Daisy stared, confused. “He went home?”
“Before that?”
“He broke down. He collapsed.”
Rita nodded.
Daisy clicked her tongue in contempt. “You’re saying those two things are joined? Connected in my mind? I let him see me wrecked and helpless and shortly after he broke down and left. And I tied those things together and thought whoa, better not do that again. Who thinks like that?”
“Nobody actively thinks like that,” Rita said. “But certain primitive parts of your brain only know how to think like that.”
Daisy crossed her arms. “I’m not entirely on board with this, but I’m not entirely dismissing it, either.”
“It’s all food for thought. And not all of it will taste good.”
DAISY ALMOST CANCELLED her next session, weary of self-introspection and dreading what would be the next thing to emerge from the dirt. At the same time, she was fascinated by the process. And, she had to admit, she was feeling a shift deep within. Not a window shade snapping up to flood her with clarity, but a slow dawn made up of tiny insights. Things were shifting around in her head and heart and gut. Lining up. Matching edges. Nodding and thinking, Yes. I see. This feels strange but it makes sense.
She gathered her courage and her coffee and she went.
“Let’s talk about your dreams,” Rita said.
“Which ones?”
She turned a few pages. “Your dreams were of black nothingness. Or else you were vaginally consuming Erik to save him.”
Even the mention of the dream made Daisy squirm. “And?”
“When was the last time you had the black dream?”
“A long time ago, I guess.”
“When exactly, do you remember?”
She had to think hard. “I don’t think I’ve had it since the window broke.”
“When the window broke in the diner.”
“Yes.”
“And what happened?”
“I remembered watching James shoot the glass of the booth.”
From far away, the sound of smashing glass.
“Where you had just been,” Rita said.
Another window shattered. Closer.
“Yes.”
“What were you doing in there?”
Her fingers pulled at the fringe on the pillows. “I was with Erik.”
“What were you doing?”
“We were talking about the way we’d had sex the night before. Talking about love and us and everything. What are you getting at?” With a wooly snap, a strand of yarn pulled free in her fingers. She tucked it in a guilty fist.
“What did you tell him you wanted to do?”
Fuck him? she thought, and flinched. No. Something else. She’d been sitting in his lap. Straddling his lap, in fact. He had half an erection and his eyes were dripping lust. The previous night’s memories clung like perfume to her skin and all she wanted was to…
“I wanted to ditch the rehearsal and leave,” she said. “I wanted to go back to bed with him.”
Behind her head the window exploded. A roar of icy wind and a tempest of snowflakes from inside the shattered globe.
“Oh my God,” she said. Her hands flew to her mouth. Through the blizzard her mind screamed the impossible.
“It’s impossible,” she said, but even as the impassioned words left her, her body was telling another story. She was shaking now. Her bones rattled.
I left him.
A splintering sound in her head.
“What happened in the booth, Daisy?”
“I wanted to take him out,” she said. “But then I left…”
A slow motion cracking. Daisy threaded her hands through her hair and started to pull.
“I left him in there,” she said, her voice rising up shrill. Of its own accord her head turned, twisting back over her shoulder.
James raised his arm and shot the glass.
(Erik Erik Erik Erik Erik Erik.)
“I left him in there. I left him and then I watched James shoot out the windows.”
“Did you think he had been killed?” Rita asked. “Do you remember thinking anything when you saw the windows breaking?”
Her head tipped back and forth. “I could have saved him,” she said. “I could have saved us. All I had to do was… If only I had gone with that impulse. I… We would have been out of the theater. Far away from it all and I wouldn’t have been shot and I wouldn’t have broken…”
But she did break. Broke and shattered into a thousand razor shards. Erik didn’t even look back after she aimed, fired and blew their love to smithereens.
He just left.
“No, I left him,” she said. “I left him first.” She dissolved into weeping, endless tears streaming from her eyes and mouth and nose. Endless. It was endless. She would sit on this couch and cry for the rest of her life.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Rita said softly. “You had no control over what happened that day.”
