“Do you still have…feelings?”
I knew what she meant without her saying another word.
“No.” Because I don’t feel anything anymore, I wanted to add, but I swallowed the words. How far away that time seemed when I spent every day with Blair, pretending to be grown-ups when we were just little girls, talking to her constantly about him, about Axel, about how I loved him, about how special he was, about how when I blew out the candles on my cake on my seventeenth birthday, the thing I wished for was to kiss him someday and know what it would feel like to do it. I took a deep breath, uncomfortable, my throat dry. Then I decided to try and act normal for the next forty-five minutes, or as normal as I could be.
“How’s work?”
She smiled, excited, happy to have something to talk about. “Good, good, but it’s a lot bigger sacrifice than I expected. The kids won’t stay still for a moment. I swear, I had sore muscles the first week. And the parents… Well, basically some of them should have to take a class before they’re allowed to procreate.”
I grinned, and it almost hurt. “It’s what you always wanted to do.”
“It is. And you? Are you going to go to college?”
“Seems like it.” I shrugged.
That had been my dream a long time ago, but it seemed vague just then, and a burden. I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t want to be alone in Brisbane. I didn’t want to have to meet new people when I wasn’t even capable of relating to the people I grew up around. I didn’t want to paint or study or anything like that. I didn’t, but Oliver…
My brother had gone from living glued to his surfboard and walking barefoot at all hours to being the administrative director for a major travel agency, because he’d always been an ace with numbers, and one of the partners at the company knew my father and offered him the job two weeks after the accident. I remember Oliver told him, You won’t regret it, and my brother was a man of his word, the kind who always does what he says. The same way he saved his last dollar so I could go to college.
However much I hated the idea, I didn’t want to disappoint him, hurt him more, cause him more problems, but still, I didn’t know how to stop feeling this way, so sad, so empty…
“Axel seems like a straight shooter,” Blair said.
“He is.” And I was pissed at him.
“He also seems like he cares about you.”
I looked down at my plate and concentrated on the intense green of the lettuce, so vibrant, the red of the tomato, the amber of the pumpkin seeds, the yellow of the corn, and the dark brown, almost black, of the raisins. I took a breath. It was pretty. Everything was pretty: the world, color, life, like I used to see it before. If I looked around, all I saw were things I wanted to transform—make my own version of the salad, of the dawn in front of the sea, of the woods behind my old house that made me want to spend the rest of my life with a brush in my hand when I saw Axel’s expression as he looked at them.
21
_________
Axel
Leah was already at the door of the supermarket when I got there. She was mad. I ignored her furrowed brow, we got in my car, and we spent the whole drive in silence. I carried the grocery bags into the kitchen, and I hadn’t started to put the things in the cabinet when she appeared, gorgeous and incensed, surrounded by new outlines showing curves that had been vague the month before. Her eyes were gleaming.
“How could you do that to me?”
“That? Be more specific, Leah.”
“Betray me like that! Trick me!”
“You are thin-skinned.”
“And you’re an idiot.”
“Maybe, but did you have fun? What’s it like hanging out with another human being? Nice? Now’s the moment when you say, ‘Gee Axel, thanks for helping me take this step and being so patient with me.’”
But none of that happened. Leah blinked, trying to hold back tears of frustration, turned around, and went to her room. I closed my eyes, tired, and rested my head on the wall, trying to focus. Maybe it had been a bit rushed, but I knew…no, I felt that it was what I had to do. Despite her, even despite what I would have liked. Because seeing her like that, so pissed, so hurt, was a thousand fucking times better than seeing her empty. I remembered what I had thought that morning, about holding a string in my hand and pulling till it tightened…and that was what made me go to her room and open the door without knocking.
“Can I come in?”
“You already are in.”
“True. I was trying to be nice.”
She tried to strike me dead with her stare.
“Let’s get to the point. Did I trick you? Sure, a little. Was it for a good cause? Yeah. So I want to let you know I’ll be doing it again. And I know you think I’m an insensitive fucking asshole who enjoys pouring salt in your wounds, but one day, Leah, one day you’ll thank me. Remember this conversation.”
She brought a trembling hand to her lips and whispered to me to go before she got up, opened the window, and grabbed the headphones from her table.
* * *
The next few days, we barely talked.
I didn’t care. I couldn’t stop thinking about all I’d read about PTSD. And at least I had found a way to break the paralysis and apathy for a few seconds, and that was better than nothing. When Leah got mad, there was no indifference in her eyes, and her feelings took over and she couldn’t do anything about it. So I had her there, I was pulling the cord slowly, I just had to find the right way to do it.
* * *
Oliver came to pick her up on the Monday of the last week in March. She was still at school, and I hugged him harder than usual because I missed him and I couldn’t imagine what it must be like to be in his shoes. I took two beers out of the fridge and we walked out to the back porch. I lit up a cigarette and passed him one.
“Quitting smoking is great,” he said with a laugh.
“Fantastic. Liberating.” I blew out my drag. “How are things in Sydney?”
“Better than last month. How about here?”
“More or less the same. Leah’s making slow progress.”
He looked at the tip of his cigarette and sighed. “I can hardly remember what she was like before. You know, when she used to laugh at everything and was so…so intense that I always used to be afraid of when she’d get older and wouldn’t be able to manage her emotions on her own. And now look at her. Fucking ironic.”
I swallowed the words that were burning on my lips. If I hadn’t, I would have told him that for me she was still the same, still every bit as intense, even when she locked herself away and forced herself not to feel anything because if she did, it would be sorrow at what had happened and guilt at the idea of continuing to enjoy life when her parents no longer could, as if she thought that were unjust. Oliver had assimilated the tragedy from a different perspective, emotional, sure, but with that practical orientation he had little choice over. He had cried at the funeral, said his goodbyes to them, and gotten drunk with me the night afterward. Then he had gotten to work, organizing the family’s bills and taking care of Leah, who was stuffed to the gills with tranquilizers.