Gabriel Tallent - My Absolute Darling

“And they’d let me come back here?”

Jacob hesitates.

“I don’t want to get away from my daddy,” she says. “And I don’t think he would let it happen, either.”

“You need to get away, Turtle.”

“He’s my daddy.”

“That was a pretty serious story you told.”

“Not that serious.”

“You could tell any teacher that story and you’d be done with this.”

She is silent.

“You could tell any teacher that story and in a moment you’d be living with me, giving my sister scathing looks at the dinner table every night and learning all about wine and hearing about Dad’s fascinating trips to Lehi, Utah—where there’s always some riveting drama about defect analysis in silicon wafers, complete with intradepartmental romance, misbehaving chemical engineers, you know, just an intricate story about how such and such an error got missed. We’ve got that bedroom for you, and Isobel would pay you to help in the studio. It sounds kind of good, right?”

She chews her lip.

“He could’ve hurt you badly.”

“He didn’t,” she says, “he won’t.”

“I think he will.”

“You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. He doesn’t want to hurt me. He loves me more than life itself. He’s not a perfect person sometimes. Sometimes he’s not the person he wants to be. But he loves me more than anybody else has ever been loved. I think that counts for everything.”

“‘Not a perfect person sometimes’?” Jacob echoes. “Turtle, your dad is a vast— A titanic— A colossal douchebag, among the worst to ever sail the lemon verbena seas, a primordial ur-douche the depth and profundity of whose douchism staggers the mind and beggars the imagination. Though, of course, Marcus Aurelius says that we should not despise others for hurting us. He says we should recognize that they act out of ignorance—against their will, even—that you’ll both be dead before long, and that this person hasn’t really hurt you, because they haven’t diminished your ability to choose. And I think he’s right. You don’t have to hate him. But you might probably should really possibly think about leaving. By which I mean you should go to the hospital. Because only some kind of narcissistic sociopath could possibly object to you seeing a doctor right now. Anyone who cared about you—that’d be their top concern, if they could see what I see. Everyone else, they’d be like, ‘Fuck it, my daughter’s in pain, she has compound fractures in three fingers, we’re going to the hospital.’”

He is done with her pinkie finger, applying antibiotic ointment and wrapping it in gauze. Then he traps the aluminum splint down over it and tapes it in place. He looks up at her. “Next finger,” he says. “You ready?”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I think I have some idea.”

“You don’t.”

He cuts away the cotton wrappings and reveals her left ring finger, swollen, the nail black. With the irrigation syringe, he blasts a thin jet of water and, to their surprise, the nail lifts from the bed, held fast by a few pale threads of flesh.

“Fucking motherfucking fucker fucking fuck ,” Turtle says.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Rip it off.”

“Shoot, I can’t rip it off.”

“Rip the fucking thing off.”

He seizes the nail with forceps, cuts it free with surgical scissors, and drops it into the water.

“Motherfucker,” she says.

“Keep talking. It seems like the talking helps.”

“Fuck,” Turtle says. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

“Great! Now try sentences.”

“You don’t know him.”

“Turtle. This looks really bad.”

“Jacob, you’ve only met him the once, and briefly.”

“You mean when Caroline dropped you off?”

“Of course that’s what I mean. What do you mean?”

He tapes down the final splint.

“I kept expecting to see your finger bones sticking out, but I think the breaks are all closed and these cuts are superficial. Which is good. I think. I don’t know. You know who would know? A doctor .”

“Jacob—did you meet him another time?”

“That’s it for your hands. Let’s see your back.”

“Jacob?”

She tries to pull her shirt up and over her head, but it’s stuck to her. Wincing, she lies down on the towel. Jacob picks up the trauma shears and begins to cut away the shirt. He cuts from the hem to her neckline and tries to lift it, but it is fastened to her in bloody badges, and he takes his time, irrigating to soften the scabs and then pulling it away.

“You need a hospital. The shirt has been pushed into the wound.”

“You’ve never even spoken with him.”

“I did speak to him. He never told you? I walked here from Mendocino after school. Your dad was on the porch, drinking beer and reading Descartes. I came up, and I said I was looking for you.”

