An Untamed State

by Roxane Gay

  I shook my head.

  Dr. Darcy nodded and patted the examination table. “No problem,” she said.

  I wanted no part of any exam but I also knew Lorraine wouldn’t back down. I knew I needed help. I concentrated on making it to the table and climbing up. As I lay back, I squeezed my legs together. My knees shook, all that tension working its way through my body. The doctor lightly tapped my knee. She said, “I know this is hard but I need you to relax, just a little.”

  I tried to relax, tried to pretend this was a normal annual visit but I couldn’t spread my legs apart. Something hot and wet trickled into my ears, down my neck. I sat up on my elbows. “If I freak out, please just do what you need to do because I can’t handle doing this a second time.” I still didn’t open my legs.

  “I’m sorry I have to do this,” Evelyn said softly, “but I will be as careful as I can.”

  I was so sick of sorry. Slowly, I began to inch my legs apart, my body opening. Evelyn gently placed each of my heels into the stirrups. She began to explain what she was doing but I couldn’t hear. I couldn’t care. It hurt more than I expected but I didn’t know how to say anything. I did not know how to say stop, please, stop.

  There is nothing I cannot take.

  The doctor swallowed a sharp intake of breath, muttering, “Oh my God,” and then there was the sound of metal against metal. I stopped hearing or feeling anything. I went limp. My arms fell to the side. My eyes rolled back. I suddenly felt like I was a very small person in a very big room far away from anyone or anything that could hurt me. I was almost happy. Finally, I figured out how to leave my body.

  There were hands on my shoulders and they shook me. Someone called my name. I could hardly make it out. I was still very small in the very big room and I didn’t want to leave because I felt nothing.

  There were hands on my shoulders and they were shaking me. Someone called my name again. The voice was clearer now. I opened my eyes and several unfamiliar faces peered down at me. I tried to remember where I was, tried to make sense of yet another geography. I looked down at my body. I wore a hospital gown. My face and neck were slick salty wet. I was very tired.

  An unfamiliar face loomed closest. Slowly her features became less and less fuzzy. “Glad to have you back,” she said.

  “I didn’t go anywhere.” I was groggy.

  “Can you sit up for me?”

  I frowned. “Of course I can sit up.” As I pulled myself upright, I was overcome by a wave of dizziness. I reached back to steady myself. “Where am I?”

  She held a small penlight in her right hand and looked into my eyes. She said, “I’m Dr. Darcy, Evelyn. You’re at the clinic.”

  Instinctively, I wrapped my arms around myself. “Why is everyone staring at me?”

  The doctor nodded, then shooed the others out of the room. After she closed the door behind them, she turned back to me. “You gave us quite a scare.”

  I stepped off the exam table and reached for my jeans, trying to stand and dress at the same time. I steadied myself by grabbing the table. “I’m fine.”

  “Why don’t you sit down?”

  I finished pulling on my jeans and sat in the closest chair, crossing my legs.

  She sat on the rolling stool and pulled herself closer. “I’m glad you came in,” she said. “You’ve definitely been through a lot. There’s a reason why you’re in so much pain.”

  “I never said I was in pain.”

  “Mireille, I am a doctor.” In a matter-of-fact manner, the doctor carefully explained what she had found. I was back in the very big room. I felt everything.

  “You also really need to talk to someone,” she said. “You are exhibiting all the signs of post-traumatic stress disorder.”

  “Really,” I said, drily. “That’s a crack diagnosis.”

  Evelyn smiled. “I have a list of great people who can help.”

  I nodded tightly. “I can’t. I don’t. It’s too much. I will be fine. I don’t want anyone inside me in any way.”

  The doctor patted my knee. “We’ll revisit this. Meanwhile, I’m going to run some tests, have you come back tomorrow.”

  I nodded and finished getting dressed and tried to forget everything the doctor told me.

