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I sit in a weird, uncomfortable position, trying to calm my unsteady breathing. The row of plastic chairs is empty and it’s not hard to figure out why no one dares to sit next to me. I look like I have just had my last meal, and am about to have a meeting with the electric chair.
Outside, the planes slowly make their way toward the runway. All of the morning flights, including mine, were canceled or delayed because of the hurricane, still strolling up the east coast, causing chaos. In my confused, panicking mind, it had made all the sense in the world to run away from the therapy center, look for a job and book a flight to the first place that came to mind—hurricane-rattled Boston.
Fool’s luck turned out to be a real thing, as I received an email from one of the barn jobs I applied for, telling me I was accepted and could start as soon as I could get a visa and fly to America. With a bit of extra money, I was able to expedite the paperwork and leave my home country behind only a week after I ran from the bald shrink, who never lured me into his IKEA furnished office.
I have waited for my delayed flight all day, unable to move from the plastic chair next to my gate. My cell phone feels slippery in my sweaty hands. I keep touching it in my pocket, making sure it’s still there. It takes all the willpower I have not to run out of the terminal and jump onto a bus. No one would ever know I chickened out.
With my shaky fingers, I type a text message and send it to a weird, long phone number.
I will be in Boston tonight at 8:45 p.m.
I need to write the text twice because just before sending it, it comes to my mind not to say “20.45 tonight.” I also don’t have a clue if the guy who is getting my text is called Bill or Ben.
“You are a fucking moron,” I mumble just quiet enough not to break the dead silence at a terminal full of people. People are moving their lips, talking, but I can’t hear a word they’re saying.
I shove my Nokia back into my winter coat pocket, wishing I had a cigarette. Just one Marlboro to get my breathing back to normal. Is that too much to ask? Did I need to quit smoking after ten years? Right fucking now, when I’m changing everything? Can’t I start my new life as a chain-smoker?
I should be excited, jumping around anxiously trying to be the first person on the plane. Instead, my gut has turned itself around, leaving me hungry and restless.
“Better get used to it.” I keep nervously talking to myself. It could be days until I’ll be able to keep something down.
Is there someone sitting on my chest? Maybe one of my nightly imaginary friends I’m about to leave behind? They could all stay here, freeze to death, while I run and hide in a place full of people who have no idea who I am and what I’ve done. Suddenly all those jokes my best friend made about me being kidnapped by psychopath Americans who will make a raincoat out of my bare skin don’t seem as funny as they did last week.
I hoped the second flight would last forever, but at some point it has ended. I’ve collected my two oversized bags full of barn clothes, rain boots, and about a dozen hats and caps. As the bus flies by the huge, endless skyscrapers and buildings, I wonder if the city is ever dark, or if the million lights stay on day and night. The traffic seems faster, people talk louder and the bus seats and people’s luggage next to them look giant. I feel like an ant lost in five o’clock traffic.
My stomach makes demanding growling sounds, but I’m still too afraid to eat. Not even an overpriced airport yogurt. I would most likely end up throwing it up on Bill-Ben’s shoes. His text message said to meet him at the bus station half an hour away from the airport.
I stand at the bus station, trying to bury myself inside a huge Scandinavian quality winter coat. Maybe I’m at the wrong place. There’s a young man with a baseball cap, looking around like he’s trying to find something. I feel an overwhelming need to hide from Bill-Ben’s searching eyes, and his surprisingly good looks annoy me for a reason I can’t possibly comprehend. He makes a U-turn, meeting my eyes, which are filled with horror and a desperate need to escape. The smile is a genuine ear-to-ear smile. The kind that makes teenage girls lose sleep and the older ladies wish they were younger. He walks over, trying to pull something out of his pocket. Maybe I will get lucky and he will murder me right here and now, saving me from a nerve-racking trip to the unknown.
“There you are! Would you like a cigarette?”
It’s late when we arrive at the pitch-dark horse farm up in the mountains. I’m way too tired to feel nervous or worried about my new home-to-be. Bill tells me I’ll be spending the first night in the guest apartment so I won’t wake up my roommate sleeping at the log house. As I walk through a beautiful barn building made of marble, dark oak wood, and glass windows, I see at least a dozen mares and their foals lying down sound asleep.
“The stallions and geldings live outside. You’ll see them tomorrow.”
I simply nod to my new friend because the time difference and exhaustion have apparently made me mute.
Bill’s demeanor is calm and self-assured. When he walks, it seems like everything around him steps aside to make more room. Or am I hallucinating? His step is steady and assured. People like him never stumble and fall. They don’t stutter, make bad life choices, and they never catch a cold. He fits into the gorgeous and almost too clean barn like a glove.
