Paul.
Liam opens his mouth and instead of saying something his eyes roll around, trying to fix on a solid point, but they can’t. He’s so stiff, mouth agape but his eyes have broken the bravado, so dark, so heavy with sadness. Finally, his breath is loud as he sighs through clenched teeth.
I should cry now. Just cry. Liam, who I’ve grown up aspiring to be as tough as, is standing in front of me balling his fists into white knuckles, and red-faced, ready to lose it.
“I can’t believe you are saying this . . . again,” he adds, as if for another non-funny joke attempt.
“I wouldn’t have to say it again if you listened the first time.” Instantly, I want to grab onto my words and recoil them, but they’re gone. It’s too late.
I sink my face into my palm, confused.
Something glides over my arm but I shake it off before looking up. Liam pulls his arm away. His look tells me he’s offended, though not surprised. He stays put, seems stiff for a moment. Then he tousles his hair, drawing my eyes down to his bright eyes.
He comes to me again, this time engulfing me in arms. I flex my forearms in reaction, which are useless against his hard body.
Does he expect me to see a rainbow of joy? Does he think a hug is going to fix our mess?
Why? How dare he? I pound my fists against his chest. My attempt at Bruce Lee’s one-inch punch is laughable. But I continue until I feel better.
Liam’s barely-there stubble tickles my forehead as I’m plastered against his chest. When I gasp into his neck, I smell his scent. His heart pulses from him into me. We’re one heartbeat.
With the two of us pressed against each other, I can’t think of anything but his skin on mine and how I want to peel myself from him and stay here until we turn to stone and someone will have to crack us apart. He’d only do this if he cares. Right? He came here and cooked, cleaned, played with Ella. Handled all of my personalities.
As we stand together, I remember doing this when we were fourteen. When he curled me against his scrawny chest, all I wanted to do was push away because it felt so weird to hug the same boy I’d call names, chatted with about aspirations for when we were “old”, and fought with.
Liam had pressed his cheek against mine—we were the same height then, before his growth spurt. He’d wrapped one of his arms over my back and pressed me into him. Inviting me to relax against him. I can’t remember why he’d hugged me like that, only that I felt safe enough to cry. My knees relaxed and Liam pulled tighter as I heaved in tears. Each time I shuddered, he held me higher, until I had no strength left in my legs and I was still flush against him.
Now, Liam releases the pressure between us and I’m unsteady for a moment, half-thinking I was wobbly teen-Katie again.
I stare at the ground, until I’m certain he’s staring at me and the urge to check wins. As I look up, Liam pinches my chin tenderly, and draws me in too close to see his whole face. His eyes bore into mine.
“I liked old Kates.” He smirks, and inhales obviously. “It used to mean I could call you a dag and you’d whack my arm. Or I’d pull down your pants in front of Brent, Mom and Dad, and you’d pull down mine before pulling your own up.”
He leans closer again, and whispers into my ear. “That Kates was fun, unpredictable, tough.”
I stutter on my breath. He’s there. Right in front of my lips.
“But this Kates is defensive, crumbling, hollow.”
Shuffling my feet, watching them slide along the tiles, Liam eventually throws his hands up in defeat at my non-reaction.
Likewise, I turn away but halt when his heavy footsteps cease. He taps the front door impatiently, then is somehow in my space, stealing the air I was about to breathe. He’s an inch from my face. When he speaks, his voice is delicate, trembling even.
“Goodnight, Ella,” he calls, though he’s trained on me. His lips are much too close. His hand shouldn’t be cupping the back of my neck because it brings my mind back to the sofa when I almost lost control. And I can’t lose control.
I look down, but I can’t see. I can only smell his scent with his neck so close to me. In a breath, hushed like the winds, he says, “I just wanted . . . I . . . ” but he doesn’t finish.
Liam mutters fuck and punches the doorframe as he storms off to his car, slides into the driver’s seat, and burns up the street until the vicious acceleration of his engine dies in the distance.
