Soon, I lifted the lighter and moved it, an inch closer to my elbow. I did it again. It felt like being pulled under by hungry waves. I did it again.
My mother staggered back.
I tried to keep watching her but could keep my eyes open for only a second before the pressure closed them. Still, in that second when I couldn’t see her, I saw her. It was as if she’d been struck from behind. Her neck was pushed a little bit forward, her face a little lifted, like she was about to cry out. And yet she didn’t. Her mouth was open in the tiniest o. If she’d let her voice burst, it would have made the sound of something huge crashing into an unfilled pool. Something unfamiliar, a little bit absurd.
But the thing was, there was dead silence. She should have screamed. She should have held me. She should have told me that everything would be all right. She should have raced for an ice cube. She should have cursed herself. She should have shared the story of why my name was Lorca, and that it was a beautiful name for someone like me. She should have. She should have. She should have. And yet, as I should have known by now, her doing any of that would have been the most unlikely, most alarming thing that could have happened. She never ever would.
She covered her face. “I see you,” she whispered. “Okay? Enough now.”
“Enough?” I said.
“I won’t stand here and watch you,” she said. “I won’t condone this kind of thing. So just stop. I don’t know what you want me to do.”
She reached for the doorknob and left, closing the door behind her silently, like she’d just put a child to sleep.
“Anything,” I said and the word ricocheted off the door.
I stayed in my room for hours. She didn’t come back in. I heard her turn on the TV, turn it off, put on her coat, drop her keys, and then pick them up. Go.
After that, I really couldn’t stop.
It’s impossible to know when enough is enough until it’s too much.
Victoria
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT was that I felt feverishly sorry for myself—and it didn’t end there. With every moment, I felt more entitled to feel sorry for myself, and so I did, until I couldn’t remember what I’d felt sorry about, and then it started all over again. I did dramatic things like huff and shake my head, cry out. I tossed and turned in bed and shoved my face into a pillow, sitting up only when I was left gasping for air. I listened to sad songs on the radio and wept until something cheerful came on and I felt embarrassed and inappropriate. I ordered in, didn’t wash dishes or change my socks. I had Joseph’s ashes delivered—they came in a giant cardboard box surrounded by lots of bubble wrap—and had the man put them into Joseph’s closet directly. I tipped him generously, as though it were hush money for my strange behavior. I locked the door so Dottie couldn’t even attempt to pop in. I did not think of Dottie and Joseph as a couple. I did not. I did not. I did not think of all the lies that grew between Joseph and myself, like mold under a house. I watched the snow from the kitchen window. I rested my head on the glass. Every once in a while, I thought of how dismissive I’d been to Lorca, how I might never see her again because of it. But rather than punish myself or—God forbid—actually do something about it, I felt sorrier still.
If I really wanted to reach the bottom of my sadness, I’d remind myself that all this was entirely moot. I could cry myself to death and no one would stop me. I could lie down and kick and scream until I hit my head on the radiator and knocked myself out. Out and out. It could have been Lorca who held my hand at the end, but now it wouldn’t be. Not ever. To make it even worse, I’d never been one to believe in the kind of loving that led to losing. Why had I tricked myself? I would have rather, if I’d had all my wits about me, kept my expectations to a minimum.
Days later, my buzzer rang. I hoped it was Lorca being braver than me. I gathered my bones and raced to the door. I buzzed her in. I would apologize first. There was no question about that. I should have made cookies, lit a candle, readied some tea, just in case. I should have tidied up. Still, things might turn around.
Instead, seconds later, a boy who merely looked like a girl was at my door.
“Have you seen Lorca?” he asked, out of breath. His cheeks were red, and his eyelashes thick and dark as spider legs. “Hi,” he said, as an afterthought.
It took me a second to process. Not Lorca. About Lorca. Come on, Victoria. Snap to.
“No,” I said. “Not since—” I began, but he was impatient and interrupted me. Young brain. Young love. It was obvious. His face was plump with young hope.
“When?” he asked.
I tried to count the days on my fingers. One day collapsed into the next. What was the difference? The difference was that each day I was a little less sure of which day it might actually be.
“Who are you?” I asked him.
I told him to come inside while I looked at a calendar, but he wouldn’t. He stood on the threshold, twitching in a thousand different ways, holding the door open and waiting for me. It made my heart race.
“Come in,” I said again. “You’re Blot.”
He nodded. I moved my finger through the calendar boxes, through the tiny closets of emotions that had been the past week.
“Five days,” I said finally, venturing a guess.
“What happened?” he said. “Something must have happened.”
“How much do you know?” I said.
He nodded again.
“I’m not her grandmother,” I said.
“Shit,” he said.
He was itchy, just standing there. Looking at me, looking at my feet.
“Are we going somewhere?” I asked him, knowing the answer. As I leaned down to shift my socks, Lorca’s face emerged as it was just before she’d left. I’d done something awful to her. I’d known that at the time. But I’d been beaten, exhausted. It was my excuse—and I’d reveled in having it. In having an excuse to have an excuse. I’d been selfish. Again.
