by Rachel Gold
In a super creepy way, it reminded me of living with my father: how he never wanted to know how I was or what I was interested in. That thought was so gross that I rolled over and resolutely focused on falling asleep.
Chapter Forty
I heard Blake’s dad moving around the house, the shutting of a door and his truck starting in the garage. The sun was up, but it was early. After a quick trip to the bathroom, I sat on the bed and read because I didn’t feel okay rambling around the house by myself.
Blake stuck her head in the door and grinned at me. Her hair was damp, like she’d tried to wet down the bedhead effect but a few wisps on one side were still making a run for it. She wore a black tank top and faded blue and white striped loose pajama bottoms.
“Hey you’re up,” she said.
“And still here, as promised.”
She dropped down onto the air mattress and kissed me. We made out until someone’s stomach growled.
“Let’s eat,” Blake said.
“Can I make coffee?”
“Sure.”
She showed me where the coffee was and I started a pot brewing while she contemplated the inside of the refrigerator.
“Last night’s leftovers?” I asked, looking over her shoulder. “I can do dinner for breakfast.”
She shook her head. “Sit down. I’m no cook, but I excel at reheating.”
I watched her pull a bunch of stuff out of the fridge and freezer. In minutes she’d set out a spread of little brown pancakes, a tub of sour cream, smoked salmon, capers, red onions, chopped hard-boiled eggs and two flavors of jam.
“Blinis,” she said, pointing to the pancakes. “From my grandmom. You can eat them savory or sweet or alternating. I like to go two savory, one sweet and repeat.”
“What about one savory, one sweet, two savory, three sweet?” I asked.
Blake laughed. “But then you have to eat five savory. How long have you been planning that joke?”
“At least a month. I read about the Fibonacci sequence and figured I’d get a chance eventually.”
“Are you planning ahead for Pi Day already?”
“You know I am,” I told her. “We’re going to eat three-point-one-four pieces of pie.”
She took a blini and put sour cream and smoked salmon on it. I did the same, feeling deja vuish. (Or was that deja Jewish?) Replace the blinis with bagels and you had half the meals I ate when I was out east. Call me a stereotype, but I loved bagels and lox. The blini was dense and hearty and great with the salty fish.
When she’d had her first two blini, she got up and went to a cabinet, took down a prescription bottle.
“Can I see?” I asked. “Is that okay?”
She turned around, eyes wary, but held the bottle out. I examined the label with her name printed all in capital letters and the pills inside. The only person in my family who took prescription medication for anything was my grandpop for his heart. My father would say many deeply stupid words about weakness at this point—I could hear his voice in my head. I didn’t want that to ever be my voice.
I handed the bottle back to Blake and said, “Thanks. Can I ask you stuff about it?”
“Yeah.”
“When did you know?”
She raised an eyebrow at me. “How did I get diagnosed?”
I nodded, feeling awkward for not asking right.
She said, “My mother has it too. Dad was watching for signs of bipolar in me, in case. Genetically, it’s likely.” She took a pill from the bottle, downed it and put the bottle back in its place.
Sitting, she went on. “Mom and Dad split up a long time ago. I don’t even remember. She wasn’t…she couldn’t stick around.”
“Where does she live?”
“Wisconsin, I think. She moves a lot. Anyway, I remember things starting to change when I was eleven. I’d have these weeks where everything was amazing, I’d get all my school stuff done and extra projects and hang out with everybody and have a blast. I’d get tired for days but I thought that was because of all the partying and staying up reading. But the tiredness got dark. I’d wonder about it but then I’d feel good again. Except the dark times got darker and longer. And really bleak, like I was hollowed out inside except for pain and hopelessness.”
I put together another blini while she talked, to do something and not stare at her.
“Did he find out because of the suicide attempts?” I asked. Hard to say the word, to even think about it, but I wanted to let her know it was all okay to say.
“You’d think,” she said. “But no. I was lucky that the attempts didn’t…work. Dad didn’t know. Not until after I started therapy and I told him. He figured it out when I was manic. I got in a fight with him about electrical engineering. It sounds weird when I try to retell it, but I thought he was doing it wrong. I was fourteen and he has a PhD and I thought he was doing it wrong. I was in his workshop and I was convinced I knew how to make this amazing combination of circuits and stuff, I don’t even know what it was, but it made total sense to me. It was going to revolutionize the world, a new kind of communication, but so much more than that. He came back from work and found me in the middle of this project he’d been working on, totally screwing it up, and I was trying to tell him how to make it right and I wasn’t making any sense. So he took me to the hospital.”
“Wow, for real?” It seemed like such a big move to make, from finding her messing around with his stuff to going to what I assumed was the psych ward.
She shook her head, got up from the table and walked a few steps away, looking into the living room.
“It’s not like that, okay? I’m telling it wrong. I’d been awake for a few days and he came home and he kept trying to get me to stop, to leave the project alone, and I wouldn’t. When he tried to carry me to bed, I started yelling at him and fighting him. I don’t remember all of it now, but he did what he was supposed to do.”
I said, “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be judgy. If you haven’t noticed, I’m kind of a jerk sometimes.”
