Borderline

by Mishell Baker

  “Holy shit,” I said.

  “Would you like to see what would be your room?” Caryl asked, continuing toward a wide, airy wooden staircase. The living room was two stories high; doors that might have been bedrooms or bathrooms were visible over an ostentatious balustrade on the second floor.

  “Upstairs? Really?” I aimed for a scathing tone, but I was feeling a bit nauseated. After the orderly neutrality of the hospital, this place was a brutal assault on the senses.

  “It’s the only unoccupied room,” Caryl said, not seeming apologetic in the slightest.

  “Have you noticed this place is not particularly, ah—wheelchair accessible?”

  Before Caryl could answer, a freckled topless woman with wavy hair and Asian eyes wandered in from the presumable direction of the kitchen. She was partially covered by a cloth sling that supported the black-haired baby she was suckling.

  “Hey, Caryl,” she said with a dreamy smile. “Teo’s making gnocchi. Who’s this?”

  Caryl turned to me expectantly.

  “Nobody,” I blurted. “I’m nobody.”

  Caryl turned back to the young mother. “We’ll be down in a moment, Song,” she said gently, then started up the steps without looking to see if I was following. Using my cane and a light touch on the rail, I was able to make fairly good time.

  “Was that one of the other . . . mentally ill people you’re finding work for?” I whispered when I reached Caryl, who had been kind enough to pause at the top of the staircase.

  “No. Song is the manager here at Residence Four.”

  “Residence Four? Out of how many?”

  “Three.”

  My head was starting to hurt. The garlic smell was not helping.

  Caryl headed along the balustrade to the right, past numbered doors that were set into the narrow hallway. Tantalizing hints of graffiti could be seen where the fleur-de-lis wallpaper had peeled away.

  A door faced us at the dark dead end of the hall. Like the other doors, it had a brass number attached to it, presumably a six if you took the other numbers into account, but it was canted at a decidedly nine-like angle.

  Just before it on the north side of the hall stood an unnumbered door; Caryl rapped on it lightly with her knuckles before easing it open to reveal a murky three-quarter bath with a dripping faucet. A one-eared tortoiseshell cat darted out like something from a horror movie and raced for the top of the stairs, where it crouched warily.

  “You’ll be sharing this bathroom with Stevie,” said Caryl, not seeming to notice my distress. “She’s in room five. I doubt you will hear from her.”

  “Caryl,” I began as she produced another key and turned it in the dead-end door. I wasn’t sure what to say, how to tell her how very wrong this all was. I was trying to frame a protest that didn’t contain the word “insane” when she opened the door and made me lose my train of thought.

  Sunlight poured across the one-and-a-half-story octagonal room like honey, illuminating the emptiness of the freshly refinished floor. Five of the eight walls were mostly glass; the bamboo Roman shades had been rolled all the way up, flooding the room with afternoon sun.

  I don’t know how to describe the feeling that overtook me except to call it love. It had the same bouquet: electric top notes of want, smoky warmth at the heart, and a bitter base note of unworthiness. I glanced at Caryl and found her watching me closely. I have a lousy poker face.

  “This is the nicest room in the house,” Caryl said flatly.

  “Then why is it empty?”

  “It used to be an art studio, but it hasn’t been used enough to justify the designation. My original plan was to offer the room to Song and give you hers, but she raised concerns about not being able to make the room dark enough during the day. For her baby,” she added when I looked confused.

  “Right, right,” I said, walking farther into the room. My imagination ignited so powerfully that I felt nostalgic, as though I were remembering a past rather than planning a future. My inner set dresser placed phantom film posters on the two window­less walls, a bed with a folding screen at the foot, a hot plate and coffeemaker, a cluttered desk with a bra slung over the back of the chair. Months’ if not years’ worth of compressed longings unpacked themselves to fill the empty space.

  Using my cane for security on the unfamiliar floor, I crossed to one of the windows and touched it with my fingertips. It had been a long time since I had been awakened by a sunrise, and I’m one of those rare people who adores it. I love a day I haven’t screwed up yet.

  “It’s not furnished,” said the last rational part of my brain before it stopped waving its arms and drowned.

