Ophelia, Alive Read online

  sun. jan. 16.

  10:43 am.

  anyway

  I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what Kate said, about things being made new. Like she was saying, it’s a strange turn of phrase, one that the first time you hear it you say I know what that means, but then you think about it for a minute and you realize I guess maybe I don’t know what that means, and then you think about it for a couple of hours and you’re like I actually have no idea at all what that means. People talk about buying “new” shoes, but the shoes are always made from old, dead animals. People talk about a “new” baby, but the baby’s always made from recycled DNA and whatever crap its mom has been eating. Then it comes out into the world smothered in old blood and old gunk, and pushed headfirst through a sweaty vagina.

  Kids are gross.

  I’m not saying I don’t like new shoes, just that Kate might have a point. I can’t stop thinking about the possibility of starting—not just, like, starting over or starting fresh, but just plain starting. Is that possible? I remember reading once that even Big Bang cosmology can’t account for the first 10-37 seconds of the universe’s existence, whatever that means. We talk about newness like it’s a thing, like we see it every day, but it’s not and we don’t. Everything is made from old, recycled stardust.

  I think I’m starting to understand Kate’s fascination, at least a little.

  Last night in the elevator, before the nightmares started, I remember standing there, thinking about all the things I would do tomorrow as soon as the sun came up. Graduate, find a job, write that book. But this morning, now that I’m sitting in my room with the blinds half-open, in the glow of a stale sunrise and the last vestiges of evaporating frost, all that seems secondary. To really fix things, to really start over (there it is again), I’ll have to track down my father.

  I don’t know where that thought came from, to be honest. I haven’t given the man a thought in years, and it’s not like I feel particularly hung up on the guy. It’s just a bridge that’s been burned, and when something is lying broken, you fix it. You ever feel like you don’t want to do something, and maybe you can’t even think of a good reason for it, but you still have to do it? Because it’s, y’know, the “right thing” (whatever that means)? Yeah, this is that.

  Is that stupid?

  I’ve been poking around online this morning, trying to find a phone number for him. There’s a name that matches my dad’s on several of those shady “white pages” websites that people only use when they’re desperate. I briefly thought about looking at Facebook, but no one ever puts their phone number on Facebook anymore, plus it doesn’t seem like the sort of site my dad would spend a lot of time on. But anyway, all the white pages listings match up, so I guess the number here is legit. There’s no picture, just one of those silhouettes with a question mark over it, but I guess that shouldn’t surprise me too much. Actually, it’d be scarier if this sort of website had more people’s pictures, right?

  And now that I think about it, I could probably get the number from Sara—I’m pretty sure she still talks to the guy (he’s paying a lot of her bills right now, I think). But whatever, if I call her, I know what’ll happen. It’ll be just like last time, where she answers and I realize I can’t say anything and then I just hang up. I still wish she didn’t have that sort of power over me, but one thing at a time, right? I’ve been staring at this number for almost an hour now, and I should probably either call or give up.

  And I need to stop giving up. That’s not something I’m going to let myself do anymore.

  I carefully punch each number into my phone, and then my thumb hovers—for too long—over Call.

  Then I stand up and walk out the door, locking it behind me. If I’m going to be awake, I can at least get a late breakfast or something. And somehow, that momentum, moving forward, even just toward breakfast, gives me the spark I need to let my thumb fall. I trip down the stairs, putting the phone to my ear. It rings.

  I close my eyes (hard). I can’t see where I’m going, but after four-and-a-half years I know the campus by heart. I burst out into the winter air, and it’s cool and it’s dry with the smell of brown grass and mud. A third ring, a fourth. Then the fifth is cut off halfway through and I swallow my breath and I squash the impulse to throw the phone into a snowdrift and run, and I clench my fist till the handset bleeds silicon, but then I hear his voice.

  “Hey, sorry I missed your call, leave a message.”

  I open my eyes and I breathe. Voicemail. I can do that, sure. “Hey, uh, Dad. It’s Ophie. Ophelia. Your daughter. Sorry, uh, sorry I missed you. I just thought we should catch up. Or something. Give me a call back at this number.”

  It’s weird when you gear up for something awkward and possibly contentious and then it’s not. He might not even call me back. Would that be so bad?

  Ah, damn it.

  He’s gonna think I was calling about money.

  I could kick myself for leaving that message now. He’ll call me back with a lecture about being responsible and not wasting my time, and I want to chuck the phone again, but I shove it back in my pocket, so hard that the seam tears. But I’m at the door to the dining hall now, so I guess I might as well have something to eat.

  It’s dark inside, even compared to the clouded-out sun. I haven’t felt like eating in days (O, true apothecary), but I know I should probably try. I swallow the cottony lump in my throat and scan my ID badge (guy at the register doesn’t even look up), and step into the garish bazaar of assorted foodstuffs.

