I was
staring at myself in the mirror when Bryan rapped lightly on the locked
bathroom door. “Rache,” he said, “come
out. I promise all I want to do is to
talk. Okay?”
From his
shortening of my name I knew there would be no recriminations for what I had
done. Problem was, I hadn’t a clue where
to go from here—or even who I was anymore.
“I hit you,” I said softly. “I
really hit you.”
“It’s okay.
I’m fine. Just come out, all
right?”
The skinny girl in
the mirror shook her head. The
hollowness in her eyes betrayed the hollowness of her heart. “I’m sorry,” I told her. “I honestly am. But I’m done.”
Sounding
appropriately suspicious, Bryan said, “What do you mean, you’re done?”
“Exactly what you
think I mean,” I answered, and with that he pounded on the door with
significantly more force than he had the last time. As my devoted nurse during those long weeks
of recovery, he knew that in addition to a variety of sharp objects, my
medicine cabinet housed a vast assortment of extremely potent pain pills—pain pills that I now had unrestricted access
to. “Rachel,” Bryan barked, “open the
fucking door!”
I read once that
people who decide to kill themselves are happy, because they finally know what
it is they need to do. But I didn’t feel
happy at all—just terribly, terribly sad.
“I can’t do that,” I answered him.
“It’s too late.” Looking at the
bruise spreading across my knuckles, I said, “I’m finished with this fucked up
life.”
The doorknob
rattled viciously, but without consequence.
The quality construction of our apartment was such that it could have
survived a 9.0 earthquake—which was precisely the reason Bryan had removed the
lock from my bedroom door, back when I was in seventh grade. Too bad he’d left the lock for the bathroom
door intact.
“This isn’t how
you make a fucking point!” he shouted at me, but undeterred, I opened the
medicine cabinet. Shying away from the
scissors—that just sounded
distasteful—I reached for the bottle of pills that Bryan had reserved for my
worst episodes of sleeplessness, the first week I was home. With an eerie sense of detachment I pulled
the sink stopper and dumped the means of my escape into the basin. As Bryan banged on the door so hard that the
wall vibrated, I filled my bathroom cup with water and swallowed a heaping
handful of the pink and white capsules.
“What the fuck do you think this is going to solve?” he yelped from
the other side of the door. “This isn’t
going to make anything better,
Rachel!”
I wished
I could agree. Yeah, I was afraid of
death. I just couldn’t make myself
afraid enough to care. “It’s been nice
knowing you,” I told him. “Well, not
really. Good luck and all of that.”
“No, goddamnit! Open the fucking door!”
That wasn’t going
to happen, so I popped several more pills for good measure, and, satisfied that
I had reached a lethal dosage, lay down on the floor alongside the
bathtub. I recognized that killing
myself with Bryan on the other side of the door constituted the reprehensibly
cruel—especially considering how his mother had died—but there was nothing to be
done about it. He had brought me to
this. He had no one to blame but himself
when the firemen axed their way in and discovered his ward dead on the floor.
*From my serialized novel, A Slow Twisting Place, available to read free here: http://slowtwistingplace.blogspot.co.uk/