Song to the Moon (Damnatio Memoriae Book 2)

by Laura Giebfried

  “Is it?” He eyed me carefully, a frown forming over his eyes. “Are you still taking the pills?”

  “Of course I am. It's not like I have a choice.”

  They doled the medication out in little cups every morning and night and watched me swallow them down. The third month that I was in the facility I started to hide them beneath my tongue and spit them out when I got back to my room because they made me so nauseated; when the nurses had finally caught on, Fisker had begun giving the medication in weekly injections instead until I was deemed trustworthy again.

  Karl hummed quietly to himself.

  “Of course. Only, given the way you've been acting, they don't seem to be working.”

  “It's not my appetite – the food's just terrible here,” I said. “Worse than Bickerby, even.”

  “I'm sure it is. Only, no one else seems to have any trouble eating.”

  I narrowed my eyes at his patronizing tone.

  “Whatever, Karl. It's not like I expect you to believe me.”

  “I'm just worried, Enim – you're looking thin again.”

  “I've always been thin.”

  “You're looking gaunt, then. And that's not all: the nurses say you toss and turn during the night, and your roommate says you talk in your sleep.” He gave me a pointed look. “He says you constantly say, 'burying her.'”

  I shifted uncomfortably.

  “So?”

  “So if you're having nightmares about your mother again, then I think that you need to discuss it with Dr. Graves –”

  “I'm not dreaming of my mother.”

  “Enim, you're saying, 'burying her.' What other meaning could that possibly have?”

  My face twitched on its own accord, but I managed to right it almost immediately afterwards. The nightmares that had returned were not of my mother.

  “I'm not having nightmares, and I don't talk in my sleep,” I said, “except to tell him to stop snoring.”

  Karl hardly looked convinced.

  “They also say you've been listening to your opera music more and more.”

  “So? I like opera. And it's not like there's anything else to do around here, unless you want me to start making crafts out of popsicle sticks.”

  Karl's eyes shifted over my face.

  “They say it's always the same song,” he said.

  I shrugged. Admittedly, I had been listening to the song from Rusalka more and more lately, but I hardly expected Karl to understand the meaning behind it; he had no idea what it was like to miss someone the way that I missed Jack, and the song was the only thing that eased some of the tightness in my chest.

  “It might be,” I said when he continued to stare at me. “It's not a big deal.”

  “It is a big deal,” Karl snapped. “A very big one. You know how your mother was with that song from Turandot – she listened to it repeatedly until it drove her insane!”

  “No, she listened to it repeatedly because she was insane,” I said. “Big difference.”

  “You can't really maintain that there are no similarities, can you, Enim?” Karl asked, his voice dropping back down. “She was obsessed with that opera by the end of it – I don't want that to be the case with you, too.”

  “Well, it won't be. I'm not obsessed.”

  “You say that, but you listen to the song just as incessantly.”

  “They're completely different operas, though.”

  “But the practice is the same.”

  “Not really. Mom was obsessed with Turandot's ending; mine actually has one.” I looked at him steadily, but I wasn't even certain that I cared if he believed me anymore. “And I don't listen to it because I think there's some hidden meaning or whatever, I listen to it because it's my favorite and I couldn't listen to it for the past few years because she only ever played Nessum Dorma.”

  Karl sighed and dropped his head a bit, shutting his eyes as though hoping to block out my flattened tone or the image of me sitting there in the too-white shirt and lace-less shoes beneath the fluorescent lights. He seemed torn between what he wanted to believe and what he couldn't, and I knew that no amount of arguing would ever allow him to see my point.

  “I just worry, Enim. I know you can't see it, but the similarities between you two are clearly there.”

  “No, they're not.”

  “They are, Enim – blatantly so.”

  “Forgive me for not taking your word for it, Karl,” I said coldly, “but considering how little you know about both of us, I really don't trust your opinion.”

  “I think I've gotten to know you fairly well, Enim,” he said quietly. “And I knew your mother better than you'd like to remember.”

  He paused for a moment to see if I would answer, but when I continued to look off to the side he ran his tongue over his lips and tried again.

  “You know, I took her to see Turandot once,” he said.

  “What?”

  My neck cracked as I looked back at him, though I hardly registered the pain. My mother and I had always planned to see the opera together; I remembered her telling me after I had learned the aria perfectly on the piano, and then several more times when she told me the story at bedtime. It was supposed to have been our reward for when we figured out the ending that Puccini had intended, and knowing that she had seen it already – not even with my father, but with Karl – made my throat burn.

  “When?”

  “I ... it was four years ago, approximately. It was playing in the city, and ...”

  “And I was in school, and my father was away?”

  Karl shook his head.

  “I have never maintained that I did the right thing, Enim. But I won’t say it was wrong, either.”

