Chapter 4
We arrived in Holme twenty minutes later.
It was early evening. The streets were empty, evidence of a place that took Sunday seriously.
As we drove down the main road, James pointed out his favorite places: low-roofed restaurants, the local bakery, everything cast in a flat carnivorous blue.
A bit of liquid crept from my ankle into my sock.
James turned onto a wide road with rectangles of grass swaying over the curbs.
The houses stood far apart from each other, boxy and glum-looking with their empty black windows.
As soon as James parked and switched off the engine, I jumped out the car, my jeans wet against my thighs.
Still inside, James rifled through his bag, produced a packet of cleaning wipes, and scrubbed my seat.
Cool air pinched the back of my nose. Beyond the road where we parked, the ocean shone. I expected a feeling to come over me: awe, or wonder. People talked about the ocean like it was this great titanic force, but here it was, calm as a bed.
James emerged from behind me. “What do you think?”
I shifted. “We’re so close to the water. What happens if there’s a tsunami?”
“Here? The waves only really get high in the morning. Usually they’re not even big enough to boogie-board.”
“Well, I don’t know.”
“You’re sweet,” said James. “I can’t believe you’ve never seen the ocean before.”
“A lot of people haven’t seen the ocean before.”
“You always think a lot of people haven’t done the things you haven’t done,” James said. “Maybe it’s just some people.”
I smiled. It felt nice to think I was part of a rare few.
James’s house looked like something a kid might draw, perfectly symmetrical with a triangular roof.
The key ring made a rattling noise as he opened the door.
It was full of keys to different places: James’s place in Manhattan, his parents’ home uptown, work, Holme, maybe a few more I didn’t know—a secret other home, or was it a mailbox, a pool, some private sea?
I thumbed inside my wet jean pocket. My key to Anna’s wasn’t there; I’d left it at James’s apartment.
The door closed behind me. Too tired to even feign dignity, I peeled off my pants.
Inside, the walls were painted sage green.
Floor-to-ceiling shelves held books, photo frames, and various trinkets: a Christmas angel ornament, a seashell, small ceramic figurines.
In the window, my reflection flashed, enclosed by thick white curtains that looked to have just been moving.
An old childhood feeling washed over me—certainty that my items rearranged themselves each time my eyes closed, but so imperceptibly I’d never notice.
Me, on the outside of a conspiracy, even in my own room.
Silver ran inside. The curtains twitched.
“What do you think?” James asked, his voice almost shy. “Do you like it?”
“Yeah, it’s nice.” I wrapped my arms around myself. I felt very cold in my underwear.
“It needs refurbishing.”
“I thought refurbishments were for houses that were falling apart.”
“It’s an old house, so there’s always something. The heating’s wonky, you have to kick it. And we want to redo the walls, turn the attic into a functional space. Mom likes a project.”
“But it’s so nice already.”
“Save that for when you meet. She’ll adore you.”
James went to unload the car. He told me the shower was in the master bedroom at the end of the stairs, the one with the towels already laid out on the bed. My feet left momentary prints on the dark wood of the stairs. I walked faster. Without James, each step felt like a trespass.
The master bedroom smelled like clean laundry and old wood, evidently decorated by the same person who did the living room.
James’s mother, probably, who liked a project.
A patchwork quilt hugged the king bed, otherwise tightly wrapped in white linen and crowned with no fewer than six pillows.
Instead of the green downstairs, the walls here were a pale blue.
I thought of the red walls of my mother’s house. She hated those walls.
I stepped inside the bathroom. The shower was cavernous, with a speckled stone floor that looked attractively edible, like a slab of nougat, and a wall of shell-like tiles, each pearl square distinct from the rest. I closed my eyes, turned the water to the highest heat, and stood beneath the spray.
I counted to ten—fifty—one hundred. When was the last time I’d peed myself?
Self-control usually came easily to me. I could cry on command if I wanted, which as a child was often, but I could also keep myself from crying at all, even in great physical discomfort.
I could run for hours without stopping. I only ever ate until I felt full; I never understood the need people had for more.
If I was sleeping with someone, I could make myself come easily when I wanted it to end, and if I was alone, I could finish in less than a minute.
