by M. Anjelais
But, no. No, no, no. I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want to kill myself. I would never want to do that.
I wanted to protest aloud, but I couldn’t anymore. It wasn’t an option: My voice had frozen in my throat, the ice in my chest had reached up and caught it there. I just stared at Cadence, at those terrible eyes, at his mouth. I could take my hand out of his at any time. There was nothing really rooting me to the floor underneath my feet. The attic had no locked door to keep me prisoner inside. But what if he tried to take my life if I disagreed, if I didn’t do it myself? I had never been so terrified.
But I could see it. I could make sense of it. Did that mean I could do it?
“We’ll plan it all out,” Cadence said. “It has to be art. I’ll think of the perfect way for you to do it.”
In my head, I was little again. I was in my backyard and the games that Cadence thought up were always the best games in the world, always far better than anything I could have come up with. I was sitting on the floor in his room on the day before the shared birthday party we were going to have. I was looking up at him as he sat perched on his bed and told me that he’d think of the perfect games to play at our party.
Cadence let go of my hand and cocked his head to one side, regarding me thoughtfully. Then he reached out and traced the line of the scar on my cheek, slowly, deliberately.
“Another knife for you, Sphinxie,” he said. “Don’t you think that would be perfect?”
Click. I felt like I’d been awakened from a state of hypnosis. This was out of hand, I had let him talk to me for far too long. I should have shut him down right at the beginning, run from him. Just because someone knows that there’s a steel trap set in the woods doesn’t mean that they’re safe from walking on top of it. I tore my voice out of my throat, ripping it through the ice.
“No,” I said as firmly as I could despite my shaking voice. “No, I won’t do that. I’m not killing myself. I’m sorry about what’s happening to you, Cadence, but I am not dying with you.”
His eyes snapped open wide, no longer soft. He tightened his grasp on my hand, tight enough to make me gasp slightly. Wordlessly, he jerked my hand up and twisted it, turning it so that the underside of my wrist was facing upward.
“Let go of me, Cadence,” I said, pulling backward, but his grip was vicious. “I said, let go of me!” He ignored me, and lifted the paintbrush, still soaked with ultramarine. Wordlessly, he painted a line across my wrist and then dropped my hand. I tried to dart backward, but he caught me by the other wrist, twisted it upward, and painted a line on that one, too.
“Let go of me!” I said again, louder and more frantic. He released my hand as though he were dropping something into the trash and towered over me.
“When I said come with me,” he said, his voice reduced to a hoarse growl in his throat, “I meant it, Sphinx.”
“When I said I’m not killing myself, I meant it,” I retorted, trying to be defiant.
“Why?” he said, challenging. “You don’t have anything better to do. No plans for the future, isn’t that right? Nothing except this. And there isn’t ever going to be anything better for you than this, Sphinx.” He turned on his heel and walked back to the canvas. I looked down at the painted lines on my wrists and imagined them changing, ultramarine giving way to dripping red. I felt all the air go out of my lungs, as though I were already dying where I stood.
Then I turned and ran from the attic, sprinting down the stairs fast enough that I tripped and nearly fell. Tears sprang to my eyes as I skidded around the corner into my room, into the en suite bathroom. My hands fumbled with the sink taps. I jerked them on and shoved my wrists underneath the gush of water, scrubbing until there was no trace of the paint, until my skin turned pink from the hot water. Panting, I turned off the water flow and leaned against the bathroom counter, water pooling around my hands, my head down, watching a little tendril of paint snake its way down the sink drain with the water.
I didn’t want to kill myself. I would never want to do that. But I wasn’t lifting my head to look at myself in the bathroom mirror, and I knew why.
I didn’t want to see the person who might take my life.
After shakily drying my hands, I went into my room and sat down on the bed. The digital camera was still in the back pocket of my jeans, and it pressed uncomfortably against me when I sat down. I pulled it out and tossed it lightly onto the bed, and then lay down beside it, curling into a ball.
