White Lines

by Jennifer Banash

  “Anyway, the more we got to know each other, the more I started to realize she was seriously screwed up. I mean, she’d cut herself all the time for no reason, just gouge her skin with a razor every time she got angry or sad. It got to the point where I was scared to fight with her, or even just disagree about a movie or some dumb bullshit without worrying that she’d hurt herself.”

  I watch his face as he fumbles for the words to explain. I hold my drink very still in my hands, cupping them around the cold glass as if it can somehow magically warm them.

  “By this time we were sleeping together, and I wanted out even though I was worried that she’d freak if I broke up with her. I couldn’t help her, and she didn’t want to tell her parents or see a shrink or anything. But I didn’t know what else to do, you know?” He holds his hands out in front of him in exasperation, confusion and anger distorting his features. “She started following me around everywhere, trailing my every move as if she was afraid I’d disappear if she let me out of her sight. I could barely breathe anymore, so I told her it was over, that she had to let me go. A few nights later her father found her passed out on the bathroom floor. She’d taken a bottle of her mother’s Valium and carved my name into her leg with a razor blade.” Julian is practically whispering now, and I lean forward so I can hear him. “Her parents sent her away somewhere, some hospital upstate,” he says, bitterness coloring his voice. “I don’t know where.”

  “Shit,” I breathe, not sure of what to say or how to comfort him. I slide down onto the couch next to him, my feet tentatively touching his leg. “Are you OK, now? I mean, I know that’s probably a dumb question, but . . .”

  Julian laughs, a short bark that bounces off the walls, utterly mirthless. “I don’t know,” he mutters, looking away. “I feel responsible, like I could’ve done something different, like I could’ve saved her.”

  “From what?”

  “Herself.” Julian looks back at me, and the shame and intensity in his eyes burn through me. I feel dizzy, like I’m going to pass out, and I force myself to keep breathing, Sara’s words echoing in my head like a skipping record.

  Sooner or later you’re going to end up in the goddamn hospital. Or the morgue.

  I need to keep talking, to move away from these awful thoughts crowding my head, leave behind that image of my own gray, bloodless face, limbs splayed out against the cold slab, eyes fixed uncomprehendingly on the ceiling.

  “Do you miss her?”

  “I don’t know.” He lets out a sigh, his narrow shoulders shaking. “It’s more like I miss the way she used to be before she got so screwed up, you know? When we first started seeing each other, she was happy. And I was, too. I miss that. That feeling. I haven’t felt that way since, well—until now.” He takes a deep breath and looks at me, his eyes watery with unshed tears. “I like the way I feel around you,” he says softly. “You make me feel like things are going to be all right for some reason.”

  “I don’t know why,” I say, my emotions caught in my throat in a large, unwieldy ball of stopped-up tears and hopefulness. “I mean, I have no idea why you like me.” I swallow hard, looking away. “I’m probably just as screwed up as your ex-girlfriend.”

  “You don’t need anything from me,” he says, looking at me until I meet his gaze. I can see the hurt and disappointment so clearly, the part of him that doesn’t want to trust anyone again. “You seem so, I don’t know . . . contained. Like you don’t need anyone at all.”

  Before I can answer, he pulls me to him and his lips find mine once again, the room dissolving around us in a crimson swirl, his words turning around in my brain over and over, the absurdity of them. If Julian knew how vulnerable I really am inside, where no one can see it, he’d walk out my front door right now and never look back. It’s easier to pretend that you need nothing and no one, that you’re an island surrounded by miles of water, uninhabitable, than it is to let your real feelings out where they can be trampled on. Sometimes I wish I were made of something impermeable and hard like wood or metal. Something that would keep the core of me locked away, encased in a thick, glittering shell.

  Julian slowly pushes me down on the couch, stretching his long body over mine, kissing me deeply, my hands pulling him closer, his strong, wiry body under my palms. His fingers, tangled in my hair, begin traveling slowly down my torso, reaching beneath my T-shirt and gently pulling away the soft cotton. But at the feel of his warm hands on my bare stomach, the rush of cool air on my skin, I freeze, my body going rigid as a metal ruler. This is too much, too real. The shock of his hands on my skin, the exposed underbelly, the softest bits I never let anyone close enough to touch. My mother’s smile as she pulled a leg from beneath the covers at night, pinching the skin of my calf in her tight fingers. You belong to me.

