So Much Love Read online

  “She was a strong person, so she probably stayed a strong presence after she died. I mean, you know, sometimes you can feel the spirit of someone who has passed on, giving you strength or… ”

  “You mean like a ghost?” Donny’s voice isn’t mocking, and Catherine finds that strange—despite his sweetness, he has a teenager’s sarcasm, usually. But he wants to believe.

  “Maybe. I don’t know. Sometimes a part of them stays with the people they cared about, don’t you think?” She hopes it’s true.

  Catherine keeps murmuring, a long, slippery story about Julianna’s spirit drifting above the city where she died. Poems float into her head and she grabs whatever scraps she can and says them aloud, then goes back to her story.

  For a while, she thinks the words are helping: first Donny stops his anxious periodic whispers, and then the tension in his back and shoulders seems to gradually slacken. Then his breathing slows. The hiccups and pauses resume. A cough. Another jagged pause. Three more breaths, then no more after that. His ribcage isn’t moving anymore.

  She does not feel alone in the room, which is how she was expecting to know—so she doesn’t accept it yet. But she has been sobbing for a long time, so hard she’s gasping for air, crying in a way she hasn’t yet no matter how much Dex hurt her. Part of her thinks Donny might wake up in a moment, and another part is hollowed out, numb from the knowledge that he is gone. His body is not cold, though, not while she holds him close.

  Leaves, mother, air. The one I love looking down into the moon on my face…

  She is not fully awake, and the room is so dark that Donny is just moonlight and dust in her eyes. But he feels heavy against her chest and belly. She will tell herself later that she did all she could, that she held him when he died, and even though she did not feel the exact moment his life slipped away, it had to have been while she was holding him because when else would it have been?

  When next she’s fully conscious, it’s darker, the moon is gone, and his weight on her is dull and cool. She knows for sure then, stops hoping, but it feels wrong to push him off, to struggle out from under. Wrong because it would hurt his feelings, feelings that he no longer has, make him feel stupid and rejected—he is sensitive that way. Was. But isn’t anymore.

  She screams then, from how her brain bends under the complexity of what is not anymore, and having not eaten all day or seen the sun or her husband or been touched with mindless affection for so long. She screams and wails and beats against Donny’s silent chest. And then she sleeps again, or something like sleep. There are no more thoughts for a while.

  Grey told his story quickly, a touch contritely, to the nurse at the desk, and Catherine tried to appear as if she wasn’t listening by watching the doors through which Aimee had disappeared. Catherine wasn’t particularly interested in what was wrong with Grey; she listened because the only other distraction was an infomercial for some kind of washcloth on the television above her head. Along with her purse, she’d left her book on Britomart and the Red Cross Knight back at the restaurant; otherwise she would have been reading. Grey was not fascinating to her until she loved him.

  He eventually came back and sat across from her again, beside his friend, who had bought his own bag of Ringolos in the meantime. This was Evan, who stood up at their wedding in his brother’s suit, the cuffs slumping over his palms; who once pulled her to safety at the side of a pool after she bumped her head on the waterslide; who always invited her and Grey to Thanksgiving—she didn’t know anything about him then either. Evan offered some Ringolos to Grey, who shifted the weight of his limp arm carefully onto his thigh, which finally freed his other hand to grab a fistful. With half of them in his mouth, he inclined his head toward her and mumbled through crumbs, “You okay? I mean, obviously not, but okay enough? Even the nurses look worried about you. You don’t expect that from them.”

  Catherine started to shrug, then felt a crinkling flutter of pain and stopped. “I’m okay, I think I’ll be okay.”

  Evan nodded but remained focused on eating.

  “I’m Grey. Fell off that cement wall in the park by the water. What happened to you?” Grey would never again be so forward.

  Catherine was sick-dizzy. Heat seemed to press in on her throat, cutting off her air, bringing hot bile into her esophagus. She could feel sweat gloss her face. It had only been ten minutes since Aimee left, maybe fifteen—actually, she had no idea—but she was clearly in far worse shape now than she had been then.

  “Burn,” she whispered.

  Grey’s eyebrows shot up and beside him, his pale friend grimaced. “Burn?”

