Ophelia, Alive Read online

  “I’m in the kitchen, Ophie,” I hear my mom saying, and I take a deep breath and enter the house, fumbling with my keys. No matter how I shove them into my pocket, they’re still stabbing me. If only I’d brought a purse.

  Like the rest of the house, the kitchen is cavernous, and it’s separated from the living room by only a bar with some stools. I lean on the bar, take a deep breath, try to ignore that she still hasn’t even bothered to take down the Christmas tree. What does she do all day that she can’t find the time to move a plastic tree to the basement?

  At the moment, she’s at the microwave stabbing at beeping buttons with a sharp fingernail. “Hi,” she says, licking her finger. “You said you were hungry, right?”

  “Uh—”

  “This’ll be ready in a second.”

  “I’m not really that hungry.”

  “What? You said you were.”

  “I said I hadn’t eaten. That’s not the same thing.” I finally fix the keys in my pocket and climb onto a barstool, slouching, curled under the ten feet of hot, dead air between me and the vaulted ceiling. There’s a border around the kitchen wall—stenciled farm animals, maybe in memoriam of the farmland torn out when the house was built. Sara’s notes are still pounding in my head, sharp and punctuated with mathematical precision.

  “Well, here it is, anyway,” she says, and she slides a plate in front of me and sits on the opposite side of the bar. “I made it, so you might as well eat it.”

  “I’m not sure your conclusion follows from your premise.”

  That was a terrible thing to say, but can you blame me under the circumstances? She sighs and I poke at the plate, trying to decide what it’s supposed to be. Some sort of…meat. With a mushy starch on the side. She’s always been a lousy cook, but at least she tries, which is more than my dad ever did. And I’m in a foul mood, but I should probably make an effort, so I start swallowing some of it anyway. At least it’s warm.

  So much of this house is tangled in memories from my childhood.

  There was an older house, one we used to live in, tiny and cramped and musty. Mismatched curtains and old dusty furniture and secret passages and a backyard covered in lush, perfect weeds. But then Dad got his M.D. and for some reason that meant we had to move into a big, square, beige-and-gray brick house, and we carried in hundreds of boxes and sat on our new expensive furniture and said Now real life begins. But “real life” (I guess) meant that he would be gone, and then Sara’d be gone, and then I was gone too, until nothing was left in the big-beige-brick-box but my mom, her divorce, and a study she always kept locked while the air went stale.

  One Sunday, last year, when I was bored, I drove around and tried to find the old house with the secret passages and the green backyard and the magical smells, but someone had torn it down and built a grocery store.

  (I never told her any of this. How could I?)

  She’s slouching like me, head in her hand, elbow on the bar, waiting for a conversation that I can’t start. She’s wearing a skirt.

  “So.” That was her. She said So. Just the word So, like a single conjunction will somehow fill the silence.

  “Thanks.”

  “‘Thanks’?”

  “For the food.” I got no pleasure from eating it (thanks, Sara), but I did manage to put some of it away.

  She smiles weakly. Plays with her wedding ring, the one that’s meant nothing for a decade now. I look at her face and study the lines, the same ones I can see appearing on my own face when I’m tired and squint in a mirror. Faint whispers around her mouth, sad crow’s feet above. Blue eyes like mine, if a little icier. Add 30 years and subtract 30 pounds, and I could almost be that.

  “This is weird, isn’t it?” she sighs.

  I stare at my plate. “What did you expect, Mom?”

  “I guess—” she’s saying—“I guess I thought we could just talk and be friends, like we used to, sometimes. But there’s just the elephant in the room.”

  “I—”

  “I mean, yeah, I cut you off. And I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to learn to take school more seriously. That’s all I’m trying to—”

  “Mom.”

  “What?” She looks into my eyes, for the first time tonight. Then she looks away. Gets up. Pours coffee.

  “I wasn’t even thinking about that,” I say.

  “You weren’t?” She sits back down, slides a mug at me. The kitchen counter’s a disaster of gadgets, and all of them need cleaning.

  “I’m way too tired for this conversation.”

  She pushes the sugar in my direction, but I just let it sit there and suck moisture from the air. She looks at her watch. “Well—” trying hard—“how was your first day of work?”

  I drain the mug. “Do you really want to know?”

  “I mean—”

  “It was fine.”

  She takes my half-empty plate, drops it in the sink. “Ophie, I’m your mother. You can be honest with me if you want.”

  “It was actually pretty awful. There were old lady crotches. My pants were too small. Sara was annoying.” And I notice the piano’s stopped.

  “Why is it so hard for you two to get along these days, anyway?”

  “I dunno.”

  “Speak up. Why do you always mumble like that, Ophie?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Ophie, we’ve been doing this weekly dinner thing ever since you started school four years ago, but every night we do it, I feel like I’m talking to a stranger. I’m your mother. I know you. You can tell me things.”

  I look around at the kitchen, well lit but poorly warmed, a faint glow in a dark house, in a dark neighborhood where no one ever goes outside, and it’s so quiet I can hear the dew forming on the grass. I try to find something to say to her, to pick ideas out of the gray buzz sloshing around in my head and form them into something presentable, but there’s nothing in there that she’ll understand. “I—”

  I start, but—

  “—Mom, you said you had something to give me.”

