by Trisha Cull
Roadkill.
Everything has a reason, a root. For a long time I stopped believing in God, but I’ve come to believe again.
Part of my problem is an inability to decipher truth from lies, to get my teeth into something and hold on the way life requires you to hold on, to settle into my skin and breathe, like a robin settling into her nest on a warm spring day. I can’t get a foothold.
My wings are trembling.
The sky is too big.
This branch is weak.
This morning, I pass by Leigh without saying a word, careful not to touch anything, and he is careful not to touch me too. I open the fridge and guzzle back a litre of orange juice.
Sometimes I don’t eat all day, can’t figure out what to eat in replacement of meat. Salads require so much work. Cutting up vegetables is tedious. I hate vegetables anyway. Sometimes I eat fish, but that’s all.
In the evenings, I buffer the hunger with booze, numb the pain and disappear. Pouring alcohol into an empty stomach is like pouring bleach into a basement. The mornings after nights like this, I wake up bleached out, anaesthetized, bloodless.
Climbing the stairs to Fiona’s office is exhausting. “Your body is probably in shock,” she says. “I can’t help you until you stop drinking.”
Fiona, I can’t stop drinking until you help me.
I close my eyes and see my uncle hanging from a noose in Grandma’s garage last year, can’t imagine what maternal inkling made her go out back in the nick of time, open the door and find him there, what supernatural force flooded her seventy-nine-year-old frame and instilled her with the strength to hoist him up and get him down, to save him.
Just now, my mother sits across from me in a slippery plastic swivel chair on the Spirit of Vancouver Island and says something I’ll never forget. Sunlight streams through the windows, glares off the white surface of the table between us. Seagulls hang in currents of wind beyond the glass, their wings spanned, their beaks opening and closing in seagull-talk but no sound coming out. The words leave her body and brand themselves into my heart.
Depression runs in my family.
My sister Tammy has severe anxiety issues. My brother Sean positions all of the cans in his cupboards so the labels face outward. My sister Sandy lives a few blocks away from me. She polishes each individual apple from the tree in her backyard.
The seagulls open and close their mouths, no sound, just sunlight and waves and the vessel slowing as it enters the islands.
“I don’t know if I can do this anymore,” my mother says, and I know what she means.
I can’t believe this is me. I don’t want to believe this is me.
“You are actively suicidal,” Fiona says. I balk at this summation of my psyche. Her conclusion seems melodramatic. I have, after all, only been thinking about it. Thinking about it doesn’t make you suicidal. “How would you do it?” she says.
“Pills,” I say. It’s a no-brainer. I don’t understand why anyone would deliberately inflict more pain upon themselves than necessary. Why make such a mess? Why not just go to sleep?
“On a scale of one to ten, one being you’re nowhere near, and ten being you’re ready to do it now,” she says, “how close are you?”
Her scale raises an interesting question. If I were a one I wouldn’t be in therapy, and if I were a ten I’d already be dead. So for all intents and purposes, the scale is a paradox. “Five,” I say.
She asks me how the medication is working. I tell her I feel tired and foggy, but that this is preferable to the gut-wrenching pain. I consider telling her I’ve been having Technicolor dreams—blue lightning bolts shooting from my fingertips, like the Emperor in Star Wars. “I want you to check in with your doctor,” she says.
So I go see Dr. Pastorovic; she increases my dosage and refers me back to Fiona. This goes on for a while, this back-and-forth scenario.
Fiona speaks to me in gentle tones, but doesn’t put up with any shit either. When I tell her I feel like at any moment I could fall off the edge of a cliff, she asks me to locate this feeling. “Groundless,” I say.
“But how do you feel?” she says. I find it difficult to describe my feelings without the buffer of metaphor. Like a bird. Like the earth is slipping out from under me. Like I’m falling. I have cultivated an intellectual existence, but I have the emotional integrity of a ten-year-old. “Mad, glad, sad or scared?” Fiona says.
