“What happens tomorrow?” the doctor asked.
“I’m here today, aren’t I?” I said, feeling the useless urge to defend myself. You couldn’t trust a person who controlled the odds. A singular mention of suicide would slaughter my odds of walking out of here a liar and still sick of my illness. Phone call. Remember the phone call, you spanner. Behave.
“Are you? Are you really here, Kaia?”
“Ah, you tell me doc.” Yeah, a fitting response because I had long ago judged her mental aptitude was statistically better than mine. She had a PHD and since the age of ten, I’ve had depression.
“Seems to me like your back in Camden with your father. Perhaps in the Cape with your boyfriend…” She paused to read over my file before getting to his name. “James—”
“Tuck,” I said, saving her the trouble. “He goes by Tucker. Tucker James Young.”
The doctor however, was right. There wasn’t a damn moment that I stared at these white walls and the paintings made by patients. Particularly the one with green waves and a gold shore because if I just squinted hard enough, I could imagine I was back at the Cape. A part of me still lived there, on Contuit Dock, where hope and the boy on a cloud of perfection found me. I remember watching him drift between the sunset and the sea, imagining all the things perfect boys like him did: jog eight miles in the morning, instill a healthy dose of insecurity when they spoke, run a stressed hand through their hair only to make it more perfect. Fuck. What didn’t they do? Want to kill themselves? Yeah, that.
“What was he like?” The good doctor asked, seeming to comprehend that there was no return for my thoughts. Some days, my intellectual teammate could read my mind. Today was begrudgingly one of them. “Start at the beginning for me, Kaia.”
“The beginning.” I tried to define the word. Beginning of what? There were two for me. Before I picked up a razor and after I experimented with one, incapable of going back.
“Yes,” the doc said. “The beginning of your relationship with Tucker.”
“It was June 11th.” And he was the type of boy you wanted to spend all your time with, regardless of his boy-ish energy or his diet of chicken breasts and broccoli that you had to abide by and swear you’d hold a cupcake within a ten-foot pole. He was a mechanic with a penchant for fixing broken things and a rower who would face any tide. In the end, was my best friend, my love, and my hero. In the beginning, he asked me what my name was.
There were so many things I could have said like, poor girl, patient Abrams, I miss you— this one followed up my mother’s staticy greetings. “Hi, I miss you.” Yeah shit mama, I missed me too. Instead, I had taken a sip of iced tea, washed down my insecurity and all those names which defined me and said, ‘Kaia Abrams,” because that was my name. I just didn’t know who it made me.
“That was ten months ago, yes?”
I nodded. Ten months ago, I had been attending York County Community College in Maine before my statistics professor found me in the bathroom. A monster on the tile floor, that’s what I was. Itching to relieve myself of everything fucked up and painful, hunting for blood while shaking with fear of what I had become. An addict, really, that’s who I was. I didn’t snort lines, I carved them.
At the time I had been living with my pop in Camden, Maine. Just a small tenement on Sea Breeze Drive where two addicts balanced on a tightrope, trying not to fall off into valium or onto razors. My pop and I coped differently, yet we understood each other all the same. We waged our own battles, his in the trenches of Drang Valley, mine in the betrayal of my own body because apparently lacking the happy cells meant you were constantly fighting for them. Before I had been admitted to Spaulding Center, before I came to the Cape, we had made an ultimatum: If the trenches got too deep or the climb suddenly felt impossible, it would be alright if we didn’t get back up. We would understand.
It wasn’t healthy, but it was a fucked up kind of hope.
Doctor K smiled as if sensing the gears in my mind were turning. My sweater had all of a sudden become too close to the ridges on my arms, brushing up against the scarred flesh that was a testament to my self-hatred and a reminder of my guilt. The way I hurt myself, fighting pain with pain, searching for a relief that I would never find, was how I became so capable of hurting others. Because decimating my body, decimated Tucker’s all the same.
Doc K flipped through her notes. An open page which my every thought and fucked up notion would fill. “Let’s talk about him.”
“Can we not?” Because I wanted to leave. To be anywhere but here, sitting in front of my therapist as she tallied each word against my prospects of release like I tallied each of my days and pain on my wrists. Feeling entirely defeated, tired of sitting in this damn bean bag for two weeks, I said, “He doesn’t have anything to do with this. He’s not a part of this, Doc.”
“Isn’t he? You broke up because you knew you were hurting him. I believe you’re here to be better for him,” Doc K said, hitting it right on the nail and not a damn inch to the side. “Are you not?”
