“Softer lines, see?”
“I want to paint too,” Connor said.
Before I realized it, it was past midnight and I had a stretch of wall covered in children’s paintings and I hadn’t turned on my phone. Justin was going to kill me. It was bedtime. Both of them complained at once.
“What about the candy?”
“It’s on the list,” Max reminded me.
“I don’t have any. Well, now that you mention it…”
That week, when I went to the store, I had grabbed a handful of those strawberry suckers shaped like hearts that Leah liked when she was little. I took a few out of the cupboard and handed them out. I found my cell in my underwear drawer. I had six calls from Justin. I wrote him to tell him all was well. I also had a message from Madison saying we should see each other Saturday night. I responded with a simple yes and went back to the living room.
“Okay, boys, now it really is bedtime.”
They didn’t put up a fight. I accompanied them to the guest room and they both curled up in the same bed. Just before turning out the lamp on the nightstand, I saw the papers Leah had left on the table. I grabbed them and took them out onto the porch. I lit a cigarette and looked at them. One by one. Slowly. Looking closely at the spirals that filled the first page, a mechanical, numb drawing, like the kind I did. I looked through a few more until I found something that truly caught my eye. I blew out a lungful of smoke all at once and turned the page as I realized that, viewed horizontally, those quivering lines made a face in profile. It was drawn in charcoal. Black tears were sliding down a girl’s face, frozen forever now on that paper, and something in her expression struck me as tender within her sorrow. I ran the tip of my fingers over the tears, smearing them until they became grayish streaks. Then I pulled my hand away as though they’d burned me, because I never drew that way, trying to express something intimate; it just didn’t work that way for me.
14
_________
Leah
For months, i’d felt selfish and useless, unable to get ahead, but I didn’t know what to do about it. One day, with my eyes red and swollen from so much crying, I found myself throwing on a raincoat so the pain wouldn’t get me wet, and somehow I realized then that happiness, laughter, love, and all the good things I’d known couldn’t touch me either.
I read once that feelings are somehow mutable, that sorrow can transform into apathy, for example, and manifest itself through other sensations. I had provoked this. I had made my emotions remain ravaged, frozen in a way that made it possible for me to cope with them. And yet…Axel had poked holes in that raincoat in fewer than three weeks. I had been afraid of that from the beginning. So much so that I didn’t want to return to his hope, that place that was so his that it made me feel hemmed in.
I guess I was still thinking about that when, on the last night before he left, Oliver said we should have pizza for dinner and watch a movie. My first impulse was to say no. My second one was to take off running and shut myself up in my room. And the third…the third would have been something similar if Axel’s words about the effort my brother was making for me hadn’t kept repeating in my head. My voice shook when I uttered that soft yes. Oliver smiled, leaned over toward me, and gave me a kiss on the forehead.
March
* * *
(AUTUMN)
15
_________
Axel
Leah returned. and with her, the closed door, the silence in the house, the furtive glances. But something was different. Something was new. She didn’t take off running when dinner was over; instead she stayed sitting there awhile, distractedly balling her napkin in her hand or offering to do the dishes. Sometimes, in the afternoons, while eating a piece of fruit and leaning on the counter, she would look at the sea through the window, distant, lost.
That first week, I asked her three times if she wanted to come surfing with me, but she rejected the offer, and after what happened last time, I didn’t force it. I didn’t say anything when the tricolor cat came to visit me and Leah went to give it leftovers from dinner. I didn’t say anything that first Saturday night when I was lying in the hammock and I heard her steps behind me. I had put on a record, and I don’t know why, but I had this thought that the chords in the song that was playing had grabbed her by the hair and pushed her out on the porch, note by note.
“Can I stay here?”
“Of course. Want some tea?”
She shook her head and sat on one of the cushions on the wooden floor.
“How was the week?”
“Same as always. Normal.”
I had lots of questions to ask, but none that she would respond to, so I didn’t bother to bring them up. I sighed, relaxed, contemplating the starry sky, listening to the music, living that instant, that moment.
“Axel, are you happy?”
“Happy…? Of course.”
“Is it easy?” she whispered.
“It should be, right?”
“I used to think it was.”
I sat up in the hammock. Leah was sitting up, hugging her knees against her chest. She looked small under the darkness of the night.
“There’s something wrong with what you just said. Before you were happy because you didn’t think about it, and who does when they have the world at their feet? In those moments, you just live, just feel.”
There was fear in her eyes. But also longing. “Will I never be that way again?”
“I don’t know, Leah. Do you want to be?”
She swallowed and licked her lips nervously before taking a deep breath. I knelt beside her, took her hand, and tried to get her to look me in the eyes.
“I can’t…breathe…”
“I know. Slow. Easy…” I whispered. “I’m here, babe. I’m right beside you. Close your eyes. Just think… Think about the sea, Leah, about a choppy sea that’s starting to calm down. Are you seeing it in your mind? There’s almost no waves left…”
I wasn’t even sure what I was saying to her, but I got Leah to breathe slower, more relaxed. I accompanied her to her room, and something quivered in me when she said good night at the door. Compassion. Impotence. What do I know?
That night, I broke my routine. Instead of reading a little and going to bed, I turned on my computer and pushed aside the things I had on the keyboard before searching for anxiety. I spent hours reading and taking notes.
Post-traumatic stress disorder: a psychiatric affliction that appears in people who have experienced some traumatic moment in their lives. I took more notes: Sufferers have frequent nightmares and recall the experience. Other typical signs are anxiety, palpitations, and increased sweating. I went on, incapable of sleeping: A sense of distance, paralysis in the face of normal emotional experiences. Loss of interest in hobbies and pastimes.
I found out there were four types of post-traumatic stress.
In the first, patients constantly relive the triggering event. In the second, they are hyper-excited, constantly perceiving danger or surprise. In the third, they focus on negative thoughts and their sense of guilt. And in the fourth…shit, the fourth was Leah, one hundred percent. They adopt evasion as a tactic. Patients show and transmit emotional insensitivity or indifference about daily activities, and avoid places or things that make them remember what happened.