  “We have an air mattress and an extra chair or two you can use until you make other arrangements,” said Caryl. “Would you like to see the kitchen?”

  Suddenly I was ravenous. Caryl held the door open for my exit and then locked up behind us as the one-eared cat skittered back into the bathroom. I fought an irrational surge of possessiveness when Caryl slipped the key into her pocket.

  She led me downstairs and took a right toward the grand piano, then another right through a framed opening into a quaint dining room complete with dark oak china cabinets. A third right through a narrow doorway brought us into a clay-tiled kitchen with an island in the center. There, Song and two others sat on bar stools, watching a young man cook.

  The chef had the chiseled, dark-browed beauty of a telenovela heartthrob, but his hair was dull as tar and cut to hide his face. I guessed him to be in his early twenties, despite the practiced, almost presentational way he handled the kitchen equipment. When he glanced my way, I noticed the shadows under his eyes. He smiled, quick and devastating.

  “Six plates or five?” he said, his gaze lingering briefly on the more severely scarred side of my face. Until that moment, I had forgotten what I looked like now. My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth.

  “Will you be eating?” Caryl prompted me gently.

  “At some point,” I said. “It’s kind of a regular thing with me.”

  “Another wiseass,” said the dark-bearded white guy next to Song. “She and Teo will get along fine.”

  “That is my hope,” said Caryl.

  A soft ohhhh of understanding rose from everyone but Teo. Teo just turned and looked at me again, more penetrating this time and a lot less friendly. Finally he muttered a bitter “Fan-tastic,” and turned back to his cooking.

  “Mateo Salazar,” said Caryl politely, “allow me to introduce Millicent Roper. Millie, this is Teo. You will be working together.”

  “Charmed,” said Teo in a tone that meant the opposite.

  “Don’t mind Teo,” said a cloying, high-pitched Southern voice. “He’s a Grouchy Gus.” The woman on the other side of Song leaned around mother and baby to look at me.

  She was a blonde dressed in business casual. I was so disoriented by her accent—North Georgia, if I wasn’t mistaken—that it took me a moment to process that she wasn’t quite four feet tall. She was pretty despite an overlarge forehead; her bare feet dangled above the floor, where a delicate pair of beige pumps rested beneath her bar stool. “I’m Gloria,” she said.

  “I, uh.” My brain felt like a bumper-to-bumper traffic jam.

  “You’ve never met a little person before.” She giggled, in that cute way Southern women do instead of punching you in the teeth.

  Pretty blond Southern girls had tormented me all through high school, but I just nodded and smiled, knowing she’d mistake the reason for my instant revulsion.

  Teo, bless him, chose that moment to start plunking down plates of gnocchi on the tiled island. He put down six, so I took one, but I elected to hunch over the counter instead of sitting. The first bite made my fork hand go limp with pleasure.

  “Sweet Jesus,” I said, earning a frown from Gloria.

  “Good thing you
like Italian,” growled Nameless Bearded Guy. “It’s all he ever makes, and the rest of us can’t cook for shit. Sorry, Gloria,” he added, though whether for the language or the slight on her cooking I couldn’t tell.

  “Sometimes I do Chinese,” protested Teo, “or Jamaican. I’d do Indian more often if Phil didn’t make a point of bringing back Wendy’s every time I did.”

  “Would it kill you to make a burger?” grumbled Bearded Guy.

  Mexican was my favorite, but there had to be some reason that particular elephant was shuffling unmolested around the room. So I just shut my mouth and ate my gnocchi, trying not to make pornographic sounds about the oily-smooth Gorgonzola cream sauce.

  “Should Song start getting your room ready for you after lunch?” said Caryl as she settled down with her own plate.

  Song gave me a smile. Now that her baby was finished drinking from her boob, it was dozing comfortably in the sling.

  I looked back at Caryl. “Do you live here too?”

  “I don’t, though I often dine here.” That got a grin from Teo.

  I said nothing, just gave Caryl a look that said, You’re leaving me alone with this menagerie?

  My expression must have been transparent, because Caryl said in as close to a reassuring tone as she could manage, “Song will look after you.”