It really felt like my room now, and not a guest room. I had been there for just over a month by then, woken up in that room for more than four weeks. The sheets and pillows had my scent on them; they no longer smelled foreign. And the guest bathroom had my makeup and hairbrushes spread constantly over the sink counter. I no longer bothered to put them away after each use. I had settled in at Leigh’s house, snuggled in for the winter.
I shivered and wrapped my arms around my own body; it was a colder winter than I’d expected, and my mind was made of different stuff than I’d thought. People always talk about how when you’re young, you feel like you’re going to live forever, an evergreen amidst the blizzards. Now I felt my hair fall over my forehead and was reminded of dead leaves — brown, dry, falling, and then covered by a blanket of heavy, icy white.
No. I had to get out. It wasn’t time for that, not for me.
I could call my mother. I could tell her everything. I could get a flight. I could make my excuses to Leigh, say that it was too hard for me, that I wasn’t strong enough to stay and watch Cadence fade away. I could make myself believe it for a little while, for as long as it took to get out, to safety, to a place where it was still warm.
I had a wild thought in my head all of a sudden: I would stay, but I’d be fine. And when I left, I would take all of Cadence’s paintings with me to the United States, show them to somebody at an art gallery, and make them famous. They would hang them up on the pristine walls of the gallery, shine lights down on them from overhead, and charge people to see them. Under them would be a little card with Cadence’s name and the title. Did they have titles? I had never heard Cadence call any of his paintings by any particular name, but they had to have titles. He must think of all of them as something. I would find out what they were called, before he died. I would write out all the names on a folded piece of paper and take it back with me, with all the paintings, to some art gallery that would make them famous. And maybe the proceeds from people paying to see the paintings could go to research for the kind of leukemia Cadence had, or research for curing sociopaths …
I stopped myself. It sounded like a sappy Chicken Soup for the Soul story: a girl bringing her dead friend’s paintings home with her, getting them discovered, donating the money. It was cliché. It was the end of every movie ever conceived on the subject, if any ever were. Besides, whose dream was it to be famous after their death? And this was assuming that I ever left Leigh’s house. After finding out what was wrong with Cadence, I’d thought that I was protected by my knowledge, untouchable as long as I remembered what he was. I’d thought that as long as I kept telling myself the truth over and over that he wouldn’t be able to get inside my head. Now I knew I was wrong. If I stayed, there was a chance I wouldn’t be taking anything home with me, that my things might stay spread out in Leigh’s guest room forever — or at least until my mother came and packed them away.
And Cadence doesn’t believe in God anyway, I thought distractedly. From what I understood of religion, if you didn’t believe, you would just disappear after your death. No eternal life. No looking down from the clouds to check and see if you were famous yet. No peering at Earth to check up on how people were remembering you. Would that happen to me too, if I went, when I went? Did I believe enough? My breathing sped up involuntarily: I vaguely remembered hearing something once about how suicides didn’t get into heaven. Was that true? No, it couldn’t be … not if you were a good person, not if you were killing yourself for someone else, not if you were fulfilling an ulti
mate purpose, not if it meant something …
I got up from the bed abruptly. It wasn’t good for me to be alone now. I needed distractions, I needed to shake myself awake, I needed to be with someone, anyone. Quickly, I darted out of the room and went downstairs, skidding around the corner at the bottom.
“Leigh!” I said, surprising myself with the urgency of my own voice. She was sitting at the kitchen table, a mug of tea in front of her. I stopped, wondering if she was crying, but when she turned to look at me, she looked only as sad as usual.
“Yeah?” she said, her voice husky. “Something wrong?” Her brow furrowed.
I opened my mouth and shut it just as quickly. Something wrong? She’d asked that question so casually. Yes, I was sure that my face looked pale and frightened, that she could hear how fast and odd my breathing was, but she didn’t know what was going on. She didn’t know what Cadence had said to me, up in the attic, and she didn’t know what I had been thinking of, what I was still thinking of.
