And my vision flitted over to my mother, lying as motionlessly as ever, and the song from Turandot continued in my ears. I squinted my eyes very firmly as I gazed upon her until the image of her changed: she was no longer the broken, emaciated woman in a white gown, but rather the sunlit, shimmering-skinned woman who had laid her head back on gray rocks and light sand, her blond hair fanned out behind her like a halo, and who had looked over at me with blue-green eyes and beckoned me to join her, to watch the water come closer as the tide came in and skimmed our feet …
And that was how I saw her in that moment, and every moment, and how I wanted to see her forever. I wanted that to be the only image resting on my eyes and warming my hands. I stumbled forward, barely able to keep myself upright for a moment longer, and pulled myself up onto the bed to lie down beside her. I lifted her arm to wrap around my shoulder and imagined that she had done so herself, that she had known that I was there and wanted me to be there with her, and that she, more than anything, forgave me for what I had done.
“I’m just going to the car, Enim.”
No, you’re not. My jaw wouldn’t move to allow me to speak, and the words were lost somewhere within me. I tried to raise my arms to hold her there with me, but she was already at the door and turning to leave.
“I’ll just be a minute. You stay right here and wait for me. And be a good boy, Enim, and don’t tell your father on me.”
And the door opened and icy air blew in to make us colder, and the water from the beach rose to come around us and drown us, and I was stuck somewhere in between the white room and the dark-blue ocean, held in place and not knowing which way to go –
And the light in the room grew very bright above my head – whiter than anything I had ever seen before – and it fell upon me like a bending, never-breaking mirror. It came over me and wrapped around me, reflecting everything I had ever seen and would never see again, and then lifted me from my side and raised me into the sky, up past the old forsaken house and cold winter sky, and over the sparsely strewn clouds and into the nothingness, and I felt my eyes drop down, the lids covering the shining blue, and I finally felt it, the long-forgotten sense in my head – content.
“Enim.”
The voice moved into the blankness sometime later, but it was far away and unrecognizable. I tried to shift to hear it more clearly, but my skull was a weight too heavy to move.
“Enim. Enim. Enim.”
The mattress had turned to lead beneath me and pressed into my face sharply. My limbs throbbed uncomfortably and the pain in my head was so sharp and relentless that it pushed against my eyes and threatened to disgorge them from their sockets.
“Enim, Enim, wake up. Wake up, Enim, please. Please.”
It was so dark and cold that I had lost track of time, and my eyes couldn’t open enough to distinguish if it was day or night. I tried to remember what day of the week it was and how many more hours there were until Christmas would come and pass, but holes had filled in my mind and sand poured through them to obscure my thoughts.
“Enim!”
My body jolted without my trying to move, and my head flopped over on my neck and threatened to snap off. Someone was shaking my shoulders. The rough, rapid movements were unsettling my insides. As I opened my mouth to tell him to stop, the contents of my stomach upturned and I heaved forward, retching violently onto him.
“Here. Here.”
Karl wiped at my mouth and leaned my head against him to keep it from falling over again. The warmth of his form was offset by the rapid beating of his heart and the hammering in his lungs.
“It’s all right. It’s all right.”
He scooped me up and lifted me from the bed. As he carried me to the door, the figure in white that lay broken beneath the wires became smaller and smaller over his shoulder. He laid me gently on the bed in the room with the floral blue comforter but only put a sheet over me. As it graced my skin, it saturated with sweat.
He murmured something and backed from the room. The sound of beeping grew fainter from down the hall as he closed the door to the guestroom again. Before his footsteps had sounded on the wood to return, though, my eyes drooped shut and I drifted back to sleep.
The sun came through the window sometime later and warmed my skin. Though I had slept, the grogginess hadn’t worn off my limbs and the exhaustion remained in my head. I slowly sat up and looked around the room. Books and furniture were overturned and clothes were strewn throughout the room, though I couldn’t remember how they had gotten that way. I detached myself from the sheets and stood up shakily: my head was reeling painfully.
There was an empty glass of water beside the bed and a partially eaten bowl of oatmeal. I shifted them to read the time on the clock. My eyes were having trouble focusing, though, and it only blurred in red before me.
My legs felt like pillars of sand beneath me and my footsteps were heavy and clumsy as I made my way to the door. When I reached it, it took several moments for my fingers to grasp the knob and twist it, and another to gain the strength to pull it open. I was aware that my head seemed to have expanded inside of my skull.
In the bathroom I turned on the faucet and stuck my head beneath it to gulp down some water. A stale taste was on my tongue and wouldn’t wash away. I wiped at my face with my sleeve and stared into the mirror for a long moment before I recognized myself in the reflection: my eyes and hair had faded against white skin, and the circles beneath bloodshot eyes had deepened. I leaned heavily against the sink to keep myself from falling to the floor as I remembered what I had done. The thought left a tainted feeling in my bones.