  The next day, the doctor seemed smaller behind her desk, younger, still kind. I fidgeted in my seat. Lorraine reached for my arm, steadied me. “Calm down,” she said. I tried but I couldn’t stop shaking my leg. The doctor opened a manila folder bearing my name.

  She smiled. “I got the sense you didn’t hear much of what I said to you yesterday so I thought it might be easier to talk in a less clinical setting. Your blood work came back clean. You’ll want to be tested again in six weeks, three months, and six months just to be sure.”

  I clasped my forehead. It was a small miracle. I held that small miracle in my hand as I listened to the rest. I needed a reconstructive procedure, she said, to repair my vaginal canal. The damage was extensive. I thought about the ugliness of her words. They would keep me in the hospital for a night or two, could fit me in this week.

  “You’re saying I have to be in a hospital, on an operating table?”

  The doctor nodded.

  “I cannot do that. I just cannot.”

  “This is not optional. If you want to have a normal life, or something like a normal life, it is not optional.”

  “Goddamnit. I cannot deal with this. When will this be over?”

  Dr. Darcy leaned forward. “I understand how you’re feeling. I do, but this surgery is one step toward getting better, hurting less, being whole.”

  I imagined being in a hospital, being paralyzed, being cut open again and shook my head so violently, I gave myself a headache.

  “You look here,” Lorraine said. “When I was sick as a dog and refusing that chemotherapy, you were the one who said my family needed me to get better, who was so stubborn and sat with me day after day in that hospital, with all those tubes running in and out of me. Now it’s your turn to do what has to be done because your family needs you. We need you.”

  The doctor continued talking, telling me about the procedure, how the best doctors would be helping me. I sat still and pretended to listen. I hoped for something to go terribly wrong. If they put me under, and I was lucky, I might never wake up.

  On the way back to the farm, Lorraine said, “Should you call Michael or should I?”

  “I’ll do it,” I said, dully.

  When we pulled up to the farmhouse, I jumped out of the truck and walked toward the barn, walked until I couldn’t see the house rising above the cornfields anymore.

  He answered the phone after only one ring. “It’s never going to be over, Michael.”

  “What’s wrong?” He was tired, impatient.

  My terror overwhelmed me. All I could think of was everything that could happen to my body in a hospital. “I don’t know if you want to know but I need to have surgery.”

  His voice changed. Suddenly, he sounded terribly serious, his words clipped and precise. “What kind of surgery? Why? When?” He fumbled for a piece of paper.

  I tried to remember the doctor’s words, tried to explain them to Michael carefully. He took notes, his pen moving furiously. I knew later he would call every doctor he had ever known.

  “I don’t want to do this,” I said. “Please don’t make me.”

  “I’ll be there tomorrow. I should have never left.”

  “You don’t have to fly back out here,” I said. “You just left and I’m not an infant. Stop saying what you think you’re supposed to say. I can’t take it anymore.”

  “I’m not going to fight with you. I have fucked this all up but I am going to get better at taking care of you, I swear.”

  I was silent. I looked up into the sky, clear and blue, the sun high and bright. A flock of birds passed overhead. I raised my arm high above my head. I wanted to grab hold of their dark feathers so they might lift me from the ground, take me away.

  “Miri
,” Michael said. “Are you there?”

  “You have been somewhat of an asshole. I need you to know that and I need you to be nicer to me.” I hung up on him again and it felt good. I waited a few moments and called Michael back. Neither of us said anything for a long while. We breathed.

  Finally, I said, “I’ve always been the fighter and that has worked for us but I don’t . . . I can’t do it right now. You need to be the fighter. You need to fight for me and for us, or you need to walk away.”

  “You make it sound like this could be an easy decision.”

  “It is mostly easy, Michael. Either you can fight for me until I . . . until I can find my way back or you can’t. And if you can’t that’s fine. Or it’s not fine but it is out of my hands. I’ll let you go. You’ll let me go. Eventually, we’ll work out what’s best for Christophe.”

  Michael flared his nostrils. “Here you go again, making decisions for us without letting me into the process, not even a little bit.”

