Chapter 38 Jillian
JILLIAN
“Hail Mary, forgive me / Blood for blood, hearts beating”
— “King for a Day” by Pierce the Veil
I don’t remember falling asleep here. I remember Kir leaving through the window, and I remember pouring myself another drink, and I remember putting my head down for just a second.
That was hours ago.
In between, I dreamed. The dreams were bad.
Not my usual ones, no dorm rooms or cracks in the ceiling.
These were new and vivid. A boy crouched in a dark closet, eye pressed to the gap between the doors.
A man walking past with a woman in his arms, her head tipped back, mouth slack.
Muddy hands. Blood under fingernails. And the boy not making a sound, not moving, just watching his whole world get carried out the front door.
I dreamed it over and over. Each time, I couldn’t move or scream or do anything but watch through that crack.
I peel my face off the table and sit up. I feel hollowed out and heavy at the same time.
I close the window, wash both glasses, and put the whiskey away. Then I open my laptop at the kitchen table and try to work while Kir’s story is still fresh in my head.
But the story won’t stay straight in my mind. Elena Lazareva, crushed pills, applesauce, a closet with a crack in the door. The details merge and fade and refuse to lie still.
Maybe because it’s not Kir’s story I’m seeing anymore.
It’s a hospital room. Beige walls, fluorescent lights, beeping machines. I was so tired that I almost couldn’t keep my eyes open, but I forced them open anyway, because I knew I didn’t have much time.
They put her on my chest. She weighed almost nothing. She had a red face and her fists were balled up tight and she was screaming, absolutely furious at the world for pulling her out of the warm, dark, safe place she’d been living in.
The nurse told me to take as long as I needed. I wanted to say, Then I need forever, but I knew that wasn’t one of the options. So when the time I allotted myself was up, I pressed my lips to the top of her head—she smelled like nothing I can describe, clean and new—and I handed her back.
The nurse took her out of the room and I didn’t see her again.
I told myself it was the right thing. I was giving her a better life than I could. I was scared and broke and the person who put her inside me was a monster. What was I supposed to do? Raise a child conceived in violence?
I thought I chose right.
Kir makes me wonder otherwise. He didn’t know why his mom was gone, just that she was gone, and no one would explain to him why. It’s ruined him. Did I ruin her?
Did I? Did I? Did I?
I close the laptop. I can’t do this right now.
I shower on autopilot, then get out, towel off, and put on whatever my hands find first. Jeans, a green sweater, boots. I grab my coat and my keys and I’m out the door before five-thirty.
The streets are desolate in the predawn gray.
The sky is the flat, crackling dark of a bad photocopy.
I don’t know where I’m going. My feet are just moving and I’m letting them, because staying in that apartment with my laptop closed and my thoughts open was not an option.
I head south on Broadway, then cut east somewhere around Houston.
I end up on Mulberry Street somehow. I don’t remember turning onto it. But I’m here, and I’m standing in front of a church, the Basilica of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral. I’ve walked past it a hundred times on my way to get pho at the little Vietnamese place on the corner, but I’ve never been inside.
It’s beautiful but haunting. The building is old, dark brick, Gothic windows, with a wrought iron fence winding around the cemetery next to it. The headstones in there are neat and straight, well-cared-for. The front doors are open. A faint yellow light spills out onto the stone steps.
I don’t know why I’m here. I don’t know what I’m looking for. I’m not even sure I believe in any of it: God, forgiveness, prayer. I do think I believe in devils now, though. After all, one wears a mask and comes to my apartment night after night.
But the doors are open, and I don’t have anywhere else to be, and the alternative is going back to my apartment and opening that laptop and trying to write about dead mothers while my own ghost sits on my shoulder and breathes down my neck.
So I take a deep breath and walk in.