“Scared?” I suggest.
Several years back: Linden is on her tiptoes, leaning over the bathroom sink in the cabin at Two Coves Resort. Her head is in my hands. Woodsmoke in the air: sap and pine. Dust burning off the base heater against the wall. The air in this cabin is dank, coppery. The toilet water has not moved in months. The boys are by the fireplace threading popcorn onto a string. In a moment, Logan will flail a stick and burn Grant’s neck, scar him for life perhaps. Leigh will shout obtusely, ineffectually, “Jesus Christ!” But they won’t care. He only sees his kids every other Sunday and on special holidays.
Linden’s hair is so long it gets sucked down the drain. I cannot manage this delicate relationship of soap and water and hair; it is up to me to keep this child from going blind; it is up to me to make her clean. I resent this process. I resent this child for being a child who does not fully comprehend my ability to resent her. I resent her for not loving me and making me whole. “Is the water too hot?” I say.
“No, it’s good,” she says, eager to please, already learning to be compliant and willing like good girls are expected to be. I lather her hair, gaze upon her tanned neck, a freckle.
The first time I met her, she came up just above my knee, thudded along the steep path from the beach, her sandals kicking up clouds of dust, the thin straps of her yellow sundress falling off her shoulders to expose the slender tan lines beneath. “This is fun,” she said. “What’s your name?”
Now, she strains higher on her tiptoes, lets out a gasp, her gut compressed against the counter. “Lean in more,” I say.
She is a tiny drowned creature in my hands.
She prematurely wears her mother’s hoop earrings these days, and Gap jeans and clunky shoes. I hear her shiny bracelets jingle as she taps on the bedroom door and whispers, “Aren’t you awake yet?” I smell ham and onions, burnt eggs. I hear Leigh’s silly banter, cartoons. I want to kill Spongebob Squarepants.
Blue sky bleeds through the olive-green curtains. Gateau is terrorizing swallows in the lilac tree next door; their chirping is inflicted with urgency. It reminds me of the chatter that echoes from the cliffs overlooking China Beach when the small birds scatter every time an eagle swoops by, how they drive the solitary creature from the cliffs, and the eagle glides complacently onward until it disappears in the mist and gloaming above the treetops.
My stepson Grant, the oldest boy, strums his blue electric guitar in the spare room with the lights out, doesn’t speak unless spoken to, has become infatuated with Led Zeppelin, scoffs at my love of John Denver. He is kind and sensitive, has the tender reserve of a monk. I worry about him sometimes.
Logan is bright and mischievous, needs a lot of attention. Just now he torments Linden, calls her ugly and stupid. She screams in terror; she is too old for these antics, has no self-soothing abilities.
“Why did you stop eating meat?” he says.
“I don’t like the way they treat animals,” I say.
“But you still eat eggs, right?”
“Yes,” I reply.
I’m twenty-two years old. My best friend Kay sits next to me on the ferry. Her hands lie folded on her belly, caressing the slight curve protruding beneath her Kurt Cobain T-shirt. My hand rests on her belly too. I have friendship bracelets on both of my wrists—aqua blue and fuchsia threads, silky strings woven into tapestry. These are our three hands resting upon the life inside; this is the closest this kid will get to experiencing the world outside.<
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Kay’s blown her student loan money to buy the RX-7, and I’m bulimic and fucking up everything. We drink a lot and get high sometimes. Kay’s face is angular, thin and freckled. She looks like a young Meryl Streep with red hair. “Holy shit, I think I felt it kick,” she says. I’m sort of in love with Kay in a non-sexual way. She isn’t traditionally pretty, but I love her hair and slender body, and her studded leather belts and choice of T-shirts, for being the cool, unaffected girl I’ve always wanted to be. Maybe I even love the baby inside her. You have to go the mainland to get an abortion this far along. “Can you feel it?” she says.
