12. Chapter Twelve Grace
Chapter Twelve: Grace
I wake up and Carmelo is gone.
The bed is cold on his side. The sheets are pulled back, and the pillow has the indent of his head and there's a glass of water on the nightstand that wasn't there when I fell asleep. He left it for me. He left water and he left, and the apartment is empty and quiet and my body feels wrong.
Not wrong in the way it felt last night when I screamed in a language I don't speak while a man was inside me.
A different wrong. Physical. My head is pounding, a low, persistent throb behind my eyes that started the second I opened them.
My stomach is churning. My hands are shaking, not the deep bone-tremor from last week but a visible shake, my fingers vibrating against the sheets when I hold them up.
I sit on the edge of the bed, naked. The clothes from last night are on the floor. My work pants, my shirt, my bra. My underwear is tangled in the sheets at the foot of the bed. The pill bottle is on the nightstand next to the water.
I pick it up. Empty. I knew it was empty.
I took the last one yesterday morning before my shift.
I was going to call Linda again, get the refill, pick it up this week.
Linda hasn't called back. Linda hasn't texted back.
Linda hasn't responded to six calls and two texts in five days, and the bottle is empty.
My head is splitting and my hands are shaking and I don't know what happens when I don't take the pills because I've never not taken the pills. Not once in eleven years.
I drink the water and then go to the bathroom and turn the shower on, stand under it as it burns my skin, but the hot water doesn't help the headache.
The headache is behind my eyes and in my temples and at the base of my skull and it doesn't respond to water or heat or the two ibuprofen I take from the bottle in the medicine cabinet.
I get dressed and pick up my phone and call Linda.
Voicemail. "Hi, you've reached Paul and Linda. Leave a message."
I don't leave a message. I call Paul's cell, which I almost never call. Straight to voicemail. Not ringing. Straight to a dead line.
I call Linda again. Voicemail.
I text: Linda I really need my prescription. Please call me back.
I stare at the phone. Nothing. No typing bubbles. No read receipt. Nothing.
For the first time, a thought forms that I've never had before.
Not about the pills. About the silence. Linda has never gone dark on me for five days.
She's gone quiet, sure. Weeks without a call when I don't initiate.
But when I reach out, especially about the medication, she responds within hours.
Always. The pills are the one thing she's never been casual about.
Five days. Six calls. Two texts. Nothing.
Something is wrong.
I put the phone down and sit on my bed and the headache pulses behind my eyes and my finger taps my thigh, fast. I need to get to work.
I need to function. I need to put on my apron and carry plates and smile at Arthur and Helen and let Javi make jokes about The Rhino.
I need to not think about the fact that last night I screamed in a foreign language during sex and this morning my pills are gone and my foster mother has vanished.
He vanished too, but I don’t have time to think about that. Not with the pain in my Goddamn head.
I eat half a granola bar. It comes back up in the bathroom ten minutes later. Nausea. Great. New symptom. The headache, the shaking, now nausea. Three things that weren't there a week ago and are all here now and the only variable that changed is the pill count dropping to zero.
The walk to work takes longer than usual because my legs feel heavy and my balance is slightly off, a mild vertigo that makes the sidewalk feel tilted.
Rosa says something to me when I pass the bodega, but I don't stop.
I can't stop. If I stop moving, I'm going to sit down on the sidewalk and not get up.
The restaurant is warm as I push the door open and walk in, but shoulders don't drop today. My shoulders stay exactly where they are, up around my ears, tense, and Javi notices the second I walk through the door.
"You look like shit," he says.
"Thank you."
"I'm serious. You're gray. Are you sick?"
"Bad night."
"How bad?"
I tie my apron. My hands shake while I do it and the knot takes three tries. Javi watches from behind the bar, polishing a glass he's already polished, which is what Javi does when he's worried and trying not to show it.
"Grace. Talk to me."
"I'm fine. It's just a headache."
"You don't get headaches."
He's right. I don't. In four years of working together, I've never called in sick, never complained about a headache, never missed a shift.