  The room reeks of industrial-strength dishwasher soap. If I can find something bland, maybe I can force it down. The specials are waffles and omelets and sausage, doubtless all frozen from a factory, and I can’t stop thinking about them rolling off the line on a sanitized conveyor belt. I turn to the old standby, the breakfast nook, where cereal comes out of a faucet. Froot Loops and Lucky Charms and other grain-sugar pellets that scrape your tongue like sand. I reach far away from the sugary stuff (toward the cardboardy stuff) and my hand lands on the knob for the Cheerios and jerks it back and forth fast, trying to get as little as possible into my bowl. The loathsome rings bounce rustily down the chute like a knocking car engine, and they smell like old newspapers. And the milk from the machine next-door smells like a foot, but I put some on them anyway, and it erupts out of their little white O-holes with a bubbly, white stickiness. I grab a spoon and collapse into a booth and stab at the floating things, trying to work up enough hatred to make them worth grinding between my teeth.

  Maybe I should just give up and go back to bed.

  A tray clatters down across from me, and it’s covered in waffles and eggs and bananas, and I struggle not to vomit from the smell. “Hey Phelia.”

  It’s Kate.

  I say hey back, and I throw down my spoon, and it bounces on the tray, throwing gray-silver sunlight back out the window. She sits and she bites her lip and plays with a fork.

  Hesitates.

  “You feeling okay?” she says.

  “Yeah, sure. Just a weird morning so far.”

  “Weird how?”

  I slouch back against the seat and I shrug. “Called my dad.”

  “Your dad?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s what's weird about this morning? That you called your dad?”

  “Well, I mean, I haven’t talked to him in almost ten years.”

  “Oh.” She’s slowly peeling a banana, but won’t take her eyes off of me. Her brow is wrinkled, and she’s staring, like maybe she’s afraid I’ll run off or pull a knife.

  “Sorry—I still haven’t told you much about me, have I? My folks divorced when I was in fifth grade. I’m still not sure why.”

  “Oh. Sorry about that.”

  “Yeah, I mean, it’s all right. I guess. Except, it’s not.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah, I just, have this feeling, y’know? That I need to fix it. No, I don’t mean fix it, not like that. I’m not trying to pull a Pare
nt Trap here. I just, y’know, need to see him. I mean, I haven’t talked to him in forever, but, like, he’s my father, and I need to. Even if he’s a total dick and it’s a miserable conversation, I feel like I just can’t leave the wound sitting there.”

  She picks up her orange juice and sucks at the straw, slowly. She still won’t take her eyes off of me. Narrow and skeptical. “That makes sense, I guess.”

  “Does it?”

  “Yeah, I think so.” She stabs at a waffle with her fork, again without looking down. “I’ve been there. I think. That’s a big step, though. Ballsy.”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “Nothing. I mean—he didn’t answer. I left a message.”

  “Oh.” She sits there, looking me up and down. Barely eating. Finally: “You sure you’re okay?”

  “Okay, Kate, you wanna tell me what’s up? You’ve been acting weird since you sat down.”

  “Uh—” she says—“it’s just that—I mean—” leans forward, and under her breath: “—do you even remember last night?”

  I lean in as well. “Of course I remember last night. It was awful, but now it’s over, and I’m trying to move forward. I mean, what else can I do?”

  She grabs my wrist. Stares into my eyes. Drops a fork with a clank on her tray. She says, “This is important, okay? I need you to tell me, from the beginning, what you think happened last night.”

  “What?”

  “Just do it, okay?”

  “Um—okay. And I push the bowl of soggy oat mush aside, and I take a breath, and: “We left the room around two-ish, right? We threw the body out the window into the dumpster, and you pulled the van around, right? Hey, I never found your screwdriver, by the way.”

  “It’s somewhere. Go on.”

  “Okay. So, once we got her into the van, we drove around for—a long time.”

  “Yeah, I took a lot of twists and turns.”

  “Okay. Then we got to the hospital, took her down to the basement, stripped her naked and put her in a body cooler, and then we got back on the elevator.”

  “And then?”

  “And then—uh—”

  She finishes her orange juice and says, “That’s what I thought.”

  “What?”

  “You don’t remember anything after that.”

  “Well—” and I stop because she’s right. A dozen nightmares ago I’m in the elevator with Kate and a gurney full of clothes, and it rises and it doesn’t stop. Then the thrashing and the sweating, the waking, the phone call, and then I’m back here in the dining hall, eyes stinging.

  She’s silent, her deep-black eyes holding back something—a dark, heavy thought that feels out-of-place here, with the plastic benches and tables built out of cheap particleboard and stumbling, gray sunlight that pours through square holes in the window shade, casting prison-bar shadows across her black freckles.

