Page 126 of Wait for Him

I don't know where I'm going.

The form doesn't require that information yet, which is helpful. Knowing where your life is headed is optional.

I order dinner because people eat dinner in the evening. When it arrives, I tip the delivery person, carry the bag to the table and eat because eating is what bodies are supposed to do if they intend to keep being bodies. I chew, swallow, take another bite and stare through the blank television screen across the room.

Halfway through, the food turns to nothing in my mouth.

I stop chewing and push it around the plate with my fork, watching my own hand move like it belongs to somebody sitting across from me. My nails need filing. There's a small cut across one knuckle I don't remember getting. The fork makes one slow pass through the food, then another, and I am still staring at it when the plate suddenly leaves my hand.

I didn't decide to throw it.

One second it's on the table. The next it's sailing across the room and exploding against the wall hard enough to send ceramic and sauce everywhere.

I stare at the mess.

The wine glass goes next.

That one makes a prettier sound.

Something inside me gives way then, not all at once and not cleanly, more like a seal that has spent too long holding pressure finally tearing open somewhere I can't reach. I hear a woman screaming, raw and high enough that it takes me several seconds to understand the sound is coming from me, and then another glass leaves my hand, followed by a bowl, the lamp beside the sofa, anything close enough to grab.

There aren't words in the screaming. There aren't any words big enough.

Be a good girl.

The television caves inward when something heavy hits it, and I don't even know what I threw. Glass sprays across the floor. My shoulders ache from the force I'm putting behind everything, my throat burns, my lungs hurt, and still the strange vacancy in my head remains untouched while my body rages through the apartment without waiting for permission from the rest of me.

Then my hand closes around the framed photograph of Michael and me from the day Sullivan went public.

I pull my arm back.

And stop.

His grin stares back at me through the glass. My own face beside his, proud and exhausted and happy enough that I barely recognize the woman anymore.

My fingers loosen.

The frame lands on the sofa instead of against the wall.

And just like that, whatever took over me is gone.

The apartment falls silent around me.

I stand in the middle of the wreckage, chest heaving, surrounded by broken pieces of things I owned fifteen minutes ago. There is blood on the floor, and when I look down I realize my feet are bleeding from walking through the glass. Several small cuts, one deeper one near my heel.

I should clean them. Bandage them. Vacuum. Call somebody.

Instead, I walk through the wreckage toward my bedroom, leaving little red prints behind me on the hardwood.

That seems like tomorrow's problem.

I climb into bed and pull the covers over my head.

A nap will be good.

It's been such a long day.

Chapter Ten