Sleeping Awake (11 page)

I went back to bed.

*~*

The only reason why I made it
down to dinner that evening was because Maman had sent Cienna up to get me. The
four of us sat at the dining room table, eating quiche and salad as Maman and
Camelea chattered away.

“…And when will you be seeing
him again?” Maman asked, reaching for her glass of wine.

I gathered that they were
talking about Axel.

Camelea smiled. The bright
lights of the dining room’s chandelier were as effective as a small flashlight
in a dark forest when compared to Camelea’s radiance. “Tomorrow,” she replied.
“He’s taking me to the opera.”

“How lovely,” Maman beamed.
She looked just about ready to clap. Cienna, unnoticed by Maman, punched away
furiously on her iPhone.

“I still don’t know what I’m
going to wear. He only told me a few minutes ago that he’d gotten tickets,”
Camelea continued. “He’s very spontaneous.”

“Spontaneity makes life more
exciting, doesn’t it?” Maman replied.  She took a bite of the salad and
seemed to chew thoughtfully.

Camelea nodded.

Across from me, Cienna mimed slitting
her wrists with her butter knife. I coughed to suppress my giggle.

“Is anything the matter,
Noira?” Maman’s fork paused midair.

I shook my head.

“Well it’s seven….” She didn’t
need to continue her statement. I reached into my pocket for my pill case.
Maman smiled and turned towards Camelea. “Thankfully, you have a mother who has
a wardrobe filled with beautiful dresses for the opera…”

I put four pills in my mouth
and took up my glass. They tasted retched as they began to dissolve on my
tongue. Reflexively, I spat them into the glass.

“Really?” Camelea gave a
little clap.

Cienna continued to punch away
on her phone.

 “Mais si,”
Maman replied. “Anything for
you, Mia.”

This time, Cienna put her
knife to her throat. I grabbed my napkin and feigned a series of raucous
coughs. My eyes watered as I held my breath to stifle the laughter.

“Noira are you sure that
nothing’s the matter?” Maman asked.

“Perhaps you should go and lie
down,” Cienna said, smiling. Her eyes twinkled mischievously at me.

I nodded, not at all
interested in continuing to bear witness to Camelea and Maman’s nauseating
conversation.

“That’s a good idea,” Maman
replied. “I’ll come up after dinner.”

I nodded and excused myself. No
one had noticed the three pills that were dissolving at the bottom of my glass.

*~*

Midnight came and went and
Maman still had not come to check me on after dinner. It wasn’t like Maman to
make a promise and to not follow through. I lay in bed for a few minutes and
listened to see if I could hear her feet padding towards my room. Nothing. I
decided to go and check on her.

Light shone under the door at
the end of the hallway, so I knew that she was awake. I paused slightly and put
my head against the door. I heard a faint cough. I didn’t remember her having a
cold at dinner. I knocked once to announce my entrance and pushed the door
open. It wasn’t as if I expected to find her shacked up with a man in her bed.

“Maman?” I called.

It took a while for my eyes to
adjust to the bright room. When they did, I found her struggling to sit up in
her bed. Her hands shook, and she kept falling back against the pillows.

“Maman, what’s wrong with
you?” I asked. It took me all of two seconds to be by her side.

She winced as she tried to
speak. “Me…Medicine ca…bi…net. White bottle.” She ended her sentence
breathlessly as if she was going over the final hurdle in a sprint.

I turned and ran for the
bathroom. I didn’t need a medical degree to know that Maman was in pain. By the
looks of things, she was in a lot of it. The bottle was on the top shelf of the
cabinet, almost hidden behind a tall jar of makeup remover. I almost knocked
the jar out of the way as I grabbed the bottle and ran back to Maman.

“How many?” I asked.

She held up two fingers.

I took out two of the pills
and put them in her open mouth. On her nightstand was a glass of water. Gently,
I cradled her head as I tipped the water into her mouth. Once she’d swallowed
the pills, I set the glass and prescription bottle aside and sat on her bed.

“I… for…got… you,” Maman said.

“Shhh,” I whispered. I took
her hand into mine. “It’s fine. Don’t try to speak.”

Maman smiled and closed her
eyes.

Maybe it was my childish naïveté,
but in all my twenty-two years—almost twenty-three at that—I’d
never seen Maman with so much as a cold. She was always the one who was nursing
us or staying up late with us to tell us that there was nothing waiting for us
under the bed.

I didn’t know what to do. What
had caused her that much pain? I took up the prescription bottle with my free
hands. It wasn’t labelled. I put it down and turned back to Maman. She hadn’t
opened her eyes, but I wasn’t sure if she was sleeping. Her breathing was
coming out in uneven rasps. For a moment, I contemplated calling an ambulance
then changed my mind. If Maman had needed a doctor, she would have told me that
instead of asking for the pills. Whatever was wrong with her was obviously not
something that had suddenly come upon her in the middle of the night.

I turned off the light and I
got into the bed with her, snuggling as close to her as possible and breathed
in her scent. She smelled like lavender. The familiar scent was comforting. I
wrapped my arm across her stomach and kissed her cheek.

“Mmm…” she murmured.

“I love you,” I whispered.

“Mmm…”

My eyelids became heavy as I
listened to her steady wheezes, and I eventually fell asleep. I didn’t wake up
until the next morning when I felt Maman kiss my cheek. Slowly, I opened my
eyes. She was sitting beside me, dressed for work and stroking my hair. I sat
up.

“Are you sure that you should
be going to work?” I asked, yawning slightly.

“I’m fine,” she said, kissing
my forehead. “Just some really bad cramps. My doctor gave me something for the
pain, but I forgot to take them during dinner.”

“Oh,” I replied. “So you’re
fine, then?”

