Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked

by Christa Carmen

  It’s a decorative fabric box, the kind for storing photos in, and Lisa takes it, tells Sheila and Ray that they should call tomorrow, that perhaps you will be ready to speak to them then.

  “Before we go, can you tell me, has our daughter’s wife, Imogene, been to see her yet?”

  Lisa tells Sheila that by some strange stroke of misfortune, each instance of Imogene’s arrival has seen you off the ward for one medical test or another.

  “Make sure Willow knows,” Sheila implores. “She’s convinced her struggles will lead those who love her to abandon her, but Imogene’s not going anywhere, and neither are we.”

  The visiting hour is hectic and the box of photographs is forgotten until the following morning, when your doctor arrives for the day’s appointments. You are third on his list, which means you are pulled from a group on relaxation and deep breathing exercises, though neither tactic has had any effect on your state of mind. You trudge into the office with the enthusiasm of a cat before a bath and sit on the edge of the chair, your body language a testament to your distrust and exhaustion.

  After questions about your meds (you feel lethargic), how you’re eating (you’re not), and how you’re sleeping (in fits and starts, for fifteen minutes or so each hour), the doctor asks if you would like to go through the photographs that your once-foster parents delivered.

  You bristle, but Dr. Mendelevitch explains that the duration of your stay depends on the effort put into your treatment, and so with pursed lips and a shrug, you agree and brace for this Rorschach test of images rather than cnidarian blobs of ink.

  The doctor lifts the stack of photographs from the box and unties the salmon, satin ribbon keeping them in place. On the desk, he fans them out like he’s reviewing paint samples, plucks up a single photograph, studies it, then turns it so it’s facing you. A long-taloned hand reaches up from the depths of your empty stomach to grab you by the throat. In the photo, you are fifteen…

  —

  You are fifteen, and it is the evening of your sophomore homecoming dance. Neither your mother nor your father has a sharp word or worried glance at the news that you are going with Imogene Rogers.

  “I love you no matter what,” your father says, and you warm with the knowledge that all is, and will continue to be, right with the world.

  When Imogene arrives, your mother stitches a tear in the girl’s hem, while you make last minute adjustments to your cat-eye liner and Heidi-braid. Your father takes rapid-fire shots of you and Imogene until you smile shyly, kiss Imogene on the cheek, and ask your date if she’ll take a picture of you and your parents. Imogene counts to three, you squeeze your parents’ hands with each of your own, and your smile is like a spray of tulips at the start of April, blooming toward the flash of light.

  No one snaps a picture of you at your parents’ funeral the following week. If they had, any beholder would think your lips incapable of flowering smiles or kisses.

  —

  When Dr. Mendelevitch lowers the photo, you are looking out the room’s one barred window. Your hands are shaking, and you struggle to clasp them in your lap around the bulky bandages encircling your wrists.

  The doctor squints at the computer screen. “I see you’ve been treated for an irregular heartbeat and electrolyte imbalances in the past. During these prior hospitalizations, you were identified as a suicide risk due to the nature of your self-inflicted wounds. Did these behaviors begin immediately after the death of your parents?”

  Your eyes do not stray from the window. A seagull soars past the glass, and you visualize the sandy beach to which it is traveling, the algae-slick rocks above the crashing surf on which it will perch.

  “Willow?”

  You drag your gaze away from the outside world and back to the doctor as if you’ve lived out five hundred lives on the ward since Friday, as if the first of the photographs has had a vampiric effect on your vitality.

  “Maybe we should move on to the next photo,” Dr. Mendelevitch says.

  You nod, emit a small exhalation of relief.

  “What can you tell me about this one?”

  The memory associated with the photo leeches what little color was left in your face. You remember that day, the storm, your vision swimming along a horizon that surged like a gale-ravaged sea. You remember the seismic wave of nausea; you remember stopping to lift the tangle of hair from your neck, and strain to hear past the ringing in your ears. The thunder is closer now, a hornets’ nest knocked from the eaves and rolling, helter-skelter, down the sidewalk. You are nineteen...