“I don’t— No. I can’t.” I was up and out of my chair in seconds, my heart gunning in my chest, a tidal wave of self-loathing washing over me. He didn’t deserve me. He deserved more because I was an addict and I would never stop wanting to use. The prospect of fighting my own urges for the rest of my life was depressing.
“A memory, then.” She gestured to me to sit. “Let’s start there. Can we do that, instead?”
“A memory.”
“That’s broad, yes. Perhaps we could… begin with intimacy?”
Like how my pop and I sat on the sofa in the silence of our dark living room, clutching books to be anywhere but sat in the truth. When the fire would crack, pop, and he’d nearly jump out of his skin, look at me with a mix of devastation and humiliation, a carefully concocted shame, and say, “They didn’t get me, kiddo. They didn’t pop your pop.” No, they didn’t. But sometimes I imagined he wished they did. That a bullet from the Vietnam War had found his heart if only to stop haunting him.
“Intimacy. Ah,” I dredged up, through the onslaught of emotional steel that was blocking my throat. “We weren’t intimate. Didn’t, uh, get there exactly…Me and Tuck.”
It wasn’t like we didn’t try. Hell, even Richard, my boyfriend’s boss, sensed the sexual frustration that emanated through my teenage boyfriend. A goddamn summer bonus, he called it.
“Either you fixed a flat and told the woman she actually had four.” I had jumped up to grab the concert tickets in his hand. “Or you took the cash from Richard, which—baby please tell me you did not take cash from Richard.” I didn’t understand. The way my boyfriend suddenly had four hundred dollars to purchase concert tickets to Switchfoot’s tour? It was beyond my comprehension and impossibly out of Tuck’s paygrade.
“Pack it in, alright? Rich would chop my head like a fucking chicken if I told a woman she’s got four flats,” he’d said, backing up towards the window as his 6’5 frame took the defensive. “Two flats? Now, that’s more realistic.”
I scowled at my ridiculous boyfriend. Give it up asshole. I’ll shove those tickets up—
“Christ. Okay, okay, yes. Rich did give me a summer bonus. Because the old man said I was fucking pussy-whipped. You hear that? Pussy-whipped.” My mouth fell open. “Yeah, baby. You can’t keep calling me when I’m at work. Seven cigarette breaks make me look— I mean hell, I don’t mind it, but when it takes me away from my job…”
“What did he say, Tuck? Tell me baby that you stood up for me.”
He grinned stupidly, unable to hide his smug amusement when I was burning up inside. “That I needed to, you know, finally get my hole.”
What else could I have done but take it on the chin? His boss had told him to tie the knot more or less. And I’d be a damn good liar if I said I didn’t think about it too. Of course, I called my boyfriend everyday, sitting on the bathroom floor, a foot away from relief and miles away from his voice. It had to be enough to keep me stable, steady. To keep me alive, damnit— Richard, lad, ego aside, you did a good thing here.
A day later, packing our duffle bags, his mother, Georgia, had turned on the radio, 162.400 MHz for the weather. All but a sixty eight and cloudy, my boyfriend and I folded t-shirts and shorts like we were going to the Bahamas and never coming back. “Christ Abrams. How many times do you need to change those things? Because unless you’re due baby, I think three of those frillies will be alright.”
I looked at him like he had grown a head. “Frillies? Are you eighty and really going to say no to these?” I said, smiling as I had showed off a pink pair which I knew would blow his mind. Indeed, my had boyfriend threw three of his shirts onto the floor, making room for his imagination and what would later be the cataclysmic sight of me in pink.
With enough room in my Opel Corsa for our duffles, a tent, some sleeping bags, and a cooler with sandwiches made by Georgia, we managed enough room for two cases of Boston Lightship. Tucker handed me the phone having already dialed Xavier Dicey, his weed dealer who I had never spoken to once in my life, nor ever imagined I would be, when I mouthed to him, You really want me to do this? He mouthed back, No time like the present, baby. I could do nothing else but ask the twenty-seven year old on the line for two cases of beer and to meet us at Merkel Beach in Harwich Port.
Our funds and beer had taken a significant dip as we pulled into the gravel lot at Village Green Bandstand Point. Just short of the horizon, the sun was falling and all around us, people were playing music from their speakers, unloading their cars, stringing up tents, drinking, smoking. And then there was my boyfriend with a shit-eating grin spread wide across his face and an untabbed can of beer in his hand. I knew exactly where his thoughts had traveled because mine met him right at the convergence.
“Don’t get too big for those boots now, ya hear me?” Fucking Rich. He may have been a like father to my boy, but on the days he chose to be Tucker’s buddy rather than his boss, I wouldn’t be surprised if in my boyfriend’s pockets were several packets of condoms.