The dark barn with a night light smells nothing like the barns back home. The air does have a faint smell of fresh hay and horse shit, but mostly it smells like sawdust and the horses themselves. Gosh, I love that smell. It must be the most soothing and exciting smell in this world.
Bill shows me to my temporary room upstairs.
“Tha-hank you,” I mumble while trying to smile at him, coming up with a weird grin you only make when visiting the dentist office.
“Yeah,” Bill replies.
I can’t tell if the smile he gives me is meant to be reassuring, or if he’s simply amused.
As soon as the door shuts, I take the few steps that separate me and the king-sized bed. The bed is so big, it would easily fit one of the mares sleeping downstairs. Sleep is exactly what I need right now, but I hesitate to fall into the comfy-looking bed with pearl-white sheets and a thousand pillows.
I can’t fight the temptation of looking around the enormous two-room apartment. The place is like a palace, built for—and by—giants. The flower-print curtains in the bedroom look as if they belong in a 3D movie theater. The carpeting is thick and soft under my bare feet. There are sailboat-themed frames and decorations all over, and the bathroom walls are covered with framed pictures of seashells and anchors.
Walking around makes me feel like I’m floating, and I’m not completely sure if I’m still awake or if I have already gone to bed. Awake or already asleep, I fall onto the bed and shut my eyes. For a second, I wish I would never wake up in the morning, but I shake that feeling and other memories of my now-past life, and fall fast asleep. I dream about hay bales stacked in perfect piles placed around an empty hospital bed.
The headache is not terrible but it’s there. I wake up when I hear someone knocking on my door. Normal people would get up and cheerfully go meet their new friends and “family.”
“So this is what it’s like to feel like you’re suffocating,” I mumble under a pile of pillows I have tossed over my head to block out the outside world. The hell if I’m going out there. If I had a cigarette I might. If I still smoked I would have something to do with my hands, and maybe they’d think I stutter because of the roll of cancer between my lips. But I don’t have a cigarette. Suffocating is not an option either. I’m way too much of a wimp to go that way.
Everything looks double the size. My toothpaste and brush look doll-sized next to the enormous shampoo bottles and soaps resting on the shelves of a too-bright bathroom. Brushing my teeth becomes the most important mission in this world. I brush like my teeth have been damaged by twenty years of coffee drinking and too many cigarettes and they now need to be punished. Fifteen minutes later my gums start to bleed. What else is there to do before walking out of my temporary fortress?
After making the bed six times, trying on at least four different outfits—if jeans and a T-shirt can be considered as an outfit—and packing my bags the third time, I stand by the door, my left hand on the doorknob. Hay bales are moved around and wheelbarrows make a faint sound when pitchforks scrape their surface. The two or three hours of sleep make me forget every word of English ever taught to me.
“Hi there, my name is....” I whisper and practice what I would say after opening the door. Not good. I’d sound like a radio commercial trying to make people buy the latest shitty plastic merchandise no one in their right mind would ever use. Plus, they already know my name and who I am. There’s no other awkwardly talking paper-white foreign girl here. I would be the only one.
“What’s up, dudes?” I squeal cheerfully.
Just fucking kill me now. I’m staying here. Brushing my teeth until there’s nothing left to brush. They would need to break in to find my rotting corpse lying on the spotless white tile floor. I would still be holding my bloody toothbrush in my hand, and the Barbie-sized toothpaste would lie dramatically open, exposing its little whitening crystals.
“Much better way to go than suffocating.”
“Well, finally.”
My new boss has an accent as thick as in any American movie I’ve ever seen. She comes to shake my hand, patiently waiting for me to decide which oversized duffle bag in my sweaty hands I would let go of to formally meet the lady of the house. Her sand-colored hair is up in a perfect bun, and when she smiles, it doesn’t reach her eyes. Shaking hands with her makes me wonder if I now have a small fracture in my right hand. Her gray, foggy eyes tell a tale of too many late-night drinks from the years of stress and business owners work hours.
She’s nothing like her annoyingly attractive son. In fact, she is so different from him, it makes me wonder if Bill was adopted. There’s nothing ugly about her though. Her face is flawless white, with a few nearly impossible to see wrinkles around her ice-cold eyes. She’s wearing a pair of black riding breeches and a white polo shirt that looks as if it were tailored for her. I don’t recognize the brand label on the shirt’s chest pocket. The most unreal detail of this woman is her black dressage boots that look brand new, because I can see my reflection in their flawless shiny surfaces.
