by Karen Rivers
Her sadness drifted around her like a mermaid’s hair underwater, even while the whole time she smiled at me with artificially bright white teeth.
How could I be seeing that?
I both was and wasn’t. It was different than with Axel, where it was all crystal clear and obvious. This was like seeing someone’s thoughts through a fog, through glass covered with a film of steam. I couldn’t help squinting through the blur. It was like I had to see it, a compulsion, I couldn’t stop it.
It wasn’t right. It was supposed to be only Axel. Axel I could cope with. Axel was just me, only different. I didn’t want to know all this. Not strangers. Not Maman. I felt sick. Really sick. Carsick, like after a two-hour road trip on winding roads. Or seasick. Unstoppable nausea wrapped my throat in newsprint and made me throw up. The throwing up hurt my head, but that was okay.
As soon as I was done, a janitor pulled back the curtain and began swabbing the floor, thinking something along the lines of, This is a disgusting job, this is so disgusting, people are disgusting, I hope this ache in my head isn’t a brain tumour.
A dull green smear followed him in the air. If I looked closely, the smear was sticking to him like chewed gum on a shoe.
I mean, I could have misread it, it was so hazy. But I don’t think that I did.
My heart was racing, pounding like it was trying to get out of my chest, I swear I could feel it contract and release. The nurse was frowning. Your pressure is high, she said. How are you feeling?
But then I had to close my eyes because it was overwhelming to know everything, to see everything. It was like falling through space, too fat; too fast. It was dizzying.
I tried to think about songs. My song. I kept my eyes glued shut and repeated some lyrics over and over again in my head. My own lyrics. Absolutely, I repeated. Absolutely feeling like I absolutely know. Absolutely everything and still I absolutely go.
The words felt wrong, though. I felt like I was thinking in someone else’s language. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I must be dying. Because somehow it felt almost celestial, to see everything. It felt surreal to be so disconnected from myself.
And it also felt like the worst thing in the world. It was so much. Too much.
I don’t want to know, I said. I don’t want to do this.
Do what? said Maman. What is it, chere?
Nothing, I said. Eyes firmly shut. It’s nothing, Maman. I just have a headache. I have a really bad headache.
You have a concussion, said the nurse briskly. You’ll have a headache for a while. She’ll be moving upstairs to a ward, she added to Maman, like I wasn’t there or wouldn’t be able to absorb the information myself. We’ll keep her overnight for observation.
What happened? I asked finally. I can’t believe it took me so long to ask. Maybe I already sort of knew. I kept my eyes closed like I’d never open them again. Is anyone going to tell me what happened?
You fell, said Maman. Don’t you remember? You fell from Cake. He slipped. Do you forget it all? Do you forget the ambulance ride?
I don’t remember, I said. I just woke up here. I don’t remember any of it. Is Cake okay? Is he hurt?
He’s fine. Your brother is taking him home. He’s fine.
Oh, I said. I’m going to sleep now.
It wasn’t true, I knew I couldn’t possibly sleep, my heart thundering like galloping hooves on a track. I felt like I’d never sleep again. I just couldn’t look. Not at Maman, not at anyone. Especially not at Axel, who at that moment pushed back the curtains, saying, It stinks in here. Why do hospitals always have to stink? How is she? Is she sleeping?
She’s asleep, said Maman. She’s okay, she’s just tired.
I am tired, I thought. I am so tired. I don’t want this. Is it a gift? Is it a disease? Am I crazy? Why is this happening to me? I can understand it, with Axel. We’re part of the same person. We’re the same. But the nurse? The janitor? I don’t want that. I don’t.
I felt the cool smoothness of the worn hospital sheets under my fingers. Even though they were wrinkled and sweaty, I could find cool patches with my hands that felt like relief. I’ll never forget that. Maybe it sounds dumb, but the fact that they were cool and smooth made me feel okay. Like when I was a kid, I always used to keep a smooth beach rock in my pocket at school to rub when I felt worried or anxious. We both did. I think the rock was Dad’s idea. I guess we were pretty nervous when we were little.