With all the offense, while none being serious, my boyfriend gaped. “I would never.”
We hadn’t had sex yet. In a way, giving my body to him like that, well, it was more than just stripping down. Long sleeves were like my shield, my iron barrier to protect him from the scars on my body. What Tucker didn’t see, couldn’t hurt him. Besides, wearing long sleeves had become my trademark. “What tattoos have you got under there, Abrams? Because if it’s my name, tell me now, and the ring is yours.” He never asked for something I couldn’t give him, but Tuck could sense a break before he even saw one; it was the mechanic in him, born to fix broken things. Drinking at the pier was when the question came out all slurred and sleepy. “What’s making you hurt? Tell me so I can fix it.”
Thing was, the permanent damage on my wrists couldn’t be fixed. My depression couldn’t be solved. Not with his wrench in one hand, or his sacrificial heart, ready to hand it over, in the other.
One by one, Tucker slid beers into the pockets of his shorts, another one beneath the band of his underwear. Then his hands had found the band of mine. “Absolutely not. Nope,” I had squealed when he slid the cold tin down those underwear he loved so much, then two more until I nearly jumped out of my skin because it was so damn cold. “Jesus Tuck, look at me. I’m packing on another six pounds, babe,” I said, gesturing to the bulge in my shorts, impregnated with my boyfriend’s beer baby.
“Yeah and it’s impressive as fuck,” he said, wrapping his arms around my torso and sending a wet tide of beer against my stomach as he swung me around and pulled me in the direction of the gates. “My beautiful whale.” His smile was one only the damned devil could hate, and whale or not, I kissed him like there was no tomorrow.
I had nothing to give this boy. Barely even the promise of a tomorrow, yet in the eight months Tuck and I had been together, I had managed to stick it out for two hundred and forty three days. I’ll be loving ya tomorrow, stud. That was our vow and as much as it was a promise to him, it was a promise to myself.
My doc tapped her pen on the orange folder, the clock around her neck sounded that the hour was finished and for some fucking reason, I had a hard time moving. I had a hard time doing anything that didn’t involve wanting to kill myself these days. Being alive was a challenge for me because it always felt like I didn’t work right, or was constantly fighting to. I didn’t have the right tools in my toolbox.
“It’s okay to miss him, you know,” Doc K said.
“Who?” I muttered.
“It’s okay to mourn the loss of your father and still accept love from others who are not him. It’s okay to put your trust in someone else, ask them to take the load off you. Asking for help is good.”
I tried that damnit. Visiting my mother in the Cape, giving into her lawless prescription of the sun and the sea, my pop had given me the keys to his Opel Corsa, telling me to hang in there kiddo. The irony is what disturbs me the most, the call from the cops who used the same word to tell me that my pop was dead. The way my heart plummeted to my ass, dragging me deeper into darkness because how could I hang in there when my pop had gone and done it himself? Fuck.
I remember when the news came. Tucker and I had been painting his guest house. It was the first time I looked down at the stains in my clothes and had seen Ivory Lace and Thornton Green instead of DNA. My first instinct was to hurl the paint roller in my hand, hit the wall and release the surge of anger, disappointment, shame. When I did, another one smacked the same spot and I looked at my stud with tears in my eyes finding the understanding in his. “Would throwing something else work?”
He started opening cabinets, one by one, revealing plates, platters, bowls, wine glasses, mugs, tumblers from Baccarat, Waterford, Yeoward. Instead of treating the glass with delicacy, instead of looking at me the way my pop had full of pity and apology, Tucker handed me a glass. “Go crazy, baby. Start wherever you’d like.”
So I did. I hit the same wall and the glass splattered with a crack like thunder in the sky, lightning sparking over the sea. Again and again and again and before I knew it, a single tear slipped down my face, a single row of glasses remained, and I had broken what was not mine to break.
The same way, I had decimated my body only to decimate Tucker’s heart.
That night, sitting in the Young estate, when I made no move to eat, my boyfriend’s fork stabbed a piece of chicken, moving it towards my mouth, letting it hang there until I gave in. Nine or ten times, he hooked another, feeding me until my head slumped forward and my shoulders sagged in defeat. Where was I supposed to go? Home? To a barren battleground? To my mother who thought depression was a stain? Something you could simply scrub from your couch with some bleach and a little hard work.
