How to Disappear Completely - a short story assignment from GVSU Winter 2018

How to Disappear Completely

Katie Dawson was one of those annoyingly giddy people who couldn’t seem to stop smiling. She tried to annoy you to death in hopes that in your last agonizing moments, before your heart stops, you might be smiling too.  If I was smiling it would be out of relief.  On top of that she was also an obnoxious flirt and had no qualms if everyone knew about it.   She’d be in the Wal-Mart break room, and I’d see her across the room chatting up any semi-attractive male that might have walked in.  Laughing at corny jokes, hand on her upper chest because her boobs pulled her shirt forward to reveal the string of cleavage at the top, and then the hand would go up to a shoulder and, I’m certain, there was a slight pinch of the arm.   I’m not going to call her a slut, the words a double standard, but she was what she was.  More power to her, I just found it sort of pathetic.   Maybe it’s because when a cute guy walked up to me I tended to give a death stare, or roll my eyes at what he might say and I wouldn’t say anything more than “hi” or “hello” because I’m not a bitch and that is just polite.

Katie would always ask me, “Hey Moira, how was your weekend?”  To which I would reply, “Yeah, it was alright.”   Then she’d say, “Just alright?”  And I’d say, “Yeah.”  Then she’d giggle, and make me want to strangle her or at least punch her in the face.  It didn’t matter, I just wanted that invasive conversation and that smile stricken from the record of my life.   There were only four months of working customer service that were pure bliss – as far as working in customer service can be pure bliss.  I had listened to ill structured lies, to people trying to return soccer cleats that their son had worn all season but claiming that they were purchased a week ago.  Grass stains and the general shit of the exteriors spoke otherwise.  The sweaty adolescent foot smell wafting out of the interiors made me dazed, wanting to pass out or gag.   The woman would stare at me with wide eyed, I-dare-you-to-defy-me-bitch eyes, and I would smile and say, “Would you be okay with store credit?”   Then she would lighten up and beam at me.  Liars always have elaborate stories.

That was bliss to me.  It was heaven as far as jobs go because my original partner in crime, Monique – who had been with the company for several years – wasn’t a chatterbox.  Sure, we’d bitch about work, but that was it.  And then Monique got fired for stealing a Twix candy bar off the front lanes, and I was given Katie Dawson as a replacement.

So, a few days in a row she no called, no showed.  By that time, I’d gotten used to her routine of blabbering on at the mouth about this or that.  Asking me how my weekend was, asking if I was seeing anybody or if I thought about going back to school to study whatever, and I’d politely nod as much as I could but my “I don’t give a shit” face never worked.  That was part of my routine.

First part of my routine consisted of waking up, and then making coffee, followed by spilling coffee on: countertop, floor, self.  It consisted of leaving toast in toaster, and coming out of shower to reveal that toast was scorched and prepped to catch fire.  As I stood in towel dripping wet from shower my phone would ring with my mom on the other end, probably swirling a glass of red wine, waiting for me to answer. I never picked up on the first attempt.  I’d hope she’d leave me alone, or just leave me a voicemail, but she’d click off the phone if my robotic secretary started in with, “We’re sorry the number you are calling is unavailable.”  The phone would be still, and I’d sip at my three-quarter filled lukewarm coffee, with too much cream and too much sugar, and I’d wait to see if it’d try and ring back to life.   It would, convulsing on my countertop, and I’d answer it after three rings, and in my best attempt at a fuck you, I would say, “Hi mom.”

There’s an issue with my parents - Bernard and Susan Reynolds.  They were not religious but terribly concerned about appearing to be.  They didn’t practice their faith outside of the walls of the church, they didn’t speak with any convictions about heaven and hell, or sins and prayers, but by God did we have to sit in those uncomfortable pews every Sunday morning.   All dolled up in our Sunday best, my sister Olivia and I in sun dresses, and my parents all stone faced and praise the lord during worship service.  They drank heavily on the weekend, and light during the week.  My dad swore up a storm with his buddies out in the garage any chance he could, and my mom always seemed to look on the homeless with repulsion.  It wasn’t a surprise when Richard Dean knocked me up, and they got into a hissy fit about how they might be perceived in our community.  After wedding bells, a still birth, a separation, followed by speedy divorce later, I’m not exactly keen on the type of religious faith that puts a seventeen-year-old through that.   As soon as I could, I got a job, and I got out of that house.

