Part 1
I start meditating because I’m trying to stop the pain. It hurts too much to sit on the floor, so I tug out one of the stiff wooden chairs at our kitchen table and slowly lower myself into it. It’s just after 6 am, and the only lights outside are streetlamps. I’d rather be in the dark than in unnatural light, so I don’t open the shade on the big window in the living room. Our condo is small, and has one of those open layouts with no doors, except the bedroom, where my husband, Ash, is still asleep. We could afford something bigger, or in a nicer neighborhood like Back Bay, but this place is paid off, and I like having the extra money even if it just sits there. I set a timer for ten minutes, close my eyes, take a deep breath, and try to clear my mind of thoughts. But all my mind wants to do is replay what got me here.
Twelve weeks ago, I wrenched my back reaching for a tennis ball. I don’t even really play tennis. It was a stupid idea I had to get closer to Ash, who doesn’t play either. It was the first weekend this summer where one of us wasn’t working, and at the end of August, it might have been the last warm weekend in Boston until next year, so I suggested we fish out the rackets we bought who knows when and go to that park with the blue courts.
On my first serve, I lobbed it directly into the net. I tried again and it landed somewhere around the square where Ash was waiting. He hit it back, too hard, and it sailed past the back line.
“Out,” I called, trotting over to retrieve it.
I walked to the far end of the court and set up for a new serve. Ash sat back on his haunches, his white Wilson racket in front of him, his belly hung against his gray t-shirt. He’s gaining weight again.
I served the ball. He hit it back with a huge backswing, straight at my hips, and I twisted my torso to get it before the first bounce. I made contact. It launched straight up into the air, and I heard a snap in my lower back. The ball came down right beside me, bounced up to my head, came down again, bounced up to my thighs, then dribbled around my heels. My body was full of air. No pain yet, just a dull sense of panic.
“What’s the matter?” Ash yelled from mid-court.
I jogged in place for a minute, picking up my knees to stop the tingling in my legs. But each strike of a foot on the hard concrete sent shocks up to my brain. It reminded me of when I was six and got a tooth pulled—the harsh, unnatural pressure of something popping out of place.
Ash came up to the net, placed his hands on it, and looked at me with pursed lips.
“I have to go home,” I said.
On the couch, he put an ice pack on my lower back and told me to keep still. He must have been so sick of taking care of me. I fell asleep and when I woke up a few hours later, I couldn’t bend my knees without my body convulsing in sharp, excruciating pain.
Under protest, Ash drove me to the doctor, who X-rayed me while I wept. There was nothing wrong with my spine. It was muscle tension. The doctor shrugged at me and said the only way to get better was to rest.
For weeks I did that. I took off of work, except for a few calls here and there. Every single movement, no matter how small, was pain. To get to the toilet, Ash had to help me. He took off a few days of work at the shop, just so he could wait on me. I felt terrible. It seems every time Ash and I try to do anything together, I get sick or injured and it ends up with him taking care of me. He loves his job, and I wanted him to go back to work as soon as possible. When I could successfully fall from the couch onto my hands and knees and crawl, use the basin to lift myself up, pee, and then crawl back to bed, I told him I’d be fine alone during the day.
A few more weeks and I could walk again, but only bent over. I still needed help standing up or sitting down. I started going to acupuncturists and chiropractors to see if that kind of stuff would help, which they did, but only a little. The acupuncturist is the one who recommended meditating, her head cocked to one side, frowning at me slightly.
“Why aren’t you better yet?” she said. “You’re too young for this.”
I’m thirty-six, and I don’t feel young. Ash and I started having sex in high school, lived together in college, and then it just sort of made sense to get married after we graduated. That was twelve years ago, God. Most days I’m surprised he’s still here. There have been a lot of days when I wished he weren’t. Sometimes I hate him and the whole world. But who am I kidding of course I hate myself most. Things have been dark. There was the incident with the palmful of Benadryl. I thought for sure after that he would leave. But he didn’t. That might have been when things started to shift a little. No, I think it was when we went on that trip together to France. A decade of marriage and we’d never even traveled together. And we were kind of okay. Even though I got sick again, I think he had an okay time. In a few weeks, we have another trip planned, down to Miami Beach. I have to get better in time. Maybe, with all that saltwater, I could get better. I just don’t want to be sick and sad anymore. Something is shifting. I feel—not more stable—but at least like it’s possible for me to be stable. There’s been some good times. And just because there’s been bad times doesn’t mean we can’t start again. People change. I’m changing. For one thing, I’m meditating...
