Girl From the Tree House, стр. 42
“Did you burn yourself?”
“What the…” I snap around and almost stumble over my feet. In front of me sits my neighbor, blood seeping from a hole in his head, and is splattered over his shirt. For a moment I don’t know where to look and what to do. How did he get here? And more to the point, did I cause the injury? I must have because he looks at me as if he’s afraid I’m going to clobber him any moment with a skillet.
“You don’t have to be afraid of me.” My voice cracks up. It doesn’t appear that my voice, choosing this very moment to crack up, is convincing him. Should I be afraid of him instead?
“I know. I’m not afraid. Well, that’s not quite true. I hope you know what you’re doing. Are you a nurse? Do you have aspirins? My head is killing me. Maybe I should try to get to a hospital.”
He tries to get up and his face twists in pain.
“No, you shouldn’t go anywhere.” The poor guy probably has a concussion. I pick up a bowl, fill it with water, take a clean towel, and walk back to him.
“I’ve been a vet nurse. As long as I don’t have to operate on you, I’m sure I’m capable of stitching the gash on your forehead. Can you lean back, please?”
I know what will happen next, but there is nothing I can do about it other than bracing myself. Ever since I’ve been a young child, I could see people’s life unfolding in my head the moment I touch them. That’s why I avoid touching them.
I’m not only intruding on another person’s privacy, but it also drains me. I suffer the aftereffects for days. When their life has been hard, I too carry their heaviness and their pain. I’ve tried wearing gloves to stem the flood of information people transmit without knowing, but it didn’t do an iota of good.
I need a steady hand if I’m going to stitch him up. It means touching him before I start. I take a deep breath and center myself. Then I put both my hands on his shoulders… and I see it all.
He’s surrounded by a darkness that envelops him like a comforting blanket and shelters him from feeling his pain.
There is a laughing couple, walking arm in arm through a park, along a stream. She is a tiny slip of a woman, pregnant, maybe seven months, and he hangs on her every word. His admiring gaze wraps around her like a golden orb of love and care.
They are so young and so happy. The next image is her lying in hospital, people running around, cries, tears, pain.
The baby is coming, much too early. I see its soul leaving even before it is born.
An emergency C-section.
Scott is standing at her head, holding her hands, whispering “Amelie”. Her name is Amelie. I can’t bear seeing the doctor lifting a tiny dead body from Amelie’s womb.
Her pain shoots through me like the heat wave of an explosion. She won’t make it.
I see Scott falling apart over a marble headstone.
It makes sense now why he is hiding in the wilderness of the West Coast. He’s given up on the life path of ordinary people. He’s still licking his wounds, like a stag shot and left wounded by an overly eager hunter, no longer moving, waiting for the end.
I dip into his bottomless sadness and find my own reflected in it. That’s how it is, isn’t it? We don’t discover what is out there in the world. We can’t. We project our own pain and only see what we already know. We can only go where we’ve already been.
He hasn’t decided yet whether he will make it. He may not want to. That’s okay with me. I don’t understand people’s obsession with the life and death thing. I have been in the hospital a few times after a suicide attempt, so they told me. Okay, I don’t remember cutting my wrist or taking pills, but I remember very well how I felt and still often feel. These doctors and nurses bend over backward to keep me alive, half of the time angry that I dared to take my life into my own hands. I remember one doctor saying, “That was silly, wasn’t it?”
In reality, they didn’t care whether I lived or died. For them, it mattered whether I did so on their shift. If they heard on TV of me dying, they wouldn’t even blink an eye. I only thought how ridiculous they were, pointing out all the things I have going for me. The wonderful caring husband, now there’s a laugh, the beautiful house, what? And no financial worries.
I beg your pardon, how is any of that relevant? It’s nothing than decoration hanging on me like an old dress inherited from a relative who passed away a long time ago. Too large, too long, and too fake, only good for Halloween dress-up as the female version of Ebenezer Scrooge or some other ludicrous character.
How dare people tell me life is worth living? They don’t know what it means to be me, how it feels to be me, how I’m consumed every day by pain and doubts. I won’t tolerate having my life flicker by, like a silent Chaplin motion picture, worn-out through overuse.
“Ahem. Is everything okay?”
He looks at me and for the first time, I recognize in the depth of his eyes the light of a fellow wanderer of whom I don’t have to be afraid. We may not be able to help each other out of the darkness, but we can walk together, like friends.
“No. I mean yes. My mind just