“Yes, mom,” I say to her comments about moving on, and meeting “Mr. Right.”  It’s hard to tell your mom how she betrayed you and thrust you out into a world you hadn’t been prepared for.  It’s hard to explain to her that you were drunk and that that was no excuse for a pretty boy to invite himself to enter inside you, and you don’t want to tell her that he didn’t really want to be with you anyways, but that his parents acted the same as she did.  You don’t want to tell her that you tried to make it work, and that you tried to be in love with him, and that yeah, he didn’t hit you but he didn’t give a shit about you either.  You don’t want to tell her that every day the living breathing thing inside you grew from a sea monkey, into something resembling a mole rat, and then into a tiny person, that you started to think life might not be so bad.  You can’t tell her about that because the first thing she’ll say is, “He should have stuck around, you could have tried again for another one,” and maybe she’ll say, “You can’t keep blaming me for your mistakes.”   You can’t tell her when you found out that human being inside you had stopped being, that you had to carry it to term because you were so close.  How you pushed it out, and there was no crying to calm your pains, and that you felt this wave of voided, nothing.  And you continued to feel it for a month and half later when Richard, your husband, decided his reasons for being married to you were over.  You can’t voice that properly into a big enough, “fuck you,” because the first time a man touched you and fucked you it wasn’t consensual, and it resulted in an infant.   And you can’t go to church on Sundays anymore because God fucked you over by taking that infant away.

“Mom, I told you, I’m fine how I am.  I make enough to cover rent, hours will be going back up, I don’t need groceries from you.”  I say this to her on the phone at one point at least every week, and then she’ll show up at the end of one of my shifts and have bags of groceries, and I take them, but I never say Thank you.

Katie no called no showed on a Monday, then on a Tuesday, finally on Wednesday.  Lisa, our manager, came up to me on that Thursday afternoon after a rush of unhappy people - who blamed us for not taking the coupons they never showed us -  and said, “Katie isn’t going to be in for the rest of the week, I will try to get someone to help you out over here.”

I learned that Katie had been driving with her father, and she had crossed into an intersection only to be T-boned by someone running a stop sign.  Impact was on her father’s side, he was gone.  Somehow, she had showed up on Monday, and smiled, and flirted, and I don’t know why but I walked up to her with the intention of giving her a hug but she said, “I’m okay,” without a drop of tears, without a sniffle, without anything.  We worked that day as if nothing had happened, as if there was no funeral the next day for her father, and she put up with the verbal abuse of people who couldn’t grasp that cashiers were people too.   I watched her the entire time, and she never broke character.

I worked the day of her father’s funeral.  I stood there all day, absent mindedly giving off faux concern that the coffee pot being returned to me didn’t come with the advertised coffee.  I didn’t have the energy to explain to the ninety-year-old veteran that he didn’t know how a Keurig machine was supposed to work.   I gave him his refund, and damaged out the coffee maker and imagined the funeral.  It isn’t hard to imagine a funeral, people dressed head to toe in their Sunday best, usually awful black, a bunch of morticians synchronized to cry.

It was probably about nine-o-clock at night when I popped in my DVD of Coco and thought about death and dying, and singing skeletons and had a good cry.   Like an idiot this memory came back to me: Richard sitting next to me and awkwardly holding my hand and kissing my forehead.  That bastard told me it’d be okay, and then he left me there on the sofa that stank of cat piss because he’d promised his friends he’d be over to watch the sports ball game.  It was just me and my belly swelled up like a balloon for no goddamned reason, and I hugged it, I hugged her, she was named Angela.  I wished I’d chosen a different name.  At the service a dozen old ladies, professionals in the grieving process, would tell me, “God just needed another Angel.”  or “Her name suits her new job now.”  I’d never wanted to kill someone more than then.

