None Shall Sleep (Damnatio Memoriae Book 1)

by Laura Giebfried

  Though my father had said little on the subject altogether, I knew that Karl was a replacement for the role my grandmother had left upon dying; he couldn’t fool me into thinking that he was there for any other reason than compliance.

  Karl straightened and exhaled deeply in an effort to subdue his exasperation.

  “It’s not true, Enim,” he said. “I’m here because I want to be. Because I ...”

  “Don’t,” I cut in derisively. “Don’t say it’s because you care. You don’t.”

  “How can you say that? I’ve been here – dealing with all of this – for months. I’ve put up with you, I’ve taken care of –”

  “Taking care of? Is that what you call this? Taking care of someone? We hate each other!”

  “That’s – that’s not –”

  “That is true!”

  “No, it’s not! I’m doing my best here, Enim –”

  “Because my father makes you!” I shouted, my voice hoarse as I did so. “He makes you stay here, he makes you take care of me –”

  “That’s not true; I do it willingly –”

  “No you don’t!” I shouted hoarsely. “You do it because he’s angry at you – because you feel guilty!”

  He looked struck as I said it, shaking his head in confusion at what he had heard, but I didn’t pause to let him speak. The guilt that I had been harboring for months now had reached its limit, and all that I wanted to do was shove it off of myself and onto him before it suffocated me.

  “You feel guilty because you could have stopped her!” I said wretchedly. “It’s your fault – it’s your fault that she jumped!”

  Karl cheeks hollowed in a way that I had never seen before and his expression changed to one that I couldn’t begin to explain. And it happened so quickly that, had I not been staring right at him, I would not have believed it: he stepped forward, raised his hand, and struck me across the face. I stumbled backwards and onto the floor, more out of surprise than hurt, as my face and eyes burned.

  For a long moment neither of us spoke. My chest rose and fell as I sat curled beside the bed, my hand pressed against my face, and his own breathing was ragged where he stood above me.

  “Enim, I –” He was at a loss for words. His rage had gone and he stared in shock at what he had done, his expression horrified as he looked down to where I was sprawled on the floor. His jaw quivered as he tried to rectify his mistake. “Enim – I’m sorry.”

  I slowly turned my head to look up at him.

  “No you’re not.”

  I stood and pushed past him before he could think to grab me and hurried down the stairs, pulling my coat and shoes on as quickly as I could, and ran outside. I swerved in and out of streets to ensure that he could not follow me, putting as much distance between us as I could. I imagined him running out the door after me, perhaps calling my name, before slinking back inside to avoid the questioning stares of the neighbors. Only when I was certain that he was not there did I finally slow down and try to find where I wanted to go. Everything looked different in the snow. Time seemed to drag on endlessly as I made my way.

  The bridge stretched over the river unassumingly, frozen beneath layers of snow and ice, and looked nearly as forsaken as it was. I approached it cautiously and stepped onto the side walkway. No cars were in sight. I wondered if it had been just as empty a year ago when she had come down to it, or if someone had seen her as they passed on their way home from a holiday party. She had to have looked out of place in her sundress and bare feet.

  With the resolve to not think of her dwindling, I clutched at the cold railing with an aching expression and all the feeling from the chill on my skin and tiredness of my feet withdrew to make room for the pain that had set in over my lungs. I shook as I leaned over the edge to stare down to where she had fallen. Chunks of ice floated below. She had hit one on the way down and snapped her neck.

  I bit down on my lip and the view of the water blurred behind tears. Despite seeing her huddled in her room in the dark most days and listening to my father tell me that she was sick, I had never really thought that she would do it. I couldn’t understand what she had seen waiting for her down in the fragmented water that was more inviting than the life that she had had with me.