Halfway back to my room, the muted sound of voices rose through the floor. My already erratic heartbeat sped up at the thought that Karl had told someone what I had done. I turned towards the stairs but only managed to get down a few steps before fatigue caused me to sit down. I didn’t want to imagine what would ensue if my father or Beringer knew what had happened.
“...on such short notice.”
I slid down a few more steps to listen better. Through the spaces in the railing I could see two pairs of dress shoes at the kitchen table. Karl’s were as spotless as ever, but the other man’s were covered in dirty snow from the front walkway.
“Don’t get me wrong, Karl – I think that it’s good for you to take some time off. I was just concerned when you called ... Is everything all right here?”
“It’s fine.”
“Of course, it’s just ... in all the time we’ve worked together, I don’t think you’ve ever taken a sick day. I was worried something might have happened.”
“No, everything’s fine.”
“Of course.” The other lawyer leaned back a bit in his seat; I rather thought that he didn’t believe the lie. “How’s your nephew? Is he here?”
“He’s ... upstairs.”
“He’s certainly quiet – I wish my teenagers had been like that.”
“Well, he’s ... he has the flu.”
“All through Christmas? That’s terrible – though, I suppose the holiday isn’t really a celebratory one anymore.” He dropped his voice to a graver tone. “Is everything else all right? How’s your sister-in-law?”
“Evelyn? She’s ...”
Karl’s feet tapped the ground anxiously as he sought for a way to respond; his colleague folded his hands in front of him.
“Are you and your brother still fighting about her?”
“Well, he ... he still thinks that it would be best to take her off life-support, but he’s agreed to keep her on. So long as ...”
“So long as you’re the one dealing with her, not him.”
“It’s not like that, Sam.”
“Yes it is.”
When Karl made no response, the man named Sam sighed and continued in a quieter voice.
“Karl, I know your thoughts on this matter, and I wouldn’t say anything if I thought that there was nothing wrong, but I think that it’s gone on long enough. I know that you want to
do the right thing by your brother and his son, but this situation isn’t helping anyone.”
“I’m not letting her die.”
“I’m not saying that – you don’t have to. But maybe there’s another alternative ... Maybe it’s time to put her in another place. They have plenty of facilities close by –”
“No.”
“I – all right, all right, Karl. I just thought ... It might be good to step away for a little bit.”
There was another pause. Karl’s feet had stopped tapping. He now appeared quite numb.
“Do you agree with anything that I’m saying?” Sam asked a moment later. “I think you could use some time to yourself. By yourself.”
Karl made an indiscriminate noise but gave no further response.
“You could take some time; maybe visit that place upstate where your parents were from. The nurse could take care of Daniel’s wife for the time –”
“No, I can’t leave.”
“You could. Once your nephew’s back in school, I mean. You could certainly take the time off work – I would cover for you –”
“No, I couldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because,” Karl said. “It’s my fault.”
His voice was wrecked with devastation. Sam cleared his throat hesitantly.
“I ... I rather doubt that, Karl,” he said after a minute. “These things happen. They’re never anyone’s fault –”
“No, it was my fault.”
“Karl, don’t be ridiculous. What happened – everything that happened – was just a tragedy. People make mistakes. There was nothing malicious about it, despite what Daniel would have you believe.”
“It’s not just Daniel. It’s Enim, too.”
“What? But he doesn’t know about what happened, does he?”
Karl didn’t answer; his head was in his hands.
“How would he know?” Sam said. “Did Daniel tell him?”
“I don’t know, but ... He outright accused me of killing her.”
“But that’s preposterous, Karl: you can’t believe that. This wasn’t your fault. She had a serious mental illness.”
“But I should have been there ... I shouldn’t have ...”
“You didn’t know that she was ill.”
“I knew about the depression.”
“You didn’t know about the rest. No one did – not until long after you had put an end to it.”
There was silence. Sam uncrossed his leg and leaned forward.
“She jumped because of a choice that she made herself, not because of you. Not because of the affair.”
My hand slipped on the railing and I stumbled. The step below me creaked and it was all that I could do to hold my weight against the banister to keep it from alerting the two men to my presence.
“You know that, Karl, don’t you? You know that it wasn’t your fault?”
“What does it matter?” Karl replied tonelessly. “Everyone else thinks it was.”
The chair screeched against the wood as Karl stood up. Sam eyed him prudently before doing the same.
“Whatever they think, Karl, it doesn’t change the fact that what you’re doing here is admirable. They’re lucky to have you.”
“I’m not doing it for them.”
Sam sighed heavily.
“That I don’t like to hear,” he said worryingly. He hesitated on the threshold, torn between speaking and silence. “Don’t do this for her, Karl. She won’t know any differently – she can’t. It’s not worth it.”
“It is to me.”
When the front door opened, a gust of cold air came into the hall that filled the house with a damp, dank feeling and wiped away the warmth that had been struggling to remain. Karl shut it after his colleague’s departure and leaned his head against the wood, looking as wretched as I felt.
