On her knees, back to me, chin tucked to chest.
Breathing.
The rush of relief was short-lived.
Because Captain rushed forward in front of her, sniffing, whining.
And when his head turned up, there was no mistaking the bright red blood on his all-white snout.
Stomach dropping, heart seizing, I rushed forward.
I wish I could claim it was a scene I had never seen before. But that would be a lie.
A knife in the dominant hand.
A bleeding cut across the wrist.
I’d seen it.
A few more times than I had cared to count. I’d seen men hanging. I’d seen pill bottles overturned next to cold bodies.
But this was here.
This was my knife.
This was her.
“Goddamnit,” I growled, rushing forward, grabbing the knife, throwing it away from her. Reaching up, I peeled off my shirt, ripping the fabric to create a strip, tying it around her wrist, not sure how deep the cut was, how serious this was. It was too dark. We had to get back to the house.
I was barely aware of the tears until they wet my chest.
But I didn’t have time to coddle, to comfort.
I ran us back to the house, flicking on the lights, resting her down on the couch.
“Hang on,” I demanded, washing my hands, getting a kit that would need to be refilled soon with how much use she had put it too, and coming back, gut in tight circles as I unwound the bandage.
Shallow.
Deep enough to scar, to bleed like a mother, but not to damage the vein, not to risk her life.
Ending your life with a knife was hard.
It took work.
Not the simple pull of a hair trigger.
You had to watch it, knife going in, blood beading out, acutely aware of the pain.
And no matter the trauma that led you there, it was hard to overcome the animalistic self-preservation that wanted you to live, that made it hard to press deeper, to guarantee an end.
Taking a deep breath, I pretended my hands weren’t shaking as I grabbed for the more unconventional thing in my kit – the superglue, popping off the cap.
I cleared off the blood, then got back up, something within me telling me not to reach for the saline like I usually would.
No.
I grabbed the vodka out of the cabinet, came back, uncapping it, pouring.
Her body jolted, a shriek coming from her lips.
And, what I was hoping for, life came back into her eyes.
“Good,” I mumbled, wiping off the excess vodka, then swiping the superglue over the cut. “You’re back. We need to talk.”
FOUR
Meadow
I remembered.
In dreams, when it wasn’t possible for me to hold it all at a distance, when I couldn’t drift away, lose myself into better memories.
It came back then, when my mind, my body so desperately needed rest.
That was when it came back.
In short snippets at first.
Just the eyes.
Just the fists to my face.
No clear images, everything fuzzy and dark.
But always repeats.
Until, one night, it was something new.
The euphoria swarmed my system, confidence the likes of which I had never known – didn’t even know existed – flooded me.
And I saw myself stripping out of my work blazer, pulling my hair down, and dancing.
I was not, by any stretch of the definition, a dancer. I had the elegance of a newly born foal when I tried to imitate the moves that seemed to come so naturally to others.
I had not attempted to dance since I made a fool of myself at an after-school dance in middle school. I didn’t even try to shake it alone in my apartment where no one could see me.
But there was no denying that was what I had been doing. Back when the drugs had been so readily flooding my system.
And somewhere within that dance, a hand closed onto my shoulder, curled in, pushed until my knees slammed to the ground, cement biting through the knees of my pants, scratching the skin beneath.
One hand curled into my hair.
The other pried open my mouth.
And from there, well, let’s just say… I finally had the answer to my question.
It was absolutely, one-hundred percent, no doubt about it, better not to know.
The not-knowing was easy.
The knowing… well.
The knowing was impossible.
Sickening.
Incomprehensible.
Too much.
Way, way too much.
I couldn’t claim the thought itself crossed my mind.
Not in the most technical way.
I didn’t recall thinking I want to kill myself.
As far as I knew, those words never crossed my mind as I threw off the covers, as I pulled my aching – but healing – body up off the couch, padded barefoot toward the door, vaguely aware of the cold floor, the oily feel of my skin, the weakness I felt in my muscles from disuse.
Instinctively, I reached into Ranger’s jacket pocket, my fingers closing around something long and sleek.
I’d never held one before, but I knew the feel of it as my fingers closed around it.
A pocketknife.