  —

  You are nineteen, and days pass with all the detail of half-finished pencil sketches, grey and smudged and evanescent. You have been living from acquaintances’ couches to shelters and back again for three years now, unwilling to burden Sheila, Ray, and Imogene with your defectiveness any longer. It is easier this way, easier to subject your body to the repertoire of tortures it requires. Food is scarce and instruments of pain abound in the absence of everything else.

  On the day you are caught in the storm, you have not eaten in over a week. Though indiscriminate shapes bob at your periphery, the shadow wolf is unmistakable. It’s been stalking you since the night of the accident, the night a young man’s negligence cost your parents everything. Nineteen of Keith Coates’ driving citations had been covered up by his father, a local senator. The twentieth was a head-on collision with your parents’ Prius.

  You will never put the ones who love you in the position of wishing they hadn’t given you a second chance. Maybe the shadow wolf is real, and maybe it’s a manifestation of your fractured mind; either way, you will not string your family along while you do what needs to be done to escape it.

  The rain increases from a drizzle to a deluge, and, unexpectedly, the front bedroom of the Gonzalez’s warm, inviting home flashes across your mind’s eye with a corresponding zigzag of lightening. You shake the image of this place you have abandoned from your head, and turn to put some distance between you and the shadow wolf.

  You stop at the sound of a whimper on the wind.

  You can make little sense of a tiny foxhound puppy beneath the verdant stalks of a plot of amaryllises, but a flourishing garden in this neighborhood of debris-strewn lawns and boarded-up windows is equally perplexing. You bring the puppy to your chest, and its quivering body is like fur-covered twigs tossed together by the storm. You set your jaw and focus your gaze, preparing to outrun the shadow wolf.

  When you look over your shoulder to gauge the distance between you, its sinister presence is gone.

  It is only later, of course, that the picture is taken. Euphoric at your return, frantic to feed both the foster daughter who left and the malnourished puppy she has returned with, Sheila Gonzalez sets you up at the kitchen table with a massive plate of food and snaps a photo on her old Minolta camera without warning.

  The black and white film cannot soften the angles of your cheeks, or the depressions beneath your eyes, but it does capture something else. The tilt of your jaw is like a daylily in fall, set against the wind, confirmation that the shadow wolf did not destroy you, that deliverance is at hand.

  You name the puppy Amaryllis, after the flowers under which you found her. Perhaps it is only a coincidence that they were your mother’s favorites.

  —

  A knock comes at the door, and the nurse who opens it doesn’t bother to hide her annoyance at Dr. Mendelevitch and his lack of progress on the day’s appointments. The doctor shoos her away with an impatient gesture. His movements cause the satin ribbon to cascade over the side of his desk like molten lava over a volcano summit. The doctor nabs the end of the ribbon right before it is lost, and you ask if you can hold it. Dr. Mendelevitch wavers.

  “Just while I’m in your office,” you say. “I know we can’t have anything resembling rope on the ward.”

  He smiles at your insight, passes over the ribbon. You run it through your fingers, tie it in a bow around the arm of the chair, the way you us
ed to around Amaryllis’ neck. The dog would prance as if the Gonzalez’s living room was the Westminster Kennel Club arena, velvet ears falling back from her delicately-boned face, tail drumming a beat against the side of Ray’s leather armchair.

  “Your last hospitalization...” Dr. Mendelevitch pauses to calculate forward from the date scrawled on the back of the photo he still held, “was a little over a year after this was taken.”

  You think, the duration of your stay depends on the effort put into your treatment, and therefore say, “The shadow wolf stopped chasing me when I found Amaryllis. It took a little while for my body to acknowledge this.”

  “The... shadow wolf? Can you tell me more about that?”