I was still wearing my riding clothes but not my boots. My jodhpurs cut into my waist and felt sweaty and tight. I needed to use the bathroom but couldn’t figure out how to ask someone to help me up, show me the way.
I started to cry, but not enough that anyone noticed. I just knew that something very bad was happening, something out of my control. Out of anyone’s control. Axel and Maman didn’t know anything. How could I tell them? I mean, obviously I couldn’t. They’d have had me committed to a psychiatric ward or something. They would think that I’m nuts.
They just sat there, obliviously, and had a conversation in hushed tones about how lucky they are, how lucky I was to have survived, not broken anything, not snapped my neck. Axel was sitting on the bed and leaning on my leg. It hurt, but I didn’t move it. I didn’t want him to know I was awake.
After a while, I was moved upstairs, away from the noise and clutter of the emergency ward, which was better because there were fewer thoughts to avoid seeing.
When I finally slept, I dreamed about the trail I was riding when I fell. I dreamed about the leaves on the trees. I dreamed that I could see Cake and around him the snaking spiral of an ivy-leaf apology, so sorry so sorry so sorry for what he’s done to me.
It was my own fault. Not his.
I closed my eyes. He trusted me and I wasn’t even watching. I wasn’t even looking out for him.
I’ll never ride again. He deserves a better rider and ...
I’m scared. I’m scared of myself.
That’s what I decided, lying there. That’s what I was sure of.
I was wrong, of course, about never riding again. The horses had to be ridden. We have boarders and part of what the owners pay us for is to ride their horses every day. So I had to do it when I got home. Not on the first day. It was dumb, but on the first day I just stayed in bed with one of my old worry rocks in my hand and tried to remember how that used to make everything okay. This must be what people experience in panic attacks. But don’t they always say that they pass quickly? This wasn’t passing.
I was stuck.
The next day, I got up just like normal. I did my barn chores. But everything felt wonky. I felt wonky. Like when you have water in your ear and your balance is just slightly askew. I tried so hard to pretend everything was normal but it was like carrying something way too heavy and pretending that it was light. I pretended to be okay but I didn’t think anyone really bought it.
That evening, Wick was having a barbecue at his house. I went with Axel and Gigi but it was so much effort. Seeing Gigi especially. She thought too much. She thought constantly. Her thoughts were layered on top of one another so that the air around her looked like knitting, thick and woolly. I couldn’t stop staring even though I told myself I didn’t care. I didn’t like her thoughts, the way they looked was like the feel of Styrofoam against teeth. Ugly. *
All night, I felt like I was wading through mud, the thick mud of all those thoughts that I did and didn’t want to see. It was the push-pull that was confusing. Like I couldn’t look away. I wanted to ignore them but the thoughts were like magnets.
I guess that’s when I figured it out: until I knew what happened and how to fix it, I was going to have to avoid people. They were all well-meaning. It wasn’t that. It was just that I couldn’t deal. It was way too much. It was too much weight and I just couldn’t carry it after all.
Even with Sin.
Especially with Sin.
AXEL
Chapter 8
IT’S TOO HOT, really, to be working Detritus like th
is but Axel doesn’t care. It makes him feel good. And Det, being Det, is a good sport about it. Axel gets the feeling that Det would literally ride through fire if he asked him to do it. Det is about as loyal as an animal can get. He’ll keep working, that’s for sure, as long as Axel keeps demanding it.
Sweat trickles down his back. His shirt is clinging to him like a floppy layer of extra skin. When he’s riding, all the stuff that’s on his mind seems less heavy than it does when he’s not. Less intense. Like, for example, Gigi and her ... quirkiness. Quirkiness is a nice way of saying that she’s getting on his nerves and he doesn’t know what to do about it other than to avoid her. She seems to need so much from him, like they always have to be together and she puts so much pressure on everything, on every minute. Missed anniversary dates (who knew that a one-month anniversary was a big deal requiring gifts and cards?). Bursting into tears if things aren’t going her way. Staring at him forlornly if he, say, dives off the cliff at the lake with Des and Wick instead of sitting next to her on the blanket, staring at her. That’s what she likes. Sitting. Staring.