And it struck me quite bluntly rather than sharply, my head pounding and pulsating as I tried to get the thoughts to filter through, that the reason that Karl had stayed in the house for all those months had not been because my father had threatened him to take up the place of my guardian in my grandmother’s absence: it was because he cared for my mother, and her alone.
As he shifted by the door, I quickly scampered up the steps back to my room. I shut the door before remembering that he had taken the lock off: the hole where it had been gaped through the wood like a watchful eye staring in at me. I took a sweater and draped it over the doorknob to cover it. His footsteps creaked on the stairs a moment later.
“Enim, you’re ... awake.”
He opened the door and looked in at me with a strange mixture of surprise and unease. My heart was still beating too quickly; I wished that I had had more time to compose myself.
“How long was I ...?”
“You were in and out for a few days,” he said. “Through Christmas. Do you remember any of it?”
My eyes went to the half-eaten food on the bedside table and the strewn books and clothing around the room, but I neither remembered him feeding me nor how I had managed to make such a mess.
“No.”
“Do you remember anything from ... before?”
The conversation was even more strained than usual. I was waiting for the sound of his exasperated sigh, or the hard tone of his voice as he gave way to his irritation, but he seemed to have detached himself from anything resembling emotion. Perhaps he was waiting for me to apologize for the trouble that I had caused him or to explain what I had done; he still didn’t know me well enough to realize that I would never do either.
“No.”
He took the sweater off of the doorknob, folded it, and returned it to the drawer. The frown on his face made him look a bit too much like my father.
“Is there any more?” he asked.
“Any more what?”
No sooner had I asked than it dawned on me that he had been the one to tear the room apart in search of the medication. I shook my head without mentioning the pills stockpiled beneath the mattress at Bickerby; as Beringer had stopped prescribing it months ago, there was no reason to concern him that there was more.
“Good.”
“Did you ... did you tell my father?”
“No.”
“Will you?”
“No.”
He didn’t need to say why. My unwarranted decision would be buried deeply along with the rest of the unsightly events of the holidays. He was not failing to report it to my father out of compassion, but rather to prevent the trouble he would be in for allowing me to do something so reckless. Regardless, I was relieved. If my father ever found out, he would be disappointed with me in the same way that he was with my mother: partially for attempting something so damaging, and partially for failing.
“Things have to change, Enim,” Karl said. “You have to change. Because I can’t do this anymore. I just can’t.”
“Alright.”
“There will be new rules that I expect you to follow. You have to start eating properly and you can’t spend all your time in your room. Once you go back to Bickerby, you have to start engaging in some activities. Normal activities, not whatever you and Jack get up to.”
“Alright.”
“And I’ll be checking up on you to make sure that you’re doing well. I’ve already made arrangements with Barker. Someone will be checking in on you at meal times to ensure that you’re eating properly, and if you and Jack get into any more trouble, he’ll be expelled.”
I bit the insides of my cheeks to keep from retorting and nodded compliantly. I was certain that my frown matched his exactly, and to anyone staring at us we might have looked quite the same. Yet we were alike only in that we were so different – like looking into a mirror only to realize that the images were conflicting. We were parallel lines moving along separate courses, doomed to run alongside one another without ever meeting.
He left the room and I laid back on my bed in defeat. The weeks leading up to that point had eaten away everything that I ha
d ever been, and I didn’t recognize anything below my flesh. Yet as I went over it all in my head, one thought flickered encouragingly with the rest: Christmas was over. Everything would be all right.
Ch. 11
The overwhelming smell of cigarette smoke alerted me to Jack’s presence before he had even reached the door of the dorm room, made all the more apparent by the lack of it over the past two weeks, but his impish smile was just the same as always as he leaned against the wall and waited for me to unlock the door, and in a moment the scent grew familiar again.
“Glad to see you and Karl didn’t kill each other,” he said. “Or did you try?”
“What?” I nearly dropped my keys at the question. He indicated to my bruised cheekbone. “Oh, that – I slipped on the ice.”
“Figures. It’s those shoes.”
I nodded wordlessly for fear that my tone might give away the lie. Luckily, Jack was so preoccupied that he hardly seemed to notice my apprehension at all. He tapped his foot as I shifted my keys in my hands.
“Hurry up, will you?” Jack said. “I want to let the cat out of my bag.”
“You want to what, Hadler?”
Sanders had come out of his room at Jack’s loud voice. He crossed his arms and looked at the two of us as he pondered how we could possibly be up to something so soon after returning to school. Jack rolled his eyes.
“I said I want to let the cat out of the bag,” he said.
“You have a cat in your bag?” Sanders asked disbelievingly.
“What did you think I said?”
“I thought maybe a bat ... a weapon of some sort ...”
Sanders tried to get a better look at his backpack, but Jack shifted it from his view. As I stared at it, I could see Dictionary squirming a bit inside.
“Relax, Sanders. It’s an expression. You know what that is, don’t you?”
None Shall Sleep (Damnatio Memoriae Book 1) Page 19