“But what about the other days,” she cried. “Those belong to me, those are mine and I can’t do this anymore.”
“Can’t do what?”
“I walked away from Erik when I should’ve stayed. And I stayed with David when I should’ve walked away. That’s my big revelation, now what am I supposed to do with it? Tell me. What does it change? Nothing. I can’t stand this, Rita. It was easier to cut myself. It was sick, yes, but it accomplished something. Cutting into how I feel, digging into the psychological dirt doesn’t do anything. Nothing’s changed. It still hurts so much and I still need him to know I’m sorry.”
“Of course,” Rita said. “It’s difficult to be unresolved.”
“I would do anything, anything but… What am I supposed to do? I was stupid and weak and I cracked. I let him down. I never let anyone down in my life. I’ve always been there, I’ve always been strong. But I was shot.”
She cried hard, terrible sobs from her knees into her palms. Tears from the years gone by. Tears from future years she had yet to get through. The pores of her skin wept with her, wailed and pleaded to be torn and rent with grief, to let the blood flow with her tears.
“I hate what I did. I hate myself for what I did. I fucked up, I admit it. I’m not denying it or hiding it or making excuses. I’m trying to face him but he won’t open the door. I was shot and I fell apart and I fucked up and I’m sorry.”
She slumped, tattered and wrecked, a dozen balled-up clumps of tissue at her feet.
“It makes no difference how sorry I am,” she said. “That’s what kills me. It makes no difference. I can’t do anything about what I did except be sorry and want him to come back. Every day I whisper it inside my head or out loud when no one is listening. It’s what I chant inside when I want to cut myself. Every day I wake up with a man who loves me, and yet I’m reaching out to Erik and thinking, Come back to me, please come back…”
AS USUAL, JOHN WAS AT THE APARTMENT when she got home. Curled up under the quilt, napping. And as usual, his arm folded it back for her.
She sat on the bed. Her eyes ached. Her heart pulsed with a pain she didn’t think was possible to feel, let alone endure.
I can’t do this anymore.
You have to. If you don’t get up, everyone else falls down.
No. I don’t have to. I don’t have to get up at all. For anyone. Erik doesn’t care. Why should I?
“Honey,” John whispered.
A single sob cracked out of her chest, bounced off the walls as her mouth clamped down tight.
A creak of bedsprings as he scooted over and curved his body around hers at the edge of the bed. His hand soft on her back.
“I know it sucks,” he said. “I know how bad it hurts.”
You know nothing, she thought, trembling with the effort not to cry. She was angry he was there and hated herself for it. Because he cared more than Erik did.
“Tell me, Dais,” he said, stroking her back. “Tell me what happened.”
“It’s hard,” she said. “It�
��s hard having so little to give you. Feeling like I have nothing but the scraps of myself on my best days. And then coming home from my sessions so shredded and raw. And you want me to tell you, but it’s nothing but him. It’s him, John. And Lancaster. And glass. In my bones and my skin and I can’t get it out. I don’t know how you can stay here and watch this. Day after day, you give me your heart and your soul and get next to nothing in return. I honestly don’t know how or why you stay.”
She sank her face into her hands, curved and curled like an ampersand of misery.
“If I want to leave, you’ll be the first to know, Dais. And we’ll have something called a conversation about it.”
“I’m sorry,” she said to her palms. “I’m…lost and flailing and if you weren’t here I’d probably be slicing my skin right now. I’m sorry. You wanted to know and that’s how I feel. I’m sorry. I’m no better than I was a couple months ago. But I’m glad you’re here. And…I’m sorry.”
“I’m gonna get you some water,” he said. “Be right back. Take your shoes off.”
Face still buried, she heeled off her shoes. Then she drank the water John brought, icy and numbing against her battered, abused throat.
