Wintergirls (24 page)

But he’ll come back. He has to.

At two I turn on the television and knit, back and forth, back and forth, making the half knots and twists that pull it all together on the long needles. I knit the afternoon away. I knit reasons for Elijah to come back. I knit apologies for Emma. I knit angry knots and slipped stitches for every mistake I ever made, and I knit wet, swollen stitches that look awful. I knit the sun down.

I sleep.

Wake in the dark, reach for the light, get up to pee.

When I come back, I see the piece of paper under my purse. I unfold it. There is a key inside and his note.

L—

I know you’re haunted, it’s in your eyes. You
have to pay attention to your visions. Deal with
them.

You can hate me for stealing your money, but
not for leaving you behind. Your family wants to
help. They love you.

It’s not right to run from that.

Peace,

E

P.S.—The key opens the office. The vending
machine is unlocked. Don’t eat the cheese crackers. They’re older than you are.

He left me a twenty-dollar bill. To pay for a cab, I guess.

It’s snowing again. I eat two more pills and fade to white.

They say, “Eat this, Lia. Eat this please eat please just this please little bit.

“Please.”

The crows stalk me, wings folded neatly behind them, hungry yellow eyes weighing my soft spots. They circle around me once, twice, three times, claws scarring the stone floor of the church.

I curl up on the frozen altar. They flutter close, black feathers filling my mouth and eyes and ears.

my body

my motel room

alone

They feed. They snatch bites with their beaks—one from my calf, one from the inside of my elbow—tug the meat from the bone and fly away with their treasure.

It takes hours to drag myself out of dream and back into the bed in room 115. No, days. Hours or days or weeks. I can’t tell. I don’t know how many pills I took.

Everything hurts. Worms are gnawing on my cuts, through my joints, inside my ugly bones. My heart runs rabbitfast, then lies in the mud to hibernate. If I had a knife, I’d cut deep enough to end this game. I don’t even have a plastic fork.

I pick up my knitting needles.

I could.

If I really want to die, right now, this minute, in this empty place, I could stab myself in a vein; they’re easy enough to see. I could walk into the blizzard and lie down in the snow and bleed out. Hypothermia and blood loss is like going to sleep, like pricking my finger on a thorn or a spindle.

I could.

A spider dangles from the lamp shade. She swings toward me, brushing over my face and landing on the headboard. She dances the thread in place and swings back.

Againagainagain. Playing out thread from her tiny hands, legs slicing through the light like black knives. Her web grows, strand by strand. Each laying a path for the next step. Up-and-down threads first, then connecting them with side-to-side threads. More silk, more tension, more places to walk, weaving a world made from the inside of her.

If I had lady-spider legs, I would weave a sky where the stars lined up. Mattresses would be tied down tight to their trucks, bodies would never crash through windshields. The moon would rise above the wine-dark sea and give babies only to maidens and musicians who had prayed long and hard. Lost girls wouldn’t need compasses or maps. They would find gingerbread paths to lead them out of the forest and home again.

They would never sleep in silver boxes with white velvet sheets, not until they were wrinkled-paper grandmas and ready for the trip.

The spider sighs and sings quietly to herself.

My name is Lia. My mother is Chloe, my father is David. And sister, Emma. And Jennifer.

My mother can put her hands inside the open chests of strangers and fix their broken hearts, but she doesn’t know what music I like. My father thinks I am eleven. His wife keeps her promises. She brought me a sister who is waiting for me to come home and play. My name is Lia.

My bones drag out of bed, across the floor to the window. I pull the cord that opens the curtains. The sun is stuck near the ground. I don’t know which way is east. I can’t tell if it’s twilight or dawn.

I sit back down. The mirror reflects the dim light in the window behind me, and the snow. I cannot see me in the glass. I am not there. Or here. I close my eyes, open them. It doesn’t make any difference.

I turn my head at a sound—air bubbling through water. My lungs. I’m still breathing. That’s a good sign.

There is a chance I might want to live, after I get some sleep.

I wake in black.

Time is stuck in molasses, blackstrap molasses poured into a mixing bowl. The mirror shows the dark outside.

Night. The sun was setting, not coming up.

I am in the Gateway. 115. The monster-boy left. I pick up the phone: no dial tone. The motel is sleeping, shut down for the season.