Joseph was a giver. He’d minded the weaker ones. “That’s what you do,” he’d said. And not just with Dottie—though obvi- ously with Dottie too. He passed a tissue to a crier on the subway. He asked tourists if he could take their photo for them. He put trash where it belonged. And I—one thousand years old—was still afraid of what empathy might do to me, how it might weaken me, which was why I’d pushed Lorca away. And yet, how much weaker could I get? I wondered. How much stronger?
Lorca was a child, I told myself. It didn’t matter whose.
I put on my coat and gloves as this young man, Blot, stood there.
“I think she’s hurt,” he said.
Believe it or not, he helped me with my boots. Still, I’ve never moved like that. I had someplace to go. I moved. I surprised even myself.
We climbed into a van cab that smelled of spearmint. Salt made rings on the rubber floor mats. Blot buckled up. Feeling strangely important, I did too.
He told me about how they’d looked for the masgouf recipe together.
I told him about the restaurant.
He told me that she hadn’t been going to school.
I told him that she’d called it vacation.
He told me that they’d seen Dottie and me putting Joseph’s clothes on the street.
“What a first impression,” I said and he shrugged.
I told him, hating myself, that I’d ignored her until she went away because of something that wasn’t her fault but mine. And because of my pride. It didn’t feel any better admitting it out loud, but Blot just nodded and I was grateful for that.
I should have put it all together—the cut on her face, the too-long sleeves, the way she always sought her own shadow, as if afraid of shining through. But I was blinded with hope. At least, that’s what Blot said. He was trying to be nice. It didn’t help.
“Self-harm is what they call it,” he said, and I covered my mouth. “Self-abuse, self-mutilation, self-injury.”
The words made something funny happen to my skin.
I had to ask him to stop. I
was feeling weak.
“But how do you know that’s it?” I said. And just to hear the things I wanted to believe, I said, “Couldn’t she just be back in school now or studying or watching television? Maybe she doesn’t feel like talking.”
“No,” he said. “She bled on a book once. The scabs on her arms were like fireworks. I saw them. She said she had a cat.”
“She never told me about a cat,” I said, as if I knew everything about everything.
“Another time . . .” he said. “Well, never mind. You can just tell.”
“I know,” I said.
I knew nothing.
I’d read about it years ago. Back then, I couldn’t understand. It was during the Gulf War. What audacity, I’d thought, to hurt yourself for the hell of it. How about those death plows? How about being killed as your surrendering arms shook above your head? It was guilt I’d felt then, for the lives that I wasn’t living—but only for those who were worse off. It’s amazing how guilt doesn’t work in reverse and how empathy can be like walking a tightrope.
The cabdriver caught me in the rearview mirror. I was rubbing my lips to keep myself from crying.
“Are you sure you want me to come?” I said. I swear, I wasn’t looking for a compliment.
“You have to,” he said and left it at that.
Lorca lived in an ugly white building with too-small windows not far from our old restaurant. We made our way up the four steps to the buzzers. I gripped the handrail for dear life. Blot was scanning the names and corresponding numbers, wiping away snow just to see.
It had begun to hail and the wind was picking up, hurling the tiny pellets into our faces like it was some kind of nasty child flinging fistfuls of jacks. My legs were wobbly. My energy was waning. We were the only ones out. But the weather was the least of it. It wasn’t that I wanted to be home. I didn’t. I just didn’t know if I could bear rejection again.
“Do you have a plan?” he asked.
I gave him a face, like he must be joking. Hadn’t he been the one to come get me?
“What if she doesn’t want us to help?” I said, but as soon as the words came out of my mouth, I wished I could take them back. I knew the answer to my own question. “Never mind,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
Just then, a woman came out in a hurry. Her scarf was wrapped halfway up her face but she was unmistakable, her thick eyebrows, the part in her hair. Of course. The woman from the photo. I couldn’t move. And yet, I wanted to say something to her. She wasn’t my daughter, but I’d dreamed about her. For a little while, this woman had been everything. But she was moving very quickly. She was brisk, hardly one for chitchat. You could tell just by looking at her.
“Hey,” I said, surprising myself by catching the door. For a second, I held her gaze, but then I couldn’t. Her eyes were piercing, insulting without her saying a word. It was too much like trying not to blink during a sneeze. She was waiting for me but not really waiting. It made me lose my courage. I couldn’t imagine what we might find upstairs. Lorca’s mother was all ice. And Lorca, dear Lorca, wanted nothing more than to warm her. It’s so grossly unfunny, I thought, how self-satisfied a person can be. You’d miss your little girl, I wanted to say. You have no idea how much.
“Hold the door for an old lady,” I whispered instead, but she was already on her way. Blot held the door and held on to me as we went in from the cold. He checked the mailboxes. I realized that I didn’t know her last name.
“Goldberg / Seltzer,” he said. And then: “Ladies first. Up we go.”
We only half knocked. The door was unlocked.
The place was a mess, but only in a superficial sense. You could tell that someone kept things organized. The books were neatly stacked on shelves. The pots, the ones still hanging from the rack, were arranged by size. There were hooks by the front door for keys with a little note in silver marker that said Don’t forget me!