  “I slipped. Oil…is slippery. It slipped, the chute, the round thing, it’s like a slide for the oil, it slipped, and the oil splashed on my—” She remembered seeing the shiny yellow oil touch her skin. There probably hadn’t been an actual sizzle, but in her mind it sounded like eggs in a pan.

  “You have an oil burn, that’s what you’re saying?” Grey’s forehead furrowed. She didn’t know he was Grey yet, even though he’d told her his name. It hadn’t become synonymous with him yet. Back then he was just some guy, but the years of breakfasts and naps and birthdays since have overwritten those first memories—he was always Grey. He leaned toward her, his intact arm cradling the broken one so he couldn’t reach out to touch her. “You don’t sound very good.”

  “I don’t even work in the kitchen!” Catherine said. “Aislinn was on fryers, she was supposed to do it, but the funnel slipped so I leaned down to try to grab it, to keep her from getting burned… ”

  “Aislinn is the girl who was with you?” This was Evan, peering at her from under deep eyebrows. “Where did she go?”

  “No, that was Aimee!” Catherine was disturbed to find herself almost wailing. She took a deep breath. “She had to get…the bus.” She trained her eyes firmly on the first guy, then the second, even as they seemed to be receding from her in the over-bright room. It was the one whose cradled forearm mirrored hers who returned the gaze. She remembers that even as she remembers little else from the rest of that evening, retreating into pain haze and fluorescent fuzz.

  It has been dark down here for so long that Catherine can distinguish the tiniest threads of dawn penetrating the thinning branches of the hedge and the bars and her dirty window, the light slanting across the shit-brown rug allowing her to see—faintly, in silhouette—where she left the crumpled blanket when she got up at some point. She has no clock, and hasn’t kept track of days very well, but it seems like the light is taking longer to come each morning—the days are getting shorter. She was brought down here when spring was just on the horizon, and the cycle is turning again.

  She watches the light grow stronger and more vertical until it is a diffused glow, beamless but striped with the shadows of security bars, lighting the room to reasonable brightness, so that she can see the numbers on the ancient TV dial, read again about Taylor Swift’s problems in her one issue of People. “I think my eyesight is getting stronger,” she tells Donny. “I swear I can see more these days with less light.” She nods, still gazing at the window.

  Donny’s been gone for some time now. Dex hauled him away, flung over his shoulder like a drunk kid on prom night. Donny never went to prom. She keeps talking to him because she doesn’t want the basement to be silent, and because she can’t imagine another person there—her and Donny are the only ones who make sense in this room. She is still telling him stories about her childhood, the places she’s worked, the books she’s read. She is still reciting Julianna’s poetry to him, whatever lines come back to her. More and more do, appearing in her mind in the mornings as the light winks in. The more time she has to go over each poem, the less she feels she understands—the stanzas keep changing meanings, or their meanings to her. She imagines being back in Professor Altaris’s class, sitting quiet in a shiny plastic chair, listening and thinking and reading. Writing down titles she might get from the library, studying the bright blue PowerPoint slides on the screen.
When she didn’t understand something, she would just raise her hand and ask a question. So breathtakingly easy.

  Even at midmorning, when the basement gets the most light through the hedge, what she can’t see, not really, is herself. Catherine is convinced she’s getting paler, but without Donny, who can tell her what she looks like? Even if he didn’t say, she could tell by his face what he saw in hers: if he said, “Don’t worry,” she knew her eyes looked tense and darting; if he told her funny stories about pranks the guys on his basketball team played, her fear must have shown in her bitten lips. If he was silent but stroked her back, Donny was frightened of her rage. She’s sure Dex cannot see her face, has some way of not seeing her eyes and nose and soft cheeks—how else could he grind them into the gritty orange runner in the hallway upstairs, strike them with the side of a bathroom scale? When the bruises and scrapes on her face were fresh and gory, Donny would kiss them, soft dry lips, a gentle press, like her mother would when she was a little girl. She did the same for him. What else did they have?

  At the Clinique counter, the white-coated makeup ladies assessed Catherine as “olive-complexioned,” which seemed to translate into dark-skinned, permanently tanned. But now that she has been indoors and away from the sun for so long she feels bleached to bone. She gets up and stands on tiptoe in the spot where Donny stopped being alive, the place she prefers to stay, but she can’t see out the window at all from across the room. The only place she can peer up and out through the security bars and thick glass and the tangled branches and dead leaves into the smudged and muddy sky is directly below the window. Walking across the room is a long journey, but she eventually gets there.

