Daphne_A Novel Page 11

  It was pouring as I waited on the Caltrain platform. The train came late, no seats in any car, the heater full blast, people packed into the aisles. I felt their fraying patience shoving in, gritted my teeth, tried to let my mechanical self take over. At 16th Street, I waited in the dreary, sodden line for the escalator, mechanical as a clock grinding through its gears. But when I hit street level, I found myself not pointed toward the safety of home and more pills but raising a hand for a cab. Then I was riding through the city, out to the avenues, watching the drawn faces of commuters slogging their way home.

  When Ollie opened his door, I registered his surprise, then my eyes fluttered closed. “Hey,” he said. “It’s you. You’re here. Why haven’t you—”

  He’d just been able to catch me. My strings had been cut. I hung there in his arms, the only thing moving the tears streaming down my cheeks.

  SIXTEEN

  THAT NIGHT, I TOLD HIM.

  We lay on his mattress, surrounded by old radio parts. It took more than an hour for the last of the attacks to wash through me. We lay apart, neither of us quite willing to touch. He was confused and angry with me. I couldn’t blame him. But, as it was, I’d barely been able to talk about the break-in. Now he wanted to know what had happened at the columbarium. “You just freaked the fuck out. Where have you been? Shit, I don’t even know what I did. Why haven’t you even called?”

  “What, never had a girl go crazy on you?”

  “I’m definitely not taking that for an answer.”

  “It’d take all night to explain.”

  “Well.”

  I shivered. The memory froze me as hard as oak. I didn’t know if my tongue could even get it out. I tried to start, once, twice. “O-kay,” I began again, “you ever go to dumb movies when you were a kid? Just to make fun of them?

  Ollie gave me a doubtful look, still worried I was evading.

  “My friend Brook, she had all the irony. But I was just . . . susceptible.”

  Truly, I loved every movie we saw. The huge, beautiful faces of the actors, the seismic bass of the soundtrack, the vividness and velocity of the lives flung up on screen—even the lousiest, corniest stuff grabbed me, held me tight. Brook was always snorting and coughing out her hard, sharp laugh. But I could never get that distance. In the moments when the story, no matter how worn and predictable, began to yearn toward its climax, when you knew someone was going to die or sacrifice themselves or do something truly, foolishly noble, I couldn’t keep my heart from gonging in my chest.

  Plus, in the dark, no one could see me: my sagging jaw and fluttering eyes. God, sometimes it was like my eyelids weighed a ton. This was junior year. Despite everything I’d tried to avoid—stress, arguments, competition, flirting—my weird little moments had grown more frequent. Kids started to pull faces back at me in the halls. I hid myself under droopy bangs, brown lipstick, ribbed Henleys, and chunky Docs, mimicking Brook’s style. And when I had to be seen, in speech class or gym, I’d rattle off my notes or listlessly shoot hoops, all my concentration spent on trying to ward it off. I had my methods then, crude as they were. Counting back from a hundred, that kind of thing. But at the movies, finally, I could surrender.

  That afternoon, Brook and I had been out with Samantha and Tina. They were more Brook’s friends than mine. They smoked, cut classes, wore Joe Camel sweatshirts and baggy jeans. Tina had even dated Kyle Magolski. In other words, Brook was busy shrugging off the Sunday-school sweetheart her Evangelical parents still expected her to be, and Samantha and Tina were part of the campaign. At least they never mentioned my funny faces.

  Brook insisted on some period drama. It was set in the 1930s, a dusty cattle ranch down by the border. The lead was tall and dark with a perfect, floppy haircut such the height of ’90s fashion he might as well have been wearing a beeper. His love interest was a beautiful Mexican girl he first glimpsed while breaking wild horses for the stern widower father who kept her locked away. I remember that the theater smelled of burnt nacho cheese, and that, three rows in front of us, two farm boys wearing Colts caps, in this movie because they thought it was one girls liked, kept turning around and ogling us. And still, despite their leers, the actors’ cardboard cutout performances, the hopelessly out-of-date plot, the love interest’s ridiculous fake accent, and Brook’s running commentary on it all—despite every distraction, I watched that movie like I was living it.

