walked out of the room.” Ada was giggling now too. “Was that you or me?” she asked.
I shrugged and drank from my bottle. “Same difference.”
“Oh my god, and remember the e-mail he sent a few months later?”
I made my voice high and whiny to mimic him. “‘I never loved you. I was just missing my girlfriend.’”
Ada scoffed. “As if it mattered at that point.”
“Eh, he was just trying to get to you.”
Ada tilted her bottle up and pouted at me. “It’s empty.”
I reached over to touch the glass, and it filled back up with pink slush.
“What’s that?”
“Strawberry this time,” I said, and Ada laughed.
“This is why I keep you around.”
I elbowed her and we drank in silence for a bit. “How come you’re thinking about Soren?” I asked.
Ada sighed. “I’m pissed, I guess. It feels like he took something from me. I couldn’t even be normal with Ewan. Like, what kind of wife can’t make love to her own husband?”
I flinched. “Can we just say ‘fuck’? You know how I feel about calling it that.”
“You know what I mean. Have emotional sex.”
“We did have emotional sex,” I countered. “There were a lot of emotions involved in our fucking, thank you very much.”
“Not that kind of emotion. I meant like tenderness.”
I flinched again. “Seriously, Ada, or I’ll take your drink away.”
She laughed. “Okay, okay. You’re fucking weird.” A pause, and then she changed the subject. “Sometimes when I think about you, I can see you standing right next to me and it’s like we’re twins.”
I gave her a look. “You know we’re identical, right?”
She shushed me with her hand. “Except, when you’re standing next to me, you’re all covered in blood.”
I drank some more. “That seems accurate.”
“You’d be like the older twin, though, because you take care of me.”
“I’m not very good at that.”
Ada shrugged. “Eh. In your own way.”
I changed my drink to straight tequila. “No, I’m good at hurting people and leaving people, and I’m really good at hiding you so that nobody can get you again.”
“And you’re good at fucking,” Ada added, holding her bottle out to me.
I clinked mine to hers in salute. “And I’m good at fucking.”
“And making them feel special.”
“Oh, I’m reaaallly good at that.” I smiled at her, but it was bitter and she knew it.
“You did your best, Asụghara.”
“Yeah.” I looked into my bottle. “I shouldn’t even have existed.”
“Oh god, are you getting to the sad drunk stage?” Ada reached for my bottle and I hugged it to my chest.
“Fuck off!”
She laughed. “Okay, stop whining then. You had to exist. I wasn’t ready.”
“But, like, you should’ve been, you know? You should’ve had time to do it when you were ready, not the way it happened.” I was getting a little sad. Maybe her grief was contagious. I was remembering the day she realized it wasn’t her fault, three years after I arrived, when she read the definition of rape online and burst into tears in Ewan’s garden in Dublin, crying and crying as he held her.
“You should’ve had a chance to be ready,” I said.
Ada sipped her drink, tilting her head back. “Shit happens,” she said.
“Okay, now you sound like me.”
“Hah. I’m just trying to be at peace. If I don’t, I’ll end up blaming Soren for me losing Ewan and that kind of makes me want to find the bastard and stab him in the face.”
I tapped my bottle against hers. “Shit, I’m down with that.”
Ada smiled and put her head on my shoulder. “Don’t leave me,” she said. “I don’t think anyone else will want me without you.”
“Don’t say that.”
“It’s true. I’m the damaged and broken one; you’re the bright and shiny one. Who are they going to love more? They don’t have to do any work with you.”
“I’m not going to leave you, but then you have to come with me, okay?”
“Come where?”
I exhaled. “You know where.”
Ada hesitated. “It’s just that I’m scared, Asụghara. I want to, but what if it doesn’t work?”
I put down my bottle and put my arm around her. “I know,” I said, and we sat together for a long time, saying nothing.
Ada surrendered to me in October, a year after Uche died. She was seeing a man named Hassan then, a capoeira teacher who she’d met at a club in Harlem during her breakup with Donyen. It was on a night when I was out hunting in her body, and Hassan had been standing by the club exit, dressed in tight black, his hair pouring down his back. I let him take Ada to his apartment, where he danced in his living room, his locs flying in the air. He kept talking the whole time, hard and fast, and his words jumped and scattered and cartwheeled. I was tired of them, so I climbed into the stretch of his black satin bed and watched him pull off his shirt. He was still talking.
“Shut up and fuck me,” I said.
I remember how he stopped, shocked, before he gathered himself and climbed onto the bed with me. For the rest of the night I got to be myself in my meaty form, doing meaty things. I didn’t have to think about Ada losing Ewan and neither did she, so it was good. It was a white blank space of pleasure and I felt free inside it.