After I kiss Ella goodnight, I turn on the TV in my spare room. It’s sappy romance evening. I switch to DVD but the disk is Ten Things I Hate About You—a genre and movie I have no motivation for. I put the volume down to a couple of bars. That’s enough noise to drown out the silent buzz of nothingness.
Twenty minutes later and I’m tossing in the sheets.
Thirty minutes later and I’m burying my head under the pillow.
I count sheep. See Paul’s lavender eyelids. Switch positions every minute. Hear the screams. They’re wretched, high pitch wails.
Fifty minutes later, I almost drift off. Then I’m shaking Paul. So hard my biceps tingle.
The flash hits me and it’s too soon because this happened, and impossible because Paul’s dead.
I see through the bedroom door. Paul’s not wearing socks, or shoes for some reason. Actually, the curve of his foot is hooked around a bed leg. His arm is sprawled. I alternate between gasping and hyperventilating at the threshold. The taste of metal licks my throat when I swallow.
I see what should be inside him. It’s bloody and chunky. The air smells of blood and vomit too. I’m confused. Shouldn’t Paul be watching a fat cartoon character from his bed?
I start to wail impulsive phrases like, “Oh God. Not yet. Not ever.”
Downstairs, Elton John is crooning. My ears begin to ring.
He’s acting. It’s a practical joke from that idiot’s show-bag.
He fell. This is serious. Is that blood and vomit? And chunks? This is wrong. This is a mistake.
He’s not dead, he’s not dead, he’s not dead.
I drop my Nutella toast and soak it good with juice.
When I rush in, there are neat rows of towels lined above the dresser, the curtains creased in even intervals as they drape to the side of the bay window. Everything is made of cards. Everything waiting to flutter to pieces with one slight of movement.
I stagger to Paul’s side. My limbs shake so much I could beat eggs til they fluff.
I stumble in, run to his side, but a part of me never leaves the threshold of the door. If I’m not in the spare bedroom anymore this can’t be a dream.
The brain-numb part of me runs to his body. I’m not sure how, but I have red on my jeans. The blue and red doesn’t equal purple. It’s black, murky. It’s everywhere; my hands feel slick. It has sprayed further around him—blotchy carpet, my white comforter is red, some on the chest of drawers (how did it get over there?).
But I’m sort of still at the door. I’m waiting for the director to call cut, for my dying husband to wipe the blood and vomit off him and sit up, laugh, point at me, and fold over in fits.
Elton’s voice was so, so loud before. There’s a world of sound somewhere, but Paul, this room and me are silent. I’m hearing nothing but adrenaline whooshing, and feeling arresting panic in the half of me at the door.
It’s this panic packed with disbelief that makes me touch the nausea sprayed over his chin, over most of his chest, because he’s only done three buttons up. I’m scratching and clawing through mushy muck all over the carpet.
His arms splay as if he’s thrown something, then landed on the carpet in that way. A towel lies in a heap at the threshold between the bedroom and the en suite.
The air is dense, like breathing within a butterfly house.
No.
He’s done this so ma
ny times in my nightmares, like this, that maybe he isn’t dead right now. Maybe the aneurysm didn’t explode his insides and spurt vomit and blood everywhere.
It’s still not making sense why I’m not in the spare room or how I can be at that threshold when I’m fingering the frothy, white stuff around Paul’s mouth.
My throat feels raspy again, as if I’ve spent an entire soccer grand final screaming out support for my team. My wrist throbs because I remember somehow whacking it on my bedside table. That shouldn’t be possible because I’m not sleeping in bed.
The window panes are the bars. The carpet is stiff like concrete. The ornate furniture we received as gifts are invisible. The room is so bare.
I realize: I’m trapped in a prison.
Cutting off my logic.
Erasing twelve years of kissing the same lips. Crushing my body against the same shoulders every time I needed a voice. The same, sweet scent that calmed my nerves.
