Marianna Baer - Frost

Nothing emerged from my mouth because someone held my tongue, pressed it back into my throat so I couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe. I began to gag. I tilted my gaze to the floor, to my arms. Visualized raising them up. But I couldn’t. Only one hand. One hand moved. Lifting it was like lifting the whole house. I reached up with my last bit of energy, reached up with that one hand and scratched at the door. My fingernails scraped against the wood. Once, twice.

“Did you hear that?” someone outside said.

Scratched once more. All I had in me.

I couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, except for the voice. Stay with me , she cooed, over and over . I’m the only one who wants you . After I reached the heaviest place, so heavy I thought my body was being obliterated, I felt a release, a lightness. Like when you’ve held your arms against a doorframe and then walk out and they fly up. I flew up. Up and out and high and wide and all over and circling and spreading. And no more containment. Just me, energy, spreading into wood and plaster and brick and floating in the air and filling the space. An angel after all. No more body keeping me tied down. The body was still there, I just wasn’t in it.

SUN-STREAMS POURED IN from the arched window. Dust particles shimmered in the pathway.

“Would it sound really weird,” I asked Viv, my eyes shifting away from the light, “if I told you that part of me … part of me didn’t come back?”

“Didn’t come back?” she said.

“You know, after the paramedics got to me.”

Viv reloaded the nail polish brush and stroked the pearly white liquid over my left thumbnail. She’d come down to see me at my dad’s condo. “Well, it kind of makes sense,” she said. “I mean, we have this life-force energy, right? Who’s to say that some of yours wasn’t released when your body thought it was the end. Like a leak in an inflatable raft that’s then patched up. Right? The air that escapes never comes back.”

“Exactly,” I said. “I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. I just … I feel like I left something behind. I never would have believed that, before. I mean, it sounds so stupid. It’s the kind of kooky thinking I’d have made fun of.”

The springs of the sofa bed creaked as Viv shifted her weight.

“I suppose,” she said, “a lot was different before.”

Before.

Before, I knew so many things. About David and Celeste. About myself. About real and unreal. I built a fort out of all of these things I knew.

That day in Frost House, the fort collapsed.

Afterward, I searched back through the semester, trying to find new facts to build with. But just as I was ready to nail one down, it would disintegrate in my hands.

Information came to me slowly.

All I grasped at first was that I’d nearly died from a combination of the pills I’d taken and carbon monoxide poisoning. I spent two nights in the hospital: a blur of confusion, the stink of vomit and disinfectant, throat scraped raw, tubes running in and out of my body, fragments of sleep cut short by needles, the claustrophobia of the oxygen chamber, doctors with charts, nurses with implements, and my parents sitting next to me with looks on their faces that said, How did this happen? as much as they said, “We love you.”

Not that I blamed them for wondering. I was wondering the same thing.

Everyone wanted an explanation. But how could I explain? So I kept most of what happened to myself, only saying enough to assure the hospital psychiatrist I wasn’t suicidal and didn’t need admission into the psych ward. When I took the pills, my thought process had supposedly been compromised by the carbon monoxide, so they believed I’d just been confused about how many pills I’d taken. I agreed to outpatient therapy.

To my parents’ credit, they didn’t push. And they tried to do what they could. At one point, I woke to my mother standing next to my bed, a tentative smile on her face, hands behind her back.

“I found something that might make you feel a bit better,” she said. She laid Cubby on my pillow. “Your old friend.”

“Oh.” I swallowed the bile that rose in my throat as I turned my face away. “Thanks. But you can get rid of it.”

Viv came for a quick visit the day after I was discharged.

“What’s happened since I left?” I said. “I feel like I’ve been gone for years.”

She told me about the chaos of that afternoon. Apparently, a crowd of students gathered outside the dorm and rumors spread across campus the minute the fire department and paramedics arrived, so many trucks that all of Highland Street was blocked off. Dean Shepherd moved them all out of Frost House—Viv and Abby to Dee Hall, Celeste to Revere Hall.

“Celeste is still at school?” I said, shocked. I hadn’t dreamed that I’d told the dean about her, had I?

Viv’s blank look reminded me she didn’t know the whole story. I gave her a condensed version: Celeste’s fear that Frost House was haunted, my meeting with the dean, David’s anger and his plan to save her—

“Wait,” Viv interrupted. “What did David have to do with the carbon monoxide leak?”

“He caused it,” I said. “By doing something to the furnace. That was his plan to get Celeste moved out.”

Viv shook her head. “That’s impossible. The leak had been going on for a long time.”

Now it was my turn to look blank.

“The alarm nearest your room was screwed up,” she said. “It wasn’t calibrated right, or whatever. So it was only when the carbon monoxide reached upstairs that an alarm went off. You guys had been breathing it for … well, they don’t know how long. Hard to say with windows being opened, stuff like that. Didn’t anyone tell you this?”

Did they? “I don’t know,” I said. “I just remember when they found out the carbon monoxide was from the furnace. The stuff at the hospital is kind of a big blur.”

“They still don’t really know if it was from the furnace,” she said. “I don’t quite get it, but there was some problem and they couldn’t tell. But we all had to get tested for CO poisoning, and Celeste had to get oxygen therapy. David had nothing to do with it.”

Until that moment, I’d thought David had left me in the dorm, knowing I would get sick from the carbon monoxide leak he’d caused. I hadn’t thought he’d wanted me dead—he wouldn’t have known that I’d shut myself up in the closet with my pills. But still … I’d used it as an excuse to believe I was better off without him. Better off without a guy who would ever do something like that.

But now?

Before this all happened, I think I would have forced myself to forget about it, to ignore the fact that I wanted to see him. Anything to avoid the risk of further rejection.

Now, though, I realized that reaching out to David or not reaching out—it was going to hurt either way.

I allowed myself to be a bit of a coward and send a message instead of call, so when he agreed to come visit, I couldn’t sense his tone of voice.

The day he was coming, my body was so twitchy I felt like I was walking around with my finger stuck in a socket. I tried a deep-breathing technique my therapist taught me. A Valium would have worked better. I knew I shouldn’t think that way— didn’t want to think that way—but it was a hard habit to break.

Finally, the doorbell buzzed.

We stared at each other, awkward. His face was paler, drawn—more like his sister than ever. After a moment, I stepped forward and hugged him. My cheek pressed into the satiny puff of his down jacket. We stood like that, quiet, for a long time. I loved being this close to him, no matter what had happened.