  “Well, what happened?”

  She’s playing with a tater tot now, mashing it into ketchup over and over again, not looking up. She says, “I saw things last night I wish I could forget.”

  “Kate, you’re kinda creeping me out.”

  Laughs. “I’m creeping you out?”

  “Kate, would you please just tell me what happened?”

  She breathes deep. Sighs. “Okay—well—we were in the elevator, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And we were going up, and you looked over at me, and suddenly—”

  “Suddenly what?”

  She bites her lip. “It’s hard to explain. The look in your eyes got weird. They got—distant. Sort of...grayish? I guess? Then the doors opened, and you ran off.”

  “I ran off?”

  “Well—sort of? You weren’t running, exactly, it was more like—shambling? That’s a thing, right? But, y’know, weirdly fast. It was—I’ve never seen anyone move quite the way you were. Anyway, I guess I thought you were messing around, or something, not that it made a lot of sense for you to be messing around at that moment, but whatever. So I was like, C’mon, and I grabbed the gurney and started back toward the door. But the next thing I knew, you were gone. I looked over my shoulder, and you weren’t there anymore. So there I am, standing in the middle of a hallway with a gurney full of bloody clothes, and I have to decide: do I try to find Phelia, or do I try to get out of here while I still can?”

  Deep bags under her eyes, bearing down on her freckles. The mashed tater tot finally finds its way to her mouth.

  “What’d you do?”

  “Well, obviously I went after you.”

  “What’d you do with her clothes?”

  “I threw them down a trash chute. Probably wasn’t the best move, but what choice did I have?”

  “Yeah, I guess,” I say. (That’ll come back to bite us in the ass.)

  “Anyway, I just left the gurney sitting along the wall, and then I went off in the direction that I thought I saw you go.”

  “And you found me?”

  “Eventually, yeah. Took me almost an hour.”

  “And I was—?”

  “You don’t remember any of this?”

  “Sorry.”

  Starts mashing another tot. “You were five floors up. I found you lying in front of a door.”

  “Like, lying down?”

  “Passed out on the floor.”

  “Oh.”

  “It was weird.”

  “Yeah.”

  She bites her lip, looks away, picks up her fork and plays with it. There’s more, but she doesn’t want to say it. “It was—” she says—“it was one of those heavy steel doors? Like, a painted metal door? Anyway, it was covered in scratches—deep gouges that went all the way down to the metal. And there you were, at the bottom, with your fingernails still dug into the paint.”

  I look down at my fingernails. Jagged, flayed, still filled with paint chips. Orange, and under that, beige. Bleeding. “So—what? I’d been scratching at a door for an hour?”

  “As far as I could tell, yeah.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  She shrugs, looking down at her food. “Anyway,” she says, “you were lying there, passed out and bleeding. I managed to wake you up—I mean, you opened your eyes, anyway.”

  “I did?”

  “Yeah, but again, your eyes just didn’t look like you. It was a weird, faraway look—gray, y’know? And I couldn’t get you to talk. You just gurgled at me.” Her tater tot is basically liquid now, so she gives up and leaves it in the ketchup-potato mush and starts wiping her hand on a napkin.

  “What’d you do?”

  “What could I do? I did my best to get you back to your feet, and then you shambled with me back toward the van.”

  “I didn’t say anything?”

  “Not till we got back to the van. Then you collapsed in the passenger seat and mumbled all the way back.”

  “I mumbled? What was I talking about?”

  “Nothing that made sense. I picked out the name Sara a couple of times. Does that name mean anything?”

  “It’s—my sister’s name—”

  “Oh.”

  “What?”

  “There’s been some drama there, then?”

  “I—I mean—that’s not really your business.”

  Once I say it, I wish I could take it back. It sounds so unfriendly, so hostile. Like I’m shutting out the one person who’s listened to me in years.

  “Listen,” I say, “I’m sorry—”

  “No, I get it. Listen, though, Phelia. I’ve known enough druggies to recognize drug-induced behavior when I see it. I don’t know what you’re on, but you really need to get off it.”

  “But I’m not—”

  She raises an eyebrow. Just one. Just a bit.

  “I mean—”

  “Was that her last night? The one following us around? The mortician? Was that Sara?”

  “How could you possibly know that?”

  “Just a lucky guess.” She leans o
n her elbow. “No, I saw the way you recognized her voice. The look in your eyes while she was still around the corner. It was obvious you two had a history. An uncomfortable one.”

  Don’t tell anyone. “I’m not angry at her. I mean, I needed a job, she got me a job—”

  “—which you complain about every day.”

  It’s our secret. “Well—I mean—I need it, though. I was in a rough spot.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  For now. “What?”