  I feel as if I’m drowning under the weight of Julian’s body, so comforting and delicious a moment before. I push him away, my thoughts spinning out of control. Too much, too close, they shriek, drowning out the music, the noise of the street outside my windows, Julian himself, who is looking at me and speaking, his mouth moving soundlessly. I cannot hear a word he’s saying. The blood pounding in my ears erases everything.

  “I can’t do this,” I say, sitting up. “You need to leave.”

  The urge to be completely alone comes over me in a vast wave, the need to sit by myself in my empty apartment, the refrigerator humming maniacally in the silence. Right now my apartment feels about as big as a cubicle, crowded with heat and flesh and a kind of emotional messiness that I can’t seem to decipher, written in a language I don’t understand.

  “What did I do?” he asks, clearly worried. “Cat, talk to me!”

  “Nothing,” I say, standing up, crossing my arms over my chest. “I’m not ready for this.” The room is moving rapidly. Things are speeding up, and all I want is for him to leave me alone. “I told you that day on Eighth Street.”

  “I know,” he starts, walking toward me, “but then you asked me up here, so I thought—”

  “I don’t care what you thought,” I say, and the look that comes over his face as the words leave my lips is enough to break what’s left of my heart. Still, I can’t seem to stop myself, even as I know I’m ruining everything, even as I can see it all slipping away from me. “You need to go.”

  Julian’s face is alive with anger, his eyes steaming as he pulls his leather jacket on roughly.

  “You and I both know this is bullshit,” he says in a low voice. “And I know that what happened here tonight was real—even if you won’t admit it.”

  He stares at me for a long, uncomfortable moment that makes me wish I could disappear before he walks to the door, slamming it loudly behind him.

  As the silence grows in his absence, I begin to breathe normally again, my heart slowing. But along with relief, what I feel most of all is a potent combination of sadness and disappointment—disappointment in myself for chickening out, for making him leave when all I really wanted was for him to stay. I sit back down on the couch, one foot kicking over Julian’s empty glass, which shatters against the wood floor, the fragments sparkling like crystal. As I bend to pick them up, I cut my finger on a long, sickle-shaped piece of glass, red blood bubbling up to the surface of my skin. And when the tears begin to stream from my eyes, it’s not only from the pain in my finger, sharp and smarting, but at my inability to connect, to live my life in any other emotional state except fear mixed with detachment. As I cry, I put my finger in my mouth, sucking on it to stop the bleeding. Julian’s hurt and confused face rises up in my mind until I am seized by the overwhelming desire to feel nothing, nothing at all anymore.

  I walk into the bedroom, rummage for the blue velvet coat I wore to the club a few nights ago, fingers searching for the plastic baggie at the bottom of the front pocket. I pull out a large rock of cocaine, breathing a sigh of relief as I dump it onto my bedside table, chopping it into fine pieces with an American Express card I find there next to the phone, my mother’s name
printed in raised letters along the bottom. After the first line disappears up my nose, I feel markedly better, the powder shimmering in my bloodstream like a million tiny lights, the familiar, bitter taste of baby aspirin dripping down the back of my throat.

  I look over at my closet, at the bustle of tulle and brightly colored satin sticking out from the open door, and feel the club pulling me closer. I get up and grab the first thing I see, a gold skirt embroidered with tiny sequins like stars. I hold the rough material up against my body, a bandage, a tourniquet, the taste of blood suspended in my mouth like an iron curtain.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  EIGHT A.M. AND I’M STILL WIDE AWAKE, pacing the floor of my apartment as if I’m trapped here, the walls closing in around me. I’ve already called school and told them I have a migraine, which I’m sure will put me in detention for the rest of my natural life, if not get me expelled completely. I sniff hard, looking into the mirror, paranoid that the residue from the coke I’ve been snorting for most of the previous evening has crusted around my nostrils. My eyes are bloodshot and ache in their sockets. I stare longingly at my bed reflected in the glass, the soft pillows urging me to collapse on top of them and rest. I would give anything to lie down and sleep until next week, falling into a land of oblivion without thoughts or dreams. Sleeping Beauty lying motionless in a glass coffin, trapped for eternity until a kiss set her free, blue eyes blinking open in sudden light, a face as blank and empty as a plastic doll’s. I think of Christoph’s face as he leaned toward me last night, whispering in my ear. You are so beautiful . . . That sense of danger as his arm slid up the length of my own and up to my face, cupping my cheek in his hand, holding my breath until he released me. Unlike Christoph, I don’t see any beauty reflected in the mirror this morning. I see a pair of bulging red eyes and a nose that is moist, pink, and twitchy as a rabbit’s.