  The shadow of another bird passes the glass and you fight the urge to surrender to the pull of the world outside the window. “I... it’s hard to explain. I saw it for the first time the night my parents died. The last time was the day of the thunderstorm. The day I found Amaryllis. Now that she’s... it’s come back. It’s always been hard to see head-on. Mostly it stays at one corner of my vision. But it is always there.

  “Imogene doesn’t understand. She thinks if I surround myself with people who support me, or go into treatment, I’ll get better. It’s when I…” you pause, swallow, “don’t eat, or when I cut myself, that it stays away. That’s why I was admitted. I wasn’t trying to kill myself, I just... I was trying to make the darkness go away.”

  You weave the ribbon between your fingers, then stop and gesture rather wildly toward the desk. “Which photo’s next, Doctor? The one of Sheila jumping for joy when I got my GED? How about Imogene in her florist apron, the day I ran into her at the local nursery and we started spending time together again? I took a lot of those photographs myself, you know. I even worked as a photographer for the local paper. Imogene convinced me to get into it.”

  Dr. Mendelevitch holds up another photo. “Is this Imogene?” he asks.

  You wilt like wisteria in winter at the image before you, at how blindingly white your wedding dresses were in the camera’s flash. You can make out the amaryllises along the dance floor in one corner of the shot, and you run your tongue over your lips in hopes of tasting the ghost of the decadent frosting that topped your raspberry crème cake.

  “We have each other now,” Imogene had said, as she’d looked into your eyes and gripped you tight. “And we will always have each other, for I will never leave you, Willow...”

  But she had left, hadn’t she?

  “Yes. That’s her.” You are suddenly tired enough that departing this office and journeying back to your bed seems like an endeavor requiring far more stamina than you possess.

  Dr. Mendelevitch straightens the photos and returns them to the box. “Have you talked to Imogene since you were admitted?”

  “Imogene will not be coming to see me.”

  The doctor looks back at his computer screen, confused. “It says here that your wife has been to the ward several times. Once you were having your wrists rebandaged, another instance you were on the Cardiology floor having an EKG, and the third time she visited, you were with the chaplain.”

  “The nurses and counselors are telling me that to keep my spirits up. I know they’re lying.” You hold out the ribbon with a look that says the ribbon is the only other thing the doctor will be getting from you, and think, whether they keep you here longer or not, that enough effort has been put into your treatment for one day. “Are we done?”

  Dr. Mendelevitch sighs. “We certainly don’t have time for me to challenge these iterations of delusional thinking, Ms. Keret, so I suppose we’re through. I would like to try you on a new medication, however. Something for hallucinations. Let’s see if we can’t get this shadow creature to go up in smoke, shall we?”

  You make a gesture somewhere between acquiescence and apathy, and the placid look on the doctor’s face as he enters the pharmacy order tells you that despite your swift consent, you have not aroused his suspicion.

  —

  You wait until two-fifteen AM, when the last three instances of checks have produced neither sigh nor stirring on the part of your roommates’. You extricate yourself from the web of tangled sheets and open the nightstand drawer, pausing when it creaks. Olive and Lauren stay asleep. You retrieve the small bouquet of origami roses—the sweet schizophrenic who’d lived in Japan for several years made them for you when you mentioned you loved flowers in an arts and crafts group—and shake the bouquet upside down over your lap.

  Ten Elavil and ten Valium tablets, two each for each of the days you’ve been on the ward, two per paper rose, rain down like sweets from a candy-store dispenser, amassed the way a child would sneak candy from a discerning parent, held beneath the tongue until around the corner and out of sight. You hold the twenty pills in your palm, and you think of what you have lost, of how you have come to the end of your ability to cope with the unfairness, and with pain.

  You lift your hand to your lips, drop the pills into your mouth like seeds, and wait for them to take root.