That got a little laugh.
“I don’t want to be a jerk to you,” I told her. “Can you tell me how not to?”
“Don’t assume things. Like mania…people say all kinds of dumb stuff about it, like, ‘it must be nice to have all that energy.’ But it’s not fun. And it’s not even like being out of control, because I didn’t know that I wasn’t making sense. I could see this whole design and it was perfect and it was genius and I had to do it, I couldn’t stop, and I thought it was all me, the most natural, logical sequence in the world. When we got back from the hospital the mess was still there in Dad’s workshop and it made no sense at all, to me or him or anyone. After that, for a long time, everything felt unreal. How do I know that what I’m thinking is what’s real?”
“What do you do?”
“I ask people,” she said. “I write numbers in annoying little boxes and report to my shrink. And I take my meds and try to do what I’m supposed to even when it sucks.”
“What sucks?”
“Bedtime for one thing,” she said.
“Last night?”
“Messing with my sleep is supposed to be bad. I mean, it is bad. But I hate it. Trying to sleep and maybe I can and maybe I can’t but I have to be in bed for eight or nine hours and write it all down. I want to get up and do things or go out or kiss you and I’m supposed to go to bed like a little kid.”
I put my arms around her. She turned to face me and wrapped her arms tightly around my body, shaking against me.
“What time is bedtime?” I asked, trying to remember when it was last night that she’d left the workshop/guest room.
She shook her head against my shoulder.
“I’m asking so I can make sure I get you into bed a couple hours before that,” I said.
She was laughing, or crying, or both. She pulled away and went across the kitchen to get a tissue, then turned and faced me.
“How?” she asked.
“Wha
t?”
“How are you going to get me into bed at all when you live three hours away?”
“Two-and-a-half,” I said by reflex.
She wiped her eyes with the tissue. “How can this even work?”
“I don’t know, but it has to. Doesn’t it?”
“Yeah,” she said, but her voice was low and sad. “Maybe it’s better this way.”
“It can’t be,” I insisted. “It can’t ever be better to be away from you.”
“You won’t see how messed up I am,” she said.
“Yeah, that’s a good point. If you’re here and I’m there, you won’t discover what a total moron I am in a relationship.”
“You are not.”
“Really? Have you dated me? Because if you ask Sierra…”
“Oh fuck her,” Blake said.
She started around the table but I scooted away so I could keep talking and not get distracted.
“In addition, I’m told that I’m moody and a bit of a drama queen,” I told her. “Plus I can’t tell what I’m feeling most of the time.”
She was lopsided grinning and moving more quickly around the corner of the table to catch me. I attempted to bolt into the hallway, but she caught my wrist and tugged me toward her.
“On top of that,” I said. “Apparently I can be cold.”
“No. You’re just a little broken.”
“Yeah. Or a lot.”
“I don’t want you to go back there. I hate it. You’re going to shut down again.”
“Can we not think about that? Can we pretend today is the first of lots of days like this?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t want to pretend.”
I remembered what she’d said about not knowing what was real and what wasn’t and nodded. “Okay. No pretending. Let’s go help Cyd move.”
I went to change into my grimy moving and cleaning clothes. As I was putting on my shoes, I heard Blake’s dad get back. His voice and Blake’s carried to me from the kitchen and I went to say hi.
When I got the doorway, Blake and her dad were standing in front of the refrigerator. He was putting a new carton of eggs on the shelf and asking, “Guess why I got out of the market so fast?”
“You used the eggs-press lane,” Blake told him.
“Clearly I need some new material,” he said.
Stepping back from the refrigerator, he slung an arm across her shoulders. She tucked in toward him and put her arms around his body. The fabric of his shirt wrinkled as she squeezed him tightly. He kissed the side of her head.
In profile, I saw the side of his smile and one eye unfocused, half-closed with joy.
I turned around and went back into the guest room. Standing in front of the family photos, I saw how often the two of them were touching. He’d have an arm around her or, when she was a little kid, be carrying her or holding her hand.
“You ready?” Blake asked from the doorway.
“Yeah.”
She raised her eyebrows at me, questioning whatever expression my face had going on, but I shook my head.
“Let’s go,” I said.
Chapter Forty-One
The moving effort was intense. Cyd only had the U-haul for a few hours. We began loading around noon. Bear was busy moving all of her stuff, but Roy showed up with a guy he introduced as Shaman Bill. Cyd’s sister showed up with her partner—both of them tall and beautiful and completely enviable for a thousand reasons. We got all of Cyd’s stuff into the truck in about two hours and drove to the new place where we unloaded it as quickly.
Cyd and Bear were moving into the bottom half of a duplex, like the place Cyd shared with Sierra, but this one was smaller and nicer. It had natural woodwork and wood floors instead of carpet, so it felt warm all through. The living room and dining room were open to each other, with a small kitchen in the back. Off the dining room were two bedrooms on either side of a bathroom.
