Lovely, Dark, and Deep

  I’m about to say, “You take it, then,” because no matter how beautiful the trappings, there is no masking that this is a glorified bunker. Then I read the quote above the landing:

  “One day you will take my heart completely and make it more fiery than a dragon.”—Rumi

  My mind races to Josh and the dragon meteors and our fiery kiss.

  If only that were true. I lower myself onto the bed. There, I find the blanket that Josh had wrapped around us, the one he had thrown over the sunroof to protect me.

  “I’ll stay here,” I tell everyone.

  “Oh, honey, that makes me so happy!” Mom says, and her face relaxes.

  “It’s the best choice,” Dad agrees.

  Roz clomps up the stairs: No. Fair. No. Fair.

  So begins my stay in my very own Necromanteion.

  My parents have nothing to worry about. There is zero possibility of me testing any limits, real or imaginary, especially when everything aches: legs, arms, skin, heart, soul. It’s been a full week in the basement. So how the hell can I feel even worse?

  I have a suspicion. Take your pick, any pick, of what’s wiped me out in a way that the sun reflecting off the snow did not: Josh’s continued silence, my solitary confinement, or my standing up to Roz for once. Heaviest of all, I flaked on yet another bake sale.

  Awash at sea, I am tugged into deep waters of hopelessness. Even so, my hand reaches for the tape recorder that I have set on my bedside table.

  If I can’t have Josh, I’ll take Nocturne.

  Listening to the mixtape only makes me yearn for Josh even more. Call it compulsive and obsessive, but I tackle the stairs, a baker’s dozen of them, just to pull my phone from the Basket of Doom.

  One missed call, one voice mail, three texts. All from Aminta, Caresse, and Auntie Ruth.

  “Honey,” Mom says from out of the gloom in the breakfast nook. “I’m sorry, but you know what your dad and I said. You can’t see That Boy.”

  Who knew that even more potent than hot rage is icy fury. Cold, my anger is pure iceberg, deep as a black sea.

  “That Boy did everything possible to take care of me, not that you have to worry,” I tell her, dropping the silent phone back into the basket. “That Boy doesn’t want to see me. No boy is going to want to. So, no, you never have to worry about me seeing That Boy or sleeping with any boy or getting an STD or any of that anymore.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Mom, seriously? Do you honestly think that anyone is ever going to want to date a freak? A human vampire? A girl who can only go out in the dark? What man is going to sign up for a woman who has to sleep in the basement and never travel anywhere outside their home? Mom, I might never, ever get to fall in love. I might never get married. Happy now?”

  “No, I’m not happy about any of this,” Mom says, sniffling. I see the wads of tissue by her coffee mug. “But let’s be perfectly clear. We don’t want you to date That Boy because he’s a rule breaker. He doesn’t respect the rules that we have in place to keep you safe. It has nothing—nothing!—to do with you having a boyfriend or sleeping with a guy. Nothing.” When I start to protest, Mom holds up a hand. “You have to listen to me about the second thing.” Her voice gentles. “That Boy adores you, but he can’t see you because he can’t handle being responsible for yet another person.”

  “You researched him?”

  Mom nods. “It’s what we do.”

  It is true. I can’t war against that truth. “So I’m too much to handle.”

  “No, your situation is too scary for any young man to handle, especially a young man who’s already been in one major accident. It’s just too much.”

  “But Dad stayed. He stayed with Auntie Ruth. He gave up going to Georgetown and went to UW to stay close to her. You’ve always told us that.”

  “That’s because your dad is different.” Her eyes widen and she gasps, holding her hand to her chest like she’s having a heart attack.

  That scares me. “Mom, what’s wrong? Mom?”

  Mom shakes her head, panting hard.

  “Dad!” I yell. In the catch of the dim light, I finally see the puffiness around her eyes that she’s concealed so deftly with makeup. The sobbing that I’ve heard for the past couple of nights, the hard, racking sobs, those weren’t me or my dreams. But my calm, cool, collected Captain Zoë of a mother. She doubles over. I scream, “Dad!”

  Dad races into the kitchen. “What? What’s wrong?” Before anyone answers, Dad’s dropped into the nook, scooping Mom into his arms. “Honey. What’s going on?”

