Lost

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/