The me at the door cries out, “Ambulance! Emergency! Now.”
I’m looking for something.
Something to make sense of this.
Something to make the erasing stop. Just stop. Bring back sense.
Telephone. Yes, I should be doing something with a telephone.
I’m not sure how much time passes between deciding if this is real to how I’m meant to stand—I’ve forgotten—and clambering to the phone on the other side of the room. My fingers shake so a minute must pass before I successfully press the three digits and the call button combination for emergency services.
A female voice comes through, though I don’t understand how to action what she says. “Two fingers . . . yes, that’s to check the pulse . . . the pulse should feel like a da-dum under his skin . . . try to move anything around him . . . space . . . in case of seizure . . . can you . . . ”
I drop the phone to the floor. My vision is blurred, and I can’t connect the words. I don’t know why they’d employ an operator who doesn’t speak English. When I wipe my face with part of the comforter, it comes away red.
I pinch myself. Dig my nails in until blood boils, then dribbles out of the split in my skin.
No sensation. This can’t be real.
I slap Paul’s cheek. I miss contact with his skin because my fingers tremble too much. I flick away chunks of vomit, soaked in Paul’s blood, without a second thought because they can’t be real.
My breathing is ragged like scraping a fish scaler against a stainless steel sheet.
I try to scream again. The sound splutters and dies in my throat. I pull back his eyelids. Lavender flaps. Irises lost somewhere behind the cornea.
“It’s fine,” I mumble.
The me at the door sees my daughter. That me doesn’t hear a choking sound, or silent tears. My daughter has puffy skin, eyes wide as a bottle lid. She screams louder than Elton John’s Can You Feel The Love Tonight downstairs from The Lion King.
What’s her name!? I’m thinking, thinking, wanting her to find help but I can’t remember. My flesh and blood. A jumble of letters. For now, her name is my daughter and that’s all I remember.
The me at the door sees her run away with the phone. She clasps her hand to the other ear. She sounds like she’s talking to someone as she leaves.
The me with Paul is a heap of body parts shoved in someone’s skin. I have his body in my arms as I do when I hold my daughter. It’s all I can do: hold him and let him die.
I think I ought to cry, but I’ve forgotten how. What is crying? The last thing I can let go of is panic. It follows me like a shadow.
Wee-oo wee-oo wee-oo in the distance.
I shouldn’t have taken Ella swimming. I should have had Paul’s headache checked days earlier when he barely thought anything of it. We should have already seen the doctor to fix him.
Paul’s blue, his eyelids are lavender, his shirt is red.
Wee-oo—sirens. They’re here.
Paul is already gone.
I did nothing to stop his death. I let him die in my arms.
I don’t know how, but I’ve fallen off a bed. Wait—I’m still in bed?
I open my eyes. There’s carpet beneath me, I have an injured hand from the fall, ruffled sheets, darkness.
I don’t trust my surroundings. That can’t have been a dream.
My mind replays what happened out of instinct, but I only remember sitting near the pool, waiting for Ella, and suffocating in the hot, chlorine air.
During the day I can never remember as much as in my nightmares.
My hands fly to my bedside table for my phone. Before I know what I want to do, Liam’s name is lit up on my screen.
Oh my God! I’m dialing Liam. What am I thinking?
I wasn’t. And that’s my problem.
I end the call before he answers.
The next morning when I wake up, I have a plan. My nightmares and flashbacks won’t control me. I’m done with running. Sort of.
Today’s the day. I’ll march up to my master bedroom. Rip open that door as if chains aren’t bolting it shut, and yell until I’ve shrieked my Molten Man from me.
The box under the bed. I’ve thought about it on and off. When Paul used to go away on a boys’ weekend, I’d scatter the contents around me and wake up wondering why the box had fallen off my bed. Sometimes Paul would mention the box after we’d made love too. Until I fell asleep, he’d be touching, stroking me.
