I ran my finger over the jagged edge of my nail as I considered how to answer. I knew that I couldn’t tell him about how the aria crept into my mind late at night and toyed with my memories unrelentingly. His reaction would be far from welcoming, especially given what was written in the file-folder lying between us.
“Nothing, I just ... sometimes I just like to think about it.”
“For any particular reason?”
I sighed as he persisted with the topic as I ought to have known he would. From the way that his eyebrows curved downwards over his eyes, I knew that he was waiting for me to tell him something about my mother that would explain my behavior over the past twelve months.
“I just ... I mean, I guess I just wonder how it ends.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“It was never finished, so I just ... I wonder how it ends.” When he continued to look perplexed, I went on. “The writer died before he completed it, and someone else added another ending but ... it doesn’t seem to fit.”
“I see.” He leaned onto his hands as he considered what I had said, and I had just been brooding over the idea that he was finding a way to bring the subject back to my mother when he asked, “What is the story?”
“What?”
“The story – Turandot. What’s it about?”
“I ...” I shook my head. “It’s not ... I mean, I wouldn’t do a good job of explaining it.”
“I’m sure that you will. I’d like to hear about it – unless there’s something else you hoped to discuss?”
I quickly shook my head. Running a hand through my hair, I tried to recall how my mother had told the story to me when I was younger. She had an eloquence about her that I had never possessed, and the story was entertaining each time regardless of how often I had heard it before.
“Well, it’s ...” I cleared my throat and sat up a bit in my chair. “It’s about a guy – a prince – and it takes place in China. So he ... he comes to the palace of a foreign land, and he ... he meets his long-lost father, the king of a different place, who’s sort of been in hiding since his kingdom was overthrown. And ... and just as he’s arriving, an execution is beginning for another prince.”
I paused again, aware that I had already left out a dozen important details and that the story was near-to-impossible to understand. Beringer smiled across the desk at me, however, and indicated for me to continue.
“So the unnamed prince finds out that the princess of the land is unwed, and that she makes her suitors answer three riddles. If they answer correctly, she’ll marry them. If they don’t, she beheads them. The last suitor who’s tried gets executed even though he’s well-liked by everyone which, you know, sort of shows what type of princess Turandot is, but despite knowing all of that, the prince falls in love with her when he sees how beautiful she is.
“So ... the prince says that he’s going to try and answer Turandot’s riddles, and his father and his father’s servant try to stop him. And ... and the servant is especially adamant, since she’s really in love with the prince, but the prince has already made up his mind so he goes after Turandot.”
I paused again to see if I was making any sense to Beringer who, in return, looked to be at least impressed at hearing me speak more than a few words at a time. I cleared my throat again before going on.
“So Turandot gives the prince the riddles and he somehow manages to figure all three of them out. She’s pretty unhappy at the idea of marrying him and – seeing how upset she is – he offers to give her another chance to get out of the marriage. He says that if she can answer one of his riddles, she can still behead him, but if she doesn’t guess, she’ll still have to marry him.”
“And what’s the riddle?” Beringer asked as I paused.
“He asks her what his name is,” I said. The music from the aria that would have begun to play at that point in the opera was somehow sounding in my ears, and I could see my mother shaking by the window as she listened to it, distressed that she would never know the answer. “And she ... she tells everyone that no one is to sleep until someone finds out his name, and that if they don’t she’ll execute the entire kingdom. And ... and she finds the prince’s father and servant girl and threatens to torture them until one of them says his name, but the servant girl insists that she alone knows, and she kills herself without saying what it is.”
Beringer waited a moment before speaking.
“And then what happens?”
“That’s it,” I said. “That’s how it ends.”
“I see.”
He said it with certainty even though I doubted he understood what it had meant to my mother. He didn’t know the way that the final riddle – the ending of the opera – had tormented her with its answer. He hadn’t seen the way she would stand at the window and stare into the nothingness while it played throughout the house at full volume until my father came home and shut it off. He didn’t know how she had come to my room every night and asked if I had figured it out yet, silently begging me to think up the answer that she would never know. And he didn’t know how that answer was all that was still clinging on of her, and how it followed me with its relentless sound as it haunted me with the guilt that if I had just known, she would have found some peace.
I could feel Beringer’s eyes on me and purposefully pulled away, turning in my chair until I faced the wall instead of his desk. I looked at the clock and implored it to pick up speed so that I could leave, but the session was going slower than ever.
“And you think about how it would have ended,” Beringer stated slowly. “What are your ideas?”
I swallowed as I stared at the side of the filing cabinet. The faintest image was reflected in the dark metal. Though I knew that it was a reflection of myself, I imagined instead that it was her staring back at me.
“I think that the princess knew she had lost, and she didn’t want to marry the prince, and so she killed herself.”
Beringer’s eyes flickered over me.
“That sounds like a terrible ending,” he said quietly. When I didn’t respond, he leaned forward on the desk and continued in a low voice, “I know that we’ve spoken in the past, briefly, about the holidays, and I think that it’s important to discuss them today, as this will be our last chance before you go home.”