My arms fight the blankets and my feet find the floor.

They’re not waiting for me to make a decision. They’re going. We’re going. The cold swirls around my ankles, hungry to pull me to the ground. It takes a month to find my jacket. A year to lace up my boots.

Take knitting. Take purse. Take key.

My heart quivers, cranberry sauce dumped from a can.

Step outside.

The snow has stopped. The crescent moon hangs high, stars rubbing their hands together, teeth chattering. A glacier wind cuts into the spaces between my ribs and through the tiny cracks in my bones. I don’t have much time.

I shuffle toward the office. The door to 113 is open.

The lights are on.

no.

That can’t be. Everything is shut down. Everything is frozen.

no.

yes.

I peek inside. Cassie is sitting cross-legged on the bed, a solitaire game spread out on the blanket. As I cross the threshold, she throws her cards in the air.

“Finally!” she shouts. “Why are you always late? You got lost again, right?”

Her room is warm. A cheap cartoon plays on the TV.

There is a platter of half-eaten gingerbread cookies on the table along with a bottle of vodka. Popcorn is popping in a microwave.

She pulls me down to sit next to her. “Okay, listen. The next couple of minutes are totally going to suck. There’s no way around that, sorry. I’d make it easier if I could.”

“What are you talking about?”

She chuckles. “Stop kidding. This is a serious moment.

You’re crossing over.”

“I have to call my parents.”

“You can’t.”

“What? What is going on?”

She pats my shoulder with stone fingers. “Lia, honey? You’re dying. Kind of dizzy, right? Feel wicked weird? Your heart is about to stop.”

I push her hand away. “I don’t want to play.”

“You don’t have a choice. This is your fate. It’s time.”

She reaches for me again. Thin trails of mist flow from her fingers and twine around my arms. “Relax. It doesn’t hurt that much.”

“I want to go home.”

“Look both ways before you cross.”

“I have to teach Emma how to knit. I promised.”

“They’ll get her a DVD.”

“But I don’t want to.”

She speaks slowly. “Your kidneys failed a couple hours ago. Starvation plus dehydration plus exhaustion topped off with an almost-overdose? Nice job, Lia-Lia. Nice job, indeed. Your lungs are filling. Just a few more minutes.

Relax.”

She leans forward and exhales a wreath of mist that falls over me like bonfire smoke. My heart flops once. I try to breathe. My lungs don’t expand.

For a moment, one glass-coffin moment, I want to give in. Freeze. Bleed out. Surrender would be easy to swallow. I could sleep forever after.

My stupid heart flops again in the mud, not ready to hibernate yet. One more time, and then a third beat, faster. It kindles a tiny fire in my blood.

I wave my arms to break through the mist. “Open your mouth.”

“Huh?”

“If I’m dying, you have to be nice to me. Come on, Cass, one little favor.”

She shrugs and sighs, then opens up. On her tongue lies the green disk, see-glass born inside a volcano and buried with her in the ground. I snatch it.

“No!” she shrieks.

I try to get up, but my legs aren’t listening.

“It’s mine!” She slaps my arm.

The glass flies through the air and bounces on the carpet. We scramble over each other, body and shadow, bone and shimmer. She lands closest, but she doesn’t see it. I reach under the side table, pretending it’s there.

She grabs the back of my jacket and heaves me to the side.

“Ha,” she mutters, groping under the table.

I tip-tip my fingers through the carpet until they find it. Her head is halfway under the table. I hold the glass to my eye.

It’s filthy.

I lick it, green lollipop sizzle on my tongue. The noise makes Cassie freeze. She turns around as I hold it up again and look through the leaf-colored crystal out the window to the stars lining up above us.

Her scream is wrapped in white velvet, elegant and muffled.

The light beyond my eyes flashflashflashes with a hundred futures for me. Doctor. Ship’s captain. Forest ranger. Librarian. Beloved of that man or that woman or those children or those people who voted for me or who painted my picture. Poet. Acrobat. Engineer. Friend.

Guardian. Avenging whirlwind. A million futures—not all pretty, not all long, but all of them mine.

“You lied!” I say. “I do have a choice.”

Cassie flops back on the bed, pouting, arms crossed over her chest. “That’s right. Leave me alone. Go have a real life. My bad for screwing up.”