Turtle is silent.

“He said you were away at your grandfather’s house, and I asked him about Descartes, and he said he was reading the ontological proof for god’s existence. He had a strange, an interesting take on the proof—”

“When was this?”

“Shortly after we met. Late April. Early May. Something like that. Prom was coming up and I thought—”

“Did you tell him your name?”

“Yes.”

“He asked how to spell it?”

“Some of these cuts are deep, Turtle.”

“Did he ask where you live?”

“Yes, he did.”

“Why didn’t you say this before?”

“Did I get you in trouble?”

“No,” she says.

“These look awful, Turtle. How were you— How did you not mention that you were this hurt?”

She lies on the floor and lets him irrigate the wounds and extract bits of shell. Late April, she is thinking. Early May. It must have been when she was out with Grandpa and Grandpa told her how to ask for the dress. His timing had been so bad. And her own. She almost cannot believe it. Jacob is drawing long strips of cotton out of the wounds on her back. She thinks, he came here and he spoke to Martin and I never knew. Christ, she thinks.

After he leaves, she goes into Martin’s room and picks up the phone book. She finds a single dog-eared page. There are Larners and Lerners, but only one Learner. Learner, Brandon & Isobel, 266 Sea Urchin Drive. The name has a tick by it, a single blue pen stroke in the margin. Turtle stands holding the phone book. Jacob had talked to Martin. He had been talking to Martin on the day when Grandpa had been telling her how to ask about the dress. Perhaps Jacob asked Martin about prom. Then, when she’d asked about the dance, Martin had understood and he had pretended not to. He had waited for a sign from her. He’d gone up to her room, and she’d twisted away in his hands. He’d taken it seriously then, goddamn, and how prescient he had seemed. How it had surprised her, lying on the mud out in the yard and Martin bringing the iron poker down again and again. It had seemed that he could see into her heart, but that hadn’t been it; he had known. He had met Jacob, talked to him, and hidden that fact from her. Grandpa had wanted her to go to the dance. Jacob talks to Martin, Martin understands, and when Turtle hesitates, when she pulls back, he knows what to do. Then the tidal pool in Buckhorn Cove. Grandpa’s death. Martin’s disappearance. And all because of what? she thinks. A boy, she thinks. No, she thinks, because of what a boy represents.

Turtle walks through the hall and down into the basement. Opening the cabinets she takes down the most familiar bottle, SMZ/TMP. She stands looking up at the drugs. She has taken veterinary sulfamethoxazole/trimethoprim before, for urinary tract infections. She is looking at it. She cannot quite come to grips with what has happened. Martin’s single blue tick mark by the address, it was meant for her. She knows what it means: If you cannot be controlled, he can. Jacob is nothing to him; only her doubts, only her straying—that is real. She takes down the card with Martin’s notes on the SMZ/TMP. She reads it for a third time. She takes three of the 80 mg tablets. She will take them twice a day. Then she takes down the Levaquin box. His note reads, Anthrax inhalation 500mg 60ds; for blck plague, othrs 250–750mg q 24 hrs. She dispenses the foil sheets with the 250 mg red tablets in their extruded plastic bubbles and takes two. She climbs back up the stairs carrying the antibiotics. You cannot see Jacob again, she thinks. You cannot involve him in this, you cannot get him hurt. Her grandfather died for a mistake like this. And now Jacob wants her to leave. It is all useless. All this talking, all Jacob’s talking, all of her thinking, it is all useless, and what matters is already set in her and it will not change and she cannot be persuaded. She lies on her stomach across a wool blanket by the fireplace. Her thoughts rise through the murk of her mind like bubbles. She watches her little finger in its foam-lined aluminum splint pulse with her heartbeat, her back an old half-rotted sponge taking on achingly hot water. She thinks, when he’d found out, when he’d had the proof of her even thinking, even hesitating, he had pinned her to the muddy ground. She remembers the helplessness of it. That is the measure of his seriousness. She thinks, you cannot keep Jacob safe. Then she thinks: no, the truth is that you can, but you’re not willing to.