Rufi Thorpe - Dear Fang, with Love

“You’re right,” she said. “The knife was silly. Daniel will either tell me the truth or he won’t.” She was about to continue her interrogation, unaware that the spell had been broken, that the knife had been her only power.

“I’m calling the cops,” Daniel said. He was already over by the phone on the shelves.

“Please don’t,” I said. I had no idea what the ramifications would be, what they would do to Vera. Obviously I had made a grave error about her medication, but I could fix it. We just needed to get her home to her doctors. “She needs her meds — they’re in the bathroom. Just get them,” I said.

“You have her meds and you didn’t give them to her?” he asked, stunned, his hand still on the phone. “You knew she was sick?”

I didn’t know what to say. I just looked at him.

“You’re as fucking crazy as she is,” Daniel said, and he picked up the phone and dialed.

Vera had turned in toward my body and stayed huddled against the front of me. I wrapped my arms around her. She was jittery like she had drunk too much coffee or done too much coke.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered to her.

“I’m so tired,” she said. “I’m so tired and I can’t sleep. I haven’t been able to sleep for days.”

On the phone, Daniel spoke in an orderly way. He had to wait until they found an operator with fluent English. I would not have been so coherent if I had been the one making the call. Now that I was holding Vera in my arms, all my muscles were shaking, exhausted, as though I had been lifting weights for hours. “Not sure if we need police or an ambulance. There is a girl here suffering from a psychotic break. She’s been threatening people with a knife.” He paused. He looked up at me. “No, she is currently unarmed. No, no, I don’t think anyone wants to press charges, we just need to transport her to a mental hospital or a psych ward or something. She’s sick. She needs to be seen by a doctor.”

“Papa,” Vera whispered into my neck, “don’t let them take me away. Don’t let them.”

“I’m going to stay with you the whole time,” I said. “I won’t let them do anything bad to you.”

“Do you believe me? About the dragon? I know you do — I’ve known this whole time that you knew. That’s why you brought me here. That’s what this whole thing has been about.”

I didn’t know what to say. I just held her. I couldn’t look at Daniel. He could have easily pressed charges. He could have made things a living hell for us. What he had done was the right thing, no more and no less. And I had told him not to call. I stared at the little red ceramic statue of a toadstool on the shelf beside his head. I was burning with shame.

He hung up the phone. “Someone will be here in ten or fifteen minutes.”

I nodded. “Vera,” I said, “do you want to put on different clothes?”

She looked up at me. “Yeah, I don’t want to go in a nightgown. I’ll put on jeans or something.” She slowly untangled herself from my arms and floated off toward her room. “I think this is actually a good thing,” she said.

“You do?” I asked.

“I’m excited to talk to them. I think they will understand what I’m saying. There is just too much I have to catch you guys up on and as hard as I try to explain, you don’t get it! It’s so exhausting!”

Daniel and I stared at her. She smiled as though she were filled with great peace and took a deep breath. “I’m going to get changed,” she said, and went into her room.

For a moment, we just stood in the silence.

“Thank you,” I said to Daniel. He shook his head, shrugged.

“I want you to know,” he said, “I never thought she was actually going to stab me. I didn’t really think that.”

I nodded, sucked my lower lip into my mouth and ground it with my teeth. “Let’s get your clothes packed up,” I said. Together we picked up his wet clothes from the knocked-over drying rack in the hall and stuffed them into his laundry bag. We went to see if the washing machine was done with the second load. There were a few minutes left in the cycle, it seemed. “I’ll wait,” he said. “I might have to give a statement or something anyway.”

I nodded. We were both standing in the tiny, brightly lit bathroom, staring at the washing machine.

“Do you want to check on her or something?” he asked. It was like being startled awake. I rushed to her door, already panicked.

She wasn’t in her room. Her window was gaping open, letting in the velvet night sky. I stuck my head outside, screamed her name. I looked down into the courtyard, but I couldn’t see anything, any sign of her. Then I heard whimpering, and I turned my head to find she was right there next to me, hugging the sloped roof on her belly, terrified.

“I don’t know how to get down,” she whispered. “I’m really scared.”

Her feet were braced on the roof gutters. She was barefoot and still in her nightgown. The way our rooms were deformed by the gables of the building was extreme, and the window I was standing in was at a steep angle and was almost like a skylight. With my hips pressed against the window frame, I was already halfway out on the roof. I turned in the opening of the window, tried to keep my legs and hips facing forward as I arced my torso over toward her. I knew that if I sat on the window frame, even though it would get me closer to her, it would also make it possible for me to fall backward out of the window. There was a little radiator under the window and I stuck my feet under it, flexing them to try to create some kind of lock, as I reached my arm out toward her beside me on the roof.

I could just barely wrap an arm around the back of her waist. “You’ve got to edge back this way,” I said.

I heard Daniel behind me, saying “Holy fuck” over and over in a harsh whisper.

“I feel like I’m gonna break the gutter if I move,” she said. “I can’t move. I can’t move.”

“I’ve got you,” I said. I had my right arm around her waist, but if she fell there was no way I could hold her weight. The angle was too extreme. She edged toward me with baby steps. The gutter made a loud sound and she screamed, stopped moving.

I heard pounding at the door of our apartment. “For God’s sake,” I shouted at Daniel, “let them in!” But he was already doing it. The apartment filled with low voices asking questions in Lithuanian.

“Just a couple more steps, baby,” I said. She was looking only into my eyes. I tried to smile. “You can do this,” I said. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”

She was close enough now that I had my hand linked all the way under her other arm, tight around her back, and I pulled her to me, trying to get her to budge a little bit, come a little bit closer. Instead, she gave a hiccuping little leap sideways, and I got my arms around her, but there was a teetering moment where I thought she might pull us both out of the window. My feet were still wedged under the radiator, flexed, but my legs were shaking from trying to keep us both from falling. She was entirely in my arms now, and I could feel the weight of her, the pull of gravity, the light breeze outside ruffling her nightgown. For a moment, we both remained perfectly still, just breathing, and then I was able to shift one of my legs, and I found my balance again, knew I could hold her. Slowly I pulled her inside, hugging the top of her body as the window ledge scraped the front of her thighs, then her knees and shins, until she was inside.

A circle of paramedics and two police watched us. “Labas,” I said, which was the only word in Lithuanian that I knew. I imagined this was some kind of weird Greek tragedy and these men were the chorus. I was embarrassed for us. Embarrassed of Vera’s nightgown and madness and my own awkward delivery of her into the room. No one should see such things. It was like they had caught us shitting together.