The morning that Ada’s surrender happened, she was sad because she’d had a fight with Hassan the night before. I was tired of everything, tired of the number of times I was going to have to watch her be in pain. So I sat her down in her yellow kitchen a
nd splayed her out on a chair. She propped up her elbows on the raw wood of the kitchen table, stained with old splatters of turmeric and tomato. Uche’s corpse sat across from her, his lung clot turning him gray as he watched her with gutted eyelids and still blood. Ada stirred miso paste and dehydrated seaweed into a bowl of hot water, talking softly to him as if he was alive. I stood behind her with my palm on her shoulder.
“Where did they put you?” she asked. “Tell me and I’ll come find you.”
I purred in her wrists. I was keeping a fine balance by bringing Uche’s shade here, maintaining a delicate tension between Ada’s world and that of the brothersisters.
“I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner,” Ada said. “They stopped me. And I know you’ll want me to stay with them, but Uche, honestly, I don’t want to anymore.” She stopped stirring for a moment. “I wish I could tell them that.”
I watched as Ada reached for her prescription bottle, pressed down and turned, popping the lid open. They were painkillers—Donyen had taken away all the muscle relaxants after she heard about the suicide plan. I tried refilling the prescription, but Ada gave it to Hassan because he had a thing for pills and injections, so all we had left were the painkillers. I figured we could manage with them.
“I wish I could’ve said good-bye to everyone without them freaking out, you know? No crying, no trying to lock me up. As if I was just traveling. Plus, there’s no need for them to worry—I’ve got family waiting.”
Uche’s corpse leaned back and extended a long leg toward her refrigerator, folding its arms. A large flake of skin hung precariously off the steep height of its cheek.
“Alexander Uncle, Bishop Uncle, Grandpa, you.” Ada looked up at Uche’s corpse as she listed Saachi’s dead family and frowned. “I feel you’ll either be the most welcoming or the most angry.” Her face crumpled into sadness at even the thought of it. “Don’t be angry at me, please,” she said. “I’ve had too much of it down here. I know I’m too much and everyone is tired of it, especially me. And I know the others care, but they’ll stop me and I just want to lose, just this once.”
She spilled the pills on the table, above the bowl and next to the open packet of freeze-dried strawberries. Uche’s corpse dropped its heavy-lidded eyes to the pool she’d just made. I followed its gaze, looking down at the thousands of milligrams that were on our side. We couldn’t lose, not this time.
I leaned into Ada’s ear. “You know how they say take things a day at a time?” I said. “You can manage a pill at a time.”
Ada nodded and I kept the count for her. A few hundred milligrams down, several thousand, a few hundred more to go. She always hated taking tablets with water and she’d meant to make grapefruit juice earlier, but the juicer was dirty. The dishwashing liquid was grapefruit scented. She tipped the bowl of miso soup to her mouth. When she was a child, Ada used to take medicine with chocolate milk, or else it would all come pouring thickly back up. I kept count for her.
A few thousand and a few hundred down. The trick, I had realized, was to get Ada to pretend that none of this was happening. Because if it was happening, she’d have to call her best friend, and what could that one do except worry from far away? So I made the kitchen unreal and Uche was there to prove it. If you die in a video game, do you die in real life? She had practice in the unreal from all those years of fairies, all those years of believing in floating lands and split selves; they were preparing all for this moment, this true attempt, this ultimate belief. I kept the count for her.
More thousands, more hundreds of milligrams. We were halfway done. Ada thought of Bassey Ikpi and her fifteen-year-old friend who killed herself. There was a whole nonprofit now named after her, the Siwe Project. She thought of all the gay kids who had killed themselves back to back that year, including the young man she spoke to on the train in Brooklyn, who’d gone home and hanged himself. The unseen and hurting ones, all leaving together. It felt like she had missed a train and was trying to catch up, slipping on the tracks.
I kept the count going. We had spent entirely too long with a foot in this world; the hold had to give, the foot had to return. The Obi may kneel down, but it never crumbles.
Hassan spoiled everything by calling her.
I watched it fall apart from there. I watched Ada talk to Hassan as if nothing had happened, as if Uche hadn’t been and then not been in her kitchen, as if the unreal I’d spent all morning building hadn’t just been destroyed. Right before she got off the phone, she told him.
“I think I did something stupid,” she said, only calling it that because she knew that’s what he would call it.
“What did you do?”
“… I took some pills.”
“What?”
“I took some pills.”
“Some? How many did you take?”
