Hold Me Like a Breath

by Tiffany Schmidt

  I watched the hours move through tear-swollen eyes from my place on the throw rug. Shadows crept, lengthened, shrank. And nothing changed. Nothing could. Mine wasn’t a reality that could be reversed or corrected. I had nothing left.

  Except to breathe and make sure they didn’t get me too.

  Garrett would come for me. On a white horse, through an enchanted forest guarded by dragons, wicked witches, FBI agents, or murderers—it didn’t matter what the obstacles were, as soon as he learned I was alive, he would come. He would.

  It took a few more hours, but then I found the energy to begin to look around.

  Energy that turned from respectful worship to heretical frenzy as I tore open the fridge door—the same few bottles of jam, pickles, block of cheese, mustard and soy sauce packets. I searched through all the cabinets: mismatched mugs; piles of paper plates and individually wrapped plastic cutlery; the packs of crackers that come with soup; a box of sugary marshmallow cereal; a bag of Carter’s favorite dill pickle chips; cups, beer steins, bottle and can openers.

  I pulled and pulled on the locked freezer until I worried my fingertips would bruise, which made my frustration change to helpless fury. Except I wasn’t a helpless thing: I grabbed the fire extinguisher from beneath the sink and bashed the lock. The impact vibrated up my arms, but I kept going. Hitting, and hitting, and hitting, and hitting, until the latch lay in pieces around my feet. I didn’t pause to second-guess or gag over what could be inside, I threw open the lid, pulse racing and panting for the answers.

  It was empty. Nothing but ice crystals. I slammed the dented lid and left the kitchen; collapsed sideways onto the thronelike chair and cried. Sobbed. With my face buried in my knees and my shoulders shaking. All the emotions inside felt bigger than me, and letting them out felt dangerous—like I’d deflate.

  Carter.

  Mother.

  Father.

  Caroline.

  I mourned for each one separately because the collective grief was too all-consuming to even consider.

  I was alone. And feeling too small in this chair that felt too large. But since I’d sat here last time, it seemed like where I should stay. Where I was allowed to stay. With a gulp and a last blubber, I shut my eyes and stopped fighting against the easy oblivion of sleep.

  I woke up stiff and disoriented. Sat, stretched, and banged my wrist on something in the dark. A bruise I could ill afford and which caused new tears—or provided an excuse to cry again.

  I stood and carefully edged across the room, fumbling for a light switch or a lamp. Finding one, I turned it on and then went around the living room and kitchen, turning on all the lights.

  Then I went a step further: opened the three closed doors at the end of the hall. The doors that had been off-limits during my last trip here. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t a bathroom, a bedroom, and a room that was half office and half twin bed.

  It didn’t matter that it was eleven p.m., that I’d been gone more than twenty-four hours, or that I had no clue what was happening on the estate—there would be answers in those rooms. That was enough to kick my exhaustion into frenzy. I started in the bedroom. The closet contained clothing for Carter and maybe Garrett too, clothing for me. But not my typical style—usually I stuck to pastels. At least lighter colors, smaller prints. And never, ever anything purple. Nothing that would emphasize bruises. The clothing Carter had bought me was bright patterns, bold colors. Accessories that weren’t dainty. Jewelry that wasn’t pearl or diamond. Shoes with heels and prints and pointy and open toes. Apparently in my life outside the estate I was to be trendy. Brave. Noticeable.

  There was little else in the room that made sense or told me anything about Carter’s life here. A few of his favorite novels on a bedside table. An untouched book of Sudoku puzzles on the dresser, a half-finished one left in the closet. Nothing personal, nothing identifying. No mail beyond catalogs addressed to “current resident.” No photographs.

  There had to be answers in his office. I wanted a laptop with a password of “password” and a file called “Everything Pen Needs to Know.” A manila folder with a list of the bad guys and a second list that told me what to do next. An instruction manual for grief annotated with his comments and provisions.

