The Push by Ashley Audrain (motivational novels TXT) 📗

79

I stopped sleeping for weeks after that. When I did, I dreamed of Sam. His fingers were sliced one by one as he wriggled in my arms, screaming. I don’t know who was doing the cutting. Violet, I suppose. And then I could feel the ends of his fingers rolling around my tongue as I sucked and chewed them. Like a mouthful of jelly beans. I spit in the sink when I woke up, expecting I would see blood. That’s how real it felt to me.

Violet came over the following month. We were quieter this time, less pleasant to each other. The coldness was back. She knew Gemma had called me. I knew she’d taken the blade, but I didn’t know if I should confront her about it. I didn’t know what to do. I was exhausted from not sleeping and it was easier not to think about it.

I decided to let it go, until one day she asked me a question. I was bleaching the bathroom mat in the laundry tub downstairs. She pointed to the poison symbol on the bottle of bleach and opened her mouth for a moment before she let the words out: ‘That means someone could die if they drank even a bit of it, right?’ She paused again. ‘Why do you have something so dangerous down here?’

‘Why are you asking?’

She shrugged. She wasn’t looking for an answer – she left the laundry room and I heard her phone you to pick her up early. The anxiety crawled up my spine, that familiar, crippling panic that nearly closed my throat. I had been there before. I had barely survived it.

I put the bottle back in the cupboard where I kept the other cleaning supplies. I scanned the shelf. I made a mental note of what was there.

I called Gemma again and again that afternoon as my chest pounded. She answered in the evening.

I told her what Violet had said about the poison. I told her about the blade missing from my drawer.

I told her I was only looking out for her and her family. That I was worried about Jet. That we had to think about Violet differently. That I was afraid something was going to happen again – that I had an instinct. I put my head on the table while I waited for her to speak. I was so tired of thinking about Violet. I didn’t want her to be my problem anymore. My fear.

Gemma was quiet. And then she spoke calmly:

‘She didn’t push Sam, Blythe. I know you believe she did. But you’ve made it up. You saw something happen that never did. She didn’t do it.’

She hung up the phone. I heard the keys in the door – he was coming to stay the night. I called him into the kitchen and I took my clothes off. We fucked on the table while he lifted up my limp, hanging breasts that had been sucked to their death, like he was imagining where they once had been.

80

I’d thought about going back to the corner for years. The idea would come to me as effortlessly as the thought to go see a movie on an empty Sunday afternoon. Well, there’s always that. I could do that today. And then I’d talk myself into cleaning the bathroom or organizing the kitchen cupboards instead.

The day I’m speaking of, though, was different. I’d grown sleepless again and milled about the house without purpose, unable to do much more than stare at things: the saltshaker that needed refilling, the time on the stove that was still an hour ahead, the pile of junk mail that sat inches away from the recycling bin. I heard Gemma’s voice over and over for months, a muffled echo, like someone had wrapped my head in aluminum foil. She had spoken to me as though she knew something I didn’t. As though she had been there the day he died. How do you know what happened? I wanted to scream into the phone. How could you possibly know?

But I have to admit, I began to doubt myself more as time passed. The conviction I’d carried for years was losing its weight somehow. I was having a harder time seeing that day clearly in my mind. Sometimes I woke up in the morning and it was the first thing I did – search my memory for the replay. Had it faded? Was it further away than it was the day before?

I could have walked – we didn’t live that far away. But driving made it feel as far away as I needed it to be. I circled the neighborhood a few times and then parked my car one block from where it happened. I closed my eyes and leaned back into the headrest. I stayed there for a while.

And then I walked. I looked up from under my hood and saw the sign for Joe’s coffee shop. The letters were a glossy new black where they’d once been faded and chipped. I put my hand on my chest to see if I could feel my heartbeat through my coat. Each pump of blood felt like a weep.

I turned around and faced the intersection.

Everything about it looked different than it had in my memory. And yet how different could one intersection look from another? The gray cracked and faded asphalt with soft tar lines like veins, yellow iridescent paint marking the crosswalk people might not use. The stoplights rocked in the wind and the walk signal chimed as the traffic rumbled up from behind me.

I scanned the pavement, looking for a mark. Blood. Debris. And then remembered that time was real, that