She is stunning, and the most intimidating person I have ever met in my short, pathetic life. We had exchanged a few emails before my arrival and spoke on the phone once. The emails were very straight forward, asking about my salary request, how long I would work at the barn, and recommendations from my previous employers. When she called to tell me I got the job, she made it very clear that my roommate had picked me from the five girls who had all applied for the barn worker position.
“I don’t really care who you are or what you do as long as you work hard and put the horses’ needs before your own. I do have two rules you need to know and obey. Number one: You don’t drink alcohol around the farm. Number two: No flirting, fooling around or dating my son. He works here, and the last thing we need is some sort of a love triangle that’ll end up in tears and fucking up my business,” she had said with her thick accent pronouncing every word slowly, like she was talking to a child. “Guess that’s it. Welcome.”
There had been zero warmth in her voice before she hung up the phone. And here she is, standing so close to me I can smell the minty mouthwash she used this morning.
“Tha-thanks for having me. I... um... I....”
She waits for three seconds for me to stop stuttering before she turns around and walks over to her son, who’s holding onto a gorgeous saddled and bridled horse. I stare at her perfect figure as she places her left boot into a stirrup and effortlessly swings her right leg over to land smoothly on a black leather dressage saddle. The mare immediately becomes round and collected. It’s not hard to see how much this enormous animal respects the queen who just mounted her back.
A girl covered with tattoos and wearing muck boots walks over to me and cheerfully greets me. Her smiling eyes are locked onto mine, and after shaking her hand I’m ready to book an appointment at the local doctor’s office. Are they all on steroids?
“Let’s take your bags up to the house,” the girl says gleefully.
Feeling hungover and ready to die out of embarrassment, I simply follow the freakishly strong girl up to a huge log house surrounded by an endless amount of shiny black horses eating their morning hay. The gorgeous creatures are everywhere. Around the house, down the hill, up by the two gray barn buildings. They all look identical, except for the little fillies and colts running around, biting one another. It’s like a Disney movie come to life. And I’m living in it. Behind my aching brain, a small, nasty voice keeps whispering to me.
“You should be excited. A normal person would be thrilled right now.”
Shaking my head, I feel my greasy thin hair itch underneath my baseball cap. Maybe I could drown myself in a bathtub.
The strong-as-a-bull girl is Rose. We live together in an apartment built inside the log house. Our bedroom is a huge room with windows facing the horse paddocks. On the other side of the room, away from our two single beds, stands a crazy-big brick fireplace. It’s not as fancy and inviting as the guest apartment above the horse barn, but Rose has clearly made an effort to make it cozy and cute. The wooden walls are covered with trophies, including a huge deer head that makes me shudder. The walls are also covered with dried roses, horse show ribbons, and numerous pictures of the foals playing in snow. Rose has placed about a dozen small, colorful rugs around the room to make its icy-cold floor a bit gentler on bare feet. None of the rugs match one another, and the room looks like a scene from My Little Pony.
My bed is small, but it feels comfy after hours of sitting on a narrow plane seat, and spending a very restless night at the guest house. I lie down on my new bed, turn my back and pretend to fall asleep. As much as I already like Rose, who is now cracking jokes about how she should be awarded with her very own penis after carrying my “heavy-ass luggage” up the hill, I’m way too tired and uncomfortable to be social.
Being farther away from home than ever before creates a hollow hole in my chest, but at the same time, I feel the pressure of unfinished feelings escape my body, one after another. I imagine it looks like a scene from Ghostbusters when all the evil ghosts escape from their prison, one by one, fiercely flying away and vanishing into thin air. It all feels unreal, like I’m born again in a land of giants, ice queens and tattooed she-males.
Someone at home had told me I would not be able to run from my decisions, or my pain.
“Watch me go, bitches. I have run,” I mumble, but thinking about home brings back an uneasy, familiar feeling. It’s the same feeling I have had after spending a night with a person I shouldn’t have. This feeling is very familiar to me. Better yet, it is part of me, like a limb or an organ. And now I have traveled with that limb to the other side of the world, just so I can pretend it isn’t still attached to my torso.
“Y’all need to eat something,” Rose says, her mouth full of soup.
I have just woken up from a restless dream where I was trying to carry a shampoo bottle the size of an office chair up the hill leading to our log house.
Rose has prepared dinner on a hot plate, placed next to an ancient coffeemaker and a red retro-looking toaster. Our kitchen is partly a living room with an old green couch that has been sewn up way too many times.
“Um, I don’t think I have any food with me. Is there a store nearby? I could walk over and buy some bagels or something.”