  The coke still in my system has made sleep an impossibility, and the four walls of my apartment stare down on me malevolently, crowding me in. I throw off my gold skirt and top and pull on a pair of leggings and a long black sweater, stuff my feet into boots and grab my leather jacket, the zippers glinting cruelly in the morning light. I search the detritus on the couch until I find my backpack, pulling a Sony Walkman from one of its bulging pockets and checking to see if there’s a tape inside. As I make my way down the stairs of my building, shoving the headphones over my ears, I don’t know where I’m going, just that I need to move fast, to walk through the maze of the city streets until I’m lost, then found, then lost again. I walk through the East Village, past groups of NYU students hurrying to classes, past the Rastafarians on street corners selling incense and T-shirts embossed with Bob Marley’s likeness, and down Eighth Street, turning left at Sixth Avenue. When I reach the subway, I don’t hesitate as I duck inside. The A train is just pulling into the station, and before I know what I’m doing, I’m aboard, the silver doors closing behind me, a voice squawking authoritatively over the loudspeaker: “This is a downtown A train to Far Rockaway. Please stand clear of the closing doors . . .”

  The stations flash by and I sink onto a bench, grateful to find an empty seat during morning rush hour. My head feels heavy on my neck, and my eyes dart around the car, unable to settle on anything in particular. As we move through Manhattan, into Brooklyn and beyond, the car begins to empty out. The train comes up into the light aboveground as we enter Queens, the view out the windows displaying rows of tightly spaced, single-family homes in red brick or covered in aluminum siding. At the next-to-last stop I get off, the train almost empty now. As the doors close behind me, I stand on the platform for a moment, breathing in the cold air. I walk down the flight of metal stairs and onto the street. I’ve done this walk so many times, I could perform it in my sleep. The pavement is hard under my feet, and I’m grateful for one thing that feels substantial right now. Crowds of people shove by me in a hurry, the noise of traffic deadened by the music in my ears, the singer warbling in a tuneless monotone about a black planet, a black world.

  When I reach the nursing home, I’m annoyed to see the front of the building has been tagged, white paint marring the redbrick exterior in a series of unidentifiable squiggles. I push through the glass doors and step into the lobby, my cheeks red from the cold and the exertion of the walk. The walls are painted a wretched shade of green that could only be called institutional. It falls somewhere between lime and mint, and makes everyone look awful, even if they haven’t been up all night hoovering drugs.

  “Well, hello, stranger! Long time no see.”

  Mary, the plump black nurse behind the desk, smiles up at me, a pencil stuck behind one ear, her mass of braids falling over one shoulder. Her soft Jamaican accent is so soothing that I want to put my head down on her desk until she pats me on the head like a child. She smells of Chanel No. 5 and baby powder. A red scarf is knotted jauntily at her neck today, the color illuminating her brown skin.

  “No school today?” Her forehead is creased, her eyes narrowing.

  I shake my head, mumbling “Uh-uh” as I reach for the pen, my hand shaking.

  “Is she up there?” I nod toward the ceiling.

  “And just where else would she be?” Mary laughs good-naturedly, her voice filling the air with a throaty richness.

  I blush, rolling my eyes in embarrassment.

  “OK to go up?” I point at the clipboard, my signature a meaningless scrawl on the white paper. At least I’ve managed that much for today, I think, as tiredness begins creeping slowly into my bones.

  “Yes, yes,” Mary clucks, waving me through. “Go on up there now. And give the lady my best, you hear?”