He’s starting to suspect she might be just wrong for him. But he can’t quite bring himself to do anything about it. It doesn’t help that she’s so cold about Zara. It doesn’t help that she says things like, She probably has a permanent head injury. Like brain damage. She’s probably permanently changed. She’ll never be the same again.
Just yesterday, she told him a long story about someone who was injured in a car crash who later murdered his parents. Gigi’s father is a psychiatrist, so she has endless access to stories like these. Stories that make Axel feel sick. Stories that make him feel so much worse than he would if he was just dealing with his own imagination.
Shut up, he wants to say to her. Stop talking.
But when she does stop talking, she’s in the habit of staring at him intensely. Saying she’s framing one of her endless photos that she rarely seems to actually take. The whole photography thing, when he first met her, sounded so cool. So artsy and creative. The way she went on about light and shadow. Then when she never actually took any pictures, well, hardly ever, he started to feel plain irritated by it. Then amused. He wanted to be able to poke Zara and roll his eyes and laugh. Which, when he thinks about it, is just all wrong anyway, to laugh at his girlfriend.
To want to make fun of her.
It’s just that, as hard as it is to admit, he simply doesn’t like her, yet he’s still apparently willing to make out with hen To touch her. To let her touch him. To let it go on and on. And on.
Which makes him an asshole, really, who deserves to have to put up with her thoughtless chatter about brain damage that’s freaking him the fuck out.
Zara doesn’t have brain damage. Zara is going to be okay. She’s just going through ... something.
He takes a deep breath and feels his heart beating hard in his chest. Anxiety. The exercise. Both. Riding is a good workout. That’s something most people don’t know. They think it’s just sitting on a horse. Well, it’s not like that at all, though the horse is working harder than he is, he can’t argue with that, around the ring, around again, and one more time, each jump cleared with a small margin to spare. Each time the horse thumps down again Axel feels a bit better, not that he feels right, just that he feels better. It’s like a drug, riding. To him, anyway.
Almost.
If only it could tune out all his intrusive thoughts. If only it could mute him.
But when he rides, he can’t stop thinking about Zara, who has been riding lately like it’s a horrible chore she can’t wait to be finished with. Leaving the barn sloppy, throwing her tack on the ground and not bothering to pick it up. Leaving it for him.
It makes him irrationally angry. He had, after all, sort of wanted her to quit, sort of wanted it to be his own thing. But not like this. She slumps in the saddle and eggs the horses on like all the pleasure has been squeezed out of the whole thing and left her limp and lifeless.
Worse, she’s stopped singing to the horses, something he didn’t much notice that she did until she stopped.
He misses her. Like, he really really misses her. They used to have fun, didn’t they? Not just riding, but everything. They used to hang out. They used to talk. Really talk. He never thought... couldn’t have imagined ... what this would be like. This not having access to his sister. This sisterlessness. This block between them.
If she ... if he could talk to her, she’d tell him that all this stuff with Gigi was crap. She’d help him, somehow, to break up with her and get on with his life. She’d make it easy.
But now he doesn’t have that. He doesn’t have her.
Well, merde, he thinks. He likes to swear in French. It sounds less like he’s really swearing. It sounds refined. Mon Dieu.
In the distance, he can see poor old Cake wandering around in his paddock, shielding himself from the August sun under the shade of the chestnut tree, its huge branches sprawling like a giant awning between the animal and the unrelenting heat. The ground is dry and dusty and Detritus is covered with dust. Axel is covered with dust, too, but he doesn’t care.
Next weekend is a big show weekend, the last really serious event before the national tryouts. He’ll travel there with Detritus but apparently without Zara, who said that she had “something else.” Like what? he wants to say, but doesn’t. Why can’t he say it? Why can’t he ask?
She’s never missed an event of his. Never.
He’s taking Cake, too, as his backup horse even though he’s rarely ridden him. Well, lately a bit more, out of sympathy for the poor beast. He’s a good horse, but Axel’s hoping it won’t come down to that. Det is feeling so good, it’s hard to imagine that anything could go wrong. Of course, Cake has been totally under-ridden, too. He’s going to get hopelessly out of shape, languishing the summer away in the shade, not working out.