As the undead strummed the guitar on the PIXAR feature playing on my thirty-two-inch flat screen, my cat Maurice wandered onto my lap.  He purred a while, but when I scratched his neck, he rose up his back to share his pink little butthole and jumped off me.   I wished I had a dog at that moment.  A nice, drooling, annoying little canine, who needed my attention, but I knew once I was passed my crying fit I’d want to be rid of it.  No one deserved that much affection.    I thought about Katie then, her bubbling personality, and her strong demeanor and for some reason – though I hadn’t foreseen it – I was going to invite her to live with me.

It was only a few days after her father’s funeral that her mask of indifference appeared to wear off.  The façade she had built slowly fell to the way side.  At one point when I asked her, “Are you doing alright?” it lead to a full on sobbing fit.  “I just can’t handle walking about that house.  I just see him everywhere, you know?”  She said to me, and the funny thing was I did know.

After I got home from delivering Angela I heard nothing but silence in that house.  I tried to alleviate the weight of that silence with the explosions of a Marvel movie or a binge of alcohol but nothing worked.  I supposed it was different than what Katie was feeling because she had tangible memories to remember, I had fantasies: of nurseries, of softball games, of ballet.  I had plans for breast feeding, and then I had breasts ready but wasted, swelling up as a sick joke.  I couldn’t stand wandering around that house, with all the pink baby shit, the wooden rocking chair, and boxes of diapers, stacks upon stacks of boxes of diapers.   It felt pathetic that I was upset that I would never be able to clean up baby shit, or get puked on, but that’s what I was upset about.  Nine months of prep, for what?  And a house and marriage that existed only for that purpose.   Motherhood was supposed to be the reward, the absolution for the pain I’d endured, but even that was part of the joke and the house knew it.  So, when Richard didn’t come home for a couple days, and he ignored my texts and when his mother called me up and said he needed a break I was ready to light a match and set the whole thing up in flames.  But I didn’t.  So, as an alternative, I filed for divorce against my mother’s wishes.

“You can stay with me,” I told Katie.  “I have a spare couch.  Well, it’s just the one couch, but I have a bed too.  That’s mine.”  She stepped back a moment.   Even she was aware that the invitation was out of character for me.  “Do you mean it?’  She said to me, and I thought about it.  I wanted to take it back, I wanted to collect it from out in the air and scoop it up with both hands to return it to my mouth where I could swallow it back down and let it smolder in my stomach acids, and I could suffer from the reflux.  I smiled, and I sighed, “Yes, of course I mean it.”

***************

Katie was a disaster.  She spilled more coffee than I did, and used up all the hot water every time she showered.  She would always get up before me, and go to bed after me, and I’d hear her traipsing around the apartment at ungodly hours of the night, like ten or ungodly hours in the morning like nine.   But, I didn’t give her the boot.  Maybe it was because I was a glutton for torture or maybe it was because I liked having to clean up after someone else.  Katie was an invasive species to my apartment, she didn’t belong, she disrupted my routines but she didn’t so much destroy me as transform the environment into something else, because I started to open up.

“God, men are such shit aren’t they.”  She said to me one day when I told her how Richard had married me and then left me less than a year later.  I may have had too many Malibu and Coke’s when the conversation about the workday had shifted to talks of sexual conquest.   “Please tell me you’ve had better luck with men after that, please please please.  There’s got to be one good story.”  She had been turned toward me, legs crossed on the couch, a serious look of hunger in those eyes, hunger for information, for dirt.  Then, I disappointed her.

“He was it.”

“How old are you?

“Twenty-five.”

