I thought that was an incredibly selfish and ignorant thing to say to someone who watched a boy die in front of her. A boy she had seen her whole life, but had never spoken to. Suicide wasn’t natural. It was the anti-natural. It was natural to want to live. It was unnatural to be bruised in ways that made you want to die.
“Do you remember?” Dr. Elgin asks, her face arranged in way that expressed no judgment. She looks casual, like we are talking about my breakfast.
“I do.”
I feel incredibly stupid. Embarrassed. Complex. Crazy. The Judah I have spent years of my life with is a figment of my imagination. How is that possible? And what else have I imagined? You can go crazy just from realizing you’re crazy.
“I know his smell,” I tell Dr. Elgin. “How can he not be real if I know his smell?”
“I know you do, Margo. The trauma you faced caused you to go into an altered, dissociative state. You made up the Judah you know to give both you and him another chance.”
She seems quite pleased with her assessment. I am unimpressed. I can still feel him in the air around me; you can’t make up a person in such detail. And if I were going to make up an imaginary friend to help me cope with life, why wouldn’t I give him nice, strong legs? I remember the aching in my arms after having pushed his wheelchair through the streets of the Bone. The awkwardness of having to do things like drive him, bathe him, help him onto the sofa the night he slept over.
I leave Elgin’s office that day feeling like I am floating instead of walking. I could say that everything feels surreal, but the truth is, I feel surreal. Like it’s not Judah, but me who doesn’t exist. When the doors lock behind us that evening, and I crawl into the stiff, bleached sheets of the mental hospital, I am unsure. I know nothing. I bury my face in my thin pillow until I can’t breathe, then force myself to come up for air. I assure myself with a quivering, jelly voice that I am real. I do this all night until the lights flicker on, and the doors open, and the medication is handed to us in little paper cups that smell of old people. Judah is real, and I am real, I tell myself over and over. But, by lunch, I am once again unsure. If I made up Judah, I could be making all of this up—the murders, the hospital, Dr. Elgin. I check my door plaque to make sure my name is Margo.
I see Elgin three times a week, then two as she feels I am making progress in our sessions. I stop fighting her after that first time, stop saying that Judah is real. I slip silently into the role of the humble patient, clutching what remains of my sanity between oiled fingers. And then, one day, after I’ve been in Westwick for a little over five months—and my limbs are growing soft and spongy from the time I spend sitting—everything changes.
THEY RELEASE ME FROM WESTWICK, though I do not feel ready. The revelation about Judah has made me feel strange in my own skin. I am unable to trust even myself. What happens to a person when their own brain becomes the enemy? I don’t know. I’m afraid to find out.
My apartment is just as it was, except with a fine layer of dust coating everything. My lease with Doyle isn’t up for another year, and unless he decides to be a dick, I don’t have to worry about being tossed into the street for not sending a rent check.
The first thing I do is shower. I sing “Tainted Love” at the top of my lungs. At the hospital, the water was always lukewarm, the pressure barely strong enough to rinse the shampoo from your hair. I let the steam grow around me, turning my skin bright red as it licks me with hot pelts. I want to wash away the last few months of my life. Start fresh. And I feel fresh; I have fresh perspective, I have Dr. Elgin, I have a mission … purpose.
When I finish, I dress and pick up my laptop, which has been sitting on the charger for five months. I have e-mails. I open the first; it is from Judah. I giggle because there is no Judah. Right? Right. There are several from him over the months. In the first one, he apologizes for his anger when I visited, and wants to know how I am. As more time passes, his e-mails take a different tone as he urges me to call him. He fears for my safety; he’s afraid of what I am capable of doing. None of this is real, of course. I might have written these e-mails myself, though I have no recollection of it. I delete each one, and then empty my trash so I never have to see them again. I do not need an imaginary friend to show concern for my well being. Dr. Elgin said that if you love yourself, you don’t need to create people in your mind who love you. Self-hatred is a form of self-obsession, isn’t it? A self-loathing so creatively profound that any concern for others dwindles down to nothing. I don’t want to be that person—so infatuated with my flaws that I forget to see the needs of others. My mother loved to hate herself, and, in the process, forgot she had a daughter.