  And it wasn’t enough to regret it all. It wasn’t enough to feel badly that I had let her go that night, or to make excuses as to why I hadn’t reached out and grabbed her arm to hold her back. I couldn’t be happy to blame Karl for whatever his part in the mess of it all was, because Karl wasn’t the one who had let her walk out the door. The walk to the bridge, the police at the door, the muffled sound of my father’s sobs through the floorboards, the pain wrapping itself around all of our necks and cutting off the connection between our heads and our hearts – they weren’t Karl’s fault. They were mine. I had done that. I had caused that pain. It was no wonder that my father couldn’t look at me or speak to me. I had made the error. I had let her go.

  As my fingers burned against the cold metal, I let go of the railing and shoved them into my pockets instead. The fabric was stiff in the freezing temperatures and it took me a moment to realize that there was something there. I removed it to see the medication bottle that I had hidden from Karl. The orange plastic was barely visible in the dark, but the pills rattled inside to break the thick silence all around. And it occurred to me that Beringer was undoubtedly right – that I would feel better if I just took them like he prescribed – but I also knew that I didn’t deserve to feel differently or better: I had ruined everything. I had let her go.

  And as the memories tried again to push their way to the forefront of my mind, I pressed my head to the bridge and let the frozen metal sear against my skin to keep them from coming. The pain ripped at my flesh and burned against my brain, but my throat was too dry to sob and my jaw was too stiff to scream. When the cold had worked its way into the center of my head and numbed every thought away, I dropped down to my knees and knelt desperately in the remains of snow and rain. My head throbbed with a pain so severe that it threatened to split my skull into two, but it was worth it to keep the images away. For I knew that if I let them come to remind me of what I had done, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself for a moment longer.

  Ch. 10

  When the slush seeped into my clothes and saturated the fabric, I pulled myself from the ground and stumbled back to the main road. Warmth spread over my tongue from how hard I had bitten down on my lip and I dabbed at the blood with my sleeve. My hands were too raw from cold to move. Pulling my coat further around me, I turned and heaved myself up the dark streets. My head was in such a fog that I took a wrong turn and then another, and by the time I made it back to the house the air was a dense black ahead of me. I stumbled up the front steps, weighted with cold and exhaustion.

  Karl was in the hallway before I could cross over the threshold. In the dark it was hard to make out his form, but his clothes appeared wrinkled and his face was heavily lined; though several years younger, he looked as old as my father.

  “Where have you been?”

  “Out.”

  “Out where?”

  “Outside.”

  He looked over me as though he wasn’t certain of who I was. Though his voice was low, there was a definite quiver in it.

  “Outside doing what?”

  I didn’t have the strength to argue with him, nor did I have the mindset to think up a proper lie. I looked away from him and sidled towards the staircase.

  “Enim,” he said, hurrying around the banister to follow me. “Where did you go? You’ve been gone for hours – you look half-frozen.”

  I turned my back on his well-feigned concern and started up the stairs. My cheek still throbbed from where he had struck it.

  “Enim,” Karl repeated. He caught up to me and took my arm to stop me, but then immediately let go again. He moved his eyes from my face to stare down at the steps as he spoke. “Enim, I – Where did you go? Where have you been for all of this time?”


  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It – it does matter. Something might’ve happened to you!”

  “It didn’t.”

  He looked at me as though he wasn’t quite certain that that was true, but couldn’t think to dispute it. I pulled away from him and crossed the hallway to my bedroom. As I shut the door, it was with the intention to stay inside for the remainder of the holidays and never speak to him again. When my hand went to turn the lock, however, I found nothing there. I stared at the bare patch of wood with horror. He had taken the lock off my door.

  I slowly exited the room and went back to the stairs. He was still poised halfway up the steps, though he had turned to face the wall with his head in his hand.

  “I had to, Enim,” he said quietly. “You can’t stay in there.”

  I only shook my head; my throat was too dry to speak.

  “I had to,” he repeated. “You can’t do this. I’ve spoken to your father and Beringer, and they’re both concerned as well. You’re acting just like her – you’re becoming her.”