“Holy shit, listen sister, you can’t let one loser define your love life, you just can’t.   Like me, I’ve been with,” She started to count silently in her head staring up at the ceiling as she did as if she were counting imperfections, “Never mind.”  A nervous laugh later and she backed up a moment and held up both hands, palms out in protest, “Listen, I’m not a slut.  I know that’s the vibe you are getting.  I just, I’m not, okay, just take my word for it.   Zach was my first, when I was about fifteen, I mean we were best friends right and he was my first, and he like wasn’t into it at all but wanted to try it.   Like, he looked at my body with this repulsion, and he didn’t seem like he really wanted to touch any part of me, and I just, I don’t know, I urged him to do it, I gave him a handy, and well, he got hard but like there was no enthusiasm in the act.   I was worried because he just kind of finished, and then broke up with me after, and didn’t return my calls, and we’d see each other at school but he wouldn’t speak to me.  I felt gross.   I felt unwanted, you know.”  She chuckled a moment, a belly laugh, “Turned out he was gay.   He just wanted to try with me, you know to see if he liked it, and well, he didn’t want to be gay then.   Like he resisted it, and so in a way he used me.   I didn’t find this out till like a couple years ago.   I had met up with him at this coffee place, not Starbucks, but the other one.”

“Biggby?”

“Yes,” she snapped her finger as if finally clicking on the light bulb in her head, “it was a Biggby.  He had texted me out of the blue and wanted to meet up, and I hadn’t been doing anything so I thought, what the hell right.  So, he shows up and he tells me he’s gay, and I was shocked, and I went off because here I thought I was this disgusting repulsive thing, and I was horned up you know, I mean I’d wanted to have sex for as long as I knew what it was and then I got it and it was over, but I still had these urges, and I ended up with some terrible people.  I told him this, and he got all high and mighty and said I shouldn’t blame him and his search for his identity or some bullshit, and I kindly reminded him that I was happy he figured out his identity, but I would have liked it if it wasn’t at the expense of me.”  She tilted back her glass and slurped down some of the melted ice at the bottom before taking a cube between her teeth, and biting down on it hard so that it shattered into a hundred little pieces, and then she continued.

“I let Martin Hernandez finger me behind the cafeteria because I wanted someone to want me.  I let Martin Hernandez lay me on his parent’s bed and pin me against the sheets even though I’d told him no, because the first man who tried to fuck me was too scared to admit he was a homosexual to the girl who was supposedly his best friend.  I had a sexual awakening with a gay man who didn’t care to tell me he could be gay, and I couldn’t feel angry or sad about these things because he was simply discovering himself.”   Katie stood up then and walked to the kitchen and placed her glass in the sink.  I could hear her sniffling as she faced away from me.

“I felt so inadequate my entire life.   I once slept with this guy named Dale, he had a girlfriend at the time, and do you know what, she blamed me for that cheating scumbag not being faithful to her.  Why do we do that to each other.  Why do we let men have a way out, why don’t we make them take responsibility for the shitty things they do without it being that I tempted him?   I may have a vagina but it’s not a honey trap.  And I’m left to defend my want for sex, because I’ve had it, and I want it again.”

“I suppose so.”  I say, I have no dog in this fight, I’m content being where I am with what I’m doing.

“We should get laid.   Not like at the same time, but like we shouldn’t let our first encounters define who we are, you know?”

“I don’t want that.”  I say and I don’t want to judge Katheryn for what she wants but it isn’t my style.   Every man that I considered even for a fraction of a second had a glaring flaw.  They were racist, homophobic, uber-virginal, rotten teeth, picked their noses, scratched their ass cracks, or were just plain cocky.

But, what followed that initial conversation was a string of ill advised blind date attempts.   The new routine had been disrupted again, whenever she learned that someone she knew was single she would message them and they would message me, and I would awkwardly try to let them down.  Maurice had gotten jealous and he and his asshole stayed under my bed half the time, and I was left to handle the barrage of a dozen men asking me personal questions, and of course the unsolicited dick pics began to troll in.   I never understood the logic of how a close-up of a hard penis was supposed to make me want to jump into bed with someone.  I would have to assume that somewhere somehow that worked on people, that some girl somewhere when they received the shocking photo of a jungle-covered-ripple of flesh didn’t just vomit but wanted to know more about the intrusive joke.   Not me, it made me want to revert into my shell.