  Near the end, there was a scene straight out of the old black-and-white movies my mom loved so much: the lead mewling ballads under the beautiful Mexican girl’s balcony, trying to convince her to forgive him and just maybe succeeding through the force of his syrupy passion. “Oh, God,” Brook groaned, tossing a fistful of popcorn at the screen. But the look that passed between the two lovers, the earnest twinkle in the lead’s eyes as he hit the high note, the swooning sigh from the girl . . . What rose up in me was pure—pure laughter, unrestrained, all joy and dumb, innocent longing. Everyone turned to look—my perplexed friends, those boys, several annoyed adults—and knowing I shouldn’t be laughing made it rush up even harder, my stomach leaping like on the Vortex at Six Flags, an enormous bloom of giddy pleasure I just couldn’t hold back.

  The buzzing started, even stronger than what I’d felt reading in bed or playing volleyball. My whole skull fizzed as the laughter plumed. When my body dropped away, I pitched forward. I was at the end of the row and tumbled into the aisle, my forehead glancing a seat back, my right shoulder landing hard on the floor, right cheek coming to rest abruptly on the hard carpet.

  “From that mo-ment on,” I told Ollie, “I re-mem-ber everything.”

  That gritty, musty industrial carpet, the caramel taste of RC Cola still on my lips, greasy popcorn finger marks on my white Lee jeans . . . And underneath and between the seats: furred-over Raisinettes and Starbursts and the mismatched socks, one brown, one argyle, of the woman across the aisle. Time moved in slow, lazy motion, and my senses scrupulously recorded it all.

  Brook shrieked—my stunt probably looked, at first, hilarious—and Tina and Samantha followed suit. For a moment, I wanted to join in, wanted it all to be funny. But the laughter, the actual sounds anyway, wouldn’t come. I told myself, Okay, get off the floor. Get up. Get up already. And nothing, absolutely nothing, was happening. I could only lie there, staring at the argyle sock. I blinked. I could do that at least, blink.

  Then things got still. I could hear the movie’s dialogue, but other, unfamiliar voices were now whispering above me. Someone—Brook maybe—took me by the shoulders and shook me, thinking she could wake me up. But, as I’d come to find, being manhandled during an attack only made it worse. Someone rolled me onto my back. My body was so completely limp that a bolt of panic shot through me. My eyes fell closed. I couldn’t open them again. Another flurry of whispers. They merged with the distant but ultra-clear sound of rain, the movie soundtrack playing some culminating, cathartic storm. For an absurd instant, I wondered what I was missing.

  Then the movie went silent—someone had cut it off—and I heard Brook whisper, “Daphne, what the fuck are you doing? This is way too much. Come on, already.” Someone, Samantha, it sounded like, tittered nervously. Someone else tentatively pinched my arm. I wanted to cry out in pain or annoyance but couldn’t even part my lips. It seemed as if everyone in the theater had gathered over me and that the weight of their sudden attention was pressing down, keeping me pinned to the floor.

  “Lady, please,” Brook said. “Seriously, what is this?”

  Two thick, sweaty fingers pressed against my neck, and an unfamiliar male voice said, “Jesus, we should call an ambulance, huh?”

  The whispers quieted. The house lights came on; I could see them through my eyelids. No one was touching me anymore. For that, at least, I was glad. The floor was hard against my back. I wanted to squirm into a more comfortable position, wanted to tell everyone I was okay, I was fine, I was just . . . But even if I could’ve explained, I didn’t know what I’d say, couldn’t seem t
o chain any words together. With each passing minute, I felt both more flustered and more sluggish. The laughter, the embarrassment—in front of my friends, in front of those boys—the fear, the suffocating proximity of all the confused people above me . . . I didn’t know about rolling attacks then, each one building on the other, weight upon weight.

  A woman spoke. The theater manager maybe. She had a southern Indiana twang and sounded pissed. “What’s going on here? Christ, y’all been drinking.” I thought I was going to be poked or pinched again, but the woman held back. “Y’all drunk, ain’t ya?”

