Chapter 42 #2
But it’s better to be empty. Empty is good. If you’re already empty, then the loneliness might not find you as fast, might leave you alone, like a bird of prey ignoring a motionless vole in the weeds.
Busy is wearing rubber slides with the customary nonslip socks when she comes in, but she’s also wearing an old band T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants, clothes I know she must have brought from home.
Her hair is up in a messy bun, and while she looks a little tired, she’s not wan or shaky or vacant.
She smiles as she plops next to me, working a slide off her foot so she can pull her leg up on the love seat.
“It was nice of you to come,” she says. “I really wanted to see you today.”
I stare at her. And stare.
Her nose scrunches as she notices me staring, and both of our noses are scrunched, I realize. Like the mirror game we used to play as girls but so much sadder.
But maybe I’m the only one who feels sad because she pokes me in the thigh. “What is it, Bird? You’re making me wonder if I have food on my face.”
“I don’t know. I just… This is different is all.”
“Different?” She snorts. “What could be different about you visiting me in the loony bin?”
“Jessica doesn’t like it when you call it that,” I say automatically. Jessica is one of the social workers at her residential complex and the one currently assigned to Busy.
Busy stretches, arms far up above her head, shuddering a little like a cat and then relaxing again. There aren’t any marks or wounds on her wrists or arms, at least not that I can see through the tattoos. “You’ll have to hide my edgy humor from Jessica then.”
“Jessica said when she called that you asked her to help you check in last night, and I—why didn’t you call me? Ask me?”
She presses her thumb against her septum ring and fiddles with it a little while she seems to choose her words with care. Through the window behind her, I can see that the sky is clogged with clouds, drooping and dark, not yet ragged with rain.
“It’s always been you,” she finally says.
“Always been you to make me whole. I used to think that was how it should be, because you were my twin and that’s what twins do for each other.
They make each other whole. I told myself that it would all even out in the end because I’d helped make you whole sometimes too, didn’t I?
When we were little? In school? And when it was your turn to need me, I’d help you as much as you helped me…
except that never seemed to happen. It was never the other way around.
It was always you. It was always you with Mom too. That wasn’t fair, and it still isn’t.”
“I don’t care about fairness,” I reply. “That’s not how we’re called to love each other.”
“Right. Not how we’re called.” She drops her hand to her lap and gives me a tired smile.
“We’re called to offer up our suffering.
That’s what Grandma always said. That we should look for chances to suffer, that we should be grateful for it, like Saint Jacinta or the Little Flower.
You could have been a saint, Birdie, with how much you’ve offered up. ”
I think of the last three and a half months. “I think I’m disqualified from sainthood now.”
Her smile fades and she looks away. “I didn’t want you to suffer when I needed help last night. I didn’t call you because it didn’t feel fair to make you manage my breakdown over…well, over what you’d been doing to manage my breakdowns.”
I’m shaking my head, but she keeps talking.
“I want to be fair to you, and taking care of myself is something I can be fair about now. I’m doing better, Birdie, because of you.
I live in a place where I’m not alone, where people can help me, and that’s because of you too.
And last night, when I didn’t feel safe with myself, I was clear enough to ask for the help I needed, and I had someone to ask. I didn’t need you.”
I didn’t need you.
I know how she means it. I know it’s good. I know she means it like I didn’t need you to do this for me. She means it like I’m well enough that I can do this for myself.
But it pierces anyway, in a way I can’t define. In a way like loneliness.
“Anyway, I’m already feeling a little better, just knowing I’m able to take a few days to process everything with some help.
They think my meds are okay, but I met with a psych during the intake process, and we’ll meet again today, and then I have group therapy and an intensive session this afternoon.
Oh, and I signed up for art therapy. Today is clay modeling.
I thought you’d like that.” She smiles at me.
I smile back, but I’m rubbing at my chest now, just below my collarbone, trying to rub away the strange feeling there.
“And I haven’t even had my first therapy session yet, so you know I haven’t been guilted into this,” she says, straightening up and reaching for my hands.
