Chapter 22 Vivian
Vivian
Vivian came home from class to a sour smell in her apartment. She leaned over the sink to take a whiff of the garbage disposal and checked the trash bin. She couldn’t identify the culprit, so she did the easy thing and tied up the bag and took it out to the dumpster behind her complex.
The sky was an enchanted blue, but Vivian didn’t feel magical.
She felt numb. In fact, she’d just been in a second-year psych class at her community college in Kalispell—five hundred miles from her hometown of Snohomish, from her mom and dad—and had learned a new phrase: absence of affect.
It’s what therapists call someone who is devoid of emotion or even understanding, usually in response to trauma.
It had been almost a year, but she still felt the urge to text Ryan right there and explain the phrase to him. Ryan liked it when she shared new tidbits. It had become a habit of hers in the early months when she’d gone away to northwest Montana to live, ski, and attend the community college.
Ryan was always the brains in the family. He was three years younger. He asked questions about things on her mind, even silly stuff. He never teased her about them, even the stupidest stray thoughts.
One time when she was in middle school and he was still in elementary, she asked him why a glass of ice water doesn’t overflow when the cubes melt. He’d smiled kindly and explained how ice expands and is made up of mostly air, so it doesn’t change the volume. It simply displaces water.
And when he was only four years old, he memorized every country in the world and its capital.
And by the time he was eight, he was an insect freak.
But you couldn’t ask him anything or you’d be stuck forever listening to him go into great detail about his favorite aquatic bugs (namely stone flies, which survive in low-oxygen or oxygen-free conditions).
Eventually, it became a joke between them. She began sharing any matter-of-fact thing about life she came across. Hey Ryan, do you know the name of Odysseus’s dog?
He’d answer, usually correctly. He’d text back something scientific he knew. Hey Sis, do you know that floodplains are among the most biodiverse landscapes on earth?
Now she looked to the northwest, toward Glacier Park, to see mountains like those jagged teeth of the plastic dinos he played with when he was little.
It was cold out and she wrapped her arms around her waist after she closed the dumpster lid in the alley.
She wasn’t sure she wanted to go back in. She wasn’t sure what she wanted.
She looked back to the mountains. Blue bled up from the peaks, and the higher she gazed, the paler the sky.
Her boyfriend, Logan, had gone up to Big Mountain to skin up. He’d asked her to come, but she’d said she had classes. She couldn’t skip. The psych teacher told her she needed to make a choice: start attending or pull out before the drop date.
She didn’t have the energy to go skinning. She imagined Logan’s neck glistening with sweat despite the cold. She pictured his thighs pumping with each slide of his ski up the steep terrain of Tony Matt, the main run that shot up from the resort like an arterial vein.
Logan never sat still. She wondered how long he’d put up with her while she wallowed in this inertia. Hey, Ryan, learned the other day that inertia means the opposite of how it sounds. It’s lack of motion. Lack of activity, not energy in motion.
Vivian shivered and turned to face her apartment complex. It was one of the newer ones, part of the generic sprawl creeping across the valley. She often thought about all the field mice and other critters that got displaced when they tore up the land to build it.
Her parents had agreed to pay the rent and living expenses if she committed to giving college a try. She had picked Kalispell for the community college and access to skiing in Whitefish.
That’s honestly all she wanted to do: get a job in the service industry and get certified to teach skiing.
In high school, she’d dreamed of being on the slopes all the time.
That had been her dream ever since their family had taken their first trip to Salt Lake City when she was seven, to ski Park City, Alta, and Snowbird.
Hey, Ryan, did you know that tree wells are spaces under spruce trees that have unconsolidated snow that can kill you if you fall into them?
Her mom and dad used to dish out those condescending smiles whenever she’d mention her alpine goals, as if they were only humoring her.
In their minds, it was a no-brainer that she’d go to college.
That was expected. She would attend, paving the way for Ryan.
But that was unnecessary. Ryan was college bound, no matter what. Until he wasn’t.
And her parents now? After they’d fought so hard for her to enroll somewhere, anywhere, did they care if she stayed with it anymore?