  “No, ma’am,” Brook said in a very adult voice. “We haven’t been. She just . . .” Brook tried to describe what had happened. But she was drowned out by someone asking for a refund, someone else bitching about teenagers ruining every movie. It seemed they’d forgotten about me. And I was growing less aware of them. When I first went down, my heart had been hammering. Now my breathing and pulse guttered. I felt listless, near sleep—the exhaustion of multiple attacks. Briefly, I bobbed back up. All of their body heat had drawn back. Two male voices were telling everyone to clear a path.

  A large, warm hand took mine, held two fingers against the inside of my wrist. I vaguely felt a blood pressure cuff around my arm, growing tighter with each pump before a soft, almost pretty release of air. A hand touched the center of my chest, the palm flat, pressed hard several times, then stopped. Lips touched mine, breathed into my mouth. I tasted something like salami, felt the burn of stubble. “Okay, Bob, the salts,” a man said. Five seconds later, an ammoniac vapor hit my nostrils. My brain exploded, a thousand flashbulbs bursting. I wanted to scream, You idiots, you fucking idiots, what the fuck are you doing? But they did all the tests. Not as well as they might have, but they did them. What none of us knew then: the deeper my panic, the deeper the paralysis.

  “Okay, Bob?” the man said. “Let’s get the gurney?”

  “I want to go with her,” Brook said.

  “Miss,” the man said, “I’m not sure it would be appropriate.”

  Brook didn’t answer. No one did.

  “Can someone call her folks, tell them to come to St. Mary’s?” the other EMT said. “It’s . . .” He paused for a moment, then reeled off the address.

  “I’ll do it,” Brook said, her voice trembling. “I’ll call her mom.”

  People shuffled apart, making way. There were hands underneath me. I was lifted into the air, deposited onto the gurney. They tightened the straps, pulling them so they bit into my arms and legs. They wheeled me up the sloping aisle and out into the lobby—I heard the distant rumble of movies playing on other screens—out the double doors, and into the parking lot, where the humid August air suddenly clung to my skin. Before I could think to somehow protest, they’d slotted me into the back of the ambulance. Then my panic became ravenous.

  Neither of the EMTs rode in back with me. I smelled only the stink of my own sweat as my mind lurched, stumbled, flailed to sort all of this out. Yet, somehow, it cohered. It wasn’t a dream. As the ambulance moved through the streets, all of the weird things that had happened over the last couple of years—my lapses and spells and “growing pains”—began to twine together. An entire hidden history unspooled underneath me as we accelerated, decelerated, turned, accelerated again.

  We stopped. The rear doors opened. They pulled the gurney out. It began to roll again, one wheel squeaking now. Automatic doors parted with a whoosh. We slid into a sterile, chilly cavern of air. I heard elevator doors open. But only when I felt us descending, not ascending, did I guess where we were headed. Then I was senseless with terror.

  The elevator opened again. The density of the air had changed, a basement level. One of the EMTs started whistling the chorus of some pop song.

  “Beers at Billy’s after we get off?” the other said.

  “Come on, I can’t be there every time you hit on that bartender.” The whistler squawked like a chicken. “You goddamn pussy.”

  “Wrong beast, dumbass.”

  “You’re the wrong beast.”

  We knocked through two sets of swinging doors. The temperature plunged, and the smell hit in layers: bad taco meat, the boys’ locker room, a sharp, chemical lemon, the frogs we dissected in bio. The light was so bright that, even through my closed eyelids, I wanted to flinch. A deep hum vibrated the air. A high-pitched, aggrieved voice said, “Shit, not you two again.”

  “Same bat channel.” The whistler whistled the old Batman theme.

  “Can’t you and Robin come back when I’m not slammed?”

  “Key-rist, are these all the wreck on 465?”

  “These were the wreck, yes.”

  “Okay, Dr. Grammar, where’d you want this one?”

  “She’s young. What happened?”

  “I don’t know, cardiac maybe. Her friends looked druggie. Anyway, isn’t that your job?”

  “Write out the sheet, put her in twelve. I’ll sign when I’m done with these.”

  They moved me only a short distance. A latch clicked. Rollers trundled on a track. My arms were arranged over my chest, one hand over the other. Something that felt like an Ace bandage was tied around my wrists. One of the men pushed my feet together, lifted me by the legs while the other took my shoulders. The firm padding of the gurney disappeared, replaced a moment later by frigid, stinging metal. Someone took hold of my big toe. I felt another pinch.