  Tears are streaming down her face. “She didn’t leave because she didn’t love me, did she?”

  Dad shakes his head, still holding Mom. “No, honey, no. It was just too much. Samantha was just a kid, too. She did her best for as long as she could. But she needed to survive herself.”

  Everything hurts: my head, heart, chest. Dad comforts Mom, assuring her that they won’t leave me ever, they’ll fix me, they’ll figure something out. My fingernails scratch painfully against a fat, new blister on my clavicle. Scared, I place my hand on my pounding heart and feel the new topography bubbling on my chest. I am unfixable. I have become a hideous monster of the Underworld, wearing a lariat of blisters, too scary for any young man to handle. Before I’m discovered, I hurry back down to my lair, alone.

  Lunch and dinner arrive on lavish trays, heavy with preservative-laden sandwiches and store-bought cookies. They return uneaten. On Sunday morning, I make my way upstairs to the odorless kitchen for my morning tech check. Without the scent of simmering soups, melting chocolate, and baking pies, the house smells dead.

  “There you are!” Mom exclaims, as if I’ve been buried in an avalanche on Snoqualmie, instead of entombed in the basement they created without telling me.

  “We missed you!” Dad echoes with such manic-elation, it’d lose clients.

  “It’s almost Halloween. When are you baking pumpkin bread?” Roz asks, expectant, as she spoons what looks like bland quinoa porridge into her mouth.

  “That’d be a perfect snack. Your friends want to visit today,” Mom tells me, matching Dad, joy for joy.

  A bubble of irritation bursts. I tug my sweatshirt down to my new blisters. “Not looking like this.” While my parents emergency confer in the bathroom about this new development, I check my phone unapologetically. Caresse has joined Aminta in showering me with insistent texts.

  Caresse: HOW ARE YOU?!?!

  Aminta: YOUR FINGERS CAN MOVE.

  Caresse: SO: RESPOND.

  “We have all the ingredients,” Roz offers as if this is another normal morning at Chez Lee & Li, where my main job is to be her short-order cook, not one where my heart has been pocked with yet another hole.

  There is still no word from Josh.

  I lower the phone without answering anyone. I have become That Girl, the one in an unrequited, long-distance relationship with her phone. I’m tempted to chuck my phone at the wall. Then, at least, I’d have the satisfaction of hearing it shatter, a response of some kind.

  My one accomplishment so far in the dark isn’t finishing the essay on Toni Morrison’s Beloved that my parents assigned to me (yay, homeschool), but memorizing the lyrics of all the songs on my Nocturne mixtape, not that that is such a prize. Who knew Cupid could be so cruel?

  “I’ll follow you into the dark”—Josh hasn’t even texted me once in the dark.

  “Oh and the stars, oh, oh and the stars / Well, they just blink for us.”—Maybe two weeks and a lifetime ago they did, but now they’ve burned out.

  “Gets hectic inside of me / When you go.”—Enough said.

  A few days later, I rouse from a late afternoon nap to the chorus of Aminta and Caresse’s “Hey, Viola!”

  Mom calls, “Can we send them downstairs?”

  What is my mom thinking? Doesn’t she understand that I’m maintaining a strict no-contact zone until my blisters burst, scab over, heal, and peel, which according to the dermatolo
gist takes a good three weeks?

  “Not today,” I say.

  Upstairs, Mom apologizes to my friends. Even if I (sort of) want them to protest, demand to see me, and barge down here, I’m glad they don’t. I’m in no condition to be seen. As it turns out, Aminta and Caresse are a lot more stubborn than I knew.

  “But we come bearing gifts,” Caresse says through the basement door.

  “Well, more accurately, we come bearing prototypes,” Aminta corrects her. “From the 3-D printer you got us last year.”

  I draw to the bottom of the stairs. “I didn’t get you anything.”

  “You baked,” says Aminta. “And we bought the 3-D printer for the math department, remember? So we made you something.”

  Caresse says, “We wanted to call it the Deluminator, but that would have all kinds of trademark issues.”

  “So how does the DeLightor sound instead?” Aminta asks.

  “Tell her that’s still a little close,” Caresse says.

  “A lot close,” I mutter.

