Chapter 21
Eris
Crawl inside this body
find me where I am most ruined,
love me there.
― Rune Lazuli
The sound of the door locking behind Heather and Luke cut something loose inside Eris.
She cleaned up the kitchen with Denny, caught up in a robotic trance, headphones on with no music.
Half an hour later, Eris was in the bathroom, clutching the sink as her heartbeat soared. The clothes that had been a sensorial nightmare all night lay on the floor. She still felt the itch of the tag between her shoulder blades.
The sense of unrealness was disorienting.
Maybe one day she’d get used to it, but she couldn’t wrap her head around it just yet. The lightheartedness, the openness, the trust, the unwavering support… So ordinary on the surface, so incomprehensible at the core.
The more Eris got to know Denny’s parents, the more she liked them, and the more she liked them, the harder it became to be in their presence. They may not be perfect, but they were living proof that it really wasn’t that difficult to love a child unconditionally.
Some parents just didn’t have it in them.
The sink she was clinging to still bore traces of the makeup she’d washed off, black, watery streaks coiling towards the black hole of the drain.
In a corner, the jewellery box called to her. It didn’t sound right—a knife among jewels. There couldn’t have been a more fitting metaphor for her and Denny. Only one of them belonged in that fancy box. What was a blood-stained blade doing among gold?
‘Welcome to the family.’
She didn’t even know how to be part of a family.
Her sight blurred. A knot clamped her throat.
It was an overreaction, she knew it was. Reducing herself to a wheezing mess just for a cosy family dinner was pathetic. It’d been over a decade, she should be over this, should’ve grown out of it. The despair, the loneliness, the sense of abandonment… None of this should be still affecting her.
She used to call it the mud. When she was little and the paralysis took her, she’d let herself sink into the mud, and the mud protected her.
It was cold, and thick, and dark. It wrapped around her like a hug, holding her together when she couldn’t afford falling apart.
The mud cushioned her screams, absorbed her tears.
The mud had been her safe place—an escape from the people who should’ve been her safe place.
The mud was claiming her now and, as she sank, she couldn’t remember how to crawl out of it.
She clutched her chest. It was crushingly tight.
The very first thing Denny had taught her was that love was simple, simple enough that even a stranger could receive some completely for free, no questions asked, no dues to pay.
Eris had grown up wondering what was so wrong about her that made her undeserving of her parents’ love. Not malleable enough. Not clever enough. Not good enough. Too quiet or too loud and never an in-between. Too needy. Too weak.
“Don’t listen to them,” Micah would whisper to her, squeezing in with her in the laundry closet, the corner of the house where she felt safest, to cradle her to his chest and rock her through her episodes.
To this day, Eris wasn’t sure what those episodes were.
That was how Micah used to refer to them.
She had no memories of what would trigger them; all that was left was the imprint of the suffocation, the feeling of her ribs cracking inward, collapsing against her lungs.
“Breathe, Eris. Breathe. It’s going to be alright, I promise. ”
He said that every time. There would always be another time, another episode. A little girl had grown up hiding in a dark, stifling room to feel safe. A broken teenager had preferred to face a world that terrified her alone rather than keep calling a living hell her home.
Eris gaped for air, speared by an unknown grief.
A cry broke out of her. She smothered it into the back of her hand. Teeth dug deep into the skin.
‘Shut up, you stupid cunt! All you do is cry and whine!’
Tendrils of pain spiked all through her, comforting. The burning pulse seized her senses, disconnecting her from the anguish that compressed her ribcage. For a moment, it felt like liberation.
Then the deception crashed.
The grief took over again, broke out in a sob.
She was a shattering child again, screaming for her brother to come and put his arms around her, crush the storm out of her, protect her from their father’s rage.
Alone.
Alone.
Alone.
Her knees gave in. She sat on the floor, back against the cabinet, and stared at the crimson dents in her skin.
Her eyes shut. The watery heat in them broke though the lids.
She let go of a sob, and a fraction of the constipation in her chest eased.
So she let go of another, and another. She let go of everything.
“Eris?” Denny’s call came from a distance.
Eris couldn’t have answered even if she’d wanted to.
Through the haze, she heard dull stomps up the stairs and in no time Denny appeared on the bathroom threshold, glasses low and askew on her nose.