  I shook my head again, unbelieving of what he had done. Every resolve that I had made to protect myself had been broken, and he was oblivious to it all. I needed that room: I needed the self-inflicted solitude and the silence, I needed the sleepless nights to keep me from dreaming of what I had done, I needed the discomfort in the pit of my stomach that gnawed at my insides as a constant retelling of why I deserved to be empty. I needed a moment of privacy without his lack of understanding about what I was feeling or how I looked, or who or who not I had become.

  “You can’t ... you can’t ...”

  “I had to,” he said again. “You can’t end up like her, Enim. You don’t want that.”

  “You don’t know what I want,” I said wretchedly.

  I turned and moved back into the hallway in a panic. The house had closed in on me further without the comfort of the closed-off room, and I turned in place as I sought where to go. Coldness crept down from the walls, and with it came the feint sounds of music from the aria that played in repeat just as it had the night she had gone.

  And as I clapped my hands over my ears to block it out, I knew that there was no longer a place to go to escape her, but that there was one where I could escape him. I stumbled down the hallway to the opposite end, ignoring the sound of his voice as he called me back in surprise, and my bare feet were cold against the carpet as the walls pressed me from either side. The door to the guestroom was firmly closed in a barrier of bright white, and for a moment my hand was unyielding on the doorknob, but then it twisted to reveal what I had been avoiding at all costs for the past twelve months. I closed the door and locked myself inside before he could think to stop me.

  The room looked exactly as I remembered it, though I hadn’t been inside of it in years: the walls, ceiling, and furniture were bright white, as were the embroidered bedspread and curtains. Only the hardwood floor was a reminder that the room was a part of the old house: the rest appeared to be another place, frozen in ice and time, sitting under the winter sky. Light from the windows pooled into the room and over the floors as the sun gently rose and, as I cautiously stepped inside, my cold skin was warmed.

  The only thing different about the room were the machines that had been set up by the bed. They were too large and unsightly where they sat creating a horrid focal point, and the beeping and whirring noises that they made stung my ears from so close a distance. I stared at the wires that ran from them and up onto the bed, disappearing beneath the covers, and then allowed my eyes to travel up to the person lying on the mattress. Her once-blond hair had faded to something dull and white, and her sea-green eyes were closed behind wrinkled lids. If I hadn’t known that it was my mother, I would have never recognized her.

  I slowly took a step towards her; my breathing was ragged and cold.

  I hadn’t seen her since the accident. My father had prevented me from going into the hospital room after it had happened; with the last bit of sentiment that he had ever possessed, he had assured me that I didn’t want to remember her that way. When she lived through the night and the next day, however, I had still declined to see her. The image of her in her white dress and light sweater, barefoot and smiling as she spoke softly to me, was so strong in my memory that I couldn’t imagine seeing her any differently.

  But there she was, no longer hidden behind the closed door in the room at the end of the hallway, her smile gone and mouth agape behind an oxygen mask, her body thinned and breakable beneath the light sheets, covered in wires and tubes that ran to various parts of her body to keep her chest rising and falling and her heart beating despite the fact that she was all but lifeless. The fall had left her brain-dead and paralyzed; she would never be any more than she had been the night she went to the bridge and jumped.

  I pressed my hand against my chest as a pain shot through my ribs and had to shut my eyes tightly until it passed. The sound of the beeping had quieted, but only because the music from the aria was rising all around me. It filled my head before I could think to stop it, and though my hands were clamped over my ears, the volume of it didn’t lessen.

  I pulled myself over to the bed and fell to my knees beside it. My arms trembled as they clutched the edge and my chest ached as though it had been compressed by an unknown weight. The image of her lying there burned against my mind and intertwined with the memories that I had spent so long trying to push away.

  Be a good boy, Enim, and don’t tell your father on me.

  I shook as her voice cut into the music and I swiped at the side of my head to get it away, but my hand only raked through air. She hadn’t spoken. She couldn’t speak. And I had done that.