My timer goes off.
I open my eyes. My back doesn’t feel any different, but I decide to keep meditating the next day, and the next after that, for ten minutes before the sun comes up. I don’t need an alarm. I don’t sleep much anyway.
In meditation, whenever my mind goes just a little bit quiet, I start to notice colors. They fill up the black behind my eyelids, and if I focus on them, they get really hot and intense. Colors like indigo and candied orange. At first I think it’s just the light coming in from the big window, but even when I test it out by going into the second room, this sort of windowless half-office that would be my painting studio—if I ever painted anymore—the colors still come. I even think I can smell the color—honey or salt or lavender. Then the colors start turning into shapes. Animals, mostly—a fox, a rabbit, an ox. I watch them like movies, my lips up in a little smile.
I make the move from the kitchen to the half-office to meditate permanent because it’s darker in there and there are fewer distractions. Here, I start to see her: a woman. My eyes are closed, but I “see” her, appearing a few feet away from me. She looks like me, only very, very dirty, and exceedingly angry. Her skin, like mine, is pale and pallid, and she has sickening green circles under her eyes. Her dark hair is long and stringy and caked with filth. She’s always wearing a white dress that’s so dirty it’s nearly brown and torn along the bottom. Every day, twice a day now since I’ve added an evening meditation just before Ash gets home—on the nights he does come home—she appears, approaches me, glares at me with a silent, burning hatred. Then, she kills me.
The method by which she kills me changes. Often it’s by slitting my throat. Sometimes she chokes me. Sometimes it’s a knife in the heart and I bleed out all over the second-hand Turkish rug I bought at the flea market last year. This goes on for several days. She kills me, and then I’m alive again, and then she kills me again. In one meditation session, I die a dozen times. But when I die, I just respawn, so I learn not to fear her. And the funny thing is, my back is feeling better.
I think I should write down what I’m seeing in these mediations, so in addition to increasing my meditations to three times a day for twenty minutes a piece, that night I take a journal with me to bed. I write about how I feel about this woman. It’s like she’s been held captive somewhere, locked in a cell for centuries, and now she’s out and mad as hell. As I write, I hear the talk track in my head, but there’s another voice, too, that’s simultaneously inside my body and coming from everywhere else. It doesn’t say much. I just hear the word Child.
I write down Child. To me it seems like an address.
So on the next line, I write Voice, because I don’t trust the word Mom.
Voice tells me not to be afraid.
I tell Voice what I want, which is to control everything and to be loved. Then I ask her about the woman who keeps killing me.
She says there are angels whose job it is to kill you.
It’s just three days before Ash and I are supposed to leave for South Beach, and I can get up and down from the floor by myself. Meditation is helping, and I even look forward to it now, so curious what I might see when I look inside. The trick seems to be not to expect anything to come, but to just sit back and watch, like you’d watch a movie. It’s a complete relief to do something for once without trying to control it.
I sit on a pillow in the center of the half-room. It’s just after 6 am. Still dark. Ash isn’t home. He slept over at the shop, which he does sometimes when he works late and has an early appointment the next day. He made himself a little sleeping space with a narrow bed in the back. He likes being around the old cars. I close my eyes and sit in the darkness, and I’m surprised that I’m not more afraid. I may be in my thirties, but I’m still afraid of the dark. When Ash doesn’t come home at night, I sleep with a light on. But right now, I feel okay. Anyway, the sun must be coming up soon.
I take a few deep breaths and let my mind wander. It shows me a picture of the room I’m sitting in. I can see all of it, including me, sitting in the center on a pillow with my eyes closed. It’s a little chaotic, this room. There’s a seagreen antique wardrobe in the corner, a couple of white folding chairs, a black metal easel, a gray foam roller. Stuff I started to do. I frown.
It walks through the doorway, calm and familiar, as if it had crossed that threshold a thousand times. A figure, at least eleven-feet tall and skeletally thin, with a body the color of shadow and a long oblong head with no face. It sits down beside me on my left, calm as a single note on a piano. It wraps his right arm around my shoulder and extends one, long black index finger on its left hand, which it drops into my lap. Slowly, deliberately, it inserts that finger directly into my sex.
