Local Girl Liveblogs the Apocalypse
Chapter 15 – A Love with Nowhere To Go
Previously… Katherine blogs about what it was like to watch social media devolve into a disinformation circus, a puppet-show with an algorithm as the puppet-master. She ends with a regret that she, a staunch feminist, never lived to see what women could have done behind the helm, what true liberation could have meant for the earth and everyone on it, had there been time.
The doors of my mother's house close one by one. First, my brother leaves, defensively, through the front door. Tricia locks it behind him, jamming the door with a stopper. Not against James of course, just our new normal; still, after his comments at the dinner table, I didn't exactly care to make him feel welcome, either.
Having always been the feminist killjoy, James and I have been fairly distant as adults. Jenna was his evidence for everything: some girls think his jokes are funny, some girls don't care about 'dark' humour, some girls are even darker than him. As long as he and Jenna were glued to each other, he had a free card to play whenever I told him he was being a sexist bore.
Then Jenna was gone and no one really gave James a hard time again. Certainly our mother didn't. And she made it known that Tricia and I were not to 'gang up' on James, now that the sides weren't even. Tricia protested this entire line of reasoning, because in her mind, Jenna had been her little bestie, her doll. That had been Jenna's way, really. Being everything to everyone. I don't think she'd ever quite figured out what to be with me. I like to think that's because I always wanted her to be her authentic self, not whatever she thought would please me. But she'd been gone at fourteen – no time to even develop that true self. I hadn't helped. I thought there would be time.
The next door to close in the house is Tricia's. She says a quiet goodnight to me and Mom at the table. Penelope trots haughtily behind her, allowing herself to be enclosed behind Tricia's door, pulled shut snugly and quietly, like an apology.
“He'll miss you when you're gone,” my mom says, voice thin and stretched, like it's being pulled out of her.
“That means absolutely nothing to me, Mom,” I say. I'm freezing cold, the toes on both feet are tingling from the neuropathy, my entire abdomen feels like a cut and paste chasm held together by scar tissue but otherwise devoid of parts.
“It's just... he's your brother.”
“Yeah, and I'm his sister. But we both know he only ever had room for one. Sad thing is, now she's gone, but she's still taking up all that space.”
My mom begins to talk but I just shake my head and interrupt. “I don't have room for him either, okay? It's too late. Way too late.” I help my mother put away some earlier-dried dishes, but my energy drops fast. I take a break at the table, and when she's finished, she puts her hand on my shoulder, squeezes once, and goes to bed. Her bedroom door closes with a solid thud, being hung inexpertly and always in need of a tug whenever the season warms.
Through my aches, pins and needles, and other pain, I feel the absence of Jenna as a bitter, hot bead travelling the length of my nervous system. I think of this, it burns there. I remember that, it pierces here. I press my hand against my heart, the corporeal nature of the pain so vivid there's an instinct that a painkiller would ease it. But there's some pains you don't try to lessen, you don't tell your doctor about. Some pains that just are, just have to be. A love turned burning, never settling because there's no resolution. A love with nowhere to go.
Upstairs, my bedroom door is the last to close, fully ensconcing my family in their disparate pods.
I sit on my bed for a while, my body tight and anxious as after any confrontation. Even the small exchange with my mom makes me feel like a bad kid. James never has to be the bad kid, he can make the messes and run away. Someone else cleans up, and no one remembers there'd been a mess at all. I can't do that – I am my own mess, evidence of my own failures. Can't get along, can't get over things, can't just let it all go. Just an angry girl watching everything around her fall apart, a perfect mirror of my own disintegration.
I pull my sleeves over my thumbs and press them into my eyes, absorbing angry tears. In another family, maybe my terminal diagnosis would be sufficient to garner some empathy. But in a family with a missing daughter, a dead one at least comes with some certainty. If I were thirteen and writing in my journal, I might mention that I got the feeling my family wishes I were the one who disappeared, not the jovial Jenna – and now that I'm dying, they will get their wish. Maybe in that fantasy, Jenna comes back for my funeral, and the circle is closed.
I sigh and untuck my chin, straightening the back of my neck, forcing my head high. Having fulfilled my heart's apparent need for grave self-devaluing, I tug open my laptop and see I have a notification for a comment posted on one of my blog entries.
It's from Nicole, the woman from Windsor who'd wanted to come here to get away from her husband, who had been tumbling down the rabbit hole of internet and IRL conspiracies and making her life not only miserable but dangerous.
Katherine, I am disgusted. I honestly do not know what you write to you right now. Do you have any idea how hard it was for me to ask for help? To ask a stranger, at that? And to be told to send a copy of my ID like you're a government official with the power to decide who lives and who dies. Are you power tripping, or what? You don't even have anything set up for me to come to. Which I KNEW, and I still asked for help because I thought, after following you through all your various crises, that you would be willing to help someone in dire need. Stupid me, I guess. Well, you won't have to worry about me any more (as if you did). His job is moving us north, to the fucking tar sands for some reason. So I'll be living out the end of days while my husband spends his days chest deep in bitumen and his nights glued to his phone screen, deciding which conspiracies he'll try to save me from and which he thinks I'm in on. Truly, thank you for nothing. Any woman stupid enough to go to you for help deserves what she gets. Which, best case scenario, will be nothing, just like me.
Nicole's message washes over me like January waves on a Great Lake, a slurry of freezing water and ice, thick and shocking. I read it again and again until my body learns which parts hurt the most and which were surely just projecting. A scared woman lashing out, I tell myself. She's doing this because she's safe to – she can't talk to her husband like this. She knows I'll listen; I won’t retaliate. Yes, it's hurtful, but I can learn from this.
That's what I tell myself to think. But my brain is in the deep water, churning until the cold stiffens me completely.
I've failed.