Frost

You’ve never been strong enough, she said. If you were  strong, you wouldn’t have been with David. Admit it, Leena.

I’d tried not to be with him, but it hadn’t worked. That was true. And now look.

Now you know he never loved you. And you’re too weak to take the pain.

“He did love me.”

Weak, stupid Leena. I told you not to be with him. But you couldn’t resist. You couldn’t stop yourself from needing.

“No. I chose. I wasn’t weak.” Shudders rippled through me. Another surge of vomit.

It’s okay, Leena. I know. I know you aren’t strong enough. But I love you anyway.

“Leena?” More thumping. “Are you okay? Leena, let us know if you’re in there. Please. We don’t know if it’s a fire drill, or what, but we have to get out. Why won’t you come out?”

Admit it, she hissed. You’ll never be okay. Not out there. David was right. You’re the sick one.

“No,” I whispered.

This voice—Cubby, the closet, the walls—it wasn’t me. Wasn’t from any place inside of me.

You ’re the sick one.

Thumping. “Leena, please!”

Nothing emerged from my mouth because someone held my tongue, pressed it back into my throat so I couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe. I began to gag. I tilted my gaze to the floor, to my arms. Visualized raising them up. But I couldn’t. Only one hand. One hand moved. Lifting it was like lifting the whole house. I reached up with my last bit of energy, reached up with that one hand and scratched at the door. My fingernails scraped against the wood. Once, twice.

“Did you hear that?” someone outside said.

Scratched once more. All I had in me.

I couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, except for the voice. Stay with  me, she cooed, over and over . I’m the only one who wants you. After I reached the heaviest place, so heavy I thought my body was being obliterated, I felt a release, a lightness. Like when you’ve held your arms against a doorframe and then walk out and they fly up. I flew up. Up and out and high and wide and all over and circling and spreading. And no more containment. Just me, energy, spreading into wood and plaster and brick and floating in the air and filling the space. An angel after all. No more body keeping me tied down. The body was still there, I just wasn’t in it.

Chapter 41

SUN-STREAMS POURED IN from the arched window. Dust particles shimmered in the pathway.

“Would it sound really weird,” I asked Viv, my eyes shifting away from the light, “if I told you that part of me . . . part of me didn’t come back?”

“Didn’t come back?” she said.

“You know, after the paramedics got to me.”

Viv reloaded the nail polish brush and stroked the pearly white liquid over my left thumbnail. She’d come down to see me at my dad’s condo. “Well, it kind of makes sense,” she said. “I mean, we have this life-force energy, right? Who’s to say that some of yours wasn’t released when your body thought it was the end. Like a leak in an inflatable raft that’s then patched up. Right? The air that escapes never comes back.”

“Exactly,” I said. “I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. I just . . . I feel like I left something behind. I never would have believed that, before. I mean, it sounds so stupid. It’s the kind of kooky thinking I’d have made fun of.”

The springs of the sofa bed creaked as Viv shifted her weight.

“I suppose,” she said, “a lot was different before.”

Before.

Before, I knew so many things. About David and Celeste. About myself. About real and unreal. I built a fort out of all of these things I knew.

That day in Frost House, the fort collapsed.

Afterward, I searched back through the semester, trying to find new facts to build with. But just as I was ready to nail one down, it would disintegrate in my hands.

Information came to me slowly.

All I grasped at first was that I’d nearly died from a combination of the pills I’d taken and carbon monoxide poisoning. I spent two nights in the hospital: a blur of confusion, the stink of vomit and disinfectant, throat scraped raw, tubes running in and out of my body, fragments of sleep cut short by needles, the claustrophobia of the oxygen chamber, doctors with charts, nurses with implements, and my parents sitting next to me with looks on their faces that said, How did this happen? as much as they said, “We love you.”

Not that I blamed them for wondering. I was wondering the same thing.