  I didn’t answer. The idea that she and Karl had gone to see the opera together was inexcusable – not just for him, but for her as well. She had seen it years before I had been old enough to go, I knew, eliciting her obsession with the story, but had not gone since because of the reworked ending. We had intended to get up and leave at the point that the opera broke off, leaving the rest of the audience with the faux ending while we delighted in the real one. Knowing that she had let the promise linger for years between us when she had already broken it, dangling it in front of me constantly as she repeatedly asked me to think up the ending, struck me in a way that I couldn’t describe.

  “What I’m trying to say, Enim, is that no matter how much you resent it, I witnessed quite a bit more of her relationship with the illness than you did. The opera haunted her; voices haunted her. She was barely well enough to leave the house most days –”

  “Which didn’t stop you from taking her out, I see.”

  “Stop it, Enim – that was before. Or when it wasn’t as bad, maybe. It’s a complicated thing, as I’m sure you’ve figured out, and she seemed perfectly fine sometimes. She loved that opera: I wanted her to see it.”

  “You wanted her to see it with you,” I said. “Never mind if she wanted to see it with someone else.”

  “Your father wanted her to have nothing to do with it. And – yes – I wanted to go with her. I wanted to share it with her. She was important to me.”

  “She shouldn’t have been.”

  Karl breathed in deeply, rubbing the bridge of his nose as he tried not to diverge into another lost argument.

  “What I’m trying to say, Enim, is that I knew all about her plans to figure out the ending. I know how she used to listen to the song and find hidden meanings in it that she supposed were just for her, and her theory that it was her purpose to solve the final, greatest riddle of all. I know. I saw it. I probably took part in it, however intentional or unintentional that it was. She was more certain of her role in figuring out the opera than she was in anything else. But that’s all that it was: certainty. There was no proof outside of her head, and anyone who heard her explanations couldn’t make sense of them. Certainty isn’t factuality.”

  “So you just came here to rehash that you had an affair, and to mock me
because you think you knew her better?” I asked.

  “I’m not trying to do either, Enim. I’m telling this to you so that – because I hope that you’ll understand what you're doing. Listening to that music won't help you with anything: it's only allowing you to block out the real world and push aside what really happened at Bickerby and replace it with delusions. And I know that you can’t help it, but the doctors say that the medication should allow you to reason with your thoughts and see them for what they really are.”

  I crossed my arms. Karl leaned in closer.

  “Enim, can you see my point?”

  “That I’m delusional? Isn’t that always your point?”

  He sighed.

  “No, I’m just asking you to think harder – to try harder – to separate rational thoughts from irrational ones. Please.”

  “I can separate them, Karl,” I said, looking back at him but not unlocking my arms. “I know what’s real and what’s not, and I know what happened and what didn’t, and just because you don't believe me doesn't mean it's not true.”

  “Enim, please. Whatever you’re thinking, please just ... let it go.”

  “I can’t.”

  He gazed at me for a long while, willing me to change my mind.

  “Enim, I know that it’s difficult for you to see right now, but these thoughts can be dangerous. You’ll start with something meaningless and entertaining, but you’ll just keep going until things get out of hand. Look what happened last semester –”

  “I know what happened with Beringer,” I cut in forcefully.

  “You think you know what happened.”

  I bore my eyes into his despite wishing to look away.

  “I was there,” I said. “I was the only one there – not you or Fisker or Graves – and I know what happened.”

  Karl sighed and shook his head, finally recognizing that he was getting nowhere.

  “Where do you want your mail sent?” he asked after a moment.

  “What?”

  “Your mail. Now that you're not under conservatorship, it won't be forwarded to your father. Where do you want it sent?”

  I looked over him briefly and gave a half-shrug.

  “I don't care.”

  “Of course not. Unfortunately, the postal service does, so where do you want it sent?”

  He waited several moments for me to respond, his brow furrowing a bit farther as he did so, but I pretended not to notice as I picked an imaginary piece of lint off of my pants.

  “Have it sent here.”

  “Here?” He looked at me disbelievingly. “No, Enim, you need to give them a permanent address.”

  “Right, so here's good.”

  “You won't be here forever, Enim. You don't have to be – you can leave any time that you want.”

  I shrugged. Having their permission had hardly changed a thing.

  “Have it sent here,” I repeated.

  Karl sighed.

  “Enim … why don't I have it sent to my apartment?” he said.

  “What would be the point in that?”

  “I could bring it to you and help you sort it out – teach you how to pay your bills and take charge of your finances and whatnot.” He looked at me imploringly. “And if you decide to leave, you could … you could come and stay with me.”

  I waited several minutes before responding.

  “Have it sent here.”

  His eyes fell to the floor, but when he spoke his voice was the same.

  “Alright. I'll have it sent here.”

  He pushed his chair back and readied to leave, tucking his tie back as he stood, and out of the corner of my eye I caught the drawn expression that had come over his face. As he made his way to the door, I made a note of the time: it was only quarter-past the hour.

  “Wait,” I said, stopping him before he stepped out into the hallway. “Can you stay a bit longer?”

  He paused in surprise.

  “Why?”

  I chewed the sides of my mouth before answering.

  “I don't want to go to group therapy.”

