Chapter 38 Jessa
JESSA
Not ready to leave yet, I sit in my room with Tori singing to my soul.
I think back to the concert, when it all seemed romantic, when the words somehow turned themselves into hope.
But the truth, at least of Little Earthquakes, is that the album is about pain, disappointment, grief, loss.
Give me life, give me pain, give me myself again…
The cramped loneliness of her stories in each song, how even on the cover of the album she’s boxed in, that is me.
I am in her space and I want out. I bide the time painting my nails, the polish loud and chemical, black, as always.
I get out the makeup kit Mom got me last year and actually use it, dark red-purple lips like a scab, streaked black eyeliner thick and mean.
A mask. You’re just an empty cage, girl, if you kill the bird…
Dragging a Slayer shirt over my head, I prepare for war. I pull on my heaviest pair of Doc Martens and drag out the leather jacket I spiked up last winter.
I’m ready to shit-kick and get shit-kicked in the mosh pit. Tonight I want to hurt something and myself. I want to feel something else, be destructive and destroyed, give in to the black hole, and fuck it if what’s inside is crazy. I don’t owe allegiance to anyone anymore.
Downstairs, I’m grabbing my keys and attaching my wallet chain when I hear it.
Deep, heavy, racking sobs. Painful in their sound, surely tearing apart Mack’s body as she lets them wash over her.
This sound is familiar, like a siren in the distance.
Someone is hurt and needs help. This is a bad noise.
Walking down the hall to her room is like a scene in a horror movie.
Fear creeps up my body, tightening my jaw, cinching my neck, bringing out goose bumps and a rumble deep in my insides.
It’s been a year since I’ve heard her cry like this.
Three hundred and sixty-five days, plus or minus some, and all the red never washed out.
I used to think Mack was a modern-day Ophelia from Hamlet, going mad.
But these days I wonder if I’m turning into a new breed of Ophelia, watching the blood spill as someone else does the crime, but still holding all that guilt.
Is it bad that I selfishly don’t want her to open the door? I want to go out and hurt myself in a crowd instead of seeing her hurt again. But if I ignore her, then no one is listening to Mack. She’ll be alone. She won’t be safe.
“Mack?” I ask softly, and the sound ebbs for a moment. I try the handle, her door is locked. “Mack, are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
Fine. I fucking hate that word. It holds a million meanings that aren’t even close to the actual. It’s a waste of a word, and here it is saying something Mack definitely isn’t.
“Mack, let me in and show me you’re fine,” I say, the fear in me bringing out a rough tone in my voice and a cold sweat through my body.
“Just go, Jessa.”
“No, Mack, let me in.”
I start pushing on the door. She’s still sobbing, not talking anymore. Not fine.
I’ve seen it on cop shows. I’ve seen it in so many movies Dade showed me.
But the act of kicking in a door is nothing like they make it look.
It doesn’t splinter as I slam hard with my boot.
It stays right there, a big boot print on the pristine door.
My dirt, ineffective. I kick again and it shudders.
I take an extra step into the hall and project my body forward, like I’m rushing into the mosh pit, like I’m body-slamming some Juggalo who’s 250-plus, with muscle, like I’m trying to do some damage. And I do.
Finally the lock gives way and the door swings open, and there is Mack and the knife.
I think 90 percent of my nightmares have been right here. Me and Mack and the knife.
But the red. It’s not there. She hasn’t made the first cut. She’s screaming, crying, unintelligible phrases except for “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.” I’m moving toward her faster than I thought possible. My brain all animal, all fear.
I reach for the knife, a mean kitchen blade meant to slice through a turkey or roast. I grab it away from her tissue-paper wrist, from the scars left from another night like this one.
I feel it bite into my palm. It’s still sharp from Thanksgiving.
Dad standing in the kitchen with the honing steel, the shink, shink noise of the sharp becoming sharper.
I feel the cut more than I’ve felt anything this month.
It’s real and white-hot and the red finally blooms. Except it’s mine this time.
For a second I’m relieved, until my brain understands the damage.
I wanted to hurt tonight, but not in this way.
Mack is in my other arm, the words repeating in a mantra that doesn’t summon anything for me. “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t…”
I hold her close. I put the knife out of her reach. I dial 911 with bloody fingers on the cell my parents gave me for exactly this purpose. I don’t know what I ask for, but I hope they’re coming fast.
I hum to her. The only thing I can think of is Dar Williams’s cover of one of Mack’s favorite songs by the Kinks, “Better Things.” It’s a sweet song of hope—hope that I don’t think either of us has. I hold her, my blood seeping into the back of her shirt.
I know you’ve got a lot of good things happening up ahead.
Are there? I don’t know. But we need fake hope. Mack and I need something.
“Mack, you’re gonna find better things,” I murmur into her hair, her head pressed into my shoulder, and I hope she will, I hope I will.
I hope we grow up one day and look back at all this and think it’s incredibly fucked but that we survived.
I hold her so tight and she keeps crying and I feel hot tears on my face and I just hope for once that we can make this better the right way.
We’re still on the floor together when I hear the emergency crew coming in the front door, calling out.
I respond, and they’re here. Me explaining she’s suicidal.
Me telling them she’s the one who needs help.
She fights, but the cops are here too and restrain her.
She’s going to the hospital. No, I don’t want to ride along.
No, I don’t need first aid; it’s just a scratch.
Yes, I’ll let our parents know. The ambulance is here and gone in a flash that was actually an hour.
The paramedics looking at me like I’m an idiot, me lying that I’m eighteen and not seventeen and a half, and fully able to refuse medical assistance.
I call Dad and don’t know what to say to his voicemail. I write a note and leave it on the counter, my blood dripping across it, sticky smears. I wrap my hand in the same towel Bird used to cover the frozen corn for my face. No one is left to care for me tonight.
Mack tried to reboot. She’s at the hospital. I’m done. You need to fucking help her.
There’s only one place to go. There’s only one person right now I can be around. I can’t worry about the shit of the last month. I can’t worry about anything. This is me choosing to grab a safety rope, and I hope to fucking god she’ll understand.
I get into Betty the Buick, blood oozing from underneath the towel, coating the tan leather of the steering wheel. I shove that hand in my pocket and head to her house.
Almost there, I see a flash of white on the sidewalk, like a ghost, a memory of her.
But I stop and realize it is her. Bird. All her beauty there and tears streaming from her eyes.
Inside me, a mix of so much emotion blasts through the black hole and overwhelms, tears flowing down my face too, no sound…
just all the things I’ve been swallowing coming back up.
I put the car in park and get out.
“Bird!”
She looks scared, then relieved, wide eyes on me.
“I’m so sorry,” I sob.
She says something as I rush to her, the hug in my arms aching for her body.