  I nod and walk toward the elevators.

  Outside my grandmother’s room I stop for a moment and smooth my hair back from my face, aware that it is matted and tangled from last night. When I enter, she is sitting propped up in bed, three fat pillows behind her back. The walls are covered in framed pictures of me at every age—newborn in her arms, at my christening, a floppy white dress hiding my small, pudgy legs. There are photos of her and my grandfather when they were first married, a mink coat draped around her shoulders, snapshots of my grandfather young and handsome in his army uniform, medals glinting on his chest. There are no pictures of my mother anywhere in the room. It’s as if she has been erased entirely.

  As I reach the bed, her eyes open, clouded by cataracts. Her eyes move restlessly, sensing my presence in the small space. Her arms extending from her pink satin nightgown are bony and frail, marked by prominent veins, and her hair frames her face in a cloud of white, her skin deeply lined around the mouth and eyes.

  “Who’s that?” Her voice trembles, and her eyes move from side to side, searching for that which she can no longer see. No matter how many surgeries she’s endured, the cataracts grow back with a vengeance.

  “It’s me, Nana.” I sit down on the bed beside her, taking her warm hand in my own. She smells of Ivory soap and Shalimar, of home and safety, and I close my eyes, breathing deeply.

  “Who’s me?” she says, chuckling, squeezing my hand.

  “Caitlin. Your granddaughter?”

  “Oh, yes,” she says happily. “Caitlin.”

  These moments of clarity are happening less and less frequently as the months pass by, and I sigh loudly in relief, reaching up to smooth her hair back from her face. Today she recognizes me, if only for an instant, and that’s enough for now.

  “Did you eat breakfast?” I ask, searching the room for the empty tray.

  My grandmother looks at me, a mischievous expression on her face, although her eyes are unfocused.

  “I cheated,” she says, her voice dropping to a whisper. “I had prunes, but I hid them under the napkin! They’ll never find them there!”

  Her tone is triumphant, and I smile, glad to see that she’s taking little rebellions wherever she can. It means that her spirit is still mostly intact, that she’s still fighting.

  “How’s school?” she asks, patting my hand as if I’m t
he one in the hospital bed needing to be consoled.

  “Not so great.” My voice breaks a little, and I blink back tears. Something in my chest folds in on itself, breaks free, and I long to just rest my head in her lap and sleep.

  A confused expression distorts her face, and she begins patting my hand quickly, more rhythmically.

  “There, there,” she murmurs. “You never did have a knack for schoolwork. You always had your head in the clouds, Diana.”

  I freeze, my body going rigid.

  Diana is my mother’s name.

  “Nana,” I say softly, afraid I will break down completely if I speak any louder, “it’s Caitlin.”

  No matter how many times this happens, I never get used to it, the unsettling feeling of being thrust into my mother’s skin, suffocating under the weight of her heavy perfume, her life itself. My grandmother’s love for me is the only sacred thing I possess, something that cannot be marred by time or history. She is so much a part of me that I don’t know where her frail body ends in this hospital bed and I begin. Her hand resting in mine is a mirror image of my own, the same long, slender fingers and olive skin.

  “I know who you are,” my grandmother snaps, dropping my hand and turning away, seemingly miffed. But I can tell by the way she stares defiantly at the ceiling that it isn’t true. I think of how terrifying that must be, to be having a whole conversation with someone who thinks they know you well enough to hold your hand, but whom you don’t recognize. I know from what her nurses have told me that these moments will begin to happen more and more frequently, that she will lose more of her memory with every passing day until she slips away from me for good, unable to recall my name or what I mean to her.

  Meant.

  Past tense, I tell myself over and over like a mantra, the words reverberating in my brain. Get used to it. But I can’t, don’t want to.

  “Where’s my nurse?” She looks around indignantly, her hands gripping the sheets white-knuckled. “Who are you?” she barks at me, staring in the space above my head. I recognize the note of hysteria creeping into her voice, and I get up, walk to the door and flag down a nurse at her station. The nurse has tired brown eyes, and it looks like someone has flung handfuls of what appears to be mashed peas at her blue scrub top.