I try to hide my excitement when I say the word “bagels.” I grew up watching too many American TV shows and movies, where the family mother woke up in the morning, made coffee and placed a fresh-from-the-oven bagel plate on the kitchen counter where it steamed and sat until her model-looking teenage children ran downstairs, their school bags hanging off of their left shoulder. The kids were always unnaturally excited for their day. They were too eager to stay for breakfast, so they grabbed a bagel and flew by the smiling mother who was yelling, “You forgot your lunch!”
The father walked into the kitchen, a folded newspaper in his hand, and glasses that kept falling down his wide but sharp nose. His wife sliced the bagel, and spread cream cheese on it so her lawyer husband could enjoy this heavenly treat with a cup of coffee that had way too much milk in it. There were always several bagels left on the counter. A bagel with white and black seeds on it, one with cinnamon, blueberry, whole wheat....
It’s a matter of life and death to get my hands on these miracles. I gave up on finding them back home a long time ago. The local store only had rye bread. Endless stacks of rye bread and no bagels. No wonder I have run away.
“There’s some chili on the stove. Help yourself, love.”
Rose won’t take her eyes off the television where a werewolf has just gotten its paws on a glittering vampire showing off his oversized fangs. They wrestle forcefully on the ground, making noises that remind me of Animal Planet’s lions mating after the male had fought with its competitors, winning the price of raping the beautiful lioness. Which monster was supposed to be the bad guy and which the good remains a mystery to me. I’m glad Rose doesn’t look at me to see my disappointed face, mourning the loss of my very first bagel.
“Thank you so much. It smells really good.”
Of course, I have no idea what kind of soup “chili” is. I walk over to the hot plate and open every cabinet until I locate a bowl and a spoon. Rose is completely lost in the ongoing werewolf-vampire battle. I could bang the pots and kettles together, screaming her name and she wouldn’t hear me.
Looks like the vampire is winning, but I’m still not sure if that’s a happy or a sad plot twist. I try to read Rose’s facial expression to get answers to my questions, but it’s impossible to tell. Her mouth is slightly open and her hazel-brown eyes are wide and as round as the soup bowl in my hand. She’s holding her breath, spoon full of chili in her hand, frozen midway between the bowl on her lap and her now fully open mouth. Maybe she would educate me on the werewolf and vampire politics later on today.
The food she has prepared doesn’t look anything like soup. It looks like brown gravy with random lumps in it. When I investigate closer, I recognize the lumps to be small pieces of pasta shaped like alphabet letters. My stomach makes a loud growling sound, and I’m sure Rose thinks it came from the TV, not from her new roommate’s starving stomach. How can something that looks like diarrhea smell so amazing? I scoop the brown liquid into my bowl and sit on one of the wobbly kitchen chairs, stirring the chili with a silver spoon. Still sad about my lost chance of bagels, I gently blow on the spoon, making sure it won’t burn my hungry tongue. On the TV, the werewolf is panting on the ground, barely moving. The spoon is still slightly too warm when I finally shove it into my mouth. Chili is probably the most delicious thing I have ever eaten.
The barn is full of people running down the aisle, picking up random objects that all have names I don’t recognize. Rose looks like she is a scientist working in a lab, more than she looks like a multitalented barn employee, fixing the afternoon grain into buckets that all have foreign names on them. She grabs an empty bucket, scoops in grain from one of the five barrels containing oats, beet pulp, and fiber pellets. The shelves next to her are stocked with supplement jars and pouches that have an icon of a horse joint on them.
“Now don’t you worry, love. You’ll figure this out quickly. It’s all up on the blackboard. You just concentrate on learning the horses’ names,” Rose says calmly, sounding a bit amused.
Her dark-as-night ponytail leaps into the air every time she dives for a random pouch on the shelf. Her worn blue jeans fit her so well, I wonder if she ever takes them off. I’m not sure if she’s Latina, or if her flawless bronze skin is simply evenly tanned after working in the barnyard. As much as it fascinates me, I’m way too embarrassed to ask.
I follow her around like a puppy rescued from its previous evil owners. It’s hard not to stare at Rose’s not too manly and perfectly shaped muscles when she fixes a fallen fence the fillies have played with. She finishes mucking her fifth stall when I’m still sweating and digging around my second one. I’m just about to sit down and drink some water out of my travel bottle when Rose leaves me and goes to stand by the aisleway that leads into the indoor arena. She stands quietly, her back turned away from me. About a half a minute later I hear a low voice talking, and a giant black horse head appears around the corner. Our boss, Madame Ice Queen, is done with her first ride.
I had peeked into the indoor arena earlier, after convincing Rose I wouldn’t spook the horse our lady was riding.
“Don’t let the stallions fool you. They’re all talk, but in reality, they’re as fragile and sensitive as their saggy balls,” Rose had told me, and it was impossible to read her face to see if she was joking or dead serious.
