Assisi - Vol2 Issue 2,3

And so she fell, in April as the spring kicked in. This time she wanted more than anything to go so far away we could never pull her back; this time my father found her open wrists blooming on the bedroom sheets.

Because I had turned twelve, I could visit for a little while. I wore my glen plaid kilt and blue knee socks, and used my mother‘s rouge, since she‘d never know. And when I saw her in her room on the third floor in the section with locked doors, she was still not well, whispering hello to me and gazing toward the window, her lunch sitting uneaten on a tray. I sat in the chair next to her bed and didn‘t know what to say; but I thought of some things about school and the flowers in our yard, and she said that‘s good at the end of each. And I saw the bandaged cuts on her arms and knew how deep they must have been, and wondered where she got the razor blade she used, did she take it from his razor, the one he shaved with every day?

I knew she didn‘t want me there, but I needed to say something that would make her want to stay with me; I could cook and clean and make her life less difficult when she came home. I kissed her cheek and said goodbye. She never said that I looked pretty and smelled good, Oh de London! dabbed behind my ears. I told my father I wasn‘t hungry as we took the elevator down.

But he was, and I watched him eat potatoes Lyonnais as it began to rain outside. Can‘t beat the price he said, and we drove home. *** For six straight weeks we went to St. Mary‘s on Sunday after Mass, after hard rolls and the Sunday Daily News. She grew better slowly, more slowly than the other times. My father said it upset her when I visited, and so I never went back upstairs. *** May, the month of Mary, the smell of lilacs filled the place; I should have been playing outside in the soft spring air, but instead, I was the daughter of the man who visited his sick wife week after week, the daughter of the woman who cut herself, the one who wanted so badly to die. And so, I watched the blue afternoon evaporate, seeing it from inside the bland waiting room, waiting for the ride home with him, its predictability, Sinatra songs and the waves of cigarette smoke filling the front seat.

They let her go again, her tranquilized, dead eyes. She did not want to be with us at home, the summer coming and the long, long days. And so she found another way to go, for good this time, with pills and scotch my father carried home the previous Christmas, an office gift.

She had to know that I would find her when I came home from school; she must have known that I would be the one to touch her face to see if she was warm, that I would be the one to pick the empty bottles off the floor. She must have known that I would be the freshman girl that fall, the one without a mother. She must not have cared; if she did, she would still be here. *** She had asked to be buried far from where we lived. My father picked a place a hundred miles from home, a place where no one would think to look for her, the same place where her imagined sister lived. I guess he knew how many times she practiced death and figured one day she would get it right.

ASSISI | 103