For the next few days, I re-acquaint myself with outside life. I take walks; I buy flowers and fruit from the market. I read an entire book while sitting on a bench near the Sound, the horn from the ferryboats calling out and making me smile contentedly. I am a loony, recently released from the loony bin. How many of the people around me glanced my way and thought I was normal? How many of them did I perceive as normal when in reality they were Volas and Lyndees and Leroys? Life was creepy and people were creepier.
On the fifth day, after I take a brief call from Dr. Elgin, who is checking on me, I climb into my Jeep and drive the sixty-five miles to Leroy’s ponky dink town. I don’t want to get too close—not this time anyway—but I slow down as I pass his drive and notice his blue Nissan is no longer in the driveway. There is a minivan instead. As I watch, a mother unloads her family, wrangling bags of groceries behind them and through the front door. I lean my head back against the seat and close my eyes. Leroy had me institutionalized for long enough to sell his house and get out of town. Did he know I’d come for him again? Why didn’t he just kill me when he had the chance?
I meet Johan Veissler, a South African, who runs his uncle’s fishing business while his uncle recovers from a stroke. They are a family of salmon fishermen, my least favorite fish, though lately there is always an abundance of it in my freezer.
He’s a solid lover. My first. I didn’t tell him that as he explored my body for the first time. I watched his eyes as he looked at parts of me I used to be too ashamed to look at myself. I didn’t experience any pain, and it was all very surreal. Johan kissed me when it was over, and went to sleep. You can never tell the extent of what he is feeling on his face or in his body language. He’s meticulous in his care of me—always meeting my physical needs—asking, serving, believing. And while it is not necessary in the dealings of love, it is terribly romantic to have a man look at you like you’re the last glass of water on Earth. I wonder after my own heart. Why I need to be caressed and assured, fussed over and made to feel edible?
Perhaps because a man has already given me this gift, and I have the taste of it in my past. Perhaps television has worked hard to assure me that this is normal. But I will not be undone by the past. I will adapt. I will see love in the light of truth rather than experience. Only then will I strengthen my own self and speak fluently the language of love. That is my mantra. My saving grace.
It doesn’t work. I think only of Judah when Johan kisses me. Only of Judah when Johan touches my body. I think only of Judah when his body goes slack on top of mine, his passion spent. I think only of Judah, my elusive unicorn. Johan doesn’t notice my mental absence. He is too busy noticing the way I laugh, which he compliments often, the curvature of my legs, which he compliments often. He thinks I am strong, and thus beautiful because I am strong—like those two things go together simultaneously. A man who values muscle and capability in women, and who laughs at the debutantes who trot across the street in their designer heels. Sometimes I think he sees me more as a companion than a lover. I meet his need for camaraderie, and it leaves me feeling like less of a woman. But, still, we work, and he doesn’t ask questions.
We eat enormous amounts of seafood, and spend time on his uncle’s fishing boats. I don’t care for the water. It frightens me like it did my mother. But. I am too embarrassed to ad
mit my fear—me, a woman who tied up a two hundred and twenty pound man and tortured him for two hours. So I join him on the water as often as my schedule will let me. I find myself making compromises in a relationship that I don’t much value. How weak I am. How much I itch to be of use, to not sit idly by on fishing boats with Johan’s arm draped across my shoulders, while the world swings by in a blur of color.
We’re now five months into our relationship of blackened salmon, grilled salmon, cedar plank salmon, mango salsa salmon, and salmon lemonaise. I think I’m going to go crazy.
Judah comes for a visit. Johan listens to me recount our friendship with a pull of tension between his bleached eyebrows. When I get to the part about Judah being in a wheelchair, he visibly relaxes. A wheelchair does not pose a threat to the tanned, rustic Johan. He insists on inviting Judah onto his boat for a day of fishing and grilling salmon in the Sound. When I text Judah about it, he expresses surprise.