A sudden burst of mixed anger and horror flared up in me. Leigh didn’t know anything. She hadn’t known what was going to happen the day Cadence cut me, she hadn’t known that something was wrong with her son, she hadn’t known enough to keep me from being scarred — and even now, with Cadence diagnosed, she still remained unaware of what he was doing to me. And my mother — my mother knew even less. My mother was probably standing in our kitchen back at home right now, doing something trivial like rinsing dishes in the sink, completely unaware of what was happening to me. Why didn’t they know? They were adults, they were mothers. It was their job to know what I couldn’t tell them.
“No,” I said, forcing myself to speak in a level tone. “No, I’m fine.” I looked around, making sure that Cadence hadn’t snuck up behind me. “But, Leigh, I was just upstairs watching Cadence paint, and he was talking —” I paused, reining in the words that were on the verge of tumbling out of my mouth. I could not tell Leigh what Cadence had said to me. She would react in horror, she would march upstairs and speak to him about it, and he would be angry with her — with me. What would he do, if I were to tell Leigh what he had said to me? I thought of the blue painted lines on my wrists; they were still there in my head even though I had washed them off, phantom reminders.
“He was talking about how most artists were only famous after their deaths,” I said haltingly. “I think … I think he thinks that’s what’s going to happen to him. I was wondering, maybe could we fix it so that he has some kind of an art show somewhere, like, in a real gallery?”
Leigh’s eyes lit up, and I knew that she had just forgotten whatever white-faced expression I’d had on when I’d come downstairs. It had been put entirely out of her mind by the suggestion of something else she could try, another chance to wake her child up inside.
“I can’t believe I never thought of that myself,” she said, stammering slightly. “It’s just that he’s always kept his art so secretive … always hidden up there in that attic … but I’m sure he’d love that …” Her voice was already tinged with hope. Hope, as her kitchen floor turned to quicksand underneath my feet, my hand gripping the edge of her kitchen counter, white-knuckled. And she didn’t know.
“Do you have any local art galleries?” I said, and marveled at how convincingly calm I sounded. “We could call them and tell them the situation, I’m sure they’d let us have one of their rooms to put up Cadence’s stuff, it’d be so great …” I trailed off. What was I doing? What had come over me that made me think I couldn’t ask for help, that made me think I had to cover up my terror and deal with this on my own, as though there were no one else in the house? Of course I had to tell Leigh, I had to tell her everything. It was a simple, horrific fact of life that mothers did not always know what was happening to their children; I could not rely on Leigh’s being able to read my mind to save me. And keeping secrets when my life was at risk was stupid, I was old enough to know better.
I suddenly recalled sitting on the airplane before takeoff, when my journey here had begun, listening to the flight attendant explaining the oxygen masks. If there is a loss in cabin pressure, yellow oxygen masks will deploy from the ceiling compartment located above you.
“Yes, I’m sure they would,” Leigh went on. She had gotten up from her seat and starting pulling open drawers, looking for a phone book. I sensed that she was holding back tears, but pushing all of her emotion into looking for that phone book, and then into rapidly flipping through the pages. Her eyes were a mother’s eyes, hungrily drinking in the sight of the phone numbers, searching for that one art gallery that would give her one more chance to make her kid smile. To secure, pull the mask toward you, and fasten it so that it covers your mouth and nose, said the flight attendant in my memory, holding up the example mask and stretching out the elastic band to demonstrate how it worked. Please make sure to secure your own mask before assisting others.
“Wait!” I said suddenly.
She turned to look at me, her eyes full with her desperation. And I was trapped again. I thought it would destroy her to know what Cadence wanted me to do … to know he was able to say it beautifully enough that I wasn’t sure if I was going to leave her house alive. And this woman must have been destroyed countless times already: when Cadence had cut me, when he’d been diagnosed as unsaveable, both in mind and body. Would she finally crack if she found out what he had done now? I envisioned her committing him to some kind of a mental hospital, finally too overwhelmed to care for him anymore. That would be unacceptable; he couldn’t spend his last days locked away because of something I’d told his mother.