  No. I needed more than this imaginary list or manual. I didn’t know how to live without my family. And if I didn’t have a family, I didn’t know who I was anymore.

  But the desk was pure decoration. It had a calendar with days X’d and circled … with no explanation for either. It had a bank mug with a few pens, a handful of tangled rubber bands and paper clips, and a small key topped with a silver stag’s head … probably to the lock on the freezer I’d smashed. Two blank notebooks, and a third whose spiral binding sprouted a few of the spiky strips left behind when a page is torn out. I tucked this under my arm and prayed the remaining pages were full of … something helpful.

  And in the bottom left drawer nestled beside a roll of cash the size of my wrist: a gun.

  My fingers continued to reach for it. Not getting the message from my brain because my brain was too horrified to process this properly. My fingertips brushed the metal before I gagged and shuddered backward. Slammed the desk drawer, backed out of the room, and slammed that door too.

  No.

  Carter should not own a gun. Not Garrett either, but he was a Ward, no matter how much I tried to forget it. He had guns and bullets in his DNA. But not Carter. Not my brother.

  I dropped the notebook in the hall, ran into the bathroom, and retched. Spitting out sour saliva and making my stomach muscles ache with the spasms.

  As I leaned my cheek against the wall, I couldn’t swallow the worst thought of all: And if he’d owned a gun, why didn’t he have it with him? Why hadn’t he used it? Why wasn’t he alive? If Father had carried a gun, would he be?

  I rinsed my mouth and washed my hands. Carter’s soap smelled like tangerines, which made no sense. He hated scented soap—said if he wanted to smell like vanilla, he’d rub himself with cookies, and if he wanted to smell like fruit or flowers, he’d douse himself in teenybopper body splash.

  Or was that Father?

  I couldn’t remember, and there was no one left to ask.

  I retched again.

  Was I really forgetting my family? Already?

  What was the last thing each of them had said to me? That I’d said to them? What were they wearing? What did I give them on their last birthdays? What were their last presents to me? I needed to know so those items could become that much more precious, but I couldn’t remember and couldn’t retrieve them from the estate even if I did.

  I stumbled back into the hall and grabbed Carter’s notebook. Yanked the mechanical pencil from its binding and flipped it open to find only blank, blank, blank pages.

  I labeled three in a row: Mother, Father, Carter.

  I was the last Landlow. If I forgot anything, then it was gone forever. I couldn’t forget—I couldn’t fail at this.

  I scrawled lists—

  • Mother’s favorite perfume: Hermès, 24 Faubourg

  • Father’s favorite musical: Guys and Dolls

  • Carter’s favorite teams: Giants, Mets, Celtics, Devils

  • Carter hated getting his hair cut and would put it off until Father threatened to do it for him. His reasoning: the clippers tickled.

  • Mother had a cleaning staff at her disposal, but when she was stressed she liked to vacuum. “It drowns out my thoughts—sometimes it’s good to not be able to hear yourself think.”

  • It was really Father who hit the golf ball through the solarium roof. He’d been showing off his range with a new driver. He blamed Mick, but Mother knew and indulged his cover story.

  • Carter was afraid of heights—they made him vomit. He’d thrown up on Ferris wheels and over the side of the Grand Canyon.

  • Mother collected tea sets—she had beautiful ones, even a Revere Silver—but her favorite was chipped ceramic from a d
epartment store, because her godmother had bought it.

  • Father sang in an award-winning a cappella group in college, but never told his family because Grandfather thought singing was “soft.” And he ate mustard on everything: pretzels, salads, seafood, steak, toast.

  All these and more, pages more. When I paused, my fingers ached from gripping the pencil and my back complained about my stooped-over posture on the hard hall floor.

  It wasn’t enough, not nearly enough, but it was a start.

  Chapter 20

  For two days I added to my memory log and watched the door. Waited for Garrett to walk through it and whisk me away to safety. I expected him with every tick of the vintage black-and-white cat clock whose eyes and tail twitched away seconds of my life. I held my breath and listened for knocks or keys in the lock, but they never came.

