No reply.
A hot rush of panic hits me. Surely she’s not in there taking the pill? Because I know that is not what she wants.
‘Rach?’ I knock on the door more urgently.
A couple of moments pass, then the lock twists, and she opens the door.
‘You’re not . . . Are you okay?’
She shrugs softly, tugs her cardigan a little more closely around her. Then she turns to sit down on the closed seat of the loo, where she has obviously been for the past ten minutes. ‘Why am I not more happy, Josh?’ She shakes her head, rubs her face. ‘You’realive. You didn’t die. We should be fucking ecstatic, shouldn’t we?’
I squat in front of her and take her hands. They are limp and unfeeling, her skin cold in mine. ‘This is probably normal. I mean, not normal, but... understandable. This has all been... well, a fucking nightmare, frankly.’
She scans me for a moment, as if she’s looking for something she’s lost. ‘I’m scared.’
‘I know,’ I say softly. The guilt of having done this to her is a constant cog in my chest, grinding, grinding.
‘No, I mean, I’m scared that I’ll never feel happy at big moments again. I feel numb right now. Like, I’m not feelinganything.’
Dissociation, maybe? A protection mechanism? Her mind shutting down, a hangover from childhood?
‘My main memory of my mum is that she always seemed numb, Josh. Even on big occasions. Birthdays, Christmases. Like she’d checked out of life. And I feel checked out right now.’
‘You’re not checked out. You’re talking to me about it. That’sproofthat you’re not.’
‘I asked her, once, why she used to throw things and drink and scream at my dad. Do you know what she said?’
I just shake my head, wait for her to tell me.
In the slight light of the bathroom, Rachel’s face looks sunken and pale, unsettlingly ghostly. ‘She said it was because she wanted to feel something. Anything.Any fucking feeling at all, she said.’
‘Rach—’
‘I couldn’t bear it, Josh, if I turned into her. I mean it: I don’t think I could stand it. Just going through the motions of life. Not feeling the way I’m meant to, at all the big moments.’
‘You won’t; this is temporary—’
A small, tight laugh. ‘But it’s not. How we are now is as permanent as it gets. You’re going to be twenty-nineforever. Nothing will be the same again. The life we’d planned... it’s gone for good. And I’m worried that a part of me will always be grieving that.’
And when we grieve, we go numb, I think.
I try one last time to reassure her. ‘You will never be your mum, Rach.’
‘How can you say that?’ She gives me the saddest look imaginable. ‘I’m her daughter. I’m already halfway there.’
21.
Rachel
June 2001
‘I’m not being funny, but when did we start hanging out in churches?’
It’s a humid evening, a couple of nights after our birthday. When I left the office earlier, I saw my two best friends standing at the bottom of the steps outside.
‘We’re staging an intervention,’ Ingrid said.
‘Into what?’