That’s when Allan the pizza boy showed up at my door.  When I say boy, I don’t mean he was sixteen or anything.  No, Allan was a twenty-three-year-old pizza boy who had delivered Pizza Hut to my door when I was wrapped in a towel because Katie had “forgotten” she’d ordered it. She had conveniently had to pee when the buzzer went off.  The man before me was about my height with a big head, and a large mop of shaggy black hair, and an average build.   He blushed when I opened the door, all clean shaven and baby faced, and he tried to be respectable and maintain eye contact but I caught him looking at my shoulders.  “That’ll be twenty-three, umm, seventy-five,” He said as he removed the pizza boxes from the insulated bag that he carried.

I turned around holding one hand over my chest and another tugging down on the bottom of my oversized pink towel so that it was at a constant war with itself to either stay on or slide off.   I shuffled like a penguin to my bedroom leaving him there and gathered my cash out of my wallet.  When I waddled back out he smiled at me and laughed but apologized as he cleared his throat, I handed him a twenty and a ten and told him to keep the change.   Then I pushed the door closed on him so that he had to back up as it pushed on him and closed him out.

As I waddled into the apartment carrying the pizza boxes Katie was smiling and sitting on the couch.  “Don’t be mad, I saw him working last Friday, and I remembered his name, and made a request that he deliver.”  I opened a box and removed a slice.  With a bite of peppers, cheese and mushrooms in my mouth I said, “At least the pizza is hot.”

About four days later he came back, only this time neither of us had ordered pizza, and he stood there in uniform with boxes and said, “I know, I was delivering down the hall and I just wanted to ask if you’d like to go out.”

“What are you doing right now?”  I asked him.

            He looked down at his pizza boxes, “Delivering pizzas.  Working.”

            “When do you get off?”

            “About an hour.  Well, no, not about, exactly an hour.”

            “Pick me up when you’re done.”  I tell him, “Like right when you are done.  I have work tomorrow morning and I don’t have time to wait around for you to get all spruced up.  Does that work?”

            He nodded nervously, and seemed like he was shocked, like I was about to scream, “Not!” or “Psyche!”  But I didn’t.   I supposed it was just the idea of finding some sort of initiative for myself, even if Katie tried to fix it up, because I was taking some semblance of control.

            An hour and some change later the knock on my door came.  I was wearing sweat pants and a hoodie because I didn’t want to be dolled up and form some sort of false expectation of myself.   I did brush my hair back into a taught little pony tail with a small drop of bangs because I didn’t want to look like trash.

            When I opened the passenger side door of his maroon Ford Taurus, he muttered “Shit,” and frantically tried to clean up some receipts and fast food bags, and an occasional French fry that he promptly tossed in the seat behind him so that I could still see it clearly.  “Sorry,” he said and he broke eye contact completely embarrassed as I sat down and told him, “It’s okay.  You should see my apartment.”  I scoffed out a laugh and he nodded and wiped his brow before shutting his door.

            Richard was never that frantic about anything.  He oozed with petty confidence.  Teaching me a thing or two about the world, and I remember nodding at everything he said as though he were king, pretending I’d never known such glorious information.   He’d talk about sports, and so and so running the ball for such and such yards, and I would internalize nothing.   “Nothing you’ll need to worry about,” he’d say to me and I’d giggle and smile, and be nervous as my stomach expanded.    After the disappearing act I’d look back on those memories, and all that talking down of me, and I’d wanted to slap that girl silly.   I wanted to take her hand and drag her down to the clinic and flush the life out of her that.  That life that would eventually be death and give her that measure of religious judgement and pain.  All those judgmental eyes as an avoidance at the rest of the pain that would have come.  It would have been better.

            “Do you have any siblings?”  Is one of his first ice breakers as we sat in a booth at Applebee’s.   It was in time for half off appetizers, and I didn’t feel like making him pay a shit ton of money if things went sour.