The heat pervades my pelvis first and then shoots up my spine and out the top of my head like a geyser. My awareness, which had been expanded to the whole room, shrinks back into my body. Not just my body, but squarely into my cervix, which feels groggy, like it’s waking up from a deep sleep. I hadn’t even realized they had gone numb, though it makes sense. Ash and I haven’t had sex in years. He just never quite fit. The first time, I was a senior in high school. I liked his soft, white body, nearly hairless, his thick thighs and his round, red face—the Rubenesqueness of it. But most of all, I liked that he could talk to me for hours without expecting me to say a word. He had an opinion about everything, and his opinion about me seemed to be a positive one. The night of graduation he took me back to his house, his parents were gone, and undressed me on his twin bed. But when he tried to enter me, he ran into a wall.
“What if you move like this and I sit up like that?”
“What if I put my foot here and you lean over like that?”
It felt like shoving a square peg into a round hole.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” he said, finally pushing himself up onto his hands. I felt his hips press downward into mine.
Tears were rolling down my temples, but I grabbed his wrist and pulled him back, belly to belly.
“We’re doing it,” I said.
I thought about water slides. I think about Hieronymous Bosch’s painting Ascent of the Blessed.
Ash pinched his eyes shut and heaved himself in.
I shrieked, and when he pulled out, his dick was covered in my blood.
“What the fuck!” he yelled, and ran down the hall to the bathroom, returning a few seconds later with a wad of tissue. He let it go and it floated onto my stomach in a puffy white cloud. I placed it in between my legs and let the red wet it. Slowly I closed my legs over my hand and turned onto my side, and felt the heat and blood traveling through the closed circuit of my body.
I sat up on his bed, propping my knees up so I could hold the ball of bloody tissue in place. Ash was sitting at his desk with his head in his hands, the chair so overused, the pleather was peeling off and falling like confetti onto his white carpet like a black parade.
“This is a good thing,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, not looking up, “it’s great.”
“It will get easier,” I said. I had no reason to think it wasn’t true.
I bite my lower lip and think about Ash. When he comes home tonight, maybe we can start again.
My shadow removes its finger from inside me, stands up, drops its arms, and just as casually as it walked in, it walks out.
I open my eyes. Blink a few tears from them. Everything looks just as it was, but everything invisible is different.
Part 2
“Are you trying to make me come?” Ash asks.
We are in bed. I am on top. Ash’s eyes are dark and serious and searching the ceiling, but his face is so round and boyish he never looks threatening. I am bouncing myself up and down his shaft.
“No, I’m trying to make me come,” I say. I have to actively push down memories of the last times we had sex, or I’ll never make it. I am dry as a bone. I stop bouncing. The squeaking of the boxspring slows, then goes silent. I roll off Ash, but keep a hand in between his legs. He’s soft.
I stop trying to perform. I take him in my hands, and I notice little red burns on his dick.
“Did I do that? What happened?” I ask.
“Nothing, I don’t know,” says Ash.
I get up to brush my teeth. “Well you might want to get that checked out. It is probably nothing. Unless of course you’re cheating on me.” I tease, and then spit.
Silence from the bedroom.
“Ash?” I say. “Are you cheating on me?”
Shaking is a natural response to trauma. I shake and stare blankly at a point behind Ash as he tells me about a woman from his office. It’s been going on for some time. Before that was that girl we used to say hi to at the coffee shop she couldn’t have been more than twenty. Before that was Olivia. Someone named Olivia. I think about our quiet, solitary marriage. We were so different from Mom and Dad. I remember the first time Dad left. I was in bed next to Mom, trying to fall asleep, when Dad appeared in the doorway.
“Do you want me to leave?”
I hadn’t heard them yelling that day. That fight came out of nowhere.
“I don’t care what you do,” said Mom.
Dad’s eyes flickered, but he didn’t say anything. He just turned and left, flipping off the light. I closed my eyes again, pulled up the covers to my chin. The light flipped back on. Dad was back, and I realized after a minute they were fighting about me.
Who was going to take me to school. Who was going to pick me up. Who was going to sit with me? Whose job is it to do what?
Mom said she worked just as hard as Dad.
Dad said that’s not the point; he made more money.
Mom said she’d Mom says she’d be where he is if she hadn’t had to take time off of work to have me.
Dad says that’s not his fault.
Mom says yes it is. If he would help more, support her more, she would be doing more of what she wanted instead of performing inside his shadow.
Dad says he worked hard to get to where he is and he won’t apologize for it.
Mom’s head is in her hands and she wants Dad to leave.
Dad says, “You got it.”
He flips off the light and slams the door.
I close my eyes. Mom closes her eyes.
“Is Dad leaving?” I ask.
The door opens again and the light comes back on.
“Why can’t you just be grateful for everything I do for you and this family?” Dad says.
“What do you do? All you do is make me sick,” says Mom.
“Then I’ll leave. I won’t stay where I’m not appreciated.”