Ada said nothing.
“How many did you take, Ada?!”
She tried to make it sound like a joke. “Um, quite a lot.”
“What the fuck?!”
“No, no, it’s fine. Let me call you back. I’m going to call one of my friends and sort it out.” Ada hung up on him and turned on her computer. I watched, frozen. Just like that. Everything, gone. She was video chatting now, explaining what happened to one of her friends, being bright and chirpy in a way that was probably obscene.
Her friend was panicking. “Should I call 911?” she kept asking.
“No!” At least Ada and I were still on the same page with that. “Don’t call anyone. It’s going to be fine. I’m just going to make myself throw up—I didn’t take that many. It’ll be fine. Hold on.”
I followed Ada numbly to the bathroom and watched her stick her fingers down her throat. Nothing came up but a piece of seaweed and some bile. She kept trying for about ten minutes, then went back to the computer and kept talking to her friend.
“I was just having a bad morning, like I was tired of everything—” Ada was interrupted by a banging on the front door and her friend started crying.
“I’m sorry,” she said to Ada. “I had to call them.”
Ada burst into short and panicked sobs. “No, no, no!” She slammed the laptop shut and I stepped in quickly, smoothing out her face so we could answer the door.
“Don’t let them see you like this,” I told her. I could barely feel anything—my failure was overwhelming—but we were still alive, and I still knew my job. Three police officers came in and started asking questions as I watched.
“Why would you go and do something like that?” one of them asked, amused. “Things can’t be that bad.”
I put a smile on Ada’s face and she kept it as she looked at him, as she walked down the stairs and out to the sidewalk, where the ambulance was waiting for her. Donyen jumped out of a taxi and came up to Ada.
“Your friend called me,” she said. “Told me you didn’t want her to call 911 and I told her to call them. I told her, ‘Do you want Ada to be mad at you or do you want her to be dead?’ I’m coming with you.”
I kept a smile stuck on Ada’s face as they both climbed into the back of the ambulance. I had failed. Already, I knew that a second chance would be much harder to come by. But for now I had to handle the crisis I’d thrown us into. I did it with that same smile, joking with the nurses till they got irritated. One of them was Nigerian, and she scolded Ada without sympathy, forcing her to drink liquid charcoal. I watched Ada vomit it up into a white toilet bowl. I watched as she became delirious, as she panicked, as her other friends came and sat on her hospital bed. They sent a psychiatrist to come and evaluate her, but he didn’t like our attitude and I could tell that he wanted to lock us up. That sobered me up faster than anything else would have. There was no way I was ever letting someone commit us, not after that night in the ward the year before.
“Let me handle it,” I told Ada, even though we were both exhausted.
Donyen had gotten Hassan’s number from someone else and called him behind Ada’s back, yelling at him for not being there. I wa
s furious when Hassan told us.
“You had no right to call him,” I told Donyen, Ada’s hospital gown crinkling at our shoulders. “It’s none of your business.”
“Are you serious?” she said. “You were calling his name, did you know? When you were delirious. You were calling his name and he can’t even fucking come and see you?”
I took a deep breath. It was so fucking inconvenient to be dealing with this right when the doctors were trying to decide whether to discharge Ada or dump her in a psych ward. I wanted to slap Donyen. “You’re my ex!” I snapped. “You can’t be calling the person I’m seeing now to shout at him. And now I have to handle this shit in the middle of everything else because you can’t mind your fucking business.”
Hassan had been upset on the phone when he finally got through to Ada. “I can’t do this shit,” he said. “Your ex is fucking crazy.”
“Dude,” I told him, “you don’t have to come to the hospital.” The last time he’d been in one was when his mother had died. He’d been avoiding them since.
He showed up anyway, to tell Ada that he wanted to break up. I almost laughed. She was in a hospital bed after my suicide attempt and now she was getting dumped. Wonderful.
“Can you meet the doctor with me?” I asked him. “You were the last person I was with before it happened. I need someone to vouch for me.”
So Hassan sat next to Ada across from the doctor, and he and I both turned on the charm, smiling and downplaying everything.
“I’ve had eight friends come in over the past twelve hours,” I told the doctor. “Do you really think it’s in my best interests to be separated from my support system and admitted into a ward without any form of outside communication instead of being released into their custody?”
She tapped on her desk. “The doctor who evaluated you felt you might be a risk to yourself,” she said.
I smiled, and it was broad and confident. “I was a little groggy when he was asking me questions and he seemed a bit irritated, I don’t know why. But you can see for yourself that I’m in good hands.”
Freshwater Page 14