            “An older sister.”  I say.   I realized then that I hadn’t given much thought to Olivia.   I knew why too, and I knew it wasn’t fair.  She had taken responsibility for what happened to Richard and me because it was at a house party with a bunch of her friends that it happened at.  She had been trying to help me socialize because I’d spent so much time sitting in a corner in the cafeteria reading books, and when I got home I did my homework and watched TV or a movie, and played the occasional video game.   I didn’t care to be around people much, but I whined to her that I wanted to be around them in some way.  Then the opportunity came up and Olivia offered to let me join her at a party with her friends who were a couple years older than I was and I agreed to go because I felt safe that my sister was going to be there.

            “I have a little brother and sister, they’re pretty sweet kids.   Amy’s twelve and Evan is sixteen.”  He said to me, and he paused a moment after the sweet smile of his siblings faded to draw concern for me and then I stared down blankly at my napkin-wrapped silverware.   I realized that I was not hungry at all.

            There’s something trivial about sitting there and knowing where this is supposed to end up, something trivial about making small talk.  The whole point of this set-up is to “get laid,” according to Katie so why was I supposed to be invested in these norms.   In Katie’s opinion, sex was her oppressor and her liberator, she’d owned it again, taken it back, and if it worked for her perhaps it’d work for me.   I wasn’t threatened by Allan, and his dullness, it was calm. “Do you want to get out of here?”  I said to him.

            “We haven’t ordered anything yet.”  He looked a little anxious as though he were worried about being rude to the waiter who had brought us our glasses of water.  But he looked at me, and seemed to conjure up some strength and he said, “Yeah we can go.”  Then he took out his wallet and dropped a five-dollar bill on the table.

            I could tell as we drove back to my apartment that he was nervous and thought he’d fucked the whole thing up.  His nervous grin was gone, and there was a tight furrow in his brow, and I knew he was upset.  It didn’t bother me that he was angry.  I kept staring at him, and thinking about how he looked nothing like Richard, who had a square draw, a tight thick neck.  I recall my heart skipping a beat and being terrified when Richard took off his shirt that first time, when I had wanted it, and he was so comically chiseled.   It’s funny thinking back on this ideal I had built up in my head of what sexy looked like, if that’s what you would have called it.  I tried to make the most out of the sham marriage, whatever that meant.  I suppose he was good to me, he touched me in the right ways, explored my body, but that was only at first.   “I didn’t take initiative enough,” he’d tell me, “I wasn’t dominate,” or some shit like that, and then at one point he commented how the weight gain had made my ass flabby.

            “Do you want to come inside?”  I found myself saying.  He swiftly turned to look at me as though I’d stripped down naked.  He swallowed a lump in his throat and attempted to sound confident by saying, “Yeah I can come in for a minute.”

            I was tired of letting the past define me, I was tired of letting other people define what I should be doing, or who I should be seeing.  I was tired of having my sexual reflexes longing for a man who attacked me in a field because I’d been polite and kissed him back.

            Katie was sitting on the couch when we walked in and I was leading Allan along by his hand and I could feel him wanting to drag his feet.   She gave me a slight smile and I gave her a glare and shake of the head as if to say, “Don’t, say, a word.”

            Once in my room I shut the door and Allan scratched at the back of his head and asked, “What’s your favorite movie?” and I told him to “Shut up,” before grabbing his face and pulling him in for a kiss.  That was the only motivation he needed and his arms wrapped around my back and he pulled me in close and his hands began to wander under my shirt and his chubby little fingers pressed firm but not forceful into the flesh of my back and I knew I was ready.

            I don’t want to get into the nitty gritty of what happened that night.  But, Allan was gentle, patient.  He didn’t last long but I didn’t care about that.   It was the way he touched me, the way his fingers glided over skin as though I was something to be preserved and not broken.  I’m not going to get into the details of body parts, and positions.   In those moments I was defining myself.  There was no contempt or disappointment in that man’s eyes and when he told me, “You’re gorgeous,” I believed him.  We eventually collapsed onto the sheets of my bed, wet and ruffled.