Unsure of how to approach the horse and rider at work, I slowly walked into one of the empty stalls and peeked through the bars into the enormous indoor riding arena. The stallion was big and powerful, and he moved like someone installed four springs under his enormous round hooves. The rider slowly bounced like a rubber band, her giving and relaxed body so in sync with the horse’s movement, it seemed they were one being instead of two. The stallion picked up a canter, approaching my hiding place with a steady pace. When he passed by, I was sure he hovered in the air, because his powerful hooves barely made a sound on the sand and rubber footing.
“Psst, hey, those piles are not going to shovel themselves into the muck pile, girl!” Rose had said, peeking into my hiding place. It was nearly impossible to remove my obsessed gaze off the magical being, flying around the arena, but I didn’t want to piss off my new friend.
Our partly horse, partly human boss doesn’t talk much to Rose either, but it’s easy to see they have a mutual understanding between them. Maybe this unnatural woman can read human minds as well as horses’. Her stallion has white foam all around its hind end and neck, but our lady looks like she is fresh out of the shower, her hair tied in a neat and tight bun, her face fresh and pale, no signs of sweat or blush. It’s like her supernatural hair and skin are too afraid to misbehave and madden their picture-perfect owner. My face always turns bright red after horseback riding, and my hair is a tangled mess dripping with sweat. Not her. She stands in the aisle, looking out of this world, stunning and oozing with excellent life decisions, stuck in a barn with a stuttering foreign girl and a handful of other slaves.
Rose picks up one hoof at a time while the lady holds onto the reins. After throwing a red fleece cooler on the horse, Rose grabs the reins from the rider and leads the stallion into a huge wash stall at the end of the barn aisle.
Our boss has a name, of course, but I haven’t quite learned how to pronounce it yet. I decide to call her Dorothy until I get the name down. There’s never any need to say her name out loud. She barely talks to me, and if she does, Rose has taught me to reply “yes, ma’am” like a well-behaved, cookie-craving parrot. Dorothy would better fit sipping dirty martinis and dining on Maine lobster and caviar in a fancy cocktail bar in the middle of downtown Boston than she fits on a horse farm hundreds of miles away from the big city.
The only time I see her smile is when her son is around. He behaves the same way around his mother as he does with anybody: filled with oozing confidence and calmness. Bill never rides the horses, but the animals follow him around like puppies. Even the biting horse babies behave nicely when he leads them to the fields in the mornings. Something about him makes the room fill with a feeling as if everything is going to be okay.
They are like night and day, the mother and her son. Watching them together is mesmerizing, like water and oil mixing together, or two politicians apologizing to each other, admitting they were wrong all along.
Bill says good morning to us and listens to Rose waffle on about what had happened in one of her all-time favorite TV shows last night. He stands there smiling, listening to every word but never tells stories of his own. The guy is a mystery to me, and something about him annoys the crap out of me. That’s one thing him and his mother have in common. Their beauty and perfection annoy me more than I want to admit. I’m not one to be jealous or compare myself to others. Dad taught me there was always more than what meets the eye, and I believed every word. Being beautiful doesn’t mean you will automatically be successful in life, nor does being ugly mean you’ll never make it.
I work as much as I can, mucking stalls and sweeping the aisleway. Anything to keep my mind busy. The nightmares have shortened, and some nights I enjoy not having any dreams whatsoever. It feels like I have traveled away from my torture and finally get to choose if I want to revisit the pain or take a break from it and live this new life of mine. Neither feels real, the past or the present. I have placed myself outside of my own life. I stand on the side, watching myself work harder than ever in my life, pushing away my demons, and trying on the new personality of barn worker, roommate, and awkwardly stuttering foreign girl who desperately wants to fit in.
The more I sweat, and the more my muscles get sore, the better I feel. After the work day is done, and Rose wants to go inside and “chill the fuck down” with a few Rolling Rocks and her overwhelmingly bad TV shows, I grab my crappy old Discman, pull on my running shoes and head out to the mountains. That moment becomes the only time I spend alone, without my new friend Rose, my cold-as-ice boss Dorothy or the annoyingly handsome Bill. Just me and my thoughts, running up and down the early winter scenery.
There is no leaving the twisting and turning dirt roads. I would instantly get lost in the woods, or end up wandering in circles up on the mountain peaks. It’s easy to see around the land when you’re that high, but because of my lack of sense of direction, I never take a chance of getting lost in the dark, especially without decent cell phone service.
