• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 508 0

in the beginning were too garbled for him to figure out. “You’re here with me, Helen, and Emily is safe in her crib. Let’s look at Emily, Helen. You’re here with us.” He had read somewhere that repeating the name of the sleeper helped usher her into the present. He would speak to me like this as he saw me surfacing. My eyes would open but remain unfocused until I heard him saying his name, Emily’s name, mine. My pupils were like camera lenses, adjusting, readjusting, zooming in. “Cut-up dream?” he would ask then. Slowly I rose out of the land where I was the person who had cut my mother up and labeled the boxes. My father was in our house at large in the dream. Whistling.

As the remaining students left and Tanner futilely shouted out a homework assignment to their departing backs, I stepped behind the partition to get dressed.

“We’ll wait for you outside the room,” Detective Broumas said.

I heard them go and the door shut, but I was not dressing. I was sitting on the wooden chair, shivering and holding the hospital gown tighter and tighter against myself. I had finally done it, and now the world would know.

“Helen?”

It was Tanner.

“Are you okay?”

“Come around,” I said.

Tanner came behind the partition and knelt in front of me. We had tried to have sex once but instead ended up getting drunk and depressed about how our lives had turned out. As he knelt before me, I saw that he had begun balding on top.

“You have to get dressed,” he said.

“I know.” I stared down at my knees, which suddenly seemed as marbleized as my mother’s skin. I saw my joints, fat sheared off at a rendering plant. Scarsdale patties made of my thighs and arms and stored in a meat freezer, waiting to be broiled or pan seared.

“It will be okay,” he said. “Cops are always freaky, but they’ll just ask you things about your mother’s routines and such. It happened when my landlady died.”

I thought about nodding my head, for a moment I even thought I was nodding my head, but my brain seemed to have broken itself in two. I looked at Tanner.

“I’m not crying,” I said.

“No, Helen, you’re not.”

“It’s over,” I said.

Tanner did not know the details of my life. But drunkenly, I had mentioned how I felt my mother was sucking the life out of me day by day, year by year. I wondered if he could possibly know what “it’s over” meant, or if he, despite his anarchist habits, was still moved by the sentimentalist portraits of mothers that were created all over the world.

“Let me help you,” he said. “Is this your sweater?”

He reached over to the hutch and pulled out my sweater, along with my bra, which I had tucked inside. Hurriedly he snatched the bra off the dirty floor.

“Sorry,” he said.

Though Tanner had seen me nude week after week for years now, as I peeled back the top of the hospital gown and let it fall around me on the chair, I felt as if I had never really undressed in front of him. He held out my bra as if it were a dress for me to slip into. Seeing his attempt to dress me, I realized that no matter how hard it was, I would have to wrest control of myself and perform.

I took the bra from him and held it in my lap. I managed a small smile. “Thank you, Tanner,” I said. “I’ll take it from here.”

He held out his left hand, and I put my free hand in his. When I was standing, he very gently leaned over and kissed me on the head.

“I’ll see you Monday morning at ten a.m.?”

This time, I nodded my head.

I was zipping up my jeans when Natalie came in.

“Are you back there?”

“Yes.”

She came around the partition in her Diane von Furstenberg and a cloud of newly applied perfume. Her face was splotchy. Tears had recently moistened her cheeks.

“They came in Room Two Thirty looking for you. I dressed as fast as I could. Can I hug you?” she asked. Always, even now, I radiated that permission had to be granted.

Her warmth made me melt into her, want her in the way I had always wanted a mother. But inside my animal brain, I thought how dangerous this was. The very things that would comfort me could make the necessary coil unwind.

I wanted to claw at her. At