The Death of Small Creatures (7 page)

I can't believe
this is me. I don't want to believe this is me.

“You are actively suicidal,” Fiona says. I balk at this summation of my psyche. Her conclusion seems melodramatic. I have, after all, only been thinking about it. Thinking about it doesn't make you suicidal. “How would you do it?” she says.

“Pills,” I say. It's a no-brainer. I don't understand why anyone would deliberately inflict more pain upon themselves than necessary. Why make such a mess? Why not just go to sleep?

“On a scale of one to ten, one being you're nowhere near, and ten being you're ready to do it now,” she says, “how close are you?”

Her scale raises an interesting question. If I were a one I wouldn't be in therapy, and if I were a ten I'd already be dead. So for all intents and purposes, the scale is a paradox. “Five,” I say.

She asks me how the medication is working. I tell her I feel tired and foggy, but that this is preferable to the gut-wrenching pain. I consider telling her I've been having Technicolor dreams—blue lightning bolts shooting from my fingertips, like the Emperor in
Star Wars
. “I want you to check in with your doctor,” she says.

So I go see Dr. Pastorovic; she increases my dosage and refers me back to Fiona. This goes on for a while, this back-and-forth scenario.

Fiona speaks to me in gentle tones, but doesn't put up with any shit either. When I tell her I feel like at any moment I could fall off the edge of a cliff, she asks me to locate this feeling. “Groundless,” I say.

“But how do you feel?” she says. I find it difficult to describe my feelings without the buffer of metaphor. Like a bird. Like the earth is slipping out from under me. Like I'm falling. I have cultivated an intellectual existence, but I have the emotional integrity of a ten-year-old. “Mad, glad, sad or scared?” Fiona says.

“Scared?” I suggest.

Several years back:
Linden is on her tiptoes, leaning over the bathroom sink in the cabin at Two Coves Resort. Her head is in my hands. Woodsmoke in the air: sap and pine. Dust burning off the base heater against the wall. The air in this cabin is dank, coppery. The toilet water has not moved in months. The boys are by the fireplace threading popcorn onto a string. In a moment, Logan will flail a stick and burn Grant's neck, scar him for life perhaps. Leigh will shout obtusely, ineffectually, “Jesus Christ!” But they won't care. He only sees his kids every other Sunday and on special holidays.

Linden's hair is so long it gets sucked down the drain. I cannot manage this delicate relationship of soap and water and hair; it is up to me to keep this child from going blind; it is up to me to make her clean. I resent this process. I resent this child for being a child who does not fully comprehend my ability to resent her. I resent her for not loving me and making me whole. “Is the water too hot?” I say.

“No, it's good,” she says, eager to please, already learning to be compliant and willing like good girls are expected to be. I lather her hair, gaze upon her tanned neck, a freckle.

The first time I met her, she came up just above my knee, thudded along the steep path from the beach, her sandals kicking up clouds of dust, the thin straps of her yellow sundress falling off her shoulders to expose the slender tan lines beneath. “This is fun,” she said. “What's your name?”

Now, she strains higher on her tiptoes, lets out a gasp, her gut compressed against the counter. “Lean in more,” I say.

She is a tiny drowned creature in my hands.

She prematurely wears her mother's hoop earrings these days, and Gap jeans and clunky shoes. I hear her shiny bracelets jingle as she taps on the bedroom door and whispers, “Aren't you awake yet?” I smell ham and onions, burnt eggs. I hear Leigh's silly banter, cartoons. I want to kill Spongebob Squarepants.

Blue sky bleeds through the olive-green curtains. Gateau is terrorizing swallows in the lilac tree next door; their chirping is inflicted with urgency. It reminds me of the chatter that echoes from the cliffs overlooking China Beach when the small birds scatter every time an eagle swoops by, how they drive the solitary creature from the cliffs, and the eagle glides complacently onward until it disappears in the mist and gloaming above the treetops.

My stepson Grant, the oldest boy, strums his blue electric guitar in the spare room with the lights out, doesn't speak unless spoken to, has become infatuated with Led Zeppelin, scoffs at my love of John Denver. He is kind and sensitive, has the tender reserve of a monk. I worry about him sometimes.

Logan is bright and mischievous, needs a lot of attention. Just now he torments Linden, calls her ugly and stupid. She screams in terror; she is too old for these antics, has no self-soothing abilities.

