Page 11 of Breaking the Dark

“What kind of therapist?”

“Post-trauma therapy mainly.”

Jessica takes a breath. “That’s—”

“Here.” Amber waves the plate of sushi at her. “Take some, please. I won’t eat them.”

“Oh, yes. Sure.” She grabs three and holds them inside her hand, immediately aware that this was not what Amber meant.

Amber looks askance at the handful of sushi and passes her a paper napkin. “Here,” she says kindly. “Wrap them in this.”

“Thank you.”

Outside on the street, Jessica drops the wrapped-up maki in a trash can and scours the other side of the street, looking for the blow-dry bar, drawing in a heavy breath when she sees it. She can barely remember the last time she washed her hair, let alone the last time anybody else did. But she’s on the clock and somebody else is paying for it and she has nothing else to do, so why not, she thinks. Why not?

Jessica stares at her shiny mermaid waves in the mirror in front of her. She does not look like a mermaid, but she does look a hundred times better than when she walked in an hour ago, and according to the girl—Cat—who did it for her, she won’t need to wash it for at least a week now, so it’s a win as far as she’s concerned.

But the hair makes her feel strange once she’s out of the rarefied environs of the salon and heading down West Forty-Fifth toward her apartment block. It boings and bounces and flips and flicks. She feels self-conscious and conspicuous.

She takes a woolen hat from the inside pocket of her jacket and is about to pull it down over her hair when she catches sight of her reflection in a shop window and stops. The woman she sees in the glass takes her breath away for a moment. It’s her, but it’s not her. It’s her as if the last couple of years of her life had never happened, if that man hadn’t done what he’d done to her. It’s her without all the self-medicating and self-loathing. It’s the her she used to be.

She touches the ends of her hair, lets her shoulders roll back, turns up the corners of her mouth, then tucks the woolen hat back into her pocket and heads into her apartment building, trying to hold on to the feeling. But the feeling fades with every step she takes down the dark hallways, with every sound of trashy daytime TV leaking from strangers’ front doors, with every echo of crying babies, of shouting men. It fades again as she opens the door to her tragic apartment, the only place she has. And she stares at the view from her window of grimy buildings and purple-gray skies, listens to the muted soundtrack of angry traffic and, beyond that, the deathly rumble of the big rusty ships lumbering up the Hudson, and she can see no brightness, nothing anywhere that matches the sheen of her fifty-dollar mermaid blowout, nothing that makes her feel like she deserves such hair, and just then a shaft of sunlight slices suddenly through the filth of her window and catches the last five inches of dark amber in the bourbon bottle atop her filing cabinet, and she has not had a drink in two days, and there is a reason why she has not had a drink in two days, but it’s not a reason she wants to dwell on for too long or in any depth, because she’s not ready for it, not at all, and maybe, just maybe, she never will be.

Her hand goes to the bottle, she feels the cool of the glass beneath her fingertips, imagines the soft hit of the whiskey as it bleeds into her bloodstream from the empty pit of her stomach.

But then a cloud passes across the sun and the bottle falls back into shadow, and Jessica snatches her hand back and lets it hang by her side. No, she decides. Not now. It will still be there later if she wants it. She can wait.

And at that thought she runs to her bathroom, throws open the lid of the toilet, and is horribly and violently sick.

Thirty-four years ago

Tabasco, Mexico

Ophelia celebrates her twenty-second birthday under a bower of plum trees in a busy square next to an ornate white cathedral in the old heart of Villahermosa. They drink cold beer as the sky starts to turn red, and John makes a toast.

“Cheers,” he says. “To turning twenty-two.”

Twenty-two.

Ophelia almost can’t believe she is now twenty-two.

She looks at him and smiles. “Thanks to you.”

“Well,” he replies, “what can I say? It was my pleasure.”

They look very different from the people who met in a bar in Harlem two years earlier. Her short hair has grown long. His long hair is cut short. She is now blond, he is dark. They are different people in so many ways.

Their quick New York exit turned into a two-year road trip, and it’s been amazing. Ophelia has felt herself re-forming every day, her blood settling, her nerves calming, fewer things calling to her, less noise. Just her, and him, growing older together, at last.

But now she wants more.

She wants a child.

She has wanted a child for forever and never been able to have one. All she has experienced is loss. Everyone she ever loved is dead, apart from him.

“I want to go home,” Ophelia says, holding his hand in hers, tracing her thumb along the hump of his artery. “I want to go back to the UK. To have a baby.”

“I know,” he says softly. “It’s time. I’m ready.”

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