My phone doesn’t work at the farm, at all. I need to drive twenty-five minutes to get my foreign phone service to work and check my messages from home. So I rarely do. Not having a phone, or even a decent Internet connection, doesn’t really bother me that much. Half of the time, the shitty Internet makes Rose yell and curse only the way Americans with a thick southern accent can. For some reason I find it amusing, and enjoy these outbursts to an extent where I am once again reassured I’m an abnormal human being. I make sure never to giggle out loud, and I concentrate on looking as emphatic as humanly possible. In those moments, Rose must think I have cramps or I’m wearing too-small panties for twisting my face like that. What can you do? That shit is funny as hell.
I jog along the muddy roads not too far from the farm. The Discman keeps skipping because of my bouncy step but I don’t need it to play the song to hear it in my ears. The song enters my brain, twirling around my limbic system, shooting out memories that are not welcome. My eyes start to burn but I force the tears to go back to wherever they came from. This keeps happening but trying to choose new albums I have never heard before is challenging. I packed five CDs in my two oversized travel bags. Most days, I end up listening to Guns ‘N Roses’ latest album, until Axl’s yapping and screaming starts to carve a permanent tunnel from my ears to my tired and overwhelmed brain.
The too familiar, suffocating feeling wins on my way back to the farm. It must be the neighboring barn down the road that reminds me so much of home. The neighbor’s old red barn building is structured exactly like the barn back home, where an evil, mischievous pony used to try to murder me once a week when I was a kid.
My head, full of random words and nasty thoughts, spins, and there is no stopping the emotional shit storm that is about to take over. The voices know no remorse.
“You nasty little whore.”
“I can’t live with you any longer.”
“The tumor has grown and the cancer spread.”
“Must you fuck every guy who accidently peeks in your general direction?”
The voices stab my gut. I feel like someone is sitting on my chest, making it impossible to breathe. I run faster and turn up the music. The powerful bass makes my ears scream in pain, and I concentrate on that pain instead of listening to the relentless voices.
Suddenly I’m staring at a row of muddy muck boots in the front room of our log house.
“How was your run, love?” Rose’s cheerful voice is somewhere nearby. I try to smile, wiping my scruffy face on my too-long sweater sleeve.
“I think I need a cigarette.”
Walk. Turn up the music. Run. Repeat. It’s almost like a sad mantra that my body would repeat every day at four o’clock sharp. The mountains now have a pretty coating of white snow, and I’m mesmerized by the way the black horses look against the slowly whitening landscape.
Since my last blackout, I’ve dug out the weekday pill organizer I had hidden in a pocket in the padding of my bag with my visa, passport, and a stack of cash I had taken from the ATM, emptying my whole savings account with one withdrawal. I haven’t been taking any of the pills our local doctor once prescribed for me, but in fear of the anxiety attacks making a comeback and staying for good, I’ve popped open the plastic container and started to take the daily pills again. They make me nauseated and sometimes the room spins around, forcing me to support myself with a wall or sit down on the couch.
“Wow, you okay, love?” Rose had fast walked over the first day the spinning surprised me at the barn and I had to sit down in a middle of a horse stall, covered with horse shit and urine.
“I’m okay. I have low blood sugar. I should eat my granola bar.”
It was only a white lie. I do have low blood sugar and I do eat way less than my physically demanding job requires.
My Discman needs new batteries. That means I need to borrow Rose’s old rusty truck I don’t really know how to drive and go shopping. That also means checking text messages from home.
“You be careful now, honey. Go and die in that truck and I’ll have to kill you again myself.”
Once again, I can’t tell if Rose is joking or making a threat. She is glued to our green couch with its inners bursting out after years of people sitting and sleeping on it. The TV is on and she is enjoying her second bowl of rocky road ice cream.
I climb onto the driver’s seat and carefully remind myself how the gears work. I stuff my left leg between the seat and the inside of the car door, so I won’t accidently step on the non-existing clutch. I have driven automatic cars before. It’s just been awhile. And this truck is a monster compared to my dad’s red automatic Saab I used to drive around. The engine comes to life as I carefully turn the key. I pull the gear stick down.
“One, two, three is rear,” I say out loud, the words sounding like a terrible children’s song.
Good thing I’m alone. I inch down the driveway, and turn onto the twisting mountain road I usually roam with Axl. My cell phone burns a hole in my pocket, and I play with the thought of not checking my messages. I get to a small parking lot near the city. My Nokia is stuffed deep in my winter coat’s pocket and it takes me a while to fish it out. The power button blinks twice as I switch the old phone on. Four messages ... five ... six. All from a number I haven’t saved on my phone. I take a deep breath and tap open the first one.
“... you know some cultures stone people like you. Be glad I haven’t found you yet. You slut.”