Her flesh feels thick and hot in the sunlight, and it occurs to me I’ve never touched a woman like this before, never been so intimate. “No,” I say. “I don’t feel anything.”
Later that night, we sit on my mom’s porch overlooking the park. In the distance, the lake gleams in moonlight. Willows sway on the shore. I hear ducks paddling across the surface, and every so often the squeak of wings followed by a long threshing as a duck skids across the surface and halts to a landing. Then a quack or two, then nothing as its feet find rhythm under water. “It’s not too late to change your mind,” I say. The sky is black and starry but glows white above the far side of the lake where the shopping mall parking lot begins, and beyond that is a faint reddish glow from the neon cross on the spire of the church adjacent to the mall.
“I know,” she says, and a mother raccoon and three babies scurry across the yard.
“You’ve lost weight,” Fiona says. “How extraordinary.” She is careful with her semantics, a skill honed from years of clinical practice.
“I no longer eat meat,” I say.
“Oh?” she says.
“I think I’m feeling better.”
I have no explanation for what comes next except to say that inevitably change happens this way. After seven years of perpetual hangovers, I wake up one morning and say, “Leigh, I’m never going to drink again,” and even though this is the millionth time I’ve said it, this time I stop. For now anyway.
I start taking my pills one at a time, eat breakfast every day and even take up Bikram yoga: hot yoga.
At my first yoga class the teacher, Wendy, walks me into the studio where they all lie flat on their backs in the Savasana position, everyone’s feet facing the same direction—this is yoga etiquette; it is considered an insult to point your feet at the teacher. She leads me to a vacant space, unfolds my mat, whispers, “Did you bring a towel?”
“Yes,” I say, my voice booming. “Yes,” I whisper. But mine is a hand towel, and everyone else is lying on full-size bath towels. I lay my tiny white towel on my blue mat; it floats in the middle of the thin foam like an upside-down stamp floating in a blue sea.
“You’ll need something bigger,” Wendy smiles. “You’re going to sweat…a lot.”
Damn, I think. The impulse to berate myself surges, then subsides. But it’s okay. These blips in my judgment are part of my charm. I can forgive myself for this.
We begin by breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth, using our throats as a valve so the air moves slowly and deliberately in counts of six. We flex and arch and reach for the sky, moulding our bodies into half-moons and eagles and trees. In between each posture, Wendy tells us to relax in Savasana, the dead body pose—palms up, mouth slack—to let our feet fall open as our heels touch, to just breathe, to just be.
My sister Sandy and I sit in her backyard. The apple tree has begun to blossom. Every so often we hear the Tally-Ho horse carriage full of tourists dawdling along the next street over: the horse’s hooves clopping on asphalt and a man’s voice on a microphone fading as the trolley turns into Beacon Hill Park.
“Do you still polish each individual apple?” I say.
She laughs. “Yeah, so? It’s just my thing.”
“My neighbour has an apple tree,” I say. “And a cat named Cake.”
“A cat named what?”
“Gateau,” I say. “Like French for cake.”
She rolls her eyes. “Could it be gatto? Like Italian for cat?”
I keep going, now with a big bathmat and two litres of water. I continue practising. You do not do yoga; you practise yoga. My muscles stretch, my core tightens, my legs grow stronger. It hurts and strains.
“A millimetre farther each time,” Wendy says. “Baby steps… wherever you are is where you’re meant to be.” So I pull on my heels and arch my back and let my palms fall open.
I am becoming the half-moon, the eagle, the tree.
I can feel the earth beneath my feet.
I breathe.
I drink rose petal tea, lean out my kitchen window and inhale the scent of life sprouting in the garden: geraniums, wisteria, clematis climbing up the fence, twirling around the lower branches of the plum tree.
Gatto blinks, sniffs the wind.
“I’m sorry, Gatto,” I say.
Ti amo. Ti amo. Ti amo.
