Later, when it had been many days since the night at the hotel, Genevieve told Alexandra, “Remember when we were kids our parents told us television would turn our brains to mush.” Watching was supposed to save her from pain.
But sometimes there was too much feeling even in the screen to take the advice of television. It was possible, she learned, to think for hours of something you couldn’t imagine: dead.
And so for the first time in her life, there was sleep to look forward to. Only, pleasure-deaf, she faded in linens. Draw the blinds. Cover the head. Sleep to be alone. Sometimes, she would take a cab home from work, tell the driver to hurry. “Got somewhere to be, miss?” would be the question.
“I cannot be late,” she’d say. She intended it only the way that meant there was no destination for her.
Convoking dreamlessness, she swallowed roots and herbs. Jeremy came at her with spoons. She didn’t want food, but it was easier to accept the peanut butter or the ice cream, the soups he melted butter into so she wouldn’t disappear. She allowed Han to come to her in bed. There was only the solace of his warm head, alive on her chest.
And she was tired. Awake, yes, but tired.
“There is a sort of fact so heavy it drags the speech out of you, makes everything unspeakable,” she said to Jeremy.
“I’m sorry,” she said to Jeremy.
“I thought what if he was right,” she said to Jeremy, and she didn’t finish.
She was tired with confessing. She was tired with telling him all the secrets that had kept no one happy. The dead could not be happy.
“Say something,” she said.
“Rest,” Jeremy said.
On nights the pills worked, she would, in dreams, sit at a restaurant with Lyle, a burgundy tablecloth hooded between. He’d eat his steak with enthusiasm, then, when her mouth was too full to say no, pull back a stretchy membrane from the meat, and she knew to turn away from the reveal. She woke up in sheets confused by tossing in her sleep.
In the mornings, all the seeped substances were dried to her face, and her eyelashes adhered. As she dressed, Jeremy would speak to her of stages and symptoms. He would say there were professionals. It didn’t have to be him.
“It is possible to do both at once,” he said. “To seek help is not a betrayal of grief.”
Where there was good blankness was within the rote declarations of work. She said, we believe in the power of storytelling as a growth strategy. She said, we craft brand narratives that repeat, catch. We at Amica Malmot will make the plot of your company viral, she said, and we thank you for your time. But then the script ended, and sometimes her boss, Carver Ellington, would touch her bicep, say, “You can go now.”
“Is everything okay at home?” Carver Ellington said.
“Why wouldn’t it?” she said.
“Andrea and I stayed at a really wonderful resort in Hawaii two years ago,” he said. “Just you, the beach, and your thoughts. I could send you the information.”
It sounded like a nightmare to Alexandra.
But she agreed to two weeks because it suggested that there had been a choice at all. She asked Carver Ellington to please send her the information about the resort. She pretended to be happy to use her frequent flyer miles. And, truly, she still must return to Nevada.
But she did not buy the ticket, and she did not call. She sent the wire transfers and paid her mother’s bills, the numbers somehow a code that said, life still goes. There was no body to burn or bury. There had not even been a pronouncement.
To Jeremy she explained, “It is not something to say on the phone.”
“Sometimes, how is less important than that,” Jeremy said.
“I’m not a patient,” Alexandra said.
“Of course you aren’t,” he said. “You’ll let no one take care of you.”
She perceived that he regretted the words immediately. It was like the way betrayal once made her contrite, the way she had allowed Jeremy to hold her when she used to return home after lying, pliant with shame, wanting to substantiate the goodness he saw. She knew now he removed the local section of the newspaper, where it was reported that people shot themselves smiling in pictures in front of a building blown out three weeks before by a gas explosion in Brooklyn, where, inexplicably, no body had been found. And still, like a child, she said, “You can’t make me.”