“You need to get a doctor out here,” Nance says, speaking in a hushed voice.
Nash’s housekeeper has never had a quiet voice. It’s why I can’t help but overhear her.
“She won’t speak to the doctor.” Nash’s frustration bleeds through the door.
He keeps trying to talk to me, to give me things, to pull me out of this hole I’ve crawled into, but nothing works. He must be tired of trying, but he never gives up.
“We won’t know until we try,” Nance says, sounding stubborn.
“I’m with Nash,” Makhi says. “She was like this at the hospital. She won’t talk to a doctor when she barely talks to us.”
“Not barely. At all,” Vonn says quietly, his concern so loud that it almost punctures through the bubble I’ve been living in since he found me in the desert and saved me.
Vonn sits with me the most. He told me that Makhi was an idiot for accusing me of stealing and throwing me out. That Makhi is sorry, and if I wanted, Vonn could punch him in the face again, since I missed the first and second time he’d done it.
I believed him. Makhi’s face had fading bruises when I first saw him, so it must have been a couple of hard punches.
Vonn smiled down at me, but his smile slid off his face when I continued to stare at the wall. With a heavy sigh, he leaned down and kissed my forehead and left.
I know it hurts him to see me like this.
It hurtsmeto have them cook for me, bring me magazines and a TV to watch, only for me to stare at nothing and pick at my food.
Every couple of days, Nance brings me fresh flowers from the garden. Even Lydia, the maid that Nash hired me to replace, and who I thought would have left to get married by now, stopped by with a magazine for me.
And Nash…
I realized I was broken when he brought me a small speaker and he’d made a playlist of all my favorite music I like to play on the piano. Pieces that always made me cry. Pieces that becameso ingrained inside me when I would play them over and over again because I never learned how to read music. Those songs became a part of me. He pressed play, and music filled the room, beautiful notes settling over me like a blanket that should have felt familiar and safe.
But I felt nothing at all.
When he left, leaving the music playing, I got up, turned the speaker off, and got back into bed again.
That’s what led to this hushed conversation outside of my room, where I’m pretending to be asleep, and they don’t know how to fix the broken pieces inside of me.
It’s nighttime when my eyes open.
The lamp on my bedside is on, the way I need it to be, or I think I’m back in the desert.
Suddenly, the silence is too much to withstand for a second longer.
It squeezes me, that silence. Wraps me up in thick cotton wool when I’m already too hot, too smothered, can’t breathe. Need fresh air.
The roof makes sense in a way that nothing else has since they brought me back here.
Even though I’m puffed from pushing my way up each step, I keep going. Walking upstairs never felt as hard as it does now. I keep climbing, one step after another, pushing the roof door open and stepping out as the wind whips around me, instantly cooling my overheated skin.
I leave the door open and walk across the roof to the same spot in my dream where Makhi killed me.
He’s not there, though a part of me had thought he would be.
The sky is black.
I lost all sense of time in the desert and haven’t gained it back yet. It must be the middle of the night, and everyone is sleeping.
The wind whips my face as I stand at the edge of the roof, looking down. My head is cold, freezing with no hair to keep my scalp warm. A nurse at the hospital shaved the odd tufts that made me look insane. It’s all even now, and I don’t know how long it will take for my hair to grow back. I don’t miss it as much as I miss the warmth, especially now.
Nance warned me I would lose my job if I ever came up here. My curiosity was too loud for me to ignore any longer, so I climbed up those stairs anyway, and Makhi was sitting at the edge smoking. I slipped when I tried to get up. He dropped his cigarette, saving me, and I remember how his hands shook when he told me he was poison and to stay away from him.