The sign in the Thrifty’s produce section reads: Very ripe mangos should only be eaten naked in a bathtub. On the way home, Linden and I stop at Starbucks. I get a vanilla soy latte and say, “Sweetheart, you get whatever you want.”
We walk through the Ross Bay Cemetery, the bay sparkling in the distance through trees and rows of tombstones. Somewhere in here is Emily Carr. And Matthew Begbie, the Hanging Judge. On days like this I don’t mind walking among the dead. “Do you think you’re smart?” Linden says.
“Sure,” I say.
“What’s your favourite colour?”
“Blue.”
“What colour is my hair?”
“Brown.”
“What colour is the sky?”
“Blue.”
“What was the first question I asked you?”
“Do you think you’re smart?” I say, and she laughs, covers her mouth with her hands, her brown hair shimmering in sunlight. “I think you’re amazing,” I say.
I catch myself smiling, thinking about eating mangos in a bathtub.
We sit down on a bench. I hold a mango in my hands, watch the white sails drift past in the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Cherry blossoms float through the air. Every so often I see the bright colours of a spinnaker as a sailor jibes and changes course.
Is this the cloud lifting, these colours blooming against the blue sky? Is this the blue sky? Maybe I don’t need to know why.
My front teeth pierce through the surface, find an edge and pull the pink-green skin away from the fruit in broad sections. I bite down and take the flesh inside.
Journal
December 4, 2008
Something mysterious happened this morning as I jolted awake to find my husband dressing in the darkness. It had the weather of acute despair, hopelessness and guilt all tied up in one. It had this weather but it had no name or shape or weight. It is awful to wake into such a nameless weather, like waking up stillborn but also alive.
I saw that he was in great pain. He had bags under his eyes darker than I’ve ever seen before. He was emitting a new energy, and perhaps it was this energy, this aura of despair, that pulled me from my sleep so urgently. It occurred to me that his pain might be trumping my own.
How selfish have I been?
His hair was messy. He looked aged. I realized my husband had aged overnight.
He had slept in for the second day in a row. He was in a hurry and late for work. He had been drinking last night. He has been drinking every night as a matter of fact. I saw that my husband has been in pain for a long time. He has steadfastly been going to work without fail, all this time, every day, earning money, supporting me, taking care of me, making child support payments to his ex, working every day at his job, trying to deal with sick and crazy me, trying to retain some semblance of a relationship with his children. For years, I have been crucifying him for wanting something basic like a solid
ordinary life.
He turned to leave. I couldn’t bear it, so I called him back. I said, “Honey, are you okay? I’m worried about you.”
He said, “It’s okay, honey, I’m fine.”
I had to make things right, had to do something to ease the terrible despair that has now taken us both inside, had to do something about the hopelessness that I have dragged into this relationship. But what could I do?
I said, “Honey, come back. Give me a kiss.” And he did.
He was now dressed, had on his sweatpants, his hoody, black socks and white running shoes. He had bags under his eyes, had aged overnight and he’d just said he’s fine and have a good day. He came back to me, back to the bed, and he leaned down and he kissed me. His lips were warm and soft, but the man inside was sad. I felt that my husband had almost nothing left inside him as his lips pressed against my lips this morning. I felt his dead dreams in the pressure of his lips against mine.
And here’s the thing, the semblance of the truth, here’s one thing, not God, no, not God, but the closest semblance to that one true thing as anything can be:
All of this, all of it, is because of me.
December 14, 2008
I am in love with Ativan. I take too many. It knocks me out, dulls the pain.
Last night I fell asleep with my head resting on my arms on the computer desk for four hours solid. The other night (my sister howled with laughter when I told her this) I was lying on the couch in the bunny room, cuddling Marcello and eating chocolates. I fell asleep, woke up the next morning with melted chocolate drooling out of the corner of my mouth and the majority of a chocolate wedged against the roof of my mouth.
I am becoming an invalid.
December 21, 2008