“I don’t know how I’m going to make it through the winter,” he said after they’d walked a bit more.
“I don’t know how I’m going to make it through the winter, either. No one does. None of us know what’s going to happen one day to the next in this life. We just…keep going,” she said, surprising herself by being so bare with him. She could’ve tried to pretend like the winter would be no problem for her, that she was translucently optimistic about her future. She’d gotten used to pretending with people who didn’t know her well—and her family, too, when she didn’t feel like discussing it. It was easier to act like she’d always be fine, but she knew better. Even people without a history of mental illness had to go to great lengths to protect their mental health.
Taking Friday off from appointments was one of the self-care boxes Tallie checked. In the past few months, there had been a rising energy to Tallie’s diligence about her own mind and feelings. She’d sometimes write the letters m and h on her hand in black ink, a reminder to recognize the need for protecting her mental health. She thought of her good and bad days as Morse code messages—every little bit recorded in her bones—wanting to honor the time and energy it took for them to be translated and transcribed.
“Everyone needs someone to trust, someone to talk to. It sounds like you’ve been doing all this emotional work on your own, which is so hard it can feel impossible. I could help you find a therapist if you’d give it a try. You can look at it as adding tools to your toolbox. We all have a toolbox,” she said.
“Ah, a toolbox. So there’s a hardware store down here somewhere?” he asked, looking around.
“You’re—”
“Oh, yeah? I’m what?”
“Wow,” she said, smiling and shaking her head.
Another golf cart passed them, the sound zipping over the wet road like a record needle on vinyl. Tallie waved, and the man in the cart waved back, a neighbor she recognized but had never actually spoken to.
Tallie took Emmett’s hand as they continued walking. Not interlocking fingers but holding his hand as if they were grade-school friends, making a connection: a red rover chain blocking out the rest of the world, if only for a moment. She imagined the neighbors whispering to one another about how they’d seen her dressed like Paddington Bear, holding hands with a young man on Halloween. They’d gossip about how Tallie and her new beau had stopped in front of the trattoria and Thai noodle shop before ultimately deciding on the Irish pub across the street. How the green bulbs framing the sign shone on the wet sidewalk and eerily flickered the gloss of their rainwear—those two ambling aliens aglow.
EMMETT
He’d been Emmett since Thursday evening, and he would continue being Emmett to Tallie, everyone he would meet at the Halloween party, and anyone else he came across. His real name was too recognizable. And although Tallie had been the first person to use the word striking directly to him, he was all too aware that he had a unique, memorable face. He imagined it plastered on posters around his hometown. Wouldn’t his family put up MISSING posters, even when they thought he was dead? Wouldn’t they still be looking for his body so they could put him to a proper rest? What picture would they use? One of him smiling next to Christine, Christine cropped away? One of him holding hands with Brenna, Brenna snipped out? One of him from the restaurant, tired and smoking in his kitchen whites? One of him on the church camping trip, wearing his backpack, glancing over at the camera a moment before he knew the pic would be taken? He’d always stood out in his little town: his hair, his freckles, the unmistakable mix of blackness from his father’s side with his mother’s whiteness. Christine’s dad, Mike, had said the word quadroon in front of him once, as if it were a word he used or heard every day and not an obscene word written in pale pencil in a slave auctioneer’s ledger, next to a dollar amount and sold.
People often told him he looked familiar, and he could read the surprise and horror on the pitying faces of the ones who knew why they recognized him. As if he’d morphed into Francisco Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son or the hellscape in Hieronymus Bosch’s Last Judgment—those terrifying paintings that revealed something new and fearsome every time they were examined. Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for a Crucifixion—wriggled, bloody flesh devouring itself. Emmett had spent hours, weeks, months with that art history book in the library. Flipping, absorbing, memorizing, wanting to be emptied out and filled up with something else. Anything else. It didn’t matter what.