by Nora Price
“How can you not have sent my letters?” I screamed.
No answer. I slapped the glass surface of the table with every ounce of strength, causing it to rattle menacingly.
“That’s why she hasn’t written me back.” Little black stars were scattering across my vision. “Not me. It has nothing to do with me. I hate this place. I hate it!”
“No, Zoe, that’s not why,” Alexandra soothed, her well-moisturized hands folded over one knee.
“Did you read them?” I pummeled my fists against the couch. “You read my letters. How dare you read my letters?”
“I did not read your letters.”
This was not happening. It could not be happening. I needed to sit down badly, but I would rather die than touch the wretched sofa again—the sofa where I’d sat, like an idiot, lapping up hours of Alexandra’s false empathy.
I melted to the floor, clutching my shoulders. Tears boiled forth. I rocked, trying to force air into my cramped lungs. Then I heard her voice again.
“You know why Elise hasn’t responded,” Alexandra said from a closer distance this time.
She came to kneel at my side.
“You didn’t send them,” I sobbed, rocking. “You didn’t send them.”
“Elise is dead, Zoe.”
“You didn’t send my letters.”
“It’s time for you to confront it.”
“You never sent my letters.”
“Elise is dead.”
“You—”
“Zoe.”
I was going under, I could feel it. There I went.
“Zoe.”
I sat very still, like a spoon suspended in Jell-O. Not thinking, just floating.
Alexandra stood above me, her face shimmering through the Jell-O distortion. There was no reason for me to break the surface.
I didn’t need to breathe.
[Day Thirty-Three]
Elise always said that there are two types of people in the world: people who lose things and people who break things. She was the kind of person who lost things—subway passes, pots of lip balm, glasses of water, English papers. I am the other kind of person.
Forty-eight hours ago, I finally learned why I’d been sent to this place.
I spent the remainder of that day in bed, watching shadows change shape against the wall. My door remained closed except for visits from Alexandra, who brought food at intervals but didn’t make me eat it. All day I hovered in some strange place between consciousness and unconsciousness, though I must have truly fallen asleep at some point because I woke up today to find that it was morning. The light that entered the bedroom had not woken me up. It was too pale and weak, and Devon hadn’t woken me up, either. Nobody else was awake, and I figured it had to be around six a.m. Sitting up, I immediately understood what had roused me. The pain originated in a hidden space behind my ear, the left one, and spidered out across my skull, pulsing coolly as it grasped. No, no, I said aloud, mainly to register that I wasn’t dreaming. There was no roommate to worry about waking with my moans; Caroline had been transferred to Jane’s room as soon as our confrontation was brought to Angela’s attention. I stood up experimentally. But this worsened the headache, so I got back in bed and waited. The room was silent. There was a knock on the door.
Then it opened. None of the doors at Twin Birch can be locked.
Alexandra knelt down beside the bed and put a hand on my arm.
When I didn’t verbally or physically respond, she stood, looked around for a seat, and settled on Caroline’s vacant bed. I followed the trajectory of a dust mote as it drifted to the bedspread in front of me.
“I think it would be a good idea to start talking again,” she said. Technically we’d skipped the previous day’s session, though Alexandra had been in and out of my room every hour. A session would have been pointless. I could barely breathe, much less talk.
“What time is it?” I asked.
“Eleven thirty, give or take.”
Later than I thought. Had I fallen asleep since waking up this morning? The rest of the girls were outside, gardening, hence the absolute quiet of the house. My headache was better, and I hoisted myself up to a sitting position.
“On April 22 of this year,” Alexandra began, “you experienced an extraordinarily tragic event.”
I found another dust mote to watch.
“Your best friend passed away.”
The mote fell.
“Zoe? Stay with me.”
Then she repeated what she had already said, and although I’d heard the words before, they still struck me as gibberish. As pure nonsense. It was like bending down to tie your shoes and finding gloves on your feet.
“What you’ve been experiencing,” Alexandra said, “are symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, Zoe. Numbness. Detachment. A lack of interest in daily activities.”
I wrapped my arms around my chest, pretending that they were stitches holding my body together.
“You’ve experienced significant memory loss,” Alexandra continued. “You’ve told me many things about your life during our sessions, but your stories abruptly drop off after a certain date. We’ve talked about nothing that has happened since April 8 of this year.”
“April 8?” I echoed. The date had no significance to me.
“The final snowstorm of the season.”
“Oh,” I said, my voice microscopic.
“According to her parents, that was the last time you saw Elise.”
“I can barely survive a week without her,” I said, straining to keep my voice from growing agitated. “But two months? Three months? That—”
“Zoe.”
Alexandra leaned over and picked a manila envelope up from my bedside table. I hadn’t noticed it before—had it been there when she entered?
