Page 52 of Give In to Me
“If that’s what you need to tell yourself.”
I open the door...and he doesn’t stop me from leaving. The hallway is fluorescent and empty, and I walk into it, and the door closes behind me, and the click of the latch is the quietest, most violent sound I’ve ever heard.
THE BATHROOM IS ATthe end of the hall.
Fourteen steps. I count them. My flats on the tile, one after another, my bag on my shoulder, my back straight, my chin up, because Agnes Cuthbert could be around any corner and I won’t give her the satisfaction, I won’t give anyone the satisfaction, I’ll walk this hallway like Robert Lively’s daughter and I’ll hold myself together until I’m behind a door that locks.
Seven. Eight. Nine.
My vision blurs at step ten. I blink it clear.
Twelve. Thirteen.
Fourteen.
The bathroom door swings in. Empty. Two stalls, a row of sinks, a mirror that catches my face as I pass it, and I make it into the far stall and I lock the door and I press my back against the cold partition and my bag slides off my shoulder and hits the floor and I drop.
Hard, onto the tile, and my hands find the floor and they’re shaking so badly that my fingers can’t grip anything, they just scrape against the grout, and the sound that comes out of me isn’t a cry.
It’s the sound of something being pulled apart at a seam that was never meant to open.
My forehead drops to my knees. My hands fist in my dress, and the fabric bunches under my fingers and I hold on because I need to hold something and there’s nothing else, there’s no hand reaching for mine, no thumb drawing circles on my wrist, no voice saying my name with an accent that makes the vowels bloom.
He called me Miss Lively.
He made this decision before I walked into his office, before I sat down, before I opened my mouth. He decided, and then he let me walk in and sit in that chair and hope, and then he cut.
My circle starts. On my own knee, through the fabric. Small, shaky, barely a circle at all. More of a tremor with a shape.
I cry the way I do everything. Quietly. My father taught me that tears aren’t something to be ashamed of, but they’re private, like prayers, and you don’t perform them for an audience. So I cry in a bathroom stall with my forehead on my knees and my hands in my dress and my circle going nowhere, and the tiles are cold under me and the fluorescent hum is the only sound in the room, and somewhere on the other side of this building, in an office that smells like old books and clean cotton and the subtle Italian thing that I’ll never get out of my memory, a man is sitting behind his desk with a folder full of paperwork that says I was never his.
My phone buzzes.
I don’t look at it. I can’t. My hands are too full of fabric and shaking and the effort of holding myself together. But the buzz is insistent, a second one following the first, and my traitorous heart leaps because some stupid, stubborn part of me thinks it might be him, thinks he might have picked up his phone the second I walked out and typed something in Italian that his control couldn’t hold back—
I pull it out. Wipe my eyes with the heel of my hand.
Two texts. Not from Luciano.
From Mama.
Baby girl, just checking in. Daddy fixed the east fence AGAIN. Says hi. Call when you can. Love you to the moon.
And underneath, a second one, sent forty seconds later:
Also your father wants to know if you’ve eaten today. He won’t ask himself because he’s “not a worrier.” Direct quote. He’s ABSOLUTELY a worrier.
A sound comes out of me. Half laugh, half sob, ugly and wet and entirely Martha Lively’s daughter. I press the phone against my chest and I sit on the bathroom floor and I laugh-cry until my ribs ache, because my mother somehow, from three thousand miles away, from a farmhouse where the kettle whistles and the fences need fixing and a man with a bad hip pretends he’s not worried—my mother reached through the phone and held me, and she doesn’t even know I need it.
I type back. My fingers are still shaking.
Tell Daddy I ate a muffin. Love you both. Call Sunday.
I pressSend. I close my eyes. My circle has stopped.
The fluorescent light hums above me. The bathroom is empty. The building is emptying. And somewhere beyond these walls, in a hallway I just walked through with my chin up and my back straight, a man who kissed me like I was the last real thing in the world just told me I’m nothing, and I believed him for exactly fourteen steps, and then I fell apart, and now I’m sitting on a bathroom floor with mascara on my knees and my mother’s love on my phone and the ruins of something beautiful folded inside my notebook next to a letter on department letterhead.
I don’t know how long I sit there.