  He never came. The only place he appeared was in the memories on the pages of my notebook. His childhood was knotted up with my own, as tangled as my old Slinky, which he and Carter had used to play tug-of-war. He’d been the fifth person in my stick-figure, crayoned family portraits. The one who taught me to tie my shoes. The one who cheated to help me find more eggs on Easter.

  He would come for me. He had to come for me.

  But after the cheese, cereal, chips, and oyster crackers were gone, I was faced with making a meal out of soy sauce or leaving the four walls that were crowding in on me. I hadn’t followed Dr. Castillo’s advice and thrown away my cell, but I hadn’t turned it on either. And while I couldn’t bring myself to toss my license or credit cards, I hid all forms of ID behind a gift card in my wallet.

  I had no similar hesitation when it came to my medical ID bracelet. I removed that shackle and tossed it in the bottom of Carter’s trash can.

  I flipped over a take-out menu and scrawled a note.

  G,

  I’m here. Please wait, I’ll be back soon.

  I centered it on the coffee table, slipped the keys onto a paper clip and into my pocket, and tiptoed out. I slunk down the stairs and reminded myself to breathe with every step that took me farther from the building. I skipped the bodega Garrett had warned me about and went into one on the next corner.

  Bread, peanut butter, milk, and a smile from the clerk—these were the things I took back to the apartment with me.

  Seeing the untouched note threw my claustrophobia into overdrive. A quick sandwich and I was back out the door, down the stairs, and burying myself in the foot traffic.

  New York City had a rhythm, but I couldn’t quite master it. I couldn’t figure out the pattern for merging into the streams of pedestrian traffic. When to chance crossing during a blinking signal and when to pause. How to purchase an umbrella from a street vendor during a quick summer storm, then manage it and my purse without becoming a liability to myself and everyone around me.

  They were the same numbered streets and avenues from the maps I’d studied through so many infusions. The same districts I’d dreamed about—but they were different in reality than on a screen. My theoretical knowledge of the city didn’t translate.

  The steps of the crowds hit like a metronome, but I never could match their beat. Others looked forward, at phones, at buildings in the distance. They smoked cigarettes, juggled packages, strollers, dog leashes, conversations. I looked sideways, skipped and skittered in diagonals. Dodged and danced and did everything I could to avoid elbows and heels and shoulders and purses.

  The brush-against, the casual collision. It was a part of city life. To the extent that stopping to say “excuse me” was irrelevant and unnecessary. But I couldn’t afford those bumps. Not without a steady supply of immunoglobulin. I didn’t need a CBC to tell me that if my counts had started at “okay,” they were only getting worse with every day that passed.

  I didn’t fit in. Nothing about me did. Not my steps. Not my clothing—neither the clothing I would have worn if I had access to my pastel wardrobe, nor the brightly patterned dresses left for me in the closet. Everything here was black. Black on black. Black as an accent. In accessories. Always somewhere. But not on me.

  And I talked too much. To strangers at crosswalks. To dog walkers. To nannies and parents. To the man standing between me and the trash can when I went to throw away a gum wrapper. To the person handing out flyers on a corner.

  I knew I was supposed to be keeping my head down. I knew it. I understood it. I woke wet-eyed several times each night from nightmarish reminders.