  The rollers trundled again. It was suddenly cold and so dark behind my eyelids I didn’t even see shapes or the ghosts of colors. I lay there, trying to blink, failing to blink, trying, trying to snap myself out of it.

  Time passed. I seemed to be falling, bottoming out through all the layers of my terror. Then came murk, a bog of dark, turbulent sensation: sorrow, regret, guilt, all churning. I’d done something wrong; this was punishment. I remembered all of my petty exasperation with my mother, thought of her crying alone in our house while the wind yowled off the river. The dark and cold—I’d somehow fallen out of the world, stranded myself somewhere between bright, moving life and the blankness of the other side. One moment it was excruciating—my skin adhering to metal—the next an eerie stillness settled over me. I felt the humming in my bones. But, gradually, both it and the smells dissipated, and only the stillness remained. A long, slow, thin shiver went through me as everything took on an icy, hard clarity: While I waited in line for the coroner, I was either going to suffocate in that drawer or freeze to death.

  As each second passed, cloudiness seeped in. My head began to silt away. My body went thick. Indifference lodged in my stomach. My skin, down to the muscle, went as hard and thick as bark. Time got cloudy, the passing seconds fogged together. Time went hard and still.

  Then something prickled. Beneath the bottom, past the stillness, another thin shiver.

  It began to spread, a million tiny pricks of pain, like numbness receding from a foot that’s fallen asleep. It went on forever, agonizing. But, after a time, I could open my eyes again. Was I imagining it? The darkness didn’t change—open them, close them, open them—but the muscles in my brow had perked up. My legs were as heavy as telephone poles. Yet, it seemed, I could twitch them.

  Flinging everything into one exhausting effort, I shrugged my right arm off my chest, brushed the tips of my fingers against the cold steel and, knowing it was still real, panicked again. My arm and hand fell limp.

  Then, after an endless span in which I kept fighting but not understanding what I fought, I let myself go still again. Gaining confidence, I tried to kick at the metal panels. But there was barely room to move, and anyway my kicks were too feeble to make enough noise. Outside, I could hear voices, metallic and muted through the steel. No one had heard me. I waited. The darkness thrummed. My tongue was coming back.

  When I tried to clear my throat, my mouth was so dry I almost choked. The first sound from my lips was a pathetic, slurred whimper. Then, swallowing, gritting my teeth, working up my saliva, I spoke once into the darkness. Not more than a slur
red syllable. It came back, a tiny, hollow echo, but it spurred me on. I had to gather all my strength.

  The coroner on duty later said he nearly had a heart attack when it happened. He was working alone, had just turned on the radio, when he heard another voice, muffled but still distinct, speak from seemingly out of nowhere.

  “Ex-cuse me,” that voice said. “P-lease. Could you help me? I’m not dead. I’m in here. Help, I don’t think I’m dead in here.”

  OLLIE LAY LISTENING, watching me, not taking his eyes from mine as I mumbled my way to the end. “Ah, Jesus,” he said solemnly. “One person shouldn’t have to . . .”

  “That columbarium,” I said. “Too familiar. All those little doors.”

  “I should have warned you.”

  “How could you? I don’t talk about that day. I don’t even think about it.”

  “You can. We’ll figure it out.”

  “Is that what you always say?”

  “Look,” he began, and the sparkle in his eye drew inward, like the silvery twist trapped in a marble. He was about to make a declaration. I put out a hand to stay him, reached for my phone. No way my tongue could get it out. And my fingers were still clumsy as I typed. A moment later, his phone dinged with a text. “ ‘Ollie, I really, really lice you,’ ” he read aloud.

  I sent another. “ ‘Fucking autocorrect.’ ” He put his phone down, pinned me again with that silvery gaze. Then the smile squeaked out. “Daphne, I think I lice you, too.”

  As best I could I rolled my eyes.

  SEVENTEEN

  TOP DRAWER: HIS TIGHTY WHITIES, BLEACHED V-necks, and slightly crusty socks.