  Dex’s basement is deep; he probably chose it with Donny and Catherine—or people like them—in mind. But still it is a basement, the ceiling looming not far above them. The windows were just shallow bands of glass striped with bars, but Donny could see out pretty well. He was taller than Catherine by a good six inches—a born basketball player. She would ask him for the weather report in the mornings when they woke up and he would stand at the tiny window, the sill level with his eyes, and tell her what he could see of the sky. It got more difficult as the summer wore on: Dex planted hedges and they leafed out fast. She suspected Donny made up a lot of it—the swooping crows, the glints of dandelions, a wandering raccoon—but she appreciated the stories, the sound of his voice, the reminder that the outside existed, that it could be seen.

  Now the windowpane is cold to the touch and the leaves on the hedges have started to die. Has she ever really been out there? How could she ever manage it again? On certain hungry mornings, when Grey seems like a fairy tale her mother must have told her, she is convinced that her skin has gone too white and fragile for her to ever step outside again; so dark is the room that she would probably burn, even if only by the light of a bright moon. She thinks the time to go, if there was one, has come and gone.

  When she woke up in the hospital, her was arm thick and stiff with gauze. The light spiked under her dry eyelids, and then Grey was there, on a bed across from hers. He was just sitting on the edge in his jeans and polo shirt, with his parallel arm in a cast, reading a copy of People with Jennifer Aniston on the cover, while Catherine was in a gown and tucked fully into her bed.

  “Did you stay…did I faint or…Did you stay for me?” Her face was warm.

  “Well.” He shrugged awkwardly, with only one shoulder. “It was too bad you were by yourself after your friend left, and you seemed so scared. Besides, it took them a while to fix me up, so I wasn’t waiting that long.”

  She shook her head, hair grinding against the pillow—pathetic.

  “You said you didn’t want to be on your own. No need to…I have time.”

  She squirmed. “I said that? I don’t remember.”

  He nodded, the half-shrug again. “It’s fine.”

  Catherine felt clean and light and her arm didn’t hurt; they must have given her drugs. Grey was watching her closely. She said, “I’m sorry to keep you here so late.”

  He smiled, but soft and worried, no teeth. “It isn’t late.” He glanced around. “You can’t tell because there’s no windows, but it’s not late—it’s early.”

  She smiled, something in her veins making her slow and sweet.

  “It’s morning, Catherine.” She jolted and saw Grey flinch in response. “The nurse told me your name. I’m Grey, by the way.”

  “Grey. It’s morning. Today is morning. It’s now.”

  Dex is in the basement, which is unusual. Lately, he just calls them up from the open door at the top of the stairs. Calls her. No we or us anymore. No plurals at all now. Dex bumps her against the wall, tries to draw her into one of his chase games, but he quickly gets frustrated—she’s tough to catch in the darkness, and she knows the room so very very well. She knows how to skirt the edge of the morning haze from the window and stay invisible, how to use the TV stand and the toilet bucket and the door frame to the old cold cellar to her advantage. She barely falters. He still gets his hands on her and slams her into a wall once or twice, mumbling about her being a bad bunny and running too fast on her long legs. She rarely listens to Dex anymore; he doesn’t make much sense and it drives her crazy trying to figure him out. She just scurries, both because he likes it and because she wants to. She’s tried going limp many times, but if Dex gets angry because she won’t play the game he wants, things get worse for her.

  She hears Dex’s heavy boots stumble and a loud Oof as he hits the TV stand. He must have tripped over the blanket. He mutters the words Dumb cunt and slowly goes back up the stairs. Catherine and Donny could never agree if it was better or worse when Dex dropped the weird game of them being rabbits and they were all just humans again. There are bangs from above. When Dex comes back down, he brings something long and white, something metal that clanks, and a flashlight. The wide gold beam of brightness snaps the room into focus, paints it strange and electric—she doesn’t recognize what she is seeing. Is this where she has lived all this time, with these rusty pipes, this dirty rug, this sickly shade of peach paint? Is that where Donny told her about his first kiss, there on the brownish cement under the window? She used to know what the basement looked like, but the light blew out ages ago, or at least that’s how it feels. It didn’t seem so grim, so cement, so real. It was better in the dark.