“Why did you stop eating meat?” he says.

“I don't like the way they treat animals,” I say.

“But you still eat eggs, right?”

“Yes,” I reply.

I'm twenty-two years
old. My best friend Kay sits next to me on the ferry. Her hands lie folded on her belly, caressing the slight curve protruding beneath her Kurt Cobain T-shirt. My hand rests on her belly too. I have friendship bracelets on both of my wrists—aqua blue and fuchsia threads, silky strings woven into tapestry. These are our three hands resting upon the life inside; this is the closest this kid will get to experiencing the world outside.

Kay's blown her student loan money to buy the RX-7, and I'm bulimic and fucking up everything. We drink a lot and get high sometimes. Kay's face is angular, thin and freckled. She looks like a young Meryl Streep with red hair. “Holy shit, I think I felt it kick,” she says. I'm sort of in love with Kay in a non-sexual way. She isn't traditionally pretty, but I love her hair and slender body, and her studded leather belts and choice of T-shirts, for being the cool, unaffected girl I've always wanted to be. Maybe I even love the baby inside her. You have to go the mainland to get an abortion this far along. “Can you feel it?” she says.

Her flesh feels thick and hot in the sunlight, and it occurs to me I've never touched a woman like this before, never been so intimate. “No,” I say. “I don't feel anything.”

Later that night, we sit on my mom's porch overlooking the park. In the distance, the lake gleams in moonlight. Willows sway on the shore. I hear ducks paddling across the surface, and every so often the squeak of wings followed by a long threshing as a duck skids across the surface and halts to a landing. Then a quack or two, then nothing as its feet find rhythm under water. “It's not too late to change your mind,” I say. The sky is black and starry but glows white above the far side of the lake where the shopping mall parking lot begins, and beyond that is a faint reddish glow from the neon cross on the spire of the church adjacent to the mall.

“I know,” she says, and a mother raccoon and three babies scurry across the yard.

“You've lost weight,”
Fiona says. “How extraordinary.” She is careful with her semantics, a skill honed from years of clinical practice.

“I no longer eat meat,” I say.

“Oh?” she says.

“I think I'm feeling better.”

I have no explanation for what comes next except to say that inevitably change happens this way. After seven years of perpetual hangovers, I wake up one morning and say, “Leigh, I'm never going to drink again,” and even though this is the millionth time I've said it, this time I stop. For now anyway.

I start taking my pills one at a time, eat breakfast every day and even take up Bikram yoga: hot yoga.

At my first yoga class the teacher, Wendy, walks me into the studio where they all lie flat on their backs in the Savasana position, everyone's feet facing the same direction—this is yoga etiquette; it is considered an insult to point your feet at the teacher. She leads me to a vacant space, unfolds my mat, whispers, “Did you bring a towel?”

“Yes,” I say, my voice booming. “Yes,” I whisper. But mine is a hand towel, and everyone else is lying on full-size bath towels. I lay my tiny white towel on my blue mat; it floats in the middle of the thin foam like an upside-down stamp floating in a blue sea.

“You'll need something bigger,” Wendy smiles. “You're going to sweat…a lot.”

Damn
, I think. The impulse to berate myself surges, then subsides.
But it's okay. These blips in my judgment are part of my charm. I can forgive myself for this.

We begin by breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth, using our throats as a valve so the air moves slowly and deliberately in counts of six. We flex and arch and reach for the sky, moulding our bodies into half-moons and eagles and trees. In between each posture, Wendy tells us to relax in Savasana, the dead body pose—palms up, mouth slack—to let our feet fall open as our heels touch, to just breathe, to just be.

My sister Sandy
and I sit in her backyard. The apple tree has begun to blossom. Every so often we hear the Tally-Ho horse carriage full of tourists dawdling along the next street over: the horse's hooves clopping on asphalt and a man's voice on a microphone fading as the trolley turns into Beacon Hill Park.

“Do you still polish each individual apple?” I say.

She laughs. “Yeah, so? It's just my thing.”

“My neighbour has an apple tree,” I say. “And a cat named Cake.”

“A cat named what?”

“Gateau,” I say. “Like French for cake.”

She rolls her eyes. “Could it be
gatto
? Like Italian for cat?”