  “It can wait.” She picks at the sugar with the spoon.

  “Wait for what?”

  “I—I don’t know.”

  I say, “Mom, if you want to talk, we can—”

  “No, never mind.” She sighs and stands up, walks off into the dark. “Come with me.”

  And then I find myself alone in the light. The dishwasher whines, and the clock on the wall ticks. I look down at my empty coffee cup, the dregs dried to the bottom. I hear her ascending the stairs, but she doesn’t turn on any lights. Hollow steps on a hardwood staircase.

  The light feels small, and the dark feels big, and I chase after her, up the stairs.

  There once was a dark, empty mansion

  In a new (-ish) exurban expansion.

  The floors were hard wood;

  The acoustics were good;

  And I’d finish this, but I’m totally stuck for a rhyme. What’s another word that rhymes with “mansion”? I’m drawing a blank.

  Man, I felt so confident going into that one.

  The landing is dark, but she’s standing in the light of my bedroom, and there’s a dull purple glow leaking from my door. She’s inside, leaning, looking away. Biting a finger, casting a shadow that reaches into the dark and makes it darker. I fight my way through it till I’m standing in the doorway, and I watch her face as she looks from the bed to the bookshelves to her expensive leather boots. She knows I’m here, heard my footsteps, doesn’t say anything, won’t turn around. Her heels are four inches tall and I can hear the discs in her spine slipping. A new green shirt with cute stitching hiding perfect curves under the assault of age.

  My feet hurt.

  This was my room for years. It took me five years before I found the perfect shade of purple for the walls. Ten years spent buying bookshelves and filling them with books, and I’ve read them all, even though no one believes that I have. The perfect carpet, black shag that feels like weeds from another planet on
my bare feet. An antique desk that I never sat at, but it fills the air with spiced cedar.

  My bed.

  A thousand years ago, back when Sara and I had to share a room in our old house, we lived in the attic with a low ceiling that sloped and our beds were side-by-side. But then we moved and they tried to give us our own rooms, but she held onto me tight and said No, we want bunk beds, and even though Mom said bunk beds were for boys, Dad stacked our beds together and she took the top one, and I’d lie underneath her and we’d share secrets late into the night, and I promised I’d always be hers. But then something changed and she wanted her own room, a newer and bigger bed, and she got them, and then forever after that she was down the hall in a different world.

  But I kept the bunk beds.

  I kept the beds stacked together, and I kept the curtains hanging around my bottom bunk. I still don’t remember when we hung them, but they transformed my bed into a canopy like something a princess would have. I built it into a cave of pillows and stuffed dragons and unicorns, a niche fit to my body’s developing contours and shut strong against the noise and people outside, where a stack of books and I could be alone.

  But none of that matters right now because my mom is standing there, and she coughs, and she hasn’t said anything this whole time. She’s playing with her wedding ring like she always does, and I look near her feet, and there’s a stack of boxes on the floor, nice ones like you’d get at Loewe’s, and every so often she kicks them with her leather-covered toe, and it makes a little thwack noise, and I wonder if she even knows she’s doing it.

  I can’t catch her eyes.

  I made this room perfect, and left it that way—I didn’t even clean when I went off to school—but now that I’m seeing her stand there with boxes and knowing what all of this means, that we’ve both crossed a line we can never uncross, and imagining this house without me, this room with no purple, no black, and no books and no canopy bed, and then I remember to breathe, and I stare at her, watching her biting her lip till she finally looks up, till her eyes come to rest (guarded) on mine.

  She says, “It doesn’t all have to be cleared out tonight. But soon.”

  I lean on my bedpost and study her face, hiding emotions behind freckles and expensive glasses. She’s standing there, waiting for me to say it for her.

  She says, “I’m sorry, I just need the room cleared out. It’s nothing personal.”

  “You’re kicking me out?”

  “No—what?—of course I’m not ‘kicking you out.’ That doesn’t even make sense, Ophie.”

  I’m pushing on the books, which are spilling out of my bed, trying to cram them behind the curtains.

  “You can still come by any time you want,” she says. “I just need the room for—for other things.”

  “For what, Mom?” I snapped a little. I shouldn’t have. This moment has been coming for years, but it’s worse than I expected. The air is thick.

  “It’s complicated,” she says. “I—”

  “What about Sara’s room? Isn’t it time for her to—to—”

  I stop talking because I see tiny slivers of liquid in her eyes, the start of tears. Quivering lids, teeth biting a lip, trying to hide her eyes behind the glare in her glasses. Then I have to look away, and she turns to leave the room, and the darkness swallows her, and I’m alone.

  It’s cold and I’m tired.

  I look at the boxes, and I look at the clutter, which is far too vast to fit inside them. A thousand adolescent hopes and dreams, not one of them realized and all of them silly. I’d forgotten this room. I’d forgotten this life, willfully, I guess. I run my hand over the books, paperbacks and hardbacks and plastic-covered library books I never returned. Globs of dust, collecting under my half-painted nails.