  5

  Song had Teo bring up my stuff, as well as a folding chair, a card table, and a box containing an air mattress twice the size of anything I’d slept on in the past two years. While Song inflated the mattress with an electric pump, her offspring sat with his chubby legs sticking out of a round rubber chair, gnawing a slimy fist and trying to figure out what exactly I was. I found myself profoundly disinterested in him.

  “Someone gave me a baby monitor I don’t use,” said Song, looking at my legs with concern. “Do you want me to set it up so that you can call for me if you have any problems?”

  I swallowed down a sudden rush of indignation and ­managed to keep my tone polite. “I’ll be fine,” I said. She took the hint and left as soon as the mattress was inflated.

  • • •

  It hadn’t occurred to me until the sun started going down that the same windows that let in light could let in a lot of darkness, too. It was a cloudy night without moon or stars, just a velvety blackness that seemed to press in at the windows. By the time I was finished rolling down all the shades, my back and hips were aching fiercely. I allowed myself the luxury of a single Vicodin just to get to sleep. I took off my legs and went through the routine—checking the sockets for cracks and scratches, checking the stumps of my left thigh and right shin—and then went to bed.

  Even drugged, I didn’t sleep well. The old house was full of strange sounds, not the least of which was the susurration of leaves outside my windows. I imagined them whispering to one another: That’s her—that’s the thoughtless girl who broke a dozen perfectly good branches on her way to the pavement.

  I didn’t remember the fall; I didn’t even remember the roof. The last thing I remembered was the smoky iodine smell of whiskey dripping down the wall of my room. I’d been trying to finish off the Laphroaig Professor Scott had given me, since I knew we’d never share it again. But I got too sick to finish. I shattered the bottle against the wall and stood there staring, wishing I could shatter all of it: the truths Scott had told me to reel me in, the lies he’d told the whole department to shut me out.

  I couldn’t think of it, not if I wanted to go forward. I tried the mindfulness exercise Dr. Davis had been teaching me, following my breath in and out. Eventually I slipped down into fitful dreams of snakes and broken glass, only to wake from a shockingly vivid nightmare that a vortex of null space had appeared where the ceiling used to be. Like an idiot, I woke calling for a nurse; it was a good thing I had refused the baby monitor.

  Even awake, I found I couldn’t shake my terror of the high ceiling; I was afraid to even look up at it, afraid of seeing a mind-numbing, gut-curdling nothingness. I did some more mindfulness work and reminded myself that if I couldn’t ­handle this, I’d have to check back into the hospital.

  At the rate I was burning through my dad’s inheritance, I had maybe six months left of that fallback. Eventually I was going to have to enter the workforce again, unless I planned on living under a bridge or jumping off one. The latter wasn’t really an option for me anymore now that I’d lived to see strangers coping with the aftermath of my last attempt. Suicide is not a way of ending pain; it’s just a way of redistributing it.

  By about two in the morning, I dropped off pretty solidly. Even with the shades rolled down, morning crept in the way I’d hoped: a soft rosy kiss to wake me. The house was silent now, the night wind having died down and those other layabouts still in bed.

  I’d been too freaked out to take a shower the night before, and morning showers don’t allow enough drying time to don my prosthetics. So I just put on my legs and my bathrobe, made my slow, careful way down to the kitchen, and bullied the vintage coffeemaker into doing my bidding. The tortoiseshell cat was there, but it kept its distance, lone ear flicking nervously back and forth. Under the kitchen lights I could see the graying of its fur and the crimp in its tail; it was a decrepit wreck, just like the rest of the house. I felt right at home.

  “Well, look who sneaked down to the kitchen!” chirped Gloria as she came in fully dressed, pink foam rollers in her hair. At the sound of her voice, the cat darted away. I briefly considered doing the same.

  “I, uh, didn’t want to wake anyone,” I said.

  “Bless your heart. Minnie, right, like the mouse?”

  “Millie, actually,” I corrected her, feeling freakishly tall as she went by.

  “And just where are you off to so early?”

