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Shame crippled her in the back of the police car. She wanted to get out of there, wanted to run, so fast, at the first chance she got. It didn't matter that there was no chance. Her mind was telling her to get out of there, screamingly repeating get out get out get out get out so she could barely think of anything else, barely respond to anything else.
Barely. She still had room for resentment. She should have been more careful. She should have remembered to hide the bill. That god damn credit card bill. And anger - she had room for anger. She was so angry at Imogene for finding it, so angry at her father for marrying Imogene, so angry. Imogene shouldn't even have an emergency credit card if she didn't want people to spend it. It was just money. Imogene has so much money! She was only using this as an excuse to get rid of Rachel. Imogene was a bitch, a hellish bitch, a hellish monster bitch.
She had room for fear. Imogene had her dad. Rachel had told the police, when they'd come, that Imogene and her monster daughter had killed her dad and hidden his body. The accusations had poured out of her mouth, the pitch of each one getting higher and higher as she got more and more desperate.
Shame, anger, resentment, fear.
Rachel didn't know if her dad was dead or not.
He couldn't be, right?
She couldn't be an orphan.
She hated Imogene so much.
The police hadn't found her dad, but she didn't think they'd searched very hard.
She hated them too.
She was made of hate. A creature of shaking hate, stitched together with shame. Fear, anger, resentment.
get out get out get out.
It overwhelmed her, the noise inside her head. As they they pressed her inky dark fingers to the paper, she looked down at her prints carefully placed within the thin lines of each box, and thought, quite clearly this isn't happening to me.
Her mind settled down quite a bit once she realised that.
this isn't happening to me.
She wasn't getting her fingerprints taken. She wasn't answering questions. She'd never stolen or even just borrowed a credit card, any credit card. Everyone seemed to think she had, but it wasn't true. She walked through the corridors of the police station like an extra in the background of a set.
A self-preservative brand of denial had kicked in, and was flicking off all the switches in her head.
Flick - she didn't care about her fingerprints.
Flick - she didn't care about Imogene.
Flick - she didn't care about anything.
It helped. Numb, she inspected her fingers as they walked down the hall. Her clean skin stained dark. The unfamiliar scent of the ink. Her face was hot because she'd spent most of the car ride crying.
She remembered this place. Not the police station, but this place. It was just like the kitchen floor where she lay once with a broken arm. It was where she ended up when she'd run out of tears and heart and will.
She thought, without malice or curiosity: I would drive a car into a river right now. Huh. There was no... opposition to it, in her mind. No reason not to. Had her mother felt this numb and disconnected the day she'd done it? Had her mother felt this numb and disconnected the day her youngest kid broke her arm? Little wonder she didn't get out of bed. Little wonder Rachel's brother always ended up picking up the bits.
For a second - just a second - she had a flash of a face and pale arms reaching through water for her, and a sensation of suffocating, drowning. Her brother's face. Except it hadn't been him that saved her that day in the river, because he'd drowned.
He'd drowned and her father was probably dead and there was no family left to put her bits back together. (Danny and Zoe were not options, Danny and Zoe could not help. No one could help. It was over. She'd had her chance with them and it was over.)
At one point, after fingerprints and before cell, there were questions. She answered them, because it was easier than resisting; there was no point in resisting. She gave them everything, name and age and, yeah, she told them she used that credit card. The anger was gone with everything else. The resentment, the denial. All the fight had left her. She used the credit card and bought her friends presents and bought herself a nice dress and took out some cash and hidden it.
Why had she hidden it? She didn't know. In case she needed to run away, she guessed.
Yeah, about a thousand sounded right. She didn't really remember. It was in an empty drink bottle buried under a brick in the back yard, if they wanted it. She was passed needing it anyway.
They asked her 'have you ever been known by any other name' and she surprised herself by laughing. It wasn't really a laugh - it was a sharp noise sudden and desperate to escape her throat. But it sounded more like a laugh than anything else. She felt her mother close, searching. Like she was reaching through the dark toward her daughter.
Once, in Rachel's distant past, she had been leaning against Danny as they watched the Return of the King, bodies close, fingers wound together. She'd never had the attention span to watch the movies all the way through, but sitting next to Danny, she found her attention was not the skittish creature she was used to. Danny calmed her, Danny made her feel real, and good, and hopeful. Near the end of the film, when Frodo and Sam were so close to completing their quest, and Frodo took the Ring and claimed it for himself, the Eye of Sauron turned directly toward Frodo. And bam it found him.
That's how she felt when she said her old name. The name her mother had given her. She felt the Eye of her mother swivel and turn and bam - the spectre of her mother had found her.