I let her take them. “But I’m sorry about yesterday.
I’m sorry for the way I reacted. It was shitty of me to make you feel cheap for a choice you made only because you wanted to help me. ”
The twinging hollowness in my chest intensifies. “It’s okay.”
“It’s not,” she says, and she’s completely serious, her eyes clear and her grip warm and steady.
“I don’t even know why I said some of those things, honestly.
I don’t actually think dating is a bad way to make money.
There were times when I did it that were nice and safe, and other times that were boring but still safe.
And I knew a lot of girls who did it smart, who only dated guys who were respectful, who were dating because they liked the job and not because they needed a place to stay or a tank of gas.
But when I found out what you were doing, I wasn’t thinking of the times it had been nice or boring.
I was thinking of the bad times…the times I would pay any price for you not to have to go through. Like Odessa.”
Her hands twitch when she says Odessa. I squeeze them until they stop.
“It’s okay,” I promise her. “I mean it. I haven’t been so kind to myself about what I’ve been doing with Ryan, and I should have been, and I’m sorry for what I said yesterday too. You didn’t deserve me unloading on you like that.”
She looks at me and chews on her lower lip a moment before responding.
“I should have known, though. About people coming after you for money…about the broken fingers. Jesus, I wish so fucking much that I had known. I wish I had thought harder about what it was like for you being alone with Mom. Would you believe that I wasn’t thinking of anything at all?
Dad died, and it was like all of us woke up the next day with our feet sunk six inches into the ground, and I felt so stuck, I felt like I was dying with stuckness, and then I had the miscarriage, and I just couldn’t.
If I stayed, I was going to sink all the way into the earth, and Mom—it scared me, being around her.
I saw the inside of myself in her sometimes. It felt like a prophecy.”
She’s never told me this, never explained this all the way. I squeeze her hands again, and she sighs.
“Anyway. You’re sorry. I’m sorry. But I wanted you to visit today because I wanted you to see that I’m okay now.
Maybe the most okay I’ve been since Dad died, which I know sounds stupid while I’m sitting here in the free socks, but I’m okay enough to know when I’m not.
I’m in a place where I don’t need you to be my life jacket over and over again and where I have lots of people who can help.
” She shifts so she can lay her head on my shoulder.
“You can have your own life now, Birdie. Isn’t that wonderful? ”
I drive westward into the rain—hard, scattered drops at first, and then sporadic and patchy torrents that are more like cataracts than rainfall.
When I get to the farm and get out of the truck, I see raindrops shivering on the grass and dripping from the leaves, but there’s no rain now.
Just a low ceiling made of clouds, so low it feels like it’s about to scrape the roof of the barn.
I don’t go inside.
It’s not a choice to walk east to the rutted track and turn north.
It’s not really an instinct either, not anything so animate or alive.
It’s gravity, if it’s anything—gravity like the dripping of tears off my jaw or the clatter of wood chips to the floor or the sickening spin of crumpled metal on the highway.
It’s an inevitability of outcomes—only a matter of time.
The pond is overgrown now. I’ve told myself for years that it’s because I have my hands full trying to keep the area around the house mowed; I don’t have time to mow all the way back here too.
But obviously that’s not really the truth. Time isn’t the reason I don’t come back here.
I push through the grass and volunteer trees, thinking distantly that I’ll need to check for ticks later and then forging ahead anyway, until I start seeing purple sprays of aster and finally the wind-rippled surface of the pond.
The trellis is overtaken with climbing weeds, and the wooden swing has broken, with one side still attached to the upper beam by a rusted chain, the rest swallowed by vegetation.
The sweet little idyll that a farmer once built for his bride is unruly and choked now, a forgettable spot on a forgettable wedge of land with almost no one left to remember it anyway.
I find a large rock near the bank of the pond and sit. The wind is tugging and pulling at everything, making the asters toss and the surface of the pond distort.
It was a bright and sunny day when Mom came here for the last time. She’d left her sunglasses on the rock I’m sitting on now and a tube of lipstick.