If I can face what’s in the box, I’ll be strong enough to give Ella the attention she deserves. To prove to people I’m fine. For what’s happening with Liam. Then I remember I shouldn’t care about him. But his scent fills my lungs, and an image of he and I lying together in a daisy field hits me from nowhere. Neck lifted and exposed to the sky, just taking in the world without having to be responsible for anything but the enjoyment of now.
Suddenly, a memory hits me. I remembered the box on Saturday night. It was when . . . when I saw an old school friend kissing a stranger.
It was Dina Hemmingway. The man she was kissing doesn’t feel altogether alien. The logical part of me tries to reason this isn’t possible. I haven’t seen Dina in a decade. I don’t know where I was last night.
Last night.
I clamber out of bed and dash for some coffee to wake up. To think. To remember.
Chlorine stings my throat while I hurry down the stairs. Paul has always been a trigger but I’m not thinking of him for once. Maybe it’s because the chemical has burned its way into my head, throat and tummy. As if it never leaves.
But this feeling doesn’t remind me of the countless mornings, afternoons or nights when Ella isn’t home and it’s just Johnny, Molten Man, and Paul.
No.
A hot swirl of uneasiness fills my stomach.
When I assume a self-embrace, stroking my arms, they are cold—like, goose bumps cold. There’s a niggle begging me to remember something, yet it’s too vague to reach. Like an itch in my mouth I can’t get to.
Dina Hemmingway.
Her boyfriend.
The box.
Alcohol.
Hold it together. Promise yourself you can. Or else you will hand over Ella to your parents.
I pull out a mug, and spoon one teaspoon of coffee in. God I need my morning coffee.
The flakes are a rich brown, the ugliest darn color invented. Yet I’m transfixed. They slip off the teaspoon and collect at the bottom of the cup. It’s a heap of brown.
This isn’t coffee I’m seeing. My tongue gets close to that itch, it wiggles and I can feel the hint of remembering. That’s it! The flakes remind me of the balls that collect on clothes over time. Strange, ‘cause coffee flakes and balls on clothes don’t look or feel the same.
Suddenly, I remember.
The
snippet of memory doesn’t piece together neatly. But seriously, who needs neat? I’ll take any form.
A man with dark hair, Italian heritage, hands me his brown sweater. It’s the same one I woke up with on Saturday. In this snippet, there’s a distant lamppost. The shapes and textures of the flowers, bark and leaves are invisible.
I’m in a park at night.
The man smiles as I take his sweater and he says, “You’re different to what I thought . . . ” I put the sweater on and he adds, “You’re more than just a pretty face.”
Bingo.
I remember that sweater, you monster.
I remember my rapist.
• • •
SOS calls only. How typical. I don’t remember paying phone bills since forever but Mom has been collecting my mail, buying groceries. Why would she stop paying my bills now?
“What’s the password to your email?” she’d asked.
I don’t know how I remember that. I don’t recall conversations that happen. So I’m at a loss as to why she asked. I know I didn’t answer.
Another few stabs at my mobile. Nothing. I even try re-inserting the SIM card. Nada.
Okay, Mom. Let’s see what you were up to.
I fire up the computer. On my email screen, a number pops out at me next to “Inbox”. Two-hundred-and-ten unread emails. I search, and perform a mass delete of anything with the words “Daily Deals” strung together, or free upgrades. One hundred unread emails to go.
After sorting further, at the bottom of the first page, an email with the subject, “Mobile Phone Bill” explains everything. Date? Over a month ago. There are two subsequent reminder emails, no doubt a kind warning of how they’ll shut down their services if I don’t pay up.
I open the original email. Oh God. I haven’t used a computer in weeks. The buttons are bloody everywhere. I switched providers a couple of months into the year, so I only remember ever paying one of this provider’s bills myself.
Pulling Me Under Page 11