Rachel expected thunderstorms, but the policewoman just type the name in, quiet, orderly, unaware of what she'd just unleashed.
After that, they led her to her cell for the night and left her alone. It was a single, but there were other women nearby. She barely noticed them. She was remembering.
But if there's any chance that your crazy mum's family is looking for you, if you ever feel like anyone is following you, you tell me immediately right? Zoe had made her promise, once what felt like a long long time ago. And Rachel had promised. But there was nothing she could about that now. No way to call. Sorry Zoe.
Rachel wasn't really sorry. She wasn't really anything. Well - she was one thing: She was ready for this to stop. She was ready to make this all stop.
No more running from a dead mother. No more trying to keep a dead father happy. No more living while her brother was dead - both brothers - while both brothers were dead. No more struggling with memories or exams or the future. No more fighting. It was time to stop. Time to make it stop.
She wasn't clever about it. She was in too much pain to be clever about it. Still, by the time any of the officers arrived to stop her, she'd managed to claw open her wrist, and both her hands were smeared with blood. She thought she might have screamed at one point.
She definitely screamed when they tried to stop her.
Morning came. Breakfast came too. It was toast. Rachel stared at it until it was cold. She was hungry, but eating the toast would prove that she wanted to continue her existence, and that was a step she wasn't ready for.
She was hungry, but eating was terrifying and Rachel wasn't brave. She'd lost all her artillery. She might have been a girl once who'd danced in front of school to prove she wasn't a failure, she might have once stood up against her family and bravely walked out, she might have once lit up with fearlessness for Danny and Zoe. But now she was a girl in a cell with one bandaged burning stinging wrist and fingernails cut so short her fingertips hurt. She'd spent the rest of the night on suicide watch, unable to do anything except try to will herself dead.
Now there was toast. It taunted and mocked her. She could barely look at it. No once forced her to eat it. She was viciously thirsty, too, but drinking was a similar problem.
She'd lost a lot of water through tears. And sweat, and pee, and some blood. Thirst hammered against her constantly. It took all her strength not to drink the plastic cup of water sitting by the toast.
After breakfast she sat on a hard couch and watched television with the other women. A few of them talked to her. She didn't remember what they said. She thought one of them had been angry with her. She found a bruise on her leg a couple of days later that she didn't remember getting.
It was a little bit like the hospital in Plymouth, except it was much, must worse because it was happening now and wasn't far away and long ago.
She tried not to think, or remember, or do anything much at all. She tried to keep all the switches in her head flicked off. If she stayed numb long enough maybe she'd eventually lose all feeling, lose all connection to the world, and be able to stop for good.
When her father arrived in the middle of the morning, she didn't understand. He started to speak about taking her home and she couldn't wrap her head around it. She was stunned simply by his appearance. She'd convinced herself he was definitely dead. She'd been so sure and now he stood in front of her, proving her wrong. Rachel stepped toward him and grabbed two handfuls of his shirt, staring at his face. She could feel the warmth coming off his body. He felt real. He smelled real.
"I can go home?" she repeated what he'd told her. He covered her hands with his, easing her grip on his shirt. He turned her wounded wrist over, though there was nothing to see except the bandage.
"Yes," he told her, and that one word started her shaking. Yes. "Imogene over-reacted," he smoothed her hair down the sides of her head. "I've spoken to her. That credit card was a gift she had given me, her husband, and I have given you, my daughter, permission to use it. There is no crime. You are going to be fine, princess."
She collapsed against him in tears, as he continued to stroke her hair and call her his princess, his princess. He was going to get her out of here, he was going to look after her, they were going to be fine. No one was going to take her from him. No one was going to do that. "I'm a shit dad but I can at least keep you out of jail," he said, which made her start crying even harder.
Rachel clung to his arm as he filled out paperwork, her eyes feeling as raw and painful from all the crying as her wrist did. Her throat, too. But she was okay. She was going to be okay. Her dad was here to rescue her. She wasn't going to spend the rest of her life in prison. She wasn't an orphan. Her dad was here. She was going to be okay. She still had family. She still had somebody.
When one of the officers offered her a glass of water as her dad filled out a final form, she took it, and drank it down so fast she nearly made herself sick.
He took her home, but it wasn't Imogene's home. "We're not going back to her," he said, though Rachel hadn't asked. She was sitting in the front seat of the car, her legs drawn up on the seat and her head resting against the window. He was driving. It was his car, and the back contained numerous black rubbish bags he'd used in lieu of suitcases. At Rachel's feet was the kettle from the upstairs guest room. She'd recognised it, but she hadn't questioned it. A kettle at her feet was hardly stranger than her father coming back to life and breaking her out of prison.