“I’m fine.” Maman said. She
looked down at her watch and kissed me once more on my cheek. “I’ve got to go,
or I’ll be late.”

I watched in silence as she
left. I couldn’t shake the feeling that something wasn’t quite right.

*~*

A week later, I found myself
alone at last. Somewhere between the appetiser and dessert the night before,
Camelea had mentioned that she was going with her best friend, Raecine, to see
a movie after dinner and would be spending the night at her house. Cienna was
going to Miami for the weekend for a photo shoot and had left before I had
woken up. Maman had gone into work.

I showered quickly and went
down to the kitchen. This was my first day alone in over eight months, and I
wasn’t going to waste the opportunity. I decided to indulge myself and made a
Nutella and banana crêpe and brewed ground Blue Mountain coffee beans instead
of my usual tea.

I was in such a good mood that
I hummed as I washed the dishes. Around this time for the last few days, Cienna
would come barging into my room and start jabbering away about her
self-improvement project. I wished that she would leave me out of it. I was
Macduff. Born not by a woman, but ripped from the womb—a fatherless
bastard who accepted her plight. And then Cienna had to blast away my armour
and expose me to the elements.

I scrubbed the French press as
I remembered our last conversation about the night that Philippe had left. I
didn’t want to go over the details of how strange he’d been acting at dinner
and how he and Maman had been arguing constantly during the month before. Who
the hell wanted to remember those times?

I was fine. Fucking f-i-n-e. I
didn’t need some Kumbaya session talking about our father walking out on us and
the hole that he left to know that I preferred casual sex to relationships
because I didn’t want anyone close enough to hurt me. All I had to do was look
at Nicolaas and his pleading eyes to be reminded of the fact that there was
clearly something wrong with me. Who else would push away a man who was so
smitten with her that he called every night “Just to say goodnight” and usually
sent her follow up “good morning” text? Thousands of articles were written in
magazines about how to best get a man to be that attentive, and here I was
wishing that just for once, I wouldn’t get the message when I woke up.

I set the press on the counter
and began to rearrange the bowls in the dish rack to make space. My hand
shifted ever so slightly and tipped the pot over the edge. I watched as it fell
to the floor. I bent over to pick up the largest piece and accidentally stepped
on a shard of glass. I couldn’t tell which was worse, the blood or the pain
that surged through me. My cell phone began to vibrate on the breakfast table.
I grabbed it just in case it was Maman or Cienna calling to check up on me. It
was a text message.

“Morning, Mooi.”

I slammed the phone down on
the table and dropped to the floor as the tears began to fall. One month out of
Golden Ridge and I was back to being a failure.

“Get yourself together!” I
slammed my fist down on the wood.

I was pain. All that I did was
cause pain, and all that I seemed to enjoy was pain. Why else didn’t I want to
change like Cienna or find love like Camelea? Why else would I put Maman
through all the hoops and hurdles like I did? I had single-handedly turned my
house into a circus, and I didn’t fucking care.

“Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.”

With every word said, I banged
my head against the kitchen cupboard. My eyes fell on the broken glass. I
formed my hands into two fists, bit down hard on my bottom lip and looked away.
I tried to think of a million reasons why I shouldn’t do what was on my mind,
but I couldn’t think of a single one. My hands started to shake. I grabbed a
piece of the glass. The cut that I made on my foot bottom wasn’t so deep that I
wouldn’t be able to walk without limping, but it was just enough to sting.

       “Stupid.
Stupid. Stupid.”

       I
made another slit and another, until the stinging turned into burning and the
burning turned into mind-numbing pain. It was only then that my hands stopped
shaking. I dropped the glass. I felt as if I’d been injected with a tranquiliser.
I could breathe again. I sat in Maman’s pride-and-joy-of-a-kitchen with its
open space plan and calming yellow walls, surrounded by the broken glass and
the recently laid hardwood floors—now stained with the crimson of my
carelessly discarded blood. I could not help but wonder what my herd of
well-wishers at Golden Ridge would think of my backsliding.

Would Dr. Stein nod his head
in that annoyingly slow fashion of his and tell me that he understood that when
my hands started shaking, every second spent not satisfying my desire would
lead to anger so intense that I could probably punch a hole in the wall? Or
better yet, would he for just once not try and diagnose me and listen to me
when I tried to explain why I did what I had done? Why thinking about my father
and Nicolaas had triggered all the wrong emotions? Would he cluck his tongue
and shake his head?

Knowing him, he would tell me
that I had allowed myself to lose control because I didn't want to get better, to
become “well” like everyone else, and that I didn't have to cut myself.

“You have a choice, Noira,” he
always said at the end of our sessions. “Work towards happiness, or keep being
sad.”

I suppose that he would also
say that I chose to remain sad when I made the choice to pick up the broken
glass. Dr. Stein did not believe in the theory that by feeling some sort of
external pain, one can rid one's self of internal pain.

“Self-inflicted wounds are exactly
what their name means,” he once said to me. “A wound that you give yourself.
Wounds hurt, don't they? You are only giving yourself more pain.”

I watched as the blood poured
freely from the almost microscopic slits that I had cut into the soles of my
feet. I disagreed with Dr. Stein. Some of the pain
was
in fact gone.

I could feel it slowly ebbing
as I leaned my head against the cupboard door and closed my eyes. In the
darkness of my mind, an image immediately formed of Dr. Stein sighing away as
he wrote on his notepad with the speed of a gold medallist.

He wouldn't listen to my side
of the story; he never did.

"By cutting yourself, you
are giving into the sadness!"

Always the fucking sadness!
Always giving in! I could never do anything right in his chastising eyes.

I slammed my fists down onto
the insipid cherry oak flooring, and a slab of glass cut right through. I bit
down sharply on my teeth as the hot pain soared through my veins.