            “By the way,” I said between gulps of breath, “My favorite movie is The Princess Bride.”

            “Can I see you again?”  He said.  I could feel the smile in his voice.

            “Probably.  But you should know I’m a mess.   I have issues.”

            “Everyone has issues.”  He said to me and I agreed and worried that I may have just added a new one.

We had a couple of proper dates after but I couldn’t open-up like I wanted to, I wasn’t a flower, in fact I started to panic.  I’d been stupid and forgot about protection, and I hadn’t bothered with birth control.  When we were alone again and hands began to wander for buckles I stopped him, “Do you have a condom?”  He collapsed exasperated, “No, I guess I just thought you were on something because you didn’t say anything.”  He cuddled up close to me and as our heart beats slowed, and our heaving chests went more muted he placed a palm against my cheek and pulled me in with his fingertips.

            The next time he was prepared.  Eager.  When he touched me it was aggressive, but not violently.  He had gotten familiar, impulsive.  He went for a kiss but I turned my face to the ceiling.  His lips connected to my cheek, down my neck.  I didn’t want him to stop, shivers ran down my spine, but for some reason when he leaned up to kiss me I locked my mouth shut.  Those sausage fingers wandered, outside of my shirt, to my midriff, squeezing at the lumps of flesh around my stomach.  Then his pinky, that smallest of fingers invaded my waist band.

            “I can’t do this.”  I said, and he quickly pulled his hand away.

            “I brought protection.”  He answered, ignorant.

            “I know,” I said, “I just can’t.”

            “Issues?”  He said.

            “Issues.”  I answered.

            “Everyone has issues,” he stated, it mine as well have been a parrot squawk.  “I don’t think you should count me out,” he continued as he laid there and I sat up and tugged my shirt down, “Let me in, let me know, I can help you.”

            I laugh, “Are you going to save me?”

            I feel the distribution of the bed as it shakes from the movement of his weight.  His arm goes over my shoulder, about my neck and he moves in for an embrace, and I break away from it.  “What?”  He says, and when I stand I see his face is angry with embarrassment, red cheeks wounded, and pitiful.

            “You think I need saving?”  I shouldn’t have laughed, I guess.

            “I didn’t say that.”  He backtracks, but he mine as well have.

            “Tell me, Allan, what exactly are you going to help me with?”

            “Well, you have a problem with being touched.”  An exasperated hand swept in front of him.

            “Oh, I see.”  I started in and he slumped back in defeat, “My want to back off is a problem that needs fixing?”  It’s a rhetorical question, “Isn’t that kind of my choice.   Isn’t it kind of my choice to be mended, I mean, I barely know you.  Is that the cure all slogan, everyone has issues?  Is that supposed to make me yank down my pants, unclasp my bra and go all spread eagle for you?”

            “Sex can wait.  I just didn’t know.”  He pleaded, and maybe it was sincere but I was seeing red.

            “Wasn’t that your motivation?  Did you even ask what my issue was, was that ever a consideration?  What if I told you it was that I got raped, impregnated, a doe eyed little idiot who was forced to marry some prick.  Then months of aches, and pains, and vomit, and then she died inside of me and I had to deliver her.  Afterwards, he left me, like a heap of trash, a broken useless thing, garbage.”

            He got up to his feet and attempted to hug me.  I shoved him.  He fell back on the mattress and retorted, “Not all men are like that, I won’t do that, I’m not like that.”

            I laughed again, “How am I supposed to know that?  Because you say so, because you promise?”

            He shook his head, and sighed, “You can’t just disappear a part of yourself, Moira.  That is not how human beings work.”

            “That,” I say, “Is exactly how we work.”

            “What do I do now then?”  He said to me and for a second I felt sorry for him but I didn’t know who he was, what he wanted out of this mess, and I was sorry that I’d let Katie get to me.   When I didn’t respond he stood up, gathered up his jacket, and slid on his shoes.   I could see a conflict in him, as to whether he had done something wrong, and the truth was I knew he hadn’t.   I knew that whatever ignorance he had about my feelings was just a lack of knowledge, of experience.   I stayed standing in that same place for a few minutes after I heard the door shut, he didn’t slam it.