When he spoke, she turned her head to look at him. "Well, she wouldn't have us. But more than that, I wouldn't have her anymore either, not after what she's put you through." He reached over and stroked her arm, and Rachel closed her eyes in a very slow blink. Though she'd started to drink again, and though she'd accepted his offer of McDonald's for breakfast and had struggled through the hot cakes, she still felt unbearably weak. She hadn't slept at all the night before, and she'd spent most of that hellish night trying to die. She absolutely didn't have it in her to ask where they were going instead.
But Harley talked to fill her silence.
And when he ran out of things to say, they had the radio.
And anyway the motel wasn't so far away.
He walked around the front of the car after he'd parked, and opened her door for her. He helped her out like she was royalty or an invalid, she wasn't sure. Either way, she leaned against him, and let him guide her over the threshold and into the bedroom. There was only one. "I'm on the couch," he said. "You take the bed. S'all they had, this one. Bad time in the season. Hey, uh," he rubbed the back of his head as she sat down on the side of the bed. "Y'reckon... y'reckon you're... alright?"
She didn't quite get what he meant at first, till his eyes fell heavily onto her wrist, on the bandage which was already stained with maple syrup and butter. Oh, she thought, in faint surprise. I did that. He wants to know if I'm going to try and do it again. She managed the faintest of smiles. "I'm alright," her voice was little more than a whisper.
He took her face in both of his hands and kissed her fiercely on the forehead. "You're all I got left, princess," he said, his voice almost a growl from how hard he meant it. "You're all I got left, don't you leave me."
"I won't," she said, swaying backward when he let her go.
He smiled at her with such sadness and longing that it hurt to look at. Sometimes she could forget how hard he'd had it, falling in love with her crazy mother, dealing with all the shit she'd put him through and then, on top of it, all the shit Rachel had put him through as well. She was amazed he hadn't left her a long time ago. She was amazed he'd stuck around. It was no wonder he lost his temper sometimes, with everything he'd had to deal with. But he kept coming back because she was his princess and she was all he had left. He'd left his wife and his fancy house and he'd given up everything to rescue her. The least she could do was stay alive, try to spare him any more pain. She swallowed through her tender throat and promised with all she had, "I won't leave you, daddy."
Barely. She still had room for resentment. She should have been more careful. She should have remembered to hide the bill. That god damn credit card bill. And anger - she had room for anger. She was so angry at Imogene for finding it, so angry at her father for marrying Imogene, so angry. Imogene shouldn't even have an emergency credit card if she didn't want people to spend it. It was just money. Imogene has so much money! She was only using this as an excuse to get rid of Rachel. Imogene was a bitch, a hellish bitch, a hellish monster bitch.
She had room for fear. Imogene had her dad. Rachel had told the police, when they'd come, that Imogene and her monster daughter had killed her dad and hidden his body. The accusations had poured out of her mouth, the pitch of each one getting higher and higher as she got more and more desperate.
Shame, anger, resentment, fear.
Rachel didn't know if her dad was dead or not.
He couldn't be, right?
She couldn't be an orphan.
She hated Imogene so much.
The police hadn't found her dad, but she didn't think they'd searched very hard.
She hated them too.
She was made of hate. A creature of shaking hate, stitched together with shame. Fear, anger, resentment.
get out get out get out.
It overwhelmed her, the noise inside her head. As they they pressed her inky dark fingers to the paper, she looked down at her prints carefully placed within the thin lines of each box, and thought, quite clearly this isn't happening to me.
Her mind settled down quite a bit once she realised that.
this isn't happening to me.
She wasn't getting her fingerprints taken. She wasn't answering questions. She'd never stolen or even just borrowed a credit card, any credit card. Everyone seemed to think she had, but it wasn't true. She walked through the corridors of the police station like an extra in the background of a set.
A self-preservative brand of denial had kicked in, and was flicking off all the switches in her head.
Flick - she didn't care about her fingerprints.
Flick - she didn't care about Imogene.
Flick - she didn't care about anything.
It helped. Numb, she inspected her fingers as they walked down the hall. Her clean skin stained dark. The unfamiliar scent of the ink. Her face was hot because she'd spent most of the car ride crying.
She remembered this place. Not the police station, but this place. It was just like the kitchen floor where she lay once with a broken arm. It was where she ended up when she'd run out of tears and heart and will.