  “That’s not what this is. I can’t fix me and us at the same time.”

  He grunted. “I guess you’ve given me a lot to think about.”

  I swallowed my irritation. At least I had that. “I guess I have. Goodbye, Michael.”

  This time, when I hung up, I didn’t call him back. There was a quiet finality to our conversation, one I could live with. He didn’t call me back, either. The birds disappeared past the horizon. They left me. Nothing would take me away.

  Everything was out of control. Michael knew that.

  The morning after they found Mireille in the outbuilding, his mother had a long talk with Michael while Mireille slept.

  “Everything comes easy to you, Michael,” Lorraine said. “It always has. That’s not your fault but now, something isn’t coming easy to you and you are acting like a damn fool. There’s nothing easy about what you’re dealing with but you need to face that and step up.”

  Michael didn’t know what to say to his mother so he shrugged, his eyes burning at the edges. He couldn’t bring himself to look Lorraine in the eye. “I don’t think anyone could step up to something like this. My wife was kidnapped but I went through something too.”

  Lorraine gave him a look he had never seen from her. Michael wasn’t sure if it was disgust or disappointment or a little of both. “You are breaking her heart. It’s written all over her face.”

  “I’m the last thing on Miri’s mind right now, Mom. She barely even talks to me.”

  “She talks to me. She doesn’t say much but most of what she has to say is about you and the baby and how much she wishes she could be with you both.”

  “Right. The baby she ran away from,” Michael said. “She left us, without a word, right when I got her back.” He yanked at his hair. “I keep losing her.”

  Lorraine’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t even know you right now.”

  “I don’t know myself, either,” he said, storming out of the house, his face burning. For hours, he walked along the dusty paths between the house and the barn and a cluster of outbuildings. He called Mona to check on Christophe and avoided answering her questions about Mireille. Later, his father interrogated Michael while they were in the barn, fixing one of the milking machines.

  “This is not how you were raised,” Glen said, “and I think that’s all I really need to say about the way you’re acting.”

  Michael kicked at a rotting board. “You and Mom think you know so much. You have no idea what I’ve been through. Every second she was gone I was dying. Every single second. Honestly, I still feel that way.”

  Glen removed his hat and began squeezing the bill. He grunted. “You take a look at those bruises around your wife’s neck and every damn where else?”

  “I’m not blind, Dad. I’m supposed to just suck it up because I don’t have any bruises?”

  “You are not behaving like the man I know you are, Michael Scott.”

  Michael paled. “I’m not making myself clear. I just . . . I need help, too. I don’t even know where to begin. I don’t understand half of what she’s saying. I look at her and just want to cry because she’s hurting so bad and I can’t fix it.”

  Glen pulled his hat back down on his head, sank to his haunches, and resumed his tinkering. “You’re still thinking this is about you, Michael. Don’t get me wrong. You’ve been through hell. I’d lose my mind if your mother were hurt like that. But you should have seen your wife when your ma was sick, the things she did to help us even though your ma was ornery as hell. It makes me sick to say this but thank God we didn’t have to depend on you. Everything would have fallen apart.”

  Michael chewed on the inside of his cheek. “Don’t say that. I’m trying my best. I don’t know how to get us past this.”

  Glen stood again, wiping his hands on his overalls. “What makes you think you need all the answers right now?”

  Michael smiled wearily. “I’m an engineer, Dad.”

  His father chuckled, but quickly grew serious. “I remember when you were in eleventh grade, doing real good in wrestling. That year, we drove down to Lincoln for the state championship. Your ma and I were so proud because you were unbeatable, pinning guys fast and doing all sorts of crazy things on the mat. We had no idea where you got all that from. You got a look at your first opponent and all of a sudden, you didn’t feel well, started holding your stomach and mumbling some horseshit about the flu. It was the first time you had come up against a guy bigger than you. Your coach told you to walk it off and you did fine but I still remember how you wanted to walk away, as great as you were. I had hoped you finally learned how to stand up to something bigger than you.”