  His mouth twitched in an unfamiliar way, but the scoffing sound that escaped it was all-too well-known. He looked at me steadily and shook his head with a tiredness that had nothing to do with a lack of sleep.

  “I'll see you in a few days, Enim.”

  From the window I could see him crossing to the parking lot and getting into his car, straightening his tie as he went. It didn’t matter to him whether or not I was right, only that I would continue to be an extension of who my mother had been and someone that he could work towards fixing. I shook my head as his car pulled up the street, and despite disagreeing with everything that I had heard, something in his words had shaken me.

  The nurse returned shortly after he had left to bring me to the group session. She situated the wheelchair in the last remaining spot in the circle of chairs directly across from Graves. He was listening intently as one of the other patients went on about her myriad of mundane struggles, blubbering and sobbing into her sleeves as she went, and didn't look over to me for a good ten minutes until she was done.

  “I'm glad that you could join us, Enim,” he said with one of his friendly smiles.

  “That makes one of us.”

  The smile tightened in place as he fought to maintain it, and he looked around the room to ask if anyone else had anything to share rather than continue to look at me. I leaned back in the wheelchair, absently scratching at the rubber covering the handle, and tried to block out the irritating voices all around me.

  When the meeting had finally drawn to a close, the nurse arrived to wheel me back to the activity room. I tried to shake her off by saying I wanted to walk but she ignored me and brought me down the hall. The leg injury had taken the last bit of freedom that the illness and hospital stint had already depleted, and regardless of what Fisker thought, the pain was a nuisance rather than a reminder.

  “Why don’t we sit you over here today?” she suggested in a light, embellished voice.

  She wheeled me over to a table covered in puzzles rather than to the window, and I was too lost in thought to protest before she had walked away. As I looked down at the assortment of yellow and black pieces scattered atop the wood, my expression deadened with the thought that I would no sooner put together the picture of the sunflower field than I would find Jack.

  And as I turned my head to the side to get it out of my sight, the thought of my mother standing at her bedroom window came to my mind instead. I could admit that Karl had been right that she looked for meaning in meaningless places and searched for answers to things that hadn’t been questions, but he had no understanding that what I was looking for was something real, and something tangible. Jack was somewhere out there: I just didn't know where.

  “Why don't you see if you can put a few together?” said one of the aides monitoring the room, taking notice of my lack of interest as he passed. He leaned over the table to find a few pieces that I could add to the edge that someone else had started and the smell of starched fabric and disinfectant wafted over me.

  I shut my eyes to bring back the image of Jack, trying futilely to imagine where he was over the border. I had never been to Canada and the landscape that I drew up to place him in was snow-covered and mountainous regardless of the fact that it was summer, but no amount of screwing up my face could make the picture more plausible.

  “Come on – just give it a try. It's not so difficult,” he said.

  “Yes, it is,” I muttered.

  As he moved away to check in on another patient, I stood from the wheelchair and circled around the table to limp to the door. The room was too small for the amount of people they crammed inside, and the longer I stayed there the more certain I was that I didn’t belong.

  I waited for the nod of approval before going out to the yard. The grass had grown dry from the heat and crunched beneath my boat shoes as I made my way to the fence to look out onto the street. Despite the brightness, t
he view had never looked grayer and the county that I had grown up in seemed no more familiar than the people all around me.

  Chewing the insides of my mouth, I tried to suppress the urge for a cigarette. Looking through the chain-links seemed to tear the space between me and Jack open a bit wider, and my desperation to find him and make things right again had brought back the uncharacteristic longing to breathe in the familiar scent that had plagued our dorm room for years.

  “You need one, honey?”

  The woman off to my left had noticed the way my eyes lingered on the smoke billowing up from her hand and approached me. Her hair was flat and thin despite being curly, and the color had faded to an unnatural reddish hue. She smiled as she offered me the pack.

  “Thanks.”

  I plucked one out and stared at it blankly. Despite the years that I had watched Jack smoke, I had never really determined how it was done. I held it in my hand for a long moment before realizing that she was waiting to light it, and I hesitantly brought it to my mouth so that she could do so. As the flame caught, I sucked my breath in and immediately gagged.

  The taste was far worse than the smell, and I had barely inhaled before my throat tightened in protest to what I was doing. I quickly turned my head under the pretense of blowing smoke in the other direction, but instead screwed up my face and tried not to cough.

  “No one brings them for you?” the woman asked, taking another drag of her own.

  I shook my head and raised the cigarette back to my mouth, inhaling more cautiously to allow the smoke to travel down my throat. Though untried, the taste was not unfamiliar and brought with it a warmth that spread beneath my skin. I held the breath in for a long time before exhaling heavily, letting my shoulders fall from their stiff position as I did so. For once, I felt relaxed.

  “My uncle would freak,” I told her.

  “He’s right to – it’s a bad habit.” She shook her head as she looked down at the stub that remained between her index and middle fingers. “It’ll kill you.”

  She dropped it to the ground and stomped it into the grass, streaking the green with grayish-blue. The smear that was left marked the indent where her foot had been.