The water beat my back. I screwed my eyes shut, resisting the urge to move. Not moving was something I could do. I counted to one hundred fifty, and then to two hundred. Could somebody else get to two hundred? I went again.
When I opened my eyes, my skin was pink.
I stuffed my face into a towel and thrashed my head, sharp with energy that needed fracturing.
I pressed my hands deep into my eye sockets until the black of my vision became dotted with green and pink and red.
When I put the towel down, my reflection alarmed me.
Both my eyes were red, but something was very wrong with the left. Around the pupil, cannibalizing the white of my eye, was a big blob of scarlet. I picked up my phone from the counter and went on Google. Apparently, I had burst a blood vessel.
My phone buzzed with a text. For a second, I hoped it was from my mother, but it was only James. Dinner was ready.
I couldn’t bring myself to move. My eye glared back at me, ugly next to the iridescent tiles of the mirror.
This sensation of being frozen in place was another familiar childhood feeling.
My mother, for reasons she never articulated to me, hated being at home.
She often took herself on long drives, or else worked late at the lab.
In her absence, I passed many hours the way I did now, studying my reflection, waiting for something—hunger, thirst, the click of the front door—to break my stillness.
In the summer, my mother left me ice pops she made from soda and food coloring, which I used to stain my lips red.
I knew red lips were beautiful because my mother had them.
On the bathroom mirror, I’d trace the mouth of my reflection with the tip of a melting pop, watch the red crawl down my reflection’s face.
I dreaded the moment the liquid finished its journey and pooled in the border between mirror and wall.
There, the girl in the mirror ceased to exist, and I felt she was more real than me.
Those were lonely but not unhappy hours. There was a certain pleasure in challenging the girl in the mirror to stay still. But something had changed between then and now—a capacity for imagination had been lost. In my reflection, I saw only myself.
Again, my phone buzzed. Again, it was only James.
—
Downstairs, it smelled like butter and garlic. James hummed as he set the table. I felt nervous but somewhat excited about him seeing my eye. I knew he would be startled and then very worried.
James stopped humming as soon as he saw me. “What happened?” His breath was warm, slightly garlicky. He took my face and turned it toward the ceiling light.
“I don’t know. It just looked like this when I got out of the shower.”
“It looks like you’ve burst a blood vessel,” he said, confirming my hypothesis. “You’ll be okay, try not to touch it.”
Scanning the room for Silver, I took stock of my surroundings.
Everything looked hand-drawn or homemade: the ceramic plates, the painted pitcher, even the dining table, which was simple and wooden with visible black nails.
There was a time in my life where this room would’ve looked plain to me, the décor unconsidered, but I sensed now that the plainness was intentional.
This discernment, I felt, had been given to me against my will.
Outside, the spines of closed beach umbrellas shuddered against the windows, casting shadows on the walls.
Silver studied the shadows with focus. When she finally turned to look at me, she seemed startled at my appearance.
Then she licked her paw and brought it to the left side of her face, swiping at her eye. My heart jumped.
“James.” I pointed. “Look!”
“Cute, right? She’s bathing herself.”
Silver and I met each other’s gaze. She licked and swiped again at her eye. “It’s like she can see something’s wrong with my eye,” I said. “She’s showing me how to heal.”
“That’s a sweet thought.”
He didn’t believe me. I licked my finger and massaged my eye, the way my mother used to smear her saliva on my scraped knees.
Spit, she said, was your body’s own antibiotic; you didn’t need anything else.
It was only when Lou caught me licking a bad stovetop burn in our sophomore year that I realized this was gross.
“Whoever taught you that needs to be jailed,” she’d said, handing me a tube of Vaseline.
I hadn’t licked my wounds since, until now.
James had prepared potatoes and scallops for dinner.
I loved scallops because of the surf-and-turf buffets my university threw each spring, when they covered the campus in bounce houses and served steak and seafood while blasting R&B music into the evening.
The fanfare was probably designed to distract from the winter’s suicides, reliable as clockwork, but Lou and I loved it in earnest. Surf and turf was one of the only things we did together sober.
I told James my theory about surf and turf.
“God,” he said. “That’s dark.”
“It wasn’t so bad. People seemed used to it.”