“I … just wait,” I told him, grabbing his arm to get him to stop. He dragged me to one of the cold stone benches in the Center Garden so that he could catch his breath.
“Don’t be stupid, Nim. You have to go – the glass is stuck in your foot.”
“No, listen ... We … can’t go. I’ll be suspended.”
“Stop thinking about all that: you just sliced your foot in half – you have to get it bandaged!”
“No, I … I can’t get suspended.”
“Nim, don’t be –”
“Please, Jack. Let’s just … go up to the room.”
I tried to stand up on my good foot but my leg was shaking too badly. Jack jumped up to help me.
“Nim, please. It’s bad.”
I shook my head with as much firmness as I could muster.
“If we go, we’ll have to admit we were out after curfew. We’ll be reported.”
“Forget school – you’re going to lose more than that if you don’t get that glass out of your foot.”
“No, Barker saw me fall. If we go to the Health Center, he’ll know it was us in the woods.”
“Nim …”
“He’ll know it was us, Jack. I don’t care about being suspended – I just don’t want us to end up dead.”
“I … Alright.”
I blacked out somewhere in the stairwell and only came to when he heaved me up onto my mattress. When he turned on the lights, my eyes shuddered against the brightness and I thought that I would be sick again. He ripped the covers off of his bed and brought them over to wrap around my shoulders to stop me from shaking.
I shifted my leg to a semi-straight position. Despite my blurred vision, I could see the comforter soaking with blood. As Jack edged around to look at the cut, he sucked his cheeks in.
“Well?” I asked groggily.
“Beer bottle – straight through your shoe.”
“Can you pull it out?”
He crossed his arms as he surveyed the injury; his expression had turned sickened. He shook his head.
“I can’t. I – I just can’t. Sorry.”
I pulled myself to a sitting position and twisted my leg up so that my foot was in my lap. My vision swayed again as I stared down at the gruesome injury, and my hands were shaking in such a cold sweat that it took me a moment to pinch the glass between my fingers. Jack turned away. I paused to choke back the urge to vomit again and then, before I could lose my nerve, I jerked the piece of glass back: it caught the skin and ripped the flesh from the bottom of the foot, and for a moment I was left staring down at the horrible hole gushing blood all over my lap, but then my eyes rolled back and I blacked out against the mattress.
The warmth of sunlight hit my face sometime later, and I was partially aware of someone brushing the hair back from my forehead. The touch was familiar on my skin. Through half-closed eyes I reached up to take their arm, but my own were too heavy to lift.
“Mom,” I said softly.
I hoped that she would sit by me to softly sing the melody from Turandot; it had been so long since I had heard her do so. As she moved away from me again, my head lolled to the side and my fingers scraped the mattress in an attempt to reach her.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
She made no indication that she had heard the apology. Instead the comforters were moved off of me and the window was opened to let some cold air into the room. It was only then that I realized how warm I was. Before I could murmur in thanks, my eyes had flickered closed again.
When I woke up fully, the room had darkened and a harsh chill had come over it. My foot still throbbed beneath a thick wrapping, but the pain had decreased considerably. As I hobbled to the window and pushed it closed, I wondered how Jack had managed to bandage the wound so well.
Outside, the sky was a dull mask of gray and the campus was covered in a fresh covering of snow. As I watched a line of students cross through it to get to class, the sinking fear that had escaped me until that moment began to creep over my skin, and I shivered in the cold air: Barker had seen us.
I heaved myself down the hall to the bathroom and stepped into the shower, leaning against the tile wall to keep the pressure and water off of my foot. The water wasn’t quite hot enough to dispel the chill in my bones, and as I raked my fingers through my hair, the dried blood from it and my skin washed down to pool at my feet before swarming down the drain. The images of Miss Mercier’s body rose before my eyes. I wondered if that was the fate that awaited me and Jack, or if he would simply throw our bodies into the ocean as he had the local girls’.
I returned to the room and fell back on Jack’s bed. Mine was such a mess of covers that it hardly looked more comfortable than the floor. As I laid in silence, Dictionary hopped up to sit beside me. Her soft mewing broke into my muddled thoughts.
“Oh good – you’re up.”
Jack returned to the room and dumped his bag down. I slowly lifted my head from the mattress to face him.
“How long was I out?”
“A while,” he said, coming closer. “How do you feel?”
“Pretty bad.”
“Yeah, I figured. I had to keep wrapping it; I stole every roll of toilet paper in the building – Sanders suspects someone’s going to teepee the campus.”
He sat down beside me and pulled his shoes off.
“Anyhow, it wasn’t working so I finally just dragged you down to the nurse. She took care of it properly.”
“What?” I gave him an alarmed look and sat up straighter, causing the blood to rush to my head. “Jack, I told you not to!”
“Don’t worry about it. I told the nurse I left a bottle lying in the dorm room and you stepped on it, and everyone else thinks you have the flu. I got a few detentions – that’s it.”
“But Jack, Barker’s probably just waiting for someone to go to the Health Center with this type of injury – now he’ll know it was us!”