Didn’t know you were seeing someone!
It’s pretty new, I lie.
I guess I should say that I can’t wait to meet him, but I’m not sure I mean it.
That part makes me smile. When I pick up Judah at the airport a few days later, he has a wide smile and a deep tan.
“Look at you! All California and shit.”
“And shit,” he says as I lean down to give him a hug. He’s wearing faded blue jeans and a tight white T-shirt. He doesn’t look like a poor boy from the Bone. He looks healthy and well. I help him into the front seat of my Jeep, my eyes scanning for any traces of my hobby, though I know there aren’t any. When his chair is folded into my trunk and we are on the road, I turn to him and find him already looking at me.
“You’re so different,” he says. “I can’t believe how much.”
“You too,” I say. “It’s like once you leave the Bone, you are free to develop into the person you were supposed to be.”
“Maybe,” he says thoughtfully. “Or maybe we just grew up, and it would have happened anyway.”
“Yeah right!” I tease. “Like you’d ever have a tan like that in the Bone!”
He laughs in the way that I remember and love, and I feel warm all the way down to my toes.
When we get back to my apartment, Judah insists on wheeling himself up the ramp and into the elevator of my building. I am embarrassed by the slight urine smell in the elevator, and then I am embarrassed by the empty sack of McDonald’s someone left outside the door of the elevator on the twelfth floor, sitting proud and stinking of fried oil. Judah doesn’t seem to notice any of it. When I open the door to my apartment, he waits for me to walk in first before wheeling himself behind me. He looks around my space like it’s the first time he’s seeing it. My teal walls, hung with prints of Seattle that I found at Pike Place Market. The striped black and white sofa that I bought from my neighbor when she moved to Baltimore. The flourishing potted plants that I stick on bookshelves and windowsills. His eyes linger longest on my books, piled everywhere in stacks of brightly colored dust jackets. He takes it all in and sighs a deeply satisfied sigh.
“What?” I ask him.
“I like where you live,” he says. “I like how you fix your space. It feels like a home.”
And I like that he notices. Johan never notices the things that make me a woman: the nesting and painted nails and the trimmed hair. But if I caught a big one on the glimmering fishing rod he bought me as a gift, oh boy!
“Do you like salmon?” I ask him. “I’m making it for dinner.”
“Sure.” He shrugs. “But I kinda wanted to take you out for dinner. Would your boyfriend be okay with that?”
I grin at Judah, suppressing a larger smile. “You are my oldest and dearest friend, Judah Grant. I don’t care what Johan thinks about that.”
We change our clothes and head to an Indian restaurant a few blocks away. I offer to grab a cab, but Judah shakes his head. “I like to see the city this way.”
They seat us outside, next to the hustle and bustle of the city. The air is rich with the scent of the red and green curries they carry out on large servers. I eat my beef curry too quickly, relieved to be having something other than seafood. We laugh and talk, Judah telling me stories of the school where he teaches in LA. When our dessert arrives—two silver goblets of rice pudding filled with raisins—Judah’s face becomes serious.
“Margo, I’m moving back to the Bone.”
I drop my spoon. It clatters onto the floor, and I bend to retrieve it.
“Judah … no.”
I say it with such finality it surprises me.
Judah raises his eyebrows in amusement, licking off his spoon and dipping it back in.
“Well, it’s not really your decision.” I don’t miss the laughter in his voice. He knew this declaration would mortify me. He timed it just right so it wouldn’t ruin my dinner.
“Why?” I ask. “We left there for good. We said we’d never go back.”
He says one word to me, and it chills my spine.
“Marrow.”
I feel the Bone like it is a flesh and blood person, looming behind me, waiting for my answer.
“I have the fancy education,” he says. “I can teach anywhere I want, but I’d rather give my gift back to the Bone. They need good teachers there, Margo. You remember.”