  Michael lowered his head before clapping Glen’s shoulder. “I’m doing the best I can.”

  Glen looked Michael up and down and shook his head. “I don’t think you are. I don’t think you’re even close.”

  There was nothing Michael could say or do to explain himself. When he closed his eyes, he heard his wife screaming. When he opened them, she was gone, always gone. He was on his own. On his way back to the house, Michael kicked the barn door over and over until he couldn’t lift his leg anymore. Back at the farmhouse, he wrote Mireille a note. He left.

  Now, he was alone in Miami, with Christophe. Michael’s eyes were dry and his neck and knees ached. He slept badly on the two flights back to Miami, a middle seat for both legs, nowhere to fall but forward. Walking through the airport to the parking garage made him sick to his stomach. The Miami airport was a horrible place, he decided, always sending people to or returning them from sorrow.

  There was the right thing to do. Michael knew that. He was supposed to stand by his wife, this woman he barely recognized, the one who was normally poised and confident, maybe even a little arrogant but always captivating. She was his compass point.

  But this woman was a stranger. He hated himself for thinking it but it was the truth. His wife was a stranger. Or he was the stranger. He had failed her from the moment she was taken until the night she was returned. He couldn’t stop replaying that afternoon, wondering how he could have stopped those men, wondering how he didn’t.

  That night she was returned, after finding Miri outside by the fire, he got a phone call from Victor, who told Michael to meet him on the street outside Sebastien’s gates. Victor was alone in his car, the radio humming.

  “What’s up?” Michael asked as Victor put the car into gear and pulled away.

  “We’re going to handle some business.”

  Michael’s stomach flopped and he cracked his knuckles, leaned forward in his seat. “You know who did it, don’t you?”

  They pulled up to the same squat house they had visited days earlier. It was late, soon morning would rise, and the street was empty, no lights on in the house.

  “There’s a crew that suddenly has all kinds of money. This motherfucker we talked to lied and now we’re going to fix him good.”

  Michael looked around. A stray dog ambled past, growling softly. “I don’t kno
w if this is such a good idea,” Michael said. “We should report this to the police or something.”

  Victor got out of the car and slapped his hand against the roof of the car. “You don’t think that the men who did this wouldn’t own the police too? Now shut up and get out.”

  Reluctantly, Michael stretched himself out of the car and stood, swinging his arms in front of his chest the way he used to before wrestling matches.

  “Follow me,” Victor said as he strode right up to the door and began pounding. There was silence, then a light and the door unlocking. TiPierre opened the door and peered out, his eyes half-lidded.

  “Victor, what the fuck?”

  Victor pulled his gun out from his waistband and shoved his way into the house. Michael followed, adrenaline burning through his skin. Victor cocked TiPierre’s forehead with his gun and the young man grabbed his face as it began bleeding. “You shouldn’t have lied to me.”

  “I didn’t lie, and Laurent is going to fuck you up for this,” he whined. “Why do people keep messing with my face?”

  In the dim light, Michael and Victor noticed the bandage on TiPierre’s cheek. Victor tapped the bandage with the barrel of his gun. “What happened there?”

  “Cat got me. Fucking pussy.”

  Victor ripped the bandage from TiPierre’s face, studying the wound, still fresh and open and angry and red. “That doesn’t look a cat scratch, not at all. It looks like someone took a bite out of you.”

  TiPierre shrugged. “I don’t know what to tell you.”

  Victor cocked him with the gun again and kneed TiPierre in the stomach. He hunched over, wincing. “You better stop or we’re going to have a real problem.”

  “What the fuck is going on?” Michael asked. “Who is this guy?” Everything was moving too fast.

  TiPierre finally looked at Michael. He sucked his teeth. “Who is this blan?”

  Things were slowly starting to make sense. Michael’s knees nearly buckled. All the nervous energy he had been bottling inside threatened to explode out of him. “You know who took my wife,” he said. “You know.”