  Aminta says, “Well, you can’t judge until you see the prototype for yourself.”

  Which is true. Despite my best intention to be blasé, I’m intrigued. “Okay, come on down.”

  The basement door opens. Even though my bunker is cast in dim candlelight, I yank my sweatshirt higher up onto my neck, wishing I’d worn a turtleneck, but it chafed too much. I tug my hat down.

  “Well, this is very hygge,” Aminta says.

  “What?” Caresse and I ask at the same time.

  “Hygge,” Aminta says, gesturing around the basement. “Danish for ‘cozy.’ They don’t get a whole lot of light in the winter, so they’ve embraced coziness.”

  “And you would know because?”

  “I’m a geek. We know all kinds of arcane things. And”—she opens a slim, plastic box, the exact size of my iPhone—“we build things. Welcome to your DeLightor. See? Your phone is completely enclosed except for the home button, so you can make calls and use Siri safely.” She clicks it shut. “Aren’t you … delighted?”

  Caresse groans. I echo that groan and raise it a snort.

  “We are so not going to call it that. But look,” Caresse says as she flips the case over. My name is inked in Firefly font.

  I laugh and tear up at the same time. “This is amazing.”

  “It isn’t yet,” says Aminta. “But it will be.”

  “So now you’ll be able to flirt with Josh safe and in style,” says Caresse.

  “I haven’t heard from him.”

  “Today?” asks Aminta.

  “In two weeks.”

  Aminta and Caresse exchange The Look, the one that confirms what I know: Whatever Josh and I had has died a quick and silent death.

  “Maybe he’s busy?” says Aminta, nodding. “He could be working on another issue of Persephone, or got slammed with tests.”

  “No, he did the drastic pullback,” Caresse declares flatly. “The disappearing act. I hate that even more than the slow fade.”

  I hate it, too. What I hate more is that I start to cry, the weeping that makes you worry you’ll never, ever stop. They go all “he’s a stupidhead” on me. But the fact is, he isn’t. It feels even worse to vilify Josh than to miss him.

  “I’m sorry,” I tell them in between sobs. “I need to be alone.”

  The dark is not for the faint of heart. There, the primordial goop of tears turns into the primal fury of a dragon scorned.

  What a fine fury it is.

  He is a stupidhead.

  Who does Thor think he is? Does he really think that his grief and his guilt and his fear are an excuse for plain old rudeness? Does he really think it’s okay to share confidences and kisses and shooting stars one night, then vanish the next with a courtesy check-in to make sure I hadn’t died?

  News flash: Pullback, fade-out, and ghosting are pure cowardice.

  I am done lounging in the purgatory of waiting: Will he or won’t he text? I’m sure as hell not staying in some existential dithering: to text or not to text.

  No, Josh does not get to stay in his tent, all safe and sound and silent. I have had it with being Little Miss Good Girl, sugar and spice and all things nice.

  DEAR JOHN LETTER

  VERSION 1

  Dear (Dumb) (Boy)friend,

  You promised me that you’d never ghost me. You said that was what cowards did. That Darren should have told me that he was moving on, instead of just fading out on me.

  So what does that make you?

  Angrily (too obvious for you?),

  Viola

  Hello, darkness, my old friend.

  I shut down the mixtape and slide the tape recorder under my bed. As if hidden, I won’t think of Josh. Who am I fooling? Every remembered note echoes of him.

  The problem is: so does the sound of silence.

  And the sound of Mom crying over her sister who left her. Josh wasn’t ghosting me like some coward. He was surviving the only way he knew how: alone.

  I trash the letter.

  A few days later, I sneak upstairs when the house is quiet, and I can refresh my water bottle in peace without my parents enquiring about how I’m feeling and Roz hinting about everything I can (should) be doing (for her). Unfortunately, I’ve miscalculated. Roz is at the kitchen island, sitting with a book in her hand and a spoon in her mouth.

  As soon as she sees me, Roz points the spoon at me and asks unexpectedly, “Hey, you want some Molly Moon’s? Salted caramel?”

  I begin to smile at her thoughtfulness until Roz tips her container in my direction, empty except for two, maybe three melting spoonfuls.

  She says, “I’m done with it.”