She thought, without malice or curiosity: I would drive a car into a river right now. Huh. There was no... opposition to it, in her mind. No reason not to. Had her mother felt this numb and disconnected the day she'd done it? Had her mother felt this numb and disconnected the day her youngest kid broke her arm? Little wonder she didn't get out of bed. Little wonder Rachel's brother always ended up picking up the bits.
For a second - just a second - she had a flash of a face and pale arms reaching through water for her, and a sensation of suffocating, drowning. Her brother's face. Except it hadn't been him that saved her that day in the river, because he'd drowned.
He'd drowned and her father was probably dead and there was no family left to put her bits back together. (Danny and Zoe were not options, Danny and Zoe could not help. No one could help. It was over. She'd had her chance with them and it was over.)
At one point, after fingerprints and before cell, there were questions. She answered them, because it was easier than resisting; there was no point in resisting. She gave them everything, name and age and, yeah, she told them she used that credit card. The anger was gone with everything else. The resentment, the denial. All the fight had left her. She used the credit card and bought her friends presents and bought herself a nice dress and took out some cash and hidden it.
Why had she hidden it? She didn't know. In case she needed to run away, she guessed.
Yeah, about a thousand sounded right. She didn't really remember. It was in an empty drink bottle buried under a brick in the back yard, if they wanted it. She was passed needing it anyway.
They asked her 'have you ever been known by any other name' and she surprised herself by laughing. It wasn't really a laugh - it was a sharp noise sudden and desperate to escape her throat. But it sounded more like a laugh than anything else. She felt her mother close, searching. Like she was reaching through the dark toward her daughter.
Once, in Rachel's distant past, she had been leaning against Danny as they watched the Return of the King, bodies close, fingers wound together. She'd never had the attention span to watch the movies all the way through, but sitting next to Danny, she found her attention was not the skittish creature she was used to. Danny calmed her, Danny made her feel real, and good, and hopeful. Near the end of the film, when Frodo and Sam were so close to completing their quest, and Frodo took the Ring and claimed it for himself, the Eye of Sauron turned directly toward Frodo. And bam it found him.
That's how she felt when she said her old name. The name her mother had given her. She felt the Eye of her mother swivel and turn and bam - the spectre of her mother had found her.
Rachel expected thunderstorms, but the policewoman just type the name in, quiet, orderly, unaware of what she'd just unleashed.
After that, they led her to her cell for the night and left her alone. It was a single, but there were other women nearby. She barely noticed them. She was remembering.
But if there's any chance that your crazy mum's family is looking for you, if you ever feel like anyone is following you, you tell me immediately right? Zoe had made her promise, once what felt like a long long time ago. And Rachel had promised. But there was nothing she could about that now. No way to call. Sorry Zoe.
Rachel wasn't really sorry. She wasn't really anything. Well - she was one thing: She was ready for this to stop. She was ready to make this all stop.
No more running from a dead mother. No more trying to keep a dead father happy. No more living while her brother was dead - both brothers - while both brothers were dead. No more struggling with memories or exams or the future. No more fighting. It was time to stop. Time to make it stop.
She wasn't clever about it. She was in too much pain to be clever about it. Still, by the time any of the officers arrived to stop her, she'd managed to claw open her wrist, and both her hands were smeared with blood. She thought she might have screamed at one point.
She definitely screamed when they tried to stop her.
Morning came. Breakfast came too. It was toast. Rachel stared at it until it was cold. She was hungry, but eating the toast would prove that she wanted to continue her existence, and that was a step she wasn't ready for.
She was hungry, but eating was terrifying and Rachel wasn't brave. She'd lost all her artillery. She might have been a girl once who'd danced in front of school to prove she wasn't a failure, she might have once stood up against her family and bravely walked out, she might have once lit up with fearlessness for Danny and Zoe. But now she was a girl in a cell with one bandaged burning stinging wrist and fingernails cut so short her fingertips hurt. She'd spent the rest of the night on suicide watch, unable to do anything except try to will herself dead.
Now there was toast. It taunted and mocked her. She could barely look at it. No once forced her to eat it. She was viciously thirsty, too, but drinking was a similar problem.
She'd lost a lot of water through tears. And sweat, and pee, and some blood. Thirst hammered against her constantly. It took all her strength not to drink the plastic cup of water sitting by the toast.
After breakfast she sat on a hard couch and watched television with the other women. A few of them talked to her. She didn't remember what they said. She thought one of them had been angry with her. She found a bruise on her leg a couple of days later that she didn't remember getting.