The door was open. The door was always open: no one had anything to hide. Not even this.
“Eris!” All colour drained out of Denny’s face. She rushed to the sink and dropped to her knees, immediately zeroing in on the wound. “Oh, Eris…”
There was no stopping the tears, nor the sobs.
Denny was frozen with both her hands hovering on top of Eris’ injured one, stuck between conflicting impulses: ‘Don’t touch!
’, ‘Help!’. If Eris had had any control over herself, she would’ve reached up and stroked Denny’s cheek to thank her for her consideration.
Sadly, all she could do was clutch her knees tighter to her chest and whimper like a baby.
“What can I do?” Denny asked with a paper-thin voice that sounded one word away from crumbling.
I don’t know, Sunshine. I’m sorry. Please, don’t be scared.
But Denny was scared, very visibly so. Scared and distraught, and buzzing to do something.
“Should I worry?”
Eris, thick, hot tears streaming down her face, grabbed her wrist, squeezed firmly, let go.
Denny’s brittle smile confirmed that she remembered what that meant. “Okay.” After a shaky exhale, she neared her fingers to the glaring red of the marks on Eris’ hand. “Please, let me take care of this.”
A wet sniff was the only affirmation that Eris could provide, but Denny was trained to read through much less than that.
She fetched a towel and a first aid kit; she spread the towel on her own legs and laid Eris’ hand on top of it.
The throb was still there, sharp and grounding.
Eris stayed focused on it as Denny cracked an ice pack with wet streaks rolling down her cheeks.
You softie, Eris lovingly thought. Her sobs were weak and soundless now, but it still hurt to breathe. The pain in her chest wasn’t going away.
“I don’t suppose you want to talk about it,” said Denny while holding the ice in place.
Silence.
Eris wasn’t even sure what all this ado was about. She knew what she was feeling but had no idea where it was coming from, why it wasn’t going away.
“Want me to leave you alone?”
Eris firmly squeezed Denny’s wrist and let go one more time. However raw and vulnerable she may feel, Denny’s presence would never be unwelcome.
Denny draped a large towel around Eris. She sat beside her on the ground and, without a word, smeared a greasy ointment over the lacerations. She stayed close even after it was absorbed, Eris’ hand on her lap, stroking it lightly.
“I’ll just be here, okay? No talking. I’m gonna shut up. Right now.”
She cried it all out. Sobs became hiccups. Denny cried with her, quietly, as if not to disturb, unaware of what was going on, but receptive to Eris’ grief. That soft heart of hers was like an antenna. Empathy was a bitch.
Eris kissed away a teardrop hanging off the side of her chin. “Who’s the silly sausage now?”
Denny coughed up a giggle. Eris rubbed her leg and kissed her again through her own tears.
“I’m supposed to be the one consoling you.”
“Having you here is all the consolation I need.”
Minutes ticked by. Eris’ breath evened out.
The tears dried up into lines of salt that pulled at her skin.
Spent and hollowed out, she sniffled and wiped her nose one last time.
Eris herself couldn’t remember the last time she’d been so emotionally wrecked.
It wasn’t like her to feel so much. She had always seen her numbness as a blessing; now she wondered if the feeling had actually been there all along, not gone, just blocked somewhere, waiting to blow up in her face.
Denny had changed her.
Denny, in a way, had ruined her. She’d hacked through Eris’ walls, had made a home for herself within them, but the crack she’d opened had remained unguarded. Now ghosts that had been buried in the dark for years, if not decades, were crawling out.
“Where would I be,” she wondered out loud, “if I’d had parents like yours?”
A blend of panic and shame flashed in Denny’s eyes. It wasn’t hard to guess what she was thinking: ‘Not here. Not with me.’
It was what Eris was thinking, too.
An ounce, maybe less, of the love and security Denny had been raised in would’ve been enough to alter the course of Eris’ existence, her personality. She and Denny would’ve never met or, worse, they could’ve met without having any impact on each other.
Denny ran a knuckle down her damp cheek. “Is that what this is about?”
“I don’t know.” Eris had never been good at identifying her own feelings, those rare times she felt anything at all. “Your luck makes me sad for some reason.”
“Like jealousy?”
“No, like… Nostalgia? But for something you’ve never known. Does it make sense?”
A long silence hung between them before Denny muttered: “Unfortunately, it does.”