The pills handled everything. The pills made me functional and stable and even and predictable, and without them my body is announcing its displeasure in ways I don't have a reference for.
"First time for everything," I say. "Table two is a reservation for noon. Did the wine order come in?"
He lets it go. For now.
The shift is hell.
The headache doesn't fade. It gets worse.
By two PM the overhead lights in the dining room feel like they're drilling into my skull, and the sound of plates clinking makes me wince.
I drop a bread basket at table six. I enter the wrong order for table three and Marco screams at me through the pass and I stand there and take it because I don't have the energy to fire back.
The fragments come at three seventeen.
I'm in the kitchen doorway, waiting for a plate, and the smell of the branzino hits me.
Fish. Lemon. Olive oil. And underneath those smells, something else.
Something that isn't in Marco's kitchen.
A chemical smell, institutional, the same one from the shower flash last week but stronger.
Closer. The branzino smell layers on top of the chemical smell and my stomach heaves.
I grip the doorframe and close my eyes and the fragment arrives.
Not a flash this time, but a scene. A room with no windows.
A floor that's gray and cold and cracked.
A metal door with a slot at the bottom. The smell of disinfectant and something else, something biological, sweat and urine and fear.
My hands are small. Child's hands. Pressed flat against the cold floor.
My finger is tapping the concrete. One beat.
Two beats. Fast. The rhythm I know, the rhythm I've always known, and in this fragment I can see the origin.
A small girl on a cold floor, tapping her finger against concrete to remind herself she's still alive.
"Grace."
Devon is standing in front of me. His face is concerned. I'm gripping the doorframe hard enough that my knuckles are white, and I don't know how long I've been standing here.
"Your plate is up," he says.
I take the plate and deliver it. I smile through the tears pressing in the back of my eyes before walking to the bathroom and locking the door.
I vomit into the toilet and my whole body is shaking and my finger is tapping the tile floor in the same rhythm the girl in the fragment was tapping on the concrete.
I'm on my knees in the bathroom of the restaurant where I've worked for four years, throwing up and tapping the floor, trying to understand what I just saw.
A room with no windows. A metal door. Child's hands on concrete.
My hands. Those were my hands. I know because the tapping is the same.
The exact same rhythm, the exact same finger, and I've been doing it my whole life and now I know where it started.
It started on a floor I don't remember.
In a room I've never been in.
Except I have been in it. My body knows. My body has always known. My body kept the tapping when my mind couldn't keep the room.
I flush the toilet and wash my face. I look at myself in the mirror in dismay.
My skin is gray and my eyes are bloodshot and I look sick because I am sick, not from a virus, not from bad food.
Sick because the medication I've been taking for eleven years is gone and my body is releasing things that don’t make sense.
But what else can I do? Work is all I have so I go back to the floor and finish the shift. I carry plates and pour water and smile and function because that's what I do.
Carmelo never showed today and that adds to my confusion. My anger. I need him and he isn’t here. Why isn’t he here?
At closing, Javi walks me home. He doesn't joke. He doesn't tease. He just walks beside me, looking at me like I might explode at any moment without warning.
"Eat something tonight," he says at my door.
"Yeah."
"I mean it. You threw up. I heard you."
"Bad branzino."
"Marco's branzino is never bad and you know it." He stands on the sidewalk, hands in his pockets. "Whatever is happening, you can tell me. You know that, right?"
"I know. I'm fine. Goodnight, Javi."
He goes. I lock the door. I sit on my bed with my phone and the empty pill bottle.
I pick up the bottle. I've held this bottle a thousand times. Two thousand. Eleven years of mornings, opening the cap, taking the pill, closing the cap. I've never looked at the label. Not really. Not the way you look at something when you're trying to see it.
I look at it now.
The pharmacy name: Pemberton Family Pharmacy. The address: 1847 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, PA 19103.
I've never been to this pharmacy. I've never called this pharmacy. Linda always handled the refills. Every bottle arrived with the same label, the same address, the same dosage instructions: one daily, with food or water, for anxiety management.