I’ve apparently forgotten how powerful my native tongue is, especially when you’re upset and want to hurt somebody. Every word makes my eyes jump a little in their sockets, and I turn the phone around after reading the second text message. The power button blinks again, and the old Nokia falls back to sleep.
“One, two, three is rear.”
The parking lot is stuffed with oversized American trucks. I park my monster as far away from the store’s front door as possible and hope no one parks beside me, so I would stand a chance to back up and leave without scratching anybody’s car door.
Approaching the store, I see a child lying on the ground, kicking the air wildly with his Velcro sneakers that have fallen half off his tiny feet. My ears hurt as I pass this knee-high monster who keeps screaming random words I can’t understand. Apparently he did not get something that “everyone else’s parents already bought them,” and is now lying in the wet parking lot refusing to go home until his mother buys him this thing he can’t live without. I think about asking the mother how old her evil child is, so I could tell Rose about him later on. She would definitely ask how old the child was, but I had no idea. For me, the only way to tell a child’s age is by size or behavior.
The heated store immediately makes my cheeks and ears burn, and I see my reflection in the store’s glass door. My face reminds me of a certain red-nosed reindeer, or better yet, the sewer-residing clown from IT.
I play with a thought of buying a new pair of jeans, knowing very well I would end up wearing my old pair I have had since I was fifteen. The jeans didn’t fit me nearly as well as Rose’s blue jeans fit her, and mine have tiny holes next to the crotch seam. The increasing amount of holes worries me, but I have blind faith in my beloved jeans. They would pull off at least another year. I wore riding breeches or yoga pants daily anyway. Who needs new clothes with over-appreciated, non-broken seams and stupid glitter-covered pockets?
“Hi there! May I help you with something?”
The lady must have snuck up on me while I was eyeing the glitter-and-diamond-covered jeans, looking like a suspicious Rudolph about to shoplift.
“No.”
I stare at her big hair that has more decorations in it than an American front lawn on a Christmas day. The dark middle-aged woman with purple eyeshade and orange lipstick blinks her eyes rapidly. For a second, I’m afraid she’s about to fly away.
“I mean, no thank you. I just look.”
For fuck sake. Am I still the same person who scored a flush of As in English back in school?
Her rapid eyelashes settle a bit and she flashes her insanely white teeth at me.
“Well, ma’am, my name is Destiny and I’m here to help. Just holler if you need me and I’ll be right over.”
I thank her again and hope I can locate the batteries without telling her I desperately need her help. The store is enormous and I knew the second I walked in, I would spend at least an hour lost between the endless shelves stuffed with bagel slicers, foot massage machines, and the newest action figures of G.I. Joe, the very kind that the knee-high monster child was screaming for outside in the parking lot.
“You sure you’re not coming along?” Rose holds the phone away from her lipstick-covered mouth and looks at me, sincerely hoping I have changed my mind. She has a different pair of jeans on—without holes or muck—and I wonder if she’s used duct tape to boost up her bosom. Her night-dark hair looks natural and wild all at once, and even though she has spent the last hour and a half carefully placing high-end make-up on her face, she looks naturally beautiful, like someone who just happens to wake up every morning looking like million bucks.
I honestly want to go with her, drink one too many Rolling Rocks and smoke a pack of Marlboros. But I know I would drink too much, maybe take some shots, which are always a bad idea with my medication. I could easily have a few beers and nothing would happen. But I only need to mix one shot with my daily pills and I’d have one of my blackouts, or completely lose myself and drink day and night for the next seven days to come.
“You go ahead. Have fun. I have some stuff to do and I need to call my mom.”
Lies, lies, lies. There’s not really anything I need to do, and my mother won’t come to the phone. I would end up talking to her caretaker instead. She would repeat the same mantra, telling me how my mother is “going to be okay, any day now.”
Rose shrugs her shoulders, turns on her high heels and waves goodbye before she bangs the door on her way out. Outside I hear the old Chevy roar to life.
The house falls quiet and the cozy feeling Rose creates around her is gone. I look outside and see a thick fog surround the trees. We lost all snow at once and the dark, wet and cold night makes the place seem eerie and new all at once. This is the perfect night to make some shitty, impossible life decisions.
I have all the apologies written in my head. I know them by heart but never wrote down a word. I have always been good with words, but for the longest time they seem to have abandoned me. Maybe I could write a mutual apology letter? A press release?
“To whom it may concern. Sorry I fucked up your life. I was high on booze and pills. Do not try this at home. Me sorry. Bygones?”