When it had all first started, weeks ago now, right after Zara got home from the hospital, he cornered Maman in the home office and tried to get her to talk about Zara’s lethargy. What he’s come to think of as her emptiness, almost. Like her body is there but it’s her ... something else. Her Zara-ness. It’s ... missing.
Which sounds idiotic, even to him, so maybe it’s a good thing that Maman just wouldn’t listen. Maybe he wouldn’t have been able to explain how he feels like she’s absent.
In any event, Maman was so busy with a problem with the dogs — someone had called and told her that a puppy they’d bought from her had developed dysplasia — so panicked. He couldn’t bring himself to somehow add more stress to that, to see her worry even more.
She’s fine, she kept saying. She’s fine. She’ll be fine. Give her time. Don’t be in such a rush. She’s okay.
Please, he’d thought. Help me, Maman. But he hadn’t said it, he’d just let her escape into her dog world.
This dog, she said. It can’t be right, the vet must be wrong. My dogs don’t get dysplasia.
Why didn’t she see that he needed to talk? The dogs, the dogs, the dogs.
I’m sure it’s just a mistake, he’d said.
He’d actually wanted to shout at her but then that would make him too much like Dad and he knew she didn’t need that. Bad enough when Dad does it. When Dad used to do it.
He’d made a mental note to try to ... to focus his concerns, to find some way to list them that didn’t sound nutty and vague and self-pitying. To talk to Maman about Zara again some other time when he could articulate it better. And that other time hasn’t come up. Maman is busy, he is busy, she is out or he is. He’ll wait. Wait his turn. After all the attention she gives the dogs and Dad, even when he’s not here, somewhere maybe she has a scrap left for the twins. Beyond being mad, if he thinks about it too closely, it makes him almost painfully sad. Like they’re not kids anymore, like they’re not worth looking after, because, if they were, then Dad would be here and Maman would be listening.
He kicks the horse up into a canter and holds himself ramrod straight in the
saddle. He can feel his abdominal muscles clenching. Rippling. I’m strong, he reminds himself. I’m ripped.
A car honks on the street below the ring and Detritus kicks out, bucks a bit. It takes Axel a minute to calm him down. His back clenches like the muscles are being ripped apart. The pain startles him. Lately it seems like something always hurts.
Embarrassing as it is, he’s actually crying. Not that anyone can see him, but still. Get it together, he tells himself fiercely. Grow up. Zara can take care of herself.
He slows Detritus down and slumps forward in the saddle to release the tension in his back. Stands up in the stirrups. Stretches.
Detritus pulls forward on his bit, shaking his head, and Axel tries to force himself to concentrate on his ride.
Yesterday, Sin called him and in hushed tones announced that she thought Zara was on drugs. Well, that’s ridiculous. Obviously she’d never do that. He hasn’t looked through her room yet for evidence. He will. But he knows it’s not true. He has a flash of her lying on the ground, the way he saw her after the fall. The way she was swarmed with wasps. It was those wasps, he thinks.
Then he thinks, That’s stupid. It wasn’t real. There were no wasps.
Were there?
He shakes his head as though the wasps are buzzing in his face, for real. Brushes at the air. He can’t do this. Can’t be worrying about his sister so much. He has to concentrate on the upcoming show, on his horse, on himself. It’s serious, there are serious stakes.
This morning at breakfast, Maman said, Dad is coming home tonight for a while, for a little while.
For some reason, this brought him up short. Maybe it was the “little while.” Maybe it was the smashing inside his head of the conflicting cymbals of “Oh, good” and “Oh, no.” What does he want, anyway? Isn’t he too old to even really need a dad? Yet usually Axel likes it when he’s home, no matter how much of an ass he is. But this time it feels like an intrusion. Maybe it’s because he’s so busy himself. Maybe it’s because he knows it will make Zara even more weird and uncomfortable. Distant. Maybe, just maybe, he’s finally over Dad and all the crap that Dad has dragged through their lives all these years.