Raze (Riven 3)

But the damage was done. I was shaky and unsettled, and despite how exhausted I felt, I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep. It had been a while since I’d had one of these nights. Still, it was a familiar sensation, and I sank into it with equal parts dread and resignation.

I turned on every light in the apartment. The shadows had a way of creeping across the walls at certain hours, to be hailed like acquaintances encountered after a long winter spent indoors.

In the middle of the living room, I did push-ups until my shoulders gave out, then sit-ups until I puked. Squats, then, until my thighs shook so hard I sank down where I stood.

Finally, I pulled out my notebook, flipped to the next blank page, and started writing. I wrote for what felt like hours, the jagged black marks a visible record of each minute spent here, on earth, alive, breathing.

I wrote until my hand cramped, then switched to my left hand. When I couldn’t write another word, I slid the notebook behind the row of books with all the others.

I dragged myself into the bathroom, a mess of shrieking muscles and too-tight skin, and stepped into the shower, water turned as hot as I could make it. I watched distractedly as my skin turned pink.

After my mom died, my father would take long showers and emerge from the steamy bathroom lobster pink. He probably thought the rush of running water would drown out the sound of him crying.

It didn’t. But I gave him the courtesy of pretending, because pretense was all he had. I’d taken on the responsibilities I could, at twelve, and I’d done my best to stay away from the house and my father’s misery. I’d thrown myself into football, gone out with friends every night, worked grueling jobs in the summers that would leave me too tired to need anything more than a sandwich and my bed at the end of the day.

The football scholarship had dropped down like a lifeline and I had grabbed it with both hands, counting the days until I could leave town. My father had shaken my hand and patted my shoulder, but I truly hadn’t known if he would take over the things I’d done for years—grocery shopping and cleaning and paying bills—or if he would let it all go.

I hadn’t known and I’d left anyway, so relieved to be free of his crushing sadness that I’d told myself it wasn’t my problem anymore.

Sometime in the first year of my recovery I’d begun to remember things about him. How he paced the house at night the way I now did. The way he couldn’t sleep. How he panicked one night when he found something in the trash that I’d thrown away and pulled it out, repeating over and over that it wasn’t garbage.

I’d remembered finding a notebook shoved under a couch cushion. I’d assumed it was mine from school, but when I’d opened it my father’s left-slanting hand had poured his heart out in letters that my mother would never read.

I can’t do this. I can’t do anything. I open my mouth to scream but nothing comes out. How did this happen? How could we have ended up this way? This isn’t what it was supposed to be like. I don’t know how to take care of him. Good thing he doesn’t really need me. You would have been so much better at this than me. I wish it had been me instead of you. I still wish it could be.

I’d replaced the notebook and never looked at it again. But in my own apartment, I’d taken out another and written words of my own.

For the first time in a long time, I tried to remember the week after my mother died instead of avoiding it.

I could remember my father, swallowed by grief until he turned himself inside out and swallowed it instead. I could remember the funeral, my father stoic as a zombie until we got home and he fell apart, my mother’s parents weeping and drifting off afterward, neighbors and friends wishing heartfelt and cumbersome condolences. I remembered my friends’ preteen awkwardness as they offered video game playing, Doritos, and bike lending, the most precious things they had.

I could remember all of that, and I could even remember what I wore—a dark gray suit I’d outgrown the previous year when I’d worn it to my cousin’s wedding, shiny black shoes that pinched my toes, and a purple shirt that my mother had brought home for me one day and said she thought would look nice on me. It was the only purple thing I’d ever worn.

Yet I couldn’t remember myself.

Couldn’t remember what I had done or said. I couldn’t remember crying. I couldn’t remember my father hugging me. I didn’t know what had happened to that suit or that purple shirt, but I didn’t think I’d ever seen them again. I couldn’t remember how I’d felt. If I’d felt anything at all.