“Right.”
“Are you having any thoughts about the break? How you’ll spend it?”
I chewed the inside of my mouth and gave a half-hearted shrug, neither confirming nor denying that I had spent the last few weeks agonizing over the two-week period that I would spend stuck in the house in Connecticut.
“I’d like to at least go over how you feel about the holidays, Enim,” Beringer continued. “I am worried, given your aversion to the subject, that you may become ... distressed as Christmas approaches. Could you tell me your thoughts about it?”
“I ... I don’t really think about it, Dr. Beringer.”
“You don’t think about what?” he asked. “How you’ll feel, or the anniversary itself?”
“I ... neither. I don’t think about either of them.”
“Not at all?”
“No. I mean, sometimes. But I ... I’d rather not think about it. I’d rather just ... just wait for it all to pass.”
Beringer exhaled slowly and pressed his mouth to his hands. Even without looking at him directly, I knew that his brow was furrowed in concern.
“And if it passes,” he said, “what will happen then? How do you think you’ll feel the day after Christmas?”
I shook my head. My thoughts had grown too heavy with thoughts of the opera and it was difficult to think.
“Enim,” Beringer said, “what happened on Christmas last year?”
“You know.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know what happened. I need you to tell me.”
“Well, there’s – there’s nothing to say.”
“No? Nothing happened? It was just a normal, everyday holiday
?”
His voice was soft but it was digging under my flesh: I could feel it peeling back the skin over my skull as he tried to see further inside my head.
“No, you –” I looked back at him as I tried to explain something with no answer. “I don’t know what you want me to say: you know what happened. Do you just want me to repeat it? I’ll just echo whatever’s written in my file – is that what you want me to do?”
“I just want to hear what happened, Enim. There’s no specific answer. Just what happened that night.”
“She jumped off a bridge,” I said, my arms shaking as I clutched the chair. I was aware that it was the first time I had said it aloud. The words sounded unforgiving in the air.
“What else happened?” he said calmly.
“Nothing – nothing else happened! Why does everyone think that? Why does everyone keep asking? You’re waiting for me to say something, but there’s nothing to say!”
There was a crack in my voice as I finished and I turned my face away, swallowing to make it smooth again.
“What happened before she left for the bridge?” Beringer said. “Did you see her before she went?”
“Yes. Yes, but nothing happened. She was ... There was nothing different.”
“What do you mean? What was happening?”
“I ... I don’t know. We were – she made me dinner. She was – she was listening to the soundtrack from the opera. It was – everything was normal. Nothing happened; she was fine.”
Beringer ran his hands together as he sorted through my disjointed statements.
“So you had dinner, and you were listening to a favorite song of hers, and then ...? What happened next, Enim?”
“Nothing. I mean – you know. She ... she left. She went to the bridge. She jumped.”
“Did she say anything to you?”
“No.” The lie came out as automatically as always, firmer and more defiant than the rest of my shaky words. “No, she just left. I – I didn’t even know she was gone until ... until later.”
“And that’s when you called Karl?”
I ran my tongue over my teeth as I tried to recall the details without thinking of the actual memory. It was so hard with the music blaring in my ears. Beringer waited as I fidgeted with my hands.
“I called my father,” I said. “He didn’t pick up.”
“I see,” Beringer said. “And when he didn’t answer, you called your uncle?”
“Yes.”
“And he did what?”
I bit down on my tongue until the pain tore me from the memory.
“Nothing,” I said. “He did ... nothing.”
Beringer waited through the silence, but I couldn’t think of anything more to say. I had told him all that I could, and the rest was well-worded and written down in the papers lying between us. I refused to paraphrase them just to prove that I wasn’t in denial of what had happened.
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore, Dr. Beringer. I don’t ... I don’t see how restating all of this will make anything any different – or any better.”
He stared at me for a long moment with a sorrowful expression, and when he spoke his voice was just a murmur over the loudness in my head.
“I know that you don’t want to talk about it, Enim. I know. But something about that night is upsetting you, and I’d like to know what it is.”
“My mother jumped off a bridge,” I said. “That’s what upsets me.”
“And I understand that, but I don’t think that this is grief. Not now, not after twelve months. I think that this is guilt.”
I was silent for so long that an eternity seemed to pass between us, pushing us away from one another until I couldn’t see him sitting there anymore. He was so distant in the room, just a fragmented piece that didn’t fit into the images around me from my memories, and I couldn’t think to understand why he was there watching me. I felt the room collapse and rebuild into the kitchen where she had last stood, her light sweater covering her white dress, her feet bare against the floor as she tiptoed around to the aria playing in the background, her face calmer than I had seen it in so long, and she looked more like herself than she had in so long: so clear, so at ease, so content.
“Enim? What is it that you feel badly about? What don’t you want to say?”
His voice broke through the thoughts and the shattered picture faded away. As the room reemerged, a coldness came down on my skin that left me feeling ill. Before I could give in and speak the words pressing against my mouth, I stood and circled around the chair and wrenched the door open. Stumbling out of the room, I ran down the hallway and out the front door away from the answer that I couldn’t give to him.