He says this as if to sway me, but it only makes me resent our former home even more. Judah is right. He can teach anywhere in the country. Why waste his life on the Bone and the worthless excuses who live there?
“Why not come here?” I exclaim. “Like we planned all those years ago.”
“So I can watch you and Johan live out your life?”
Why does his voice suddenly sound so bitter?
“Johan and I are not that serious, Judah. Eventually he will go back to South Africa.” And then, as if to make myself feel better, I add, “He’s on a work visa.”
“My mother has high blood pressure; the doctor has her on all kinds on medication. I don’t know how long she will be here. I want to spend time with her.”
I think of Delaney, and I immediately soften. If I had a mother like her, perhaps I never would have left the Bone.
“When?”
“After the holidays,” he says. “I’ve already let my job know.”
“I don’t like it.”
“I know.” He reaches across the table and runs his fingertip along my knuckles.
“Come with me,” he says.
I jar. Both at the idea of it, and the fact that he’s asking. For a moment I wonder if perhaps his feelings for me have changed.
Before I can answer, my phone chimes from my purse. It’s the fifth time someone has called. It’s Johan.
“Hello,” I say after hitting the call button.
“Hey baby,” he says, the richness of his accent pooling through the phone. He doesn’t often call me baby. It was more Margie, Margo, and Mar, which I hate. I wonder if Judah’s presence is making him feel insecure.
“I was wondering if you wanted to bring your bud to the boat tonight. We can take her out and have some drinks, hey.”
I glance across the table at Judah, suddenly annoyed at the way Johan punctuates all of his sentences with hey.
Is it, hey?
We have to get some fresh ground pepper, hey.
Remember we have that dinner with my aunt tonight, hey.
“Not tonight, Johan. Judah is feeling a little under the weather.”
Johan sounds disappointed, but says he understands. When I hang up, Judah slouches in his seat and pretends to look ill.
“I didn’t know I was sick, but now that you mention it…”
“Shut up,” I tell him. “I just want you all to myself for one night. Is that so bad?”
“No,” he answers. Suddenly the moment feels too serious. Both of our eyes are dewy, and our body language has become stiff and awkward. It’s the most peculiar moment Judah and I have ever had. He flags over our server, and we hurry out into the rain.
> By the time we reach my building, our clothes are soaked through and my arms are aching from pushing Judah’s chair up one of the steeper Seattle streets. We shiver in the elevator, laughing at my streaked makeup and Judah’s nipples, which are visible through his white shirt. Our chortles vibrate through the hallway, and then stop short. Johan is standing at my door, sheepishly holding a bottle of wine.
“Hello, gorgeous,” he says, pulling me in for a kiss. I feel my body stiffen and try to relax. He’s doused himself in cologne, and underneath I can smell the slightly fishy smell of the ocean. I turn my body away from his and look at Judah who is watching us with a strange expression on his face.
JOHAN OVERSTAYS HIS WELCOME. A strange thing to say about my own boyfriend, but it’s true. Once I brought wine into the room, both of them relaxed. Johan chatted about fishing boats and his catch for the day, while Judah listened quietly, nodding and smiling at the right times. When the conversation dwindles along with the hour, Judah announces that he is going to bed, and that he’ll leave the two of us alone so we can have time together. I shoot him the dirtiest look I can muster, ashamed of my feelings about Johan. Judah is only here once in a while, I think.
I watch him wheel himself into my bedroom and close the door. Johan looks toward the bedroom strangely. “It’s breezy in here tonight.”
“I’m tired,” I say. He nods. I walk to the door ahead of him and hold it open, biting down my guilt. I just want him to leave, so why am I with someone I just want to leave?
He kisses me at the door, but I pull away and step into the hallway, closing the door behind me so we have can privacy to talk.
“What is it?” he says.
“Why did you come here tonight?”
He looks embarrassed, glancing over his shoulder and down the hallway like he wants to make a dash for the elevator.
“I wanted to see you,” he says. “Is that so wrong?”