  “Nowhere, really; just couldn’t sleep.” I watched her rummage through the pantry for a box of cereal. Aside from the rollers and a lack of lipstick, she looked ready to green-light a three-picture deal. “How about you?” I ventured.

  “Well, we can’t all collect disability, now can we? I’m a script supervisor, and we’re wrappin’ up a shoot this morning.”

  Gloria filled a cereal bowl, then appraised me, eyes quick and bright as fireflies. Her gaze stopped on my scars, and her nose wrinkled as though I were covered in gravy. Before I could even respond, her face brightened.

  “You know,” she said, “you should try Pure Porcelain, by Fournier. That stuff could cover a pothole in the road. I hardly need foundation myself, so my bottle’s yours if you want it. I think we’ve got just about the same skin tone.”

  I tried to make words. I really did.

  “I just love Fournier,” she pressed on in the face of my silence, taking her bowl to the fridge. “They don’t sell it in this part of town; I have to order it special. But listen to me prattling on. You must have a ton of questions. After Caryl I’m the best one to ask, so go on, sugar, hit me.”

  I imagined landing a crisp little smack to her dimpled cheek. (I could exaggerate the sound later in Foley—thwap!) Then we’d close in on her shocked expression before cutting back to me. Cover that with foundation, I’d say. Then I’d saunter out in the casual, distracted way I used to saunter.

  “You all right, hon?”

  “I, uh—don’t really know enough to have questions yet.”

  “Do you know what Arcadia means?” she asked, pouring milk on her cereal.

  “It’s . . . the name of the project?”

  “Don’t get smart, now.”

  “Um, it’s a Greek province,” I tried again, “but I imagine it’s being used here more in the sense of a pastoral utopia.”

  “All right,” she said ambiguously. “Did Song go over the house rules at least?”

  “Not yet.”

  Gloria used a step stool to help herself sit at the kitchen counter with her cereal. “Most common rule broken is: don’t ask perso
nal questions of anyone who lives here, not even their names. Anything Caryl doesn’t tell you, wait for them to bring it up. Everyone at the Residence gets to live their life how they want, and for some that means pretending the rest of us aren’t here.”

  Gloria jabbed her spoon into her cereal and gave me a look that dared me to prove I wasn’t one of those people. Her eyes were unsettlingly blue.

  “You can ask me whatever you want,” I heard myself say.

  “Not by the house rules, I can’t,” she said, shaking a finger at me in a way that was just a bit too vehement to pass as playful.

  “All right then,” I said. “What other rules should I know?”

  “No drugs, alcohol, or tobacco allowed on the premises, prescribed or otherwise.”

  My mind went to the Vicodin in my suitcase, and I wondered if the nice lady was about to ask me to pee in a cup. “What if I need antibiotics or something?”

  “Then you talk to Caryl. Antibiotics are probably okay, but we can’t keep anything around that some addict could kill themselves with.” She said “addict” the way a hellfire preacher would say “sinner.”

  I found myself wondering, but contractually obligated not to ask, what had gotten Miss Goody Two-Shoes tangled up with this crowd in the first place.

  “The rest of the rules,” she said, “should wait till Caryl shows you the contract.”

  “If no one’s told me a rule, can I still get fired for breaking it?”

  “I don’t know, Minnie Mouse,” said Gloria with a sweet smile. “Guess it depends on whether we figure it’s worth it to keep you.”

  I stared back at her. Was I hearing this right? Nice new job you’ve got here. Shame if something happened to it.

  Gloria giggled at my expression. “Look at you!” she said. “You are too precious.”

  I noticed she did not, however, say that she’d been joking.

  6

  I fled upstairs to put on a T-shirt and some baggy shorts, then feigned rapt interest in the dog-eared paperbacks in the living room to avoid further “chitchat” with Gloria. Reading was one of the slowest things to come back to me after my head injury; thirteen months later printed words still sometimes seemed to lose their moorings on the page. When Caryl arrived dressed smartly in a sage-green pantsuit, I was stretched out on a squishy couch, reading the fifth page of Prisoner of Azkaban for the third time. The decrepit cat lay curled up near my feet, despite my having displayed no signs of interest in the creature.