The air was cold and biting, and the ground beneath my feet was hardened with frozen snow. I staggered my way down the path and into the Center Garden, not sure where I was going but certain that I had to get away from him before the truth rose up between us, sinking us, drowning us –
“Enim!”
I heard Beringer’s voice in the darkness before I could see him, and had barely begun to turn in surprise when his hands closed around my forearms. He held me as I fought to get away from him, trying to escape even when then was nowhere to go, and his grip was firm but not harsh. When I finally stopped struggling, he loosened his hands and placed them on my shoulders instead.
“It’s all right, Enim. It’s all right.”
“It’s not.”
The words were wrecked by a sob, and I turned my face away to try and hide any tears that the darkness did not.
His hand was warm on my shoulder, and the feeling was reminiscent of the way my father used to take hold of me to pull me into an embrace, and of how my mother would pull me close and tell me that she loved me. It was a touch that I hadn’t felt in so long. I wished that he was someone else, or that I was someone else, because his ability to understand me was halted by the file that sat between us in the office, and his compassion was something manufactured from a diploma hanging on a wall.
“It will be,” he said, but I couldn’t bring myself to believe him.
Ch. 9
“You need a haircut.”
It was the first thing that Karl had thought to say to me in the four hours that we had been driving, but I didn’t feel obligated to respond. He looked over at me as he waited for me to speak, his light hair as smooth as ever and his blue eyes muddled beneath a frown, and sighed in discontent when I turned away towards the window instead. If we were going to coexist for the two-week holiday break, then I rather thought that we would have to get accustomed to ignoring one another.
The light misting of snow that had followed us from the port in Maine had turned into rain, and the back-and-forth motion of the windshield wipers was making me drowsy. As Karl continued to pinpoint flaws in my outward appearance, I leaned my head against the window and drifted off to sleep.
The sound of the car door slamming woke me up sometime later, and I could just make out the blurred shape that was his form as he hurried through the rain before he disappeared into the house. Karl had become accustomed to living in the residence that belonged to neither of us, but I was still wary of what it held. Shrinking back against the seat, I ran my eyes over the place as I waited out the time before I would have to go inside.
It was a standard house that had belonged to my maternal grandparents before their deaths. I had a few neutral memories of visiting them there when I was younger, but those had been largely ruined by the time that I had had to spend there over the past year. My father had moved us in with my grandmother after selling my childhood home, though I wasn’t sure that he had ever intended to live there himself: he had coincidentally gotten a job overseas before his living arrangements had been discussed.
My grandmother had never particularly liked my father and would often tell me so during the weeks that followed his departure. It was only she who seemed to share my thoughts that he had abandoned his family, and I had held a certain amount of regar
d for her for that alone. A large part of me thought that she had died purposefully to force him to come home again, but her plans had been thwarted: he had not returned upon learning of her death, but had sent Karl to take her place in the house instead.
I opened the car door but remained seated. Even the damp chill and soft pattering of rain couldn’t hasten me inside. A huge puddle had formed outside of the house that flooded the remains of my grandmother’s peony garden and front path; if it didn’t stop raining soon, it might rise up to flood the place. Then we would all drown properly.
I grabbed my bag from the backseat and went inside. I could hear the heat hissing from the radiator, but the cold seeped in through the old wood and chilled the house regardless. I shivered and hurried upstairs.
“Oh, Enim, I didn’t hear you come in.”
I paused on the landing as the caregiver spoke to me but didn’t turn to face her. The trail of light leading down the hallway indicated that the door to the room at the end of the hallway was still open, and I had no desire to see inside. I could never be quite certain what laid there out of sight. She hummed to herself as she closed the door and made her way down to where I stood. Only when I was certain that the door was closed did I relax and turn to her.
“Hello, Mrs. Quincy,” I said politely.
“Hello, dear,” she said, reaching over to pat my arm. “I was just going downstairs to put on a pot of coffee, if you wanted to ...”
She indicated to the room that she had just left, but I averted my gaze.
“Right.” I said. “Thank you, Mrs. Quincy.”
She nodded solemnly at me and turned to go downstairs. When her footsteps had died away into the kitchen, I hurried into the room at the opposite end of the hallway and shut myself inside. Mrs. Quincy had been coming to the house as long as I had lived there. With her warm tone and little laced-up shoes, she appeared more compatible in the antiquated house than either Karl or I did, and she was certainly more comfortable there.
The faint sound of beeping that came from down the hall was only slightly audible from my room, but I took a pillow from the bed and shoved it into the crack beneath the door even so. The room had been converted to a small bedroom for me by my grandmother when I had moved in. Though she had decorated it in shades of blue, the floral-patterned bedspread and curtains negated the attempt at masculinity. I dropped my bag at the end of the bed and perched on the edge of the mattress. The place was both too familiar and overly foreign all at once.
None Shall Sleep (Damnatio Memoriae Book 1) Page 16