Page 77 of Beach Bodies

Pain is all there is. It feels like I’ll never move again.

Then, strong arms wrap around me.

Daniel; he’s lying next to me, holding me.

He doesn’t flinch as I spasm and cough and choke on my tears.

He doesn’t say anything, either. Just stays, solid and unmoving and warm and real.

An eternity later, my body begins to ease, each breath slower and deeper than the last. Finally, after a ragged exhale that feels like it expels the last of the poison, I feel myself return from wherever I just went.

It still hurts. But the violence is over, for now.

We lie quietly as my body remembers how to breathe, how to be. Daniel’s arms are braced around my torso, one of my hands wrapped around his wrist, and little by little, our breathing syncs, as if we’ve found the same frequency of existence.

I don’t know how long we lie here.

Or why I start speaking.

‘She slit her wrists in the bath.’

Daniel doesn’t flinch. The curtains are semi-drawn, and a fierce blade of light lies across our bodies, jagged and brilliant.

Daniel’s notes:What happened to Jessica?I’m not surprised he couldn’t find out, between HIPAA laws and Jess’s family’s private-mode social media. I’m going to tell him. I need him to know. I need someone to know my side of the story. What it felt like to live through that horrific night.

‘But we think she actually… changed her mind. Part way through.’ My throat squeezes.

I hate this part. Hate it. Just because I’ve never spoken of it out loud since then, doesn’t mean I haven’t relived it over and over in my head.

‘She got out of the bath and tried to get to her phone to call for help, but she was dripping wet and weak from blood loss, and she slipped and hit her head on the kitchen counter.’ I suck in my lips and breathe out through my nostrils. Even though I wasn’t there, I’m seeing it play through my mind as if I was. Like I’ve done ever since it happened.

That night, I was at a networking event for young entrepreneurs in Cincinnati while my girlfriend was attempting to take her own life. I was hobnobbing while she decided she didn’t want to exist any more. I was talking about loans and grants and marketing software and customer ‘touch points’ while she was walking through unimaginable pain, because she was that desperate for an exit.

Fuck.

I wipe the tears with the back of my hand. I had wondered about leaving Jessica alone for a whole day. She’d only been back from her programme for about two weeks. Technically, she wasn’t supposed to be alone at all for the first thirty days. But she seemed OK, and when I suggested that she spend the day with her folks, or that we call in a friend to be with her, she was adamantly against it. ‘I’m not a child, Lily,’ she said. ‘I don’t need a goddamn babysitter.’ And I had so much on my plate. In her absence, I’d been running Taste of Heaven alone, and I was in over my head. I’d been feeling like Jessica tossed me to the sharks, and the conference was a chance to not be so alone; to talk to other young people who were ambitious and overwhelmed, just like me. I sat in on lectures, forums and panels. I took pages and pages of notes: books to look up, city resources available to us, recommendations on a better ERP system for tracking our inventory. I was feelingexcited, invigorated, capable; like a real adult, dressed in my suit and brand-new eggshell silk blouse.

After the closing awards banquet, where the mayor made an appearance, I went out for drinks with a few people I’d met– the owner of a new gluten-free bakery, a tattoo artist, and a beautician who was working on her business plan for a beauty school in an under-resourced neighbourhood. We lingered at the bar until eleven thirty, laughing and talking and promising to stay in touch.

‘If I’d gone straight home…’ I say, and Daniel pulls me even closer, knotting his hands together around my torso like he’s a human seatbelt.

‘But I didn’t,’ I make myself continue. ‘I stayed out.’

I unlocked the door just after midnight and kicked off my shoes. The apartment was dark, with just the lights in the kitchen and the bathroom on. ‘Jessica?’ I called softly, walking towards the kitchen. Shit– why was the floor wet? Ceiling leak, I thought immediately– we’d had one a few months prior when the dishwasher in the upstairs unit broke. But no, the ceiling looked fine.

Then I saw her. First, just a pale foot, peeking out from behind the island. I darted forward. It took me a second to understand what I was seeing. My girlfriend on the floor behind the kitchen island, naked, wet, bloody, a huge gash on her head and ribbon cuts up her forearms. I didn’t shriek. I didn’t cry. I dashed to the couch and grabbed her favourite fuzzy blanket, then ran back to wrap her in it.

‘Jessica, can you hear me? Jessica?’ I said as I propped her up, trying to get the blanket around her cold body.

She was limp. Her lips were blue. I hoisted her up in myarms. Her head lolled back; she was dead weight, but I managed to get her to the couch.

For a second, curled there on the couch, it seemed as if she was snuggled up. She always fell asleep during movies; I’d seen her in that position a hundred times.

Sitting there on the couch next to her, one hand on Jessica’s knee, I pulled out my phone and called 9-1-1. As I spoke the words to the operator, ‘I need an ambulance right away,’ I remembered my mother and her sense of otherworldly calm during crisis.We’ll just go for a drive.

I trusted my mother in that moment. Trevor’s corpse was laid flat on our carpet, but she had a plan. And in a strange way, I felt her with me that night as I wrapped a body for the second time in my life. One in a shower curtain, one in a blanket. One who deserved it and one who didn’t. The parallels felt comforting, because nothing made sense. The one thing in my life I’d wanted to succeed at was loving Jessica, and making her safe in that love, and I had failed.Just like my mother.Who hadn’t protected me from Trevor, after all. She only struck Trevor after Trevor struck me.

But I don’t tell Daniel all of this. I just say, ‘When I found her that night, she was already gone.’

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