The words fell into her husbands outstretched hands, and just like that, the raven turned back into a woman. Just like that, the man wanted her once again to be his wife.
The next morning, a chill snaked its way into the house. Daniel found his teeth chattering as he headed downstairs to make a pot of coffee. He put a call in to the hospital: Trixie had had a good night.
Well. So had he. His mistake had been in not admitting just how much had gone wrong between him and Laura. Maybe you had to scrape the bottom before you could push your way back to the surface. He was bent over the fireplace, feeding kindling to the paper he'd read, when Laura came downstairs wearing a sweater over her flannel pajamas. Her hair was sticking up in the back, and her cheeks were
still flushed with a dream. “Morning,” she murmured, and she slipped by him to pour herself a glass of orange juice. Daniel waited for her to say something about the previous night. to admit that things had changed between them, but Laura wouldn't even look him in the eye. Immediately, his boldness faded. What if this spiderweb connection they'd made last night was not, as he thought, a first step . . . but a mistake? What if the whole time she's been with Daniel, she'd wished she wasn't?
“The hospital says we can get Trixie at nine,” he said neutrally. At news of Trixie, Laura turned. “How is she?”
“Great.”
“Great? She tried to kill herself yesterday.” Daniel sat back on his heels. “Well. . . compared to yesterday then ... I guess she is doing pretty damn great.” Laura looked down at the counter. “Maybe that's true for all of us,” she said.
Her face was red, and Daniel realized she wasn't embarrassed but nervous. He stood up and walked into the kitchen until he was standing beside her. Sometime between when they had gone to bed last night and the sun coming up this morning, the world had shifted beneath them. It wasn't what they had said to each other but what they hadn't: that forgiving and forgetting were fused together - flip sides of the same coin - and yet they couldn't both exist at the saim time. Choosing one meant that you sacrificed seeing the other.
Daniel slipped his arm around Laura's waist and felt her shiver. “Cold out,” she said.
“Brutal.”
“Did you hear anything about weather like this?” Daniel faced her. “I don't think anyone predicted it.” He opened his arms, and Laura moved into them, her eyes closing as she leaned against him. “I guess these things happen,” she replied, as a rogue burst of sparks rose up the chimney.
* * *
You could not walk out of the hospital, for insurance reasons. If you tripped before you crossed the threshold, you might sue. However, if you chose to throw yourself in front of a car the minute you stepped outside, no one would give a damn. Trixie was thinking about it.
She'd already had to sit down with a shrink this morning, and apparently she was going to have to do that twice a week for the next five forevers, too, all because she had seen a brass ring in the bathroom and had tried to grab it. It didn't matter if, like Janice the rape counselor, these sessions could eventually wind up in court. She had to attend them, or she had to stay in the hospital on the psych floor with a roommate who ate her own hair. She was going to have to take medicine, too - under the watchful eye of her parents, who would actually check the sides of her mouth and under her tongue to make sure she didn't fake swallowing. Since arriving at the hospital this morning, her mother was trying so hard to smile that Trixie expected her face to crack, and her father kept asking her if she needed anything. Yeah, she felt like answering. A life.
Trixie seesawed between wishing everyone would leave her alone and wondering why everyone treated her like a leper. Even when that stupid psychiatrist had been sitting across from her, asking things like, Do you think you're in danger of wanting to kill yourself right now? she felt like she was watching the whole scene from a balcony, and it was a comedy. She kept expecting the girl who played her to say something smart, like, Why yes, thanks, I would like to kill myself right now. .. but I'll restrain myself until the audience is gone. Instead, she watched the actress who was really her fold like a fortune cookie and burst into tears. What Trixie wanted, most of all, was what she couldn't have to go back to being the kind of girl who worried about things like science tests and whether any college would admit her, instead of being the kind of girl everyone worried about.
She survived the ride home by closing her eyes almost immediately and pretending she'd fallen asleep. Instead, she listened to the conversation between her parents in the front seat:
Do you think it's normal, the way her voice sounds?
How do you mean?
You know. Like most of the notes are missing.
Maybe it's the medicine.
They said that would take a few weeks to kick in.
Then how are we supposed to keep her safe in the meantime?
Trixie almost would have felt sorry for her parents if she wasn't so sure that they'd brought this on themselves. After all, her mother didn't have to open the bathroom door yesterday. She felt the truth that she'd been hiding, like an after-dinner mint that might last for ages, if you were careful enough; the truth that she hadn't told the shrink or the doctors or her parents, no matter how much they tried to pull it out of her. She would swallow it whole before she spit it out loud. Trixie made a big show of stretching and yawning as they approached the turn to their street. Her mother turned around, that Halloween-mask smile still on her face. “You're awake!” Her father glanced at her in the rearview mirror. “You need anything?”
Trixie turned and stared out the window. Maybe she had died, after all. And this was hell.
Just about when Trixie decided things couldn't get any worse, the car turned into the driveway and she saw Zephyr waiting. The last conversation they'd had wasn't one that invited future chats, and it had left Trixie feeling like she'd been quarantined from the rest of the earth. But right now, Zephyr was the one who looked nervous.
Zephyr knocked on the window. “Um, Mrs. Stone. I, was kind of, you know, hoping to talk to Trixie.”
Her mother frowned. “I don't really think that now's the best time . . .”
“Laura,” her father interrupted, and he glanced at Trixie in the rearview mirror: It's up to you.