I pick up my phone and type the address into Google Maps.
1847 Spruce Street is a parking garage.
No… no, no. This can’t be real. Some kind of mistake, surely.
I stare at the screen. I zoom in. I zoom out.
I switch to street view. A five-story concrete parking garage between a dry cleaner and an office building.
No pharmacy. No storefront. No sign. Just a parking garage with a monthly rate posted on the entrance and a gate arm and a strip of LED lights along the ceiling of the first level.
I type the pharmacy name into Google. Pemberton Family Pharmacy. Zero results. No website. No Yelp listing. No phone number. No record of a business by that name anywhere in Philadelphia, anywhere in Pennsylvania, anywhere in the country.
The pharmacy on my prescription label does not exist.
I put the phone down. I pick up the bottle. I read the label again. Pemberton Family Pharmacy. 1847 Spruce Street. One daily. For anxiety management.
The pharmacy doesn't exist. The address is a parking garage. The medication I've been taking every morning for eleven years was prescribed by a doctor I don't remember, filled at a pharmacy that isn't real, and supplied by a foster mother who hasn't returned my calls in five days.
My finger taps the pill bottle. Fast. Faster. The plastic rattles in my hand because the bottle is empty and the tapping makes the sides vibrate and the sound fills the quiet apartment.
I think about the girl on the floor. My hands on the concrete. The tapping.
I think about the pills that kept me from seeing her.
I think about Linda's voice on the phone. Don't forget your vitamins. You've been on them since you were a girl. Your body depends on them. Don't try to go without.
My body depends on them. What does that mean? What happens when I go without? Headaches, nausea and shaking and fragments of a life I don't remember, a room with no windows, a floor with no warmth, a child's hands doing the thing my hands still do twenty-four years later.
What were the pills keeping quiet?
What am I remembering?
I put the bottle down. I pick up the phone. I don't call Linda. I don't call Carmelo. I don't call Javi or a therapist or a doctor. An idea just smacked me in the face and for some reason there’s an urge to jump down the rabbit hole with it.
I open the browser and I type: pharmaceutical memory suppression.
The results load. I read the first three links.
I read them again. I read them a third time.
My tapping has stopped completely. My hands are still.
The apartment is dark and quiet and I'm sitting on my bed with an empty pill bottle and a phone screen full of information that is dismantling every assumption I have ever made about my own life.
Memory suppression. Pharmaceutical intervention designed to prevent traumatic memories from consolidating into conscious recall.
Experimental. Not commercially available.
Used in classified military and intelligence applications.
Side effects of cessation include: headaches, nausea, tremors, dream disturbances, fragmentary recall, emotional dysregulation.
Headaches. Nausea. Tremors. Fragments.
Every symptom I've had is on this list. But that doesn’t make sense.
Military and intelligence operations? Why…
how would I be on them? And yet, even as I think it, I know it to be true.
I can’t explain why, but my body is remembering things and that feeling of rightness is hitting me square in the chest.
The pill wasn't for anxiety. It was never for anxiety.
It was for forgetting. Someone gave me this pill when I was thirteen years old and told me it was for anxiety and I believed them.
I took it every morning for eleven years and it kept me from remembering a room with no windows and a child's hands on a concrete floor.
My phone buzzes. A text from Carmelo. I’d forgotten I gave him my number: Are you okay?
I stare at the message. I think about last night. His body above mine. His mouth on mine. The way he held me when I screamed. The way he said, "Your body remembers things your mind doesn't" and I heard comfort in it and now I'm hearing something else.
He wasn't surprised. When I screamed in Italian, when I had the flashback, when I curled into a ball and shook and cried. He wasn't surprised. He pulled back immediately. He knew what to say. He knew how to hold me. He knew what was happening.
How did he know what was happening?
I don't text back.
I sit in the dark with the empty bottle and the phone and the search results and the headache and the nausea and the fact that everything I believed about my life just cracked down the middle.
The tapping starts again. My finger against the pill bottle. Slow. The rhythm of a woman who is about to ask questions that will tear her life apart.