Tracy O'Neill - The Hopeful

Everyone was staring at me now, as though I was withholding information. I was withholding information. “Same old Mo to me,” I said.

“Nothing happened? Think, VoVo. Anything could help.”

“Any symptoms?” my father added.

“I was pretty tired that night,” I said. “And bored. Addiction is very boring to everyone besides the addict.”

“I don’t know why you have to be so harsh,” my mother said. “So what if Mo is an addict? You don’t need to call him that.”

“This isn’t VoVo’s fault, Auntie,” Lucy said.

“Finding fault is but a part of the cycle of suffering,” Jack said.

“Somebody has to be responsible for this shit,” Aunt Janine wailed. “It’s all a bunch of shit.” Lucy began to pet her head.

“This family has had enough suffering,” my mother said.

“Excellent vegetable medley, Jack,” my father said, and that was that. We ate the rest of the meal in silence.

On the ride home, all I could think of was: one left, no appointments, and pounds to lose. I wouldn’t die if I didn’t skate again, but you’d find me wandering around crazy-haired and rattling a coin cup, drooling and lost. I’d be found sleeping on church steps, screaming at the believers, not hoping that God could exist but knowing something of hell. And now that I was about to be revealed, the best solution would be to disappear. I’d come back in the form I was in two years before, when my mother wanted another child and my father said, “You only need one if you do it right. And look at our daughter.”

It could be done. Wasn’t it Dr. Ogden who had always been saying I needed to take responsibility for my happiness? I would take responsibility. I would take responsibility all the way to Massachusetts, where his office was. There was a commuter bus in Nashua, the next town over. I could go in the morning, take the bus to Boston and the bus from Boston to Weston. I’d have to walk many miles, but what was worth great steps more than this? I would knock until Dr. Ogden had to open up. I would demand the pills my hard work was owed. It wasn’t over because I’d not let it be over.

At a certain point in exhaustion, all you can do is tell yourself to just stay awake. Eyes open. Breathe. The body’s functions are the only response. Be strong, get strong. Morning is coming faster than you can say circumference.

But when we got home I fell asleep. I’d been awake awake awake. I couldn’t keep going any longer.

I had a bus to catch in ten minutes, and the only way I’d make it was with a pair of scissors. The others — imagining the red windmill turning blue with positivity or the lung exhaling doubt— wouldn’t do. I needed to trim my monstrosity into a small, manageable form.

Catching the bus was never a problem until getting out of bed was, but you can’t make excuses. “Get out of bed. Get out of bed!” I’d told myself, but I kept watching myself fall. Or collide with the barrier of the rink. Or chicken out. Imagining was death; I knew it would happen but not how.

I could hear the thin clock arm marking seconds populous and bland as rabbits — tick tock tick tock tick — and knew the difference between the rhythm of a metronome and a song. I tried to materialize scissors for the exercise but instead saw only a four-post bed. Sit! Roll over! Fetch! I commanded, but the mind is like most teenagers.

So as I had done so many other days, I popped pills — except this time, they were my last — and just for a moment, I let my foot forget it was part of Middle America. I let myself lapse pastward, my foot pointing as it used to when my entire body pivoted around the axis of one toe, and I felt as I did when my life consisted of perfect circles, when it was all figure eights and laps around the rink. I closed my eyes and was back again, spinning on that slippery plane, and everything streaked together into ribbons of color so that I could not discern separate forms. But I knew where I was, where I was going. The ice, flatter and more perfect than the kind that forms in nature, revealed the path cut by my blades beneath me. I was flying without wings, contorting through the cold. My coach Lauren called out, “Arms! Arms!” and a Prince song about a love grown grander through absence could be heard.

A jump lasts less than a second. I practiced hard. Then harder. I fell for hours in seconds. It was the way I tried. The violence of ambition bloomed blue and green and yellow through my legs. I’ve never wanted comfort; I want rarity.

“Think diamonds,” I’d told my mother. “Supply and demand. That’s why the cost. And that’s why they’re worth it.”

And then a voice: “Not not trying is not going to land the jump for you. I don’t want to see any of you.”

I would have to take matters into my own hands.

Bulbous things don’t rotate well. Ignore the planet; it is so big its shape cannot be seen by the eye. The edge between perfection and everything else is smaller than the eye can see.

Hurtle from steel, get ungrounded. Rotate three times. Land one-footed. Again! Again! Again!

Birth unnatural beauty. Swindle physics. You don’t have it until you do. Perfection means one. Two feet on the ground: that’s for pedestrians.

Will a red windmill to blue. There’s no place for purple. Lungs expand and collapse. On the clock slow seconds circling away. Skate the circumference of the rink. Leap with hope and spin one two three. Point the toe. You have your entire life. This isn’t how it happens every time. Again! Again! Again!

Seven minutes on the clock.

And then I saw her, that monster created by Dr. Ogden. She sauntered long-legged over — tick tock tick tock tick — and I fumbled for scissors to cut her hair, hair thick and black and wild enough to get lost in, hair that resembled my own.

She moved closer, raising her hand to touch the pillow behind my head, a dark, leaning figment, and breathed hot towards my ear until all I saw was a schism in her chest. Two fingers teased between my legs, two moving above the thighs— harder, harder — a young thing like me didn’t belong in a place like this — a tingle shivered through my fingers.

Shears raised, I squeezed my knees and caught a glint of light reflecting in the sharpened edges. I squeezed tight through legs and fingers, closing my fist in a snip.

“There’s no one like me,” I said.

And then I got out of bed. That is when it happened, not of luck, but a stroke nonetheless. There is no glory to a stroke like the glow of a seizure. You wake up with your face sagging or sometimes you never even knew it happened. I could see my mother’s tears, but I didn’t feel them on my face. My father was holding my right hand, and the sensation had departed. And yet, there were no residual complications from the stroke except for psychiatry. I woke up in the hospital.

So you’re telling me this was not a suicide attempt?

A stroke, Doctor, a stroke.

You said it wasn’t a stroke of luck.

Nor a stroke of genius.

An unintentional harm.

An accident, not an attack. Though of course, I did kill her, that I who would have stayed in bed, who would have succumbed to nature, to fatigue. I cut the monstrosity out and when she went down, the rest of me went down too. And regardless, yes, it was an accident.

Then you feel that it was misfortune.

I hate to think there’s such a thing as fortune in the world, though of course, to love is the greatest fortune of all.

Then you feel fortunate?

I do, Doctor, I do. Some people look their entire lives for love and never find it. I can see now that that was the case for Mark, for my mother and my father, for Dorothy, and until the baby, for Lucy.

But didn’t you also feel that they’d found love in you?