To my surprise, Jack smiled. He seemed to have been suppressing the urge to do so since coming into the room. It wasn’t the reaction I had been expecting, and I shook my head while wondering if I was still dazed from the injury.
“Why are you so happy?”
His smile, if possible, grew wider. It stretched his face oddly and made him look like a coyote staring out at me through gleaming eyes from the darkness.
“Barker’s had a heart attack,” he said.
“What?”
The comment dropped from his mouth and hit the floor so quickly that it seemed to shatter in the quiet room. I shook my head, thinking that I must have heard him incorrectly.
“How? When?”
“A few days ago. They didn’t give us details, but ... maybe he was stressed.”
His gleaming eyes flashed and the maniacal grin grew. It took me another moment to absorb what he had said.
“Wait – Barker’s dead?”
“Unfortunately, no. He was airlifted to a hospital on the mainland and deemed ‘in critical condition.’”
“So he will be dead.”
“That’s the hope, Nim.”
He leaned back against the wall as I sank back to the mattress, the smile still working on his face as he considered our potential involvement in the matter. Though my initial shock had worn off, my heart was still beating erratically. As I toyed with the bandage over my foot, Dictionary stepped over me to sit by him.
“Strange, isn’t it?” he said as he patted her head.
“Not really,” I said numbly. “He wasn’t exactly healthy.”
“Not that. I meant – things worked out. It’s strange.”
“Guess they did.”
It was almost too much to consider. I seemed to have fallen asleep and woken up in another place. With Barker gone, it felt as though something should have lifted from my chest, but I felt both heavier and hollower than ever. The feelings created diametric responses within me, and my insides shifted unpleasantly as they tried to even out.
I blinked and shook
my head.
“Did I miss anything else?”
“I have the assignments you missed from the week. Sanders shoved them under the door – he didn’t want to catch your supposed illness.”
“Great.”
“It didn’t look too bad, actually. Everyone but Volkov gave you extensions, so if you skip tomorrow you’ll have the weekend to finish them.”
“What? Isn’t tomorrow Wednesday?”
“Try again, Nim. Tomorrow’s Friday. You were out for a while.”
I shut my eyes and leaned my head back against the wall as the feeling of incongruity grew. Karl would be furious enough when he found out how many classes I had missed, but more so when he found out how far behind I had fallen in my work again.
Jack caught my expression and gave me a nudge.
“Don’t worry, Nim. It’s not so bad. And think of it this way: Barker’s done with. What’s a little homework compared with watching our backs for him for the next four months?”
“I guess you’re right.”
“I usually am,” he replied with his characteristic smirk.
Before I could return the expression, though, something else occurred to me.
“Wait, so it’s Thursday?” I said, quickly turning to look at the clock.
“Yeah – why?”
“I’m supposed to see Beringer.”
“Tell him you’re sick. He won’t argue when he sees you.”
“He’s a doctor, Jack. I hardly think he could mistake this for the flu.”
“He’s a psychiatrist,” he countered distastefully, “not a surgeon. He probably hasn’t seen blood in years.”
But despite his best efforts, I shook my head and stood to get dressed, eying my appearance unhappily: my hair had faded and thinned, the bruises on my face stuck out against pale skin, and the circles beneath my eyes were darker than ever. Though I brushed my hair from my eyes and donned my cleanest sweater and pants, I looked wretched.
“Borrow my shoes,” Jack said when I reached for the ruined loafers. “Yours should be burned. Mine are bigger anyway, so you can fit your foot in them.”
As I entered the Health Center, one of the nurses asked if I needed the bandage changed. She peered at me with a sorrowfulness that I couldn’t quite place, and I quickly shook my head and ducked down the hallway towards the back of the building. She must have had to call to Karl and tell him about the injury; he would undoubtedly call to reprimand me by the weekend. I was still mulling over what I would tell him when I reached the office door.
“Enim.”
Beringer’s voice faltered upon seeing me. I stepped into the room and sat down.
“Hi, Dr. Beringer.”
He eyed me for a moment before moving to adjust the lamp. The light swam out from behind the shade and filled the room with a deeper glow. As he ran his eyes over me again, his expression turned to a frown.
“What happened?”
“Julian sort of ... paid me back.”
“I see.”
He stared at me for another long moment. I lowered my eyes to the floor, wishing that the light would die out and hide me from view.
“Well, I was hoping that we could discuss what happened with Julian, actually,” he said. “I wanted to get your version of it, since I didn’t get a chance to over the weekend.”
I shifted in my chair. I was all too aware that he had given me his complete defense without even knowing if I had deserved it, and that I had no way of repaying him.
“Well, I ... I’m not sure that I have a reason for what I did, Dr. Beringer.”
“No? Could you have been ... upset about something?”
I stared blankly at the bookshelf off to his side, wishing that I could tell him the truth but knowing that it was impossible.
“I ... I don’t really want to talk about it, Dr. Beringer.”
“Why’s that?”
“There are just ... there are just some things I’d rather you didn’t know.”