Behind the kitchen, steps led down to a wide, low-ceilinged basement that looked like someone had wanted to finish it in their spare time but wandered off in the middle. There was one finished room, mostly wood paneling, and a much larger unfinished area that would be both the laundry zone and the new home to all of Bear’s outdoor gear. She had camping packs and a tent and snowshoes and lots of boxes with labels like: Rain, Mild Cold, Heavy Cold, Heavy Snow, Summer, Boundary Waters, Climbing.
The side of the basement she’d picked to store the gear was gross. Every side of the basement was gross, but this was the grossest. When all the boxes were in, I started mopping. Blake was upstairs helping clean the kitchen and unpack things into it.
By the washing machine, dryer and utility sink, a household disaster had happened. It involved a cracked bottle of detergent, lint, dryer sheets and assorted bits of anything that drifted by. The detergent had all leaked out of the bottle months ago, pooled on the floor, attracted every tiny object it could and congealed into a dense, sticky mass.
I refilled the mop bucket and found a stiff-bristled brush. I was trying not to think about Blake’s dad. Scrubbing hard on hands and knees was usually a good not-thinking activity, but it wasn’t working. I kept seeing his sandstone-colored lips against the raven black of her hair, the tiny wrinkles that gathered in the corner of his eye from his smile.
I remembered the night I’d driven her home from the golf course when he said, “It’s what we do, parents. We worry.” I remembered the way he watched her, joked with her, made her laugh, made sure she was more than okay.
I pulled my mind back to the present and forced my eyes to focus on the navy blue detergent and gray lint. There was a penny, tarnished and old, stuck to the cement floor with blue gunk and I scrubbed at it until it came loose.
The mess was near the floor drain under the utility sink. I’d washed about a third of it down. Maybe the previous tenants had left it because they thought eventually it would all slip down the drain. But it wouldn’t. It was a hardened, stuck mass that would never change no matter how long you left it alone.
I wasn’t sure I had enough water and strength to scrub it all away.
From the wall behind the sink, a daddy long legs spider looked at me.
I yelped and scrambled backward until I hit the Boundary Waters gear box. The spider took a few steps up the wall and paused.
“Blake would carry you outside,” I told it.
That was a better memory than thinking about her father blatantly caring about her—Blake sitting at the mirror, seeing the spider, her face softly laughing.
She’d been so careful with the little creature.
Tender. Like her father was with her. Like he’d been that morning in the kitchen, fingers cradling her shoulder. The blocky shape of his smiling cheek that was so like hers. The tenderness of his fingers curled around her shoulder like he wanted to protect her forever.
I slid sideways and back, crammed myself between Boundary Waters and Heavy Cold. Tears pressed behind my eyes, in my throat, but I heard someone coming down the stairs and forced the tears back.
“Lauren?” Blake called.
I couldn’t talk.
She came around the corner, saw the bucket and brush, turned in a slow circle, saw me.
Crouching in front of me, she said, “You look sad.”
I stared at my hands, curled uselessly in my lap. I wanted to shred apart like Zeno into a billion particles. A tear dropped onto the pad of my thumb.
I can’t cry, I thought, she’ll think I’m weak and childish and dramatic.
No. That was my father’s voice. If I could turn into anything, I would never turn into him.
Tears slid down my face. I looked up at Blake.
She shoved Heavy Cold out of the way and pushed in next to me. With her arms around me, she tugged me toward her. I let her tip me sideways, my shoulders and head in her lap.
She curled around me.
Tears ran until they’d soaked my face and my hands. Blake sat with her arms around me, solid and warm.
Afte
r a long time, she asked, “Did something happen?”
“You hugged your dad,” I said and started crying again. Sobbing like a little kid, embarrassed and too relieved to stop.
“Goose?”
“The refrigerator. Eggs-press lane. You hugged him and he kissed you like…like he loves you.”
“Oh,” she said. “Your dad.”
“Father,” I told her. “He doesn’t get to be called ‘dad.’”
Her arms held me harder.
I said, “I don’t want to go back. I feel like I’m dying. Like I’m going crazy. I hurt all the time and I don’t know why.”
“You know why.”
“Nobody gives a shit about me up there. Nobody cares. It’s like I’m already out in space, already at the edge of everything looking into nothingness. The end of everything isn’t far away. It’s here. It’s happening—I’m disintegrating.”
Blake rubbed the side of my arm with her palm. She said, “It’s not nothing out there. You don’t get to the edge of everything and find nothing. Nothing is everywhere, already inside of everything. That edge where you are, that’s the leap to a higher order of infinity.”
That made me cry more.
My nose was running so much that I rolled out of her lap and got a handful of paper towels from on top of the dryer. I blew my nose, but I was still crying.
I wanted to get back into her lap but didn’t know how to fold myself down again. I knelt, trying to figure it out. She took my hand and pulled me toward her. I kissed her, lips closed, but with pressure, trying to say how much I loved her. She kissed back harder and we were tangled up together again.
Blake pulled back, her cheeks wet from my tears. She brushed my cheeks with her thumbs, dried her own cheeks with the back of her hand.
“Higher order of infinity?” I asked, my voice catching on the last word.
“Zeno the infinite,” she replied.
“You know we might have to start a new story. I have a bad feeling about Zeno and Cypher. I don’t think Sierra’s going to stop until they’re dead.”
