The silence runs a few beats too long after she sets down her fork. I've been sitting with a question since she woke up. She notices — I can tell by the slight shift of her attention, the way her gaze angles toward me and then back to the table.
"What?" she says. “Spit it out.”
I take a deep breath. “Why did you answer my ad? And don’t give me some bullshit about being bored. I want the real reason.”
She's quiet for a moment. I watch her decide whether to give me this.
Then she starts talking. Starts at the end and works backward.
"The numbness," she says. "That's the word for it, I think. The clinical word." She looks at the table. "Five years of just moving around without a single emotion filtering through. I guess I was looking for myself, or some bullshit. Anyway, I went to Seattle, Portland, Chicago, New York. You name it, I’ve been there. I kept thinking the next city would stick." A pause. "None of them did."
I don't say anything.
"I guess I figured that once I found a place that felt like home, I'd start to feel like myself again." She glances up at me. "Or maybe I've watched too much Dr.Phil."
I reach out and place a hand on her knee. She looks down at it and takes a deep breath, then keeps talking.
"So when I saw your ad, I figured fear might actually cut through the nothingness. Like I might actually feel like I was in my own body again."
I squeeze her knee. "Why did you feel numb?"
"My mom got sick when I was sixteen. A degenerative illness. It was slow. Really damn slow." She turns her fork over in her hand. "She lasted six years. I looked after her. I did the medications, the appointments, kept the house running."
"No dad?"
"My dad—" She sets the fork down. "He wasn't available."
I wait.
"He couldn't handle Mom's illness. He started drinking, and Mom said to let him take the time to process it. But he never stopped drinking. It got worse and worse, got so bad that I had to look after him too. When he was around, at least."
I think about what it means to be sixteen and the most functional person in a house. I look at her hands. She's turned the fork over twice more without noticing.
"I went to school, though. I mean, my grades were awful but I managed to get a scholarship to art school. I was good." She lets out a little humorless chuckle. She sets the fork down and doesn't pick it up again. "I was just a few weeks from graduating when she died."
She's quiet for a moment. Outside, a boat moves across the bay, slow and white and small.
"I'd spent six years getting ready for it. Preparing for the tsunami of horror, the depths of grief. I read a bunch of books on it. I knew exactly what it was going to feel like." She looks up at me. "And then it didn't. The grief just — it didn't come."
She says this last part the same way she said she was good. Like she's reporting on weather in a city she's never been to.
That one lands differently. I know the shape of an expected feeling that simply doesn't arrive — not the same grief, not thesame loss, but I know the feel of it. My father's death. The phone call from the hospital administrator. Everything that followed handled cleanly, and underneath it nothing I could identify, nothing that felt like release. Just the fact sitting in the room with me.
I don't say this. She's still talking.
The wall went up not to protect her from pain but because the pain didn't show up. She walked away from her degree, from the city, from everything that required her to be present for herself. Started moving. Hasn't really stopped.
I listen. Don't interrupt. Don't reach for the things people say when they don't know what else to do. None of it. She's giving me the full weight and the only thing I can do is hold it without dropping any part.
She's looking at the table, not at me. Her hands are loose in her lap.
“That’s the long-winded way of saying I came here because I wanted to feel something. To remember what that felt like.”
I stare at her profile. Her light-brown hair is loose around her shoulders, hanging down over her face. I sweep the hair up behind her ear.
“And did you? Did you remember how it felt to feel?”
God, I want this answer from her more than I’ve ever wanted anything. I force myself to breathe evenly.