After an hour and a half, I’m still staring down the first pages of my notebook. I bought the book from the purple-eyeshadow lady, Destiny, specifically for this purpose. Destiny turned out to be a top-notch customer service representative, and she had quickly targeted my wondering eyes and hesitating steps while I was lost in the Home & Office section. Once I let her help me, her presence and company quickly grew on me. She talked a lot and had no trouble giving me friendly nudges and hugs.
“Now, girl, you be sure to pick the right man when the time comes. My third eye is telling me you are something special. And someone special needs... what? Come on, girl! Neeeeeds?”
I would normally feel awkward and embarrassed by attention like that, but something about this lady with a thousand necklaces and earrings made me feel good. Like I was a good person after all, worth someone... special!
Destiny had walked all the way to the parking lot with me. She had quietly smoked her cigarette and listened to me babbling about staying here for good and not wanting to go back home. Her face frowned when I told her where Rose and I lived and who I worked for.
“Listen, girl, you are far away from home. I know the people you work for. I know about their shortcomings. If you ever need help, no matter how small, you come to me,” Destiny had said, grabbing me by shoulders and staring deep into my eyes. I had nervously laughed a little bit but felt a restless tickle in my stomach. What was she talking about? Was Dorothy or Bill a mass murderer about to get caught by the feds?
“I mean it, girl. If you need a place to stay, or a truck to get away with, you come to me. I will help you.”
She had quickly kissed my cheek and smiled, squeezing my shoulders slightly too hard, before her curvy body had glided back inside. On the last page of my notebook, her artsy handwriting stated her full name, a local address and phone number.
“Time to get organized. Time to own your mistakes,” the first page of my mostly empty notebook says. The blue writing looks like a first grader wrote it. When was the last time I wrote something by hand? The pencil feels strange in my hand, and I roll it around between my pointer and middle fingers, staring at it like it’s the biggest wonder on this earth. Who created the pencil? What did they need to write so bad that they were motivated to come up with an invention people would use hundreds of years later? I shake my head and rub my forehead, trying to focus on the task at hand.
“You are such a fucking drama queen,” the writing continues on the next page, followed by a couple doodles of an animal that looks like a squirrel and a rabbit have had a one-night stand. I turn the page once again.
“I’m sorry, okay? I fucked up. In case you care, I did try to end my pathetic life. Happy? I’m rotting inside.”
The notebook pages are surprisingly thick and strong. It takes some real effort to shred the four pages into small, innocent-looking pieces. I reach for the trash can next to my bed and hide the shreds under used napkins and rotting banana peels. Time for a plan B. If only I had one. Plan A was to stay here, in the middle of nowhere, and return home as a stronger, better person. Destiny may think I’m something special, that I deserve nice things, but I doubt anyone back home shares her insight. I sure as hell don’t feel like I deserve anything nice or special.
Last time I checked my phone, I had no new text messages, angrily written in all caps. Maybe she forgot I existed. Maybe she would forgive me. But how can you ruin someone’s life, write an apology message and then return to your old life like nothing ever happened? I have not forgotten. Stoning me to my death still sounds like a fair punishment to me.
My laptop feels sticky as I fire it up hoping for a decent connection. My dry, partly scratched skin stings a bit, when a satisfied smile creeps across my face. The connection is good. It always is during weekends when the rest of the residents are out doing what normal people do on a Saturday night. None of them stayed at the dead quiet farm, writing apology letters to people who hated their guts.
The cursor blinks patiently as I hover my muddy fingernails on the keyboard. “Discount Flights Boston Airport.” If there was an AI behind the patient cursor, it would bounce its robot head on the nearest wall right now.
“Hurry. Up. Pathetic human,” it would say with its humanly voice, leaving you wonder if the thing had feelings after all. The backspace button has a piece of sand, or a dust ball under it, and I forcefully tap it until the text disappears. The nasty feeling of someone sitting on my chest is about to return. They sit there, laughing at my pathetic little heart that bounces off my chest to pump blood to my stupid unsteady brain. The overwhelming feeling has been gone for a while, but now it’s back in full force.
My Discman is not under my pillows where I usually keep it. It takes me a while to locate it in my winter coat’s chest pocket, where I’ve shoved it with force, ripping the seams off. The pocket is now ripped in half and I wonder if Destiny would be able to give me a “special” discount for a new winter jacket.
I place the headphones on my head and turn up the volume. By the time I feel like I can breathe again, I’m sure my ears are bleeding. Something about listening to music too loud makes my brain calm down and helps me dispose of the anxious, panicky feelings. I return to my sticky, dusty laptop. This time my fingers don’t hover. They type like I had worked as a typewriter in court for a year or two. The curser barely has time to blink before I tap the enter button.
“Permanent Residence in the United States.”