We laid in bed, Tuck and I, searching for dreams yet never finding a damn one. Eventually my boy had fallen asleep and I had only tumbled deeper into my own thoughts. My body had been aching and the devil on my shoulder, born to be my best lad, surviving even my most terrible battles, led me to the washroom. Just lie down. Let it out and be done with this fucking nightmare. Relieve yourself of this life and do the best thing you can for him: leave. Just disappear, Abrams. It was all over for me. All too much, the pain in my head, my lungs, my heart. I was an addict, rummaging through the bathroom drawers for anything, something to slide over my flesh, to hit a nerve, a vein, a composite of all my guilt. All I had to do was let go and the current would take me.
Putting my trust in someone was just as good as putting a razor to their heart and asking them to take the blow. So I said to Doc K, who was too damn intuitive and knowledgeable for her own good, “I see what you did there.”
The blonde woman smirked, settling back into her chair. “Ah, my degree comes to fruition. Intimacy and love, they come with trust and acceptance, Kaia. Now, what would have happened if you asked Tucker for help that day?”
“I would have felt hopeless.” Honestly? I would have felt like the poster girl for Prozac.
Doc added to her notes, chalking up my words like counting dough. How much could she get out of me today and would it be worth something? Would it add up to be enough? “Because you are frightened of what he might have seen in you. How your illness has shaped you. Is that correct?”
Illness. As if the lines beneath my sleeves were a sickness, a plague showing on the surface of my body. I didn’t say anything. How could I? Battling depression was to wield the sharpest weapon you could find and protect yourself from the person that was you. Other people didn’t get that.
“I think your whole life has been subject to fear. And that is all you know.”
Wise fucking woman. “How’d you figure doc?”
“Because suppressing your pain comes too naturally to you, Kaia. You think if you come outright with the truth, you’ll be punished for it. You took your father’s pain and made room for it, fearing if you didn’t he’d become too heavy with it.” Doc K looked me dead in the eyes and I wondered what she saw there. “And when you became so heavy with it, you cut yourself, is that right?”
I nodded, swallowing the fucking steel in my throat. Feeling as though I was my father, sitting in the darkness, breathing in gunpowder, waiting for the bullet to pierce my heart. The pinching in my lungs, the way my heart beat so hard I thought it may rip through my bloody chest. I could finally lay down, could finally let go of the aching weight I had been carrying and bleed out at this woman’s feet.
“How long has it been since you’ve cut yourself?”
“Shit, I don’t know,” I shrugged. “How many days have I been glued to this bean bag? I couldn’t tell you the last time I felt the sun on my skin for that matter.”
“Do you want to know how long you’ve been here, Kaia?”
Do you want to know how many days you’ve wasted? How many tallies your arms are missing because they make you eat with a plastic fucking spoon? How many times you’ve failed and let down everyone around you? He’ll never stop fighting for you if your heart’s still bleeding, you coward.
“May I use the restroom?” I asked, buzzing with energy and the immediate urge to escape. It was so intense I found my gaze stuck to the window, considering hurling myself through it just to distract my thoughts because it wouldn’t kill me, the fall. Jesus.
Doctor K nodded and on trembling legs I walked across the room, keeping my eyes from finding that painting or my heart from crumbling at the sight of it. My hand touched the cold door handle and I was reminded of when hope found me at Contuit Dock, visiting my mother, but discovering Tuck instead. For me, the word hope had always been associated with ‘less’. Until it had later taken on the memory of Tucker walking me to my mother’s doorstep, watching me unlock the door and step inside like he needed me to be safe. “Stay outta trouble will ya? My calendar’s got your name on it, Abrams.”
“Sure thing, Tuck,” I said, all but knowing tomorrow was a promise I struggled to keep.
I locked the bathroom door. Took a great fucking look at who I had become and the person I failed to even recognize. The sight of my drained state had my fist punching the mirror, my knuckles hitting it square on the surface so fucking hard I felt the reverberations like sheer wattage running through my bones. “Fucking pricks,” I muttered and struck the plexiglass mirror again. Again. Again, until my hand and my anger felt exhausted. I closed my eyes and breathed and breathed and breathed. “Fucking— fuck! Stupid pricks.” I wanted to crawl into my own skin before I wanted to open that door and walk out, but somehow, some fucking how, I had managed it. And the biggest prick of them all was my laughing teammate as I walked out of the bathroom with my dignity in shreds and the plexiglass mirror in-fucking-tact. “Shall we call it progress?”
I looked at her like she had grown three heads. Four, in fact. “Progress?”
“Any new cuts on that skin of yours?” She laughed.
“Fuck you,” I said.
Doctor K, my wretched, spanner of a teammate, conniving with the devil himself had the gall to call over her shoulder as I walked away, “I’ll see you tomorrow, Kaia Abrams. You’ve earned yourself some phone privileges, dear.”