“I go around with either a lump in my throat or a knot in my chest,” she said. “Like my heart is slowly being ripped out of my ribcage. Sometimes I wonder if I have cancer… Or if I’ll end up with cancer. This perpetual hurting. How much damage is it doing, how many years am I taking off my life with this kind of constant stress?”
“It’s poison,” he said, curled around her again. “It hurts coming out. The hardest thing to do is let it hurt. Let it get worse before it gets better.”
She forced her eyes not to roll as she set the glass down on the bedside table. One more platitude of recovery and she would scream the building down to its girders.
“Tell me what you dug up today,” he said. “Show me. Same way you showed me the glass once. You take away its power, remember?”
She took a deep breath and tried to pick out the salient points and string them together. The guilty responsibility implanted in her subconscious as she watched James shoot out the windows of the booth. Thinking if only she had acted on a spontaneous, sexual impulse, she and Erik wouldn’t have been in the theater. How the thought had been suppressed and buried for all these years, save for an inexplicable need to save Erik while they were making love. How the broken diner window had somehow unleashed it all again.
“It’s crazy,” she said. “On one hand, I don’t believe it. I can’t wrap my mind around the idea. It makes no sense, it seems too convenient. Too pat and contrived. And yet, when Rita and I put it all together, I couldn’t stop crying. Part of me recognizes it as the truth. It’s what happened and I believe it. God, you must think I’m nuts.”
John’s hand had kept up a steady stroke along her back. Winding his wrist around the length of her hair and letting it fall through his fingers. He listened like an expert—not interrupting or interjecting, only humming to show he was with her.
A long moment of exhausted silence then. Outside, the city sang its incessant song. The clang of tires driving across metal plates, the trumpet of car horns and the dull, rumbling roar underneath it all. Daisy slowly became aware of the apartment being a single hexagon cell in the hive of her building. And the building being one of dozens in her block. Hundreds in her neighborhood. Millions of windows looking down on the noisy streets. Millions of stories behind those windows all making a collective rumble.
How you could feel so lonely and misunderstood in the midst of all those buzzing lives.
“Hey,” John said.
She looked down at him. His handsome, loving gaze staring up at her. He hadn’t laughed or dismissed her. Or tried to put his own spin on her pain. She laid her hand on his face.
“I love you,” she said. “I’m sorry I’m so out of my mind.”
His hand circled her wrist. “Can I tell you something now? Come here, honey. Lie down.”
She fell onto her side, pushed her shoulders up against his chest. Let him cover her up and hold her.
“Do you remember,” he said. “After James dropped you in rehearsal? The day I ran into you and him on the stairs?”
She nodded.
“And I threw my dick around a little and got him in that armlock against the wall?”
“Did Will teach you how to do that?”
“No, Erik did.”
She turned her head back a little. “He did?”
“Yeah. I don’t think you knew about the secret army of brothers keeping an eye on you after the incident. Will and David, naturally, but Neil Martinez, too. And me. Fish talked to each of us, asking to keep an eye out for trouble. He didn’t want James anywhere near you. When he talked to me, he said something like, ‘I don’t care what you do. Rough him up if you need to.’ And I was like, ‘Dude, he’s a freakin’ dancer, not a street thug. Jesus, artists don’t get violent, we get dramatic. Anyway, I don’t know the first thing about roughing people up. What, you want me to grand jeté into his face?’
“So he showed me a couple moves, taught me how to punch. I remember wondering who taught him that kind of shit if he didn’t have a father.”
“Will,” Daisy said. “He went to taekwondo classes with Will.”
“Ah. Anyway, I figured I’d never need it. But then I did. Or rather, I didn’t need to do what I did but I… I was just…”
She rolled over to face him. “Tell me.”