I hold out the glass. “Look through this. Maybe you can come back.”

“It doesn’t work that way. There are some laws in physics that are real, you know. I can’t change them. I’m stuck here forever.”

“Stuck in the middle? In between worlds?”

“Yeah, that’s the classic definition of a ghost, isn’t it?”

“Do you want to be all the way dead?” I ask.

“Yes.” She shakes her head, ignoring the tears in her eyes. “No. Maybe. I get glimpses of it sometimes, like a countryside that you can see from an airplane. Something about it reminds me of being a kid, when the world was our kingdom, but I don’t know why.”

My heart is waving a red flag. I have to hurry.

“Quick,” I say. “Tell me what you miss the most.”

“What?”

“What do you miss about being alive?”

Her eyes blur with summer clouds. “The sound of my mom singing, a little off-key. The way my dad went to all my swim meets and I could hear his whistle when my head was underwater, even if he did yell at me afterward for not trying harder.”

While she talks, I move slowly to the door. She doesn’t notice.

“I miss going to the library. I miss the smell of clothes fresh out of the dryer. I miss diving off the highest board and nailing the landing. I miss waffles. Oh.” Her head tilts back, like she’s high on a swing. Her edges are fading. “Oh, this is awesome, Lia. I never thought of trying this, of taking the best parts with me.”

I open the door. “Do you feel better?”

She’s transparent. “Best.”

“Good.” My heart lurches.

“Go to the office,” she says, her body disappearing like a mist in the sun. “The pay phone on the wall still works.

There are quarters in the top drawer. Hurry.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “Sorry I didn’t answer.”

Her eyes glitter like stars. “I’m sorry I didn’t call sooner.”

It takes almost the rest of my life to get to the office but because the moon is paying attention to my visions and the stars are lined up, the quarters are in the drawer and the pay phone does work.

I call my mother and give her directions so she can find me. I tell her that I’m finally alive, but that she should hurry.

The paramedics zap my heart with their magic wands as we speed to the hospital. Once, twice, three times.

They tell me I was ten days in the hospital.

I slept. Dreamless.

My third visit to New Seasons is the longest one yet, a marathon, not a sprint to the exit. I walk, mostly. Stop and sit down when I’m tired. Ask a lot of questions. Every once in a while I spend a day or three with storm clouds in my head. I sit some more, quiet, until they pass.

No games this time. No midnight exercise parties in the shower for me. No dumping my food in the plants or sticking it in my underwear or bribing an attendant to lie about my intake. I avoid the drama of the girls still neck-deep in the snow, running away from the pain as fast as they can. I hope they figure it out.

The concept of eating is scary. The nasty voices are always on call, eager to pull me back down

::Stupid/ugly/stupid/bitch/stupid/fat/

stupid/baby/stupid/loser/stupid/lost::

but I do not let them. I put all of the bites in my mouth and try not to count. It’s hard. I take half a cinnamon bagel and the numbers jump out at me,
boo!
Half a bagel (165).

Whole bagel (330). Two tablespoons full-fat cream cheese (80).

I breathe in slowly.
Food is life
. I exhale, take another breath.
Food is life.
And that’s the problem. When you’re alive, people can hurt you. It’s easier to crawl into a bone cage or a snowdrift of confusion. It’s easier to lock everybody out.

But it’s a lie.

Food is life.
I reach for the second half of the bagel and spread cream cheese on both. I have no idea how much I weigh. This scares me almost to death, but I’m working on it. I am beginning to measure myself in strength, not pounds. Sometimes in smiles.

I read a lot. Emerson, Thoreau, Watts. Sonya Sanchez; he was right, she’s amazing. The Bible, a couple of pages. The Bhagavad Gita, Dr. Seuss, Santayana. I write awkward, random poetry. Our floor goes on a field trip to a restaurant. I eat a waffle with syrup and I ask for more.

They’re teaching me how to play bridge. I’m not interested in poker. All bets are off.

Mom and Dad and Jennifer visit. We talk and talk until the dams burst and the tears flow with a little blood, because we’re all angry. But nobody storms out of our sessions. Nobody uses nasty names. We take turns shoveling through years of muck. Sometimes I think my skin will burst into flames. I’m angry at them. I’m angry at us.