I wanted to die, and I wanted my death to be slow and painful. Emma Bovary’s death came to mind. I told Pete this when he picked me up from the side of the road on the day Leif left. He said, Don’t you ever fucking say something like that again, Margaret, Jesus Christ.
At Ma’s, I took off all my clothes except my underwear and my T-shirt, and I climbed into bed. I fell asleep for fourteen or fifteen hours, and when I woke, I lay still and I remembered. Leif called the home phone for me, but I refused to touch it, so Ma would bring the phone into the bedroom and lay it on my stomach, where I could faintly hear his voice speaking into my belly button. Peg? Baby? Should I come back for you? I want to come back for you. Will you come with me? Please, baby. Come with me. I didn’t mean what I said about us breaking up. I was in a bad way. I’m better now, and we should be together. I’d let him go on for a while before, with effort, I’d hang up the phone. Sometimes when my mother came with the phone, I’d listen a little longer to Leif as he talked about the books he was reading, about what he was seeing and feeling. I never said anything, though. I stayed in bed and refused all food for two and a half weeks.
My mother began whispering with Suze and Pete about having me committed to a place where they’d force a tube down my throat and pump me full of liquid food. I stayed in bed and watched the way light moved on the leaves of the trees outside my window. I tracked the shadows in my childhood room and learned to love the reality slippage that occurred in my hungriest, saddest states—I could remember with such lucidity in those states: Dee and me playing underneath pine trees, riding bikes together; later, drinking wine and running from men; watching her paint, watching her put on makeup; the night I met Leif, the first time we had sex, the way he held me at night, how he smelled just fresh out of the shower or just home from work. I wanted to stay in these memories for good, and this seemed possible only if I stayed hungry and shadow-watching.
Once, some three weeks or so after I’d climbed in bed, Pete, Suze, and Ma came into the bedroom with a bowl of creamy root soup, which I used to love as a child. Instinctively, I curled myself up into a ball and rolled toward the wall. I put my hands over my head to protect my mouth. Protect the slippage. Pete grabbed my hands and pushed them down to my sides. He rolled me onto my back. Suze held my head. I looked into her eyes, and she was crying but not making any noise. Even after Dee had been gone, after we’d known, because it is known when things like this happen that after a certain time, the person you love is dead, even after we’d admitted, separately to ourselves but never openly to one another, that Dee was probably dead, that Frank or Tony or whatever the hell his name was probably killed her or had her killed, and probably put her body in the incinerator at his parents’ cemetery, even after all that, I still hadn’t seen Suze cry. But now long, contiguous tears rolled down the slopes of her cheeks and into my face. I spit and bit at Ma as she moved toward me with the soup. She had brought a spoon, but eventually, she abandoned the utensil and just dipped her index finger deep into the bowl. I squirmed and fought the three of them, but I was not strong then, I had never really been strong, and I was tired, very tired, and Ma was able to run her soup-filled finger up and down my gums. I tried to spit it out, but I felt myself swallow some of it, and I could feel it go down my throat and into my stomach, where it ate away at the memories and the slippage so that I was yanked, by my brother’s hands, and my aunt’s wet cheeks, and my mother’s fingers, back into the reality of our lives. This was our routine every day for almost a week before I was fully back in reality and I could smell the smelliness of my own body.
“I won’t live without her,” I said. My thoughts became bright crystals in front of my eyes; I could see my life clearly now, spinning out ahead for years and years, without Dee. It was unbearable.
My mother put a wet washcloth to my face. It shocked me awake. “There is no other choice,” she said. “Let’s get you cleaned up.” I rubbed my arms where Pete’s hands had bruised me through the skin and into the bone.
I had been forced awake, and once out of this sleep, I realized, for the first time but not the last, that I had disappointed my family. I had acted like a child in the face of this disaster, and I would be treated like a child until I proved myself otherwise. So it was at this time that I committed myself to proving that, no matter what the police said, Frank had disappeared my sister. Yes, I’d failed my sister, but Frank, he was the monster. I needed him to be the monster.