  I wipe it on my pants. An ugly streak of greasy gray—what all memories come to, I guess. I start to pull books off the shelves, to stack them in the box, but I give up after a dozen or so.

  This is stupid.

  The book in my hand—A Study in Scarlet—gets thrown down in frustration, and I rub my temples and think that I just want to hide. Backing away from the light, I climb back into my canopy bed, the only comforting womb I have left, and I close the curtains so there’s just enough light to read. And I pull the tattered copy of Hamlet out of my pocket.

  I know it’s strange, but I’ve been carrying this paperback with me ever since I found it on my mom’s bookshelf more than a decade ago. I guess most 12-year-olds wouldn’t have gotten far with it, but something about it grabbed me. Maybe it was just the shared name, but I spent that whole summer behind the curtains on my bed poring over the words till I finally understood them, while everyone else was out riding bikes and swimming and going to camp. Is it strange to say I’m comforted by a book where nearly every character dies? (Probably.) I don’t know, maybe people are just comforted by the familiar, and what’s more familiar than death? It’s the inevitability—like when I was looking at those faces melting into the beds in the ICU and thinking That will be me someday, even if I achieve immortality. Because even if you find the Fountain of Youth or whatever, entropy always wins in the end. The stars will die out and energy itself will disappear and even the electrons in your atoms will stop in their tracks.

  Or at least, that’s what I gleaned from Physics 101.

  I open the book.

  It falls open to my favorite scene, the one where Ophelia finally snaps. She’s handing out flowers to everyone else, singing songs with a lute and mumbling nonsense. She speaks much of her father; Says she hears there’s tricks i’ the world; and hems and beats her heart; spurns enviously at straws; speaks things in doubt, That carry but half-sense. She’s got a bouquet and she’s handing them out. There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance. And there is pansies; that’s for thoughts. I’m watching her fingers, they’re picking at stems and at thorns in the light of the dawn. Thick-calloused hands but slender and beautiful; nails that were long but are worn down to stubs; a smoky black dress that goes on for miles and a smile that says madness that’s actually knowledge. Thumbs picking thorns on the stems as she drifts past the king and the queen, speaking songs, mumbling flowers. I would give you some violets, but they withered all when my father died. Drifts down the hall, lace soaked in tears, and I follow her song. And will he not come again? Will he not come again? Following fast, across silent, white tile, hearing No in my ear, but her dress is absorbing the sun as he sets behind mountains and lights up the stream, and I follow her, barefoot, up into the arms of the willow that holds us and whispers that things are okay, with the water beneath us careening and sparkling and lapping at stones in the warm, dying light. We sleep in its arms till they’re drifting apart, till we’re feeling the air of the night on our skin, and slipping through breeze and through stars till we’re wet with the sky and the moonlight and dreams, in cool, soothing memories (all dying away). I let the flow take me and pull me and bind me, a cool hand, a firm hand, a hand that’s the color of night and it’s sharp and it’s prickly and won’t let me go. It’s got me, it’s holding my hand, and my teeth, and my throat, and it’s pulling. Skin I can feel with its claws in me, pulling, and screams in my ear, through door after door, through the hallway, the stairway, the moon and the stars, and then darkness takes everything, teeth in my eyes, by the throat, by the throat, and it pounds and I can’t push the darkness away. I’m running and running, but can’t get away and can’t change what I’ve started, I’m lost in the dark with blood bleeding and yelling, She won’t let me go—

  And my eyes snap open and I’m waking up in my bed back in my dorm room.

  (The light is deafening.)

  wed. jan. 12.

  4:22 am.

  confused

  I’m tangled in sheets and the lights are on. It’s dark outside, and I’m still in my hospital scrubs. They smell, and Hamlet is stabbing me in gut, and my back is killing me, and I reach for my phone and my nails are chipped.

  It’s four in the morning.
On the twelfth.

  How long have I been asleep? I retrace my steps. I was at my mom’s place, and she took me upstairs, and gave me those boxes, and—

  There’s a box on the floor now, next to me, and it’s filled with books that I half-remember running my hand over last night. Sitting on top is my old collection of Poe, a paperback with a raven on the cover who stares at me with red, glowing eyes. My roommate who never says anything and never turns off the lights is sitting across the room, on her bed, tapping on a laptop.

  My phone has a text from Sara: “don’t forget 2 take med”

  (She sent it at three in the morning.)

  It’s not quite twenty-four hours since the last time I took it, but I guess it’s close enough. I fumble around in my pocket for the orange bottle full of rattling pills and I twist the clicking lid till one tumbles out into my palm. I close my eyes and force it down, and my mouth is dry, and it tastes like chalk and mothballs, and it grinds its way down my throat while my headache gets worse.

  I need water. Or aspirin, or something. I’m soaked in day-old sweat and twisted in a half-dozen sheets. I fight, jerking around until I’m halfway free, and then I yank on the sheet twisted around me until I push myself onto the floor, landing on my face. I breathe the cold air above the dry, dusty tile and I slowly push myself up to standing. What day did I say it was?

  I glance at my phone again.

  “Shit.”

  My roommate looks up. “You okay?”