            I loved the movies but I never believed in the romanticism and its ability to remove the hurt, to fix the parts that were broken.   Sex, was nice, it was a fundamental part of the human biology, but it was missing for me.   There was a moment when Allan was holding me, when he collapsed beside me and gathered me up in his arms, and I felt a certain safety.    It was fleeting though, but I remember it, sweaty, smelly, but right.  The act though, the act was empty, and I’d lie if I didn’t say it felt good, but that wasn’t enough.

            I thought about Angela, and I thought about the life that had grown inside of me.  A being that existed suspended in fluids inside my womb.   Ate what I ate, heard what I heard, and lived in perpetual paradise.   Richard once collapsed next to me, sweaty, smelly, and he hugged me close and the lies of chemical reactions in the brain trigged by hormones made him think he loved me.  I trusted that, we had made this thing, this child together, born out of an act of violence, but we were going to make it work.

            And that’s the lie.  I missed him.  He used to cook dinner on Sunday afternoons, and the house would be filled with the charring scent of steaks or pork chops.   He’d spoon out a glob of mashed potatoes on to my plate, and he’d kiss my forehead, and pinch my butt and it was an ideal, it was like a movie.   “At least you’re good looking,” he’d say to me, and now with the benefit of hindsight I might say, that was a shitty thing to say, but it made me feel better about myself.   That was before the comments about my weight gain, before death invaded our existence, but it was still after the rape, after the forcing of a relationship and engagement and marriage.   It was after his parents bought us a house, and I hadn’t thought about escape because he owned me.  He co-created a being that drifted with placenta inside my uterus.  He’d exchanged vows with me, and his family owned the roof over my head.   I was a prisoner but I was content.

            Olivia never visited me.   I shared a bed with my attacker for seven months, but I couldn’t face my own sister.   The only one who believed me about how it’d happened.   I wasn’t always as honest as I became, and it was easier to live a lie.   Olivia ended up with a fiancé and then a husband, and ended up with a little girl, Bethany.   Bethany and Angela would have been a year or so apart, they would have been cousins, would have been friends.

            When I told Richard, “Something’s wrong,” he didn’t second guess me, and he carried me to his pick-up and sped dangerously down the country roads, and through the parking lot of the hospital, and he told me, “I’m sure it’s nothing.  It’s nothing.”   When the news came, he cried.    I don’t like to remember that, but he cried and I felt as though I’d robbed him of something, as though my body had broken his child, and refused to bare her.   Angela was seven pounds and eight ounces, and eighteen inches long.   There were slight, and thin strands of black hair that hung off the side of her head, and when I kissed her I felt the darkness latch onto my spine.

            Richard was a coward, but I was cold, distant, and broken.  I had a right to be, and if he had truly cared he might have stuck around, and maybe if I had the energy to hold on to him, maybe he would have.   That old hindsight gets to me though, and I know that would have dragged out an inevitability.  That’s how I felt as the door shut to my apartment, and I shuffled my feet out into the living room.

            Katie had been watching one of the Avengers movie, the screen paused on an explosion.  I’d known she’d been eavesdropping as soon as she had heard raised voices.  She was curled up in a blanket, hugging the arm rest of the couch, and I collapsed beside her.   “I can’t do it.”  I began to cry, “I can’t do it.”  I wrapped my arms around my stomach, that barren womb that I imagine is filled with cobwebs, and cracked machinery, and I laid my head on Katie’s shoulder.

            She resumed the movie.  As Iron Man saved the day on the TV, I closed my eyes to sleep.  This was my new routine.  Eventually I’d have to face life, sex, men, but I liked simple steps first, giant leaps were too much work.  I knew Katie was going to come home bragging of her conquests, and I’d be there to listen intently, entertained, living through her drama and always a twinge-jealous of that liberation.