“I was in love with you,” he said. “At the same time I loved Fish like a brother. My own brother always kept his distance from me. I know my being a dancer embarrassed him. It was nothing like the abuse James suffered but still. I never felt like Tom had my back when I was taking crap from the jocks at school. He sure as shit never took the time to show me how to fight. So when Erik, someone I admired, took me aside and gave me, one, his trust with the thing he loved most and two, the means to fight for you if I had to… It meant a lot. It felt big-brotherish. It soothed my ego. It helped me reconcile being a dancer with being a man or whatever. Anyway, when I came across you and James on the stairs, I didn’t have to do what I did. It wasn’t necessary. He wasn’t gonna hurt you. He was such a sorry-ass mess by that point. But it was you. And it was the job Fish gave me. And to be honest, it felt really fucking good.”
The tiniest trembling was coming from under his clothes. She put her cheek against his chest and listened to the hard beat under his ribs.
“So after you left…”
“What happened?”
“Well he kind of shoved me off, shrugged his jacket and his pride back into place. He was like Judd Nelson in The Breakfast Club. He said, ‘Check out little Opie. I think I might actually have a hard-on.’ I was high on testosterone by then, I can’t remember what I said. He was like, ‘She’s out of your league, kid. It was a nice rescue attempt but you’ll never fuck her.’ Then he was trying to get under my skin, implying he had an idea of what you were like in bed.”
“What…?”
“Oh, stupid shit. ‘You know I slept a couple nights at Jay Street. Holy shit, you should hear how Fish makes her scream. She’s a handful in the sack, bet she gets her legs around him in ways you can’t imagine.’”
“He never slept at Jay Street,” she said.
“He was just trying to get his pride back,” he said. “I see it now. I could’ve helped.”
“No, you couldn’t,” she whispered.
“Maybe not help, but I could’ve been decent. Been the bigger man. I could’ve walked away, I could’ve done the right thing. Instead I got up in his face and said ‘At least I didn’t piss my art away.’ Then of course I had to twist the knife a little. ‘Where you gonna go with this on your transcript? Think Marie or Kees is gonna write you a glowing letter of recommendation? I’ll be dancing your role in Who Cares? in a couple of weeks. You’ll be applying to community college back in Pittsburgh. Won’t that be fun? Living at home, dodging your old man
and taking care of your poor, drunk mother…’”
He sighed, his heart kicking up under Daisy’s face. “That’s the shit I had to wrestle out of my soul in therapy. Feeling like I’d helped put James over the edge. Like I’d driven a couple of nails into the coffin of what he’d done to his life and I had a part in what happened next. Because when the shots went off and I was in the wing with Lucky… I had her tight under me and I looked out across the stage and saw you lying there in the blood. This frozen second where James was standing over you with the gun in his hand.”
“John,” she whispered.
“I thought he killed you. All I could think was I’m sorry, Fish. You trusted me. I wasn’t supposed to let this happen, I was supposed to be guarding her. Instead I made her a target and now she’s dead.”
She was crying then. A relieved river of validation pouring out of her eyes and nose and throat. She wound her arms up around his neck, pulled herself into him and clung hard.
“You gotta know it makes sense to me,” he said, holding her tight, pressing her head to his shoulder. “What you’re doing and what you’re feeling and pulling out of your guts. It makes sense to me. I can deal with you thinking it makes you unlovable because I’m gonna love you anyway. But you gotta know, please know it doesn’t make you a mystery to me. Don’t be afraid to tell me how you think you could have done something to keep it from happening because I get it. You have no idea how much I get it.”
He held her. Rocked her until she quieted. His hands ran cool over her flushed face and dry, burning eyes.
“Feels like you have a little fever,” he said. “Want me to get you some Tylenol?”
“No. Hold me. Don’t go away.”
He gathered her close.
“Thank you,” she said. “For being here when I got home tonight.”
“I’ll be wherever you need me to be.”
And it was clear to her then, how John was always where she needed him. Stepping in to dance when James left her partnerless. Showing up to protect her on the stairs. Coming out of nowhere to call her name on a random day. Waiting at the stage door of the Met to see her home. Pulling her out from under a table. Forcing her sliced skin into the light of day. And having the guts to call for help.
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