When she was home over Thanksgiving, her parents had barely spoken to each other. Mom seemed upset over how much Dad drank. Mom wouldn’t say it outright, but Vivian could see that there was a new disgust in her face when she looked at her father—one that never existed before Ryan’s suicide.
And Dad, he had learned since Ryan’s death not to say anything out loud. But Vivian could tell he was impatient that Mom hadn’t been out of the house in months. She walked around like a zombie.
Suddenly college, something Vivian had initially felt forced to do, presented itself like a lifeline.
When the teacher said she should maybe drop the class altogether, a fear so sharp and cold rose inside her that she went speechless.
When she was confident she could speak without her voice cracking, she promised the instructor that she’d do better.
As Vivian came closer to the outdoor staircase of her building, she saw a gal from school park her Honda Civic in the complex’s lot.
Vivian almost stopped and waited in a slice of a chilling shadow to let her go up the stairs first, but then it would be obvious she didn’t want to interact.
It was the truth, though. She wanted to retreat to the dark cave of her apartment.
But when the woman saw Vivian, she flashed a cheerleader smile and waited until Vivian caught up at the base of the stairwell.
“Hey there,” she said, squinting into the bright winter sun. “It’s Shona. In case you forgot.”
“Yes. Hi.” Vivian knew her from one of her classes during her first year at Flathead Valley Community College. Shona was in the nursing program and worked hard. Much harder than Vivian. She was a non-trad student, as everyone called them.
They chatted about school as they climbed the steps. As they arrived at Shona’s entrance, she said, “Want to come in? Have tea or coffee or something?”
Vivian looked at her, still squinting in the sunshine, her cheeks rosy from the cold. In Shona’s polite offer, there was something motherly and inviting, something suggesting to Vivian that she didn’t have to bear this world alone. She accepted.
Shona’s layout was exactly like her own—one bedroom, a bathroom, and a small kitchen separated from a tiny main room by a counter that allowed exactly two stools.
But Shona had made her space much homier than Vivian’s.
Shona had prettier furniture and a nice fuzzy area rug with earthy tones.
She’d hung abstract artwork—something generic and cheap she’d most likely purchased from Target, but it looked nice.
Vivian was the type who’d rather go without than make do with something chintzy.
In the end, she lived starkly, while most of her friends’ surroundings were at least comfy and attractive.
Vivian and Shona pulled off their boots. They hung their jackets on coat hooks by the door. Shona motioned to one of the stools at the kitchen counter while she went to the other side, grabbed the kettle, filled it with water, and heated it on the stove.
“You’re in nursing, right?” Vivian asked.
“Not exactly. I’m on the phlebotomy track, but I have to take a lot of the nursing classes for that.” Shona angled her head down, like she was studying her. “I haven’t seen you around campus that much this year.”
Vivian wasn’t sure she wanted to acknowledge her absence from classes, from social events in general.
She knew that Shona knew about Ryan. When it first happened, a little over a year ago, she had come up to her after class and told her that she was thinking about her and that if she needed anything at all to let her know.
That she’d keep Vivian in her thoughts and prayers.
“How are you doing?” Shona grabbed two cups from her cabinet.
Vivian smiled. It felt foreign and forced. She couldn’t deny it, though; it was good to be in Shona’s presence. She was genuinely nice. She would make an excellent phlebotomist, Vivian thought. One look at her smile and anyone would surrender the pale, blue-veined underbelly of their arm to her.
Shona put tea bags in the cups, took a lemon out of her fridge, and began slicing it as they waited for the kettle to whistle.
“You have a boyfriend?” Shona asked.
“Been seeing him for over a year now.” Vivian had met Logan in mid-November of her first year at college. The relationship started a month, she thought, before it happened, but she did not say that to Shona.
“That’s nice. You met him at the college?”
Vivian explained they’d met on the mountain when she was buying a ski pass, how they were in line next to each other.
“So he’s a student?”
“No, bartender. And ski bum.”
“Must be nice,” Shona said.
“Yeah, he pretty much does what I came here to do, only I’m not really doing it.” Vivian told Shona how she’d wanted to come here to work and ski, how she’d made a pact with her parents about college.
“Your parents. They’re faring okay?”
“I guess. I mean, it’s hard.”
“I’m sure.”
“It’s, well, it’s all so complicated.”