  Still, I couldn’t stop myself from having conversations with everyone. Conversations that validated I still existed; I was still here. Conversations with the clerk at the drug store where I bought hair dye—after I’d already consulted with three different shoppers about color selection. With the businessmen lining up in front of and behind me for morning coffee. The harried baristas who could barely keep up with the chaos of latte, double-shot, extra-dry, nonfat, half-caf, soy milk, almond milk, no milk, medium-in-a-large-cup. With the nannies in the park where I sat on a bench and drank mine as slowly as possible—in no rush to return and see the apartment empty and my note to Garrett still unread. I toed the line between friendly and flirty with the guys who played Hacky Sack in front of a private school, then practiced the art of polite rejection when they tried to slip me phone numbers. I offered extra smiles to the waitress at the diner where I stopped for orange juice and toast. She looked like she wanted to shuffle through the remainder of her shift and go home and bury herself in a pack of cigarettes, an afghan, and a romance novel—but when I asked for honey, using the name on her tag, “Shanice,” she paused long enough for me to launch into an explanation of how Mother always buttered my toast, spread it with honey, sprinkled it with cinnamon, then cut it into fourths with the crusts removed to look like hearts.

  “That’s a lot of work for bread,” she said with a grudging smile.

  “She only did it when I was sick,” I admitted, twirling a strand of my newly dark-brown hair. “Homesick counts as sick, right? Because I really crave that today.”

  She took my plate and I added this detail to Mother’s pages in the notebook, finishing just before Shanice came back with it exactly as I’d described. Her hearts might not have been as perfect as Mother’s and she was a little heavy-handed with the cinnamon, but if I closed my eyes while I bit I could pretend I was back home in my bed with a breakfast tray and Mother seated in a chair beside me.

  My teary-eyed “thank you” earned me a pat on the cheek. Even with her cigarette and bacon-grease-and-coffee smell, she felt like a mom. I needed that, and told her as much.

  “I needed it too.” She wiped her eyes. “My youngest just moved out. Do you think he calls home? Never. You be a good girl and call your mama, okay? Tell her you need her. Tell her you love her.”

  I sucked on the inside of my cheek and nodded, wishing oh so badly that I could.

  I should have been lying low. Waiting. But there were only so many times I could pace the dimensions of the apartment without going crazy. Only so many times I could imagine Garrett walking through that door armed with answers and comfort. Only so many times I could reread the anecdotes and lists in my notebook without panicking when I couldn’t come up with anything new to add. Without dissolving into a mush of memories and grief and missing.

  When I was moving, when I was out in the city with its heartbeat and its energy and its demands and promises, then I could pretend this was all some elaborate game. My parents weren’t dead. Neither was Carter. I wasn’t exiled awaiting who-knows-what, with an unnamed, unknown threat hanging above my head.

  This wasn’t really my life. This couldn’t really be my life.

  So it all must be a dream.

  And as long as I kept moving, I could believe it.

  Chapter 21

  It took me five days to realize my major mistake: if Garrett wasn’t coming, Dr. Castillo was my only way out—and I’d left the hotel where he knew how to reach me. I didn’t even know the name I was supposed to check in under—it ha
d been written on a scrap of paper I’d torn and tossed in various trash cans on my walk from the hotel to the apartment—so I couldn’t call to see if there were messages left for me.

  Instead I went to a random street corner—one as far from my building as I’d dared to venture. With stress-stiffened fingers, I turned on my cell phone, panicking through the moments it took to load, and then jotted down Dr. Castillo’s number. I jammed my thumb on the Off button, already moving and putting space between myself and the corner. Looking around with fear-wide eyes, like if the mysterious “They” were monitoring the GPS on my phone, they had the ability to teleport and become an immediate threat.

  Fifteen minutes later I finally located a pay phone, punched in the doctor’s number, and prayed while it rang. Voice mail—but not his usual message.

  “You’ve reached Doctor Darius Castillo. At the pause, leave a careful message. You can count on a response at my earliest convenience. Please be patient.”

  I didn’t leave a message. I could hear his warning in the awkward cadence, his desperately inflected words—words he knew I hated, words he knew I’d notice. I wondered how much it had cost him not to say, “Penelope, be careful!” at the end. How long until the last bit of patience I was clutching like a kite string flew away?

  On the walk home I did something I’d vowed not to: I bought a newspaper. I would not bring it back in the apartment—where there was no audience to keep me from falling to pieces or obsessing over the photos and articles—instead I sat on a bench and unfolded it with shaking fingers.