  I had done it.

  The thought came and I pushed it violently away before it could settle, afraid that if I admitted it to myself that it might slip out into the air to be heard. No one could know what had happened, and no one could know what I had done. The prince’s words from Turandot rang in fervent tones in my ears along with the music – my secret is hidden within me – but the sound of them only added to the crushing pain on my chest.

  And if I had known the answer to the riddle – if I had just thought up an ending that had fit – then she would have been appeased. She would have settled down with the answer, and pulled herself from the dark bedroom and out into the rest of the house, content to stay there with us forever instead of set on going to the bridge.

  Be a good boy, Enim, and don’t tell your father on me.

  I could see her clearly standing in the kitchen at our house, her gray sweater pulled loosely over the white dress and her feet bare against the floor. She was smiling as she listened to the song from the opera even though it had been playing in a loop for hours, and her expression was calmer than it had been in so long. And if they knew what I had done, then they wouldn’t have been worried about me becoming like her. They would have understood that I deserved to be where I was, alone with the tormenting music and inescapable blame.

  Because I had known what she had meant when she told me that she had finally figured out how it was supposed to end, and I had known where she was really going when she kissed my head and told me that she was just running out to the car, and yet I didn’t stop her as she went to the door without so much as a jacket or pair of shoes: I only watched her wordlessly as she stepped out into the snow and disappeared into the darkness.

  And it would have been so easy to raise my hands and clasp my fingers around her wrists to make her stay, or to follow her out into the streets and pull her home again. And even after letting her go, I could have called my father and told him what she had done, but instead I sat on the steps and stared at the front door, wishing that it was a mistake and that she would come back through it again.

  And I couldn’t blame my father for not picking up the phone when I called an hour later, because he had trusted me to stay with her while he went to dinner with his colleagues. And I couldn’t blame Karl for not getting th
ere quickly enough when I called him next – though I wanted to, and my father undoubtedly did – because I knew that by the time I had dialed his number, she had already jumped. And I wished that I could rip the guilt from my chest and push it onto him so that I didn’t have to feel it pressing down on me anymore, but I couldn’t when I knew that it wasn’t his fault: it was my fault, and mine alone.

  I suppressed a sob by clapping my hand over my mouth and shut my eyes to keep the tears from streaming down my face, and I pressed my head into the side of the bed and silently screamed into the mattress. I wished that she would reach over and stroke my head, and soothingly tell me that it was alright and that it hadn’t been my fault, but her eyes were closed and her body was still and she wouldn’t – she couldn’t – ever speak a word to me again.

  And when I lifted my head, my chest was burning with a pain more intense than any I had felt there before, and all I needed was for it to go away. It was acid at the base of my throat, scorching the skin inside, and melting away whatever lay beneath the ribs. And the pain wasn’t sadness or grief or denial – I knew that now. It was guilt. Pure, unheeded, massacring guilt. It stretched out within me and consumed everything else inside. And I deserved it – I deserved to feel that way – but I didn’t want to anymore.

  I wriggled my hand into my pocket and took the prescription bottle from it, uncapping it and tipping its contents into my palm before bringing the pills to my mouth. My tongue and throat were so dry that it was near to impossible to swallow them, and I gagged as I choked them down. I no longer cared what they did to me – if they changed me, or distorted me, or ruined me – because nothing could be worse than who I already was.

  I placed the bottle back on the bedside table alongside the metal box that contained all of the wires. It was so orange and out of place in the monochromatic room, like a sunrise over the ocean.

  My already full head began to get heavier, though now with emptiness rather than thoughts. It kept lulling onto my shoulder though I tried to keep it upright, and my vision kept fading in and out of black in the white room. I put my hands on the bed and tried to stand but my legs had turned to sand beneath me and I kept sinking further and further down into the floor, into the water, into the ocean that was rising up all around me ...