You heave. That was it, you realize. It’s already over.
You missed your own last bite.
*
The chaplain returns. He sits outside your cell, his chair flipped backward, like a teacher trying to be cool. He holds a leather-bound copy of the Holy Bible, and his thumb circles the cover in repetitive strokes.
I can pass a message along to Blue, the chaplain says. Is there anything you’d like to say?
You have nothing more to tell her. Blue has seen it already—the stickiest proof of your own humanity. Your Theory, compounded. There exists inside you a galaxy of possibility, a universe of promise.
How can they do it? you ask.
The chaplain grimaces, sheepish.
How can they go through with this, Chaplain?
I don’t know.
That girl out there, you say. Blue. She is living proof. I can be normal. I can be good.
Of course you can be good, the chaplain says. Everyone can be good. That’s not the question.
The chaplain looks unbearably paunchy. Fleshy, weak. You want to reach through the bars, take fistfuls of his potato face in your hands. There are practiced ways you could still gain control: You could embarrass him. You could outwit him. You could hurl yourself against the bars, intimidate him with pure physical force. But these options require too much inertia. You have forty-four minutes left, and the game feels pointless.
The question is how we face what you have done, the chaplain continues. The question is how we ask forgiveness.
Forgiveness is flimsy. Forgiveness is like a square of warm sun on the carpet. You’d like to curl up in it, feel its temporary comfort—but forgiveness will not change you. Forgiveness will not bring you back.
*
Jenny comes to you then. A ghost, an accusation. The softest thing.
She exists now in pure distillation—in minuscule details, daily routines, mundane remembrances of a life before this place. An ache, for that old house. The flannel bedsheets Jenny chose at the department store, the curtains over the sink, embroidered with lace. The beige carpet, which never seemed to look clean, the TV sitting dusty on its stand. You can picture her there, still. Jenny, coming through the front door in her nurse’s scrubs, stomping the salt from her winter boots.
Love? she calls. I’m home.
The texture of Jenny. Fruit shampoo, hangover breath. You remember how she used to tease you, hands on your cheeks. It’s okay to feel things, she liked to say with a laugh, and this always irritated you. But if you could go back now, you would clap your hands over hers, relish in the knobby warmth of Jenny’s fingers—the only person who dared to stand between the world and yourself.
Please, you would beg. I’ll feel anything.
Just show me how.
*
You can see the line now, in the spotlight of retrospect. The direct link, from the Blue House to Jenny.
The Harrisons sent you away on a Sunday morning. Blue and Rachel stood in the restaurant parking lot, their arms crossed, a palpable unease in their eyes. Don’t come back, they said. We don’t want you here anymore. You’d heard those words many times over the course of your life, but they felt different, coming from the Harrisons. The Blue House had brightened you, softened you, proven so much—finally, you were a part of something. A family.
But Rachel’s voice was determined. You did not know what they’d learned or how they’d learned it, only that it was too much.
As you climbed into your truck and pulled out of the parking lot, a furious itch rose in your fingertips. Everything fuzzed, slanted. You watched Blue and Rachel disappear in the rearview, their gazes searing permanent: they were afraid of you.
You drove to Texas. It took four days. You could not imagine going back to Vermont; you could not even go back to the motel. You left everything in that damp little room, your clothes and your cash, your razor and your toothbrush, the photograph Blue had gifted of the Blue House, shot on an overcast morning. You drove, blank and fuming, wondering how much more hurt your human body could sustain. The desperation was a parasite.
There was only one certainty, and that was Jenny. Her shape. Her smell. Her breath, sour on the pillow first thing in the morning. You needed it like you needed oxygen. How naive, how foolish you had been, to think that the Blue House could ever take her place.
So you slept in the bed of your truck. You tossed and twitched through each gusty night, until the air turned humid and leafy highways shifted into desert plains.
Jenny had blocked your number. She had only called once, since she left ten months earlier, to make sure you signed the divorce papers, her lawyer breathing heavy on the conference line.