  —

  Following irrevocability such as this, you assumed that the shadow wolf would dissipate like fog off the sea, but it looms from the corner, gnashing its teeth as your breathing slows, striking forward while your pillow loses solidity. You can feel it, its waves and billows replete with cloying substance that leaves condensation on your greying skin. You smell it, the dank, heavy scent of impending death. You hear... clicking.

  Clicking like the sound of toenails on linoleum. With a burst of strength—your last—you turn your head, and are overwrought by what you see. Amaryllis, halfway across the room, the fur on her back raised in warning. She stalks toward the shadow wolf, and you blink; your vision recalibrates like the autofocus on a camera, and you determine that it is not Amaryllis. It couldn’t be. This dog is smaller, speckled.

  The therapy dog, then. Poppy, or Posey... something like that. A beagle, not a foxhound. Although…

  The dog bears down upon the shadow wolf, and though your perception flickers, you are able to focus a final, fleeting moment. You descry the dog’s eyes. Amaryllis’ eyes, deep brown with flecks of amber. The eyes you looked into every day for fifteen years, and that mirrored your flowering and your fortitude back to you.

  You struggle for enough breath to say her name. It dies in your throat like a poison-doused perennial.

  —

  It does not surprise you that whatever afterlife you assume you’ve entered into is rife with the smell of amaryllises; like your mother, they have always been your favorite. You are bewildered, however, by the persistence of pain. You strain to swallow around the tube in your throat, open your eyes, and see the hospital room around you.

  It is different from the room to which you were assigned on the ward. The sunlight offered up by a window the width of the space sets the glass-vased amaryllises on fire. You attempt to sit up, are stopped by the innumerable wires twining your body like ivy. Before you can panic, a nurse appears at your elbow, and places a hand on your still-bandaged wrist.

  “Relax, honey, you’re in the ICU. You’re going to be okay.”

  She replaces one IV bag with another, and you feel a narcotic soothing of your anxiety.

  “You are lucky,” she says, “though they still can’t figure out what happened. Nurses on the ward heard barking coming from your room. When they got there, they found you blue, not breathing. It was only later, when they’d gotten you to the ER, that they realized they never saw a dog.”

  Twice now, that Amaryllis has thought you worth saving. Or, perhaps, it has been countless times, one for each of the days she was with you, making you whole, making you better.

  Perhaps you can be made better once again.

  The nurse studies you, finds your dropping blood pressure and stabilized breathing satisfying enough to make her way toward the door.

  When you wake again, the light is softer, more diffuse, like yellow begonias at dusk. The pinch at the back of your throat is gone an
d you can turn your head, now that you have been freed from some of the creeping tubes and climbing wires.

  Imogene sits in a sage-green chair, her black hair cut shorter than you can ever remember seeing it. At first, you think she’s sleeping, but she shifts, and you realize it was a trick of the fading sunlight, casting shadows where none should be.

  The amaryllises she holds are a deeper red than any of the other bouquets. Her wedding ring shimmers, diamond-white and sapphire in the light. You hold each other’s gaze.

  Imogene is here. She has not left. Like Amaryllis, she continues to think you worth saving.

  The sun dips below the horizon. Shadows emerge from corners and spread throughout the room, but they are none of them wolf-like, none of them more sinister than any other image cast upon the ground, intercepting light.

  Imogene’s lips part in a smile, chrysanthemums embracing the sweetness of the changing season.

  Your mouth responds in turn.

  You smile at one another. Your smiles are two gardens, and the moss-covered walls around them have begun to crumble.

  REFERENCES

  Kilmer, Joyce. “The Twelve Forty-Five.” The Complete Poems of Joyce Kilmer. Kindle Edition, JR Publishing [Public Domain], April 20, 2012, pp. 6-8.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked represents both my life and my writing post-recovery from addiction, so in many instances, the people I’m thanking for their assistance in crafting my fiction are also the ones who’ve had a hand in helping me maintain my sobriety (whether they know it or not). Subsequently, my gratitude for these individuals is boundless and profound.