Mom is worked up. I don’t think she actually knows what she’s saying when she gets this mad. She’s not even looking at Dad anymore. She’s looking at a place above his head like she’s talking to someone behind him.
“Go then. Go file for divorce. We’ll be better off without you.” She puts her arm around me and hugs me to her side. I resist, but she’s stronger than I am.
Dad stands still for a moment like he doesn’t know what to do. His face is lined and his eyes have darkened. Then he nods like he’s made a decision, slips the gold ring off of his finger, rolls it in between his thumb and forefinger like he’s showing it off, then throws it hard and fast at Mom’s head.
She ducks, and it pings against the bedframe, hits the wall, and drops into the carpet under the bed. He slams the door without turning off the light.
Silence.
I wait for Mom to say something. I want her to tell me what’s going to happen next. But she doesn’t. She just closes her eyes and breathes heavily, her chest rising and falling, smoothly, restfully, indifferently, as if she’d been asleep the whole time.
Outside I hear Dad’s engine start, rev, and then fade into the distance.
The light is still on, and Mom is right beside me. Even still, for the first time in the light, I see my shadow standing in the corner of the room.
Ash has stopped talking, and the silence rouses me. All this time, I guess I thought our silences would save us. But Ash is waiting for me to say something. Something final.
“What about South Beach?” I ask dumbly.
*
I’m crammed into my red Honda Civic with all my stuff, speeding down I-95 in silence. My car is so full, there is only a me-shaped hole in the driver’s seat. Even the sound of music is too grating to bear. The only thing I can listen to is a lecture by Brian Greene about quantum mechanics and the death of the universe.
It’s a 24-hour drive to South Beach. Today, I have to get to Virginia Beach, where Ash had already booked the hotel. It’s a nine hour drive. I stop only to fill up at a gas station, use the bathroom and grab a cup of soup and a bag of Cheetos. Both hands are clutched on the steering wheel and just as I relax, an eighteen-wheeler with Think Green on the side kicks up a rock that ricochets into my windshield, causing a circular break in the glass and a crack that icicles all the way down the passenger side.
Ash didn’t show any remorse, but he did ask if I was going to be okay. He said we didn’t really have much to split. He’d keep the apartment and I should just stay in South Beach for as long as I wanted and he’d help to make sure I got settled somewhere. I thought of all the times I asked for sex and Ash turned me down. I keep trying to make some kind of sense of it. I replay our whole marriage together. It wasn’t good. And yet I feel completely gutted. We were distant, we were mean to each other, once I started working in tech and put away painting, I was unhappy, mean, critical, like my mother. Stopping around in the kitchen and realizing oh my god I’m my mother. The next few days before I left, it was like all the colors changed. And what about the shadow? I still don’t know what that thing was, but I take a minute to thank it anyway.
At 8pm, I pull into the Marriott where I’m supposed to be staying, fish out my toothbrush and a pair of shorts from the pile of clothes in the backseat, and walk into the lobby. It is one of those hotels for singles, where jokes about hooking up is the marketing. The lobby is lit in electric blue and the bar in the middle is named Bottoms Up.
I get my room key and ride the elevator up. Laminated against the doors is a photo of a man in white briefs asking if I’m feeling dirty. It’s an advertisement for the hotel’s laundry service. I get into my room and toss my things onto the bed, and head downstairs again without looking at anything else to find some food, even though even thinking of food makes me nauseous. I wander the streets and find a restaurant serving catfish sandwiches. I force a few bites. The oil from the fy is making my lips wet, but it feels stale and tasteless on my tongue. I take the long way back to the hotel, wandering the streets so I can be in the cool air a little while longer. It feels good against my skin, which is clammy and goosebumps every time there’s a breeze. I turn a corner and hear a man’s voice behind me.
“Come here, baby,” he says.
I look back at him, curiously. I haven’t been catcalled in years. I turn again and keep walking.
“You’re beautiful,” he says.
“Thank you.”
In my room, I fall onto the bed without even taking off my shoes and sleep immediately, on top of the covers. I dream of Ash running naked around Virginia Beach, his dick swollen to the size of a baseball bat.
When my alarm goes off at 5 am, I have a panic attack. I have forgotten where I am. Then the memories come back, and I relive the realization of the end of my life and marriage as I knew it all over again. I sit up and hunch over on the side of the bed, heaving until my heart rate comes down. I have a sixteen hour drive ahead of me to get to Naples. I drive in silence, again only stopping when I must, until I see a sign that says “Welcome to Florida.”