“You haven’t opened it,” she observed quietly, gazing down at the packet. ZOE was written in plain letters at the top. Returning to her seat on Caroline’s bed, she slit open the envelope and pulled out a sheaf of white envelopes, then placed the whole bundle in front of me. I picked up the first and flipped it over. Elise Pope was centered neatly on the envelope in my handwriting, followed by her address in Brooklyn. I flipped over the next envelope and saw the same thing. I did not need to see them all to know that they were sealed. Elise hadn’t read a word. But still, Alexandra was wrong—her evidence was misleading. Elise hadn’t read my letters because Alexandra hadn’t sent them, not because she was—
“Hold on,” I said. I had a way to prove Alexandra wrong.
I leaned over the bed and felt around underneath for my notebook, which I opened to an earlier page. All I had to do was find my entries from April 8 onward and show them to Alexandra to prove that my memory was intact. How, after all, could I have simply deleted two months of time from my consciousness? Nobody can do that, even if they want to. Amnesia is not a condition that can be attained voluntarily. I paged urgently through the journal as Alexandra waited.
Then I stopped.
There was nothing. I reversed the pages and tried again, going backwards through June.
Nothing.
My entries from winter converged directly with my entries from June, when I had my first day at Twin Birch. Between the two periods, there was no evidence of time elapsing.
“Memory loss can happen,” Alexandra said, “after traumatic events. Perhaps it would help if we reconstruct the timeline of what happened. The memories will start to come back to you, Zoe.”
I was caught between two versions of reality and unsure of which to believe.
“If we re-create the timeline,” Alexandra continued, “you’ll be able to see the past more clearly. And you’ll be able to come to terms with it.”
“Okay,” I said softly.
Instead of starting at the beginning, we needed to start at the end.
“Elise died on April 22,” Alexandra said.
“Elise died,” I echoed, wishing I could erase the words as soon as they were out. How cou
ld I tell such a lie? Why was she making me do it?
“Do you remember when she left school?” Alexandra prodded.
I did not remember.
“April 11 was her last day. A Monday. She was hospitalized the following Friday.”
I did not believe these things, but without a record in my journal, I could not prove them wrong. There was no evidence. Nobody believes anything without evidence.
“If this all happened,” I said, my voice thread-thin, “how come I don’t know?”
“You do know. Try to remember.”
I squinted, as if trying to bring my thoughts into focus. The memories were elusive and shape-shifting; just when I thought that I’d grabbed hold of one, it ducked my grasp. But something small was coming back to me.
“I remember being alone,” I said.
“At school?”
“Yes.” The affirmation left a black taste in my mouth, as though I’d bitten into rubber. “It happened so quickly,” I said. “She was fine one day, and the next day she was not.”
She was always cold. Even when the snow melted and the spring bulbs flowered, she wore a winter coat. Her hands were yellow from lack of circulation.
“Her parents took her out of class,” I continued.
There were always hairs on her coat. Her hair was falling out. Strands drifted downward at the slightest movement of her head. Disembodied tangles appeared on her pillow every morning, and sometimes on the collar of her coat.
“She was so thin,” I said. “I couldn’t see her anymore.”
“Why not?”
I squeezed my eyes shut, casting into the void of my mind for an answer. When it came to me, I bent my head down and mumbled the words into my blanket.
“Can you repeat that, Zoe?”
No, I couldn’t. I couldn’t speak it out loud.
“You’re doing so well,” Alexandra intoned.
I lifted my head above the blanket. “I wasn’t allowed to see her.”
“Why not?”
I knew why.
“It was my fault.”
My head dropped forward like a door on a hinge, and I buried my face in the blanket again. It was wet now; I must have been crying.
“It wasn’t your fault that Elise died, Zoe. Do you hear me?”
Deeper I went, into the blanket.
“Do you hear me, Zoe?”
A hand on my back forced me back to the surface, where I shook my head No. No. I did not hear her. “I was the one who made Elise stop eating,” I said. “I made us both do it.”
“It’s not a matter of blame,” Alexandra said. “It’s far more complicated than that.”
But it wasn’t, not really.
“You might have influenced Elise,” Alexandra said, “but—”
“No one else did,” I interrupted.
“No one else did what?”
“Influenced her.”
I looked up. I was starting to see the way things were now, and if I stayed calm and kept breathing, I could explain it all to Alexandra.
“I was the only one who ever influenced her,” I said.
Alexandra waited patiently. She knew, I realized. She’d known all along exactly what I had done. The whole story was probably typed out in my file from day one.
That’s what Brooke had seen. That’s why she was afraid of me.
Apologies were useless now, and all I could do was confess. This time, I forced myself to look straight at Alexandra as the words exited my mouth.
When we were finished, she left me alone in my room.
[Day Thirty-Four]
The crying had a trajectory. First came bewildered crying, then came angry crying, and, finally, destitute crying. For one more day, I was bedbound, barely stirring except to see Alexandra and to attempt the plain meals that were brought to my room. By last night, I felt as though I’d expelled every ounce of water in my body through crying. I was certain that I was all dried up.
The next morning—today—I woke up and got out of bed. If I don’t get up today, I thought, I might never get up at all. So I slid my feet from beneath the covers, planted them on the floor, and got dressed.
The breakfast room was quieter than it was before, and I was confused to find that both Jane and Caroline were missing from the room. “Where did everyone go?” I asked Devon as I took my seat between Victoria and Haley. Only one of the tables had been set today. A lonely quiet had settled upon the dining room.