“Hello?” I said, all wheeze and breathlessness. “Lorca?”
There were two doors, both closed, in front of us, and a noise came from behind one. It certainly wasn’t an answer, more of a swish, and suddenly I was afraid we were in the wrong place. Someone could be waiting to attack. I turned to Blot but he continued to move us forward, pointing to a chair with Lorca’s hat on it, perched like a well-behaved raccoon.
“Oh,” I whispered. “Okay.”
Blot opened the door on the right, and then, as if having almost entered a girls’ bathroom and not wanting to make a scene, he moved out of the way. I went in. There was Lorca, on the other side of the bed, kneeling on the floor with her head bent forward and her braid like a spear pointed down her back. She didn’t look at us, didn’t move. I held on to the door frame to get on my tiptoes and see what she was doing over there. What was she doing? She was still.
Her hands were upturned and her elbows tight to her sides. With her like this, I could see how long her legs were, endless, even when folded like a horse’s. She wore hardly anything, just a yellow undershirt and loose-fitting shorts, though the window was wide open beside her. Sleet reached in and attached itself to her hair, catching a silvery light. She was shaking slightly. And her face, what little I could see of it, was colorless, like a dried-out plant.
“Hi,” I said quietly, afraid of what might happen if I made too much noise. The way she sat there, so delicate and yet so clearly loaded with pain, caused me to think of what it must be like to find a bomb: not wanting to get too close and yet desperate to get close enough. Great concentration just before a finale. Sometimes, I wondered what horror had happened in the living room where I’d grown up since we’d left Iraq. It was a different world now. I had dreams about a bomb being found there while I was sleeping on the roof. I imagined gore on the rug.
Then I said, “It’s all right,” inching toward her. She followed me with just her eyes but when I came around the side of her bed and I could really see her, she looked into her hands, as if I’d disturbed her from reading. Though her palms were very white indeed—so much so against the rest of her, red from cold, that they seemed incongruous, like a book or like two beached jellyfish found miles from the ocean just after a hurricane—her left hand was just a little bit cupped and held a pool of blood. The way she wasn’t moving but looking at it reminded me of a child carrying a dead bird.
I gasped.
The cuts were all over her arms. It looked like she’d been splattered with someone else’s death. It was impossible to imagine such violence from inside her, turned against her, like a rabid set of Russian dolls had occupied her belly. This room too, though bleak, seemed so unassuming. This happened elsewhere, I thought. So much gore, elsewhere. There was an eerie pattern to what she’d done to herself and I searched for some method to it, as if that would explain something, whatever she was trying to get at, what she was trying so desperately to open up. The lines on her arms were short and dark, as if very bitter, strict little mouths had crawled out of her and now refused to budge.
“Don’t look,” she whispered, her voice a ghost of itself, barely language. Still, she didn’t move.
“Here,” I said, picking up a blanket and wrapping it over her shoulders. Her skin was cold as glass. I didn’t know what to do with her hand. I just looked at it. If she moved, the blood would go everywhere. Then here was Blot. He took off his hat, a wool thing, lifted her hand, and put it inside. He put his coat over her legs, tucking it under her knees.
I could tell by her face that this wasn’t normal, even for her. She looked terrified. She was leaning on the wall just to stay up.
There were a million questions I wanted to ask her. But all of them, I realized, would have been for me. All I knew was that if I’d had a daughter, I wouldn’t have left her like this.
“Let’s go,” I said. Finally, I felt I was coming to. We helped her onto the bed. She didn’t protest at all. Blot arranged her feet and arms as I rummaged around in her drawers to find pants and sweaters. We tied a bra around her palm, using the little pad
ding as a sponge, and put the whole thing back in his hat. We bundled her up, her body only moving when we moved it. Her limbs felt loosely attached. Her neck, too, floppy as a hose.
It was while I was putting on her socks, running my fingers over thick, slug-like scars on the tops of her feet, that she finally said something. I thought she was about to scold; I shouldn’t have stared so.
“Okay,” she said instead. “Okay.” The sound was so gentle, as if she was trying to comfort me. For a second, I put her foot to my cheek. Only then did I feel the warm tears on my face. She was. She was comforting me too.
Blot carried her in his arms down the stairs, into a cab. He kept her on his lap. She kept her hand close to her, still in his hat. She was shoeless and her feet turned in, covered by two pairs of bulky socks. As the cab made its way, dodging squats of snow, she bobbed along as if all her blood had been drained and she’d been left weightless. She was a shadow in a storm.
I gave the driver my address, and Blot sat up straighter. “Hospital?” he whispered, but Lorca wasn’t stupid.
For just a second, she got hysterical. I put my hands on either side of her face. I promised her we’d do no such thing. I had a plan.
At home, I used the broom to tap on the ceiling.
Dottie, a million years ago, had been a nurse, a doctor’s assistant. She’d quit because an inheritance fell from the sky and she didn’t feel she was the working kind.
But when she walked into the apartment now, all purpose and charm (Blot had gone upstairs first to fill her in), it suddenly occurred to me that she might actually have been very good at her job. And it was a shame, for more than one reason, that she so easily gave it up.
Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots Page 30