Stray Fears - Gregory Ashe Page 0,69

headed into the house. I used the bat to knock down some of the paintings, and then I went to work on the cabinets. Richard followed me, not speaking, his arms folded across his chest. After I’d shattered the glass fronts to the cabinets, I reached into one and grabbed one of the wineglasses on the shelf inside. A chunk of glass sliced open the side of my arm, but I didn’t feel it. I got a bottle of red. I got the corkscrew.

“You’re bleeding,” Richard said. He had his doctor’s bag on the table, and he was rummaging through it. “Will you please stop for a moment so I can bandage that cut?”

My hands were shaking, and it took me a couple of tries to get the corkscrew seated. By the time I had, Richard was coming up behind me.

“I’m fine,” I said.

“I’d like to look at your arm.”

“I said I’m fine.”

Then I felt the prick of the needle.

“What the fuck—” I began.

But then I wasn’t saying anything because I wasn’t inside myself anymore: I was floating just outside, watching myself fall, watching Richard catch me and get me onto the couch. He pulled the ottoman up next to me and bandaged my arm. I just kept drifting; I was a kite barely tethered to my body.

“I’m going to give you something to help you sleep,” Richard said.

Special K, I wanted to say. Keeps the doctor away.

And then he gave me another shot, and I slept.

When I woke, it was late afternoon; the sun brushed the St. Augustine grass like velvet, and the magnolia leaves were glossy mirrors. A resurrection fern was opening on a sugar maple. I was a fern. I could be resurrected. I was pretty sure, with all that fern talk, I was tripping pretty hard.

My first attempt at getting up didn’t go so well. On my second try, I managed to stay upright. I crawled upstairs. The door to Richard’s study was closed, and a strip of light showed underneath it. I didn’t trust my feet, so I kept crawling, my arm aching from the cut, until I got to our bedroom. I found a Herschel backpack and stuffed a few changes of clothes inside. I grabbed the essentials from my bathroom. Then, bracing myself on the wall, I shuffled back to the stairs.

The study door was open, now. The room was dark; it smelled funky, like body odor.

When I got downstairs, Richard was standing in the kitchen. The wine and the wineglass and the corkscrew were on the counter. He was eating yogurt.

“How are you feeling?” he asked.

I shook my head. We’d left David’s laptop on the breakfast table last night, so I grabbed it and shoved it in the backpack. Then I took slow steps toward the front door.

“Elien?”

“We’re done.”

“Elien, come back here.”

“Goodbye, Richard.”

“I know you’re upset about earlier today, but you were out of control. You were hurting yourself.”

At the front door, I rubbed my eyes; everything seemed doubled. “You can have my stuff,” I said. “Or you can give it away. Or you can burn it, for all I fucking care.”

“Get back here right now. You aren’t well.”

I opened the front door.

“Elien, stop it right now. This is childish.”

I had to lean on the jamb to get myself out onto the porch.

“I’ll have you locked up for your own protection,” Richard was saying. He had such a lovely voice. He ought to have been on the radio. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

I slammed the door.

In one of the rocking chairs, I waited for my Uber. Richard paced on the other side of the windows, watching me. He didn’t come outside. He didn’t try to talk to me. He didn’t have a hypo with more Special K. I thought maybe he knew that I’d kill him if he ever came near me again.

My Uber driver’s name was Britton, and he was balding with a graying ponytail. When he dropped me in front of Dag’s house, he said, “Kid, take it from me, you gotta lay off the hard stuff every once in a while.”

I limped up the steps and knocked on the front door.

When Dag answered, he was wearing running shorts and a tank top; the tank had a cartoon narwhal and, in rainbow letters, THE GAY UNICORNS OF THE SEA.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

Or that’s what I tried to say. Mostly, I just sobbed.

Dag’s expression shifted from anger to irritation to something I couldn’t recognize. Then he pulled me into a