“Leigh,” I said, and my voice was calmer than it had been before, sounding foreign to my own ears. I licked my lips, trying to bring some moisture back into my mouth. “Leigh, I don’t want it to be just because he’s sick. He’s a really, really good artist. Can’t we get him discovered, or something? Can’t we find someone who’ll want his paintings before they know he’s got leukemia?”
Her eyes dulled. She was thinking now, of the difference between a real achievement and the result of a stranger’s pity. We both knew Cadence would hate that. Only one of us knew everything else. And I was getting better and better at producing that calm voice. With every moment that went by, more hiding layers were forming over the top of me, like a shroud. I had to tell her before I became unable to, before I disappeared entirely.
But I wouldn’t tell her. I knew I wouldn’t. The flight attendant was gone out of my head, taking her oxygen mask with her.
“I don’t know if —” Leigh started to say something, but left her sentence hanging, an unfinished thread in the air. “I don’t know if we have enough time.” No, we didn’t have enough time. I didn’t have enough time. There would never be enough time for what was happening to me. But Leigh was talking about art galleries, about paint on canvases, not the paint on my wrists. I wished that I hadn’t washed it frantically away. I should have left it there so that she could have asked me about it, perhaps pressured me into explaining it to her. Now there was no evidence of what had happened. She was never going to ask me anything.
The pages of the phone book relaxed, floating down to rest, slightly bent after her frenzied flip through them. And then suddenly, angrily, she crumpled the pages under her fingers, balling up them in her fists. When she let go, they stuck up stiffly from the rest of the phone book, wrinkled and torn in places. She looked at them for a moment, and then seized the book, raised it above her head, and threw it. It landed with a loud thump on the floor at our feet.
“Are you okay, Leigh?” I asked timidly.
She looked at me as though she had forgotten I was there. I knew there were dark circles underneath her bloodshot eyes even though she had makeup on to cover them up. She was staring at me, and I stared back, making direct eye contact with her. Talk to me. You know what’s wrong with Cadence. Can’t you see what’s happening to me, Leigh?
Shakily, she leaned over to pick up the phone book. The look of a child
was framed in her eyes, a child too old to have a temper tantrum, who was embarrassed that she had let go and had one anyway. No, she couldn’t see what was happening to me, not at all.
“I’m sorry, Sphinxie,” she said, and her voice was crackling in her throat like dry leaves, blowing away in a cold November wind, while her mouth trembled at the edges.
I forgive you, I thought, my throat stinging with a sudden lump. She was apologizing for throwing the book on the ground, not for being blind, not for hiding the truth. But it was easier if I pretended she knew what she should be sorry for. And if I thought I forgive you, over and over, maybe it too would become believable, like the calmness in my voice. I would be able to swallow it.
“I just … I can’t believe I have to say that, no one should have to say that about their own child,” Leigh continued, putting the phone book down on the counter. “That there isn’t enough time. There should be enough time for everyone, you know?”
“Yeah,” I said, so quietly I almost couldn’t hear myself. “Yeah, there should be.”
Awkwardly, I moved to hug her; I wanted to comfort her, and I wanted a mother to hold me, even if she didn’t understand what was happening. She was an awful lot taller than me, making me feel more babyish than I should have. I felt like I was intruding into her private space, and I looked up at her, trying to discern if this hug was making things worse or better for the two of us. Her soft, moist blue eyes locked onto mine.
“See, it’s that,” she said, shaking her head back and forth. “It’s that. I keep thinking if I had more time, I might see that in him.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, confused.
“Just your eyes,” she said, still shaking her head. “You’re looking at me, and I’m looking at your eyes, and I can see that you know that I’m upset, and you understand, and you can feel what I’m feeling … you understand, because you can feel it too.” She took a ragged breath, wiped her eyes on the back of her hand, and patted my back lamely, in an effort to resume her position as the grown-up — more collected, in control. The control only lasted a moment before she fell again.