Page 27 of Melancholia

11

We laugh at the divided sheet cake, our giggles devolving into delighted cackles. At nine years old, neither my twin nor I can decide on one cake flavor, and Mom finally threw up her hands and said she’d figure something out.

“This side is red velvet?” I gasp happily, sticking my finger into the cream cheese icing. My mom squawks indignantly, but while she’s focused on not letting me ruin the frosting, my sister, Elaina, scoops up some strawberry frosting from her side of the cake. She’s just more subtle about it than I am.

Something in me knows this is a dream. I don’t feel like a child as my parents sing us happy birthday. As I look at Elaina and grin with our pinkies held together under the table, she’s…different. Older, I realize. Twenty-six instead of nine years old.

Though she never made it past twelve.

But I look at her in the dream and see a reflection of myself, the same way I did when we were kids. Light grey eyes dance back at me, and her long black hair is swept up into a bun with braids framing it, the way Mom used to do for her.

Elaina was always the patient one. The one who didn’t mind Mom tugging and braiding her hair into something amateur yet perfect.

“Happy birthday, Nell,” she whispers to me, using the nickname that she’d christened me with so long ago.

“Happy birthday, Lainey,” I reply in kind, leaning close.

But when I go to blow out the candles alongside her, the chair under me falls away, and the floor goes with it. I’m falling, hands outstretched, reaching for the family still celebrating my birthday. The last happy birthday we ever had together.

“Come back,” I whisper, floating in blackness so absolute that I can’t see anything. “Please come back. I can’t do this without you. I don’t want to do this without you.”

Suddenly my surroundings are illuminated, and I blink a few times to stare out the barred window of Horizon Psychiatric Institution.

But this isn’t right.

Most of it is. Golden Girls playing on the only TV in the room, where so many patients are clustered around to laugh and titter at the show. Two men play checkers, though neither of them really knows what’s going on.

I sit alone at the heavy table, knowing from experience that it’s bolted to the floor. None of the blue scrub-wearing orderlies pay much attention to me. I’ve never really acted out or tried to throw things like so many people here.

Especially George.

My eyes narrow at one of the men playing checkers. He’s responsible for so many lockdowns and ruined afternoons that most of us think he should be moved somewhere else. Somewhere for the more serious cases.

The milk carton in front of me reminds me of the ones we had in elementary school, as I twist it in my fingers while rain pounds against the glass. That’s the part that isn’t right, I realize. It didn’t rain on my seventeenth birthday. It was obnoxiously sunny, and the sun had heated the rec room to an uncomfortable level as it burned through the glass.

Thunder sounds, and I look up as I hear footsteps getting closer.

Glory-Ann, one of the oldest nurses here, gives me a wide, kind smile. “A little birdie told me it’s your birthday,” she tells me, leaning down with a paper plate in her hands. There’s a cupcake on it, slathered in homemade frosting and a candle poking out from the top.

“Make a wish,” she instructs kindly. “It’s strawberry.”

Though my heart twists in my chest, I mechanically move to do what she says.

Strawberry was Elaina’s favorite.

I hate strawberry.

But once she removes the candle and stands there, beaming, I carefully unwrap the cupcake, biting into it and letting my teeth sink into the spongy cake. “It shouldn’t be raining,” I mumble around a mouthful that I can’t really taste. “It doesn’t rain today.”

“It rains every day,” Glory Ann replies automatically. “You love the rain.”

“I hate strawberry, though.”

“Elaina loved strawberry.”

Glory Ann had never known that, and by now, enough of me has caught on to the fact that this is a dream to recognize the other parts that aren’t quite right. There’s no door from here to the hallway. I don’t see any cameras on the walls, and I can’t quite focus on the surrounding faces. It’s as if there’s a blurry filter over them.

“Elaina is gone.” I pick up the cupcake and bite into it again, the dessert tasteless on my tongue.