  “You’re giving me your leftovers?” I fact-check her, too sharply.

  Even separated by granite and a cooktop, I can feel Roz’s hurt. Instinctively, the surrogate mom in me wants to apologize for ruining her life, take the blame, volunteer to put myself at risk, and drive her back to the gourmet ice cream shop to buy her a fresh cup, any flavor she wants. Heck, get three!

  “I was just being nice,” Roz snaps at me.

  “No, being nice would have been to bring me back some, too.”

  “You’re always so mean.”

  “No,” I correct her, “I’m honest. If I had gone to get ice cream without bringing you back your own, I can’t even imagine how mad you’d be.”

  “That’s not true!”

  “Isn’t it? If I gave you three leftover spoonfuls of my ice cream, do you really think you would have been okay with that?”

  “Wow—”

  “Excuse me? Did you just ‘wow’ me?” I say, stepping up to the island as rage courses freely in my veins. I may be five feet tall on a good day, and Roz might tower over me by eight inches, but that moment, I am Persephone in the flesh, a space Amazon ready to battle this time-sucking vampire. I slam both hands palm-down on the countertop and ignore the sharp stinging. “Do you even know how many times I went on pizza runs for you? And then you’d complain because, oh, horrors! It had olives. And oh, I need my rowing shorts. If I showed up empty-handed at the boathouse, I couldn’t even begin to imagine …”

  “What are you even talking about?” Roz actually asks me indignantly as if all of this is some bad fairy tale that I’m spinning. She is always Sleeping Beauty and Snow White and Cinderella, and I am forever the wicked stepmother.

  “Oh, like your thirteenth birthday? I used an entire three months of my allowance to take you to Bumbershoot since your favorite band was playing, remember? Did I tell Mom and Dad? No, because they would have freaked out about all the secondhand pot smoke. And then I got you, yes, Molly Moon’s in a huge waffle cone! And then when I only had enough money left for one slice of pizza for dinner, and all they had was the everything pizza, you looked at me and said, ‘This is my birthday dinner?’ I didn’t even get myself a slice! I bet you didn’t even notice that. So yeah, you pretty much do not ever get to ‘wow’ me.”

  “I was just tryin
g to be nice,” Roz says stiffly as she stomps away.

  Run away, little sister. Run from the rage of your big, bad sister.

  With a frustrated sigh, I head for the fridge, needing cold water since that rampage has left my throat raw, my emotions even rawer. But I stop when I see what Roz has left next to her cup of melted ice cream soup: her homework reading, the book of poems by Robert Frost, the one with the poetic lie about the “lovely, dark and deep” snow-filled woods. That poem should come with a neon warning about all that you can lose atop a snow-reflecting mountain pass. I shove the book across the granite countertop, a hockey puck on the frozen lake of my anger. It drops with a satisfying thud onto the floor. I refuse to pick the book up.

  There’s a movement in the dark hall. I steel myself for round two with Roz, prepare for her to play the victim when I have the weight of history and actions and miles of chauffeuring behind me. I swing around to find Dad, chagrined.

  “I just didn’t … know,” Dad says.

  “About Bumbershoot? What? Are you going to banish me?” I spread my arms out. “Sorry. Already done.”

  “No, I meant …” Dad looks toward Roz’s bedroom down the hall. Yet, he says nothing. Nothing. Until finally, Dad drags his eyes back to me and tells me, “We—I—put too much pressure on you, honey. I’m so sorry.”

  My sigh is epic in its breadth and range—irritation, outrage, disbelief, sadness, regret, resignation. There are no further words, not even a breath of relief when my rage finally burns out. When Dad approaches me, though, arms outstretched for an apology hug, all I can do is shake my head and retreat downstairs.

  Once in my bunker, I rest my back against the cement wall, welcoming its coolness, remembering the cold of another night. My hand reaches for my ghost lariat; it’d remind me of that long-lost girl, the girl who once was. I close my eyes, and the memory of stars dance in the darkness behind my eyelids, the memory of kisses dance across my skin. Vaguest of all, the lightness of hope when Josh’s hand slid in mine just as a meteor shot across the night sky. No matter how hard I try to catch that elusive moment, it escapes my desperate grasp.