“Their session ended two days ago,” Devon explained. “Six weeks from the day they started.”
I dimly recalled what was written on the memo, though I hadn’t returned to it in days. If arrivals at Twin Birch were staggered, it made sense that departures would be staggered, too. I just hadn’t realized how little time was left to go.
“You okay?” Victoria asked. I was slumped in my chair, unable to resist gravity. Did she know what I had done? My body was weak from its lack of activity over the past few days. I looked at Victoria, dreading the idea that she knew the truth about me. If she did, how could she be my friend? How could anybody be my friend?
But she just smiled and cocked her head. “Why so sad? We’re almost outta this dump.”
Of course she didn’t know the truth. Why would she?
“Haley’s next,” Victoria continued. “This afternoon. Lucky girl.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“Easy. We leave in the order that we arrived. You must be last, poor thing.”
Of course. I nodded.
“Anyhow,” Victoria went on, “you didn’t miss much while you were sick.”
Sick. Had Alexandra provided that excuse for me?
“Not true. You missed one thing,” Haley said. “We’re allowed to choose whatever we want for our final meal. I asked for carrot cake pancakes.”
“Which is, of course, my least favorite item on the menu,” Victoria griped. “The marriage of vegetables and pancakes gives me morning sickness.”
I summoned a watery smile as Devon waved us over to the side table. It was odd, being in the dining room without the other girls—who, I wondered, was first to leave?
Since there were only the three of us, we didn’t have to take turns. I’d eaten very little over the past couple of days, and for once I welcomed the sweet, mellow pancakes without anticipating how awful they’d make me feel. As it turned out, they didn’t make me feel bad at all. Just full.
I sleepwalked through the rest of the day, catatonically helping Victoria and Haley prepare for their afternoon pickups. We emptied drawers and folded button-ups and jeans that no longer fit into nylon suitcases. Neither of them asked what was wrong with me—instead, they politely chalked it up to my “sickness” of the previous few days and didn’t get frustrated when I spaced out for minutes at a time. We collected and tossed out bottles of depleted shampoo and conditioner, leaving the bathroom counters depressingly bare. Victoria’s flight to New Orleans was going to leave in the early evening, and Haley was due to be picked up any minute for the long trip back to Arizona. When Haley’s parents’ silver Lexus charged up the driveway at three o’clock sharp, we hugged goodbye and promised to visit each other. I should have cried—Victoria did—but there was nothing left in me to come out.
After Haley’s departure, the house was as quiet as a tomb, and Victoria and I decided to spend the rest of the evening outside on the grass. Classes were suspended, but Devon checked in on us every hour to make sure that we were unharmed. The two of us lay still, staring up at the trees, not talking much but not sleeping either. Victoria must have sensed that something was up, and she wisely gave me the space to think about it. We sprawled quietly within inches of each other, combing our thoughts in solitude with the reassurance that we weren’t entirely alone. I zoned in and out of the present. Mostly out.
The spell was interrupted when Victoria’s ride to the airport arrived. We sat up, brushing wisps of grass from our pants. Victoria’s face was already crumpling at the prospect of saying go
odbye, but I stopped her.
“You’re fine,” I said. “You’re doing so well.”
And you’re better off without me.
“We’ll talk a lot?” she asked, her eyelashes matting together with wetness. “Every day?”
“Whenever you want,” I lied.
Victoria nodded, and then she did something surprising. She hugged me. At first, I didn’t know what to do and stood there stiffly, my arms at my sides. But then I did something that surprised me, too. I hugged her back.
We walked silently inside to fetch her suitcases. Angela spoke with the driver for a few moments, double-checking that he knew the correct airport and terminal at which to deposit his passenger. Victoria climbed in and waved bravely from the backseat, pressing her other hand against the glass. The face framed by the window looked different than it had a few weeks earlier. The puffiness was gone, and though Victoria still looked precarious—like a glass vase so breakable it makes you nervous just looking at it—she also looked beautiful. Sweeter, somehow, and more innocent. I waved back as the car picked up speed, smiling as I said a different sort of goodbye.
Carrot Cake Pancakes for Long Goodbyes
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 cup all-purpose flour
2 ½ tsp. baking powder
2 tsp. cinnamon
½ tsp. nutmeg
½ tsp. ginger
¼ cup raisins (optional)
1 tbsp. orange or lemon zest
3 tbsp. maple syrup
1 tsp. vanilla extract
2 eggs, lightly beaten
1 cup almond milk (or soy milk, rice milk, regular milk)
½ cup grated carrot
Mix dry ingredients and raisins together. In another bowl, mix wet ingredients, excluding carrots. Make a well in the center of the dry ingredients and pour wet ingredients in. Stir, but don’t mix too much. A few lumps are fine. Fold in the grated carrots. If batter is too thick, add more milk. Cook pancakes as usual, then serve with walnuts and maple syrup. (These can be made using any pancake mix, too. Just add spices and raisins to the mix and prepare according to instructions, folding in carrots at the end.)