4. #2
Claire shook her head. The sharp ball of grief in her chest grew thornier by the minute, but she could let it roll around without hitting anything.
That was the key—take yourself as far out of your body as you can, give your feelings enough room to rattle without running into anything vital.
Dr. Lark called it avoidance, Claire called it practicality.
“I don’t know anything. We didn’t really talk about our childhoods. ”
A slight widening of Dr. Cummins’s eyes; that was probably an awkward thing to admit about your dead fiancé.
But he soldiered on, which she admired. “I’d like to have you look at these,” he said, turning on his heel to lead her down the hall.
Claire fell in line. Her toes were cold in her slippers.
“Maybe see if it jogs your memory? You’re the only person on Mr. Ashbury’s emergency contact list, and we’re having a hard time hunting down medical records. ”
The way he said that was leading, like he thought Claire might have some insight, like she was holding out on him.
She wasn’t. It was true; she and Elias hadn’t talked much about their childhoods, other than to acknowledge that they were both fucked up.
Though his was fucked up in a way that included a sizable trust fund, so still better than hers.
Maybe he’d been raised in a cult that didn’t believe in vaccines, treated everything with essential oils and dewormer.
Maybe his über-rich parents had paid for the kind of boutique medical care that felt it was above such mundanities as databases and shot records. Who knew? Not her.
She never would, now. Elias would never be able to tell her anything about his fucked-up childhood ever again.
Breathe, tether yourself only by the barest thread, leave space for the barbed thing to shake, rattle, and roll. Claire imagined her growing grief like the logo on a DVD menu, bopping around dark edges, turning bruise colors.
Dr. Cummins led her down the hall to a bright room filled with filmy black-and-white photos stuck to light panels—copies of CAT scans. The inside of Elias’s brain. It felt like a violation to look at them. Claire had often wished she could read her reticent fiancé’s mind. Here it was.
“This is the one that… that caused it.” Cummins gestured to the scan in the center of the wall, the largest. “But as you can see, there were multiple lesions. Dating these things is an exercise in futility, mostly, but some appear to be at least eight years old, possibly older.”
He was right—the scans were lousy with white spots, places in Elias’s brain where they simply shouldn’t be, like his head was a seedy hotel mattress full of bedbugs.
Even Claire, whose entire body of medical knowledge was gleaned from TV procedurals, could tell something was very wrong in Elias’s brain.
“The fact that he was living normally with this level of damage is astounding.” The doctor frowned, clearly frustrated. “There had to be some kind of condition. He should’ve been brain dead years ago.”
Claire caught the horrified look Cummins slid her, his mouth a perfect O, like he couldn’t believe that thought had slipped out of his mouth. But Claire didn’t call him on it, even though she really should; she didn’t say anything at all.
She stepped up closer to the scans on the wall, her hand rising to trace the thing that had killed Elias.
An aneurysm was a tiny detonation, short-circuiting the entire mass of animated meat that made you and turning it back into nothing but organic matter. The one that had turned Elias into medical waste was strangely shaped, spidering across the glowing wall.
The longer Claire looked at it, the more it looked like tentacles.
○ ○ 3. ○ ○
She drove home on nearly deserted roads, the radio turned down to an indistinct murmur, trying very hard not to think. It worked, mostly, until she saw the headlights.
They were behind her, too close, the kind of annoying LED that gleamed the color of Glacier Freeze Gatorade. By the time Claire registered them, she couldn’t remember how long they’d been following, but she had the feeling it’d been longer than was normal.
“It’s nothing.” Too robotic for even her to believe. “Don’t start all that again.”
All that: Thinking she was being followed.
The tingling sense of a hunted thing prickling over the back of her neck.
She was over it, she was medicated, she told Dr. Lark exactly what she wanted to hear so she could continue to be medicated.
It’d been a problem a few years ago, before she met Elias, but it was a problem that had gone away once they got together and moved to their tastefully decorated million-dollar house in Connecticut, a fairy tale she’d never expected and still couldn’t quite believe.
Still, her list of diagnoses spelled themselves out in her mind: anxiety, depression, a spicing of OCD.
All helped by meds and talk therapy, even if she tried her level best not to talk much.
These headlights looked so similar to the ones she’d seen that night, the ones she’d seen that year in college, before she met Elias. Then after: the accident, the hit-and-run, standing on the side of a night road with her head too swimmy to call 911—
Claire slammed her brakes, swerved over onto the sidewalk, nearly taking out a mailbox bedecked in plastic flowers.
Her wheels skidded, loud in the midnight silence, and she unbuckled her seat belt and pushed open her door in one ungraceful movement, so hard it almost rebounded back and got her in the knee.
“What?!” She yelled it as she stood from the driver’s side door of the new Mercedes, fists clenched, eyes fixed on the tinted windows of the car behind her, still bathing her in that Gatorade glow.
It had parked, too, which she knew logically was a very bad sign, but she was too wired to stop now.
Here’s what she couldn’t adequately explain to Dr. Lark, why her avoidance tactics were a net good: When she let herself feel, she became too impulsive, and it never ended well.
She’d never given herself the opportunity to learn restraint. “What the hell do you want?!”
No one got out of the car. She couldn’t see through the windows to whoever was driving, so she found herself anthropomorphizing the vehicle instead. The too-bright headlights were cruel eyes, the grille a sneering mouth. It stared at her and didn’t answer.
She was flagging fast, exhaustion weakening her knees and making her head feel like an overfilled balloon.
Claire clutched the car door to hold herself up.
Puddled rainwater from earlier in the day soaked steadily into her slippers.
“Leave me alone,” she murmured, too low for the driver to hear, for anyone but herself to hear. “Just leave me alone, please.”
Her knees crumpled, depositing her back in the driver’s seat.
Claire rested her forehead on the steering wheel, not listening for the slam of a car door or the beat of footsteps or the hiss of an opening switchblade.
Not caring if those things were coming. Elias was dead, and she had no one, and her shoes were wet.
After a moment, the blue light inside the car faded away. The other car was leaving, pulling back out onto the road, streaking through the night fast and nearly silent.
○ ○ 4. ○ ○
She pulled the Mercedes into the garage and jumped out, pressing her thumb to the security screen to silence the beeping countdown.
The last thing she needed tonight was to deal with a too-solicitous cop checking up on her, the edges of their disposition sanded down by her obvious money and obvious whiteness.
They’d say one almost-nice thing, and she would cry.