I couldn’t meet his eyes. I worried that if I did so, he would be able to peel back the skin stretching over my skull and see into my mind, and that he would become aware of the thoughts that swirled around in my head, and of the guilt that I harbored for the things that I had done, and that he would know about the music I heard late at night when the world was otherwise silent. More than anything, I was frightened that he, of all people, would be the one to see me for who I really was; and I knew that once he was able to, he would no longer make the trips to come see me on the island every week.
“Is that because you feel you can’t trust me?”
“No, I trust you, just ...”
“Just what?”
His voice was gentle, but I felt as though I had let him down. After all he had done for me, I couldn’t even give him a proper response.
“Have I done something to make you wary of my intentions?”
“No,” I said quickly. “No, it’s nothing like that. I just ...”
I couldn’t explain it to him without letting him know that there was something unsettling hidden beneath the neatly-pressed sweater and collared shirt, so I only shook my head in explanation.
“Is there something I could do to make you more comfortable telling me?” he asked. “I want you to be able to trust me, Enim. I want you to know that you can.”
I pressed my hand across the bridge of my nose to hide my eyes. He made it sound so simple, as though the words could easily be erased or taken back again if needed, when in fact they were permanent and unforgettable. And I wanted to tell him the truth, but it burned my insides with such an intensity that I couldn’t imagine what it would do out in the open air; I was afraid that it would make him turn on me the way that they had all turned on my mother under the pretense of protecting her.
“What are you thinking about, Enim?”
“My mother.” I looked across the desk at him carefully. “About what happened to her.”
“Her attempted suicide, you mean?”
“No. I was thinking of what happened to her after she got ... sick.”
The lamp was facing away from him and his face was cast in shadow, but the light in his eyes still cut through in flecks of gold and brown. He leaned forward with a thoughtful frown.
“What do you mean?”
“She ... My father made her stay in the house. She stopped going out, no one came to see her ... She just sat in her room all the time, listening to the soundtrack from that opera.”
“Did he explain why?”
“He said that he was helping her, but he was hiding her. He didn’t want anyone to know that there was something wrong with her.” I fidgeted in my spot for a moment before continuing. “And that’s ... that’s what he’d do to me, too. Put me away somewhere until he could fix whatever’s wrong with me.”
Beringer pressed his hands to his mouth as he considered me, and his brow furrowed further.
“I don’t think that that’s true, Enim. I don’t think he’d do that.”
“You don’t know my father.”
“No. But I do know why your mother was ... restricted to the house during the time leading up to her suicide.”
“But you can’t tell me.”
“Your uncle – and father – both feel that it would best if you didn’t know. I spoke to your uncle about it after our last session. He was ... quite adamant.”
Karl’s coldness towards Beringer during the meeting in Barker’s office became clearer, and it occurred to me that he assumed Beringer had incited my inquiry about my mother’s illness.
“Why is it so important for you to know?” Beringer asked.
“Because.” The knowledge that there was something other than depression that had crept up upon her and consumed her unsettled me just as the ending to the opera did, and I needed to know the answer. Knowing what had affected her meant knowing what affected me.
“Why?”
“It doesn’t matter. You can’t tell me anyhow, can you?”
&nb
sp; “The circumstances are peculiar. I checked the protocol, and there’s nothing that gives me permission to.” The throbbing that had left my foot had entered my head instead, and my skull pounded at the words. As I slumped further in my seat, Beringer added, “But there’s nothing that says I can’t, either.”
My eyes flickered up again. Beringer sighed before speaking again.
“She had schizophrenia, Enim.”
“What?”
“It’s an illness where the individual suffers a break from reality. They often hear voices, and suffer from disordered thoughts ...”
“No, I – I know what it is.”
My heart hammered beneath the neatly-ironed sweater and I wondered if Beringer could feel its pounding through the air. As I struggled to twist the words in a way that they would make sense, he leaned forward towards me.
“She had had a break from reality,” he said. “She had delusions that there was a mystery of some sort that she needed to solve, and since she repeatedly stopped taking her medication, your father kept her housebound so that she wouldn’t go looking for the answer. He was ... trying to protect her.”
My limbs had gone numb and still. I didn’t believe him.
“But that’s ... that’s nothing. She just wanted to know the end of the opera – that’s it.”
“She heard voices, Enim. Voices that promised her the answers to her questions, if only she did what they said.”
It didn’t seem right. I wished that he had known her, and the way that she would brush my hair from my eyes, or hum the tune of her favorite song, or sit by my side as I played the piano, because the label that they had stuck on her seemed to strip away all of it and leave her in a more barren state than the fall from the bridge had.
“Enim?” Beringer searched my expression cautiously. “Are you alright?”
I wanted to rip the folder from his desk and search through the files until I found the real reason neatly printed within, but clutched the arms of the chair to keep myself still instead. It was clear why he hadn’t wanted me to know. And though I wished that he was lying, even if it would mean that everything he had ever said had been a lie, as well, I could finally see someone that I could trust staring back at me.
“Yes. I’m fine.”
“Is there something you’d like to discuss? Or something I can do?”
None Shall Sleep (Damnatio Memoriae Book 1) Page 27