  Dex sets the metal thing down on the floor and steps up on it—a step-stool. Then he clenches the flashlight between shoulder and jowl and reaches above his head to unscrew one of the glass tubes from the ceiling. She forgot, during her weeks in the dark, that there was a way to make it light again. Now, she’s not sure she wants it to be. In the darkness, the room could be infinite. It’s only the light that reminds her she’s imprisoned. No, of course not. Of course she’s known all along.

  “Here,” Dex says softly, without turning, but still she startles. He rarely speaks to her. Donny spoke to her. He was her friend and they spoke all the time, the way friends do. But Dex is speaking now. “Here, give me a hand—hold this.” What he thrusts at her is a frosted glass tube, gritty with dust in her palms and rattling. The glass is cool in her hands, the dirt dissolving in the sweat of her fingertips. He is going to make the room light, all the time, illuminating the space where she is imprisoned, the place where Donny stopped being. She doesn’t know if she can bear it.

  Something pings onto the floor and he wobbles down toward the sound, the flashlight’s beam wobbling too. He gives up quickly and reaches back toward the ceiling, trying again to unscrew the second tube. The flashlight faces forward once more. She can see only the back of Dex’s head in silhouette. It doesn’t often occur to her that she hates him, because it is irrelevant but also because Dex is only pain, not a person. He is only the absence of everything else.

  He hands her the second tube. These are weapons in her hands. Glass swords, not heavy but surely sharp if she broke them. Who does Dex imagine she is? Has he had her so long that he’s forgotten she isn’t h
is? Is she so weak and useless now that he assumes she can do nothing to him?

  A hot white rains down on them: fluorescent light in the room where she lives and Donny doesn’t anymore. Dex has gotten one new tube in and is stooping to get the other out of its cardboard case. This is where she lives and Grey is somewhere else, in a clean, well-lit room aboveground, maybe longing for her. She longs for Grey and for the rooms he is probably in, their sunny living room with the picture window looking out onto the yard, the bright blue couch, narrow but comfortable, where she used to flop with her laptop, writing essays and reading the news and wondering where Donny was. Donny was here and now he is not here. And Grey is not here. And she has no one to protect but herself, burning in a false moonlight. When Donny couldn’t run, neither could Catherine. She had to stay still, had to be hugs and jokes and humanness for Donny because she was the only one he had. Now Donny is gone and Dex has inserted the second tube and the room is so bright and Dex is about to turn around and see Catherine’s face, her pale and only face, and then he’ll hurt her again because that’s all he does.

  Before he turns, before he turns, before he turns, she is screaming inside her brain. She raises the glass swords behind her own head and then, with all her wavering strength, brings them down against his skull. But he spins around too fast, she sees his surprised eyes as she strikes, a baffled look of hurt feelings as well as shock. She doesn’t hit skull, she hits face and not as hard as she wanted. It’s all going wrong but the tubes explode with a tinkling boom, like balloons made of glass. Something dry and sour fills the air and Dex’s face is bloody, sprinkled with glass, his eyes scrunch shut. Did she get glass in his eyes? Horrified, she flinches, closes her own eyes before she realizes that to hurt him as much as possible is what she wants—and she strikes at him again, and again. Dex staggers, lurching down from the stool in a stride that is half fall, grasping for her, but finally pitches forward in a snowstorm of shining shattered glass, draping over the top of the TV. The light tubes have broken into stubs in her hands—she throws the shortest one away and grips the end of the other, which still has some length of glass to it. And Dex is moving and she wants him to stop but the tube is short now, she has to get so close. Closer and closer, closer than is safe to his grabbing hands and mouth to reach his soft, stubbled throat, but she punches and stabs at whatever vulnerable cords and arteries are there, unleashing rivers of bright red blood. There’s so much, so wet and slick. With every thrust she loses more glass off the end of her delicate weapon. Finally she can’t tell what is cut and what is simply pooled blood on his neck. She risks a push, the first and only time she’s touched Dex willingly, and he follows the weight of her hands, slumps whimpering to the floor. Her hands are sticky—the broken end of the fluorescent tube has cut her too and now his blood and her blood are blending everywhere, this terrible intimacy.