It was a little bit like the hospital in Plymouth, except it was much, must worse because it was happening now and wasn't far away and long ago.
She tried not to think, or remember, or do anything much at all. She tried to keep all the switches in her head flicked off. If she stayed numb long enough maybe she'd eventually lose all feeling, lose all connection to the world, and be able to stop for good.
When her father arrived in the middle of the morning, she didn't understand. He started to speak about taking her home and she couldn't wrap her head around it. She was stunned simply by his appearance. She'd convinced herself he was definitely dead. She'd been so sure and now he stood in front of her, proving her wrong. Rachel stepped toward him and grabbed two handfuls of his shirt, staring at his face. She could feel the warmth coming off his body. He felt real. He smelled real.
"I can go home?" she repeated what he'd told her. He covered her hands with his, easing her grip on his shirt. He turned her wounded wrist over, though there was nothing to see except the bandage.
"Yes," he told her, and that one word started her shaking. Yes. "Imogene over-reacted," he smoothed her hair down the sides of her head. "I've spoken to her. That credit card was a gift she had given me, her husband, and I have given you, my daughter, permission to use it. There is no crime. You are going to be fine, princess."
She collapsed against him in tears, as he continued to stroke her hair and call her his princess, his princess. He was going to get her out of here, he was going to look after her, they were going to be fine. No one was going to take her from him. No one was going to do that. "I'm a shit dad but I can at least keep you out of jail," he said, which made her start crying even harder.
Rachel clung to his arm as he filled out paperwork, her eyes feeling as raw and painful from all the crying as her wrist did. Her throat, too. But she was okay. She was going to be okay. Her dad was here to rescue her. She wasn't going to spend the rest of her life in prison. She wasn't an orphan. Her dad was here. She was going to be okay. She still had family. She still had somebody.
When one of the officers offered her a glass of water as her dad filled out a final form, she took it, and drank it down so fast she nearly made herself sick.
He took her home, but it wasn't Imogene's home. "We're not going back to her," he said, though Rachel hadn't asked. She was sitting in the front seat of the car, her legs drawn up on the seat and her head resting against the window. He was driving. It was his car, and the back contained numerous black rubbish bags he'd used in lieu of suitcases. At Rachel's feet was the kettle from the upstairs guest room. She'd recognised it, but she hadn't questioned it. A kettle at her feet was hardly stranger than her father coming back to life and breaking her out of prison.
When he spoke, she turned her head to look at him. "Well, she wouldn't have us. But more than that, I wouldn't have her anymore either, not after what she's put you through." He reached over and stroked her arm, and Rachel closed her eyes in a very slow blink. Though she'd started to drink again, and though she'd accepted his offer of McDonald's for breakfast and had struggled through the hot cakes, she still felt unbearably weak. She hadn't slept at all the night before, and she'd spent most of that hellish night trying to die. She absolutely didn't have it in her to ask where they were going instead.
But Harley talked to fill her silence.
And when he ran out of things to say, they had the radio.
And anyway the motel wasn't so far away.
He walked around the front of the car after he'd parked, and opened her door for her. He helped her out like she was royalty or an invalid, she wasn't sure. Either way, she leaned against him, and let him guide her over the threshold and into the bedroom. There was only one. "I'm on the couch," he said. "You take the bed. S'all they had, this one. Bad time in the season. Hey, uh," he rubbed the back of his head as she sat down on the side of the bed. "Y'reckon... y'reckon you're... alright?"
She didn't quite get what he meant at first, till his eyes fell heavily onto her wrist, on the bandage which was already stained with maple syrup and butter. Oh, she thought, in faint surprise. I did that. He wants to know if I'm going to try and do it again. She managed the faintest of smiles. "I'm alright," her voice was little more than a whisper.
He took her face in both of his hands and kissed her fiercely on the forehead. "You're all I got left, princess," he said, his voice almost a growl from how hard he meant it. "You're all I got left, don't you leave me."
"I won't," she said, swaying backward when he let her go.
He smiled at her with such sadness and longing that it hurt to look at. Sometimes she could forget how hard he'd had it, falling in love with her crazy mother, dealing with all the shit she'd put him through and then, on top of it, all the shit Rachel had put him through as well. She was amazed he hadn't left her a long time ago. She was amazed he'd stuck around. It was no wonder he lost his temper sometimes, with everything he'd had to deal with. But he kept coming back because she was his princess and she was all he had left. He'd left his wife and his fancy house and he'd given up everything to rescue her. The least she could do was stay alive, try to spare him any more pain. She swallowed through her tender throat and promised with all she had, "I won't leave you, daddy."
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