Page 82 of A Series of Rooms
He hadn’t even stopped to pull on socks, and now the concrete patio was an icy anchor beneath his feet.
Jonah pulled in a deep lungful of air and held it, praying for the cleansing burn to shake loose his internal claustrophobia. It swirled around him when he let it out. He watched as the last trace dissipated into the darkness before he sank to the ground.
The backyard pool was stretched over with the tarp they used to cover it in the off-season. From this vantage point, it was hard to imagine the days he had spent out here as a child, his skin glowing into a golden tan in the sunlight. He looked down at his arms, turning them over to see the pale reflection of moonlight staring back up at him.
Looking away, he folded his knees into his chest and stared out at the pool, thinking about how shockingly cold the water must be beneath the cover. Maybe there was even an inch of ice on the surface. He remembered one summer,when his dad let him help open it for the season. They had removed the tarp together, freeing the hooks from the anchor points around the edge, and he had let Jonah dip his hand into the murky, green water. He remembered the way the cold shocked him, like ice down his back. Cold enough to hurt.
He wondered if he would feel the same sting now. If that sting would finally be sharp enough to cleanse his insides. Or if it would be lost like all the other sensations to his endless well of numbness, and apathy, and non-existence.
Sometimes he wondered if he really was alive at all.
It would have only taken a few steps, really. In a matter of seconds, he could have cleared the few feet to the pool’s edge, could have freed the cable that held the corner of the tarp taut, just enough to give him room to slip his body over the lip of the pool, to slip beneath the surface and feel the cold shatter him. To break up the numbness, if only for a moment.
To disappear.
Jonah blinked, coming back to his body to find his toes at the edge of the tarp. He flinched, stumbling back.
“Jonah?”
He hadn’t heard the back door open. His mother stared at him from the patio. The first thing he registered wasn’t the deepened crease in her brow or the way she stood with one arm poised away from her body, as if preparing to reach out and yank him back from the edge of the water. It was theoversized shirt, faded from years of wear and hanging loosely on her frame.
His father’s shirt.
His instinctive reaction was quick and fleeting, but he recognized that flare of heat in his chest as anger. Hot enough, if only briefly, to break through the fog and make him feel its burn. Jonah grasped after it like a starving man with a fish.
“Jonah?” she repeated, taking a step forward. Her slippers stopped at the edge of the deadened grass. “What are you...? Baby, it’s freezing out here.”
“Sorry,” he murmured.
He was braced for the usual reassurance, the promise that there wasno need to be sorry, Jonah. But she was silent, eyeing him like he was every bit as crazy as he felt. For a long time, the only sound between them was the whistle of wind through the naked tree branches overhead.
“I wish you would talk to me,” she said.
There was something different in those words, all falsehoods and optimism stripped from her voice. For the first time since Jonah had returned to Indiana, he heard the exhaustion that lay behind the façade.
Jonah ducked his head forward, the vague sense of frustration burrowing deeper.
“I don’t know how to help you, Jo. I’m trying my best, but I can’t reach you when you close yourself off like this.”
Maybe they were both done pretending. Maybe they were both too tired, now, to keep dancing around the elephant in the room.
“What do you want me to talk about?” The calm in his voice was that of a smooth surface over a dangerous rip current.
“Anything,” she said, and wasn’t that a load of bullshit? “What you’re thinking about, what... What happened to you.”
“You don’t want to listen to that,” he snapped.
“If it would help you, of course I—”
“Trust me,” Jonah said. “You don’t want to hear the details, Mom. You can barely look at me as it is.”
She flinched, but Jonah didn’t feel compelled to retract his words. The anger had taken hold, and he wasn’t about to fight it now.
“You know I don’t...” She couldn’t look him in the eye when she lied to him. “I don’t think any differently of you.”
“Iamdifferent!” he shouted. “Stop pretending like I’m this person you used to know. You won’t say it out loud, but I can feel it. You’re just waiting around for your son to show up, but he’s not coming. He’s never coming back.”
“You—” She matched him for fierceness now, her slippers stumbling into the grass to meet him. “—are my son. You will always be my son.”
